The Dark Defiles

by Richard K. Morgan

  Klithren twitched forward, and now his voice shook. “Perhaps, fucker, you don’t remember my face because when you struck me down in Hinerion, it was from behind, just like the faggot coward you are. Perhaps instead you’ll remember Venj, whose guts you spilled across the street like night soil, like I’m going to fucking do to yours!”

  Ah.

  Through veils of dimly remembered fever and frailty, now he placed the face. The voice.

  Some fucking retirement, eh pal? Hunting bandits in a foreign land for fifty florins a pop.

  The candled gloom of the bounty office in Hinerion. Grim shared hilarity, and men of violence waiting on the call. His incipient feverish trembling, banished by an effort of will as he clung to his assumed disguise and a thin semblance of good health, and joined in the brutal camaraderie as best he could.

  I pride myself on being a judge of men with steel. And you’re like me, you’ve held a command. Got the rank, the experience. Man like that, be glad to have you ride with us.

  The tavern after, Klithren’s bizarre enthusiasm for alliance, and that bullying little turd Venj in his train—the instinctive clash, the looks the axman shot Gil as he left. And later, on the sloping cobbled street, that same crowing, bullying sneer.

  Well, well, well. Thought that was a dodgy fucking Yhelteth accent if ever I heard one. Thought I knew the face from somewhere.

  And then the dance of shadows out of nowhere and the fine patter of blood like rain on his face as he watched the slaughter like something that had nothing to do with him at all.

  He stood on the sloping cobbled street—this other sloping cobbled street—and was dizzied for a moment by the swinging hinge of past over present time. The way his existence seemed to convulse about him like some crumpled parchment tossed onto the fire.

  Are we all like that, he had an instant to wonder. Parchment lives written out in lines and held rigid in time until, one by one, we all crumple and twist and flare away to nothing in Firfirdar’s flames?

  “So now you know me, Eskiath.” The march of memory must have shown on his face. There was no real question in the other man’s voice, only a certitude of hate. Gil remembered the final moment—Klithren bent over Venj’s slaughtered form, back turned to Ringil in the confidence of comradeship or maybe just the emotion of the moment.

  He was an arrogant little fuck sometimes. But you couldn’t ask for a better man at your back in a scrap. Saved my life a couple of times for sure.

  And the nape of Klithren’s neck, offered …

  “Now you remember, coward!”

  Ringil took hold, pulled himself back through the storm of time and into the now. Like hauling in canvas on a trimmed sail. He looked into Klithren’s newly familiar face.

  “Yeah, I remember I spared your life last time around. Want me to remedy that?”

  Klithren’s hands clenched around each sword hilt. He bared his teeth.

  “Let’s see you try, faggot.”

  But he didn’t quite hurl himself forward on the challenge. The imperials had come up on Ringil’s flanks and stood there like so many silent shadows. Only four men, but somehow the balance in the street shifted with their arrival, and a new moment unfolded.

  Grab it, Gil.

  “All right, darling—you can have me.” He smooched a brief kiss at Klithren. “But if this is personal, it stays that way. Got it?”

  Pause. The mercenary sneered.

  “Single combat? Are you fucking dreaming?”

  “Ah—not quite so personal after all, then.”

  A quiet arose between the faced-off parties, so intense that Ringil caught the soft moan of sea breezes down the rising hairpin streets and alleys of the town around them. Shifting among the skirmish rangers at Klithren’s back. Murmuring.

  Klithren gestured. “Why would I, outcast? The bulk of your force is already defeated and sent south to Trelayne, your nobles included. I hold this town in the palm of my hand. My men outnumber yours three to one.”

  One of the imperials, who apparently had some Naomic, coughed out laughter. “Yeah? Funny how we just chase them up street a minute gone.”

  The skirmish rangers bristled. At Ringil’s shoulder, another Empire man spat on the cobbled street and mustered his own rough take on the northern tongue.

  “Go down to harbor, look for self, pirate scum,” he snapped. “You’re against imperial marine this time. You’re fucking done.”

  “And that isn’t even the point,” said Ringil softly. He held Klithren’s eye. “Is it?”

  The moment leaned over them all, like the shade of a passing summer cloud. Klithren twitched. Nodded. He turned his head aside, toward the nearest of the skirmish rangers.

  “Captain. If I fall here, you will grant safe passage to the imperials out of Ornley and south. You will not—”

  “My lord! We—”

  “Shut up and recall your fucking oath, Captain!”

  The skirmish ranger subsided, just barely. Klithren waited a couple of beats. Laid out his words like measured paces.

  “You will not pursue them, you will let them walk. You will let them sail away. Is that understood? On your soul before the Dark Court, I want your word you’ll see it done.”

  Brief, stiff silence, while they all waited.

  “On my soul before the Dark Court,” gritted the ranger captain. “I will see it done as you command. But they—”

  “Yes, quite.” The mercenary jerked his chin at Ringil. “Your turn. You lose, your men lay down their arms and submit. I want to hear your marine pals say it. And I warn you, my Tethanne’s pretty good—you try and fuck me here, I’m going to hear it.”

  Gil nodded. He switched to Tethanne, raised his voice for the imperials so they could all hear. “Have you understood the terms?” he asked.

  “It isn’t complicated,” said one of the men who’d spoken in Naomic before.

  “Yeah,” agreed another. “You kick this piece of shit’s arse, they surrender. You lose, we do the same. Not going to lose, are you, my lord?”

  Ringil held back a smile. “No, I’m not going to lose. But this is my word, and yours, that we stand on. Under the Lady kir-Archeth, I command this expedition, and she is now a prisoner. That leaves me. If I fall, you see to it that Commander Hald honors my terms.”

  “It will be done,” said the man who’d slit the injured privateer’s throat, and with about as much emotion. “If this pirate rabble can keep faith, will an imperial marine not?”

  “Good enough?” Gil asked Klithren, in Naomic again. He gestured with his shield at the ground between them. “Shall we?”

  The duel space opened around them like some quiet clockwork trick, like the iris of an eye in thickening light. The men at their backs gave instinctive ground, the duelists moved crabwise and cautious, reading each other’s movements for error or slack. Gil circled up slope to the right, Klithren let him come, gave ground down and left. Soft scuff of boot leather on the cobbles underfoot. The early morning sun threw slant shadows off the roofs of houses and down on the street. Made broad bars of warmth and chill for the two men to move in. A gull carped shrilly at them from its overlooking rooftop perch. A hollow brightness held the air

  Best weather we’ve had since I got here.

  Klithren rushed in.

  Conventional enough—the longer of the two swords chopping down, the shorter stabbing in from the side—but very fast. Gil got his shield up in the way of the bigger blade, took the impact of a blow only partly committed, heard the muted clank it made in the morning air. He fended off the short sword with the Ravensfriend reversed downward—harsh scrape of steel on steel as the weapons crossed. He stabbed slantwise down on the same move, and Klithren had to leap backward to avoid getting skewered through the foot. Gil made a hard feint after him with the shield, watched over the rim to see what the mercenary’s instinctive guard looked like—answer; it looked pretty good—then let him go.

  Testing, testing …

  Ringil reached i
nside himself where the magic was, found the ikinri ‘ska still too slippery and restless to get a hold on. Even the brief effort he made kicked a pit of nausea open in his throat, put tiny sparks across his vision. No chance, no chance at all.

  Guess we’ll just have to do this the hard way.

  He drifted unhurriedly toward Klithren, waited for the other man’s reaction. Klithren let him come. He had the slope, a shallow slanting angle on it anyway, and Gil’s attack would have to be made uphill, with all the cost that implied. The mercenary’s lips were parted as he watched, his sword blades held open as if in invitation, as if to embrace. Ringil grinned and nodded amiably as if something had just been agreed—put an abrupt spurt of speed on his approach, drove hard with one foot, raised his shield in a repeat of the feint he’d made before. Klithren read it, wasn’t buying that or Ringil’s distracting smile, kept his eyes full on the sweep of the Ravensfriend—and Gil, driving hard from the same foot, rammed the shield all the way home.

  Klithren staggered, swung to block, both blades at once. The Ravensfriend leapt into the gap it left, faster than human steel could have moved. Sliced one mailed arm at the shoulder, bit through the metal links with no more effort than if they’d been leather weave. Klithren roared and struck back with his broadsword, in at thigh height. Gil chopped his shield down, killed the blow, snapped his own blade up across the other man’s face. Klithren recoiled—but the Ravensfriend kissed a pair of sparks off the cheek-guard of his helm before he got clear.

  Something subtly wrong with the pattern of it all …

  Ringil pressed the attack, gave himself no time to think. Get this done. The Ravensfriend went for Klithren’s throat like an enraged wolfhound, seemed to drag Gil along more for company than because he was striking the blow. The mercenary blocked with the short blade, swung his other sword in from the side. Gil took it on the shield, was moving aside anyway, dropped his wrist and stabbed low. The Ravensfriend snagged Klithren’s mail above the hip, below the curve of his cuirass. Chewed through again—bright spill of blood and wisp of smoke in the shining air. Gil pivoted and withdrew, gouging back hard with the blade’s edge, along the wound he’d made. Klithren screamed and—

  Smoke?

  —the short blade, out of nowhere, glinting down. It screeched on Gil’s cuirass, bounced off, punched him back. Fleetingly, he saw Klithren had reversed his grip on the weapon, must have let go, rolled the hilt off his thumb on the blade’s own weight in midair, grabbed it up inverted and stabbed down, all in the same split second and riding the pain of the wound in his side. There was just time for Gil to appreciate the grit and speed it would take to do all that, the momentary unsettling in his guts at the realization he was fighting an equal here after all. Then his shield was back in the way, yanked in on instinct to take another blow from Klithren’s broadsword that he never actually saw coming.

  Fucking smoke?

  He backed up. Klithren snarled a grin across the space it opened between them.

  “Ready to die now, faggot?”

  Klithren, who should have been leaking blood copiously, down his left leg from the torn up mess of the wound above his hip. Gil could almost see the way it ought to look, as if it were somehow there, in alternate moments, laid over the wound the mercenary actually bore, which looked barely knife-nick deep and didn’t seem to trouble him at all. And let’s not forget the shoulder, Gil—another solid chop that ought to have sliced and levered open the knit of the muscle there, ought to have made any major motion of that arm a screaming agony thereafter.

  Instead, as Ringil watched, Klithren flipped the reversed short sword in the air with that hand, caught it upright again, barely grimaced as he did it.

  Made it look easy.

  “Well?” he jeered. “That all you fucking got?”

  “Why don’t you ask your friend Venj?” Gil shut out his misgivings, gathered himself. “You’ll be seeing him soon enough.”

  He hurled himself forward on the last word. Ravensfriend upflung, inviting the block, then snatched down in the instant that Klithren took the bait. He drove for the other man’s leg. Somehow, the mercenary got there first, slammed a block on the Ravensfriend with his broadsword that drove the Kiriath weapon down into the cobbles and locked it there.

  The short sword came leaping, in at head height.

  Gil felt it more than saw it. Could only drop his chin and hope.

  The blade caught him a savage blow across the top of the helm, jarred it almost off his head, then skidded off the metal curve and sent him stumbling, head ringing with the impact, shield wrong-sided and useless, sword hand barely clinging to the Ravensfriend’s hilt.

  It was all he could do to keep his feet.

  Whoop of triumph from Klithren, and abruptly he felt a chilly urchin hand on his arm, tugging him to one side. He went with it, heard the other man’s broadsword slice the air apart where he’d been. Reeling, he thought he’d found his feet for a moment, but then there was another urchin tug and this time it took him to the ground. He hit the cobbles hard, full length, banged his head. Felt his helm come loose with the impact, heard it roll clinking away, and realized at the same moment that Gerin’s ghostly grip was on the Ravensfriend, dragging it out of his grasp …

  He rolled soggily onto his back, shield an impossible weight pinning down his left arm at his side, sword hand empty. Saw Klithren walk up to him and block out the sky like some towering, bad-tempered god he’d managed to upset. He felt the point of the mercenary’s broadsword jab in under his chin, press down for a long moment, then snick loose again. Blood welled and trickled where it had been.

  He guessed his throat had been slit, and marveled at how little it hurt.

  Klithren crouched down, tucked the fingers of his left hand in where the sword point had gone, then brought them back up into view, smeared wet and red with Ringil’s blood. He looked at the blood quizzically for a moment, then got to his feet again.

  Spat in Ringil’s face.

  “Some fucking hero,” he said flatly. “The Silverleaf crew were a harder take than you.”

  Ringil, still belatedly working out that his throat had probably not been cut after all, could make no sense of the words. All he knew was that Gerin’s ghost hand was cold on his brow and other hands, bigger but equal chilling, tugged at his arm as if to hurry him away at some impossible angle to the rest of the world

  Klithren turned away, then seemed to think better of it. He stepped wide, came back, and swung one colossal god-sized boot, hard into the side of Ringil’s head.

  The sky went out, like candles snuffed.

  CHAPTER 17

  t times, he feels no more than a tapestry stitching of a man.

  He moves, he acts, as ever, but it’s as if every action has an echo in his own head, as if he can stand there and watch himself perform it without really being involved. He did this consciously a few times on the voyage north—let his hands go on with a task without him. Stared down at them as if they belong to another man entirely, as if he could get up and wander away from his own body, and trust it to complete whatever duty had been assigned.

  It sits ill with him, this detachment hovering constantly in the corner of his eye. He’s a soldier after all, and what’s a soldier if not a man of forthright action. Leave maundering down the well of deep thoughts to the inkspurt clerks and graybeards they pay so handsomely to do that stuff. Last time he held a quill was when they asked him to make his mark on the articles of enlistment. His right hand has had other employment since, and ink is not a stain it’s familiar with. He is no clerk. His chosen tools are sword and ax and shield, mute iron witnesses to the life he’s carved out for himself, and the lives of others he’s spilled out in bloody ruin along the way. He has memories of slaughter in a half dozen different places across the Empire, though he doesn’t revisit them much. What would be the point? He has the decorations and scars to prove he was there. He has the body, the heart, and the brain of a soldier, and all he wants is the simple p
eace of mind that should go with it.

  Is that so much to ask?

  NOT LIKE HE’D DONE BADLY FOR HIMSELF UNTIL RECENTLY, EITHER—assignment in honor to the Emperor’s own personal adviser, the last remaining Kiriath in the world. He remembers how he swelled inside with rich satisfaction when he woke the morning after that news, and remembered the posting was his. Service aboard a river frigate—not generally something a marine would shout about, Yhelteth doesn’t do much of its fighting on rivers; they’re strategically important to be sure, and sometimes need policing like any other aspect of Empire, but no one ever launched a real threat to the Burnished Throne from a river. This river frigate, though, appointed specifically to carry the lady Archeth Indamaninarmal to and from her ancestral home at An-Monal, this was something special. He’s not sure why, exactly, but from the beginning it felt right. Destined. The lady Archeth felt important, still does in some indefinable way that nothing in his blunt soldier’s pragmatism can pin down. All he knows is that he needs to be by her side.

  He was not in the least surprised when the news broke that she would be leading a quest into the north. But he remembers the crushing anxiety he felt that he might not be among those finally selected to escort her, the relief and joy when the orders came down that he would. He traded vessel assignment with another comrade, even though it meant a lesser post, so that he could serve aboard Sea Eagle’s Daughter and stay closer to the lady Archeth’s side. He kept an eye on her cabin whenever he took night watches and whenever she went ashore during the voyage around the cape, he did his utmost to get assignment in her guard. He did these things instinctively, rarely if ever questioning the impulses that drove him. Thinking that way, questioning his basic assumptions, didn’t feel good. It distanced him from the comfort that soldiering brought, and at times it seemed to bring on that same cursed sense of detachment once more.

  The Kiriath built the Empire, their magic and their learning sustained it even now. There. Service to the last of their kind could only be service of the highest sort to the Empire itself and all its peoples.