*

“Mad?” Torquentine grunted. “Is she sure?” “She seems so.” Magrayn nodded. She was watching with a somewhat sceptical, concerned expression as a dozen burly men attempted to ease her prodigious master sideways from his bed of thick cushions onto the massive trolley standing ready to receive his weight. “And do we have any faith in her judgement in such matters?” “Well, she is only a maid. But she has served in the Palace of Red Stone for some time. She should be capable of recognising… unusual, perverse behaviour on the Shadowhand’s part.” “The man engages in little else,” Torquentine observed. “Move your hand, man. I’ve some… a rash, shall we say.” The wheels on the trolley creaked ominously as the first of Torquentine’s buttocks was allowed to rest upon it. Magrayn grimaced. Torquentine noted this and frowned. “You assured me this has been tested,” he pointed out. “Indeed. It has.” Torquentine found her tone considerably less reassuring than he would have hoped. But he had committed himself into his doorkeeper’s capable hands once he had made the decision to depart for pastures new. It was too late to lose faith in her competence. “Do we trust her? This maid?” he asked. “She is not some ploy of the Shadowhand’s, turning our curiosity against us?” “I think it unlikely. We have convinced her, I am sure, that her father’s life is forfeit should she fail us.” “Hmm. The mattress on this trolley is distressingly thin. How long must I remain perched upon it?” “Not long.” He recognised her imprecision as predictive of extended discomfort. If not suffering, indeed. He chose not to press the matter, as the only alternative would be to remain here in his Vaymouth cellar, and that prospect pleased him still less. “No reason, I suppose, that the Chancellor should be excused from falling prey to the malady of the mind claiming so many others, merely by virtue of his wit and title. When an entire city plunges into disorder and rapine and pillage, nothing should surprise us.” “Particularly if the Chancellor concerned helped the plunge along himself,” Magrayn said. With Torquentine settled upon his unconventional transport, she nodded to the men standing ready by the far wall of his subterranean lair. Obedient to her command, they began to remove the false stones set in the wall, slowly exposing a tunnel running off south-westwards. “Indeed, indeed,” Torquentine mused as he watched the men work. “There’s the most disquieting element in the whole affair. Still, I suppose if we conclude the Chancellor is mad, it clarifies a good deal. A madman may do anything. He may wantonly arrange the torture and murder of a rival Kingship’s Ambassador, thereby all but inviting them to make war. He may arrange for the escape of a rebellious minor Thane, thus practically ensuring the renewal of the rebellion so recently crushed. “He may, if rumour is true, persuade the High Thane to withdraw a portion of his army from the field on the very eve of what consequently proved to be our Blood’s greatest defeat in battle. Leaving those intolerable Black Road creatures considerably closer to Vaymouth than to their own borders and with notably little between them and us to distract them. He might even, absurd as it sounds, find someone—some insufficiently cautious and rightly regretful fool—willing to set a few fires, and use said fires as a lever to break apart the bonds which held together our city’s evidently fragile arrangements of power and patronage and mutual restraint.” The widening portal in the wall revealed a straight tunnel with walls of soft, muddy earth supported by an extensive framework of struts and beams and planking. It smelled bad down there, and Torquentine wrinkled his nose. It also looked unpleasantly wet. There was water trickling down the walls, and lying in slack pools as far as he could see. “Not an attractive view,” he said. “Still, I cannot bring myself to remain in a city become so distressingly unpredictable and violent. It’s impossible to conduct any kind of useful business. Particularly when one is about to give quite possibly mortal offence to one—possibly more—of the most powerful men in the land.” “You have decided, then?” Magrayn asked. Torquentine nodded. “One last task for you, my dear, before we fly from this sadly precarious nest. Take our inconvenient prisoner to the Moon Palace and leave an appropriate message. If Mordyn Jerain’s the rot at the heart of all this trouble, we may as well give some assistance to those who might be able to cut it out. There’ll never be another coin to be made out of this city, illicit or otherwise, unless someone does.” “I will meet you at the docks,” Magrayn said. A number of hands gently but firmly pressed against his back had Torquentine trundling indecorously forward. He felt like a morsel being wheeled into the waiting gullet of a giant snake. “The boat is fully prepared?” he asked Magrayn as she moved towards the door. “It is. The captain has all the specified supplies on board for the journey.” “Good, good.” Torquentine tapped his chin with a single stout finger. A certain despondency was settling over him at the thought of what lay ahead. “I must admit, I do not look forward with much glee to the process of boarding ship.” “Don’t worry,” Magrayn said lightly. Had he not known better, Torquentine might almost have thought he detected the contours of a smile struggling to emerge upon her lips. “They have strong ropes and nets. I checked.” “Ropes and nets,” Torquentine muttered glumly, shaking his head, as his doorkeeper disappeared to prepare Igryn oc Dargannan-Haig for one further, and likely final, journey. “Ropes and nets.”

VI

On the best days, Jaen Narran could imagine, to look out from a high window of Kolkyre’s Tower of Thrones would be to see views truly fit for a Thane, and once for High Thanes. Westward, the city sweeping down to the sprawling harbour teemed with life, and beyond it lay Anaron’s Bay with its lines of gentle waves marching in one after another. Perhaps, she imagined, on a clear and sharp day, it might even be possible to glimpse Il Anaron itself, the great island out in the distance. Eastward, the long curve of the city wall and then the broad expanse of the plains—thick with rich green grass in high summer, those—mounted gradually in successive ranks of ridges and hills until finally they merged into the very foothills of the Karkyre Peaks. But the best days had long been absent from Kolkyre. Now the view to the west showed a silent and moribund harbour. That to the east revealed not immense fields thick with grass but the huge black and brown stain of the besieging forces of the Black Road, arcing around the city like a scar. A scene rather closer to hand held Jaen’s attention now, though. She stood beside Ilessa oc Kilkry-Haig, staring down at the violence being done within the Tower’s own encircling wall. The Steward’s House, where Lagair Haldyn, Gryvan oc Haig’s mouthpiece, resided, abutted that wall, down at the foot of the mound on which the Tower of Thrones stood. It was in fact built into the fabric of the wall. Now, the Steward’s House was under assault. Crowds of Kilkry warriors milled about, some battering at its door with a heavy wooden beam, others tearing at the wooden shutters closed over its windows. Marshalling these disorderly and frenzied forces was Roaric, the Thane himself. He sat astride his finest warhorse, his Shield arrayed about him, further up the mound. Now and again he would shout some command or encouragement. Jaen and Ilessa were too far above to hear what he said, but his words never seemed to have any significant effect, in any case. The warriors he thought to guide were in the grip of their own fury. Once he had given them a target for their simmering resentment and frustration, in the form of the Steward and his household, they had followed their own instincts and hungers, not their Thane’s instructions. Lagair Haldyn had been barricaded inside his official residence for several days, Jaen knew. He was far from alone in taking such measures. The city streets had become entirely unsafe for any except the most savage and determined. Still, he had even better reasons than most for keeping out of sight, given the deep-seated hatred with which the Haig Blood was now almost universally regarded in Kolkyre. Ilessa and Jaen waited only long enough to see the Steward dragged out into the gardens before they turned away. They could not avoid his screams, though, which were piercing and easily loud enough to reach up to the heights of the Tower. They were abruptly curtailed. “That’s the end of any chance of reconciling with Haig,” muttered Ilessa as they descended hurriedly down the central spine of the Tower. “Such chances might have been slim in any case,” Jaen ventured to suggest. “Oh, I know. I can regret their abandonment, nevertheless. But my son was not to be swayed in this or in anything else. Not any more. The fever is upon him, and wholly his master.” The resignation in Ilessa’s voice was not flawless. Jaen could still catch the trace of desperate sadness that was there. The woman was seeing the last of her family surrender himself to the practices of the slaughterhouse. Whatever virtues Roaric might once have possessed, they were of the past now, for day by day he had become someone ruled by a single obsessive need: to lash out, to struggle against the chains he felt so heavily upon him. The Steward’s misfortune was to be the most easily within reach, and thus the first to suffer. They found Roaric at the foot of the stairs, issuing flurries of orders to his attending Captains. They were in the same eager, fierce mood as their Thane. As word of his intent had spread, so had that mood. So had the anticipation of blood, and the yearning for it. Whatever sickness it was that so beset Kolkyre, one of its clearest and commonest effects, Jaen had observed, was to convince those falling victim to it that they could be healed only by the shedding of other people’s blood. “Is there nothing I can say?” Ilessa asked her son, ignoring the warriors crowding around him. Roaric waved them away. “No,” he said, pulling on his gauntlets once more. “If you do not meet with success…” “If a man feared defeat, he would never give battle,” Roaric snapped. There was contempt in his tone, and Jaen could see how it wounded Ilessa. Yet she must have known this would be her reception, and had chosen even so to make one final attempt. “Every victory is inevitably succeeded by defeat,” Roaric went on dismissively, as if he addressed a child. “It is the nature of our lives. A man might fight a thousand battles and emerge triumphant from every one; still, he will suffer defeat in the end, for we die and we are forgotten. If we cannot face defeat, we must live always, throughout our lives, in fear. For it awaits us all.” “Very wise, I’m sure,” muttered Ilessa. “In this instance, if you are defeated, your city is liable to fall with you.” “What would you have me do?” cried Roaric furiously. His cheeks reddened. “We starve because Vaymouth will send us no supplies. We kill one another. We lie awake at night, too terrified of our dreams to attempt sleep. We are withering. Your people, Mother, are dying. Every day. Every night. Well, if death wants us, let us at least force it to come for us as we fight. “You’ve seen what’s happening to them out there.” He lashed an arm out in a vaguely easterly direction. “The Black Road fails just as we do. Hundreds of them have gone off into the north or the south. Those who remain fight amongst themselves, scatter further and further across the land. Every night you can hear the cries of the dying. Every day there are more bodies piled up outside their camps. They’re rotting away.” “Let them rot, then,” Ilessa said quietly. Her calm in the face of Roaric’s violent emotions was extraordinary. “Let them kill one another. Let them sicken and die. If we can but hold together for a while…” “We cannot! We cannot. I cannot.” Jaen could see the anguish in the young man now, breaching for once the anger that so often disguised it. “We are shamed. All our lands gone, save this one city. Every battle lost. Haig treating us like… like vermin. It must not stand. It must not stand. Not if I’m to be a Thane worthy of the title. Not if… Not if…” “Would you have me watch you die, then, from the city walls?” Ilessa asked coldly. “I did not see your brother die. But I was there when your father had his throat opened. Would you have me witness your end too?” Roaric glared at his mother, then turned on his heel and walked out into the wintry light. For all the harshness of her last question, Jaen could see the tremor in Ilessa’s lips and chin as her last son turned his back on her and went back to his warhorse.