But Aeglyss would not allow that escape. Kanin’s consciousness was embraced by that of the halfbreed, and borne up by it, and thrust back into the world of limitless suffering. Kanin looked up at the na’kyrim’s ruined face. Aeglyss was opening and closing his mouth like a man choking. No sound but inarticulate croaks emerged. Kanin heard more, though, within his head.
“Stay with me, Thane. I am not done yet. Not done with the world. You made me. You will be my witness.”
Aeglyss released Kanin’s hands and the Thane roared in stupefied agony as they hung limp from his wrists, bloated bags of blood and fragmentary wreckage.
“You should have killed me a long time ago,” said the air, and the boards beneath Kanin’s knees, and the pitted stone of the columns, and the darkness crowding across his vision, all speaking with the voice of the halfbreed. “Now it’s too late. For all of us.”
VII
K’rina walked as if in a daze, blundering through the night in an erratic, wayward fashion. She stumbled across the rough fields, veering aside from ditches only at the last moment, sometimes splashing down into them without pause and hauling herself up and out the other side. When the occasional stand of sallow and alder loomed suddenly out of the darkness, she would barge her way through it, showing no sign that she was even aware of the branches snagging her clothes or scratching her face.
Taim followed as steadily as he could, never more than half a dozen strides behind the na’kyrim. Her unpredictable and uncompromising course made it difficult, as did his determined efforts to keep equally close to Orisian. The Thane matched K’rina’s path and pace out to her left. Somewhere on the right, further ahead, was Varryn, but the Kyrinin stayed in the darkness and Taim had seen no hint of him for some time.
Though K’rina was the unwitting, unconscious guide, it was for Orisian that Taim reserved the greater portion of his attention. Taim stumbled many times, in some dip or rut in the ground, because he strove to keep the young man in sight.
He could not tell whether it was this constant battle with his senses and with the night, or the simple all-consuming nature of his concern for Orisian’s safety, but Taim felt a rare calm in him. For all the aching of his leg-the thigh muscle still tormented by the memory of that bone-studded club-and the constant enervating anticipation of some sudden assault, he found himself untroubled by distraction, from either within or without. His mind followed a strangely placid course, even as his body struggled on through the lightless, treacherous fields.
It was simplicity that gave him this clarity. He accepted but a single task upon his shoulders now: to bring Orisian safe out of this. It mattered not at all what lay ahead, or what familial longings remained lodged in his heart, or what fears circled him-dark possibilities riding raven wings-and tried to colonise his imagination. All these were things he had no time or space for. They all foundered against the great wall of his need to preserve the life of his Thane. In the singular and absolute primacy of that task he had come perhaps to the purest expression of his self and his history. That he should have come to it as he might well be entering upon the very threshold of his own death did not trouble him. Indeed, it seemed fitting. Taim was content.
Birds erupted now and again from thickets or from the reeds fringing ditches, whirring low away into the darkness. They were the least alarming of the night’s surprises, for strange and unsettling sights and sounds became ever more frequent as they moved further out into the Glas Valley.
The rotund carcass of a cow was suddenly there, in the middle of a bare expanse of ploughed earth. As they passed it by, that bulging form was revealed as grim illusion, for the innards had been hollowed out: the animal’s ribs and the dried, tight hide they supported encased nothing but a great cavity. Following K’rina across a shallow ditch, Taim found something that was both resistant and yielding beneath his foot. He looked down and saw the white and puffy skin of an eyeless corpse, lambent in the faint moonlight, just beneath the surface of the water.
Hoofbeats drummed their way along some track far out to the right. Taim closed up on Orisian. They slowed a little, Orisian catching hold of K’rina’s trailing sleeve to hold her back, and the sound came pounding closer. Too fast, Taim thought. No rider with any wit would go at such speed without light to see by. And when the great brown horse blurred past them, it was indeed riderless, though saddled and with stirrups flailing at its flanks.
Not long after, Varryn abruptly appeared in K’rina’s path and brought her to a halt. He nodded wordlessly ahead. It took time, for it would reveal itself from the corner of an eye, not when he looked directly at it, but soon enough Taim found the dimmest, feeblest tinge of a campfire out there in the blackness. They led K’rina on a wide looping detour, and it was the Kyrinin who decided when they had put sufficient ground between them and the distant flames to let her move freely again, in accordance with whatever mute instinct drove her.
Once there was laughter. It drifted to them from the west, clear but thin. It was a despairing, straining laughter, like the cry of some forlorn animal, closer cousin to misery than joy. It rose and fell, and lost its shape and dwindled away.
For a time Taim was sure he could hear Orisian mumbling to himself. He could not see his Thane’s lips so could not be certain, and the sound was far too soft for any words to reach him. It worried him, for Orisian had seemed in the last few days to be on the brink of some entirely solitary, personal desolation. Like a man clinging to a branch at the river’s edge, half in the current and half out of it, his strength failing, the pull of the water growing.
They halted at last, and took cover in a drainage channel that ran close to a burned-out farmhouse. The water was not as deep as it should have been-the channel was blocked somewhere, perhaps by rubble or a slide of earth-but still it came up over the tops of their boots as they crouched there watching the first grey light of dawn leach into the eastern sky. Taim had to hold K’rina down to prevent her from clambering to her feet and going blindly on. He did it as gently as he could, and she was far too slight and weakened to resist him.
They had not spoken one to another all through the night. The silence had become embedded. Taim was taken by surprise when Orisian broke it.
“Why?” he asked Varryn softly.
That this was a return to some unfinished matter between them was plain. At first he doubted whether the Kyrinin would respond. The answer came, though, as perhaps it would not have done but for that long night the three of them had spent together in this hostile land.
“Because she asked me,” Varryn said. “Because I was not there when she took the wound. If I was there, perhaps she would not have been wounded, but a… a burning was in me. I was lost to myself, lost in the hunting of the enemy. A thing that can make such a madness… it should stop. It should end.”
The quiet wrapped itself about them again, and Taim let his eyes close. He had become accustomed to exhaustion, inured in part to its crippling effects, but it was heavy now.
“Because a good man died to win this woman for you,” Varryn said unexpectedly. “He would run with you now, if he lived. I run for him. Because I saw Anain die. I saw trees made dust. The man who can do this… he will make the ground upon which we walk a dead thing. He will shape clouds out of fear and hide the sun, and we will walk in shadows. It would be a good thing to kill him. Are these reasons enough?”