*

“You’re drooling,” Torquentine said. Igryn oc Dargannan-Haig sucked spittle back from his lips. “Untie my hands, if it offends you,” the blind Thane growled. He sat hunched upon an upholstered bench. He straightened, pressing his back against the stone wall. It would not last, Torquentine knew. Twice already Igryn had gathered himself, put some dignity into his spine, and each time something in him—or some absence in him, perhaps—gradually bent his back down again, twisted his mouth into a leer, laced his words with venom and turned his measured breathing into panting, rasping gasps. It was as if there was a beast within him that could be resisted only for so long before it began to reshape him. It put Torquentine in mind of the long dead wolfenkind. “I’ll keep your hands bounds for the time being, if it’s all the same to you,” he said. “Or even if it’s not, of course. Wipe the man’s chin for him, would you, my dear?” This last he spoke to Magrayn, and she went at once to gently swipe a cloth over the Thane’s bearded chin. She was not the only one of Torquentine’s attendants present. This was one of those rare occasions on which he had felt it wise to invite men of violence down into his buried lair. Two of them stood close by Igryn: muscular, their faces battered by a lifetime’s rough usage. They were good, both of them, at performing the more brutal kinds of tasks. Between them, they had killed five men by Torquentine’s command over the years. And more on their own initiative, no doubt. It was not only to keep a wary watch upon Igryn that Torquentine wanted them close, though. The streets of Ash Pit—and of all Vaymouth—were unpredictably tumultuous; the whole city was turbid with distrust, suspicion, accusation. Mayhem simmered, and burst erratically into the open. These burly clubmen offered some small reassurance that such disturbance would be resisted should it seek to reach down into Torquentine’s abode. Both of them had been amongst the band that had seized the disgraced Dargannan Thane on the road to In’Vay. And never had Torquentine taken less pleasure from the successful outcome of one of his endeavours. The very presence of Igryn here in his secret sanctuary would have been enough to set him squirming in distress, had his great bulk not argued against such physical expression of his inner turmoil. He settled for tugging absently at loose threads in the seams of the great cushions upon which he reclined. “I have but one eye myself, you know,” he told Igryn. “No, I do not know. I know your appearance no more than I do your name, or your intent.” “Oh, my appearance is magnificent, I assure you,” Torquentine grunted. “But, since the Thane of Thanes saw fit to take your eyes, you will just have to imagine it for yourself. And let us leave my name similarly obscured. As for my intent… that, that is a good question. “But tarry on the subject of eyes for a moment. You know how I lost the one that is, I assure you, absent? No, of course you don’t. It was in fact laid open by the blade of a dockside ruffian. I too, in those days, was something of a dockside ruffian, so I describe him thus without malice or disapproval. This was before Gryvan was Thane, you understand. I’m sorry. Does his name offend you?” Igryn was grimacing once more, his lips straining slowly back to reveal clenched teeth. At the mention of the High Thane, a snarl had begun to form at the corner of his mouth, and was poised there still, half-born. “In any case,” Torquentine continued, carefully burying his unease beneath a casual tone, “this man of whom I speak, he was, as it turned out, of unusual descent: father a Tal Dyreen, mother from the Free Coast. He’d been living a rat’s life in and around Vaymouth for years, but it did not teach him much love or respect for the Haig Blood in whose house—whose lands—he was a guest. Indeed, he made that lack of affection for his hosts abundantly clear, at tedious length, one night in a tavern down by the dockyards. I listened as long as I could, but in time I felt compelled to challenge his views. I did so with a knife, and he defended them similarly. In due course, the matter was resolved in my favour. It cost me an eye, but it cost him his life, so I have always been mindful that I paid much the lower price that night.” Torquentine fluttered his bloated fingers in Magrayn’s direction. She pulled a clean, fresh cloth free from her waistband and laid it across his palm. He carefully mopped sweat from his cheeks and brow. So many breathing bodies within this confined space had made it moist and warm. “Are you still listening, Thane?” he asked. Igryn was hunching forward once more. He had begun to work his jaw as if chewing some resistant matter. Strands of his hair were hanging down across the bandage that covered his eye sockets. “Straighten him up, would you?” Torquentine muttered to his men, who were staring distastefully at the Thane. One of them planted a broad hand firmly on Igryn’s shoulder and pushed him, a little more roughly than was necessary, erect. Igryn’s head cracked against the stonework, but he did not seem to notice. “I hear an idiot dribbling nonsense. Is that you talking?” Igryn ground his chin into the notch between neck and shoulder. “My beard itches.” “If you’ve brought fleas into my home, I’ll be sorely disappointed,” Torquentine muttered. “But to return to my point. I was a different man in those days, you understand. And not only in my possession of two eyes. I was somewhat… more modestly proportioned, shall we say? More germanely, I was somewhat hotter of temper and fiercer in my adherence to the Blood of my birth and upbringing. But—and this is the important part, Thane, so I hope you are listening—though the fires of my loyal ardour may have been damped down a little by the years, they are far from extinguished. “I am a part of my Blood. A part many might wish to excise, I suppose, but a part nevertheless. I belong. And I believe, in my deeply buried heart, that the Bloods are a boon to this world. I believe that without them, and without my Blood in particular, we would sink back into the self-mutilation that has so often afflicted us as a people, as a race. As a godless world. You will therefore understand, Thane, that it troubles me greatly to see the Haig Blood convulsed, as it is now, by a multitude of difficulties.” “You’ll find no sympathy in me,” Igryn sneered. He turned his blind head towards Torquentine. The smile upon his bruised and misused face was ugly. Mad. “I’d like nothing better than to eat your Thane’s warm heart out of the bowl of his broken chest.” “Unfortunately, I do not doubt the sincerity of your desire in that regard. And therein lies my dilemma, for I find myself at a loss to know what to do with you. Quite aside from my instinctive wish to do no more harm than is strictly necessary to the Blood of my birth, change is something I find distinctly undesirable at the best of times. I would go so far as to say, in fact, that I am thoroughly averse to it, for reasons both temperamental and professional. And there is altogether too much of it in the air at the moment. Wanton, egregious change for no better reason than that everyone seems to have forgotten the limits of appropriate behaviour. Do you know who commissioned me to bring about your removal from the custody of Gryvan’s men, Thane?” “No,” hissed Igryn through gritted teeth. “And I don’t care.” “How ungrateful of you. What would you do if I were to return you to your own lands?” “Make you rich. Raise an army. Avenge myself upon your Blood and render as many of your women sonless, brotherless and husbandless as I could.” Torquentine emitted a curtailed, stifled laugh. He glanced over to Magrayn. She was as impassive, as quietly observant as ever. “Surely he would have been dead long ago, were he as guilelessly stupid as he appears?” he said to her. Magrayn frowned. It was an expression that made the exposed, corrupted flesh of her rotted face stir in interesting ways. “He is sick,” she suggested. “Deranged.” “Quite possibly,” Torquentine said. “I have not left this chamber for some time, Thane, yet I have a thousand eyes, a thousand ears, spread all through this city, all through the lands of this Blood, and others. I see, and I hear, everything. All of that knowledge flows back to this chamber, and pools here in me. And what do I glean from it? What do I discern of the shape of the world?” He waited for a response from Igryn, but the Thane was silent, his head turning very slowly, very slightly, from side to side. “I see the Crafts and the Moon Palace edging towards outright war,” Torquentine continued. “I see your own lands rent by unrest. Not mere banditry but utter lawlessness, and rumours of Dornach ships already scouting your shores with half a mind to land an army by all accounts. I see the Black Road seething across the borders of the Ayth Blood like a swarm of wolves, consuming and destroying. I see murderous mobs rampaging in the streets above us here, battling the Guard. Everywhere I see unreason and savagery and disintegration. It is as if every desire, every ambition now runs unbridled. The fetters of restraint have been cast off by all those upon whom they served a most valuable purpose.” He sighed. Even as he spoke, he could feel the creeping anxiety that had nested, of late, in his chest. He was a man who craved, who needed, order and control and organisation. Everything, in fact, that the world now seemed determined to slough like some redundant skin. “And all of it growing worse. Each part of it feeding off the rest, each brutality precipitating another, each stupidity exceeding the one that went before. I have even crept my eyes and my ears into the very house of the man who decided you should be free, Thane. I watch him, I eavesdrop upon him. And I mislike what I see and what I hear. Things have changed in strange and unreadable ways. In that house and everywhere. This puts me in a sorely testing position.” Igryn laughed. A cackle, like a crow. “I will eat his heart,” the Thane of the Dargannan Blood murmured. Torquentine raised his eyebrows and scratched disconsolately at his folded throat. “As you say, Magrayn: sick. He surrenders himself all too willingly, I think, to the malady that besets the whole world. Ah well. As I was about to explain, I find myself unwilling to comply with my instructions. Returning him to his homeland would only feed a fire that already rages beyond control. I have no wish to play the part of midwife at the birthing of a world given over to unreason and chaos. I just cannot bring myself to do it.” “Shall I return him to the storeroom?” Magrayn asked. “Indeed. And make sure there’s nothing there he can hurt himself with. Until I decide what to do with him, it’s rather important he stays alive.” The two guards unceremoniously hooked their hands under Igryn’s armpits and hoisted him up from the bench. He did not resist, but seemed unable to support his own weight. His legs buckled at the knee and he hung like an ancient, infirm greybeard propped up on a fence. “Seems like nothing much, doesn’t he?” Torquentine reflected sadly. “Yet because of him, I invite the wrath of the Shadowhand. I all but betroth myself to catastrophe. Constantly surprising, the way things turn out, isn’t it? And I never took much pleasure in surprises.”