“I do not know,” she said as she stood up.
The two of them stared down at the halfbreed. He was entirely unmoving now save for the fluttering of his chest. He looked like a strangely animated corpse. The White Owls edged nearer to him. Shraeve’s ravens drifted closer from all parts of the hall. The gaunt, senseless na’kyrim exerted a grim fascination upon them. Blood was flowing, Eska saw, from his wrists. The sleeves of his gown were soaked with it.
“I don’t understand,” said hook-backed Goedellin, almost plaintive to Eska’s ear. She curled her lip in momentary contempt at the man’s feebleness. What use was the Lore if it could offer no guidance in times such as these? It was no wonder the Battle had made itself master when the eldest Inkall so meekly lapsed into confusion and uncertainty.
“No,” muttered Shraeve. “That does not surprise me.” She was staring at Eska even as she curtly dismissed Goedellin from her attention.
Eska nodded slowly and slightly in acknowledgement of Shraeve’s gaze, and the Banner-captain of the Battle advanced towards her.
“You came here from Glasbridge, we think,” Shraeve said. The hilts of the two swords sheathed across her back rocked as she gave her shoulders a loosening shrug. Eska took comfort in the thought that even this formidable raven felt the tension, perhaps even the pain, the halfbreed spilled out from himself. She made no reply to Shraeve’s question, though. She would offer nothing willingly to Cannek’s killer.
“And presumably you mean to return there,” Shraeve continued, “since if killing Aeglyss was your plan, you would likely have made the attempt before now.”
“He would be dead,” Eska confirmed.
“Perhaps not.”
“It is difficult to defeat an assassin who places no value upon their own life.”
“Difficult,” said Shraeve with the thinnest of smiles, “but not impossible.”
Eska could see in her cold eyes that she meant Cannek, and despised that faint flicker of satisfaction she detected in the other woman. Cannek had willingly submitted himself to the judgement of fate. It ill became anyone to permit themselves more than transitory pleasure or regret at his death. Shraeve, it seemed, was less mindful than she should be of the creed’s warnings against the corrosive effects of pride.
“The Inner Servant — ” Shraeve gestured towards black-lipped Goedellin without taking her eyes from Eska “-wishes to travel to Glasbridge. I invite you to escort him. It would be for the best. Your presence here causes unwelcome disquiet.”
“Can I not come, as so many do, merely to witness for myself this man you claim as such a boon to the creed?” Eska could not help but play out in her imagination a deadly dance with Shraeve. She could picture those swords sweeping free of their scabbards, could see how her own spear-if she had it-might dart beneath or between them to pierce Shraeve’s carapace of black leather. There could be no certainty of how such a dance would end. Eska was sure of only one thing: it would be brief. The first faltering, however slight, would resolve it.
“There are many who fear the Hunt’s vision has become clouded,” Shraeve said. “That you have lost sight of what is important.”
“And that is?”
“That we-all of us-are rising to our final glory. That we have mastered two Bloods already, and today-even now-our armies hunt the fleeing host of a third. This is what Tegric and his hundred died for.” Shraeve’s voice rose as she spoke, acquiring a joyous vigour. “It is what the Fisherwoman herself died for, and all the thousands since then. This is the time that all those deaths have made possible. If you deny it, you deny them. Make them meaningless.”
“It sounds like a matter the Lore is better placed to judge than the Battle,” Eska said placidly. Her head was clearing now. Her nausea had subsided, leaving only a sour twist in her stomach.
Goedellin looked up at the mention of the Lore. His stained lips were pressed tight in a miserable pinch.
“There is time yet for…” Shraeve began, but then Aeglyss was rolling onto his stomach with a thick gurgling splutter. The White Owls and Inkallim who had gathered around him started back.
Aeglyss crawled on all fours. His hands flexed against the planking of the floor like frail white spiders. The open sores where his fingernails had once been split and leaked noisome fluid. His scabrous head bobbed up and down. Blood dripped from his face, hair fell from his scalp.
“Help me, Shraeve,” he sobbed. “Help me. Save me. I am lost.”
His gown hung limp from the bones of hip and shoulder and ribcage.
“Am I safe yet? Am I safe? I can’t tell; can’t tell anything any more. I don’t know.”
Eska saw unguarded confusion and distaste flutter for a moment on the faces of a few: several of the wood-wights, one or two of the Inkallim. There are flaws here still, she thought. There is room for doubt in some hearts, when the madness is not fully upon them.
“It’s killing me,” Aeglyss groaned. “Tearing me apart. It’s too much, too much for my body, my bones. Oh, what have they done to me?”
He crawled, jerking, across the floor like some demented child made of sticks and string. Shraeve went to him and knelt at his side. She shot a wildly hostile glare in Eska’s direction.
“Go,” she hissed. “Take Goedellin with you. Take him to that pathetic Thane of yours.”
Goedellin hobbled towards the door without further urging. He glanced uneasily, again and again, at the twitching na’kyrim as he went. Eska followed him without looking back. She heard Aeglyss muttering as she went.
“It’s not enough. This’ll eat me away unless I can see into the heart of it, see all of it. I need to go deeper. I need to go further.”
Shraeve’s whispered reply was too soft for Eska to hear. But Aeglyss shouted, and she could hear him still as she descended the stairway that carried her and Goedellin out into the derelict city.
“No,” the halfbreed cried. “I need more. I need to be more. It’s tearing me apart, unless I master it. I need to be made afresh. Again! Again!”
VII
In the night, those uncomfortable beneath Kanin’s yoke had come for him, seething out of Glasbridge’s alleys and ruins. It was not the Lannis folk who rose, but the motley bands of Black Road looters and idlers and thieves that had occupied the town before his arrival. Titles and past allegiances meant nothing, it seemed, in this newly savage world; scores had come, half of them armed with nothing more than staffs or kitchen knives, to test this Thane’s determination. They had not found him wanting.
While the mob battered at the iron-stiffened door of the Guard House and smashed in the shutters on its windows, Kanin himself had led his Shield and twenty other warriors out over the wall of the little yard in which Glasbridge’s Guard had once drilled. They had fallen on the rear of the baying throng, so suddenly and unexpectedly that the slaughter had been trivially easy. The killing brought Kanin less relief, less respite from his tortured preoccupations, than such deeds once had. It was purposeless beyond the preservation of his own life, and he set little store by that measure of purpose.
In the wake of it, though, standing with the dead and the crippled strewn about him, with groans and whimpers populating the darkness, he had rediscovered some little of the cleansing cold fire. One of his own Shield, a tall man, black-bearded, had cornered some ragged Gyre villager in the doorway of one of the shacks opposite the Guard House. As Kanin watched impassively, the shieldman’s shoulders shook, his sword sank to hang loosely at his side. The man he should have been killing was immobile for a moment, bewildered, and then fled into the night.
Kanin seized the shieldman’s shoulder and spun him about. There were tears on the man’s face, and the sight of them roused all of Kanin’s ire.
“What are you doing?” he shouted.
“I cannot, sire.” The words were tremulous. The man’s brow furrowed. The sword fell from his limp hand.