She caught dark movement at the very edge of her field of vision. Turned. And saw Shraeve sprinting towards her. The door on the far side of the street stood open. Shraeve was running for the hole in the wall that separated them. There was no time for another bolt. Eska reached blindly for her spear.
Shraeve leaped, bent her head down, folded her knees up into her chest, and came flashing through the ragged window. Eska had her spear in her hand and was running before the raven hit the ground. She ran not for the open door, but for the ruins. Her only chance, she knew, would be if she could rid herself of Shraeve.
Eska had always been fast, even by the standards of the Hunt. Shraeve matched her, though. Eska could measure in the sound of the raven’s pounding feet the ebbing away of her hopes. She cut into alleyways, vaulted fallen walls, swept over tumbled stones lying like scree against the face of a building. And Shraeve drew gradually closer.
Eska burst upon a band of ragged people struggling over the corpse of a dog. They were pulling it this way and that, snarling at one another. They looked up and let the carcass fall. To her they were made of stone. She weaved her path through them without breaking stride, heard their cries like low moans falling from her back. She heard too their more strident cries as Shraeve ploughed through them, and the sound of impacts and bodies falling.
Eska asked her legs for more and found they had but little to give her. The slightest lengthening of her stride. That was all. She still held her crossbow in one hand, her spear in the other. They hampered her and grew steadily heavier. A passageway spat her out into open ground: a wide square speckled with pale bodies from which birds rose and dogs retreated at her sudden appearance.
She turned, out in the open, chest heaving, lungs burning, to face Shraeve. Who slowed as she came near, lapsing into a casual walk and then coming to a halt. She had not even drawn her swords. She stood there empty-handed, and regarded Eska with narrow, dispassionate eyes.
“My feet are on the Road,” Eska said breathlessly, and flung the crossbow.
She darted forward in its wake, both hands set firmly on her spear. Shraeve dodged the spinning bow with ease and reached for her swords. By the time Eska closed with her, the blades were free but still high. It looked like a trap to Eska, who could see the shaft of her spear shattering beneath downward blows. At the last moment she snatched the blade of the spear aside and brought the butt round in a low sweep towards Shraeve’s knee. The raven danced back out of reach.
Shraeve rushed forward behind that failed attack, but Eska, retreating, managed to spin the spear in her hands in time to level its tip and fend off the charge. They circled one another. Eska placed her feet carefully, mistrusting the uneven ground. She never let her attention stray from Shraeve, though. She did not expect this to last long.
“You have betrayed the faith,” she said, in the slender hope of winning some minor advantage by distracting the raven. But Shraeve did not even blink. She might as well have been deaf.
Eska caught the slight dip in Shraeve’s hips. It gave the merest instant of warning. Shraeve surged forward. Eska stabbed. Shraeve crossed her swords beneath the spear and snapped them up. Eska watched the shaft of her spear caught in the intersection of those two rising blades, lifted by them, its barbed point guided harmlessly over Shraeve’s shoulder. She tried to whip it back, prepare for another lunge, but it was too late. Shraeve somehow parted her swords in such a way that one pushed the spear out high and wide as the other came low and flat for Eska’s belly. It was smoother and neater and faster than anything Eska had ever seen.
She twisted desperately, but still the blade sliced across her lower back. She felt it cutting her. And still Shraeve was moving. Inside the spear now, she pivoted on her leading foot and kicked Eska in the stomach.
Eska staggered. Bile burned up her throat and she gagged. Her spear was torn from her hands. Her heels met a block of stone and she fell. The back of her head hit another hard angle as she landed, and pain encircled her skull.
She grimaced up and saw Shraeve standing over her, swords already returning to their sheaths. Eska tried to roll onto her hands and knees, but her wounded back cramped and the searing pain locked her in place. Shraeve picked up the barbed spear. She held it over Eska’s stomach. Drew it back in preparation for the final strike.
Then suddenly lifted her head, and turned it to one side, frowning. As if she caught some summons on the air. Eska could hear nothing. But Shraeve straightened, shook her head once. Eska tried to roll aside again, and this time she mastered her body’s protests. She began to move just as Shraeve, almost absently, punched the spear down.
It went through Eska’s side. She heard its point grating on the stones beneath her, felt her blood following it. She gasped and took hold of the spear’s shaft with one hand. Through eyes almost shut by pain, she saw Shraeve turning away, running back towards the centre of Kan Avor.
IX
They crawled through the wreckage of Kan Avor like cautious rats picking over the carcass of a whale. Were it not for K’rina, it would have been easy to lose track of where they were and where they were heading. Every time taller walls or buildings closed about them, Orisian lost all sense of direction. K’rina knew, though. Always and instinctively. She would have scrambled recklessly and eagerly, as fast as she could go, through the ruins if they had let her.
It fell to Orisian to restrain her, for Taim and Varryn spent their entire concentration upon scouring the way ahead for any hint of danger. There was little. One man-a warrior from one of the Black Road Bloods-they found trying to light a fire with a pathetic pile of damp sticks. Varryn killed him quietly. Other than that, the only movement they detected was distant.
Orisian was struggling with a mounting pain inside his head: not in the bone but deep, in the place where his thoughts dwelled. It came and went, but each time it retreated it returned stronger and sharper. There was whispering as well, but that he was becoming accustomed to. The competing tasks of preventing K’rina from rushing on ahead and traversing the derelict terrain safely and quietly himself were demanding enough to keep him from slipping entirely into the diffuse besieging despair and anger he felt all about him.
He had the strange sense that they were falling, not advancing. Some great pit was drawing them into itself. Yet of all the feelings clamouring for his attention, fear was the least of them. He had somehow moved beyond the reach of that particular assailant. Perhaps he was simply too tired, in all possible ways, to succumb. The utter desolation of Kan Avor, the physical and mental destitution of those they had found alive here, the weight of the dead upon the city: all of this seemed to be murmuring to him that it was too late. Whatever happened, a wound had been delivered to the world that could never be quite healed. Too much had been broken for it ever to be restored to its former state.
Still he went on. And if he detected an increasingly wild edge to Varryn’s movement and gaze, he chose to ignore it. If he thought he saw Taim’s shoulders sinking gradually lower, and a grim, sombre intensity taking hold of the warrior, he said nothing. Kan Avor had them all in its grip, and it could only be endured, not escaped.
K’rina led them, in the bleak afternoon light, to a street over which the greatest of Kan Avor’s surviving edifices loomed. It might have been a palace in the lost days of the Gyre Blood’s dominion. It had the stubs of towers still adorning its upper reaches, and faded carvings in its stonework. Blank and empty windows looked out from high in its walls over the grey ruins.