Bloodheir (56 page)

The halfbreed’s voice was moving away. Mordyn cautiously opened his eyes. Aeglyss was stumbling across the floor, his feet scraping over the wooden boards. He drifted around one of the soaring stone columns.

“I’ve known from the first moment I found you. I made terrible sacrifices to bring you here. Terrible.

Someone . . . important slipped through my fingers. The only one I could have trusted. The only one.

Stolen from me, because I indulged myself; lingered in that awful place, and called my warriors to fetch you out of there. I lost her. And gained you, Shadowhand.

“Now that I have you, there will be none to gainsay me; none to deny me. They will not turn me away from their tables when they see that I hold the famed Shadowhand. They will not shut me out from their councils. No, they will beg me, they will entreat me, they will seek my favour. Mine! You can aid me, but I know . . . I’ve learned that aid is not given. Not when I ask for it. I must take it. Take what I need to put myself beyond their reach, beyond everyone’s reach.”

He stopped, poised in mid-stride, teetering like a frail, half-felled tree. He cocked his head to one side.

“Here they come. Now we shall see. Now there will be a decision.”

He looked towards the door, and it swung back on its rusted hinges. Wain stood there, seeing and dismissing the hunched figure of the Chancellor with a single sharp gaze.

“Temegrin is coming,” she said. “He has fifty riders at his back.”

Aeglyss nodded heavily. “He means to kill me, I think. Well. It’s good. Let him, if he can.”

More than two hundred marched out to meet the Eagle of Ragnor oc Gyre’s army, and even then Kan Avor was not emptied. Kyrinin warriors, Battle Inkallim, Wain and her Shield and fifty of her Blood’s spears, a hundred folk from the valleys and mountains of the distant north. They walked out through the city’s tumbled wall and onto the icy, wet fields beyond. Aeglyss and Wain led them, with Shraeve a few paces behind, and Mordyn Jerain at their side. They had put a cord around the Chancellor’s neck, and led him liked a leashed dog.

Aeglyss stumbled often as he walked. It was not only that the ground here was treacherous, sucking mud beneath a thin skin of ice, more marsh than solid earth; his legs seemed unequal to the task of bearing him. Wain helped him with one hand, dragging Mordyn along with the other. The great muted company drew itself up in loose array and stood watching Temegrin and his band of warriors come cantering up with the sinking orange sun at their backs, flags and pennants flying, mud and water and shards of shattered ice churning beneath the hoofs of their horses. Mordyn could feel their approach in his legs, rumbling up from the ground, shaking his bones. They looked magnificent, these warriors from beyond the Vale of Stones.

Temegrin sprang down from his horse, his feet crunching through ice as he landed. His coarse-skinned face was flushed with anger, Mordyn could see. He tried to remember what he knew of this man. He had certainly had reports of him, but so sluggish and disjointed had his memory become that he could not dredge them up. There were eagle feathers fluttering at the top of his boots as he stamped up towards Wain and Aeglyss. Silly, Mordyn thought. This is no place for birds. Not even eagles.

“So it’s true,” Temegrin snarled at Wain. “This is Gryvan’s Chancellor?” He looked at Mordyn with avaricious loathing.

“It is,” Wain said.

The Eagle grinned. “I thought it impossible, when I was told. I had the man who first reported it beaten for spreading lies and rumour. But behold! The Shadowhand himself.”

A dozen of his warriors had dismounted and lined up behind him now. Mordyn stared at the ground.

This was humiliation more than he could bear, to be gloated over like a prized exhibit at some Tal Dyreen slave market of old.

“But when did you mean to send word to us, Wain?” he heard Temegrin asking, his voice seething with threat. “I had to come all the way from Kolglas to see with my own eyes, for we’ve had no word from you of this great boon that fate has granted our cause.”

She made no answer, and that angered the Eagle still more.

“How did he come here?” he shouted.

“Ask your questions of me,” Aeglyss said softly.

Mordyn risked a glance sideways. The halfbreed was standing limply, shrunken and fragile amongst these great warriors in their mail shirts. Mordyn could hardly bear to look at him, for dread burst in through his eyes at the very sight of that stooped frame. Temegrin perhaps could not yet see it, or sense it, for he ignored the
na’kyrim
. He reached out a huge gloved hand, stretching to take from Wain the cord that bound the Chancellor. She twitched it out of his grasp.

“Don’t try my patience, lady,” the Eagle snarled. “I command the High Thane’s army here. You’ll surrender this man to me.”

“He is not for you,” Aeglyss said.

“Silence! Silence! Don’t dare speak to me, halfbreed.”

Temegrin shook with rage. He swept his head back and forth, contemptuously surveying the strange throng assembled before him.

“Shraeve,” he shouted. “Is this what the ravens have come to, consorting with halfbreeds and wights and traitors? Where does the Battle stand in this?”

“I am here to watch, and to learn, and to witness fate’s unfolding of its intent.”

Temegrin threw his hands up in exasperation. “Madness! Wain, out of respect for your father and your brother, I give you this chance to come back to the straight and level path. Come away from this place.

Bring the Shadowhand with me to Kolglas, and you will be honoured amongst—”

“She will not go with you, Eagle,” Aeglyss interrupted.

At that, Temegrin finally turned his full, ferocious attention upon the
na’kyrim
. He took two long, fast strides to stand in front of him.

“I told you to hold your tongue. You are not fit to speak, or to breathe, in the company of the faithful. Of warriors. Of humans.”

Then, to Mordyn’s horror, Aeglyss turned his head and looked directly at him. And smiled. A sad smile, fit to break a man’s heart. The Chancellor was filled up with fear at the touch of that smile, taken by a sudden urge to cry out a warning to Temegrin, to fall to his knees and hide his face in his hands.

“You see,” whispered Aeglyss, and Mordyn did not know if the words were spoken out loud or only in him, for him. “You see. This is how it will always be. Hatred. Always.”

And it seemed to Mordyn that Aeglyss was growing, and spilling a shadow from his shoulders and from his long hair, and that the air was thickening, the light of the setting sun an orange mist that turned everything to its own sickly shade. And the great crowd of his followers was stirring, rising up and murmuring.

Temegrin lunged at Aeglyss, who made no attempt to avoid his grasp. Mordyn groaned, unable to breathe now, seeing everything with a terrible clarity. His ears were ringing.

The Eagle had Aeglyss by the throat, both hands like claws, and was bellowing into his face.

“What will you do, mongrel? What do you think you can do? You’re nothing! I could crush your neck, break it, with one hand. What are you going to do?”

And Aeglyss, inexplicably, was grinning at him: a mad, wet grin.

“We’re none of us more than sticks in skin, Eagle,” he hissed between taut lips. He raised his frail hands, set one on each of Temegrin’s forearms.

The Gyre warrior was a powerful man. Aeglyss was almost nothing, like the survivor of a famine. His form was all bone and angles. Yet, impossibly, it was the Eagle who released his grip, who found his arms forced back and held fast by those lean inhuman hands. Temegrin’s face was twisted by some sort of horror or pain. Aeglyss had hold of his wrists, and was laughing.

Temegrin’s warriors started forwards, swords leaping from their scabbards.

“Hold!” cried Aeglyss, like a storm. Mordyn cowered, swords fell from stunned hands. Mail-clad warriors fell to their knees and dug their hands into the mud.

“Did you see?” Aeglyss shouted. “You saw him lay his hands on me? He meant to kill me. Did you see?”

The crowd at his back was roaring, a deep howl of incoherent fury. But within that cacophony the
na’kyrim
’s voice was an iron thread.

“He asks fate to choose between us. So be it.”

Mordyn heard the crack of bones breaking, like wet sticks. Not just once, but twice, then again and again: a ripple of tiny, sharp, savage sounds like the fracturing of an ice sheet. But it was not ice that was breaking. It was Temegrin’s arms. They crackled. The Eagle screamed and fell to his knees. Aeglyss stepped forwards and stretched those shattered arms up, the hands at their extremities fluttering limply.

“I am chosen! I am chosen! I am chosen!” Aeglyss cried it out again and again. The sound fell upon the Eagle’s warriors like blows, clubbing them back and down. Mordyn fell to his hands and knees, retching dryly. Only Wain did not stir at the torrent of power rushing out from the
na’kyrim
. She watched, quite still, as he stared madly down at Temegrin’s tear-streaked face.

“You chose the wrong mongrel to make an enemy of this time, Eagle,” Aeglyss said.

The
na’kyrim
reached down and pulled a short knife from Temegrin’s belt. The warrior’s arms fell back to his sides, and though he wailed at the agony of it, he did not – could not – move. He knelt there, raging and sobbing, and Aeglyss pushed the knife deep into the side of his neck, twisting it.

Temegrin fell onto his side, dead weight. Aeglyss dropped the knife, raised his hand, with the Eagle’s blood thick upon it. He stumbled forwards, amongst the Gyre warriors. The frozen marsh splintered beneath his feet.

“It is done. It is done. There’s to be nothing now, not for any of us, but fire and blood and a rising-up until all the world lies beneath us. Come with me. I am its herald, and its bearer, and its sword. I will give you shelter.”

Mordyn watched them scramble out of the
na’kyrim
’s path, saw the horror in their faces. And felt what they felt, bursting in his own breast: the awe and the wonder and the dazzling light that fell from Aeglyss, the certainty that here was the centre of the world, the seed of everything that was to come. It was an invasion, a foreign intrusion that overwhelmed his own deeper repulsion and disgust; but it was irresistible.

Aeglyss fell, slapping down into the sodden soil.

Wain dropped Mordyn’s leash and ran to the
na’kyrim
’s side. She knelt there and cradled his head in her hands.

“It is done,” Mordyn heard him murmur. “Carry me back. My legs are gone. I am empty.”

Mordyn did not see Aeglyss again until the afternoon of the day after Temegrin’s death. He was left, all that time, alone in the decrepit chamber that had become his gaol cell. No one brought him any food or drink. Such thirst afflicted him that he licked moisture from the walls, until ice began to creep across the stonework.

He was frightened now. Not just for himself, but for everything he had left behind when he rode out of Vaymouth. It felt tremendously distant, that vast and bustling city, as if it belonged in a world wholly unconnected with the one that he now inhabited. His Palace of Red Stone would be shining in the sharp winter sun. Tara would be soaking in the hot baths she loved at this time of year. The streets would be aswarm with visitors to the winter markets. Gryvan oc Haig would be in his high Moon Palace, dreaming of glories yet to come.

All of it seemed unutterably warm, and safe, and unreachable, to the Chancellor in his cold imprisonment. And fragile, too. Everything he and Gryvan had built over the last few years, all the wealth and power and future conquests they had worked to secure, now struck Mordyn as flimsy, illusory.

Sitting here in Kan Avor, overshadowed by the baleful, ubiquitous presence of Aeglyss, the Chancellor could no longer believe in the permanence of any earthly, mortal power, or the solidity of any wall. There was now, he feared, nothing left for the world save a dark descent into madness and destruction. Nothing of his labours would survive, nothing of his loves. What he had seen and felt here in the Glas valley admitted of no other possibility, in his besieged mind.

Mordyn struggled ineffectually against the encroaching despair. It leached out of Kan Avor’s ruined fabric into his heart. When Wain nan Horin-Gyre came for him, with her Shield grim and silent about her, he made no complaint or resistance. He allowed them to take him out into the bitter air. There was a fine crystalline dust of snow across the city, glinting like innumerable minute fragments of glass. There were icicles hanging from the ruins. His breath steamed in front of him.

On the street, in between heaps of mud that had been cleared from the roadway, columns of men and women were forming up. Scores of cruel faces watched the Chancellor shambling past. There were Kyrinin, lean and pale, and horses, great dark beasts, with the warriors who had escorted Temegrin to his death astride them.

The Chancellor was taken up the spiral staircase and dragged into the columned hall from which he had watched the slaughter of the Lannis farmers in the street below. Aeglyss was there, slumped on the stone bench at the far end, and Shraeve the Inkallim, with her raven-black hair and dead eyes, and a single tall Kyrinin whose face was an intricate dance of blue curls and curves. The
na’kyrim
did not look up as Mordyn was brought in.

“Bring him here. To me,” he said, and his voice was feeble.

Two of Wain’s Shield took hold of Mordyn’s arms, swept him down the centre of the hall and cast him onto the wooden floor in front of Aeglyss. The halfbreed’s naked foot, Mordyn saw, was trembling, twitching in tiny spasms.

“Come here, Shadowhand,” Aeglyss hissed at him.

Mordyn wanted nothing more than to haul himself away, put as much space as he could between himself and this monstrosity. But a compulsion was upon him, and he slid himself forwards and rested his back against the stone bench, almost touching the
na’kyrim
’s legs.

“Send your warriors away, Wain,” Aeglyss said, at last lifting his head a little, staring out from under his creased and gaunt brow. “You do not need your Shield here.”