Brian Ruckley - Fall of Thanes

There were voices outside in the yard. Footsteps on the paving stones, a muttered conversation, and then a rapping at the door that shook it on its old hinges.

“The Black Road, sire,” Torcaill shouted. “They’re on the road south of here, close enough to reach us tomorrow from the sound of it. Hundreds of them, maybe thousands.”

“All right,” called Orisian. Then, more softly: “I’m coming.”

He cast a last worried glance at Eshenna and met her tear-filled eyes.

“I have to go,” he said.

“It’s true, what I said before,” she breathed.

“What?”

“Someone has to kill him.”

Kanin hated the sight of Hommen. This miserable and meek little town was where word of Wain’s death had first reached him. It was here that he had watched Shraeve win leadership of the Battle in combat, and save Aeglyss’ life in doing so. It was here that his life and his faith had been brought to ruin. And perhaps all the world with them. On his journey north, he had seen plentiful signs of the dereliction into which a once-noble enterprise was slipping.

He and his company had skirted the edge of the vast army sprawled around the landward walls of Kolkyre. Like ants teeming about a corpse too thick-skinned for their jaws to pierce, the forces of the Black Road had spread themselves across great swathes of farmland. A stench, of burning and death and animals, hung over the fields and camps. Riding through the fringes of this disorderly host, Kanin saw bodies lying bloated by the side of the track; men and women howling with glee as they mobbed together to beat a Tarbain tribesman; a warrior kneeling in the mud, weeping uncontrollably, hands resting limp and upturned on his thighs.

Beyond Kolkyre, they made camp for the night a short way from the road, and in the freezing darkness a band of looters, reckless or starving or mad, tried to steal their horses. They killed two of Kanin’s guards before his warriors could be mustered to drive them off. His Shield took one alive, though only because Kanin intervened to preserve the man’s life for a time. He questioned the prisoner himself, but got little sense from him. The man was of the Gaven-Gyre Blood, a carpenter from Whale Harbour. He would not, or could not, give his name, or that of any captain he followed. Nor could he explain how the faith and duty that led him to leave his home and march to battle had been corrupted into banditry and murder. Kanin cursed him, and struck him, and walked away. He heard Igris behead the carpenter as he stooped back into his tent.

As they followed the road along the bleak shoreline towards Hommen, they passed through a broken, almost deserted, land. Many of the farmsteads and hamlets bore the black scars of fires. Doors hung loose or had been torn away completely. Outside an isolated cottage, a dead child, a boy, was impaled on a stake. Frost had laid a crisp white veil over his face. Crows had taken his eyes and opened his nose and shredded his lips.

Waves lapped along a coast littered with broken-backed boats that had been thrown ashore after coming free of their moorings. There were sea-softened corpses that lay pale and fat on the pebbles. A pack of dogs was tearing at one such piece of the war’s debris, surrounded by a patient audience of gulls and crows. A bone-thin grey hound tensed and growled when Kanin reined in his horse to watch.

There were few of the living left in this ruined land. A handful of sick Gyre warriors who had taken refuge to recover or die in a mill looked on with rheumy eyes as Kanin passed by. A solitary woman stumbled along beside his horse for a way, until she tripped and fell to her hands and knees in the snow. She said not a word, but laughed feverishly, desperately. In a field, a dozen or more enslaved villagers scrabbled in the snow and soil for half-rotted vegetables that should have been harvested long ago, watched over by grim-faced men who stared suspiciously at Kanin’s company.

And Kyrinin. Three times Kanin saw woodwights. They roamed the higher ground inland from the coast, falling away behind the shelter of ridge lines almost as soon as he caught sight of them. Had they been closer, he might have led his warriors in pursuit of them, hunted them. When his father had agreed to the alliance between his Blood and the White Owls what felt like a lifetime ago, it had been meant to last only as long as did the Kyrinin’s usefulness. That they still lingered, with impunity, in the lands the Black Road had reconquered was an insult. A corruption of what should have been. A sign of how thoroughly Aeglyss had twisted everything.

Amidst all this emptiness, Hommen itself was an island of life. As he drew near, Kanin could see the smoke of scores of cooking fires. There were countless tents amongst the houses, ranks of tethered horses being fed and watered, crowds of men and women from every Blood. And to Kanin it was still more hateful, and reeked still more pungently of death, than the desolation that surrounded it.

He left Igris to find shelter and food for his band of warriors and walked down through the crowds to the crude wooden quay. The masses of men and women who thronged Hommen’s streets barely intruded upon his awareness. He recognised no one. He heard the babble of voices as the empty noise of birds. He felt no bonds of faith or purpose or intent with these people.

He stood on the planks of the quay, close to the spot he had been standing when the rumour of Wain’s death first found him. He looked west, across the grey, dead expanse of the estuary towards the limitless sea. And so bright was the sinking sun that lay white and cold on the horizon, so piercing its light, that he had to close his eyes. He heard seagulls overhead, laughing.

“What happened to my sister, Shraeve? You were there, in Kan Avor, when she died. You must know what happened.”

“She was fortunate enough to leave this world. That is what happened. She will wake in a better one, and you will see her there, Thane.”

Shraeve and Kanin stood outside the little hall that lay beside the main road through Hommen. It was an island of comparative calm, the space in front of the hall’s doors, for Shraeve’s ravens had cleared it. Twenty of them stood in a wide half-circle, keeping back any who sought to draw near without permission. Onlookers were clustered beyond that silent cordon, eager to catch sight of the great and the powerful who were gathering here.

“Not good enough,” Kanin hissed. He took hold of the Inkallim’s upper arm as she walked away from him. It was like grasping rock. He turned her to face him, and she met him with cold contempt.

“I am Banner-captain of the Battle Inkall, Thane,” Shraeve said softly. She glanced at his restraining hand, and he let it fall away from her; not through fear, or respect, but because his purposes would not be served by fighting with her today. Shraeve would have to die as well as Aeglyss, he realised with new clarity, but not now. Not yet.

“I want to know what happened to my sister,” he said. “There is no shame in such a desire.”

“Shame? No, perhaps not. But it serves no purpose. Mourning is but self-pity. You know it as well as I do.”

Once he had known it. Now, it sounded like a hollow platitude, vindictively crafted by the lips of an enemy.

“Let the dead go, Thane,” Shraeve said. “We will join them soon enough, in the better world.”

Men and women were filing past them into the hall. Leaders from the Gyre and Gaven and Fane Bloods; Lore Inkallim, led by the shuffling, hunched, black-lipped figure of Goedellin; Cannek, who studiously avoided Kanin’s gaze as he settled his two hounds down to await his return from the council.

“It’s time,” Shraeve said, and turned away from Kanin.