Winterbirth (69 page)

Igris nodded curtly.

Kanin dismounted and led his horse gently to a patch of lush grass. They had run out of the oats they had brought as feed the day before, just as they had almost exhausted their own food supplies. Whatever happened in the day now begun, Koldihrve was going to have to provide everything they needed to return over the Car Criagar. And what would they find when they got back to Anduran, Kanin wondered. He spared himself only that one moment to think of Wain. He would see her soon enough.

His horse tore at the grass. The rain was getting heavier; great fat drops pattered down upon them.

Kanin shivered. He preferred the clean, dry snow of his homeland to this dank kind of winter.

'Lord,' someone shouted. 'Wights.'

Kanin ducked around behind his horse and followed the pointing arm of the warrior.

There were Kyrinin moving, rushing out from a woodland and on to the flat fields and bogs of the valley.

Dozens, then scores. They spilled out in a great wave that flowed over the rushes and through the scrub towards the great River Dihrve. Towards its mouth, and Koldihrve.

'Is it White Owls, or Fox?' Kanin demanded.

No one replied. At this distance, they could not tell.

'Woodwights!' cried Kanin in frustration. Even now, when he had thought himself rid of them, the petty games that Aeglyss and his savages had set in motion were plaguing him.

'It must be the White Owls,' suggested Igris, peering through the sheets of rain now crashing down.

'They're making for that Fox camp by the river mouth.'

Kanin swung up into the saddle. Rain pelted his head and back. Everyone was rushing, filling the air with cries and the clatter of weapons. He did not hear it. He turned his horse in the direction of Koldihrve.

The future was there, waiting for him, and he could only advance into it. His sword was naked in his hand.

'The slaughterhouse calls us,' he shouted. 'We ride!'

BEHIND THE TENT where the Voice of the White Owls dwelled, in a stone-lined pit beneath a roof of oak beams that had been turned hard as rock by time and smoke and heat, the
torkyr
burned. Through day and night, snow and wind, the clan fire would burn all winter long, tended by the chosen guardians who fed it and watched over it. When spring came, and the Voice had chanted over the flames, and the people began to disperse, each
a'an
would take away a single burning brand, so that in all the campfires of their summer wanderings through the furthest reaches of Anlane they carried with them a fraction of the clan's bright soul.

It was to the Voice's tent that the band of warriors brought Aeglyss the
na'kyrim,
bound and gagged by thongs of leather. They tied him to a song staff rising from the ground outside the Voice's tent, and sat cross-legged to wait. They waited for many hours. The sun walked across the sky. Clouds, the scattered raiment of the Walking God, came and went. The
na'kyrim
moaned and bled from his wrists and from the corners of his mouth where the gag had cut his skin. At length a small child, her hair dyed berry-red and holes pierced in her cheeks, came out from the tent and beckoned one of the warriors to come inside. After an hour he re-emerged and gave a slow nod. The
na'kyrim
was untied and ungagged and brought into the presence of the Voice.

She was an ageing woman, with skin creased and folded by the years and hair the colour of the moon on water. There were others within - the wise, the
a'an
chiefs of last summer, the singers and chanters and buriers of the dead and the
kakyrin
with their necklaces of bone — but it was the Voice alone who spoke with the
na'kyrim.

They talked for a long time, the old woman and the halfbreed, and of many things. They talked of the clan's history and of its struggles against the Huanin in the War of the Tainted and the centuries since.

They talked of the evil done by those who ruled in the city in the valley, their axes and fire that cleared the trees from White Owl lands, and their herds of cattle that reached ever further into Anlane; of the
na'kyrim'
s life, his flight from the White Owl as a child and eventual return, bearing gifts and promises from the cold men of the north. Through it all, the judgement was being formed, built out of the threads of the past that led to the present. Only at the end did they talk of alliances forged in necessity, and of hopes and expectations betrayed.

The Voice asked him, softly, why the lord whose army had passed through the White Owl's forest now turned away his friends and forgot them. Why the promises of friendship the
na'kyrim
had made on that lord's behalf were now so much dust. The
na'kyrim
had no answer to that, but spoke instead in the evil way he had. He spoke, as the White Owls now understood that he had so often before, with a tongue that made truth out of lies, that corrupted the mind's strength and turned judgements inside out.

Had there not been so many of them there in the Voice's tent, they might have been deceived, but they had prepared themselves for the dangers of this
na'kyrim.
Some cried out and sang to drown his poisonous words; others belaboured him with sticks.

He begged and pleaded but there had, in the end, to be a reckoning. However long his absence, he had been one of the people once, and he was theirs to do with as they would. The Voice gave her judgement and he was dragged out of her presence.

The
na'kyrim
struggled and shouted as they bore him away from the
vo'an,
and spoke in a way that threatened to lay wreaths of mist around the thoughts of the warriors. They beat him with the hafts of spears until he was still and silent. Then they carried him up above the valley. Up and up they climbed, until the trees grew wind-bent and the grass beneath their feet became coarse and rough. They climbed into the afternoon, until they pierced the roof of Anlane and came out upon the moors that formed a borderland between forest and sky. And still they went on amongst the rocky ridges and ravines. In time they began to descend again, and at last, upon a promontory of rock that was closely fringed by trees, they came to the Breaking Stone.

The great boulder — the height of two men - stood alone, resting where the Walking God had left it.

The Breaking Stone was patterned by lichens older than the clan, older than the Kyrinin. Over and amongst their innumerable pale green and grey shades lay darker stains. Black streaks that would never now be washed away, they scarred the great rock, running down like the tracks of midnight tears from two neat, smooth-sided sockets high upon its face.

The warriors laid the
na'kyrim
on the ground and stripped his clothes from his body. In that muted evening light his skin looked fragile, ashen. He stirred, but they held him firm. They gagged him with a stone wrapped in a strip of cloth. One of them brought out two sharpened, hardened shafts of willow, each the length of an arm and thicker than a man's thumb. The
na'kyrim
writhed. The Kyrinin worked quickly lest he should attempt some trick upon them using his secret skills. They raised his arms and held them tightly as the shafts, twisted and turned to force their way, were driven through his wrists. The
na'kyrim
screamed around his gag and fell into unconsciousness.

Two warriors climbed atop the Breaking Stone and, using ropes of plaited grass tied around his chest, raised him up its face. They held him there while a third reached down and manipulated the willow stakes until they slotted into the sockets in the stone. They slid in, the stone welcoming them as it had dozens of their like before, and the
na'kyrim
hung there, crucified upon the Breaking Stone.

HUNCHING DOWN AGAINST the rain, Orisian and the others crossed the long boardwalk across the mouth of the River Dihrve. Weed and barnacles coated the walkway's supports below the waterline; rot was at work on the parts above. It felt safe enough — the Dihrve was a sluggish, unthreatening thing here at its mouth - but Orisian wondered how much of a life it had left to it.

They had woken to dark skies and miserable rain that gathered strength with every minute. When Orisian said that he was going to find Ess'yr and Varryn, he had half-hoped he could go alone; instead

Yvane, Anyara and Rothe all accompanied him. He did not feel he could refuse them.

As they made their way along the shore to the river crossing, he had asked Yvane if an unannounced visit would cause a problem. The
na'kyrim
dismissed the idea.

'They're not so stiff about such things here,' she said. 'There'd not be so many
na'kyrim
around if they were.'

'Ten, Hammarn said,' Orisian remembered. 'We haven't see any. Are they hiding?'

'It can't have escaped your notice that everyone keeps themselves to themselves around here. They're all on edge now: everybody's nervous, smells trouble on the wind.'

She was right about the ease of entering the
vo'an.
No one tried to stop them as they came off the rickety bridge and walked amongst the tents. It was not, in fact, as disconcerting a place to enter as Koldihrve had been the day before. There was none of the boot-sucking mud that greeted a visitor to the human settlement - rush matting was spread in broad pathways — and none of the dark glares or muttered asides. It felt safer than the human town, at least to Orisian. The feeling did not last for long.

There was a crowd gathered in the centre of the
vo'an,
in a space where the bare earth had been trodden over countless years into the consistency of rock. As they approached the back of the crowd Yvane nudged Orisian with her elbow and pointed discreetly at a pole planted a few paces away. It was bedecked with horns, strings of threaded teeth and animal skulls. The bones looked fresh and unweathered.

'That's bad,' Yvane whispered. 'A war pole. Means they're expecting deaths.'

The Kyrinin crowd stirred gently at their arrival. There was a foul smell, Orisian realised, foul enough to make him almost gag. The crowd thinned a little before them; it let them see what stood at its centre.

A wooden frame was there, of the sort used to suspend a carcass while it was butchered. Upon the frame was bound a naked, lifeless Kyrinin. His head hung forwards and his white hair had fallen across his face like a shroud. From shoulder to hip, long thin strips of skin had been peeled back, wound on sticks. The flaying had left livid, gory bands of raw flesh exposed. He had been disembowelled, so that his entrails spilled forth to pile upon the ground beneath him. His groin was a bloody mess. An ordurous stench hung suffocatingly in the air and Orisian felt bile in his mouth as his stomach twisted itself. He heard Anyara's faint moan of disgust even as he turned away. Three young Fox children were standing close by. They watched him with bland curiosity. One had a bow and quiver - little more than toys - in his tiny, fine hands.

Then Ess'yr was coming around the edge of the crowd. Her brother was a little behind her.

'You should go,' said Ess'yr.

'We're leaving,' Orisian told her. 'On the ship. I wanted to say goodbye.'

'We will come to you.'

'It'll have to be soon. We'll be gone today.' He felt a sharp pang of apprehension. He could not leave her behind without talking to her. To him, if not to her, it was a parting that needed to be marked. He saw that Varryn was regarding him with unreadable eyes.

'Soon,' Ess'yr said, and he heard a promise in her gentle voice. 'But not now.'

'We'd better go,' Rothe said quietly. 'I don't think this is a good place to be now.'

Reluctantly, Orisian agreed. Ess'yr was already turning away, and he was suddenly afraid that he might not see those beautiful features again. He might have tried to call her back, but did not.

Yvane had been talking quietly with a Fox woman, and now rejoined them, her face troubled.

'Let's go,' she said.

The four of them walked together out of the camp and over the bridge into Koldihrve. The rain was soaking. It churned up the surface of the river.

'They really are savages,' Anyara murmured.

'They are,' agreed Rothe, and then to Orisian's faint surprise added softly, 'but I've seen worse things done by humans.'

'They caught that White Owl not far from here,' Yvane said as they stepped back on to the human side of the river. 'From the sound of it, there's a lot more where he came from. Very close. There's going to be a good deal of blood spilled.'

'Today?' Rothe asked.

'Probably. They say there're scores of White Owls. And your friends from Horin-Gyre too.'

'Wait, wait,' hissed Orisian, slowing suddenly.

The others looked questioningly at him, and he nodded down the street. Four or five men were standing in the sheeting rain. They were indistinct figures, shapeless cloaks hiding any detail, but nothing about them suggested goodwill. Yvane squinted at them, flicking rainwater from her brow.

'I thought you said you didn't upset Tomas yesterday,' she said.

'I didn't,' Orisian muttered. 'We parted on the best terms I could manage.'

He was casting about for another path to take. Every instinct told him this was something more than the simple observation Tomas had kept them under since they arrived in Koldihrve. Already, the men were moving, coming towards them. He could see weapons: staffs and cudgels.

'I'll deal with them,' Rothe growled. There was something close to relish in his voice.

'No,' Orisian said. 'No fighting unless we have no choice. We'll go around them, get out to the ship.'

Inside, the thought was ringing in his head that he should have called Ess'yr back when she turned away from him. But it was too late for that.

'Down here,' he said and led them into a side street. 'Yvane, can you find the way to Hammarn's house?'

'I should think so.' She brushed past him to take the lead.

The alley narrowed, so that they had to trot along in single file. They passed the backs of small houses and shacks. There were no doors, and the few windows were shuttered. Water was spouting from the roofs, drenching them. The ground was slick mud, constantly treacherous, and littered with broken bits of wood, empty barrels and discarded pots.