*

They waited in silence in the musty hall in Kan Avor. Not a word, hardly a breath, escaped Kyrinin or human. Every one of them watched the na’kyrim trembling upon the stone bench. They watched great dark stains spread across the bandages around his wrists. So suffused were they with blood that it oozed out onto the backs of his hands. All felt the surging of his power. They felt it in their skin: a shivering born of no cold. They felt it in the place behind their eyes where their self resided, in the blurring there, the sensation of their own minds melting into some vast, accumulative flow that cared nothing for them, did not even recognise them, yet was so immensely potent that it nevertheless gathered them into it. And they exulted in it. It filled them with the liberation of surrender to something far greater than themselves. This awful, wonderful torrent overwhelmed them, and they grew thinner and thinner beneath its onslaught, until at any moment it felt as though they might be carried off, and parted entirely from the world and from their crude bodies. And then Aeglyss sucked in a huge wet breath and coughed. He bent forward, almost touching his forehead to his knees. Strands of bloody mucus ran from his nostrils down across his mouth. He licked it away as he staggered to his feet. He brushed past the dazed man and the woman, who still abased themselves before him. Droplets of blood fell from his wrists as he moved. He wheezed, and out of the wheezing came laughter: an attenuated, cold mirth. “So,” he gasped. “So. They tried to kill me before, but now they learn… now they see what I am. I am too much for them, even for them. Now we know whose land this is. Whose world.” As he spoke, the movement of his jaw freed flakes of dead skin from his cheeks. They drifted down like tiny withered leaves. He fell to his knees with a bony crack. Shraeve and Hothyn both came quickly to his side. They eased him up. So frail had he become that the Inkallim could almost completely enclose his arm with her hand. “The flesh is too weak,” he murmured. “Send them away. I don’t want them to see me like this.”

II

Kanin led a company of four hundred into Glasbridge: every man and woman of his Blood he had been able to assert any kind of control over. Many he had wrested away from other roving bands, cowing their rebelliousness through displays of anger and violence. Most wanted nothing more than to wander on south in search of slaughter. He gave them slaughter of a different kind—the execution of those most vocally resistant to his command—and with it exerted a measure of fragile control, over some of them at least. He did not expect to maintain his authority for long. So turbulent had every heart and mind become that he could not imagine any sentiment, or rule, or order, lasting. But he did not need much time. In his dark calculation, he could see no further than a few days, weeks perhaps, ahead. Beyond that, nothing. Glasbridge was half ruin, half armed camp. All squalor. Even in the short time since Kanin had last ridden its streets, much of the town had slumped still further into decrepitude. It lay now beneath a covering of snow, yet still there was a soft, warm hint of rot on the air. Under the white shroud, decay and corpses lurked. Those houses that had been damaged by fire when Glasbridge was taken by the Black Road, or abandoned since, were miserable sights, crumbling and sodden. There were, amidst the wreckage, pockets of life and habitation. They found a sprawling stable yard near the centre of the town, with a travellers’ inn and workshops—blacksmith, wheelwright—attached to it. A dozen or more sullen-looking horses were shut up in stalls, but it was the people that caught Kanin’s attention: a hundred at least, milling about in incomprehensible activity. It all struck him as formless, chaotic. There were warriors amongst the crowds. Kanin saw badges and standards from Gyre, Gaven and Wyn, all mixing, keeping to no settled companies. Most of those who had occupied the yard were not fighters at all, though. They were ordinary villagers and townsfolk and farmers, fragments of the host of commoners that had come surging down through the Stone Vale in answer to the call of victory, the promise of restored lands and triumphant faith. Kanin dismounted, and seized the closest man roughly by the arm. “Who commands here?” he demanded. “Commands?” the man repeated vacantly. Kanin felt dizzy and disoriented. He found himself wondering, absurdly, whether he had changed so much, whether his isolation had become so complete, that he could no longer be understood. “Whose camp is this?” he shouted in the man’s face. “Mine. Yours. It belongs to the Road.” Kanin growled in contempt and thrust him away. Others were coming close now, drawn by curiosity or suspicion. He recognised no one. The faces came to him indistinctly, as if softened and disguised by the veil of his anger. He surged forward and seized the collar of another man’s jerkin in both hands. “Who claims Glasbridge?” he cried. The man made no show of resistance. There was an odd, confused expression on his face. “Fate claims us all, in these times. The Kall is upon us…” Kanin threw the man to the ground, trampled over him to reach others. The thickening crowd made him feel enclosed, beset, and his rage flared in response. He pushed a woman aside. “Has the halfbreed sent you?” she asked as she stumbled, and the hope in her words broke the last shreds of Kanin’s restraint. He spun, and brought his sword out from its scabbard and round in a rising arc that caught the woman on the shoulder. Someone rushed at him, lunging at his upper chest with a blunt pole. He dipped his shoulders enough to send the stave glancing away off his mail, straightened and brought his sword hacking up into the armpit of his assailant. And then horses were all about, clattering and barging; his own warriors pouring in on all sides and pushing the throng back, cutting into it and splaying it apart like a ship’s prow punching into the surf. Kanin ran to his own horse and sprang into the saddle. A great fury, and a great excitement, had hold of him. “I am Kanin oc Horin-Gyre,” he cried as his horse turned around and around, as his warriors surged across the stable yard, scattering men and women, overturning cooking cauldrons and stalls and racks of weapons. “My Blood sprang from this town, before our exile, and I claim it. I will hold it, in my own name, and that of the High Thane. No one else. No one else!” In time, Kanin’s anger abated. It left behind it that familiar raw bitterness that was always there now, that sense of solitary anguish. He gave no orders, made no plans. He merely watched in silence from the back of his horse while Igris and the rest of his Shield took charge, silencing with their blades any show of dissent amongst those gathered in the yard, then sending out bands of thirty or forty riders at a time to impose Horin authority upon the rest of the town. It was all necessary, Kanin knew, but it was only a prelude. Without rage to buoy him up, the present could not hold his interest; it was the future that constantly called upon his impatient attention. Only the future could offer him any release. Once a sullen peace had descended, he went with his Shield towards the harbour. There had been barns and storehouses there, still holding unspoiled food, when last he had been in this town. He needed them, for if he could not feed his little army, it would turn to bones and dust in his hands. And without it, that future he dreamed of would never come, and he might never escape the horrors of the present. “We are followed,” Igris muttered, riding at his side. Kanin did not look round. “I know,” he said. “Hunt Inkallim?” “Three of them. A few dozen paces back.” “They’ve been watching us since yesterday,” Kanin said. He drew his horse to a halt and hauled it around. The three Inkallim—two men, one woman—were standing in the middle of the street, flanked by three great dogs that had settled onto their haunches and sat there, their breath steaming out from their massive jaws. “Wait here,” Kanin said to Igris, and rode back the way they had come. The Inkallim watched his approach impassively. Kanin’s horse mistrusted the hounds, and he had to wrestle its head up with the reins to hold it steady before them. He stared down at the Inkallim. “What do you want?” he asked. “By whose command do you follow so obviously in my footsteps?” “Cannek’s,” said the woman, taking a pace forward. She wore simple leather and hide clothes, carried a crossbow slung across her back and leaned her weight on a spear with a subtly barbed point. Her face was plain, her manner casual. She regarded Kanin with all the presumed equality he had come to expect of the Inkallim. “The dead make poor captains,” Kanin said. “Yet we often find ourselves serving them. Do we not, Thane?” He glared at her and curled his lip. She was unmoved, her placid gaze unwavering. “What’s your name?” he asked her. “Eska. We were instructed, in the event of Cannek’s death, to preserve your life, if possible. To give you what aid we could.” Kanin smiled at that. “The Road I mean to follow will make that a thankless task.” Eska gave a laconic shrug. “Follow, then, if that’s your wish,” Kanin said, and turned his horse away from them. “I may find a use for your talents in the days to come.” “What is it you intend to do, Thane?” she asked him as he rode back towards his Shield. “What Cannek couldn’t.”