She just folded her arms. "If you've got a point to make, Domas, make it."
The rider captain made a hissing sound through his teeth, shook his head and looked askance at her. "I can't believe that you're going to go along with this. The man - hah, boy more like - is incompetent - "
"He did find Shaleng."
"That means nothing," Domas retorted. "Falin's no rider." Keren shook her head. "You think Byrnak doesn't know that?"
Domas met her gaze. "I think that Byrnak has lost his grip." He came a step closer. "Come on, Keren, I joined just a few months after you and we've both seen what happened to him this past year."
"And it's time for a change, eh? Time for a new chief," she said disdainfully. "Is that what this little chat is all about, Domas? Your problem is that you really don't know Byrnak at all. He is far, far more dangerous than you think. Anyone going against him will finish up with their blood in the earth, take my word for it."
Domas laughed unpleasantly. "How loyal, even when he's got that boy sharing his bed instead of you."
Furious, she lashed out and caught him across the mouth with the back of her bare hand. He staggered back, sword half-drawn.
"You're a fool, Domas," she said then walked away.
Back at the camp, she sat near the fire, gnawing on a strip of knapsack beef while staring down at the tent by the stream, now flanked by two guards. There was a low light within it, probably a candle set to keep insects from bothering any open wounds. As she sat, Domas' words came back to her, words that had so accurately echoed her own darkest thoughts. Yes, Byrnak had become a monster, but only she knew of the terrible dreams that plagued him, and the ghastly things he saw behind the wall of sleep. It had to be that which drove him to do what he did.
Suddenly she was walking towards the torture tent, moved by an awful need to see what had been done. One of the guards tried to move between her and the tent flap but when she looked him coldly in the eye he thought better of it. Pushing the flap aside, she ducked inside and came to a frozen halt, regarding with horror the sight which met her eyes.
An array of pointed and edged implements hung on a board next to a high table on which the priest's still form lay. The table's wood looked almost black in the weak glow of a tallow candle suspended in a holder at the far end of the tent. The priest's head, legs, arms and naked torso were held down with cracked leather straps, and she could detect the faint smell of scorched flesh under the candle reek.
It was the monstrous spectacle of the left arm that held her unwilling gaze. From the elbow down, the skin had been flayed and the muscles ribboned in careful, narrow strips, leaving the bones visible. Next to the arm sat two small, bronze cups, their insides smeared with traces of dark fluid. Keren shuddered - the agony must have been unimaginable. Then she noticed what resembled artery and veins protruding from the ravaged flesh near the elbow. Their ends had been closed off with blobs of a grey substance which she saw had been used to seal other gashed, exposed areas.
Blood. They had been drinking the priest's blood.
Keren straightened, scarcely able to comprehend the hideous scene before her, but full of a cold and stirring rage. Then she heard a groan and nearly gasped as the priest's turned his head to stare at her. For a moment she thought he was about to speak, but the eyes wandered unseeing, pupils dilated, eyelids half-shut. She leaned closer to sniff the prisoner's weak exhalations and caught the faint, sickly sweetness of chainberry, a powerful reverie drug.
She drew a shaky breath, wiped a hand across her face and tried to think. Death and carnage was part of the fury of battle or single combat, both of which she had experienced many times. But these lacerations were so precise and so deliberate that she could only think of the person responsible with utter loathing. The sheer vileness of it almost stripped her down to a kind of moral innocence she had thought long gone.
Her life here with Byrnak and his warband was over, irrevocably finished. She toyed with the possibility of killing him as he lay naked with his boy lover, but quickly discarded the notion. All that she really had to do was decide what kind of goodbye gift to leave for him.
She smiled hard and humorlessly, then bent and began to loosen the straps that bound the young priest to the blood-stained table.
* * *
Byrnak's dream began as it always did, with ice cold chains.
Heavy links of iron bound him to a wide, curved rock while dense, freezing fog swirled around him. His quickened breathing chilled his chest, making him cough. Faint sounds surrounded him, murmurs growing in volume and intensity, incantations in an unknown tongue. He bellowed curses and threats then tried to laugh, but the fog swallowed the sound even as his voice died from the fear in his throat.
Fear. This was the only time Byrnak ever felt it, here in sleep's realm. When the nightmares first began nearly two years ago, he had thought it was just some shred of craven fear of capture crawling out to disrupt the demesne of his dreams. But as the months passed the visions became ever more detailed and elaborate and took on echoes of meaning he could not understand but which aroused in him a wild, unreasoning terror.
There were metallic clinks and ticks as he moved to a sitting position, and he knew that he was wearing the suit of grey and silver battle armour. Spikes and fluted ridges adorned the weighty plates and his gauntlets seemed to resemble a pair of spiny sea creatures. He tried to stand but as usual the chains allowed only enough slack to sit or kneel. Grinding his teeth he shifted onto his knees, hunched down and waiting.
Soon the chanting voices sank back to a rhythmic whisper and the fog began to thin. Sometimes images and faces emerged from the pale wall and for a moment he thought he saw a tall, old man standing with hands upraised. But the image faded to be replaced by a rocky, sun-scoured desert stretching away to a shimmering horizon.
The three riders were already there, galloping straight towards him across the desolation. In some past nightmares they had appeared in the far-off distance, in others close enough to distinguish the grimacing mask-helms they wore and the dead white eyes of their horses. It was then that Byrnak's fear always strove to unleash its full potency: he had succumbed only once and was reduced to a shivering, shrieking state, lying curled up on the flat rock, arms covering his head. Since when he swore that he would never again buckle and break, and fought the terror of this recurring delirium.
He was fighting it now as the riders drew nearer, cloaks flapping and streaming, their horses' hooves striking up clouds of dust and grit. Fists clenched, the chains pulled tight, he knelt facing the desert. The voices still muttered on and on from the dense wall of fog at his back and he thought he could hear a note of expectation creep into the incantation. Shouts emerged from the murmuring chorus as the three riders came ever closer. Byrnak's mouth was dry and he was almost quivering with the effort of staying upright and staring ahead. The riders were drawing close enough for him to see the salient details of their own armour, how each had a different hue, gold, crimson and purple.
On they came, the rumble of hooves growing louder, the rattling of saddle harnesses becoming distinct. Any moment, he thought to himself, I shall awake beside Falin and I will reach across him for the winecup that sits on the travel chest and drain its sweet dregs...
The riders slowed their horses to a trot, to a walk, and brought them to a halt not half a dozen paces from him. All three grotesque mask-helms regarded him in grave silence, as were their mounts, he noticed. The horses stood stock still, tails limp, ears displaying not a twitch, while staring at him with marble-white eyes.
"Brother," said one of the riders.
"Our forgetful brother," said another.
"Our lost brother," said the third with disdain.
Drawing a shuddering breath, Byrnak forced calmness into his voice and through gritted teeth spoke.
"Forgive me, lords, but I have no brothers nor any sisters."
"Nor any parents," said the first, "save the sabotage of enemies and the carelessness of priests."
With the last word the rider dug his heels into his horse's flanks. The horse uttered a ghastly groan, let it's mouth hung open, and said:
"Forgive us, we beg. Day and night we strive to unshatter the Spirit of the World and remake what was and will be. Forgive us."
"Never," said the rider. "The moment of my birth is seared into my mind, always there to be recalled, and I will never forgive you!" The mask came up to face Byrnak again. "Do you know what womb delivered me into this world? - it was one of those holy witch-horses from Jefren. The mess and the stench never leaves me."
"I was born beneath some saint's carved monument," said the next. "It toppled and broke when I came up out of the ground."
The third was silent a moment. "A tree," he said. "I was born inside an ancient Kingsgold tree. I had to burn my way out."
One of the other two laughed. "And we'll never know just where that tree was, will we?"
The third ignored him, levelling a gauntleted finger at Byrnak. "We have seen the pit of your birth, the frozen pool with its broken shrine. Do you remember?"
Byrnak was utterly still, suddenly empty of fear and trembling as deep, brittle memories struggled to surface. A dark mountainside came back to him, before that a narrow ravine, then a glade of enclosing trees. The memory was forming strongly now. He could almost envision stumbling, no, crawling across an ice pool towards the bank. And before that? - the bristling, lung-scouring ecstasy of a first breath, the claws of cold air on his naked skin. And still further back to a journey through void, and beyond that...
A surge of terror wrenched him back from a gravid blackness of entombed knowledge. He looked up to see the three riders watching him, tasted blood in his mouth and snarled.
"Come down, you gutterworms! Come down and free me and I'll eat the faces off you!"
The riders glanced at each other. "He will not accept it," said one, bluntly.
"Then he must be told," said the second. "The time fast approaches."
"He's an ignorant savage," said the first. "How can this be one of us?"
"Why should he not be?" said the third. "The Black Priest is in his own way just as primitive. We are all fragments of the Spirit of the World, and He was as mighty in his anger as in his intellect." He prodded the head of his horse. "Is this not so?"
"When the Weaving of Souls was broken," the horse said in an iron voice that set Byrnak's teeth on edge, "the five vessels were already brimfull of His essence. Strength holds to strength so each of the five would embody an aspect of the Lord of Twilight. He lives, he resides in the House of the Dead no more, yet the Realm Between entraps him and - "
"Enough!" snapped the third rider who then regarded Byrnak. "Do you understand what has been said here?"
"Your ravings mean nothing to me," Byrnak said hoarsely. "I must be mad or dreaming or both." But that knowledge was still there, buried like a seed of poison beneath his thoughts.
"Then observe."
Tendrils of the enclosing mist rose up and poured into his eyes. He gasped in fear but choked back the shriek that threatened to loose itself from his throat. Then images emerged from the white, a vast fleet of ships of every size and shape, their decks crowded, their sails daubed in savage symbols, their flags little more than ragged sheets fluttering madly in the stiff wind that drove the fleet forward. The view changed. Byrnak saw a huge army make its way inland, burning and pillaging as it went, then he saw that same army swarm across a flat plain towards bright, serried ranks of armour.
Byrnak watched with a mixture of anger and unease. The terror had faded but the ominous chorus had returned, voices chanting sonorous syllables with undertones of anticipation. The cold sank deeper into his bones and he felt his heart thudding as the battle scene receded, falling away beneath him, then shimmered and rippled. Hands came into view on either side of a bowl of liquid: the battle was a vision upon it, he realised as robed figures moved nearby. This was the inside of a cavernous temple, wide pillars lit around their bases by flickering torches.
"The time is near," said a voice. "Bring forth the vessels."
The coldness was like lead in Byrnak's limbs and the unease had thickened to an awful dread that ate at his thoughts. Five men wearing only loinclothes were led into the temple, feet shuffling, arms hanging limply by their sides, eyes empty. All were young, their bodies strong and muscular, and Byrnak cried out as he looked at the face of the one in the middle.
"Lord of Twilight, Prince of the Realm of Dusk, Bringer of Glory," began one of the robed priests. "Hear us, your most faithful disciples. Those who serve your enemies are scattered, their swords and their shields are broken. See, the last of them are falling!"
In the bowl the vision showed a sea of axe and spear-wielding Mogaun surrounding a dozen or so mail-clad Imperial soldiers and a silver-armoured man who wore a crown and carried a long battlesword. The emperor stood beside a small tree whose foliage glittered and glowed, and as the last of his men died one by one he seemed to draw more strength from the tree and held off the engulfing attackers. Then the mass of the Mogaun drew aside as a one of their number, taller and heavier than most, stepped out and hurled a fiery spear. It caught the emperor full in the chest, pinning him to the tree, then both he and it burst into flames.
In the temple, a wordless murmuring had begun and hot green radiance was coming from a low well in the floor around which the five listless men stood. "Your enemy dies, Lord...the ancient seals fall away and the gate opens! Come forth and accept these vessels for your spirit..."
The emerald glow brightened, swelled and put forth limbs of light which surged towards each of the five men, enfolding them. Byrnak's breath was coming in shuddering gasps and he could not tell the priests' murmuring from the ravenous chanting of the white mists. The flowing green glow sank into the naked flesh of the men whose faces were now alive, their eyes alive with triumph. One of them lifted a hand to study it and the other four mirrored his action: another laughed simultaneously with the other four throats.