Bloodheir (29 page)

“What is it that you want me to hear, then?” asked Orisian. The desire to leave this small, oppressive room with its decay-tinged air was growing strong within him. Rothe was awaiting him outside; fretting, no doubt, at being refused permission to accompany his charge into this chamber.

“Amongst those fragments Tyn has spoken that make any sense, much concerns the Anain. It accords with what some of us have suspected. They are stirring, Thane. They rouse themselves, and turn their attention outward, as they have not done for centuries.”

She watched Orisian intently, searching for some reaction; all of them did. Rather than look back into those penetrating eyes, Orisian stared at Tyn’s pallid face.

“Bannain said as much,” he murmured.

“The Anain answer to no law but their own,” Cerys said. “The rest of us – Huanin, Kyrinin, Saolin,
na’kyrim
– we are like bubbles of air that rise out the Shared, spin about on its surface. The Anain, they are the currents that move it; they are its ebb and flow. If they wake, if they . . . exert themselves, we will all be as powerless as the meekest lamb.”

“I understand that. As I can do nothing to prevent it, it seems pointless to fret over it.”

“Then you do not fully understand,” Cerys said gravely. Orisian thought there was perhaps a trace of disappointment in her voice, but it was so faint that he could not be sure. “The attention of the Anain has been drawn by what happened to Aeglyss, by what he has become. We are all but certain of that. His power, his pain and anger, foul the Shared. That must be to the Anain as it would be to us if the air we breathe, the water we drink, the blood in our veins, were all corrupted. To know their intent or purposes is beyond us, but we fear they rise in order to oppose and destroy Aeglyss.”

“Fear?” Orisian echoed. “He’s as much to blame for the death of my father as anyone. He imprisoned my sister. Killed Inurian, we think. I do not fear his destruction.”

“You should fear the means of it, if that means is the Anain,” Cerys snapped. Orisian blinked in surprise at the sudden sharpness of her tone, and the way her words rang in his ears. There was a shivering down his spine, and a tingling in his scalp. For a moment, he was aware of nothing but the Elect’s cold, hard face looming large in his vision. She was not human, he reminded himself; and not all
na’kyrim
were as restrained and gentle in their capacities as Inurian had been. He almost took a step backwards, giving in to the thrill of fear that jolted his heart, but he held himself firm.

“Last time the Anain rose,” Cerys continued, more levelly, “they turned back armies, drowned a city beneath a sea of trees. They care nothing for our concerns, Thane, and we know next to nothing of theirs. They might raise another Deep Rove over your whole Glas valley. They might slaughter every
na’kyrim
in the world, all in the name of just one whose life offends them.”

Orisian drew a deep breath down into his chest. His heartbeat slowed a little.

“You’re afraid,” he said quietly, facing Cerys. “Yvane told me as much.”

He saw the Elect’s jaw tighten, and fear fluttered again in his stomach, but he pressed on. “She said you

– and her, and all
na’kyrim
– are afraid of Aeglyss, and of what he might do. There’s more, though, isn’t there? You’re afraid of what might happen because of him, too. It might be the Anain, it might be Gryvan oc Haig, when he finds out there’s a powerful
na’kyrim
who has sided with the Black Road.”

No one replied for what seemed like a long time. Cerys had taken hold of the chain she wore around her neck. She stared at Orisian for a moment, then closed her eyes.

“Yvane ever thought in such ruts,” someone said – Orisian was not sure who, though the voice was male.

Cerys smiled briefly, sadly.

“Will you come with me, Thane? Being in this room gives me a cruel headache. Perhaps fresher air is what we need.”

He followed her willingly, glad to leave the tight confines of the Dreamer’s chamber. Rothe’s relief when he saw them emerge was evident. The big shieldman fell in close behind Orisian, who gave him a reassuring smile. The Elect made no protest at Rothe’s presence.

He expected that Cerys would lead them back down, through the huge keep and into the passages and chambers cut into the rock of the mountain like the tracks of maggots in an apple. Instead, they climbed.

A stone spiral of steps carried them up and disgorged them, unexpectedly, onto the keep’s roof.

The wind blasted away all memory of the airless chamber where Tyn lay. It tugged at Orisian’s hair and jacket, snapped the Elect’s long, heavy dress about her legs. Orisian closed one eye and twisted his head away from the gale. Clouds were surging along overhead, layer upon layer of them flowing across the sky, a turbulent flood of vapours and mists. The convolutions and complexities of Highfast tumbled away beneath them: walls and buildings and battlements spilling down from the keep to crowd the peak.

Cerys, though, led them around the low crenellations to the keep’s eastern edge. Holding her hair back from her face, she glanced at Orisian and then gestured out into the void. He leaned cautiously out and looked down. The sheer wall towered over a deep and wild gorge. The cliff faces beneath were precipitous; impregnable. Further out, ranks of jagged, craggy summits jostled to fill the horizon.

Pennants of cloud, or perhaps powdery snow, were streaming out from the highest of them: fierce winter flags. Orisian could see not a single tree, no sign of life at all, save one. A great flock of crows was jousting with the wind beneath him. The black birds flashed to and fro, spinning and sweeping in the gale that roared down the gorge. They were like dark flecks of ash flung into the air by a furious fire. Some of them appeared to be disappearing into – and others emerging from – openings in the cliff far below.

Rothe, at Orisian’s side, looked over the battlements, but shrank back almost at once. He gently pulled his Thane back, too.

“Inurian had a crow,” Orisian said – loudly, against the wind – to Cerys.

The Elect nodded. “Many of us do, here. It’s a tradition, all the way back to Lorryn.” It seemed to Orisian that she did not need to shout as he did. Her voice reached him despite the raging air all about them. She looked out, let her gaze swing over the mountains and up to the seething clouds.

“This an old place, Thane; an ancient place, ringed about by ancient fears. It’s a fitting home for
na’kyrim
, don’t you think?” When Orisian said nothing, she looked at him. “I think you are a little disappointed with what you have found here.”

It did not sound to Orisian like a question, so he did not reply. The Elect seemed neither angry nor offended.

“Any who choose to live in a place as hard as this must have something to fear, you might think; something driving them, nipping at their heels. And not just here. Where else can you find my kind?

Dyrkyrnon, where dry land’s rarer than a wise Thane; Koldihrve, out on the edge of everything. We are afraid. Of course we are.
Na’kyrim
know fear as well as we know our own shadows. Come.”

She led them into the lee of a turret at the corner of the roof. It took the edge off the cold, though the wind still howled, scouring the stone of the keep.

“In Inurian,” Cerys said, “you knew the best of us. He was master of his fear. Or rather, his curiosity mastered his fear, and him. He was, in the end, more interested in what lay beyond these walls than whatever safety might be found within. We who remain sequestered here are not the same as he was.

You might think that a failing, but we cannot be other than we are. Other than the world has made us.”

“I would not ask you to be,” Orisian cried into the gale.

“Whether malice moves her tongue or not, Yvane is right. We are all afraid of Aeglyss, and of what his presence in the world might presage. If men decide that
na’kyrim
are once again a danger, there are too few of us, and we are too feeble, to do anything other than die meekly or flee. If the Anain decide they mislike the course of events, there’s no one who could obstruct their will, no matter how strange or heartless its exercising. And if Aeglyss can master the possibilities of what he is becoming, rather than being destroyed by them, we might all be wading through the blood of the slaughtered before long. Do you know what is truly different about him, Thane? Do you understand why we – and you – should find him worthy of our fear?”

Orisian waited for her to give him the answer.

“Because he is an old thing,” the Elect shouted above the wind’s roar. “Something none of us have seen in our lifetimes. He is a
na’kyrim
so potent, so immersed in the Shared, that he, perhaps alone amongst us all, need not be afraid. Think! What kind of monstrosity must he be, for the Anain themselves to take notice of him? He may not have realised it himself yet, may not have understood what he is, but all of us here can feel it, in our hearts and in our minds. He is the first of our kind in more than three hundred years who might make himself the father of fear, rather than its child.”

She held out a hand towards him. He hesitated for only the briefest of moments, then reached out and grasped it. The Elect’s eyes narrowed a fraction; her lips tightened. Orisian felt a faint and distant flutter of warmth run across the palm of his hand.

“You feel that?” Cerys asked him.

“Something.”

She released him. “You – your race – might be deaf and blind to the Shared, but that does not mean you are beyond its reach. If you were, I could not make you feel even that faint touch. There will be many, not just
na’kyrim
, whose sleep is disturbed by bad dreams now. There will be many whose minds become tinged with an anger not entirely their own.

“No creature whose head holds thoughts is truly separate from the Shared. Some believe it is the very stuff of which your mind is made. That is the country over which Aeglyss casts his shadow. That is where the Anain are rising.” She sighed. “It is not only us poor
na’kyrim
who have things to fear in these times, Thane. Aeglyss is poisoning the well from which we all draw our thoughts, our desires. We
na’kyrim
are just the first to catch the taste of it.”

On that wind-battered rooftop, with dark clouds rushing overhead and the cries of crows echoing in the bleak gorge, Orisian had a momentary sense of the world as a savagely hostile place. Cerys spoke of things he barely understood, yet for that moment he did not doubt that she was right. Terrible darkness could descend. It was possible, in a world such as this, for horror to be piled upon horror; for even the suffering he had already witnessed to be exceeded. He looked away from the
na’kyrim
’s earnest face.

Rothe was standing close by, watching in silence. Orisian shivered.

“Can you tell me how to oppose him, then?” he asked Cerys.

“Only in part,” the Elect said. “Perhaps by warning you of the dangers, we can arm you against them in some small way. And there is Eshenna. Talk with her. She believes . . . I cannot say whether she is right or not, but she believes there is something that might be done; chinks in Aeglyss’s armour.”

Orisian nodded.

“You may find her more like the Inurian you remember,” Cerys observed as she led him back towards the stairwell. “She is not yet beset by fear, nor bereft of curiosity about the world. But remember that she is young, by our reckoning. Impetuous. And she remembers Aeglyss. Her thinking is coloured by that.”

Highfast sank into another winter twilight as if it was going home, returning to the stuff of which it was made. The gale subsided, clouds congregated and breathed a fine mist across the fortress. Darkness mustered around the turrets and battlements, drifted down the flanks of the towers, pooled in its deep courtyards. The last few crows called out as they descended invisibly out of the night sky towards their roost.

Orisian, Rothe and Yvane walked in silence through the labyrinth of sombre passageways. A torch-bearer lit their way, chasing the shadows ahead of them. In their wake, the dark swept back in, tumbling always at Orisian’s heels.

Their guide pushed open a door for them and stood to one side.

“I’ll wait out here, to light your way back,” he said.

Within, they found Eshenna alone in a long, narrow dormitory. She sat on one of the beds, hands resting in her lap. In the tinted light of a single oil lamp, she might almost pass for human, Orisian thought. She stood when he entered, nodded. She looked nervous. He gestured for her to sit down again. He and Yvane sat on the bed opposite her. Rothe waited near to the door.

Orisian did not know whether bringing Yvane had been wise, but he wanted her help in navigating these waters. There was too much here that was unfamiliar and unknown. Yvane was no replacement for Inurian, but she was the closest thing he had to an interpreter.

“You know Aeglyss?” he asked Eshenna, and she nodded gravely.

“I wake every morning with the taste of anger in my mouth, the sound of hatred ringing in my ears. If I close my eyes now, I can feel his bile seeping into my mind. I know Aeglyss. I know this is him.”

“Tell me who he is,” Orisian said.

“He was a savage child.” Eshenna spoke with feeling. “Not in deeds, so much, but in words, and in instincts. Spiteful. He suffered a great deal before he reached Dyrkyrnon. Many of us did, but most overcame those memories, or learned to live with them. He . . . treasured them, almost. He could not separate himself from what had happened to him, what had happened to his parents. The past weighed heavily on him.

“He told us that his father was a warrior of the Black Road, and that the White Owls killed him for loving a Kyrinin woman. His mother died, frozen or starved, on the northern edge of the marshes. She had fled from the clan with Aeglyss when they decided to kill him too. So he told the story, at least.”

“But he didn’t stay in Dyrkyrnon,” Orisian said.

“He did for some years, but he was cast out. He inflicted many small cruelties, and some not so small. A girl . . .” Eshenna winced at the memory. “One girl in particular, Aeglyss desired. She was cold to him, as many of us were, but her coldness pained him in a different way. Much sharper. He would not – could not, I suppose – accept it, or ignore it. It ate away at him. One day he was found, alone in the marsh, crouching by a pool, staring down into the water. He was watching the girl. She was in there, under the surface, on her back. Mouth open. Drowning, without struggling.