Winterbirth (36 page)

'When I was... six? Eight? One of the other children - a girl — ah, what was her name? I can't remember. She was hounding me, tormenting me. Kyrinin are no more gentle with the likes of you and me than Huanin are. That day it was too much. I told her to take out the skinning knife she had on her belt. I told her... she put it through her hand. It was the first time I really understood anything about the Shared, understood why they were afraid of me.

'They shut me away. They must have wanted to kill me then, I suppose, but my mother came. She cut through the side of the tent and carried me off. We went into the forest, just me and her together. Do you know what that means, for one of the people to leave the
vo'an,
to go alone out into the winter?'

He gave a sudden, harsh laugh, his bowed head jerking up and cracking against the stone wall. 'Of course you know what it means. You know exactly what I'm talking about, don't you? Anyway, it was a bad winter, not a time to be alone in deep Anlane. She kept me alive, though, somehow. She was a strong woman. Ah, and beautiful. As beautiful as any Kyrinin you've ever seen.

'I remember walking through snowdrifts as high as my waist, and some so high she had to carry me on her back. I remember hiding, for days at a time. We left White Owl lands, crossed into Snake and then beyond, and always we were hiding. Can you imagine? I still feel the cold, sometimes, even when there's a fire burning. I can't get warm. It was a long time, always moving, always starving, always alone.'

His hands shifted. Inurian saw them twitching.

'There was a storm eventually, worse than anything before,' said Aeglyss. 'One morning, she just stayed asleep. She would not wake no matter how I shook her. I lay down beside her, and folded her arms around me. I knew ... I could feel... that if I could find the way to use it, the Shared could keep her alive.

It was like seeing a light just out reach, and every time I reached for it, it went away. I could tell that there was warmth in the Shared, but I had no idea how to draw it out. No one had taught me. So she died, and I waited for the end to come.

'They came instead. She had come far enough, you see. She had... lasted long enough. They found me beside her and took me into the marshes.'

Again, Aeglyss broke off. He looked up at Inurian for the first time. There was not enough moonlight for Inurian to make out his features clearly. Still, there was a pallid, haunted look about the man's face that chilled him.

'That is where I first heard your name, you know,' said Aeglyss. 'Those fools sitting around in their tents and huts; said you understood more about the Shared than most, even though it was not strong in you. I thought nothing of it, then. And yet all those years later, I found myself in Hakkan talking about Kolglas, and I remembered you. Ha! Almost enough to make you believe in the Black Road , do you think?

'Here we are. You and I, the knowledge and the power. The two halves of something that could be quite new. That is how it ought to be. You must be my guide through the deep places of the Shared. It's there in me: this... vastness, that I don't know how to reach, how to use. Do you understand?'

Inurian could sense the other man's need, his longing. Something in Aeglyss was breaking, or perhaps had broken long ago.

'I cannot help you,' said Inurian. 'I told you that before.'

'Cannot?' cried Aeglyss, surging to his feet. His voice lashed out. Inurian felt his skin crawling with the tread of a thousand imagined insects. He might die now, he thought. Now, in this cell with no one to see, he might easily die.

Aeglyss leaned against the wall. One hand hung at his side. The other was pressed to the stone, splayed like a huge, rigid spider. When he spoke again, his voice was quite level. 'You can see what is inside men.'

'I can sometimes . . . know what is unspoken,' said Inurian carefully.

'What do you see in me?' asked Aeglyss.

Inurian closed his eyes for a moment. He lay quite still beneath Aeglyss' intense gaze. He felt the hard, cold floor of the cell against his side. He focused upon it, shutting out the blackness that strove to force its way into his mind.

Aeglyss laughed bitterly. 'You are afraid. Everyone is afraid of me. They always have been. The White Owls wanted to kill me; Dyrkyrnon cast me out. Even these Black Road bitches, after I have brought them to the edge of greatness. Whatever I do for them, they will not let me be one of them. I know that.'

Knowing was not the same as believing in the heart, Inurian reflected. Whatever Aeglyss might say, the hope - the need — for acceptance was so powerful in him it leaked out, giving the lie to his words even as he spoke them. He still craved the approval of the Horin-Gyre leaders. His desire to belong somewhere, anywhere, was painfully obvious to Inurian.

'The fear is too much for them,' Aeglyss continued. 'All afraid, but now they do not even know what they fear. I will not be put aside any more. I will not! You, you of all people, will not turn away from me.' He shivered and clasped his arms across his chest. He was swaying. 'Who has been the greatest of our kind?

Dorthyn who hunted the Whreinin out of the south? Minon the Torturer? Orlane Kingbinder?'

'All were powerful in their ways,' Inurian murmured. 'Their power added little happiness to the world, but in any case you overestimate your strength if you mean to compare it to theirs.'

'You could teach me their ways,' said Aeglyss, then, no longer addressing Inurian, 'To bind a King...' He shook himself. 'I think ... I think I cannot continue like this. I think I will lose my mind. Or die, perhaps.

Will you help me, Inurian?'

When Inurian did not reply, Aeglyss turned as if to go. Inurian lifted himself up on one arm.

'I would help you if I could, Aeglyss,' he said.

Aeglyss stopped. He stood there, his head bowed, his hands digging into his shoulders.

'Not just for your sake,' continued Inurian, 'but because of what you might do. It is too late, though.

Your heart, your intent — they're too... damaged. I have known little love in my life, Aeglyss. All our kind learn what it is to be feared, to be turned away. I am sorry for what you have suffered, but the pain need not lead to whatever place it is you have found yourself in. It need not have brought you to this.'

'Help me, then,' said Aeglyss urgently. 'Do not refuse me. Please, you are the only one who could understand. I will give you whatever you want.'

'Is that truly all you have seen in the Shared? Power? A way to bend others to your will?'

'You talk of power as if it is an evil thing. I see a strength that is given to me, but not to others. Only a fool would turn aside from such a boon. What else would you have me see?'

'That all is one. If you use the Shared to harm others, you harm yourself.'

'All is one. All is one! No. I don't think so. All is hate, fear, pain. If others seek to harm me — as they will, as they have always done — would you have me lie still and unprotesting beneath their blows?'

'Then I am sorry. I cannot teach you to see what I see; I cannot heal your wounds. You would not use anything I taught you well.'

Inurian stretched himself out on the floor and shut his eyes. He could feel Aeglyss standing there for a little while, feel the weight of his presence.

'I will wait for you to change your mind, Inurian,' Aeglyss breathed. 'But not for long. Not long.'

Then he left.

Inurian did not sleep for a long time. He lay awake, staring at the wall of his cell. For some reason, out of all that had been said, it was the names Aeglyss had spoken that haunted him the most: Dorthyn, Minon, and Orlane Kingbinder, most fearful of them all. Great powers they had been in their time; true shapers, who moulded the course of the world.

The
na'kyrim
now were but an echo of what they were when the world was younger, and it had always seemed to Inurian a good thing that it was so. The might of the great
na'kyrim
of old bred fear and loathing in those, Huanin and Kyrinin alike, who could never hope to understand it. Worse, it had corrupted the
na'kyrim
themselves, made them drunk with their potency. Many had become the eyes of bloody storms. Such was the company Aeglyss sought to count himself in, and Inurian could almost smell the truth of it. This marred young
na'kyrim,
burning with anger and pain, would cast a long shadow if he ever came by the power he craved. Inurian felt the awful horrors of history crowding in, clamouring to be unleashed once more upon the world.

He knew what it was to be shunned by all, shut out from both of the worlds from which he sprang. All the peoples of the world were outcasts — all craving other certainties to replace those that had departed with the Gods - but none were so bereft as the
na'kyrim,
with no places, no kind, no children to belong to. Yet in Kennet nan Lannis-Haig Inurian had found a man who could look upon a
na'kyrim
and see an equal behind the grey eyes that returned his gaze. He had found a whole family he could love in place of the one he would never have: Kennet and Lairis, whose devotion to one another had warmed all the cold halls of Kolglas; Fariel, wonderful Fariel, who had carried his gifts with a grace that belied his youth; Anyara, who could not hide from Inurian's inner eye the things she concealed so well from others. And Orisian. The boy who grew up in his brother's shadow, only to have his heart broken when it was taken away and he was exposed to the harsh, ferocious light. He had loved every one of them, but Orisian most of all.

And he had failed them, in the end. Lairis and Fariel had been carried off to The Grave, Kennet cut down, going too gladly to his death. Perhaps Orisian still lived - he would surely have known if that one had died - but if he did he was beyond any help Inurian could give for the time being. There was only Anyara now.

Somehow, if he was allowed the life to do it, he must find a way to shield her.

Outside the window of his cell there was the sound of flapping wings. He rose and looked up. He could not reach the window and saw nothing but the night sky. There was the soft, rasping call of a crow.

Inurian smiled sadly and lay down again.

His rest was fitful. The slabs on which he lay were unyielding and the thin blanket could not keep out the cold. What finally roused him was less immediate, less tangible: a calling in his dreams, as if some distant voice was summoning him. He pressed his hands into his eyes as he lay there in the semi-darkness. The feeble first light of dawn coming in through the high window illuminated the cell. There was no sound save the skittering of a rat's claws somewhere out of sight, and the tapping of half-hearted rain on the roof.

He rolled on to one side and sat up. Looking around, his eyes still bleary with sleep, he saw nothing at first. Then the faintest distortion of the air on the far side of the cell caught his attention.

He watched as a shape formed itself out of nothing. It was too tenuous, and the cell too gloomy, for any detail to be visible, but he could tell that it was a female figure that now wavered before him. The rain outside was worsening, its drumming on the roof growing louder.

'I had thought you might be dead,' said Inurian.

'I doubt you thought of me at all,' came the almost vanishingly soft reply, as if from the walls themselves.

Inurian grunted and rubbed at his shoulders.

'And I had not troubled myself to think of you in some time,' continued the female voice, 'until I stumbled across you now.'

'Well, I'm not sorry to see you, Yvane.'

There was the thinnest thread of laughter in the cell for a moment, and then a pause. 'That's kinder than I would have expected.'

Inurian waved a hand irritably, though he knew his visitor could not see him. Not in the way that eyes saw, at least.

'This is not the time to renew old disagreements,' he said. 'You have come looking here because you felt something in the Shared.'

'I know you can't be the source, unless you've changed a good deal since I saw you last.' The question had more than a hint of confrontation in its tone.

'Yvane, Yvane, please. I will not argue with you.'

There was silence, and then the flat reply: 'Very well.'

'There is another here. He is what you have felt. His name is Aeglyss. He is young, very raw, but the Shared runs strong in him. Perhaps more strongly than it has in anyone for years.'

'Does it indeed,' said Yvane. The scepticism in her voice was clear.

'Yes,' insisted Inurian. 'We were arguing. His anger disturbs the Shared. He's filled with hate, with resentment. It's crowded everything else out of him. You know my gifts, and I tell you truly what he is.'

'What's he doing in Kolglas?'

'I'm not in Kolglas,' said Inurian wearily. 'I'm in Anduran. The Black Road has me.'

'The Black Road ? Is Anduran taken?'

'It is close.'

'Hmph. It never ends, does it? Your precious Huanin live for the chance to wade around in one another's blood. How do you come to be in the middle of it? What about that miserable old chiefling who kept you under his roof?'

'Ah, Yvane,' sighed Inurian. 'Please.'

He bowed his head, shorn of all strength. His visitor's image shimmered as if touched by a breeze, though the air was still.

'Are you a prisoner, then?' she asked.

'Yes. Yvane, if I do not come out of this alive, Highfast should know of Aeglyss. Perhaps even Dyrkyrnon: I think he may have lived there for a time. He said they cast him out. If he continues down the path he's following, it might take Highfast or Dyrkyrnon to rein him in.'

There was no reply for a time, then: 'They long for these bloodlettings. Gyre, Haig, Lannis, all of them.

From the crib they dream of vengeance for some crime or other committed in the distant past. Father kills father, and so child must kill child. It never ends. Leave them to their cruel games. Nobody will thank
na'kyrim
for interfering.'

'Aeglyss has already interfered,' said Inurian, gazing at the floor. 'The Gyre Bloods might think he is their puppet, but I doubt they understand what they're dealing with.'