The Dark Defiles

by Richard K. Morgan

  Would you now? Firfirdar’s eyes glitter in the sparse light. And how exactly would you do that? How would you recognize such an island, unless you had seen it materialize? How, in its manifest form, would it be any different from any other island? Would you expect it to glow with witch fire as the chronicles claim?

  No, I’d expect the locals to know about it and be able to point it out to me.

  They do. And they did.

  You are mistaken, my lady. Outside of myth and old wives tales, the locals made no mention of any island at all. The closest they came was—

  And realization dawns. He hears the rough Hironish-accented voice again, one among the many many they’d listened to in and out of Ornley’s taverns until they all began to blur into a single incoherent stream. On approach, Grey Gull may seem a separate island, but do not be deceived. Certain currents cause the inlets to fill enough at certain times to make it so—but you can always cross, at worst you might have to wade waist deep. And most of the time, you won’t even get your boots wet.

  He closes his eyes. Oh, for Hoiran’s fucking sake.

  Just so. As I said, you have been deceived. More specifically, you have been tricked into thinking that a legend distorted over millennia of telling and retelling can still be taken literally.

  It comes and goes with the weather, Ringil said heavily, laying it out like some theological proof. There’s an island there, then it’s gone—because there’s a peninsula in its place. I’m going to fucking drown that Helmsman.

  The Helmsmen have agendas of their own. It would be a mistake to believe they are your friends.

  He snorts. Yeah, they told me the same thing about you.

  HE SLUNG THE RAVENSFRIEND ACROSS HIS BACK BY ITS HARNESS AND FELT immediately somewhat better. The ache the truth had left in him receded, became more or less manageable. He’d had worse hangovers.

  He cast about, trying to get his bearings. The beach wasn’t one he recognized, either from his time in the Grey Places or anywhere he’d been in more prosaic realms. But the landscape behind was a close match for what he’d seen of the Hironish isles so far—windswept and low-lying, not much in the way of trees, some low rock outcroppings and what looked like cliffs out at one distant headland. He wondered for a brief moment if Firfirdar had sent him back to Grey Gull peninsula with his newly minted understanding, to finally face the Illwrack Changeling. He dismissed the idea after a moment’s groggy thought.

  We dug that grave up. It had a sheep in it.

  For a moment, it seemed he recalled the dark queen advising him that looking for the Illwrack Changeling’s corpse was in itself a mistake, a waste of time. But he couldn’t be sure. There was too much missing around the ragged wound in his memory where the gift tore loose.

  Yeah, yeah. You had the truth, and then you dropped it, and it broke. Poets weep, the sky falls down. Get a fucking grip, Gil.

  He shook his head to clear it. Found a high point on the spine of the land behind him and started walking toward it.

  The churned-up memories scampered after him.

  YES, YOU MAY ASK.

  What? She’s fallen behind so he turns to look back at her. Ask what?

  She grins, not fooled. The question that echoes through your thoughts so clearly. All those adolescent evenings at temple back in Glades House Eskiath—you remember the cant. Now you’re wondering how much truth lies in it. You’re wondering—does the dark queen really grant favors to those bold enough to face her and ask?

  They face each other across a half dozen steps in the sand. The wind buffets noisily between them. It’s a tense little moment.

  Well? Ringil gestures impatiently. Does she?

  It has been known. What would you ask for, supplicant?

  He grimaces at the epithet. Hesitates, then plunges in. Grashgal the Wanderer told me once that the Ravensfriend will hang behind museum glass in a city where there is no war.

  That is one possible end for it, yes. I ask again—what do you want?

  He swaps the grimace for a weary smile, and turns away. His words trail back over his shoulder like a scarf caught up in the wind. Well, if you can really catch the echo of my thoughts, Mistress of Dice and Death, then you already know that.

  Ah, grim and gritty little Ringil Eskiath. Yes, walk away, why don’t you? And then, abruptly, she’s close at his side again, voice intimate, a caressing whisper at his ear. The fractured heavens forbid that Gil Eskiath should ever beg a favor of anybody, even of the gods themselves. That he should ever show weakness or need. How unbecoming that would be in the scarred bearer of the dread blade Ravensfriend. Oh yes, I can see why they both like you so much.

  He kept his eyes straight ahead, kept walking. Voice just about steady. Like I said, if you can catch the echo of my thoughts—

  You want to go there. It’s out in a rush, and then Firfirdar is abruptly silent. She seems, in some indefinable way, to have surprised herself. For just a moment, her tone grows almost wondering. They’re right, you do it every fucking time. Alright, Ringil Eskiath, you want to play the game that way, let’s lay down those pathetic cards you’re holding. What do you want? What is your heart’s desire? You want to go there, to that city without war. You want to live out the rest of your days in the peace it offers. Standard twilight-of-a-warrior happy ending shit. Your basic profession-of-violence retirement dream. There. Satisfied? Did the goddess read your mind? Or did she read your mind?

  It’s his turn to be silent, oddly embarrassed to hear his own barely conscious longing laid out so brutally naked in words. He clears his throat to chase the quiet away.

  Grashgal told me there was no way to reach it. He said the quick paths are too twisted for a mortal to take, and the straight path is too long.

  True as far as it goes, yes.

  He glances sideways at her. But?

  But it misses the larger point. Grashgal’s vision was incomplete. Like so many of his Kiriath kin, he never fully recovered from the passage through the veins of the Earth and the gifts it inflicted. He had the sight, but not the critical instinct to interpret it well. In the case of the Ravensfriend, he saw the resting place, but not how it came to be. He did not appreciate the irony of that sword in that museum.

  For what it’s worth, nor do I. You want to explain in words a mere mortal can understand?

  Well, irony really does better unelaborated, but if you insist. The dark queen’s voice drifts, as if reciting some empty cant. The city you speak of will be built—will stand in all its undeserved serenity—on the bones of a billion unjust, unremembered deaths. Its foundation stones are mortared with the blood of ten thousand suffering generations that no one there recalls or cares about. Its citizens live out their safe, butterfly lives in covered gardens and brilliant halls without the slightest idea or interest in how they came to have it all. She comes abruptly back to the here and now. Turns and flashes him a hard little smile. Do you really think that you could stand to live among such people?

  Ringil shrugs. I lived among my own people nine years after the war. Most couldn’t forget the past fast enough. The fortunate among them spend their lives now forgetting the misery their good fortune squats upon. If I have to live amid ignorance, I’ll take a people who’ve forgotten what suffering is any day over a society that eats, sleeps, and breathes it daily and still turns a blind eye to the pain.

  Very well. She walks ahead of him now, raising her voice a little. Then ask yourself another question, hero. Do you think they could stand to have you in their midst—a bloody-handed monster, a living, breathing reminder of all they do not appreciate or understand?

  I’m used to that, too, he says curtly.

  They’ve reached the end of the beach’s sweep. A darkened tumble of rock looms ahead of them, fringed along its edges with the luminous shatter of waves. Windblown spray from the breakers dampens the air, puts a faint sheen on everything. The dark queen picks her way up onto the outcrop without apparent effort, turns and beckons him after her.
<
br />   Disappears.

  He follows awkwardly, places each booted step with care on the wet, unyielding tilt of the rocks. A couple of times, he slips and curses, nearly goes over—the long habit of battlefield poise keeps him up. Further along, with some relief, he finds small pale expanses of barnacles he can gain some crunching purchase on. His steps firm up.

  He catches up with Firfirdar at the edge of a minor drop, six or eight feet down to where the waves hurl themselves into the jagged line of the rocks. She’s watching them burst high and spatter, suck back and slide away off wet-gleaming granite surfaces, then surge in again, tireless.

  She waits until he’s at her side. Pitches her voice to carry over the sound it makes.

  Supposing I could take you to that city—how would you live there? Your blade would be behind glass in a museum, and no use for it even if it were not. The languages you speak would be millennia dead. What would you do for money, for food? Do you see yourself cleaning tables, perhaps, in some eatery whose owner does not mind your halting attempts at the local tongue? A brief career as a tavern whore, maybe, while your looks last? Do you see yourself washing dishes or mucking out horses, as you grow old and gray? Does that appeal?

  He grimaces. Well, now you come to mention it …

  Quite. And here is our difficulty. Your daydreamed retirement is no more honest than the daydreamed heroics of young boys who’ve never picked up a blade. It is a fantasy staple—stale, learned longing, incurious of any human detail, a mediocre hand dealt out from the grubby, endlessly reshuffled myths and legends and comforting lies you people like to tell each other. There is less weight to it in the end than in all your boyhood fantasies of a life with the gypsies, out on the marsh at Trelayne. That at least was something you might once have attempted, a path you might have taken. But this—this is a lie to yourself that you carry around in your heart because you’d rather not face the truth.

  And what truth would that be?

  Firfirdar gestures at the waves breaking below them. That there is rest and there is motion. And that once set in motion, none of us are ever truly at rest again as long as we live. That the only truly important thing is to move well while you can, to go to rest only when rest is all that remains.

  Yeah? So where does that leave me?

  The dark queen looks almost embarrassed for him. Well, she says. What else, aside from slaughter with sharp steel, are you really good for?

  There’s a long, quiet pause, broken only by the roar and suck of the sea. Ringil feels the sound stuffing itself into his ears, emptying him out. They stand, goddess and man, a foot and a half apart, like two statues carved from the granite underfoot.

  I suppose a blow job’s out of the question, he says at last.

  She turns to look at him, glitter-eyed. You said what to me, mortal?

  You’re not going to take me to Grashgal’s city. I get it.

  I cannot.

  Cannot or will not?

  Cannot. The codes the Book-Keepers wrote are very specific. Though I may grant wishes, they must be genuine, they must come from the heart and soul of the supplicant. There’s a soft, persuasive urgency to her words now. I read your mind for you—now I will read you your heart. Look inside yourself, Hero of Gallows Gap, Dragonbane unacknowledged—look deep, find the flame inside, and tell me what you really want.

  He stares into the crash and foam of the waves below, for what seems like quite a while. Long, vertiginous moments of letting go. Grashgal’s vision of a city at peace receding, sucking back and sliding away, leaving hard wet rock gleaming beneath.

  Finally, he sees what she’s talking about.

  I want them dead, he says quietly. I want them all fucking dead.

  Ah. The Mistress of Dice and Death puts a companionable arm around his shoulders. Her touch bites through his clothes like freezing iron. Now that’s more like it.

  FROM THE TOP OF THE LONG SLOPE HE’D CLIMBED, THE LANDSCAPE SPRANG into some comprehensible focus. Familiar folds in the rolling terrain. Off to the west, the long, slumped spine that led up to the cliffs where they’d dug out the grave. He pivoted about, gauging the angles in the wind and the pallid light. He squinted—could just make out the spike and tracery of mast-tips beyond a fold in the land to the east.

  Dragon’s Demise, moored where they’d left her.

  It seemed he hadn’t been away for long.

  LET ME SHOW YOU SOMETHING, SHE TELLS HIM, AS THEY EMERGE FROM A grotto of tumbled granite blocks onto another beach. Perhaps it will help.

  They leave the shadow of the rocks behind, pass over low white sand dunes and down toward a broad waterline that curves away to the horizon. The waves run in to meet them, soft and muted, lapping up the beach with creamy tongues. But farther out they’re breaking twice the height of a man, and the sound of it echoes off the cliffs behind them like distant thunder.

  Something flickers past Ringil’s shoulder.

  He tears loose of the dark queen’s arm. Flinches around, fingers twitching.

  Sees only a leaf of pale light, something like a candle flame detached from its wick and grown to the size of a man. It skitters around them for a moment, then darts away along the beach.

  Fuck was that? he asks, watching it go.

  One of the locals. Firfirdar presses on down the slope of the beach toward the waves. She calls back to him. Don’t worry, they’re not interested in us.

  True enough—as he follows the dark queen down, he sees a dozen or more of the same living flames flickering about on the sand, gathering briefly then scattering apart again, sprinting short straight lines, then dodging playfully aside, skidding out over the creamy broken surface of the water in broad curves, then skimming back again. Some of them make wobbling circuits around him or Firfirdar or both, but it’s fleeting, as if there’s simply not enough in either visitor to hold their attention, and soon they’re gone again, out across the water, away …

  It’s a little like watching energetic moths at play on some lamplit balcony.

  He joins the dark queen at the waterline.

  So what are they interested in? he asks her.

  She gestures out over the ocean. See for yourself.

  Out where the waves are breaking big, the same flickering lights dance up and down, back and across the smoothly rising, advancing face of each breaker. It looks weirdly as if some naval vessel has left small patches of float-fire burning fiercely on the surface of the waves—but patches that slide giddily around on some unfeasible clash of currents beneath.

  Nalumin, says Firfirdar, as if this is explanation enough.

  Ringil watches a pair of the glimmering things race in on a wave. They seem to grow paler as they reach the shallows.

  Are they alive?

  That depends on your working definition. Once, long ago even in the memory of the gods, the Nalumin were men and women like you. But a flame possessed them at the core, and they spent their lives stripping away all layers that did not feed that flame. Something changes in the dark queen’s voice and when Ringil looks at her, he sees that distant sadness smoking off her again. When the book-keepers came, the Nalumin made a choice. Like so many of us, they perhaps did not fully understand what that choice would mean.

  And what did it mean?

  Firfirdar shrugs. That all layers were stripped away. That they gave themselves over wholly to the flame. Just as you see.

  They burn brighter on the water than on the land. He’s speaking more to himself than to the goddess at his side. But Firfirdar nods.

  Yes. Brighter on water than on land, guttering to nothing if they leave the sea behind for very long. And brightest of all when they ride the waves. A crooked smile. It was, by all accounts, what they wanted.

  They’re trapped here, then?

  To the extent that all mortals are, I suppose. The dark queen appears not to have given it much thought. A flickering limen of existence between the saltwaters you all come from and a darkened hinterland beyond. Yes, trapped—you could
say so. Though they seem not to mind. Eternity is what you make of it, I’d say.

  They’re eternal, then? Immortal?

  So far, yes.

  It conjures out the ghost of his own smile. He rolls her a sardonic look. Right. And this is supposed to make me feel better about my own situation, is it?

  Firfirdar shrugs again.

  There are worse fates, are there not, than being forced into a place where your choice of acts is limited to those that cause your soul to burn the brightest?

  He draws a breath that hurts his throat, because he can see where this is going. Right. And now we get down to where my soul burns brightest, do we?

  The goddess looks at him—no, not at him, past him—past his face and left shoulder to where the hilt of the Ravensfriend spikes in silhouette. Her eyes glitter, like the Nalumin dancing on the waves.

  Oh, I think you already know that, she whispers.

  HE CUT ACROSS THE LAND, STAYING OUT OF DIPS AS MUCH AS HE COULD—climate in the Hironish made for boggy ground wherever water could easily collect. He picked up sheep tracks along his path, used them where they helped, ignored them when they meandered too far wide of the direction he wanted. Less than half an hour in, sweat had collected on his brow and under his clothing. He’d set a marching pace without realizing it.

  As if battle lay ahead, or something behind was gaining on him.

  About an hour later, he came over a rise, panting the steady rhythm of the march, took in the ruined croft and the short column of men on the sheep track below, not really grasping the detail for what it was.

  He stopped anyway, half wary, an alarm bell tolling somewhere gut deep.

  A large sheep—no, he narrowed his gaze, saw horns, make that a ram—broke from the path, ambled away through the long grass toward the croft. Guffawing laughter drifted up to him on the damp air. The man in the vanguard of the column looked up.

  Long hair, gaunt face, all-around evil-seeming motherfucker, looked like a scar on one ch—

  Understanding knifed through Gil’s hangover blur, hit him like a mace blow from some unsuspected attacker off his flank. He staggered backward, cloak flapping around him in the wind. Sat down hard on the wet grass at the top of the rise. Rolled frantically for cover.