*

Outside the ruins of Kan Avor, on the fringes of the sodden plain that had once been the Glas Water, a huge willow tree stood. It carried snow in the joints of its soaring branches. Its immense trunk burst from the ground and sprayed up into the air like the antler-crown of some titanic buried stag. When it was young, spindling its way up out of the wet earth amidst a host of its eager fellows, Avann oc Gyre ruled in Kan Avor, and the streets of that place bustled with the life of a thriving Blood. Later, there had been slaughter within sight of it, and the blood of thousands had sunk into the loam, to its youthful roots. As it rose to its full stature, so the Lannis Blood had risen around it, and a great dyke had been constructed, and the proud city so near at hand was drowned. The long seasonal pulse of the Glas Water ruled its life thereafter: in the winters, the waters came to lap around the base of its slowly swelling trunk; in summers, they retreated. And in those dry times, the people of the valley came and cut away its peers one by one. It had been alone for many years, standing in solitude amidst pool and marsh, spared the axe by chance which the years turned to habit. Upon this solitary giant a multitude converged. They came from Grive, and from Anduran, and from Targlas beyond it, trampling new pathways into the expanse of blank snow that lay across the valley. It was not only the people of the Black Road who assembled there on the frigid flatlands. The subjugated folk of the Lannis Blood gathered too, some by choice, some driven like cattle by their new rulers. The promise of momentous events was abroad and compelling. They came from vast Anlane itself: White Owls emerging in bands of ten and twenty from beneath its vast bare canopy. Most of all, they came from Kan Avor, the dead city reborn yet still dead. They swarmed out from that rubble in their hundreds, disgorged from its every crevice. And in the midst of them came the na’kyrim himself, riding a wagon pulled by gigantic Lannis horses that had once hauled timber from the forests. He sat in it alone, braced against straw bales wrapped in cloth, armoured against the cold by a heavy cloak that he enfolded about himself so deeply his shape was lost beneath its weight. Ice crackled under the wheels as they crunched through the frozen puddles along the track. Forty Battle Inkallim rode in escort. Hothyn and his Kyrinin walked after the cart in a great dispersed crowd. On either side, as far as any eye might see, the na’kyrim’s people were strewn across the white plain, all of them moving through the winter towards that single huge willow tree: a convocation of the mad and the wild and the desperate and the fierce. The wagoner snapped his switch at the rumps of the horses with one hand, hauled sideways at the reins with the other. The wagon creaked round in a tight circle and groaned to a halt beneath the spreading tree. The westering sun glowed coldly behind cloud. The multitude gathered. A thousand plumes of exhaled breath misted over their heads. Shraeve the Inkallim drew her horse to a halt beside the wagon and leaned towards its lone passenger. “This still seems ill advised,” she said quietly. Aeglyss looked out with filmy eyes from within his ragged, enveloping cloak. Twin runnels of mucus had dried—or frozen, for he had a bloodless, heatless glaze to his skin—under his nose and across his lips. What little more of his face was visible was cracked and flaked. He shivered. “Are you dying?” Shraeve asked. “Dying?” rasped the na’kyrim. “Perhaps. Becoming, more likely. Becoming something new.” His voice was thin. Gone was its rich, seductive lustre and its smooth caress. Now it was the crumbling away to dust of dead bark, the rustling of crisp, fallen leaves beneath a foot. “You fear my death?” he asked her. “Or is it your own loss of influence you fear? The loss of the fire at which you warm your hands? Without me, how long would you last?” “I do not see the necessity. That is all. You have more than enough —” “What would you know of necessity?” snarled Aeglyss, his sharp anger fouling his throat and almost choking him. “You know nothing about me. About what I was before, what I am now. I hear a thousand voices, countless voices, in my head. I hear the dead and the living. I suck in hatred and fear and sickness with every breath. My body burns and breaks around me, consumed by this… this flood pouring through me. And I can’t mend it. I can’t still the voices.” Shraeve scowled at the wagoner, who had twisted on his seat and was looking back at Aeglyss with an expression of fearful awe. Seeing her displeasure, he turned away once more, and made himself small. “I have to give them more. They’ll cease to love me if I don’t give them more,” Aeglyss hissed. “I know. I know. They’ll turn on me if I don’t give them more. Show them more. They always do, eventually. Always.” His eyes were closed now. His head tipped back. The hood of his cloak fell away, revealing his almost naked head. The skin was so frail and thin, the bones of his skull seemed to show through it, giving it the sheen of ivory. “The Shadowhand strains against the bonds I’ve set on him. His is a fierce will. I must be stronger, if I’m not to lose him. And the Anain. I hear them still, thinking their great, hateful thoughts. Distant… distant, but I hear them. They’ll come again for me one day, when their hate is greater than their fear. I need to be the flood itself, not just the channel the flood flows through. You wouldn’t understand. How could you?” Shraeve’s horse had dropped its head to nuzzle the snow in search of grass. She tugged irritably at the reins. “It will all have been for nothing, if you die now,” she said. Aeglyss’ head sank down until his chin rested on his chest. He coughed and wheezed. “Nothing? Maybe. But let your precious fate decide.” He spat the words contemptuously. “If it’s a new world you want out of this, this is how it happens. This is the only way it can happen, because without it I will come apart. I don’t fear death. I can master it. I just need to go deeper, further; to the root of the world. So do it. Do it, raven.” There was no more talking after that. Only the brutal business of hoisting the fragile na’kyrim up on the tree’s creased trunk, the driving of nails through the old, unhealed wounds in his wrists. A hush cloaked all the hundreds, the thousands, gathered to bear witness. They stood in a vast arc, all silent, all watching the hammers, feeling their beat like that of war drums. They were exposed, in that great flat land, to the twilight’s raw wind and to the sleet that gave it teeth, but no fires were lit, no shelters erected. Darkness descended, and the mighty tree buried its uppermost branches in the night. The crucified na’kyrim was lost against the dark trunk, save for his pale face, his white hands. Those scraps of him shone amidst the murk. The attendant host was unnaturally still, held fast by reverent expectancy. The sleet turned to rain. The snow in the tree’s intricate web of boughs was eroded. That spread across the ground slumped into slush and turned the earth beneath those innumerable feet into mud. And still they waited. Still they anticipated… something. There was not a single voice to be heard, save that of some distant owl and that of the night itself: raindrops pattering through twigs and into puddles. And then the soft, soft moaning of the na’kyrim came drifting out from the tree. It went through the crowd like a breeze, yet was stronger by far than the wind that drove the rain. With it, slowly, came his suffering, and that seeped through the skin of them all. His pain took root in every bone, and it was a wondrous pain that bound them together in the sensation of rising, ascending through its layers towards some endless presence that waited to embrace and unite them. As his limbs shook and strained, so convulsions spun their way through the throng. People fell to the ground and thrashed in the mud. He rasped out a score of hollow, panting breaths, and others wailed and clawed at their scalps, tore at their hair, suddenly succumbing to horrors that danced inside their heads. Some rode the crashing waves of emotion and experience that pulsed out from the na’kyrim; others were undone by them, and tumbled and broken by them. Some wept quiet tears of joy in the darkness; some fell to their knees; some lost themselves entirely in uncomprehending terror and fled screaming. The assault on every mind did not diminish, but grew stronger, more remorseless. People saw places that lay half a world away; they lived entire lifetimes, in moments, that belonged to others; they heard the voices of the dead. They knew for an instant what it was to be Anain or Saolin, or to be a na’kyrim crucified upon a tree with the Shared become indistinguishable from his own mind. And madness came in the wake of that knowledge, and claimed one, then another, then dozens. Killing began. Stranglings and beatings and knifings and suffocations in the sucking mud; flurries of lethal movement in amongst the great trembling mass. Kyrinin ran, lithe and agile, hissing as they lashed about them with their spears. The deaths drew no attention. Those standing next to a man who was dragged down did not notice, so enraptured or possessed were they by the transcendent power surging all about and through them. It lasted for a long time. The rain died away. Fragments of moonlight fell through passing gaps in the cloud. They lit the na’kyrim. Made his blood black. All across the great assemblage scattered outbursts of anguish, or weeping, or laughter cavorted like eddies in a wild current. And slowly the horrors and the visions and the power receded. Those driven to savagery by them halted, stood looking in confusion down at those they had slain. Minds clumsily recovered themselves from madness, remembering, bit by bit, their former shapes. There came a time when the na’kyrim opened crusted eyes and whispered, “Take me down.” The Inkallim did as he commanded. He wept at the agony of it, and sank into limp unconsciousness. They carried him—there was no weight to him at all—towards the wagon. People came stumbling forward out of the crowd, reaching out, longing to touch him, longing to draw near to the fount of such frightful, vast outpourings. The ravens pushed them away. They laid his bloody, broken form in the bed of the wagon and it groaned its way back towards the invisible ruined city that waited out in the night. Shraeve alone rode with him, seated at his side, watching the shivering of his eyes beneath their cracked and bleeding lids. As the wagon progressed through the great, now silent, assemblage, those it passed fell in behind it; those ahead of it pressed closer and closer, hoping to see for themselves its incomprehensible and awe-inspiring cargo. But Shraeve alone heard him when he murmured, “Not enough. Not enough. Still it’s too deep, too wide. Infinite.”