*

Glasbridge’s harbour was empty of boats. The deserted quayside stood silent, its moorings idle, its taverns and shops burned or deserted. Wet slush covered its stones. Offshore, amidst the turbulent waves driving in from the vast estuary, the short mast of some half-sunken fishing boat rocked like a swamped sapling. Kanin stared at it for a time, narrowing his eyes against the sleet sweeping in on the wind. He imagined for a moment that its movement, the regular, solitary beat of its instability, might convey some message to him. There was nothing there, though. He turned to the crowd standing there on the quay, a miserable, bedraggled assemblage. Some of the last dregs of Glasbridge’s Lannis inhabitants. There were only a few men of fighting age. Women and a few children, old men, frail men, regarded him with various kinds of contempt and resentment. Sixty of them, nearly one in six, as best he could guess, of those who had not died during their town’s destruction and capture, or not escaped it. They had been dragged and driven here like recalcitrant sheep, full of hate but too battered and defeated to offer any resistance. Kanin’s warriors ringed the Lannis folk, enclosing them in a silent cordon of spears and swords. He doubted such precautions were really necessary. These were broken people. And that was something he meant to change, even if only a little. A Gyre man was kneeling before him, his hands tied behind his back. Kanin spat meltwater from his lips. “You know me,” he shouted across the wind at the townsfolk. “You know I’ve made this town mine. I’ve opened the food stores to you, fed you as well as we eat ourselves. Those of you who’d been made slaves or servants, I’ve freed you from that.” He grimaced at a sudden flurry of sleet. “This man killed a Lannis girl yesterday.” He kicked the Gyre captive in the back, sending him sprawling into the slush. Igris hauled the man back onto his knees. The shieldman had great coiled chains looped over his shoulder, found in the storeroom of a half-wrecked smithy. “Now you see how things go in my town,” Kanin shouted, and nodded to Igris. The shieldman hesitated. He winced. “Do it,” Kanin hissed. Others of his Shield came forward. They helped Igris to entwine the chains about the Gyre man, securing them with cords. One took his ankles, another his shoulders, and they carried him to the edge of the quay. The man stared at Kanin all the way. There was no hatred in his dark eyes, only accusation. “I go without fear,” the man said, quite distinctly, quite calmly. “I don’t doubt it,” muttered Kanin. “But still you go.” His warriors swung their cargo once, then heaved him out. The sea swallowed him with a deep, hollow smack and he was gone, leaving not the slightest trace in the relentless waves slapping up against the stonework. Some of the Lannis townsfolk crowded to the edge, pushing past the guards, craning their necks to try and follow the man’s descent. One kicked slush after him. Another whispered curses Kanin could not hear above the wind and water. “I don’t expect love or loyalty from you,” Kanin said. They turned back to him, and he saw new patterns in their faces now: puzzlement in some, suspicion in others. “I do expect the sense to see that things can change. Have changed. I will shield you from the basest cruelties of your conquerors. I will permit no more of your children to die, or be stolen away by the ravens. I will feed you, and clothe you, as well as I feed and clothe the most devoted of my own followers. I will even seek boats and, if I find them, give them to you, and not hinder your departure.” He could see out of the corner of his eye Igris watching him with poorly disguised horror. He had not told his Shield or any of his warriors his full intent today. There had been no need or point in doing so. He was Thane, and more than that he was a man alone, engaged in an undertaking none of them could see clearly enough to grasp. Only he understood what extremities the times demanded. “But not all of you,” Kanin said, concentrating upon the attentive, bewildered townsfolk. “I want you to go amongst your fellows, and tell them what you have seen and what I have said here today. And tomorrow I will have all of you who can hold a weapon, and have the strength to walk for a day, assembled here at dawn. I don’t care who—men or women, it doesn’t matter—but you will come here, and I will arm you and train you and give you an enemy to oppose. “Because I am not your worst enemy, and you are not mine. I will show you the greatest enemy your Blood has ever had, the one responsible for all your suffering and shame, and you will fight him at my side. I will give you back the honour of your Blood. Those you leave behind here will be protected and preserved for as long as you keep this bargain with me. If you fail in what I require of you, you will all suffer the consequences.” They stared at him, a mass of disbelief and confusion, and he stared back. Resolute. Unwavering. In the silence, gulls came drifting in off the sea, their cries sharp. “That is all,” Kanin said, and turned. He walked away, ignoring his own warriors and their questioning glances. He could hold them for a time yet, he was sure. For long enough. Only Igris came hurrying after him, sword tapping at his legs, mail shirt clinking. “It doesn’t seem right, sire, to be fighting the faithful when the war is so far…” Kanin spun and leaned towards the shieldman, pointing a single finger at his eye. “The war is where I say it is. By the oath you took to my father, you made the Blood’s battles your own. The Thane is the Blood, and I am Thane yet. I choose our battles. Never forget it. I know what must be done, for the good of the faith, for the good of us all.” Igris quailed before his lord’s wrath, and Kanin stalked away. He was right in this. He was certain of it. If he was the last and only man in all the world who could see what had to be done, so be it. He had strength enough for that, whatever it cost him, wherever it led him. Two figures awaited him a short distance down the harbourside. They were leaning against the side of a broken cart, watching with wry amusement: two of the three Hunt Inkallim who had made themselves his shadows. “Have you found what I need?” Kanin asked them. “You have a rare talent for spreading havoc and confusion, it seems, Thane,” one of the men murmured. “I asked if you have found what I need,” barked Kanin. The man inclined his head, deflecting—or dismissing—the Thane’s anger. “Seventy of them. Every corpse-in-waiting this town has to offer. Most should live long enough to serve your purposes. A fine concoction they are: fevers and sores and suppuration. We’ve got them safely sequestered beyond the reach of any healers. Not that there are many of those to be found hereabouts.” “Good. I want them in Kan Avor tomorrow. I’ll have Igris arrange an escort, and drivers for the wagons. No word from Eska yet?” The man shook his head, and Kanin grunted. He strode away. “You’ll make our task of keeping you alive difficult, Thane, if you turn your own people against you,” one of the Inkallim said behind him. Kanin stopped and hung his head for a moment. Then he turned and stared at the man. “I didn’t give you the task. I don’t care how easy or otherwise you find it. What happens will happen, since none of us chooses the course of the Road. Do we?” He asked it dully at first, but then again, more pointedly, more openly: “Do we?”

VI

The heat of bodies and of breath warmed and moistened the air in the hall. Three hundred people, perhaps, crammed in, standing in expectant, reverent silence. Eska stood at the rear of the crush with her back to one of the gaping windows. She could feel the bitter wind that came up the Glas Valley on her neck, even as the warmth of the hall brushed her face. There was snow on that wind, and an occasional errant flake came tumbling over her shoulder to alight, and vanish into water, upon the hair or jacket of those in front of her. The hall was gloomy, barely recovered from the deepest dark of night. Out to the east, Eska knew, the sky would have caught the first grimy smear of the new day’s approaching light, but here in Kan Avor it would be some time yet before true dawn would break. No lights burned, and in the near-darkness, with such a close-packed crowd, it was difficult to see the halfbreed seated on his stone slab of a throne at the far end of the chamber. When he spoke, his voice was all but disembodied, grating out from the columns, from the wooden floorboards. “I killed one of the ghosts in the green. You could not understand what that means. You who hear nothing of the true thunder rolling beneath the world cannot know what it is to ride its storm winds, to master them thus. No matter. There’s none left, now… none left… who could describe even the outline of what I have become.” The hush was profound. No one breathed, none stirred. Hundreds stood there in the dark, held by that strained voice stealing across the stonework, threading its way in amongst them, running its icy touch across their skin. It seemed, even to Eska, a thing not born of a living, limited throat, but rising from the matter and nature of the world itself: as innate, as inevitable as the breaking of waves on a wild shore, or the rushing of a stream through its mountain bed. “I will give you more easily measurable wonders,” Aeglyss said. Such a slight figure, Eska thought, so small and frail alone there on the bench. Yet so utterly dominant of every eye, every mind. There was, in these extended, rapt moments, nothing else of consequence in the hall. “Because I know the course of your desires, because I know that what I demand of you must be earned by gifts, because it falls to me to shape all things now; because of all this, I will give you what no other could. You and your creed ascend now, on my wings.” The halfbreed fell silent, and his silence took something out of the world, leaving all who had been listening bereaved and diminished. There was nothing that could fill the void his presence left as he drew it back into himself, bowed his head still more deeply into his chest and let out a long, dwindling breath. But light began to come, seeping in hesitantly, eroding the lingering darkness, putting grey accents on every form. And amidst that meagre brightening, they waited and watched.