The Dark Defiles

by Richard K. Morgan

  “Fuck you—lying faggot piece of shit.”

  Ringil made a pained face. “Says the man who told me I was the only prisoner on this ship.”

  He twisted left and right in his chair, gestured with elaborate irony at the grim-featured imperial marines who flanked him. They’d not been out of their irons long, and their faces still bore the marks of the rough handling they’d had from Klithren’s men. They stood like statues at attention in the torchlight, but they stared across the table at Klithren like he was food.

  Along with Klithren himself, they probably thought they had a pretty good idea of what was coming next.

  Ringil was feeling tired and pissed off enough that he’d be sorry to disappoint them.

  FINDING OUT ABOUT THE MARINES WAS SHEER LUCK. IT SEEMED THEY’D been brought aboard in chains and confined belowdecks early in the day, long before Ringil was stretchered down to the wharf that evening under Klithren’s watchful eye. Noyal Rakan wasn’t there to see it; he was still hiding somewhere out on the upper fringes of Ornley, waiting for nightfall. And he spoke no Naomic in any case, could not have understand anything he overheard the privateers saying even when he’d stowed away to rescue Gil. He’d never had any reason to suspect there might be any other imperials aboard.

  And you, Gil, let an overweening sense of your own importance beat out any suspicion Klithren might not be telling the truth.

  Nice going.

  In fact, if one trembling young privateer hadn’t cracked and started babbling when Ringil quizzed him about the whereabouts of the Ravensfriend, neither he nor Rakan might have been any the wiser.

  Senger Hald had been confined, with the rough courtesy due a noble and a commander, to a lower-deck bosun’s cabin—Gil supposed they might have stumbled on him sooner rather than later. But the dozen or so other marines Klithren had chosen to bring along as secondary trophies were not as lucky. They’d all been crammed into a damp holding space down in the stern, built for exactly this purpose, but with about half that number in mind. They’d had no food or water, and they’d had to share the space with rats that hadn’t reacted well to the encroachment. They were in a fine mood by the time Rakan went to let them out—ready to take on the entire privateer crew empty-handed if they had to, and a little disappointed to discover that particular piece of heavy lifting had already been done.

  Suddenly having a dozen loyal men at his disposal made Ringil’s immediate situation a lot easier, but it didn’t change the basic problem he faced.

  “Check the armory,” he told Hald, when the more immediate business of lowering an anchor and locking down the privateers in the forward hold was complete. “Chances are there’s a portable torture table packed away down there somewhere. When you find it, bring it to me here.”

  “With pleasure.”

  “We’ll need some torches for those brackets there, too. Oh, and have someone get me a soft chair from the captain’s cabin. I have a feeling this is going to be a long session.”

  The marines found the table without too much trouble—it couldn’t have looked much different from similar imperial equipment they’d be used to working with. They brought it up to the main deck in pieces and set it up for him. Square and sturdy-legged once locked together, it was built of well-seasoned marsh oak and was broad enough to play chess across, or would have been but for the black iron manacle rail in the center. It had seen a lot of use. The surface around the rail was scarred and stained with accumulated wear and tear. Hammers and nails, carpenter’s drill-bits and chopping blades, poorly scrubbed away blood—all had left their mark.

  He ordered the mercenary brought up on deck. Sat in his chair on the inquisitor’s side of the table and watched as three imperial marines forced Klithren down onto a stool opposite, cut his bonds, then yanked his arms forward and cuffed his wrists into the appropriate manacles on the rack. Aside from a livid bruise across the forehead and a broken lip, the mercenary looked in reasonable shape. He’d flinched when they first got him up the companionway onto the deck and he saw where he was headed, but it was momentary and then he had it together. The only resistance he offered was a gritted snarl.

  Gil supposed he knew they’d just break his arms if he gave them any real trouble.

  “Neck, too?” asked one of the marines hopefully, gesturing at the chain-link loop and ratchet that would lock Klithren’s head flat to the board.

  “No, that’s fine. Leave him the way he is for now.”

  They finished checking the manacles, stood back. Waited expectantly in the flicker from the bracketed torches set about the deck. A couple of them, the ones who’d put the table together, had tooled up from the ship’s store for the occasion—pincers, hammers, galley knives.

  He turned his attention back to Klithren.

  “Comfortable?” he couldn’t resist asking.

  “Fuck you, faggot.”

  “Don’t go giving me ideas.”

  Klithren bared his teeth like a street dog at bay.

  WHICH WAS ABOUT AS GOOD AS IT GOT.

  Even cuffed to the torture board, Klithren was hard as nails and taut with hate. A professional lifetime spent rubbing shoulders with death and screaming agony gave him the reserves. He awaited the pain of torture with fatalistic calm, the way any rank-and-file captured soldier would; he lived and breathed the moment-by-moment luxury of its absence and meantime built what strength he could for when it must finally come. Any fear he had was stashed away deep to make way for more usefully savage emotions. Any ghost of the uncertainty he’d seemed afflicted with when he held Ringil prisoner was good and buried.

  Gil hadn’t seen such a depth of will glaring back at him since he murdered Poppy Snarl in the scrub outside Hinerion.

  And Klithren was no use to him dead.

  Try again.

  “Look, I’m not saying I wouldn’t have killed the prick if I’d got the chance. But I didn’t get the chance. Venj came looking for me, looking to cash me in for the price on my head. Something else cashed him in first.”

  Klithren sneered. “Yeah, I remember—marauding Majak tribesmen.”

  “Okay, that was some lizard-shit I fed you to get your back turned. Fact remains, it wasn’t me.” Gil bent the truth a useful fraction. “I didn’t even see it go down.”

  “No?” The rage leaking back into the mercenary’s tone again. “You were standing over his fucking corpse when I got there.”

  “I was surrounded by corpses when you got there. Remember? Some of them were torn in pieces. You really think I did all that myself?”

  Klithren leaned closer across the table, maybe the better to sneer, maybe just to ease the strain on his stretched arms. “Why do you give a flying fuck what I think, Eskiath?

  “Because I need your help.”

  “Then I guess you’re fucked.”

  Gil lost his temper.

  “You know, I could just as well have these boys here applying heated irons up your arse right now,” he snapped. “Or let them burn your prick and balls off to make way for a new cunt. Both very popular punishments down south for recalcitrant slaves.”

  “I ain’t your fucking slave.”

  Got to be smarter than this, Gil. Got to find another angle.

  Actually, he knew what he was probably going to have to do.

  He just didn’t want to do it.

  “Look,” he said evenly. “You’re a mercenary. Down in Hinerion, you were a bounty hunter for whoever paid. It’s not such a reach for you to take Empire silver. All I—”

  “Go fuck yourself, faggot. I’m a knight commander in the United Land Armies of the Trelayne League. Commissioned in League gold to bring in your backstabbing coward skull.”

  “Well you’re doing a bang-up job of that so far.”

  “Fuck you—”

  “—faggot, yeah. I think we’ve covered this ground already.” Ringil gestured impatiently. The torchlight made jumpy shadows off the motion. “You know, Klithren, you’re coming across a lot more stupid than I
took you for. You really think that shiny new rank they gave you counts for anything? It’s just a license to stand between richer men than you and their enemies, and bleed on their account. I don’t know who hired you exactly—actually, scratch that, I do have a pretty good idea—but do you really think that fuckwit cabal plans to do any of the dying in this new war they’ve got cooking?”

  He was watching the mercenary’s face—saw the faintest flicker of reaction on the word cabal, barely there, but enough. He stowed the confirmation, pressed the point, some genuine anger creeping in and warming his tone.

  “Findrich, Kaad, the rest of them—they’re using you the exact same way they used us all last time around. What benefits did you see for fighting the Scaled Folk after it was done? Five years we bled, and when it was safely over, those fuckers crawled back out of their holes and built a whole new slave trade on the back of what we’d saved from the lizards. Proud of your new employers, are you?”

  Klithren shrugged as best he could with the manacles tugging at his arms. “Proud of yours? Last time I checked, it was your imperial friends started this ball rolling. The Empire walked into a chartered League city unprovoked, a city that also happens to be my hometown by the way, and they set loose the troops. You got any fucking idea what that looks like from the inside, sir Glades noble war hero?”

  Actually, yes.

  Ringil sat silent, wrapped in bloodshot recollection. When the war against the Scaled Folk wound down, he’d spent altogether too long witnessing the depredations of imperial soldiery in disputed border towns. Had, in fact, gotten himself badly hurt trying to stop it on one occasion, before he wised up and went home.

  That the League’s forces were engaged in entirely similar behavior elsewhere in the borders, that the chaos was general and the men committing it as often as not just as bewildered as their victims, that the whole thing was in the end resolved with a flurry of save-face negotiation and the forced relocation of thousands—none of these facts had ever done anything to wash out the bloodied tinge of those memories.

  Klithren had him.

  Ringil looked across the table into his face and saw that the other man knew it, too.

  “What’s the matter, war hero?” Klithren sat back as far as the iron cuffs would let him. “Nothing smart to say about that? One scumbag mercenary to another?”

  One of the marines stooped to speak beside his ear. “Want me to slice off a couple of his fingers for you, my lord?” he asked helpfully. “Just the little ones to start, give him something to think about?”

  Ringil grimaced. “No, that won’t be necessary. Thank you.”

  “As you like, sir. Happy to do it, though—just give the word. I trained with a torture detachment at Dhashara, sir. Very tough bandits up there, I know what I’m doing.”

  You’re going to have to do it, Gil. You know you are.

  A tiny, trickling calm now that he’d accepted it.

  “Tell me something, sellsword,” he said quietly. “How do you think you beat me, back in Ornley?”

  Klithren snorted. “You looking for tuition?”

  “I tagged you twice before you took me down. What happened to those wounds?”

  “Wounds?” But this time, the snort rang forced. “I’ve had worse scratches off the kingsthorn around Tlanmar.”

  “Yes, probably.” And now he leaned in toward the other man, certain that this was the weak point, the source of the restless uncertainty he’d spotted in Klithren down in the cabin before their roles were reversed. “But your mail was sliced right through, wasn’t it?”

  The mercenary said nothing. His gaze skittered away over Ringil’s shoulder. Gil waited a couple of beats, kept his voice soft.

  “The Ravensfriend is a Kiriath blade. Kiriath tempered steel, an eternal edge. You’ve been in this game long enough, you know what that means. Deliver that edge right, it’ll go through chain link like it was cotton. And I delivered it right, you know I did. Right through your mail—twice. Big fucking holes, both times. But somehow, all you scored under that damage was a couple of scratches.” Ringil was watching the mercenary intently. “That’s not possible, is it?”

  Klithren sniffed. Met Gil’s eyes. “All I know about yesterday is you lost, Eskiath. Make up whatever lizardshit you need to, if it makes you feel better. Do whatever you’re going to do here. But Kiriath steel or no Kiriath steel, I took you down, motherfucker.”

  Ringil shook his head.

  “There’s a lot more to it than that. You think you’ve stepped inside the charmed circle back in Trelayne? Seen the real power behind the Chancellery? It goes way deeper than you think. Findrich and his pals are fucking with powers they can’t control, powers that are going to roll right over them when the time comes, like a cartwheel over dung.”

  “Yeah, right. The Dark is abroad, it prowls the marsh. The Aldrain winter is coming.” Klithren spat on the table between them, jerked his chin at Ringil. “Black mage lizardshit, you think I haven’t heard it all before? Go fuck yourself with your Kiriath steel.”

  A tight silence. The marines twitched, yearning etched into their young faces.

  You’re going to have to do it, Gil. Let’s just get on with it, shall we?

  He sighed. “You know the real problem here, bounty hunter?”

  Klithren showed him the street dog snarl again, but Gil thought he saw a tremor at the edge of it this time. Hard as nails or not, and contrary to Ringil’s earlier insult, the mercenary wasn’t stupid. He would have picked up on the new calm in his captor, would understand how it presaged the endgame.

  He offered Klithren a thin smile.

  “The real problem is that you took my friends. And I want them back.”

  “Yeah?” The mercenary spread his fingers, studied his hands in their cuffs with affected boredom. His voice missed steady by an inch. “Well, I want to fuck a Yhelteth virgin princess. Let’s see who gets lucky first, shall we?”

  Ringil laughed politely. “No, you haven’t understood,” he said.

  And launched himself forward.

  Grabbed Klithren’s fingers between his own and snapped his fists closed. The mercenary reared back in shock, then tried to mend his failed nerve by leaping straight back in with a full force head-butt. Ringil jerked his own head clear by fractions and Klithren’s forehead went all the way down. Hit the table and the iron manacle rail with a solid clank.

  The marines leapt forward on either side, curses and drawn blades—

  “No!” Gil kept his hold on Klithren’s fingers, shut the imperials down on voice alone. “It’s okay, we’re fine here. We’re fine.”

  The marines eased back, one muscle at a time. Gil saw them shoot each other glances about equal parts bemusement and anger. A fair bet they’d never attended an interrogation session quite like this one before.

  You know you’re going to have to—

  He lowered his head carefully beside Klithren’s. “Just fighting men, shooting the breeze. Right Hinerion?”

  The mercenary groaned. Lashed sideways with his head, but Ringil was too close for him to make it into a blow of any consequence. Gil pressed back, skull to skull, feeling Klithren’s stubble rasp against his own cheek. Both their faces dipped to within inches of the torture table’s ravaged wooden surface. He let go Klithren’s right hand with his left, slammed his palm up hard against the other side of the mercenary’s skull to keep the clinch.

  “I said you haven’t understood,” he hissed low. “I am going to have my friends back. If I have to burn the whole—”

  Klithren bucked against his grip. Ringil clinched harder with head and hand, dug his nails into the mercenary’s face.

  “—the whole fucking city of Trelayne into the marsh to bring them home, then I will do exactly that. Those fucks in the cabal, the Chancellery, my own fucking father—if they think I caused trouble last time I was in town, they have seen and understood nothing. Are you beginning to get which way the wind blows here, Klithren of Hinerion?”


  Grunt of muffled rage, another attempt to butt sideways. He felt Klithren’s feet thrashing about for purchase beneath the table.

  You know you’re going to—

  He reached down, reached inward. Spoke in rasping tones, hauled hard, as if pulling some massive root crop fruit up through the dry-baked earth of a pitiless summer. Felt in the pit of his stomach how the power built with each glyph, how it washed about seeking an exit, any exit other than the one he now demanded. Let the rumbling, answering snarl come up his throat and out through his gritted teeth, the sequenced cant, the savage warning to whatever he was struggling against here, living thing or insensate matter or something somewhere in between, to get the fuck out of his way. He kept his grip on Klithren, kept his weight locked in, kept on pulling at the stubborn edges of the rip he’d made, the damage he’d done to whatever fabric this was …

  And through.

  Like a fist punched into mud, and out an unexpected other side.

  Into weeping quiet.

  Ringil shudders and lets go. They’re here.

  He hears it for sure now—the low keening, like the wind in tall grass, but he knows that’s not what it is. He grips Klithren’s head for a moment like a drowning man clinging to some smoothly rounded rock. He turns his face and drags a hard, smearing kiss up over the other man’s cheek to his ear. Lets go and stands shakily back. Jerks his chin at Klithren’s huddled form where it’s slumped over the torture table.

  He gets his breathing mostly back under control.

  Now let’s stop fucking about, he says unsteadily.

  The Grey Places spread out around them, marsh flats to the horizon in every direction and a vast pale sky above.

  SOME THINGS SHIFT IN SUBSTANCE OR FORM WHEN THEY COME THROUGH to the Margins, some things melt completely away. Hjel tells him he suspects it depends on how likely or unlikely the item in question is to exist across a whole range of different times and places.

  The torture table hasn’t changed very much at all.

  The wood is a little more worn and cracked, perhaps, and whitened in the cracks with some lichen or mildew he doesn’t recognize. He thinks the scarring on the tabletop looks different, too—suddenly unfamiliar patterns among the scatter of dents and gouges, changed outlines to the blotched and faded stains, a whole new map of atrocity to get used to. The manacle rail is rusted, the manacles themselves are no longer iron; they look to be made of some cured bluish gray hide.