The Dark Defiles

by Richard K. Morgan

  The Dragonbane whirled about. He had something like a huge broken lance or harpoon held aloft in both hands—later she would realize it was Lord of the Salt Wind’s snapped and splintered bowsprit, still trailing lines and fragments of netting. His eyes were wide with berserk fury, and there was a rising, grinding roar from his mouth. Like some statue of a warrior god, he lurched forward and over on the yell, buried the length of splintered wood deep into the heart of the seething, tendriled mass.

  Twisted and leaned in. Roared again, dug deeper still.

  The tendrils spasmed, some pale fluid leapt across the air, spattered down on the rocks. The rising mass of the creature seemed to deflate. It was, she noted numbly, quite beautiful in the light—all patterned purples and pale violets flowing in and out of each other in the vaguely circular patterns she’d taken for eyes …

  “Get on this,” bellowed Egar. “Gouge this fucker with me!”

  Two men threw themselves on the leaning bowsprit, hung off it, swinging with all their weight. More splattering leakage, a low gurgling, hissing sound, and it was done. The two men dropped off the end of Egar’s improvised harpoon, someone dragged the ones who’d been grabbed by the creature’s tendrils out of harm’s way. The thing sank back down into the cleft as swiftly as it had risen, taking the bowsprit with it. Egar let go of the shaft with a kiss-off gesture. Spat into the hole after his retreating adversary.

  He turned about to check on her—by then she was back on her feet, a little shaky, but otherwise holding up. He grinned at her, still panting.

  “Hey, Archidi.” Pause for a mustered breath. A sweeping gesture with one arm “Welcome to the Kiriath Wastes.”

  IN TWO HUNDRED YEARS, SHE’D BEEN THERE JUST ONCE, AND THEN ONLY TO the southern fringes, on what amounted to a glorified child’s dare.

  When she was younger, Grashgal and her father continually talked up the possibility of expeditions north to see what had become of the land. It had been thousands of years, they argued, nature would have absorbed and repaired most of the damage done; it had to be safe by now. And who knew what they might find that had been lost to memory and record all those centuries? She remembered those conversations, the earliest of them barely comprehensible to her infant ears as she sat in Flaradnam’s lap or played on the rug while the adults talked. On later occasions, she perched on the arm of her father’s chair and joined in the speculating as best she could. She’d always assumed she’d be going with them.

  Her mother put paid to that notion pretty sharply one summer evening. The Cursed Lands? Are you insane, girl? Do you know what’s waiting up there?

  No, Mum. She would have been about eleven at the time; the answer was meant innocently enough. Do you?

  Don’t you smart mouth me, young lady.

  Mum, I’m not. Dad says no one knows what’s up there.

  Yes, and that’s precisely why you’re not going.

  In the end, it didn’t matter. Like so many of the Kiriath’s latter-day schemes, nothing came of it. The years of talk guttered and went out, focus wavered and was gone. Grashgal and Flaradnam went back to their hobby of tinkering with the Empire’s political framework instead.

  Forty-odd years slipped by.

  Archeth was never sure if it was just the nature of her father’s people and their subtly damaged mental state that killed the expedition, or if, as her mother feared, there really were things up in the Waste better left undisturbed. Or if those two factors were linked, and Grashgal and her father abandoned their plans because they came to fear that an expedition would somehow—guilt? ghosts? strange infectious airs?—further corrode their ability to live in this adopted world as if it were their home.

  Then her mother died, as humans were wont to do, and Archeth got the chance to see the Wastes for herself firsthand.

  Taken north one year by Grashgal as part of an extensive diplomatic mission to the recently formed League, she found herself wintering in Trelayne. Nantara’s death was barely a couple of years past and Archeth was still raw, ripe for mischief. Part of Grashgal’s intent had in fact been to get her away from An-Monal and her perennially grief-stricken father for a while, in the hope that it would maybe calm her down, get her back on an even keel—all of which pretty much showed how poorly he understood the half-blood girl he’d helped raise. Fuck her mother’s ghost, fuck her father in his endless self-absorbed gloom, now she was going to get even with both of them. While Grashgal and the imperial legate busied themselves with sounding out their new northern neighbors, putting out cautious feelers, getting useful ink on documents of trade and peaceful coexistence, Archeth and a couple of Kiriath lads near to her own age talked each other into mounting an expedition across the northern sound and into the Wastes.

  It took them almost the whole winter to put the scheme together. To find a suitable vessel along the ramshackle riverside moorings that passed for Trelayne’s harbor in those days, to identify a captain and crew willing not only to make the trip but to have any truck with these jet-skinned demon folk from the south in the first place. And then, with a price agreed for passage and provisions, they had to slowly siphon off the necessary cash from embassy funds without anyone in the mission noticing. It was all painfully gradual, with frequent disappointments and setbacks. But if an immortal life span was good for anything, it was the learning of methodical patience and planning. Two days into spring, and a month before the mission was due to go home, they cast off from a quay in Trelayne harbor aboard a grubby-looking longship, and they headed upriver to the estuary and the sea.

  By the time Grashgal realized they were gone—and set about tearing the city apart to find them—Archeth and her pals had raised the Wastes coast, made landfall, established an initial camp, and pretty soon had a major fight on their hands trying to stop the longship captain sailing straight back home again. The sky above the Wastes shoreline burned as often as not with luminescent greenish fire. Strange cracking and whistling sounds could be heard from farther off into the interior. The strand they’d anchored off was replete with all sorts of exciting stuff—outlandish mobile vegetation that seemed as happy in the water as it did on the sand and was given to tangling affectionately around your limbs if you walked or swam near it; clumps of shredded alloy wreckage that looked and mostly was inert, but would occasionally shudder and talk to them beseechingly in High Kir; creatures that might once have been crabs, but were now, well, quite a lot bigger for one thing, more lopsided, uglier all around, and made an unpleasant hissing sound if approached …

  The captain lasted three days at anchor, nailed in place initially by some apparent sense of contractual integrity, then, as tensions built, by improvised threats of Black Folk sorcery if he broke his signatory oath. But when Archeth insisted they proceed into the interior and would need porters, the crew delivered a quiet ultimatum of their own, and the three young Kiriath woke the next morning to find the longship gone.

  They had their provisions—the captain had been decent enough at least to off-load these—and a decision to make. Stay on the beach and wait for rescue, or head southeast along the coast with what they could carry and try to walk out. Archeth was all for walking out, but got voted down by her two rather more chastened male companions. Lucky as it happened—a Trelayne navy picket boat carrying an incandescently angry Grashgal showed up off-shore two days later. He came ashore tight-lipped and icily controlled, unwilling to loose his rage on them in front of the humans, but you could see in his face that they were going to catch it as soon as he got them alone. He wouldn’t even let them take specimens home, despite Archeth’s muted protests. She managed to sneak a cutting of the friendly mobile vegetation aboard in a bottle nonetheless, but she had no idea how to care for it and it died not long after they got back to Trelayne.

  They went home to An-Monal in deep disgrace, not least on account of the diplomatic strain caused by Grashgal’s rampage through the city in search of them. He thought they’d been taken by slavers, or some weird religious sect or ot
her, and had got pretty heavy-handed with representatives of both constituencies before the Trelayne Chancellery stepped in, posted a reward, and turned up the shamefaced longship captain a day or so later. But by then quite a lot of damage had been done. It didn’t quite set relations back between League and Empire the hundred years Grashgal ranted at them that it had—the League had in any case only been around in its current form for a couple of decades, as Archeth tried to point out before she was bellowed into silence—but it certainly hadn’t been any kind of diplomatic triumph, either.

  For Archeth, the disgrace lasted a year or so after she got back, though her father, still deep in mourning for Nantara, was halfhearted in his disapproval. He didn’t much care how many fucking humans she’d offended in the north—protests that she wasn’t the one who’d done the offending washed right over his head—he was just glad to see her home in one piece. There were some harsh words between Flaradnam and Grashgal on the subject, though nothing that Grashgal couldn’t later forgive as the grief talking, and the millennia-old friendship was never at any real risk. But for well over a century after, they all avoided anything but casual mention of the Kiriath Wastes.

  Then the Scaled Folk came, and avoidance was no longer an option.

  Year of fifty-two. The great floating purplish-black migration weed rafts, spotted drifting northward on strong coastal currents, up past the Gergis peninsula and onward. Some premature celebration at the realization that this fresh wave would not wash ashore in either Empire or League.

  And then the Helmsmen, doing the math, talking with iron certainty of what would happen if the rafts hatched out on the shores of the Wastes, of what would come sweeping south in the autumn after.

  Archeth was with the Kiriath delegation that went to Trelayne behind Akal the Great and laid it out for the League. She still remembered her father, pacing back and forth in the Chancellery hall, giving a flesh-and-blood face to the Helmsmen’s unhuman wisdom. Seamed ebony features intent as he walked the northerners through the need for yet more sacrifice, yet more blood, yet more men drawn from the war-weary ranks for an expeditionary force into the Wastes.

  The lizards can endure some cold, slower though it makes them. But they are drawn to warmth. We estimate there may be enough residual heat among the ruins of the Wastes to keep them happy through the summer months. But with autumn and the chill, they will inevitably turn south. At best, they will be a force as powerful as anything we have yet seen or fought against; at worst, the sorceries at work in the Wastes may have twisted them into new and more dangerous forms.

  In either case, the war will begin anew on your northern flank before it is even ended in the south. All we have achieved here in brotherhood will be for nothing.

  This time, Archeth was certain she’d get to go.

  But Flaradnam would not hear of it. Your mother was right, he told her. And I was foolish beside her wisdom. Enough that we devastated the land back then and poisoned it for centuries to come. Enough that we must now drag more human lives back into that hell. I will not risk my own flesh and blood there, too.

  But you’re going, she said bitterly.

  I am going because somebody has to. The humans cannot operate our engineering without help, they will need Kiriath leadership to see it through. Naranash is no longer with us; Grashgal is needed in the south. That leaves me.

  I’ll be more use at your side than I will in the south. The fighting’s all but done, it’s just politics down there now. Grashgal doesn’t need me for that.

  No—but I need you to go. And as fresh protests rose to her lips. Please, Archeth, don’t make this harder for me than it already is. I made your mother a promise on her deathbed. Don’t ask me to break it.

  It was a rarely used appeal, but it was one that in all the years since her mother died Archeth had never learned to resist.

  So she went back to Yhelteth with Grashgal and the others.

  And she never saw her father again.

  CHAPTER 12

  “ou hear that?”

  “Hear what?” The second privateer stifled a yawn. “Only thing I can hear is Kentrin snoring. Kick him for me, willya?”

  “Let the kid sleep. I mean, did you hear water dripping just n—”

  “Let him sleep? He’s on fucking watch!”

  “We’re all on watch—all three of us. Doesn’t take six eyes to peer through this murk and see nothing all night. Leave him alone.”

  “Leave him a—? What’s the matter with you, Lhesh? You after a portion of pert buttock pie or something? We’re on fucking watch.”

  “Yeah, like you never dozed off when you were his age?”

  “Yeah, I did. And the first mate put stripes on my back for it. You give him a kick in that pretty arse of his and bawl him out, he’s getting off lightl—”

  Ringil came over the watchtower rampart like a grinning black shadow.

  He was chilled and drenched through from his brief swim to the tower’s base, his teeth were locked tight to stop them chattering, and his fingers and unshod toes ached from the thirty-foot climb. He landed right at the feet of the grumbling privateer. Hit the stone flags on haunches and one braced palm, exploded up out of the crouch, dragon-fang dagger already reversed in his right hand, while the man just gaped down at him in disbelief. He struck upward for the soft underside of the jaw, up through tongue, mouth, soft palate, and on into the brain.

  He lifted the privateer backward on the force of the blow.

  Yanked the knife free.

  The man crumpled, eyes rolled up to the whites. Ringil was already turning away.

  The other privateer, Lhesh, was a scant five yards off across the flagstone roof of the tower. He turned as his comrade stopped speaking, curious more than alert, and the difference killed him. He had time to glimpse motion, the collapse of a body to the stones, dull red splatter across the fogged palette of the dawn, and a twisted black shape, spinning about …

  The dragon-tooth blade was useless for throwing; it didn’t have the balance or the elegance of form. Ringil dropped it. Raked a glyph into the chilly morning air instead, uttered harsh whispered syllables, and Jhesh choked on the cry in his throat. He gaped, staggered, made hoarse sounds and pawing gestures. Ringil crossed the five-yard gap in what seemed like a single leap. He reached in, left hand swept across the man’s eyes like the gesture of a servant wiping a window, right palm slapped in against the upper ribs. He hissed out the two-syllable command.

  Stopped the man’s heart in his chest.

  Jhesh’s eyes bulged for a brief moment - shock, terror, and the struggle to understand. Then he sagged and went bonelessly to the flagstone floor. Ringil held on to the dead man’s chest like a lover, softened the drop, lowered the body down.

  Soft snores from one gloomy corner of the tower wall.

  Ringil looked around, slightly incredulous. Kentrin, it seemed, had managed to sleep through the whole thing. He was still there, legs pulled up for warmth, leaned slightly into the corner, face slack with sleep. Gil approached, cat-footed, momentarily unsure what to do. He glanced back at the dragon fang blade, sticky with blood where he’d left it, too far to easily fetch. And now, almost as if Kentrin sensed the danger looming over him, he stirred. Muttered something, eyes sliding halfway open, still glazed with sleep …

  Drop to one knee, press the killing palm into the boy’s chest. Ringil made the window-wiping gesture again, again the two grating irrevocable words from the ikinri ‘ska. Kentrin’s eyes jerked wider open at the sound, his mouth fluttered, the beginnings of panic surfacing on his face. Gil put fingers to the boy’s lips and pressed. Made his voice soft as warm wool.

  “Hsss. Sleep, go back to sleep, it’s fine.”

  “N-n-no, but—” Body twitching sideways, legs shoving for support—in a moment he’d struggle to his feet against the hollow wrongness in his chest. “You’re—”

  “A bad dream. That’s all I am. Shsssh.” Singsong soothing, wiping the fear away. Watching the boy’s
features soften again as death took him back down. “You’re having a bad dream, go back to sleep. Rest now, rest …”

  The boy’s head lolled sideways in the angle of the wall. His legs slid down under their own weight, straightening slowly out. He looked almost as peaceful in death as he had asleep.

  His comrades lay less cozily, but still like sleeping men, flat out on the gray stone flooring, curled just fractionally into themselves as if against the cold. Blood pooling around the first man’s head told a different tale, but in this uncertain light even that was easy to miss.

  And Ringil was gone.

  HE MET SENGER HALD AT THE BASE OF THE TOWER.

  He’d stopped to kill two more men on the way down, but in the twisting spiral confines of the tower’s only staircase, it was easier work than he’d had on the roof. Each sleepy privateer heard unhurried motion on the stone steps overhead, glanced up in expectation of a comrade coming down with something to report, saw instead a looming, unfamiliar figure, jagged knife in hand. Ringil stepped down, stepped in close, and it was done.

  He used the dragon fang dagger both times—stopping the hearts of the two on the roof had tired him for magic, and anyway, trying to cast glyphs under the low stone roofing of the staircase was asking for trouble and barked knuckles besides.

  The ikinri ‘ska works better in open areas, Hjel tells him apologetically. Best of all under open skies. The powers are not always attentive in tight or hidden places.

  Great. Some fucking sorcery you’re teaching me here.