Torquentine fluttered his bloated fingers in Magrayn’s direction. She pulled a clean, fresh cloth free from her waistband and laid it across his palm. He carefully mopped sweat from his cheeks and brow. So many breathing bodies within this confined space had made it moist and warm.
“Are you still listening, Thane?” he asked.
Igryn was hunching forward once more. He had begun to work his jaw as if chewing some resistant matter. Strands of his hair were hanging down across the bandage that covered his eye sockets.
“Straighten him up, would you?” Torquentine muttered to his men, who were staring distastefully at the Thane. One of them planted a broad hand firmly on Igryn’s shoulder and pushed him, a little more roughly than was necessary, erect. Igryn’s head cracked against the stonework, but he did not seem to notice.
“I hear an idiot dribbling nonsense. Is that you talking?” Igryn ground his chin into the notch between neck and shoulder. “My beard itches.”
“If you’ve brought fleas into my home, I’ll be sorely disappointed,” Torquentine muttered. “But to return to my point. I was a different man in those days, you understand. And not only in my possession of two eyes. I was somewhat… more modestly proportioned, shall we say? More germanely, I was somewhat hotter of temper and fiercer in my adherence to the Blood of my birth and upbringing. But-and this is the important part, Thane, so I hope you are listening-though the fires of my loyal ardour may have been damped down a little by the years, they are far from extinguished.
“I am a part of my Blood. A part many might wish to excise, I suppose, but a part nevertheless. I belong. And I believe, in my deeply buried heart, that the Bloods are a boon to this world. I believe that without them, and without my Blood in particular, we would sink back into the self-mutilation that has so often afflicted us as a people, as a race. As a godless world. You will therefore understand, Thane, that it troubles me greatly to see the Haig Blood convulsed, as it is now, by a multitude of difficulties.”
“You’ll find no sympathy in me,” Igryn sneered. He turned his blind head towards Torquentine. The smile upon his bruised and misused face was ugly. Mad. “I’d like nothing better than to eat your Thane’s warm heart out of the bowl of his broken chest.”
“Unfortunately, I do not doubt the sincerity of your desire in that regard. And therein lies my dilemma, for I find myself at a loss to know what to do with you. Quite aside from my instinctive wish to do no more harm than is strictly necessary to the Blood of my birth, change is something I find distinctly undesirable at the best of times. I would go so far as to say, in fact, that I am thoroughly averse to it, for reasons both temperamental and professional. And there is altogether too much of it in the air at the moment. Wanton, egregious change for no better reason than that everyone seems to have forgotten the limits of appropriate behaviour. Do you know who commissioned me to bring about your removal from the custody of Gryvan’s men, Thane?”
“No,” hissed Igryn through gritted teeth. “And I don’t care.”
“How ungrateful of you. What would you do if I were to return you to your own lands?”
“Make you rich. Raise an army. Avenge myself upon your Blood and render as many of your women sonless, brotherless and husbandless as I could.”
Torquentine emitted a curtailed, stifled laugh. He glanced over to Magrayn. She was as impassive, as quietly observant as ever.
“Surely he would have been dead long ago, were he as guilelessly stupid as he appears?” he said to her.
Magrayn frowned. It was an expression that made the exposed, corrupted flesh of her rotted face stir in interesting ways.
“He is sick,” she suggested. “Deranged.”
“Quite possibly,” Torquentine said. “I have not left this chamber for some time, Thane, yet I have a thousand eyes, a thousand ears, spread all through this city, all through the lands of this Blood, and others. I see, and I hear, everything. All of that knowledge flows back to this chamber, and pools here in me. And what do I glean from it? What do I discern of the shape of the world?”
He waited for a response from Igryn, but the Thane was silent, his head turning very slowly, very slightly, from side to side.
“I see the Crafts and the Moon Palace edging towards outright war,” Torquentine continued. “I see your own lands rent by unrest. Not mere banditry but utter lawlessness, and rumours of Dornach ships already scouting your shores with half a mind to land an army by all accounts. I see the Black Road seething across the borders of the Ayth Blood like a swarm of wolves, consuming and destroying. I see murderous mobs rampaging in the streets above us here, battling the Guard. Everywhere I see unreason and savagery and disintegration. It is as if every desire, every ambition now runs unbridled. The fetters of restraint have been cast off by all those upon whom they served a most valuable purpose.”
He sighed. Even as he spoke, he could feel the creeping anxiety that had nested, of late, in his chest. He was a man who craved, who needed, order and control and organisation. Everything, in fact, that the world now seemed determined to slough like some redundant skin.
“And all of it growing worse. Each part of it feeding off the rest, each brutality precipitating another, each stupidity exceeding the one that went before. I have even crept my eyes and my ears into the very house of the man who decided you should be free, Thane. I watch him, I eavesdrop upon him. And I mislike what I see and what I hear. Things have changed in strange and unreadable ways. In that house and everywhere. This puts me in a sorely testing position.”
Igryn laughed. A cackle, like a crow.
“I will eat his heart,” the Thane of the Dargannan Blood murmured.
Torquentine raised his eyebrows and scratched disconsolately at his folded throat.
“As you say, Magrayn: sick. He surrenders himself all too willingly, I think, to the malady that besets the whole world. Ah well. As I was about to explain, I find myself unwilling to comply with my instructions. Returning him to his homeland would only feed a fire that already rages beyond control. I have no wish to play the part of midwife at the birthing of a world given over to unreason and chaos. I just cannot bring myself to do it.”
“Shall I return him to the storeroom?” Magrayn asked.
“Indeed. And make sure there’s nothing there he can hurt himself with. Until I decide what to do with him, it’s rather important he stays alive.”
The two guards unceremoniously hooked their hands under Igryn’s armpits and hoisted him up from the bench. He did not resist, but seemed unable to support his own weight. His legs buckled at the knee and he hung like an ancient, infirm greybeard propped up on a fence.
“Seems like nothing much, doesn’t he?” Torquentine reflected sadly. “Yet because of him, I invite the wrath of the Shadowhand. I all but betroth myself to catastrophe. Constantly surprising, the way things turn out, isn’t it? And I never took much pleasure in surprises.”
II
Yvane was trembling, Orisian realised. They had paused beside a pool into which the waters of a stream plunged from a low cliff. Moss and ferns festooned the rock face, a miniature, verdant abundance still resplendent in the green that winter had stolen from the rest of the forest. These were no mighty falls. The column of water that churned down into the pool was slight by comparison with that Orisian had seen at Sarn’s Leap, long ago. Still the sound, the cold mist that drifted over his face, was enough to make him think of Inurian. Enough to prickle his heart with needles of guilt and shame. They had left the na’kyrim there alone, and he had died. He had died on his own. What a fearful, awful thing that seemed to Orisian now: that a man so gentle and so deserving of better, had died alone, amongst enemies.