Bloodheir by Brian Ruckley Page B

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    They came howling and boiling out from the side streets: Tarbain tribesmen, covered in bone and stone talismans. They swept up to the knot of Lannis-Haig warriors, flowed around it and embraced it like the flooding sea taking hold of a rocky outcrop. Iavin hacked and slashed. The clatter of weapons and stamping of feet, cries of horror and fury, all swelled and filled his ears. He felt blows against his arms and chest, flickers of pain carried away on the anger that seethed in him. Then on his side: a smack and a sudden numbness. He saw the blade darting back, saw a blur of his own blood. Darkness came rushing up, reached for him and flung its veil across his eyes.
    Iavin still heard the terrible cacophony as he fell, but in a moment it too dissolved into the dark. His was only one amongst the many deaths on the day Tanwrye, the bastion so long believed to be impregnable, fell.
    All through the Antyryn Hyr , the Thousand Tree-clad Valleys, the White Owls were moving.
    Messengers had gone out from the great vo’an at the heart of the forest, racing along the secret ways that Kyrinin feet had trodden for hundreds of years. From every one of the clan’s winter camps, they had summoned a spear a’an to come. So the White Owls ran beneath the leafless canopy of Anlane and a cloud-thick sky. They came silent and swift to answer the Voice’s call.
    Five lifetimes ago, thousands of the White Owl had fought and died in the War of the Tainted. Only the Heron, Bull and Horse had fielded greater companies against the seething masses of humankind. The Huanin, who lived in a waking dream of their own splendour, might imagine that such strength was gone for ever. If so, they were misled by their own pride-fattened ignorance. The warband that had crossed into the Car Criagar to hunt Fox had been but a fraction of the clan’s spears. The vast deeps of the Thousand Tree-Clad Valleys held numbers unguessed by the Huanin. Many hundreds of warriors were on the move as the winter deepened and the first full snows of the season began to fall.
    Rumours ran with the spear a’ans , twisting and thickening, feeding off one another. There was a na’kyrim , it was said, child of a long-dead White Owl mother. A man who had been on the clan’s Breaking Stone, the great boulder the Walking God had left behind, and – unthinkably, impossibly – had not died. Instead, the whisperers said, he had been changed. It was because of him, and because of what he had become, that the spears were now gathering.
    The ground in front of the Voice’s lodge was hard and bare, sculpted by the touch of thousands of feet over many years. Song staffs, entwined with skulls and feathers and ivy, stood there. The people gathered before them, facing the lodge. The woven anhyne looked on from one side. The smoke of the ever-burning torkyr , the constant flame of the clan, drifted from behind the lodge.
    Not all had gathered outside the Voice’s lodge, but many did. They came because they wanted to see and hear this na’kyrim who had stirred up such tumult; some because they thought this man must die before his presence caused more chaos, others because the scent of his power filled their hearts and minds with a febrile hope.
    The na’kyrim lifted his head as he emerged from the lodge, casting his half-human eyes over the crowd.
    At the touch of that gaze, every man, woman and child felt a prickling of their skin, a drying in their throat. The na’kyrim was frail and drained, still ravaged by his long hours on the Breaking Stone, yet his presence was potent; arresting. It reached inside them, like an invisible hand.
    He advanced slowly, carefully. The Voice came behind him. She walked with her head down.
    Aeglyss took a great, deep breath as if flushing out his lungs with the clean air of the vo’an , the cleansing smoke of the torkyr . One of the kakyrin , the keepers of bones and stories and memories, stepped forwards from amongst the throng. He was an old