IX

They crawled through the wreckage of Kan Avor like cautious rats picking over the carcass of a whale. Were it not for K’rina, it would have been easy to lose track of where they were and where they were heading. Every time taller walls or buildings closed about them, Orisian lost all sense of direction. K’rina knew, though. Always and instinctively. She would have scrambled recklessly and eagerly, as fast as she could go, through the ruins if they had let her. It fell to Orisian to restrain her, for Taim and Varryn spent their entire concentration upon scouring the way ahead for any hint of danger. There was little. One man—a warrior from one of the Black Road Bloods—they found trying to light a fire with a pathetic pile of damp sticks. Varryn killed him quietly. Other than that, the only movement they detected was distant. Orisian was struggling with a mounting pain inside his head: not in the bone but deep, in the place where his thoughts dwelled. It came and went, but each time it retreated it returned stronger and sharper. There was whispering as well, but that he was becoming accustomed to. The competing tasks of preventing K’rina from rushing on ahead and traversing the derelict terrain safely and quietly himself were demanding enough to keep him from slipping entirely into the diffuse besieging despair and anger he felt all about him. He had the strange sense that they were falling, not advancing. Some great pit was drawing them into itself. Yet of all the feelings clamouring for his attention, fear was the least of them. He had somehow moved beyond the reach of that particular assailant. Perhaps he was simply too tired, in all possible ways, to succumb. The utter desolation of Kan Avor, the physical and mental destitution of those they had found alive here, the weight of the dead upon the city: all of this seemed to be murmuring to him that it was too late. Whatever happened, a wound had been delivered to the world that could never be quite healed. Too much had been broken for it ever to be restored to its former state. Still he went on. And if he detected an increasingly wild edge to Varryn’s movement and gaze, he chose to ignore it. If he thought he saw Taim’s shoulders sinking gradually lower, and a grim, sombre intensity taking hold of the warrior, he said nothing. Kan Avor had them all in its grip, and it could only be endured, not escaped. K’rina led them, in the bleak afternoon light, to a street over which the greatest of Kan Avor’s surviving edifices loomed. It might have been a palace in the lost days of the Gyre Blood’s dominion. It had the stubs of towers still adorning its upper reaches, and faded carvings in its stonework. Blank and empty windows looked out from high in its walls over the grey ruins. The na’kyrim almost tore free of Orisian’s grasp as they crouched behind a low wall, staring at the open door opposite them. He had to take a firm hold of her shoulders with both hands to keep her from running out into the street and bolting for that door. She hissed in frustration and tried to shake him loose. “Leads to a stairway,” Taim murmured. “Is that an Inkallim?” Orisian asked, staring at the corpse slumped against the base of the wall just outside the doorway. “I think so.” “Not long dead,” Varryn observed. His tone was tense, as if his jaw and lips and tongue were becoming too stiff to easily move. “I’ll take a look,” Taim said. “Wait for my sign.” He advanced cautiously into the street, looking up and down its length. He edged closer to the doorway, pausing to lean tentatively down towards the fallen Inkallim, searching for any movement in his chest. Satisfied, Taim leaned through the open door. After a brief, tense wait, he withdrew and gestured towards Orisian. Varryn moved at once, eager to throw off his enforced immobility. Orisian followed more slowly, K’rina bucking in his grasp. “Seems deserted,” Taim whispered as they gathered by the doorway. “Can’t hear anything. Perhaps they’re all dead.” “Not all of them,” Orisian said. “Not him. You can feel that he’s not dead, can’t you?” Taim nodded tightly. “Whatever K’rina wants, it’s in here,” said Orisian. “He’s in here.” “Someone,” Varryn hissed. “Where?” demanded Taim. The Kyrinin nodded towards the end of the street, already reaching for an arrow. As he did so, an Inkallim emerged. She was tall, and ran with long, easy strides. Her black hair was tied back. She carried two swords, held loose at her side, slightly splayed ahead of her. She betrayed no surprise at their presence, but increased her pace and came racing towards them. Varryn’s arrow sprang out to meet her. She swayed, and it skimmed past her arm. Orisian was astonished. “Get into the stairwell,” snapped Taim. She was coming still faster. Varryn snatched another arrow from his quiver and sent it darting for her chest. Again the Inkallim dipped and twisted in mid-stride, but she was closer now, with less time to react. The arrow smacked into her shoulder and stayed there. She barely faltered. “Keep her out of here, if you can,” Orisian said to Taim. He yielded at last to K’rina’s silent demands, and let the na’kyrim drag him into and up the stairwell. She climbed quickly, and he followed, one hand on her trailing wrist, the other clumsily drawing his sword. He scraped it against the confining wall of the spiral. His head was spinning. He felt as if he was fighting against a raging headwind as he climbed those rough steps. Some great pressure leaned against him. It was nothing conscious, nothing directed, just the immense weight of whatever he drew near. Now, too late, he felt fear taking hold of him. Whether it was his, or someone else’s, he did not know, but it tightened and tightened. At the head of the stairway was a plain wooden door. Orisian pulled K’rina aside just as she reached out for it. He leaned close, listening intently. He could hear nothing, in part because there was a throbbing bellow building within his head. He closed his eyes for a moment and fought back the terror that made him want to sink down onto the ancient stone and curl up there; fought the empty certainty of his own impotence that flooded into him; fought the sapping weariness that made granite of his arms and legs. He fought against all this but could not defeat it. Could not entirely hold it back. But nor was he defeated by it. He slowly pushed the door open and led the suddenly calm and compliant K’rina inside. The daylight coming in through the windows and through the holes in the collapsing roof was not strong enough to dispel every shadow from the hall. The rows of pillars that ran the length of the chamber on either side laid faint dark bars down across the floorboards. There was a musty, damp smell. Some way down the hall, slumped against the foot of a pillar, was a man Orisian did not at first recognise. He took in his haggard features, his battered chain mail. It was difficult to tell whether the man was alive or dead, awake or asleep. But his face was familiar. Orisian’s gaze dropped to the man’s hands, resting in his lap. They were thick, like fat, overfilled waterskins. And black and blue and yellow with damage. The fingers lay at odd, ungainly angles. Orisian looked back to the man’s face and frowned. It was the Horin-Gyre Bloodheir, he realised. The man who had hunted him through the streets of Koldihrve, who had tried and failed to kill him there in the Vale of Tears. Orisian took a hesitant step into the room. The old soft floorboards creaked beneath his boots. He glanced at K’rina, puzzled by an abrupt change in her demeanour. She was staring down the hall, her grey eyes entirely absorbed in whatever she saw there. Orisian peered into the gloom that filled the far end of the chamber. He thought he could see, pale and indistinct, some small, sunken figure sitting there. Unmoving. Corpse-like. “Who are you?” a vast and sullen voice asked inside his mind. Taim barely had time to ready himself before the Inkallim was upon them. He lifted his shield across his chest. Saw Varryn set both hands on his bow and draw it back like a club. Then she was there, and leaping high into the space between them. Taim thought she meant perhaps to fling herself beyond them in an attempt the reach the doorway they blocked, but even as the expectation formed, he saw that it was wrong. Both blades lashed down towards him, clattering against his shield with unexpected force and driving him backwards. Her right leg kicked out at Varryn. The Kyrinin was fast enough to crash his bow into her thigh; not fast enough to avoid the lunging foot that hammered into the base of his throat and sent him staggering into the wall. Taim heard the crack of his head against the stonework quite clearly. Varryn slumped down. The Inkallim landed with perfect balance and poise. She flicked a single glance at the stunned Kyrinin, then fixed her gaze on Taim. As she did so, though, one blade reached back towards Varryn. Taim roared and rushed at her, shield foremost, sword held back for a stabbing thrust. The Inkallim drifted out of his path with absurd ease and casually cut open his upper arm as she did so. But he had put her out of reach of Varryn, for now at least. She rose out of her fighting stance and took a few leisurely steps sideways. They carried her a little closer to the door. Taim backed towards it. Varryn was not stirring. There was no way Taim could defend both stairway and Kyrinin without quickly losing one or both. Suffused with sharp guilt, he chose the stairway, and hoped that the Inkallim cared more for that than she did for finishing an unconscious foe. “I saw you once before, I think,” he said to her. “In a snowstorm, at Glasbridge.” “Did you?” She seemed entirely uninterested. “Stand aside.” “I can’t do that. My Thane commanded me to hold this stair.” “That boy who was with you? He’s nothing.” “He is my Thane.” Her lip curled in disdain. She reached up and hooked a single finger over the shaft of the arrow still embedded in her shoulder. With the most fleeting of grimaces, she snapped it off, leaving just a split stub protruding from her flesh. Taim considered attacking her in that moment of distraction, but in truth it was no distraction at all, for her eyes never left him, her balance never wavered. She let the broken arrow fall and sprang forward in a flurry of whirling blades, belabouring his shield, ringing against his own sword. His defence was desperate. This raven was astonishingly fast and precise. She nicked his thigh. Almost had his eye; would have done, had he not read the sudden change in her blade’s course at the last possible moment and jerked back. She paused as he retreated into the doorway itself. “You’re too late,” he said, hoping to keep her attention upon him and away from Varryn. She glared at him but made no reply. She moistened her lips. There was a constant shiver running down Taim’s neck and spine, a kernel of pain building behind his eyes, a flutter of bitter hopelessness in his heart. None of this he believed to be truly his, and he set himself against it. But it would not release him entirely. It sapped his strength and his will. His mind reached for hope, for inspiration. Its harvest was meagre. There was perhaps the faintest suggestion that the arrow hampered her movements. If so, that would only grow worse if he could live long enough to give it the chance. And there was the stairway. He edged back into the shadows at the foot of the spiral of steps. She needed space to get the best from those fearsome swords and from her speed. Above her, with shield between them, he would have a chance. To delay her, if nothing else. But only if she came after him. “You cannot reach him,” he said as he reached back to set his foot on the first of the steps. She smiled then, the malevolent smirk of a wolf. “You think not?” she said, and ran at him. Orisian could not answer the question that had been put to him. The depth and resonant power of the voice that had asked it stunned him, and made him for a moment stand quite still, letting his sword and shield hang down. “You mean me harm.” The voice rang like the mightiest, most sombre of bells. “That I can feel, can know. But it’s a cold kind of… regret. It doesn’t burn in you as it did in the others.” Orisian gathered himself, almost groaning at the effort it took to shake off the deadening pain and the weight of the fell mind that pressed down upon his own. K’rina was walking very slowly forward, taking tiny steps. That roused Orisian enough to get his own, leaden body moving. He forced himself ahead of the na’kyrim. “Who is that with you?” the voice asked him. “I can’t see. My eyes… Can’t find anything… What? You’ve brought some empty vessel with you? A body with no mind, no thought, no life in it?” Orisian advanced, each halting stride a struggle. He could hear Kanin muttering something, but did not look. He kept his gaze fixed on the na’kyrim, who slowly became clear amidst the shadows as Orisian drew nearer. He thought at first that Aeglyss must be dead. A naked, hairless, scabrous head on a lopsided and bruised neck. The face, what little Orisian could see of it, marred by a score of tiny wounds and blisters and blemishes. Streaked with blood. Fragile shoulders, the bony points of them showing through the gown. That gown itself, foully decorated with stains. The hands, one lying atop the other in Aeglyss’ lap, so wasted that Orisian could see every bone through the skin. Each finger ending in an open sore where the nail should have been. The whole entirely withered and wretched and unmoving. Yet he was not dead, for Orisian heard him, and could feel his seething will all around. It ran dark, intrusive fingers over Orisian’s thoughts. This was the home and heart of all that poisoned the world and the Shared. Orisian recognised the teeming mass of unfettered emotion that clawed at him, could almost see it as a boiling black cloud that filled the hall and flooded out through the windows, rushing in great spreading columns out into the sky, blanketing the world. The anger and the bitter hatred, the self-loathing, the fear. It was all here, in its first and simplest form. “Why do I catch the scent of Anain?” The doubt, the almost childish puzzlement in those words, was so acute it made Orisian sigh in distant pain. He was losing himself beneath the onslaught of this formless, purposeless power. If he did not act, he would be unable to do so at all. He lurched forward, sword raised. “No,” the voice told him. “Kneel.” And his sword slipped from his numb fingers, and his knees buckled and he went down heavily. He shrugged his arm free of the shield and it fell away from him. “Who are you?” This time Orisian did not think the question was for him. “I can’t see you. Why can’t I see you?” K’rina was shuffling closer to Aeglyss. And then, quite suddenly: “Aeglyss,” K’rina said. “It’s me. It’s K’rina. I came for you.” She had a beautiful voice. Light, and fine, and easy. Orisian could feel Aeglyss’ confusion. It was so powerful, it became his, and he stared, uncomprehending, at K’rina as if he was seeing her for the first time. She stood straight, head held up. Alive and present. He felt a subtle transformation taking place inside him, inside everything. That confusion and the anger that underlay it was shifting, changing its shape. Those first emotions did not disappear, but a… joy was merging itself with them. “K’rina?” “I came for you, my son. My foster son. I felt your pain and knew I had to come.” “Yes.” Orisian thought his skull might burst at the vigour in that single word. “I am here for you.” K’rina smiled, stretching her arms out towards Aeglyss. “Come. We can be together.” “Yes.” Again, it was exultant, rising, roaring upwards. “Let me see.” Orisian felt all that force and power that swirled about him gathering itself, drawing itself in to coalesce around that one smiling woman, and within her. K’rina shook. She rocked from toe to heel. Her arms jerked. Her mouth opened. There was a sudden lessening, a dampening of the cacophony raging inside Orisian. He rose to his feet, fighting back surges of nausea. He recovered his sword. When he straightened, testing the weight of the sword in his hand, K’rina had turned towards him and was staring at him. “What?” she said through taut lips, but the voice was not truly hers now. It quivered with Aeglyss’ power, with his strident tone. “No.” The snapped denial was like a blow in the face. Orisian closed his eyes and shook his head to try to clear it. “No,” he heard again, and the sound rang around the hall, setting echoes of fear and anger running across the stone. The anger found a home in Orisian, and burned in him and blurred his vision. Amidst that fierce seizure he knew what needed to happen. What needed to be done. He advanced towards K’rina. “No,” cried Aeglyss yet again in K’rina’s voice. “I’m sorry,” gasped Orisian through the waves of crushing fury that broke over him. He could feel blood running from his nose. There was liquid beading in his eyes, and he did not know whether that was blood as well or tears. He took another heavy pace closer to K’rina. She moved suddenly, tottering on rigid legs towards him, toppling as if to fall at his feet. She was reaching for him, those delicate white hands splayed, coming towards his face. Aeglyss, Orisian shouted silently at himself. It is Aeglyss. Only him. They were in each other’s embrace then, clasped together. K’rina’s hands closed themselves on Orisian’s head. His free hand settled on her waist, just firm enough to feel her hip bone. With his other hand he drove his sword through her midriff. As steel entered flesh, so those fingers laid on his scalp suddenly tightened and pressed down, and Orisian was flung tumbling and scattering and attenuating out of his body. He was there, with Aeglyss, inside the howling nothingness that was K’rina. Orisian was but a collection of thoughts pulled this way and that by the raging tempest. That tempest was both Aeglyss and what had awaited him here within the shell of the woman who had once been his loving guardian. Two vast powers contended, the one striving to drag itself back and up towards the waking world of surfaces and light and substance; the other flailing at the first, raking it, dragging it, entwining it, struggling to contain it and haul it away, down into the bottomless void beneath. K’rina was cage and she was trap. There was nothing of her here, not the most tenuous echo or memory of who she had been or what she consisted of. Her body had been mere vessel for older, vaster powers. Orisian could feel himself coming apart, unable to shape coherent thought amidst such titanic expression of unbridled potencies. Aeglyss—the maelstrom that was his rage and desire—was in the grip of the immense will of the Anain. Their furious struggle, a storm fit to encompass worlds, threw off gouts of raw sensation that tore holes in the fabric of Orisian’s consciousness, and left fragments of themselves drifting through his faltering thoughts. He felt rasping tendrils of briar wrapped around his naked limbs, gouging great troughs into his flesh. He felt writhing tendrils forcing themselves into his mouth and into his throat, piercing him, growing into him. He felt clouds of leaves brushing over his skin; heard the creaking of ancient, mindful timber; tasted loam. He was Aeglyss lying shivering in the snow, folded into the arms of his dead mother, feeling himself dying piece by piece of grief and fear. He was Aeglyss crucified upon the Breaking Stone, enduring the agonising revelation of possibility, feeling in the core of his being the immeasurable, unbounded wonder of the Shared opening itself to him and filling him like a flood bursting through a holed dyke. He glimpsed, for a flashing, searing instant, the workings of the Anain mind, the many-in-one immensity of its slow movement through the insubstantial world within a world that was the Shared. He glimpsed their longing to silence the raucous, poisonous chaos Aeglyss inflicted; their deep and diffuse dismay at the suffering, the deformation, he brought to all the countless minds woven into the web of the Shared; their fear of him. And their cold and cruel calculation in taking the only living being he loved and snuffing her out of existence like the most trivial of flames on a candle, hollowing her out and making of her a snare for the monster loosed in the Shared. Wave after wave of experience and awareness burned through Orisian, and each left him thinner than the last, each carried away some portion of his being. But then something changed, and what was rushing up towards him, blanking out all else in the enormity of its power, was no mere fragment, no glimpse. It was Aeglyss, his entirety. And Orisian was suddenly back in his own body, standing in the hall in Kan Avor with K’rina’s hands pressed to his scalp, his sword in her stomach. Her eyes—black eyes, lightless—staring into his own. He could feel Aeglyss raging towards him, feel the buffeting of his approach and the purity of his deranged anger. He could not move. Those fingers crushing against his skull were like steel claws. His own muscles were lifeless and limp, unresponsive to his terror. He understood. Aeglyss could not be killed with sword, or knife, or fire. No bodily harm could silence him as long as he could reach into the Shared, for that was where the essence of him dwelled now. He would be unending, and a part of him would reside, for ever, in every and any mind. Unless he could be contained in this na’kyrim’s body as it died. Unless the Anain could hold him there while Orisian’s blade stilled its heart. Some part of the Anain would die with him, for the prison they had made of K’rina could not be escaped, even by its makers; but Aeglyss would cease, and be gone from the world and from the Shared. But now Aeglyss was ascending again. He was boiling up to the surface and pouring himself into Orisian. “Yield to me,” Aeglyss howled. “Open yourself to me. Become a part of me.” Blood ran thickly over Orisian’s lips now. He could taste it. He could feel it inside his ears, trickling out and down his neck. K’rina’s fingers were white-hot bars against his bone. He could feel himself collapsing beneath their impossible strength. “No,” he thought. “I will give you life,” Aeglyss roared. “Let me in.” Orisian was diminishing, like mist exposed to the morning’s glare. He could still feel his pain, but he was moving slowly away from it. He could observe it from beyond its crippling weight. He could hear and feel the Anain rising in Aeglyss’ wake. They climbed from the deeps, reaching for him. All the corruption of the Shared that Aeglyss had begun was now removed from it, locked with the na’kyrim’s mind inside K’rina. He poured it into Orisian. Every bitterness, every resentment, every hatred and fear and jealousy ran through him in place of blood, in place of the air in his lungs. Its coruscating intensity eroded him. Out of it, though, out of that dark and misshapen memory of the Shared, he could find one thing. One choice. He could remember Lairis, and Fariel, and Kennet. Inurian and Rothe. He could smell his mother’s hair, and hear the golden music of her voice. He could see Fariel, standing silhouetted against the sun. He could embrace his sorrow at the loss of those who had gone before and without him. “Release me,” commanded Aeglyss. “Give yourself to me.” K’rina’s hands crushed in against his skull. Orisian could hear crackings, ruptures. The splitting and collapsing of bone. Light was flaring in his eyes. It would end if he but yielded. The Anain were there, enfolding Aeglyss. But the na’kyrim was flooding into Orisian, forcing his way between the last resistant strands of thought. Such agonies resounded in Orisian’s head that he was blind and deaf and dumb. He felt hollow breakage in his temples, the back of his skull. No. He did not speak it. He simply chose. And reached towards the beloved dead. As they faded, and he faded, he could feel Aeglyss falling away. Into the smothering Anain. Into the eternal, perfect cage of K’rina. Aeglyss screamed in impotent ire. And fell. And he faded, just as Orisian did. He faltered, just as Orisian did. He ceased.