“Yes. Yes, we dug—” Critlin swallowed hard. His voice sounded as broken as his face. Low and shaky, a pleading in it, like raindrops trembling on the underside of a roof’s edge. His eyes kept darting to the doorway into the other room, the source of the endless weeping. “We dug it up. We—we went at night. The day before Quickening Eve, when the waters are low.”
Archeth frowned. “What waters?”
“He means the gap at Grey Gull peninsula, my lady.” Nalmur, for all the world like a tutor helping out a feeble student under examination. “Says the currents bring more water in at certain times, make it harder to cross.”
“But—” She shook her head irritably. “There was a dead sheep in that grave, that’s all we found. We didn’t …”
They’d been using Tethanne, while Critlin gaped uncomprehendingly back and forth between this evil-eyed black woman and his tormentor-in-chief. Archeth made an effort, shunted the constant keening to the back of her mind, summoned her own creaky Naomic.
“You, uh—you took the Illwrack Changeling out—and put a, uhm—deformed? Yeah—a deformed sheep in his place? What—position?—no, wait, what condition—what condition was the body in?”
Critlin hesitated. He seemed puzzled by the question, maybe confused by her fumbling, error-strewn speech. Nalmur fetched him a massive clout across the side of the head.
“The lady Archeth asks you a question! Answer, and be quick about it! Or perhaps you think little Eril’s jealous of the caresses his big brother’s had from my men. Perhaps he’d like some of the same?”
The wailing from the next room redoubled. Critlin moaned deep in his chest and strained against his bonds. Nalmur grinned and raised his hand again.
“That’s enough!” Archeth snapped.
The hand came down. A small, angry smile played around the corners of Nalmur’s mouth for a moment, but he bowed his head. Archeth leaned in closer to Critlin. He shrank from her, as far as the chair-back would allow. The stench of shit wafted as he moved. She raised her hands, palms outward, and backed away again.
“Just tell me,” she said quietly. “Was the body intact? Had it decayed at all?”
“Intact,” blurted Critlin. “It was intact! The sheep was but recently slaughtered. We took it from Gelher’s flock and—”
“All right, that’s it you little goat-fucker!” Nalmur, stepping in with fist clenched and swinging. Archeth swung up and round, put a knife-fighter’s block in the way.
“I said that’s enough.”
Nalmur recoiled from touching her, whether out of respect for rank or superstitious dread, it was hard to tell. But there was a tight anger in his face.
“My lady, he is taking the piss. He’s—”
“He is broken!” Her yell froze the room. One of Nalmur’s men, already on his zealous way to the other chamber, stopped dead his tracks. Archeth swung on him, pointed. “You! You step through that door, I will fucking kill you.”
Tand stirred. “My lady, the man shows a distinct lack of respect, given his station. Joking at our expense should hardly go unpunished.”
“I will kill you.” Still eyeballing Nalmur’s man. “Don’t test me, human.”
And abruptly it was there in her head, like some unfolding map of a battle campaign she’d only heard rumors of until now. How it could be done, how it would go. The rest of Tand’s men, their positions in the room, the gnarled hilt of each knife she carried, how to reach them, in what sequence, how many bloody seconds it would take to fucking kill them all …
These fucking humans, Archidi. Grashgal’s voice, almost toneless, empty of anything but the distant trickle of despair, as the Kiriath laid their plans to leave. They’re going turn us into something we never used to be.
Hadn’t he called it right?
Didn’t she feel it herself, day in, day out, the corrosive rub of human brutality, human cruelty, human stupidity against the weave of her soul? The slow erosion of her own moral certainties, the ground she gave up with every political compromise, every carefully balanced step in the Great Kiriath Mission, every lie she told herself about necessary sacrifice in the name of building something better …
Through the doorway, the constant keening. Her hands itched for the hilts of her knives.
Maybe it was just fucking time.
Menith Tand was watching her, fascinated. She felt his gaze like shadow in the corner of one eye, and something about it pulled her back from the brink.
“You want to live, you stand down,” she told the mercenary by the door. Voice flat now, as flat and emptied out as Grashgal’s had ever been. “Nalmur, get your men out of here.”
Nalmur looked at Tand, outraged. The slave magnate nodded soberly.
“But my lord, this man is—”
“Broken. Remember?” Archeth fixed her eyes on Critlin as she spoke, didn’t look at Nalmur at all. She didn’t trust herself to. “You heard him break, you said. Like a rotten tree branch. Couldn’t miss it. Your work here is done, sellsword. Now get out, and take your thugs with you.”
It took less than a minute to clear the house. Give Nalmur his due, he ran a tight enough crew. A sharp whistle brought a couple of younger mercenaries out of the room the keening was coming from. A gruff command and everybody trooped out, leaving Archeth and Tand alone with Critlin. Nalmur was last man out, slamming the door ungraciously shut.
The room seemed suddenly larger, less oppressive. Even the weeping next door seemed to ebb a little.
Archeth crouched in front of Critlin’s chair, made herself as unthreatening as she knew how. The Naomic came a little easier this time around. Just getting Tand’s men out of the house felt like a headache lifting.
“Listen to me, Critlin. Just listen. No one’s going to hurt you anymore. You have my word. No one’s going to hurt your family, no one’s going to hurt you. Just tell me again about the body.”
“The … the sheep?”
She breathed deep. “No, not the sheep. The body in the grave. What state was the body in?”
“But …” Critlin stared. His voice quavered. “There was no body in the grave.”
Archeth shot a glance at Tand.
“Look,” the slave magnate began angrily. “You told my men—”
Critlin cringed as if Nalmur had just come back through the door.
“There was bone,” he gabbled. “Just bone, just fragments of it, tiny, nothing left but that. The rest was just … rotted …”
His voice petered out. He was staring at them both as if they were insane. Archeth groped for some context.
“Well—were you surprised by that?”
He looked back at her numbly.
“Surprised?”
“That the Illwrack Changeling’s body had rotted? Did that surprise you?”
“N-no, my lady. He has been dead these four thousand years.”
“Yeah, but—”
She shut her mouth with a snap. Recognizing suddenly which side of reasonable they’d all somehow ended up.
Because if these last weeks have been anything at all, Archidi, it’s a lesson in how badly myth and legend butt up against the real world. And yet here she still was, wanting to know why a body put in the ground four millennia ago wouldn’t be in decent condition when you dug it up.
This place is driving us all insane.
“All right, so there was no body.” Tand seemed to have moved past his previous anger—there was a deadly metronome patience in his voice now. “Or at least nothing much left of one. And you expected that. So why bother digging up the grave in the first place?”
“The lodge elder ordered it, my lord.” Critlin’s head sagged forward. He seemed to be giving up some final thing. “To take the sword.”
Archeth gave Tand another significant look. “There’s a sword now?”
The slave magnate shrugged. “He was a warrior, was he not, this Illwrack Changeling? Makes sense that they’d bury him with his weapons.”
“All right, so you took the sword.” Archeth
rubbed at her closed eyes with finger and thumb. “But, look—why bury a fucking sheep in its place? Why would you do that?”
“The lodge elder ordered that, too, my lady.” The words were falling out of Critlin’s mouth now, stumbling to get out. He was done, he was over some kind of hill, and his eyes flickered more and more to the door into the other room. “Gelher’s flock have the run of Gray Gull—several were born last season with deformities—the lodge-master said it was a sign, that the soul of the Changeling had awakened—most died at birth, but two or three survived until this year. So the elder said we must sacrifice one such in thanks—lay it in place of the sword. We did only as he ordered us, as our oath demanded.”
Archeth drew Quarterless from the sheath in the small of her back. The knife blade glimmered in the low light.
“Where is the sword now?”
“Taken back, my lady.” His eyes were fixed dully on the blade. For one chilly moment, Archeth thought she saw a longing in that gaze that made no distinction between Quarterless cutting his bonds or his throat. “Back to Trelayne. There will be a ceremony. The lodge elder says rejoice, the Aldrain are returning.”
She shivered, not sure if it was his words or the look in his eyes that caused it. She shook it off. Knelt at his side and sliced through the cords binding his legs to the chair. He began to weep, like a small child. The stench from where he’d pissed and shat himself was stronger this close in. She cut the cords off his chest and arms, ripped them loose with unneeded violence. She swallowed hard.
“Go to your family,” she said. “You will not be harmed further. You have my word.”
Critlin staggered upright, clutching at one arm. He limped away into the other room. Archeth stared after him, locked up in a paroxysm of something she could not name.
Menith Tand cleared his throat. “Perhaps, my lady—”
“Give me your purse,” she said distantly.
“I beg your pardon?”
She stirred as if awakening. Turned on him, Quarterless still in her hand. Words like hammered nails into wood. “Give me your motherfucking purse!”
Tand’s lips tightened almost imperceptibly. The same chained rage she’d seen in his eyes at the inn was there again. But he reached carefully beneath his cloak and fished out an amply swollen soft black leather purse. Weighed it gently in the palm of his hand.
“I do not care for your tone, my lady.”
“Yeah?” She reached back and put Quarterless away in its sheath. Safer there, the way she felt right now. “Then take it up with the Emperor when we get back. I’m sure you’ll be able to buy yourself an audience.”
“Yes, no doubt. Using the same funds that have made me a significant sponsor of this expedition—”
She chopped him down. “Of which I am nominated imperial commander. Are you going to give me that purse, or am I going to take it from you?”
Brief stillness between them. The faint reek of shit from the stained torture chair she stood beside. Horseplay commotion from Tand’s men out in the street. Raised voices—they seemed to be squabbling about something. In the next room, the keening went on as if Critlin had never been released.
Tand tossed the purse at her, hard. Two centuries of drilled reflex took it out of the air with knife-fighter aplomb.
“Thank you.”
The slave magnate turned away and headed for the door. He paused, hand on the latch, and looked back at her. The fire was out in his eyes now, and he looked merely—thoughtful.
“You know, my lady—you would be ill-advised to make an enemy of me.”
She should have left it alone, but the krin still sputtered and smoked in her like a pissed-out campfire. The words were out of her mouth before she knew it.
“I think you have that backward, Tand. I’ve seen better than you strapped to an execution board in the Chamber of Confidences.”
He held her gaze for a sober moment, then shrugged.
“Understood,” he said tonelessly. “Thank you for your candor.”
He turned the latch and went outside to his men. Archeth watched the door close on him, then cast about in the dampish, shit-smelling room as if she’d dropped something of value somewhere on the earthen floor. She closed her eyes briefly, too briefly, then forced herself to the door into the next room and the source of the keening. She leaned there in the doorway, curiously unwilling to actually step over the threshold.
On the big sagging bed that constituted the room’s only real furniture, like huddled shipwreck survivors on some fortuitous raft, a young woman sat and hugged two young boys to her. All three had had their clothing torn or sliced apart and now only the woman’s tight embrace held the remnants against their pallid flesh. The eldest boy looked to be about ten or eleven, the younger more like six or seven. Both their faces and bodies were marked, beginning to bruise. The woman’s eyes were closed tight, one swollen cheek was gouged where someone had struck her, most likely with a belt-end or maybe just the back of a heavily ringed hand. Her lips were moving in some voiceless litany, but it was her throat the keening came from, the only sound she made, and she rocked in time with it, back and forth, back and forth, a rigid couple of inches either way.
Critlin was slumped on the ground near the doorway in a way that suggested he’d simply leaned there and slid down the stonework until the floor stopped him. He was less than four feet from his family and staring at them as if they’d just sailed from some harbor quay without him. His left hand reached helplessly out for them, rested on one of his own up-jutting knees, hung there limp and lifeless.
Archeth swallowed and stepped into the room. Crouched at Critlin’s side, tried to fold his nerveless fingers around the purse. “Here. Take this.”
He barely looked at her.
“Take—look, here—just fucking take it, will you?”
The purse hung in his hand a scant second. Then it tugged loose with its own weight, fell from his slackened grip and into the dirt he sat on.
Muffled clink of imperial silver within.
Greetings from the Emperor of All Lands.
She got up and backed out.
Went back through the room they’d tortured Critlin in, as if pushed by a gathering wind. Yanked open the door and stepped out into the murky evening street.
Found a sword tip at her throat.
CHAPTER 7
e woke to the crash of waves and the cold coarse press of damp sand against his cheek. Harsh gray light insisted at his eyelids until he opened them. He blinked, lifted his head, and saw eyes on stalks, watching him from less than a foot away.
Shudder and shiver with the chill.
He pushed himself more or less upright and the crab scuttled away. Seen clearly, it wasn’t much bigger than the palm of his hand. It found a burrow in the sand some distance off and stood half in, half out, still watching him. Ringil sat and stared back for a while, trying to put his head back together.
Along the curve of the beach, away from bonfire glow, she told him the Truth behind Everything, and then he forgot it.
OR MORE PRECISELY, HE DROPS IT, CANNOT HOLD ON TO IT WITH SUFFICIENT strength—the Truth, it turns out, is a delicate, ineffable thing. It will not fit in his head any more than the wind will fit in a helmet. It tumbles and falls away instead. Bruises on impact, like fruit lost off some heavily overladen market barrow, while Ringil Eskiath, sorcerer warlord apparent, runs around grabbing and groping for the scattering, rolling pieces.
HE RUBBED FEROCIOUSLY AT HIS FACE AND FOREHEAD WITH BOTH HANDS, but it was gone, scrubbed away, leaving only a truth-shaped stain on his memory and a loose, sandy feeling in his head.
The rest came back presently, in tawdry chunks—sparse fragments of recall, like soiled pieces of crockery from some lavish feast he’d attended and then been ejected from for lack of sufficiently noble blood.
THEY STEERED YOU AS BEST THEY COULD, SHE TELLS HIM. DAKOVASH AND Kwelgrish, juggling the myriad factors between them, with a little side help now and then from
Hoiran and myself. They made the introductions, so to speak. Borrowed scrapings of steppe nomad myth, crafted them into a U-turn just beyond the shadow of death. Your tithe for the Dark Gate, paid. But in the end, we of the Dark Court can only request such passage. Permission is for the Book-Keepers to give or withhold. And even that permission may be qualified, truncated, subject to change.
Ringil’s lip curls. You’ll forgive me if I say this all sounds rather clerkish. The gods of the Dark Court stooping to abject negotiation.
Well, now—most human prayer is exactly that, is it not? He thinks he can hear pique in the dark queen’s voice, and the waves seem to crash a little harder on the sand. Abject negotiation with higher powers for aid, for intercession, for benefits not otherwise obtainable?
Yes, but that’s humans. We’re a conniving, carping bunch.
As above, so below, she says tartly. And since the results have saved your life on more than one occasion, perhaps you should be a little less snide.
HE GOT TO HIS FEET, SWAYING.
The Ravensfriend lay in the sand beside him—evidently at some point he’d taken it off, but he didn’t remember that, either.
He bent, clumsy-limbed with the cold. Gathered the sword to him like the body of some dead and broken lover.
THEY STAND TOGETHER ON A PROMONTORY OVERLOOKING THE OCEAN. They must have climbed there from the beach below, though his memory on this is vague. The sky has darkened, but there’s a loose, buttery glow from the muhn, seeping through the torn-up cloud like a weaker version of band-light, dusting the sea with soft gold. Around them, the wind cuts through the long coarse grass, bending it in circles so it seems to be making obeisance to the dark queen.
You are seeking the Ghost Isle, the Chain’s Last Link. There’s no question in her voice.
Among other things, yes.
You found it a week ago. You have been deceived.
Ringil makes a restless gesture. An island that comes and goes from existence with the wind and weather? With respect, my lady, I’m fairly certain we would have noticed such a thing if we’d stumbled on it.
The Dark Defiles Page 7