Brian Ruckley - Bloodheir

A message had come from Nyve that morning. The First of the Battle had received word from Fiallic, reporting the death of Temegrin the Eagle, in circumstances that remained unclear. It was news both encouraging and disquieting. Ragnor oc Gyre had conspired with the enemies of the creed to protect his own earthly power, and the Eagle was his mouthpiece, hampering every effort to pursue the conflict with the Haig Bloods to its necessary conclusion. His death was a sign that fate might, on this occasion, side with the Inkallim. Yet Wain nan Horin-Gyre had died, too. That was a sore loss. And the Thane of Thanes would not take the death of his Third Captain lightly. Theor anticipated difficulties in convincing Ragnor that the Children of the Hundred had no part in the deed.

The First set aside his half-eaten meal. His appetite was meagre these days. He reclined on his bed, staring up at the ceiling. According to Nyve, there was talk, far away beyond the Stone Vale, that the Horin Blood’s tame na’kyrim had had a hand in Temegrin’s death. That was a disconcerting thought. The very existence of such halfbreeds was an aspect of the hubris that had provoked the Gods into departure. Five races had been created, distinct and self-contained. Na’kyrim symbolised the inability of Huanin and Kyrinin to accept the boundaries laid down by the Gods. To have one playing a role in matters of such import to the creed was… unexpected. Puzzling.

Theor rolled onto his side and reached down to the carved box on the floor. He removed a fragment of seerstem, slipped it into his mouth and lay back. He worked it gently between his teeth, feeling its black juices thicken his saliva. A cold tingling stole across his tongue and his cheeks, leaving numbness in its wake. It was a familiar sensation, and one that in years gone by he had always greeted with vague pleasure. Now, though, he felt an undeniable sense of trepidation. His seerstem dreams had been less than comforting of late. It was something all his schooling had not prepared him for. There was, to his knowledge, no precedent in the Lore’s history for the powerful and unsettling visions that now came in seerstem’s wake.

He was not alone in his experiences. Every one of the few senior Lore Inkallim permitted the use of the herb had been suffering similar disturbance of their meditation. There was much inconclusive debate about what it signified. Theor was himself uncertain, though he had his suspicions. Might it not be possible that they were caught up in the turbulence caused by a fateful convergence of great events? Might this even be the result of thousands upon thousands of lives being channelled into a single, unified path that would carry them all to the Kall itself, and to the ultimate realisation of the Black Road’s entire purpose? He hardly dared to hope, and had taken care not to voice such thoughts.

Numbing tendrils spread across his skin, creeping over his scalp towards the back of his skull. He could feel his very thoughts slowing and retreating, leaving space behind them for other things to enter his mind. He closed his eyes.

Much could be gained from seerstem: a sense of the intricate immensity of life and mind, spread out across the world, the scale of the Gods’ creation; a humbling awareness of the insignificance of any individual within that pattern. Sometimes it was even possible to glimpse fate’s roots, the chains of events and deeds stretching back from the present into the distant past. Such had been the case until recently, at least. Theor did not expect what awaited him now to be quite so soothing.

He felt as if he was sinking into the mattress, as if he himself was a dwindling spark of light, fading. Anger flickered across the surface of his mind: not anger to be felt, but anger as a wind that blew upon him, anger that he tasted and heard. It was a rage without cause and without object, like a fire that burned without any fuel. After it came the sickening sense of a tumbling, plummeting fall. He was dimly aware that his hands were clutching the bed sheet on which his distant body lay.

And then he was adrift in a dark and howling waste; suspended in a limitless void, with titanic shapes moving far beneath him, rolling as they hunted through the emptiness. Then flashes: he was one amongst thousands, running along a hard road; he was spun through treetops, carried on a vast and monstrous consciousness; he was alone in darkness, where the very fabric of the air was made of loneliness.

There was the figure of a man, an indistinct outline that spread and broadened until it filled his field of view and shut out everything else. That figure’s head turned, great planes of darkness sliding over one another. Eyes opened — eyes that were first grey then black then nothing, voids — and their gaze was a writhing, piercing thing that burned its way in through Theor’s own eyes and his mouth and his nose and filled him and scoured away the last shreds of his own awareness.

He heard a voice, deep in his bones: “Who are you? This is not your place. You do not belong here.”

And he woke, crying out. Drenched in cold sweat. Shaking.

Theor struggled upright in his bed. As he fumbled to pour water from the beaker at his bedside, it was all he could do not to vomit. It had been worse, this time. Much worse. He wanted to believe, with all his heart, that these things which the seerstem was showing him were the signs of the world twisting itself into a new shape; that they presaged the delivery of all humankind out of its long solitude. And he did feel a powerful sense of great change, an anticipation as if the world was poised upon the brink of a wholly new season, unlike anything it had seen before. But if that was so, why did he feel so unclean, so run through with sickness and corruption? Why was it fear that lay like a stone in the pit of his stomach, not hope?

From his vantage point atop a low hillock at the eastern end of the Haig lines, Taim Narran watched arrows climb and then descend like rain upon the ranks of the Black Road army. They were too distant for him to see any bodies falling. The host of the Gyre Bloods was a great grey lake into which the arrows fell and disappeared. He knew what it would be like down there, amongst the torrential shafts. He could imagine the sound of arrowheads thudding into shields and the earth and flesh.

Since first light, the two armies had faced one another, each strung out across the road that led down towards Kolkyre. The great city was only an hour or two’s march south of them. If Aewult failed today, the Kilkry Blood would be besieged by the next dawn. The Haig Bloodheir had more than ten thousand men arrayed to block the approach to Kolkyre, his losses at Glasbridge and since more than made good by the fresh companies that had come up from the south. It was as great a host as any the True Bloods had fielded since Gryvan came to power. And it was matched — exceeded, Taim’s experienced eye suggested — by the forces of the Black Road.

The northerners were coming forwards now, along their whole line. The grassy expanse between the two armies gradually disappeared beneath the slow and ominous advance. The air was full of arrows, their flight constant, their effect negligible.

Taim was behind a triple line of Haig warriors. His hands were bound, his horse’s reins securely held by one of his half-dozen guards. The scabbard at his side remained empty. He was only a spectator, brought here to witness, not to fight. Taim feared what he might witness, though. He mistrusted this day, and what it might bring. There were a hundred or more Taral-Haig riders close behind him, scattered across the top of the little hill, and he could hear them talking. They sounded almost eager for the bloodshed to begin. Most of them had young voices; callow.