Orisian did not know what to think. He had never seen so many Kyrinin dead. Although these were notionally his enemies, and their clan had taken Rothe’s life and made war upon Ess’yr’s people, he could not help but lament the transformation of so much grace and power into sanguine ugliness. Without life to animate them, the bodies looked ungainly. Pathetic almost, with their disordered, frozen clothes, their scattered bundles of belongings. He could make no connection between these sad shells and the Kyrinin he had seen, and known, and fought in the weeks since Winterbirth.
Yvane and K’rina lingered further up the slope. The bulbous bare rocks almost hid them from sight. Taim and his men were moving amongst the bodies, each following a solitary, silent path from corpse to corpse. Looking for what? Orisian wondered. There was no life here, not even its faintest residue. Taking the measure of death, perhaps. Feeling its texture, learning afresh its look.
Ess’yr and Varryn were coming up towards him, emerging from the deeper shadows down there in the thick forest, where the dead and the tree trunks and the dark ground merged into uniform gloom. Varryn’s expression filled Orisian with an imprecise, all-encompassing regret. The Kyrinin was not smiling, but his eyes gleamed with restrained excitement.
“It is good,” Varryn said as they drew near.
“No,” Orisian said. “No, it’s not.”
Ess’yr held out the bloodied stub of an arrow. It had been broken off halfway along the shaft.
“White Owl,” she said. Orisian was glad not to hear her brother’s eagerness reflected in her. But nor did he hear any trace of sorrow, any hint of distress at this slaughter.
“The enemy kill each other. Like a snared beast, they tear at their own legs. Their own bodies. It will make our path easier.”
“Easier,” Orisian echoed. He stooped down to the dead White Owl girl who lay at his feet. Half-dusted with snow, she was face down. Her arms lay neatly in at her sides, one leg bent, the other quite straight. She was small. No more than ten years old, he guessed. He picked up a little bow from where it had spilled out of the bedding roll she had been carrying. Like a toy, he thought. And remembered that he had seen the same thing in the hands of a Fox child, long ago by the banks of the River Dihrve.
“Let’s keep moving,” he said. There was a foulness about this place. He wanted only to leave it far behind.
As the two Kyrinin trotted down into the next broad vale in Anlane’s endless undulations, Orisian noticed one of Taim’s warriors staring after them. There was no warmth in the man’s fixed gaze. No sentiment at all, in fact, save mistrust. Suspicion. We’re all snared now, Orisian thought. Every one of us.
Across the moors north of Dun Aygll, the host of Black Road spread. It splintered and crumbled, like a vast flock of birds that had ridden fierce winds but found them, in the end, too potent and been scattered by them. It consumed everything it encountered: farms and villages and the fragile remnants of the Haig army. And it consumed itself. Tarbains hunted stragglers of any ilk, slaughtered and stripped them. Parties of Battle Inkallim rode back and forth across the bare and sodden land, seeking to reassert control over this vast beast, only to find it ungovernable. As often as not, they encountered nothing but madness and frenzy and feral bloodlust. Where they could not impose order, they imposed death instead, for there was a kind of madness upon many of them as well.
The masterless villages on the eastern shore of the Vaywater, where no Blood and no Thane held sway, turned on one another. The fishermen and goatherds and hunters and weavers laid down the tools of their crafts and took up knives and axes and spears instead. They fought over disputed fields and over stolen goats. They paid no heed to other concerns, and one settlement-Karlakan-was thus taken unawares when a wandering band of Heron Kyrinin, straying perversely far from their territories, descended upon it in the night. By dawn, blood was running down into the waters of the great lake and curling away in stained eddies.
In Koldihrve, at the mouth of the Vale of Tears, the men of the town hunted na’kyrim after nightfall.
The Heron and the Hawk, who had planted peace staffs along their boundaries only one season ago, disinterred all the grievances that had been so recently buried. The young men and the young women took up their spears once more. They raided, as they had done before, but this time they went not in their tens but in their scores, and wherever the spear a’ans went, they left not even the youngest of children or the frailest of elders alive.
And in Anlane the White Owl Kyrinin made war upon themselves. A few who had doubted all along the intoxicating promises of the na’kyrim Aeglyss, and found themselves dismayed by the fierce passions that now seemed to rule their fellows, spoke out. And were slain. The last of them was cut apart on the hard ground before the lodge of the Voice herself. But the killing, and the dissent, once begun did not stop. Though many of the warriors were long gone, venturing far beyond the clan’s territory to assuage their lately rediscovered martial pride and hunger for the blood of their people’s myriad enemies, enough remained to fight over every trifle, and even the least warlike, the youngest, the oldest, the most infirm, found enough passion burning in them to lift a spear or set arrow to string.
The dyke had been broken, and through the breach came flooding every resentment and division. Rumour and accusation spun all through Anlane like seeds upon the wind. Vo’ans began to break apart, families and warbands taking to paths that would normally remain untrodden until the summer, many neither knowing nor caring whether they were fleeing or pursuing, hunter or hunted. The wise chanted in their tents, questing after truth, but no answers came. Only fear and confusion. But still they chanted, and hoped for clarity, while outside and everywhere in the Thousand Tree-Clad Valleys the bloodshed continued.
III
The contours of the darkness within Ragnor oc Gyre’s fortress in Kan Dredar were subtle. Slight gradations laid a patchwork cloak of blacks and greys and shadow over the foundry and the bakery, the barracks and the stables, the low keep where the High Thane dwelled; and the Great Hall loomed over all with its huge steepled roof and its giant doors, around the edges of which light and noise and heat bled into the winter’s night. All else was quiet. Rats ran along the base of the storehouse wall, noses down. There was smoke coiling out from the armourer’s workshop, but the fires from which it sprang had long since been left to dwindle. The smiths were in the Hall with everyone else.
Beyond the outer palisade, in the trees down by the river, an owl called. There were none to hear it, save the guards in the watchtowers and at the gates, and most of them were too busy bemoaning their drawing of such a cold duty while the rest of Ragnor’s household had its revels. None to hear it, save those guards, and one other.
Shadow separated itself, a part of it coming free and slipping silently across the narrow stretch of ground between storehouse and Great Hall. Two rats, startled by this sudden intrusion into their nocturnal dominion, scampered for their tunnels in the hard earth.
The assassin who came to rest crouching at the foot of the hall’s looming rear wall had ash thickly smeared over his face. Every garment he wore was black. His hands were sheathed in gloves thin enough to ensure their movement would not be hampered. He paused there, secure in lightless obscurity, and took a few steady breaths to regulate his heartbeat and clear his mind. Satisfied, he rose smoothly to his feet, still pressing himself against the stone wall. The whites of his eyes were the only imperfection in his sombre concealment. They darted this way and that now, like pale pebbles. And found nothing to concern him. No light in any overlooking window, no movement.