Taim already had the three warriors moving, following Varryn. He watched Orisian with an unreadable expression.
“Are you all right?” he asked.
Orisian shook his head then shrugged. He did not know the answer to that question, and it seemed entirely unimportant to him.
“We should hurry,” he said, stooping to pick up his shield. “The White Owls might come back.”
“They’d probably have returned already if they were going to. Some kind of madness in them, to fight as they did. Should have waited for darkness, picked us off one by one. Not the Kyrinin way, running onto swords and shields like that. As if they didn’t care any more about their own lives. Perhaps they don’t care enough about ours to try again.”
They went in a straggling single line through the fringe of Anlane, moving with less caution now than once they had. It did not take long for the forest to begin to thin. The trees were interspersed with stumps where the tallest and straightest of their brethren had been felled. Soon enough, there were more stumps than standing trees, and they came out at the crest of a long, shallow grassy slope. At its foot was a woodsman’s cottage. Its shutters and door hung open. Crows roosting on its roof scattered upwards. Varryn was already halfway down the slope.
Orisian paused there, amongst the last of the saplings, Anlane’s outliers. Beyond that cottage, stretching out into the grey veils of soft rain, was the Glas Valley. Flat ground scattered with clumps of trees, dotted here and there with lonely buildings almost lost in the mist. Home. But he felt neither welcomed nor relieved. It had been a kind of desperate hope that brought him here, yet now he could imagine nothing good coming of this return. And still, despite that terrible foreboding, he felt it was where he had to be. If he belonged anywhere, it was here, in this bleak moment; and if there was any purpose he could claim as his own, it awaited him somewhere out there in the mist. In his homeland.
II
Kan Avor dominated the grey skyline like a challenge. Kanin smiled at the sight of its jagged, broken towers, its crumbling sprawl. A great rotten bruise on the earth. His pleasure was not engendered by the city itself, though. It was what it signified that woke his venomous, obsessive desires and promised them fulfilment. In his imagination visions crowded in upon him: an endless succession of different deaths for Aeglyss. He could smell the halfbreed’s blood, hear his wails, see his head springing free from the stump of his neck or his stomach split open by a single slash from a sword. He could feel his own hands about the halfbreed’s throat, the bones in there cracking and splintering beneath his iron grasp.
Kanin fought to rid himself of these all-consuming imaginings, but could do no more than cordon them off in a part of his mind, so that though he still heard their intoxicating whispers and still felt that unbridled longing for the release their realisation would bring him, he had the space within his skull to think clearly. To do what needed doing.
The main body of his ragged army was streaming ahead of him, struggling through the marsh and mire towards Kan Avor. Lannis folk, most of that vanguard. They spread out as they advanced. Not an army at all, in truth. Just a mob given licence to visit vengeance upon their most hated enemies, blinded for the moment to the truth that they did so in service to another enemy. They would be worthless, Kanin knew, as soon as they met any organised resistance. But they could still serve a purpose, and it was a matter of complete indifference to Kanin whether a single one of them lived to see tomorrow’s dawn. As was his own survival, as long as he achieved his goal before death claimed him.
His horse was restless beneath him, eager to follow the rushing figures ahead. He gave the reins a gentle tug, and muttered a soothing word or two to the animal. Sheets of heavier rain swept through, intermittently obscuring Kan Avor’s looming form. All the land around the ruined city was turning into a swamp. Kanin did not mind. The mists and rain offered some concealment.
He twisted in the saddle and looked down the neat line of his Shield. Igris was despondent and sullen, rainwater trickling from his hair down over his cheekbones. Behind stood two hundred Black Road warriors, all on foot, all silent and grim-countenanced. This was all that Kanin had managed to retain his hold upon. The rest had rebelled, or disappeared, or gone mad. The Glasbridge they had left when they marched out that dawn was a chaos of warring bands, frenzied killing, hungers of every kind let off their leash.
“We move round to the south,” Kanin told Igris. “Let those Lannis idiots draw out what they can of the halfbreed’s defences.”
Igris stared dolefully after the vast rabble of townsfolk flailing its way across the flat ground, closing slowly on the distant ruins.
“Wake up,” snapped Kanin.
His shieldman stirred himself and nudged his horse into motion. Kanin’s Shield led the way, and the rest of the warriors fell into column behind them. Kanin summoned Eska and the other two Hunt Inkallim with a flick of his head. They came, with Eska’s three hounds following at their heels. The dogs’ fur glistened with moisture, drawn like dew from the air and beaded over their bristly hides.
“I will find the halfbreed,” Kanin said to the Inkallim. “I will try to kill him. You make your own away. Use whatever confusion we may create to draw near to him. Do nothing to endanger yourselves. Whatever Cannek may have told you, I do not want your aid. I refuse it, unless and until you see me within reach of the halfbreed, and act then only if in doing so you can aid me in striking him down. Do you understand?”
Eska nodded casually.
“Do you consent?” Kanin asked pointedly.
She smiled narrowly. “I was commanded to preserve your life if I could, Thane. But it is difficult, when the one to be protected is so uninterested in his own continuation. It is our feeling — ” she included her silent companions with a brief glance “-that either you or the halfbreed must die. It is evidently not possible for both of you to persist in this world. Therefore, keeping you alive seems to require that we first accomplish his destruction.”
“Good,” grunted Kanin.
Eska shrugged. “Only sense. And, in any case, I dislike what I have seen of him and of his adherents, and of the kind of world he creates around him. Cannek’s judgement of him feels right to me. Perhaps fate will yet validate it, through us.”
“If I fail,” Kanin said as he guided his horse after his marching warriors, “if I fall, do not be deterred. I am sure the Hooded God, if he still watches over us, finds you more to his liking than me. Fate may yet favour you even if it condemns me.”
“Our feet are upon the Road, Thane,” Eska called after him.
He made no reply, but rode on through the rain.
The slaughter began far out to Kanin’s left. He saw it dimly, through the obscuring, pulsing bands of drifting rain. He heard it fitfully, for the air was sluggish and an unwilling messenger. But it pleased him, for it was a beginning; and once begun, this would flow quickly to its end.
Figures came running out from the grey bulk of Kan Avor, first just a few of them and then more and more until they swarmed across the boggy plain. There were no battle lines drawn up, no planning or preparation. People just emerged from the city and threw themselves at the motley forces advancing upon it. Kanin and his own company watched, but no enemy emerged to oppose their careful skirting of the city’s southern edge. The killing and dying was done closer to the river, where the ground was as much water as earth.
Knee-deep in pools, tripped by tussocks of reed and grass, amongst the emergent bones of those who had died on this same field more than a century and a half before, the desperate and deranged flung themselves at each other. They drowned one another in the stagnant waters, fell and were trampled and suffocated in the sucking mud. They beat and tore with swords and fists and cudgels and stones. A few horses churned through the marsh, most of them ridden by ravens of the Battle Inkall, but they were clumsy and ponderous. The rain fell, and washed blood from wounds down into the waterlogged foundations of the valley; cries rose, and screams, into the vaporous clouds.