Outside, it was snowing, but it was a meagre, grainy kind of snow. The flakes were not the buoyant fat flowers of midwinter, but icy granules that came on desultory gusts of wind. Thick snow still lay over the Sanctuary, the relic of what had already been a long, hard season. There would be a thaw soon enough, Theor knew. The days were slowly lengthening. The mountain streams would fatten with meltwater and rush white and blue down into the valley. The lying snow would merge into the earth and bloat it, turn it to mud. There would, eventually, be a breaking of buds and a piercing of that mud by soft new shoots. If the world did not come to its end. If this was not, in fact, the Kall.
Theor was tired. No, more than tired. Utterly drained. Lifeless, lightless.
A young Inkallim came a little hesitantly across the snow towards him. A girl whose name he could not recall. So much seemed to be slipping away from him now.
“First, there is a messenger come from the Battle.”
Theor came to a shuffling halt. The hem of his robe settled over the snow.
“From Nyve?” he asked wearily.
“Yes, First. The messenger asks that you return with him to consult with the First of the Battle. There are… apparently, there are companies of Gyre warriors moving out from Kan Dredar. Moving up the slopes.”
“Of course there are,” sighed Theor. His bones felt heavy, as if they were encrusted with defeat and disappointment, so thickened and burdened by their own weight that he could hardly lift them. All he wanted to do, all he could conceive of doing, was sleep. Hide away behind a locked door, in darkness, and be nothing for a time.
“Send the messenger back where he came from,” he said. “Tell him I will come later. Not now. Later, if I can.”
He trudged on, moving beneath the pine trees that filled so much of the compound. The young Inkallim had not moved.
“What is happening, First?” she called after him. It was not quite fear that coloured her voice. Not yet.
“Nothing, child,” Theor said without stopping or looking round. “Nothing.”
IV
When Theor woke, it was from an intermittent slumber that had done nothing to renew him. He rose stiffly and dressed. His skin felt every scrape of his robe’s rough material. He felt no hunger or thirst, no desire of any kind that might lead him out from this bare chamber. Yet there was nothing to hold him here either. Solitude brought no easing of his despair.
He went out, and found others clustered in the corridor, conferring in muted whispers. They looked up, startled, at his emergence.
“You should see…” one of them stammered.
He let them lead him to the walls of the Sanctuary. Let them guide him up the steps onto the narrow walkway cut into its inner face. He went numbly, without expectation.
What they wanted to show him was smoke. It was climbing up into a sky thick with white clouds, tracing its darker way against that bleached background in two twisting columns that merged as they rose, and then slowly bent and spread to drift in black sheets high above the snow-clad hills. Those who accompanied him talked and fretted, but Theor took none of it in. He gazed up at that dark pillar ascending from the earth towards the firmament above and felt nothing. No surprise, no confusion, no fear. He found himself beyond such things.
It was the compound of the Battle burning. There was nothing else out there on the wooded slopes that could give rise to such a conflagration. The wind was coming from his back, otherwise Theor did not doubt that he would have smelled the ash, the burning timbers. Perhaps burning flesh. Perhaps he would even have heard the cries of the dying, the commotion of sudden death.
As they stood there on the wall, a shape emerged from the trees, coming steadily towards them. Some cried out and pointed, tugging at Theor’s arm to direct his attention. He did not respond. It was a grey horse, trotting along, following the hard-packed snow of the path between the deeper, pristine drifts that flanked it. It came at its own pace, following its own course, for the man who rode it was slumped forward, draped limply around its neck. Even from this distance, it was not hard to recognise him as a Battle Inkallim. The blackness of his hair, and of his leather armour, stood out against the pale hide of his mount and the luminously white snow.
The man’s blood had stained the horse’s shoulder, forming a dark red-brown blemish that flexed and pulsed as it moved along. There were crossbow bolts standing proud from the man’s back. Two of them, Theor thought, though he could not be sure.
“We must intercede, First,” one of those gathered upon the wall cried, all panic and confusion. “They will listen to the Lore, surely? The High Thane, the Battle, they must listen to the Lore. No one else perhaps, but us.”
Theor did not know what to say. Neither Ragnor nor Nyve would listen. They had boiled over and could hear nothing but the roaring of their own hearts, their own rages. The time when consideration, negotiation, moderation might gain any purchase upon anyone had passed. Fury bestrode the world and would not yield its dominion. That Theor himself could not partake of the heady brew rendered him isolated, at a loss. For whatever reason, he had been left becalmed and irrelevant in some backwater while the river flooded on without him. As if fate had no further need for him. If it even was fate that governed this torrent.
He turned away while the horse was still approaching with its grim cargo. He descended from the wall, ignoring the questions and pleas his fellow Inkallim belaboured him with. He went silently back to his own small bedchamber and closed the door behind him, and took a little box out from its hiding place.
Three of the Lore had now died within the walls of the Sanctuary while dreaming seerstem dreams. It was unprecedented. Theor himself had forbidden any others to venture into that once-so-soothing territory. But now… there was nowhere else to turn. He could find no truth or sense any longer on this side of the seerstem gate. There were no answers here. Nothing for him to hold on to. He felt entirely defeated by the vastness of the world and its confusion.
He took out one of the shrivelled fragments from the box and regarded it blankly. He did not truly imagine it could bring him any of the clarity he so craved, but that tiny hope persisted. Even before the deaths began, there had been little save troubling turmoil to be found in those strange dreams. But still he set the seerstem in his mouth and crushed it between his teeth. He lay back on the hard bed and closed his eyes.
Slowly, slowly, the seerstem took him. It dulled him and enfolded him and gently parted the threads holding him to the waking world. He sank, and the darkness bled across his eyes and silence leaked into his ears.
And he saw a thousand flickering shadows darting back and forth across a limitless gloomy expanse. He felt a thousand fluttering touches on the skin of his thoughts. A thousand sparks of anger, of fear, hate, anguish, awful grief, each one no more than an instant, like an ocean of tiny, transient stars flaring and dying across his mind. They dizzied him and dazzled him and he wailed soundlessly in his dreams at the deluge. This place to which seerstem gave entry had twisted so radically away from its once-familiar and restful form that it now felt like an exposed pinnacle surrounded by a churning storm. Standing there he was besieged and buffeted by clamorous delirium.
Whatever faint hope he had nurtured that there might yet be answers to be found here was shattered, and its fragments torn away on the howling winds that blew through him. Lights flashed before him, and he knew they were not lights but lives. It was a fearful lightning storm of being. It was too much. Panic boiled in him, and he longed above all else to escape this invasive maelstrom, but the seerstem had him, and he could not choose to wake from its clutches yet.
And then he was not alone. He saw nothing, heard nothing, but he felt a presence settling all about him, as if the black sky had descended and gathered itself into a single shell that enclosed him. It was a cold presence. One that pressed upon his consciousness, probed it with insistent fingers.