“There,” Taim breathed, and Orisian was wrenched back into the present.
He saw the same thing Taim did. Figures drifting silently back and forth amongst the trees. All the movement was soundless, patternless, as if in search of an as-yet-unexpressed form. It spread slowly around them, widening its compass, claiming more and more of the forest.
The wounded warrior edged back into line, struggling to keep the weight off his bloody leg. And the movement out there found the form it had been seeking, and ceased. Orisian’s heart beat once, twice as he stared out. He held his breath, for everything seemed poised in that narrow span of time upon some brink. Then they came, from all sides, rushing in.
“Up!” shouted Taim as he surged to his feet.
Orisian rose, heard arrows whipping by, saw the Kyrinin running towards him, felt their blind fury like a breeze on his face, and then sight and sound and touch all collapsed into a single impenetrable blur. All existence came to be only the act and the sensation of fighting and struggling.
A White Owl charged straight at him, spear levelled. It glanced off Orisian’s shield, and its wielder ran without pause onto the point of his sword, taking it into himself just under his ribs. Orisian’s arm gave beneath the weight of that savage merging, and the dying Kyrinin fell against his shoulder. Human and inhuman eyes met for an instant. Orisian saw nothing in those ashen pools. The Kyrinin blinked and slipped to the ground.
Orisian twisted his sword free, fending off another attack with his shield. He hacked about him, battering aside spears and arms that seemed to come reaching in from every side. A hand closed on the upper rim of his shield and began to pull it down and away from him. Taim was suddenly there, cutting at the wrist of the offending arm. Warm flecks of blood hit Orisian’s face.
He was dimly aware that he was faster now, more assured than he had been before. His blade moved without the need for conscious thought. It swung and blocked and stabbed according to some instinctual imperative of its own. But still he was no match for the man who had once been Captain of Castle Anduran.
Taim barged through the mass of White Owls. He did not wait for them to come to him, did not give them the time and space to exercise all their speed or dexterity. He ducked this way and that, cutting a gory path across the front of Orisian, and seemed always to be half a moment ahead of any attack that was directed against him. Arrows and the broken stump of a spear adorned the front of his shield like quills, until Taim battered it into the chest and face of a Kyrinin warrior and splintered them against his bones.
Someone fell at Orisian’s feet. He glanced down. One of his warriors writhed there, an arrow in his face. The chaos in which Orisian was caught crowded out any response to that sight, and his eyes flicked up again at once. A tall White Owl was bearing down on him, a great club-a knotted branch of long-dead wood-held above her head in both hands. Orisian got his shield up, and the cudgel shattered against it. Fragments of it stung Orisian’s brow and scalp. The blow knocked his shield low, almost tore it from his grip, and he swayed back. The woman flung the broken remnant of her weapon at him. He twisted his head out of its tumbling path, but it grazed his cheek. She ran at him and he hammered his sword into her upper arm with all his strength. It went deep, through sleeve and skin and flesh, and knocked her aside.
Beyond her, he saw a young Kyrinin-slighter and younger than he was himself-sitting astride the chest of a dead or dying man, pounding at his wrecked skull with a rock. The sight was transfixing. Orisian watched in stunned awe as the rock rose, flicking gore and blood into the air.
He was almost too late in blocking another spear thrust, and was staggered by it. The spear’s tip scraped along the leather belt at his waist. Orisian slashed at his attacker, but the White Owl sprang nimbly back. And looked down, startled, at the other spear that suddenly burst from his own stomach.
Varryn carried his impaled victim a couple of paces forward before driving him down onto the ground. Orisian started to thank him, but saw at once that the Fox was far beyond the reach of any words. Varryn’s eyes had a glaze of fierce detachment. He snarled savagely as he hauled at his spear to free it from the back of the White Owl. The blue tattoos on his cheeks were overlaid with streams of blood coursing from a ragged scalp wound. His hair was matted down over his brow.
He hissed as he spun, bringing his spear round in a flashing flat arc and breaking it across the midriff of another closing White Owl. He leaped high and came down on the back of a Kyrinin who was sparring with Taim. Orisian stepped forward. A flicker of movement sensed out of the corner of his eye had him lifting his shield. It caught an arrow out of the air and shook. Orisian looked out towards the youth who had loosed the shaft. The Kyrinin stared back at him, slowly lowering his bow with trembling hands, and then turned on his heel and vanished into the forest.
Orisian turned about. The shadow of the oak tree now fell upon the dead, the dying and the last of the fleeing White Owls. Soft moans and gasped breaths. The stench of blood and spilled guts. Orisian saw a Kyrinin arm extended up, reaching weakly and futilely for the overhanging boughs. He saw Taim Narran on his knees, shield laid flat before him, panting. He saw more than a dozen bodies, and one White Owl limping in a tight, unsteady circle, holding a crippled and ragged arm tight in against her side. She gave out a susurrant whimper. Her eyes were closed. Varryn put an arrow into her neck, and she staggered sideways and then fell.
Varryn turned towards Orisian. The Kyrinin’s chest was heaving in a way Orisian had never seen before, from exertion and perhaps from the intensity of the fires that burned within him. Fires that subsided now, for the warrior blinked and blew out his cheeks, stretching the coils of his blue kin’thyn, and let his bow hang limply from his hand. His eyes cleared.
Orisian nodded, a gesture of simple acknowledgement, a welcoming back of someone who had been absent, in more ways than one, until that moment. But he realised that the Kyrinin’s attention had already found another object. Those eyes focused beyond Orisian, sharpening upon something over his shoulder. Varryn’s face went slack, his lips parted. Orisian turned, frowning.
And only then did he grasp the true shape of the disaster that had been closing upon them-upon him-all this time. For Ess’yr lay on her back, hair spread over the grass like a filamentous disc framing her head. She stared up, unblinking, through the branches of the oak tree to the sky above. One hand rested lightly on her breast, the fingertips just barely touching the shaft of the arrow that was sunk deep into her fluttering chest. Her blood was turning the deerskin of her jacket black.
CHAPTER 5
There is a ruin at the heart of the Lannis Blood: Kan Avor, the drowned city where once the Thanes of Gyre ruled, and where the creed of the Black Road was nurtured and tended. It stands now empty and silent, in the cold embrace of still waters and marsh. Birds roost upon its crumbling walls and bats hide in its broken towers.
The people of the Glas Valley treasure this ruin, and all but venerate it. They think it a token of their determination, a glorious symbol of their past triumphs over the Black Road. They imagine that its persistence invigorates them. “See,” they say to one another. “See these broken and shackled towers. Here is the fate of our enemies. So strong is our grasp upon this land that we can tame mighty rivers and with them drown the cities of our foes.”