Fall of Thanes (gw-3) by Brian Ruckley

Author:Brian Ruckley [Ruckley, Brian]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: sf_fantasy

Outside the ruins of Kan Avor, on the fringes of the sodden plain that had once been the Glas Water, a huge willow tree stood. It carried snow in the joints of its soaring branches. Its immense trunk burst from the ground and sprayed up into the air like the antler-crown of some titanic buried stag. When it was young, spindling its way up out of the wet earth amidst a host of its eager fellows, Avann oc Gyre ruled in Kan Avor, and the streets of that place bustled with the life of a thriving Blood. Later, there had been slaughter within sight of it, and the blood of thousands had sunk into the loam, to its youthful roots. As it rose to its full stature, so the Lannis Blood had risen around it, and a great dyke had been constructed, and the proud city so near at hand was drowned. The long seasonal pulse of the Glas Water ruled its life thereafter: in the winters, the waters came to lap around the base of its slowly swelling trunk; in summers, they retreated. And in those dry times, the people of the valley came and cut away its peers one by one. It had been alone for many years, standing in solitude amidst pool and marsh, spared the axe by chance which the years turned to habit. Upon this solitary giant a multitude converged. They came from Grive, and from Anduran, and from Targlas beyond it, trampling new pathways into the expanse of blank snow that lay across the valley. It was not only the people of the Black Road who assembled there on the frigid flatlands. The subjugated folk of the Lannis Blood gathered too, some by choice, some driven like cattle by their new rulers. The promise of momentous events was abroad and compelling. They came from vast Anlane itself: White Owls emerging in bands of ten and twenty from beneath its vast bare canopy. Most of all, they came from Kan Avor, the dead city reborn yet still dead. They swarmed out from that rubble in their hundreds, disgorged from its every crevice. And in the midst of them came the na’kyrim himself, riding a wagon pulled by gigantic Lannis horses that had once hauled timber from the forests. He sat in it alone, braced against straw bales wrapped in cloth, armoured against the cold by a heavy cloak that he enfolded about himself so deeply his shape was lost beneath its weight. Ice crackled under the wheels as they crunched through the frozen puddles along the track. Forty Battle Inkallim rode in escort. Hothyn and his Kyrinin walked after the cart in a great dispersed crowd. On either side, as far as any eye might see, the na’kyrim’s people were strewn across the white plain, all of them moving through the winter towards that single huge willow tree: a convocation of the mad and the wild and the desperate and the fierce. The wagoner snapped his switch at the rumps of the horses with one hand, hauled sideways at the reins with the other.

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