Bloodheir (46 page)

None was the kind of role that delivered wealth or fame.

Even so, as Captain of Highfast he had found a degree of contentment. Nothing of any great consequence ever happened here amidst the Peaks. His responsibilities were simple and therefore within his capabilities: ensuring the safety of the
na’kyrim
who dwelled in the castle’s roots, keeping the road out to the west clear of thieves, and maintaining order amongst the few inhabitants of the nearby mountains and forests. Those inhabitants were self-reliant, solitary folk who made almost no demands upon his attention. The sense of having at last found a task to which he was suited had engendered a certain peace in Herraic’s heart.

That peace had been shattered by recent events. He seldom had cause to spend much time with Cerys and the other
na’kyrim
, but their agitated and despondent state had communicated itself to him over the last two or three weeks. Then the Lannis-Haig Thane had arrived, causing Herraic to fret over everything from the dilapidated appearance of the fortifications to the dismal near-dereliction of the stables in which the Thane’s horse had to be quartered. And shortly after, Herraic found himself playing host to the Shadowhand himself, and in a gravely, perhaps mortally wounded condition at that. The infamous Chancellor would have died by now, but for the care of the
na’kyrim
healer. He still might.

Finally – the torch to the pyre of Herraic’s dwindling ease – there had been the mysterious business with the
na’kyrim
risen from his bed after years of dreaming. Herraic had not fully understood the explanation of that, though it had all sounded to him unpleasantly like the kind of thing that went on in olden days, when halfbreeds wielded terrible power.

Now, when he had rashly started to think that things could not get any worse, might even be showing some signs of improvement, he smelled smoke. It was not the familiar oily stink of lamps, nor the homely scent of charcoal from kitchens or brazier. This was a drier, stronger smell. It reminded him of a long ago day when wildfires had torn through the grasslands around Skeil Anchor one parched summer. He knew at once that whatever was burning should not be. He left his quiet chambers and went out into the deep courtyard before the main keep, to discover a world abandoned by reason, plunged into derangement.

Distraught voices and smoke coiled up out of Highfast’s guts. People were running. The crows had burst in black profusion from the roost in the cliff face above the gorge and plumed and tumbled upwards like a thousand leaves caught on a hot wind. They spun screaming about the man-made pinnacles of Highfast.

Herraic saw
na’kyrim
darting from passageways, across doorways; he saw men of his own meagre garrison running to and fro, and those who had come here with the Shadowhand, gathering and shouting, and glaring about in anger and alarm.

The smoke carried with it fear beyond anything it should naturally have induced: fear that seeped in through the nose and eyes and ears and twisted itself around Herraic’s mind, dizzying and nauseating him.

His heart raced, as if meaning to tear itself apart. He found images of blood and violence rushing through his head, invading him. When he tried to shout out commands, an inarticulate, barely human wail escaped his throat instead.

He heard the deep, rumbling, grating sound of Highfast’s main gate opening, and turned in confusion.

The inner gate already stood open, as it always did during daylight. Herraic could see down the long tunnel that ran out to the bridge and the road and the mountains. There were figures struggling with one another, down there at the end of the passage. They seemed impossibly distant. Herraic had to narrow his eyes to hold back the blurring waves of distortion that threatened to sweep across his vision. They were his men, fighting with each other there at the outer gate: one trying to push it closed once more, the other trying to prevent him. Herraic was dumbfounded.

Someone brushed past him, almost knocking him over.

“It’s the library,” they were shouting. “The halfbreeds have gone mad. They’re killing each other.”

Herraic’s hands were shaking now. Savage emotions – terror, fury – that were not his own had him in their grip. He was watching, in disbelieving shock, his own mind, his life and everything he had ever thought to be true, all coming apart.

More figures running now, up from the gate, through the passageway, like rats rushing up out of the earth towards the light, towards him. Woodwights. Herraic heard himself laughing at the sheer insanity of all this. There were arrows in the air, ringing off Highfast’s ancient stone. Men were dying. He saw it, but no longer understood it. The Captain of Highfast fled, weeping as he ran.

Herraic hid in a long-abandoned storeroom until the cacophony, both outside and within his skull, subsided. He could not tell how long it took, for he was alone and lost and besieged. As the noises –

terrible noises, death cries, screams – fell away, so the relentless, disorientating waves of fear receded.

His breath came more easily. His mind fell back into a shape he could recognise. And as it did so, he understood that whatever had happened, it had not been a natural thing, of the natural world. It had been some strange intrusion of the inhuman, incorporeal domain of the
na’kyrim
into his own. He went, still trembling, to discover what kind of disaster had befallen the castle he had been meant to hold. He held his sword out in front of him, knowing that it was far too late for such a gesture, but clinging to that small token of defiance, and the illusory capability it suggested.

There were still fires burning somewhere. He could smell them, and the sky above Highfast was stained with their black-brown breath. He found bodies. In the courtyard, in passageways, in the stables and the kitchens; human and Kyrinin, and
na’kyrim
too. Some of his men had made a stand in the stables, it seemed, for their corpses were piled there, with horses dead alongside them. There were dead woodwights, stretched out on the cobbles of the yard, and in doorways leading off it. Amongst them, the corpse of the
na’kyrim
whom Herraic had seen in Highfast’s kitchens. He had looked dead even then.

Now, he had assuredly passed into the Sleeping Dark. Cerys had always called him the Dreamer, but he would be dreaming no more dreams. To judge by the contortions of his limbs, the dried blood on his face and his arms, and his fixed expression of horror, his death had been cruel.

Herraic wandered amongst all this in a daze. He thought at first that he might be the only one left alive, but one by one other survivors came out from their hiding places. Herraic saw in the eyes of every one of them the same stunned vacancy he felt himself. They all looked as though they were only just waking, after a punishing dream.

An old
na’kyrim
, a little man, was amongst them. He came blinking into the watery light of the courtyard. Herraic, collecting weapons from the bodies of his men, saw the halfbreed shuffle to the centre of the courtyard and stand staring down at the body of the Dreamer. The old man had a piece of wood in his hands, which he kept turning and grasping. It took Herraic a moment or two to recognise him. He could not remember his name, but this was one of those who had come to Highfast with the Lannis Thane, only to remain here when Orisian moved on.

“He’s dead,” Herraic murmured to the halfbreed. That piece of wood in his hands was a half-finished carving, he could see now. The outlines of tiny figures had been cut, but they remained vague and ill-defined, as if they had been frozen in the act of emerging from the wood.

The
na’kyrim
was shaking his head, and worrying away at the carving with his trembling hands.

“No. Not him. Not dead. Sad to say. Oh, sad to say. He was only visiting. Only passing through.”

Herraic frowned, not understanding. He was distracted by someone shouting his name from one of the windows of the keep. He looked up, squinting against a brief flash of the sun through a crack in the clouds.

“Captain!” he heard. “The Shadowhand’s gone. They took him.”

Power loves not the light of day, nor the attention of curious eyes. In darkness it thrives most.

Examined too closely, it withers. A lord may send his army hither and thither, but the true testing
of his power is in those places where his army is not. Has he sunk the roots of his power deep
enough into the earth of his lands? Has he sent its long fingers far enough through the backstreets
and alleys, into the drinking dens and the lending-houses, so that he may gather them unto himself
and hold them firm without a single swordsman?

When a man may whisper in a close ear, and that whisper be repeated far away and many moons
later, then he has power. When a man may speak against another, and that other be brought to
ruin and rue by nothing more than those words, then he has power. And if a man can act without
the appearance of action, and bring about great change without the appearance of desiring it,
then he has power.

Ask me not who the most powerful has been, for I know not his name, and nor do you. The
greatest power will have been cultivated in the shadows, and the further into darkness and
secrecy it was sunk, the mightier will have been its exercising.

from
The Huanin Lords

 
by
an unknown hand, writing amidst chaos at the beginning of the Third Age,

 
translated from the western form of Old Aygll

A kind of fever had taken hold of Kolkyre. The ancient city was convulsed by anger, riddled with fearful rumour. The ferment was such that Anyara began to think that normal conversation was no longer possible. Every exchange she heard seemed to be conducted either in whispers or in the anguished, strident tones of outrage or grief. The death of Lheanor oc Kilkry-Haig had shaken his city out of balance.

The dead Thane was burned in the gardens that ringed the Tower of Thrones. The fire raged, turning pyre and corpse into a great column of flame, noise, smoke and heat, killing the grass around and beneath. The gardens would be scarred, at least until this winter was done with. As would the people of Kolkyre, Anyara thought, as she watched the faces of those come to witness the conflagration: distraught, stunned, vacant.

Roaric was there, arm about Ilessa, his now-widowed mother. Ilessa was weeping silently. The new Thane of the Kilkry Blood looked like a man barely in control of his emotions. His eyes were locked on the heart of the flames, as if there was nothing in his world save that fire, and whatever burned within him.

Cailla the kitchen maid had been put into an unmarked grave outside the city walls. On the very night of her burial, so Anyara had heard, someone had dug up and dismembered the old woman’s body. Roaric had spoken of Cailla only once within Anyara’s earshot.

“I would have her alive if it was possible,” he had said, “so that I could kill her again.”

Now the Thane was silent, like everyone else gathered about the crackling pyre. Lagair Haldyn was there, his expression unreadable, a knot of Haig warriors around him and his wife. Aewult had left a hundred or more men in the city, under the Steward’s command; just enough to keep resentment simmering amongst Kolkyre’s inhabitants.

A rising, gusting wind whipped the flames back and forth. Waves of heat came and went across Anyara’s face. She grieved for Lheanor. She had liked him. But the thoughts that smudged her vision with unshed tears were of her own dead father, Kennet, and of Croesan her uncle, and all the others of her family who had died. No one was left now save Orisian, and he had gone from her, out into an unsafe world.

Coinach her shieldman moved a little at her side, breaking her mournful reverie. He turned his face away from a blast of hot wind, and in doing so caught her eye for a moment. He gave her a faint, sympathetic smile.

The flames were dwindling, past the peak of their intensity. The centre of the pyre fell in, belching out a swarm of sparks. The wind took them and tumbled them away. They flared and died amongst the apple trees. Horns were blown. Their mournful voices drowned out the roar of the fire for a time, echoing off the smooth stone of the Tower. It was that sound, filling the whole world, that made Anyara weep at last.

It carried every loss, every grief, within it, and it was, briefly, too much to bear.

She saw, as she brushed a tear from her cheek, Lagair the Steward moving away. He and his wife and their accompanying warriors turned and shuffled through the crowd. Roaric was watching them go. The Thane’s gaze was so sharp with loathing that Anyara feared, then, for the future.

On the day after Lheanor’s burning, Anyara went to visit Jaen Narran in her chambers in the town barracks. Coinach accompanied her, as always. She would be surprised now if one day she turned around and did not find him there, silent, attentive and observant.

If Anyara did not know better, she might have thought Taim’s wife flustered by her arrival. The woman rushed around, clearing unnecessary space on the table, searching for her own cloak. They were to go together to visit the few dozen Lannis folk who still lived in squalor in Kolkyre’s northern parts. The plan had been agreed the day before, so Anyara knew it was not surprise that made Jaen fuss so. Rather, she imagined, it was the anxiety that affected everyone in the city, like an affliction leaping from one warm body to the next through touch or breath or glance. And for Jaen, as for Anyara, its edge could only be sharpened by the knowledge that someone precious to her was still facing immeasurable danger.

“I brought as much as I could from the Tower kitchens,” Anyara said. Coinach, who had carried the sack of ham and bread and apples for her, set it down on the table with a thump.