It would have been better to unpick this city: to break it apart, stone from stone, carry away its every timber, plough its streets back into the soft earth until nothing remained. Kan Avor is the constant shadow of the past upon the present. It commemorates not glory but unforgiven and unforgotten hurts. When men venerate the memory of war and strife, and make temples of its relics, and seek to learn from the ruins of yesterday how they should live their lives today, then they have made themselves prisoners of the past, condemned to fight its wars again and again. For few wars are ever truly finished. There is always some remaining vein of bitterness for those who can neither forgive nor forget to mine.
Time works many wonders, but they are not all to be treasured. It makes shackles out of past triumphs, burdens from victories. Bonds from memories. And it heals only if those who ride its currents are willing to be healed.
I
The Inkallim came to the na’kyrim in his ruined, rotting citadel on the floodplain. She came hesitantly, almost stumbling, eyes gritted and reddened by sleeplessness. Though the waters that had once imprisoned this city had retreated, it could never be free of their legacy. So she came with mud on her shoes, the stink of decay and mould on her clothing. And though she was one of the Children of the Hundred, and had been fashioned by those who trained her into a cold and remorseless weapon, imbued with all the certainty of her faith and her capabilities, the world had become wholly inhospitable to certainties. So she came as a supplicant, and for the first time in her hard life there was fear in her as she spoke.
“Aeglyss, can you hear me?”
The na’kyrim did not pause in his shuffling, limping, staggering progress around the columned hall. He hauled his cadaverous form on a weaving path amongst and around the pillars, wandering aimless in that sparse forest of stone trees. He walked barefoot, and his split and scabbed feet left prints of pus and blood on the dank floorboards. He moved slowly, and seemed at each and every moment to be on the point of falling.
Yet the air the Inkallim breathed felt alive. It was heavy in her mouth and throat and lungs, full of his power. It pressed upon her chest and her back and shoulders, as if he was not only contained within this shambling and broken body in its stained, ragged gown, but also in the glistening, moist walls and in the space they defined. As if he was everywhere.
She followed him, walking in those bloody footprints.
“Can you hear me?” she asked. “You must help me. You must hide some of your light, Aeglyss.”
He did not seem to hear her, for though he murmured erratic little whispers, whatever conversation he held was with himself, or with no one. What few words rose loud enough for the Inkallim to hear were in a language she did not know.
“Please,” she said. A word that her lips barely remembered well enough to form. “Our warriors turn on one another. They forget themselves, their cause, everything. They lie down and do not rise. They lose their minds. There is sickness in every street, every shelter. Fevers claim more each day, and there is barely a healer with enough sense or strength to treat them. Our triumph-the creed’s ascendancy-remains incomplete…”
He turned suddenly and sharply. His thin gown hung slack from his bony shoulders. The contours of his bones-ribs, hips-showed through its material. He stared at her from deep within the pits his eyes had sunk into. There was blood in those eyes, a fine net of countless broken vessels leaking soft red.
“Who are you?” he asked quietly. His voice cracked and creaked like the stale hinge of a long-forgotten door.
“Shraeve,” she told him. “Shraeve. You know me.”
“I know everyone,” he grunted. And turned away once more, lurching on in his unsteady circuit of the hall. There were cries rising up from outside, wailing that might be lamentation or simple madness. The Inkallim was not distracted by them. Such sounds-and worse-were common currency now in Kan Avor. The city had found its voice in them. She followed after the na’kyrim.
“Shraeve…” he whispered. “Shraeve… Shraeve. Yes, the raven. The fierce one, the cold one. Thinks she’s so wise, so clever. Not a true friend.”
“You can calm them,” she insisted. “You must calm them, bring our people back to us. If they will not-cannot-submit themselves to our commands, everything we have gained could yet slip away.”
“There is nothing I can do,” Aeglyss said bluntly, and then halted and looked around him as if puzzled. He frowned in contemplation.
“There must be,” said Shraeve.
He stared at her, and there was a shifting of the shadows about him. He flickered in and out of darkness for a few moments. It pained her eyes, and she clenched them almost shut.
“Must be?” he hissed. “Don’t you think I would, if I could?”
Scourges and daggers filled his voice. She, Banner-captain of the Battle Inkallim, quailed before this feeble, tottering figure.
“Nothing must be,” he cried in tones of venom and fire. “I am only the gate, and the truth enters through me, becomes me, and shapes the world according to its tenets. What we see now is only the true nature of the world, of us all. Nothing more. I cannot prevent it.” He was suddenly speaking softly, so laden with sorrow and regret that those same feelings took hold of Shraeve. “I cannot close what has been opened. Cannot heal my wounds. Cannot bring them back, none of them. I cannot even tell, any more, where I end and it… everything… begins. I don’t know whether I poisoned it, or it me… You can’t imagine… how I wish…”
He sagged against a pillar, then just as quickly gathered himself and lifted his head.
“We discover the truth now. That’s the thing. We become what we have always been, at our root. We enter an age of misrule, and I am its herald, its doorkeeper, its lord. Its God.”
“The Black Road is the truth,” Shraeve said. She backed away from him. He waved a dismissive hand in her direction, its flaking raw skin oozing fluid.
“Hate is coming,” he murmured, lifting his gaze towards the ruptured roof of the hall. “He is coming. From Glasbridge. Is there… is there still a place called Glasbridge?”
“Of course.”
“Oh, he burns brightly. He’s the hardest, the purest of you all. Nothing but hate to him, and it’s all his own. He takes nothing from me, gives nothing.” The na’kyrim sounded strangely joyful, raised up by a perverse pleasure.
“Who?” Shraeve asked. “Kanin?”
“Kanin. Yes. The brother. There’s no flame will forge a keener hatred than the breaking of families. I know that. I learned that. I learned that a long time ago.”
“He’s coming here?” Shraeve asked.
He looked at her clearly for the first time then, fully present and aware. He appeared almost surprised to discover that he was not alone, though his sallow features were only briefly troubled.
“You should not spend your energies fighting a chaos that cannot be halted,” he rasped. “You do not need to worry about such things. Whatever consumes us, will consume our enemies too. There are none left to oppose us, for my Shadowhand does his work well. None except him perhaps. Kanin. He’s moving. Drawing near, with hate in his heart and hate all around him, like a cloud. He’s done what you say you can’t, raven: kept a host at his side, found the will to quell it and guide it. So now we’ll see. Who is stronger, the Battle Inkall or a Thane who has no thought in his head save vengeance?”