*

There was a corpse in the street outside Jaen Narran’s house in Kolkyre. She stared down at it from one of the upper windows. Some youth—sixteen or seventeen, she judged—who had been killed in the night. Dogs came nosing about. The few people who ventured out from their homes disregarded both the dogs and the human carrion that attracted them. They seemed wilfully blind, as if a surfeit of horrors and troubles had left them incapable of acknowledging another. Jain leaned out and shouted at the dogs. They looked up at her, still stretching out towards the dead flesh of the youth. She beat the open shutter with the palm of her hand, but the dogs did not fear her. They turned back to the corpse, sniffing at it. Jaen took the bowl of water from beside her bed and slapped its contents out towards the beasts. They loped away then, without panic. They would be back, she knew. An old man walking stiffly down the street had stopped to watch. He stared up at her now, puzzlement on his face. Jaen glared at him, then withdrew, pulling the shutters closed behind her. The killings and the fighting and the fires and the cries came mostly at night but, like some rot slowly expanding beyond the darkness that had formed it, they colonised each passing day more aggressively than the one before. All of Kolkyre had taken up arms, and though the greatest hatred was reserved for the Black Road army encamped outside its landward walls, there was too much of it to be entirely absorbed by that single, inaccessible foe. The anger found other outlets for its immense unspent reserves, and turned the city in upon itself. Jaen heard all the tales from the servants in the Tower of Thrones, or from the homeless Lannis folk she supplied with food and blankets and firewood: murder and thievery, feud and suspicion. Those who hailed from lands beyond the Kilkry or Lannis Bloods were dead by now, or hiding behind barred doors and closed windows, too fearful to dare the unruly, hostile city streets. Those who were wealthy had turned their homes into fortresses, protected by hired clubmen. The Guard fought brief wars against gangs of the hungry and the desperate and the mad. Order was never more than a transient presence, liable at any moment to be rent by some new upwelling of chaos. Jaen thumped down the rickety stairs, letting her feet convey her frustrations to the boards. Her daughter Maira was there, leaning back in a cushioned chair. Though the child in her was yet too small to swell her belly, she rested a hand there nevertheless, gently protective. Her husband Achlinn was hanging a pot of water to boil over the fire, hissing at the heat of the glowing embers. “You rise earlier every day,” Jaen said to her daughter. Maira smiled. It was an exhausted smile, but contented too. “I don’t sleep, and I’d sooner be up than lying there awake. Not that Achlinn thanks me for it.” Her husband grimaced in mock demonstration of his suffering. He was a gentle man, Jaen had always thought. Good enough, just, for her precious daughter. This placid scene was enough to blunt Jaen’s ill humour. “Are our guardians awake?” she asked. Maira nodded towards the door in the rear wall. “They went to get a little rest. I told them it would be all right. I feel bad, each of them having to stand watch over us for half the night like this.” Jaen grunted. “Too bad for them I need to go to the Tower this morning, then. One at least’ll have to do escort duty.” The two gruff Guardsmen had been assigned their protective responsibilities by Roaric oc Kilkry-Haig himself. At first Jaen had thought it unnecessary and faintly embarrassing. Now she valued their taciturn presence. Part of her regretted her refusal of the Thane’s offer to take up residence in the Tower of Thrones itself. She found its austere isolation, looming over the rest of the city like an intrusion from some other, entirely unconnected place, unsettling, and had preferred this comfortable billet in a house much closer to the quarter where the displaced people of her own Blood had settled. But each day—and more particularly night—here amidst the city’s gradual disintegration made her doubt that decision more. On Maira’s behalf, if not her own. Perhaps the time had come to seek the security of the Tower’s impregnable stone. The corpse had gone by the time she ventured out onto the street, following cautiously behind her scowling guard. Someone must have dragged it away. She was glad. There was a dog sniffing the ground where it had lain. The animal looked up at her with a disappointed expression as she passed. A crowd had gathered at the gate in the low wall encircling the mound from which the Tower of Thrones needled its way up into the sky. The guards were beset by showers of shouted demands, interspersed with aimless and vitriolic abuse. Following her doggedly determined escort, Jaen could hear people crying out for access to the Tower’s food stores, accusing some family or other of riot, clamouring for an immediate sally against the besieging forces of the Black Road. She hunched her shoulders and ducked as she was jostled this way and that. Jagged words teemed about her head like an army of angry wasps. Entering into the gardens beyond the gate was a relief. Jaen sighed and shook her shoulders. Matters were definitely taking a turn for the worse. She resolved, as she ascended the path towards the Tower, to bring Maira and Achlinn here that very afternoon. The city outside this mute and ancient fastness felt entirely too volatile. Ilessa oc Kilkry-Haig was waiting, as expected, in her chambers. Jaen was surprised to find Ilessa’s son, the Thane Roaric, already there, and in full and heated flow. “They betray us,” the Thane was saying. “There’s no other description… no other word does justice to their treachery.” He saw that Ilessa’s attention had been drawn elsewhere, and looked over his shoulder. Jaen, standing in the doorway, dipped her head. “Forgive me, lady,” she said. “The maid did not tell me you had company. I will wait outside.” “No, no,” said Ilessa, beckoning Jaen. “I told them to admit you as soon as you arrived. We are almost done here. It will do no harm for you to hear this, anyway.” She returned her gaze to her son, challenging him to dispute her invitation to Jaen. The Thane seemed unconcerned. Barely interested, in fact. He was entirely focused upon his own furious thoughts. “Not a single supply ship’s berthed in two days. And the Captain of the last to reach us was quite clear: Gryvan’s forbidden any vessel to dock here, and he’s got his own and Tal Dyreen hulls on the water to make sure his ban is observed.” “We’ve stores enough to last a while longer,” Ilessa said. Her tone was measured, in contrast to Roaric’s bluster. “But only a while,” the Thane growled. “And only if we keep them tightly controlled. People will get hungry. They’re already in a foul temper. In every kind of unreasoning, foul temper. I’d have Gryvan by the neck if he was here, High Thane or not.” He made a fist of his hand, his knuckles whitening as he crushed the life out of an imagined throat. “Fortunate that he’s not,” Ilessa murmured. “The day will come. This will all be over eventually, and then I’ll have —” “I? I?” snapped Ilessa, her composure cracking a little. “It’s not just you, Roaric. You’re the Blood, all of it, now. Think of it. If you want anything to be left of it when this is all over, you need to see clearly what must be done now, not give yourself over to fancies of future vengeance.” Roaric frowned but held his tongue. “If food supplies need to be rationed, so be it,” Ilessa said. “We need to plan for that. And we can still run small boats—smugglers’ boats—along the coast and maybe out to Il Anaron. They might slip through Haig’s fingers.” “It won’t be enough,” Roaric said darkly. “But you see to it, if you think it worth your time. I’d sooner fight for our freedom than creep about like cowed outlaws. We’re alone now. Black Road on one side, Haig on the other. Both wanting to tear us down, break us down. Well, I won’t permit it! Yes, I’m Thane, if that’s what you want to hear. And I’ll be a Thane, a Thane with a sword in his hand and fire in his belly.” He brushed past Jaen without acknowledging her presence. Ilessa stared after him. She looked to Jaen like a woman grown accustomed to desperate sadness; still burdened by it, but used to it. “He turns all his grief into anger,” Ilessa said quietly. “He has a lot to grieve over. A lot to be angry about.” “He does.” Ilessa gestured towards a bench in the bay window. It was overlaid with a beautifully woven carpet. “Sit with me.” Jaen did as she was bid. She had come here, as she did almost every day now, to talk with Ilessa about the needs of the hundreds of Lannis folk caged within Kolkyre’s walls alongside its natives. But that seemed a matter for another time. “I didn’t know about the ships,” she said. “I can hardly believe Haig would abandon us. Not even abandon us; worse, turn against us. Offer us up to the Black Road.” Ilessa shook her head in sorrowful astonishment. “Nor I. Yet here we are. The world’s forgotten whatever sense it once possessed. It’s all like a bad dream from which we can’t wake. Every hand against us. Our own hands against us.” She cocked her head towards the window. “Sometimes, when the wind’s right, you can hear screaming, shouting, even from up here. Our own people, losing their minds, down in the city.” “It’s not good. I was thinking… perhaps it is time—past time—my daughter and I came into the Tower. If there’s still room for us.” “Of course.” Ilessa smiled. “I should have insisted upon it before now.” She pushed back her hair with a slow hand. It smoothed the creases from her brow, just for a moment. “You must be worried about your husband,” she said. Worried, thought Jaen. No, that is not the word. There is no word for what I feel. To be at once terrified, stalked by impotent panic, and at the same time calmed by that very impotence. There is nothing I can do for Taim. Wherever he is, he will live or die by his own strength, his own capabilities. And I will be either made whole again, or broken for ever. “My husband has a habit of surviving,” she murmured. “Of coming back to me.” “I hope you are right.” “Hope is all we have, my lady. It fades a little every day, but I cling to whatever shreds of it remain.” “I wish my men had learned the same habits your husband did,” Ilessa said. The sadness in her words was distant, thoughtful. Cavernous loss and sorrow were there, though, an echoing chamber in the background. Jaen could not bring herself to feel fortunate, but she could recognise her own suffering as that of someone who feared what might happen; Ilessa’s was that of someone assailed by what had already happened, and could never be changed. Which was worse, she could not say. “Roaric is being consumed, slowly,” Ilessa continued. Still quiet. Still treading a precarious path over a chasm. “Death seems to rule the world now. It walks among us, feeding off the madness. It’s too much for my son. I fear for him. And for all of us. Though I love him with all my heart, I fear where he might lead us.” Jaen saw then which was worse, for no matter how much had already been lost, how much darkness had already come, there was always more to fear. And once the texture of loss had been learned, it was much easier to imagine its return.