“Who are you?” Theor stammered. “What are you?”
“No.” The voice was inside him, reverberating in the chamber of his mind. “Here, the questions are mine to ask. Who are you? Another of those who stumble blindly about the fringes of this place. Another trespasser who does not belong.”
“I am…” The man did not know his name any more, for that part of his memory, and his self, was eclipsed by this immense all-encompassing presence. He fell silent.
“This is not for you. All of this, not for you. Your blood is too singular. Too clean, too pure.” The voice spat that last word with venom. It burned the man. “Your kind does not belong here.”
“Who are you? Are you… are you the Hooded God?”
“Oh, your dreams of the Road. These pathetic comforts you preach to yourselves. Like children, afraid of the dark, afraid of being alone. To be alone; I could teach you about that. I could show you. No, I’m not your Last God.”
The man felt himself failing. He was crumbling beneath the weight of this vast attention.
“He Who Waits?” He mumbled it; he gasped it. “He Who Waits, then? Not gone at all, but always here? Always with us, all this time?”
The laughter was all around him, all through him, tearing at him.
“You’d make me Death?” And a heavy silence, a nothingness for a time. “I don’t know. I don’t know. I want… I wanted everything to be different. Not death. That’s not what I wanted. I only wanted… I only wanted…” Agonies seeped from the voice into the man, filling him with another’s suffering. And it continued: “None of this is as I thought it would be. But it cannot be changed.”
Swiftly as they had come, the doubt and sorrow that had suffused the voice receded. The darkness grew deeper. The shadows massed.
“But this place is not for you. This is my body, my flesh. My blood. You are within me, and that is not… So, yes. A God, if you like. I am sitting now, in a cold room, in a ruined city, talking to someone… talking… failing. My body decays. I cannot mend it. Nothing can be mended now. But I am here too. And greater here, beyond decay.”
Theor remembered who he was then. He was granted that, as the presence shrank away from him a little, and withdrew itself from the fabric of his thoughts. He fell, from nowhere towards nowhere, simply plummeting through a roaring void; and the awful presence was that through which he fell, and it was with him also, gathering and taking hold of his essence.
It whispered in his mind, “If I am to be a God. Let it be Death.”
It tore Theor apart. He felt himself opened and splintered. Shards of his awareness were ripped away. This foul, omnipotent being that claimed the mantle of Death flayed his mind with claws of pure loathing and rage. It poured all its jealousies and hatreds and bitterness into him, and they dismembered him. In the last, flickering, dimming glimmer of Theor’s own thoughts, beyond the agony and the terror, there was only a long, descending murmur of regret and a lingering bitter certainty of failure and error. That faded. And fluttered. And finally wisped away, dispersing into the unbounded, eternal Shared.
And in the Sanctuary of the Lore Inkallim struggled to hold the First’s flailing limbs steady. He bucked and arched on the trestle bed and spat black-tainted foam at them as he screamed. Then he fell suddenly silent and still. The Inkallim backed away from him, alarmed. Tears streamed from his open, staring eyes. His heart pounded, and each mighty beat shook him, and drew a single gasping breath from him. Until there came one clenching of his heart that did not release itself; one breath that was cut short and lay unfinished in his throat. His hands twisted the bed sheet beneath him into knots. And Theor, First of the Lore, died.
Outside, in the snowbound grounds of the Sanctuary, the ancient pine trees stood as they had done for so many years. Tiny birds spiralled up their trunks, seeking insects wintering in the crevices of the bark. Above, midway between the sharp peaks of the trees and the thinning cloud, buzzards were circling. Tiny drops of rain-not snow but rain-were flickering down. The buzzards arced away, lazy wings bearing them towards Kan Dredar in the valley below, or towards the compound of the Battle Inkall. There would be food for them there.
“I see them,” Igris said from the window.
Kanin oc Horin-Gyre set down the bowl of cold broth he had been holding to his lips and twisted in his chair.
“You’re sure?” he said to his shieldman.
Igris nodded. He was staring out over a street on the very south-eastern fringe of Glasbridge. This part of the town had been beset by both flood and fire when the town fell to the Black Road. The house in which they waited, and in which Kanin took a hasty meal, had no roof to it. The floorboards were charred; the shutters at the window from which Igris looked out hung split and smoke-blackened and broken. There was even now, long since the floodwaters had receded, a damp stink of rot to the place. Kanin had had to sweep a thin crust of snow from the table when they first entered.
He wiped soup from his lips with the back of his hand.
“How many?” he asked without getting up.
“Can’t tell yet, sire,” Igris replied.
“Eska said there were twenty, when she saw them on the road this morning.”
“Might be twenty. Or they might have seen her. Perhaps they split up.”
“They didn’t see her,” said Kanin scornfully. “She’s of the Hunt, man. You think they get themselves seen except by choice?”
Igris shrugged. There was weary defeat in that sluggish movement.
“We’d best go down to greet them, then,” Kanin said, pushing back his chair and getting to his feet. He lifted his chain shirt from where it lay on the table and shrugged it over his head.
“Are you sure?” Igris murmured. Such a small sound, so frail, to come from such a man. It was resigned yet perhaps still carried the faintest thread of hope that his master might turn aside from his chosen course. Kanin glared at his shieldman’s back.
“You question me? Doubt me?”
Igris said nothing. Kanin took a heavy cloak down from a hook on the wall.
“Just do what I require of you,” he said. “Do as your Thane requires. You’ve enough honour, enough memory of who you are, to do that, I hope.”
His shieldman followed him out onto the street. The man stank of reluctance, and Kanin despised him for that. The slush outside was almost ankle deep. The night before had been the first in a long time that had not frozen. As a result, Glasbridge’s white covering was softening, turning grey, melting into its ruins and its mud. Kanin splashed out into the centre of the road and stood there, feet spaced enough to give him a firm stance, cloak flicked back clear of his sword. He waited.
The riders came around the corner in single file. The horses moved very slowly. One by one they came into sight: six, ten, twelve, then fifteen, twenty. All black-haired. All tall and upright. All clad in dark leather with iron studwork or buckles or hilts glinting softly here and there. Ravens, riding into Glasbridge. Kanin smiled to himself.
Then, still fifty or more paces distant, the lead rider halted her horse with the merest rolling of her wrist to tighten the reins. She stared down the street towards Kanin. Others of the riders came sedately forward and conferred with their leader. The muted exchange was curt. She nodded once, and two men peeled themselves away from the rest, easing their mounts round and heading, just as unhurriedly as they had come, back out towards the fields beyond the town.
Kanin’s smile died on his lips. His disappointment was far more bitter than he would have expected. It did not, in truth, matter greatly. After today, everything would rush onwards. The end-whatever its form, whatever its nature-would come quickly, and nothing and no one could change that. But he had hoped that this beginning might at least be perfect, flawless. It would have felt good.