The Dark Defiles

by Richard K. Morgan

  Something like that, anyway.

  And now it’s all up in flames, it’s a fucking mess, and not one cursed thing he can do about it. Ornley fallen to League privateer scum, the lady Archeth taken as prisoner and spirited away by ship, most likely south to Trelayne. Lord Ringil defeated, despite his dark arts and lethal steel prowess. Brought low by a common freebooter just when victory seemed within his grasp. And the imperial forces scattered, some already taken in chains with the lady Archeth, the rest awaiting a similar fate. Locked in the town jail or, like him, thrust in small groups into the dark, damp stinking confines of individual cellars all across Ornley.

  He snarls and thumps his fist impotently into the rough stone wall at his side, rakes it sideways so the skin over his knuckles breaks and oozes thick, slow droplets of blood. The others startle for a moment in the gloom, stare at him, see what he’s done. The pain burns briefly, but it’s distant, no contender anyway for the other scrapes and bumps and minor gashes he collected in the day’s fight. He grits his teeth, hisses through them like something cornered. His companions look away, staring wordless into the glow from the candle stubs guttering on the cellar’s earthen floor. He can hardly blame them. They have their own demons to contend with—ignominious defeat, forced surrender, most likely torture to look forward to once the League forces get organized, digest their victory and decide it’s time to do some questioning.

  He turns his clenched fist in the flicker of the candles, looks incuriously at the torn knuckles. In the scant, uncertain light, his blood is black.

  Should never have done it.

  Should never have accepted assignment to the search parties and Dragon’s Demise.

  Should never have trusted that the lady Archeth would be safe out of his sight, even in this dull-as-dishwater fish-reeking northern shit-hole.

  Should never have bought into the logic that said the real threat now was the undead sorcerer lord whose grave they sought, that being there to take that fucker down quick and hard was the best service he could render both Empire and the lady Archeth too.

  Would not have trusted, either, not any of it, were it not for the soft, murmured persuasion of that fucking Helmsman.

  CHAPTER 18

  e wakes on a bedroll beside a softly crackling fire. Red sparks escaping skyward over his head to mingle with the cold white scatter of stars. He props himself up and stares through the waver of flames to where Hjel the Dispossessed sits with mandolin in lap and broad-brimmed hat slanted forward over his eyes.

  How’d you find me? he asks.

  Hjel nods across the fire. They brought you.

  Three figures sit cross-legged around the fire to his right, heads bowed as if in prayer. They don’t speak or look at him, they give no sign they know Ringil and Hjel are there with them at all. They don’t even breathe. Aside from the occasional pluck of the night breeze at their ragged garments, they might be statues, carved there in obsidian to mark some auspicious campfire meeting from whatever chronicled histories this place might own.

  But they aren’t.

  They are his dead. His own personal cold command—though actually commanding them in anything is something he still has no inkling how to do. He knows only that they’ve been with him in one way or another since Hinerion and the slave caravan. That every so often, when his own death looms inescapably close, they will step out of whatever shadows they normally keep to and add a chilly thumb to the scales of chance to steer him safe and clear.

  He supposes he should be grateful for the mechanism, whatever it is. But all he feels when he looks at them is an awful, plummeting grief.

  The rangy one with the mutilated head and face, gazing down at a gore-streaked sword he holds balanced on his thighs and cupped lightly in both hands at pommel and point.

  The big, blunt one with the scarred hands and the blacksmith’s hammer in his lap.

  The boy Gerin …

  Half-starved urchin face intent, thin hands empty—the only one he actually saw die, but somehow the link that pins the three of them together and cements them all to Gil.

  He’s not even sure if they know they’re dead.

  Come to that …

  He looks at one hand, turns it in the firelight. Am I … ?

  No. Hjel smiles into the flames. Very far from it. In fact, from what I can see, you are barely here at all. Whatever your shade guard brought here is the thinnest of essences. More’s the pity. That hard warrior’s body of yours is still back in whichever real world owns it.

  Some fucking warrior. Memory crashes in on him. I lost. I got my arse handed to me by some low-rent border thug with a grudge.

  Hjel’s smile melts into a frown. That seems unlikely.

  Hey, you weren’t fucking there.

  Did you want to lose?

  Oh, yeah. Just tired of life, me.

  The dispossessed sorcerer prince lifts his head and nails him with a glitter-eyed stare. You shouldn’t joke about that. I see a weariness and a self-hatred in you that might burn down half the world if you unleashed it, if you finally gave up caring and let go. Now answer me—did you want to lose?

  Ringil sits fully up. Stares down the cold blade of his memories for a while.

  No, he says finally. It was single combat. The lives and freedom of my men if I won.

  The impotent fury of it sits in his belly like the ache of an old wound.

  Hjel shrugs. Then you misjudged your opponent. He is clearly not … some low-rent border thug after all.

  He fucking is.

  Then he had help. Hjel lifts his hands from the strings of his mandolin, gestures open-palmed. How else would he best you? Think about it. See it again. What went wrong?

  Gil peers back into the last solid moments of the duel. He sees again the damage he dealt, the way Klithren weathered it, shrugged it off as if it didn’t matter. He sees again the wisps of blue smoke that join the other man’s blood as it spills, the way the wounds didn’t—

  No, not smoke.

  Suddenly, he’s certain. He sees it again in his mind’s eye, the wisp and flicker of fragmented blue fire like lightning …

  He missed it for what it was in the bright morning air, missed the connection, and in absence of that link, his eyes had made what sense of it they could on their own. He saw smoke. Now, he looks up at Hjel in dawning shock.

  Oh, shit.

  The dispossessed prince nods. Tell me.

  I think the dwenda just chose a human champion.

  I thought they chose you.

  Yeah, well, look how that worked out. Something approaching pique creeping into his tone now. Looks like they’re trying the low end of the market this time.

  That the great ancient elder race out of legend could be satisfied with someone as, well, as basic as Klithren.

  You work with the tools at hand, Dakovash told him once of the Dark Court’s policies. No reason, he supposed, that the dwenda should be any less pragmatic.

  But still, somehow …

  I’ve got to go back.

  You’ve got to go back, agrees Hjel, and strums a gently chiming chord out of his mandolin. In fact—

  HE WOKE WITH A START, ON A LOW WOODEN COT IN THE SOFT LIGHT OF A lantern set on the floor at his side. Splutter and splash of water somewhere faint, blank boards and beams of a cabin roof overhead. Way less clearance than the imperial shipwrights habitually built for, and the woodwork was worn and split with age—he was aboard one of Klithren’s League vessels, then. Sickly heavy reek like temple incense in his parched throat, a deep ache in his jaws and a banging head. Sluggishness through his veins, and the pain was distant—it felt as though they’d drugged him with something. He tried to sit up and failed—found his hands crossed over his chest like the wings of a bird, roped together at wrists and thumbs, multiple coils of thinner cord wound tightly round his palms and fingers.

  Thicker ropes were secured tightly right around the frame of the cot, pinning him in place. He tried to shift his legs, found similar bindi
ngs there.

  Someone wasn’t taking any chances.

  And the ache in his jaw—the same someone had jammed his mouth open on a rough wooden wedge, then gagged him with silk strips soaked in some anointing oil and knotted savagely tight at the nape of his neck. Pain from the pressure flowed steadily up and around to join the throb in his head, where a broad contusion gripped hotly at one temple and the side of his brow.

  No fucking guesses as to how that got there.

  A grunt that wasn’t his. He twisted his head awkwardly and glared across the glow of the lantern to where Klithren of Hinerion sat on a low stool, watching him from the other side of the cabin.

  “Comfortable?” the mercenary asked him.

  Ringil let his gaze turn back up to the wooden ceiling. Judging by the gentle tilt in the cabin space around him, they were at sea. Bound for Trelayne, he assumed.

  “If Venj could see you now, eh?”

  He flickered Klithren a sideways glance. Rolled his eyes.

  Flurry of motion and the other man leaned over him, close enough to smell coffee and lemon on his breath. A mercy blade glinted in one raised hand. Gil felt it snick in behind his ear and lift the cartilage a hairbreadth away from his skull.

  “If I were you, faggot,” said Klithren, soft and very intent, “I’d keep what manners you can about you on this voyage. I am charged with delivering you to Trelayne as intact as possible, but there’s none to say what harm I might need to inflict on you to staunch your black mage sorceries.”

  Gil held the other man’s stare with his own. Poured every ounce of contempt he could muster into his look. He wondered briefly if Risgillen was fucking this one to keep him in thrall.

  What, the way Seethlaw was fucking you, you mean? To keep you in thrall?

  The thought must have kindled some extra measure of hate in his eyes. Klithren broke gaze. Snorted and put his knife away.

  “Don’t know why I bother. I’m pretty sure what they’ll do to you in Trelayne is going to make anything I can put you through here look like tickling.”

  He got up and turned away, stood with his back to Ringil a moment or two. Turned back, face still dark with anger. He gestured at the way Gil was trussed.

  “You know, my men wanted a more permanent solution than this. They wanted your fingers and thumbs hacked off. Your tongue sliced out at the root. Took some convincing out of it, too. You’re alone on this vessel, Eskiath. I left your men under guard back in Ornley, pending pickup from my other ships.”

  Yeah, you’ll be lucky. He’d sent the akyia after the other two vessels.

  “So it’s just you, me, and a boatload of privateers who hate your black mage guts. These men are plain sailor stock; they’re way past superstitious at the best of times, and let me tell you, right now is not the best of times.”

  The mercenary prowled the cabin in the low light from the lantern. He seemed distracted, and a lot less happy than you’d expect under the circumstances. If he was pleased with his victory over Ringil, there was precious little sign of it.

  “They’re nervous, you see. They’re full of fears about kraken and merroigai and unholy consuming fire, and they’ve got a fully declared war for an excuse. I don’t honestly think it’d take much for them to roll right over me. Break in here to get you and then sacrifice you to the Salt Lord in the old way. And while I have a contract with some very important men in Trelayne, I’m just as well served seeing you strung up from the rigging and torn apart with boathooks, and then telling my employers that dead was the best I could do.”

  No Risgillen, then. Or at least not bluntly front and center the way Seethlaw had been. Maybe Klithren was into the cabal and not the Chancellery for his commission and his new command, but he didn’t seem to be aware of the other gifts he’d been given.

  Not yet, anyway.

  Well, nor were you at the time, Gil. Nor were you.

  “Think it over,” the mercenary told him. “Think about behaving. When I come back, maybe I’ll bring you some water.”

  He got up, took the lantern, and went to the cabin door, passed out of Ringil’s field of vision as he did so. Banged the door on his way out with what sounded like unnecessary force.

  Without the lantern, the cabin was sunk in a darkness relieved only by the faint gleam of bandlight through a single porthole in the far wall. Ringil waited in the gloom awhile to make sure Klithren really had gone, then set about exploring his bonds at greater length, carefully testing each coil and knot for some measure of play. He found none. Sailor stock, sure enough.

  He couldn’t get loose, and he certainly couldn’t use the ikinri ‘ska.

  If it would even work in here.

  He spent awhile reflecting on the irony of getting sacrificed to the Salt Lord, when Dakovash and his fellow dark courtiers had apparently spent the last couple of years moving heaven and earth and a few other places besides to shape him into their champion.

  Dakovash—yeah, where’s that slippery fucker when you need him? Or Firfirdar, Hoiran, and the rest, for that matter.

  The Court has always had faith in your ability to find your own way. It is what draws us to you.

  Ask yourself—what use does any god have for worshippers who tug constantly at her sleeve like so many overmothered children?

  Yes, well.

  He drifted for a while after that, trying not to focus on the raw pain in his mouth, his dust-dry throat, and his stiffened muscles. He wondered if there was some way to get through to the Grey Places that didn’t involve actual sorcerous effort. He’d woken there on occasion in the midst of fevers or while drunk, with no clear recollection of how it had happened. He didn’t know, looking back, if he owed some dark courtier or other for the passage, or if he’d somehow done it himself and then forgotten. Or if, on those occasions, he’d just been dreaming and never really gone in the first place

  Come to that, even if he could push through right now, wouldn’t he wake there still bound and roped to this fucking cot?

  As you step through from your own world, so exactly you will arrive in the Margins.

  Hjel, explaining to Gil as his father once explained it to him. Wisdom handed down the line of dispossessed princes from the Creature at the Crossroads. It was, Hjel tells him, something to do with conservation, though what was conserved and in what kind of vessels, he admits he doesn’t know. Those mysterious black glass long-jars they sometimes stumble on in rusting waist-high racks or discarded in piles at certain points on their travels, perhaps …

  THE FIRST TIME HJEL SHOWS HIM THE JARS, HE TRIES TO PICK ONE UP FROM the top of its rack and is mildly shocked at the weight. They’re slim and gently tapered, about the length of a modest broadsword and the girth of a fortification fence pole at the thick end, but they’re heavier than the biggest campaign pack he’s ever had to lift. The closed ones are faintly warm to the touch and capped off at the tapered end with bluntly rounded stoppers that remind him, frankly, of nothing so much as the end of a gigantic straining cock. There’s no sign of handles or even wrapping bolts to knot a carry cord, so he manhandles the thing with open hands, gathers it back in his arms like a big bonfire log, into the crook of his elbows and up against his chest with a rolling impact that makes him grunt. There’s space for another one stacked against the first, but he doubts he could hold them both up. He doubts he could carry this one more than fifty feet without setting it down to rest.

  What’s in here? he pants at Hjel.

  The sorcerer prince shrugs. You’re asking the wrong man. You can’t get them open, and they will not break. Many have tried.

  Ringil lets go with a gasp, leaps back to save his toes, and proves Hjel’s point as the released canister crashes down against one rusted corner of the rack, then tumbles to the floor apparently none the worse for the impact. He crouches and rolls it carefully over on the ground a couple of times but can find no damage, not even a scratch.

  He does, however, in the course of his search come up with a single imperfect
ion in the jar’s surface—about a third of the way down from the cap, minute lines of script are etched lengthwise into the smooth black glass curve, in an alphabet he cannot read. Next to them is set an equally tiny etched image—a human skull apparently fracturing apart under the influence of what might have been the sun’s rays, except that they fall not from a sun but from a curious symbol like a double looped knot or maybe a pair of empty oval eyes just touching in the middle and staring outward.

  He can’t read it, can’t decipher it at all. But if that’s not a warding, a binding spell of some sort, then he doesn’t know what is.

  Hjel shifts impatiently behind him. If we spend so long poring over every lost thing the Margins offer up, we’ll never reach the glyph cliffs at all.

  Are they all marked like this?

  The sorcerer prince sighs. Yes. Every one I’ve ever looked at is marked like that. And no, I have no clue what it says. Hang around in the Margins long enough, you get used to that sort of thing. Now come on, let’s get out of here.

  Ringil brushes his fingertips across the minutely carved glyphs, feels their tiny tracks through the callouses a lifetime of swordsmanship has left on his skin. Then he looks away across the marsh plain around them, the empty gray sky these things have lain abandoned under for who knows how many thousands of years, and a shiver comes to walk up his spine.

  Can’t read it, can’t decipher the spell. And suddenly he doesn’t want to.

  Later on in the journey—what feels like days later, but in the Grey Places who can tell—Hjel relents a little and takes them off the paved track they’re following to show Ringil a place between standing stones where the ground is scattered with more of the same jars, all of them opened. Gil goes to pick one up and finds it almost weightless. It’s a comical moment, he staggers upright with the surplus force he’s unleashed to lift the thing, nearly goes over on his arse as a result. He recovers, catches Hjel smirking.

  Very fucking funny.