“Indeed. Yet you sit in the hall of a Kilkry-Haig town. It seems we-those who came before you, Talark-have already proved that even the impossible can sometimes be possible. If the will is there. The faith.”
One of the Gaven-Gyre warriors cut short the burgeoning argument by rasping her chair back across the floor and rapping the back of her hand on the table.
“If it’s conquest that concerns you, our time might have been better spent busying ourselves with that task instead of riding all the way back here to indulge in petty disputes. There’s more than enough chaos already, without our absence to help it along.”
“She knows that,” Talark grunted. “She’s got her ravens out there taking charge of everything while we’re dragged back here. This serves no purpose save that of the Children of the Hundred.”
“No purpose?” Shraeve snapped, anger colouring her voice for the first time. “There is only one purpose in any of this. The service of the creed. Raising it up until all the world falls beneath its shadow. None who would dissent from that, none who doubt that the moment has come for all other concerns to be set aside, have any place in this endeavour. There must be unity. That is why we are gathered here now. Not to indulge in dispute, but to end it.”
“Don’t question my faithfulness to the creed,” Talark said, though his tone lacked the steel of conviction.
“There must be unity,” Goedellin murmured. All looked towards him. To Kanin’s eyes, the man looked more frail and weary than ever before. He spoke slowly, heavily, his seerstem-darkened lips sluggish. “There must be unity, and certainty. Doubt is the enemy of faith. Yet these times are… confused. Few things seem as clear as once they did.”
“Success is clarity,” Shraeve said. “It answers all questions.” She was firm, but her manner had shed its confrontational edge. It was good to see, Kanin thought, that the Battle’s confidence and arrogance had not yet become bloated enough to crowd out some vestigial respect for an Inner Servant of the Lore.
“Indeed.” Goedellin nodded. “Indeed.” And then: “Perhaps.”
“When Kilvale falls, all doubt will be undone,” said Shraeve with cold certainty. “When we hold the Fisherwoman’s birthplace, the birthplace of our creed, then the fire will burn brightly in every heart. Nothing will quench it then. None will be able to argue fate’s intent.”
“Oh, there’s always room for argument,” Cannek interjected lightly. “It’s in our nature to be disputatious.”
Kanin groaned inwardly. Why taunt the woman? Why so brazenly flaunt his opposition? But, of course, Cannek was one of those who found such liberation in the Black Road that he feared nothing, found nothing troubling. He would dare anything, and greet the consequences of his daring with equanimity. Such sentiments, once familiar, were beyond Kanin’s reach now.
At the far, gloomy end of the hall, the Kyrinin were moving. One of the doors opened. Kanin held his breath, and sensed the same sudden expectation taking hold of everyone else at the table.
The na’kyrim entered, and whatever feelings had been stirring in Kanin turned to disgust at the sight of him. Aeglyss was a wasted figure, emaciated and gaunt, coming unsteadily forward on the arm of a tall woodwight. The halfbreed’s colourless skin was scabbed and slack. Kanin grimaced.
Yet when he looked about the faces of the others gathered there, he saw entirely different emotions portrayed. A hint of unease now and again, but fascination too. Even Talark watched Aeglyss approach with a pathetic, wide-eyed touch of wonder.
There was an empty chair at Shraeve’s side. Aeglyss settled gingerly into it. He looked so small. Kanin imagined that the halfbreed’s neck would break with only the gentlest of twists. The Kyrinin warrior who had escorted Aeglyss to his place remained standing there, just behind him.
“Must we have woodwights in attendance?” asked Talark, recovering a fragment of his previous antagonism.
“This is Hothyn,” Shraeve said. “He is the son of the White Owl Voice, and leader of the warband that accompanies Aeglyss. His presence is a sign of our strength, not our weakness.”
Yet I saw these same White Owls killing one another in the streets of Glasbridge, Kanin thought. Even in them, Aeglyss could not command the unity you hope for. Not until those who contested it had been killed.
“Do not be distressed by my appearance,” Aeglyss suddenly said. His voice grated in his throat. “I am engaged in a struggle, every day, to contain and to shape what burns within me. It takes its toll. Flesh and bone were not made to bear such burdens. A river that rises in its greatest flood will ruin and break its banks, and so it is with me. The flood is in me. Once I master it, I will repair its ravages.”
He smiled, and Kanin saw yellowing teeth, black veins of corruption and decay spreading from them through white gums. He imagined that were he close enough he would catch the stink of rot from that foul mouth. The smile faded, and Aeglyss closed his eyes.
“I can smell the spice-thick air of Adravane’s Inner Court,” the na’kyrim murmured. “I feel the sand beneath the hoofs of a Saolin running on the Din Sive shore. I remember the Whreinin; can reach out and know what it was to be of the wolfenkind. The Anain raised a forest to drown a city with trees, yet they flee from the shadow of my mind as I move through the Shared. But they cannot flee far enough, or fast enough. Even them I can taste. Their age, their thoughts running like blood through veins of leaf and bough. All of this flows through me, and I flow through all things.”
He shivered, as if a cold pleasure filled him. “Your cause has found a servant in me, and the world has never seen my like. Such is the gift that fate, through me, bestows upon you. It is a terrible gift, but that is my burden. I will bear it and I will serve you.”
He looked around them all then, giving each of those at the table a brief moment of his undivided attention. His gaze brushed most briefly over Kanin, or so it seemed to Kanin himself. Even that instant of contact was enough to feel the weight of what lay behind the na’kyrim’s eyes. To Kanin, it was oppressive and invasive. To others, he saw as their turns came, one by one, it was exhilarating.
“I am the answer you and your people have been seeking all these years,” Aeglyss breathed at length.
And Kanin felt it. He felt it blooming in his breast and spreading its warmth through his limbs. It lifted him, and for the space of those few heartbeats there was nothing but the utter delight of knowing that all was as it should, and must, be. That all his hopes would be fulfilled, in their last and smallest detail. That the world this na’kyrim could promise him was all he could ever desire. Yet still, amidst it all, there was a hard nugget marring the perfection of the sensation: a nugget of hatred; the contradictory whisper that his truest, deepest desire could not be fulfilled by this halfbreed, but only by his death.
“All I ask is that you put your faith in me,” Aeglyss said. “And in the allies I bring to your cause. The White Owls. The force of my own will. The Shadowhand.”
“It’s true, then, that the Shadowhand is bound? That you have done to him what Orlane did to Tarcene?” Goedellin’s voice broke the skin of the moment. Kanin found himself suddenly breathing deeply, realising only now that he had been holding his breath.
“To have such a weapon at our enemy’s very heart…” whispered Talark.
“The Haig Chancellor is bound to our service — ” Shraeve began, but Aeglyss cut her short with a strange, strangled grunt.
“Some things should not be spoken of,” the na’kyrim said. “Think instead of the gifts I shall bring you. Kolkyre, Kilvale. Even unto Vaymouth itself, if that is your wish.”
“Still, Tarcene’s binding hardly ended well. Not for the Kingbinder himself, nor for the Kyrinin he served. Certainly not for Tarcene,” murmured Cannek, but no one save Kanin seemed to even notice that he had spoken.
“There are things-aspects of what I have become-that none can understand,” Aeglyss continued. “Burdens I must bear alone, in silence. Only my own kind could understand what I… but they are afraid. They fear my brightness will burn them. Only one… only she… She would understand.”