The Dark Defiles

by Richard K. Morgan

  Tharalanangharst’s tone turned acidic. “Be that as it may, daughter of kir-Flaradnam, we were only ever able to determine two basic truths about the Talons of the Sun, busy as we were fulfilling our purpose and ensuring that the Aldrain did not obliterate the People. First, despite the name, the weapon does not appear to have anything to do with the sun, or at least not the sun that this world orbits around. And second, the uses to which the dwenda put their device appeared neither to tax it very much nor suit its capacities particularly well. It was a weapon immeasurably more powerful than anything the People had access to, but equally, it seemed hopelessly out of place in the Aldrain armory. It was, if you like, a broadsword used by schoolchildren to cut twine.” Another of the Warhelm’s characteristic blank pauses. “So, then. Do you wish me to make an assumption based on this evidence, kir-Archeth?”

  “Yeah, why don’t you do that.”

  “Then assume this: we are talking about a weapon held over from the cataclysm visited upon this world tens of thousands of years before the Kiriath arrived here through the veins of the earth. A battle relic of what some of your more well-read human protégés five thousand years ago liked to hark back to as the Time of Dark and Angry Ancient Gods.”

  Archeth watched the sky through the window. Early stars glimmered in the gaps between soft mounded cloud, the band leaned in from the horizon at a drunken angle. She glanced upward at the roof, expectant. Got nothing in return. It took her a couple of moments to understand that Tharalanangharst had stopped talking for good. Had chosen to absent itself in the wake of its last, charged words, and leave her swimming for herself in the implications.

  An odd quiet made itself felt, dropping into place like shutters across her view, forcing her back to the room, a half-turn to look at the Dragonbane still sitting there on the couch. He met her gaze and shrugged.

  “Dark and Angry Ancient Gods, eh? Doesn’t sound too clever.”

  She felt the chilly, dead breath in the phrase, tickling the short hairs at the back of her neck. She shook it off, impatient.

  “We have to get out of here,” she said. “We have to get home. Jhiral isn’t going to be able to handle any of this alone.”

  “Jhiral isn’t going to be able to handle any of this at all. But that doesn’t put us one foot farther south than we already are. And I don’t see how we can get back to Yhelteth in time to make a difference.”

  “You said you could walk us out of the Wastes.”

  “Yeah.” Egar nodded at the fruit bowl beside him. “Given enough of this five-thousand-year-old grub, some packs to carry it in, something resembling decent weapons, we might make it to Gallows Gap, sure. Might.”

  “This morning you were talking about doing it on a few mouthfuls of ham and oil, and some sea-soaked biscuits. You seemed pretty comfortable with the idea then.”

  “What can I tell you? Didn’t want to spoil anyone’s mood.” The Dragonbane stooped forward on the couch, leaned elbows on his knees, and looked down into his own cupped and empty hands. “Archidi, if we hadn’t found this place, chances are we would all have died in the Wastes. I doubt we’d have made a hundred miles south. But you don’t ever say things like that to the people you have at your back. I mean, they know it as well as you do, but that doesn’t mean they want to fucking hear it. What they want is for you to take charge. Distract them from it, give them some hope, some reason to keep putting one foot in front of the other.”

  “Even if it’s a crock of lizardshit?”

  “Especially if it’s a crock of lizardshit.” He looked up at her, gave her a bleak smile. “We’re all bound for the Sky Road, sooner or later. How we walk it depends on how we walked in the world beneath. So you don’t sit on your arse whining and waiting for your death to come find you. You go looking for it. Track the fucker down, force the issue. You walk, Archidi, you find the strength to walk, and you keep walking till you drop. Now some men don’t have that strength, so you have to lend it to them.”

  She gestured. “So we get walking.”

  “Not saying we don’t. But I still don’t see us riding to the rescue in Yhelteth. We’ve got the Wastes to cross, and if we do make it as far as Gallows Gap, we’re still deep in League territory, four or five hundred miles north of a border that’s on fire. And half our company is men who see the League as their side in the fight. Remember what I said about Sogren, how they’re going to feel? Not going to help the balance any, is it?”

  “So what do you want to do?”

  “I don’t know.” He got up from the couch, yawned and stretched like a man crucified. “Get some sleep might be a start. Then, tomorrow, we take stock. Feed up the men, lay some plans. And yes, try to get home. But you got to stop worrying about how fast we can get back to Yhelteth. Let that wanker Jhiral fight his own fucking battles.”

  “I promised—” She chopped off the retort, but not before the Dragonbane spotted where it was going.

  “I know, I know. The Great Kiriath Mission. But they fucking dumped it on you, Archidi. They cut and ran, and they left you holding the pieces. So give yourself a break, why don’t you? Let’s just worry about what’s possible here and now. Not get hung up on some cobbled-together dream your father had a few thousand years ago when his demons couldn’t persuade him to wipe us all out.”

  She made a noise that felt like collapsing. The Dragonbane heard it and crossed the room to her. She could see he wanted to embrace her, would have liked it herself, but could not rid herself of some stubborn, refusing fiber at her core. She held up a single arm instead. He slapped her hand, palm to palm, and they made the clasp, two hands, then four, tight. He hauled her close over the grip anyway, put his forehead to hers.

  “Go to bed, Archidi,” he said gruffly. “Get some rest. And for Urann’s sake, stop feeling fucking guilty about everything for a change.”

  GET SOME REST.

  Ha.

  She lay in the huge bed, staring across the darkened expanse of the bedchamber at the windows and the clouded night sky beyond. Bandlight filtered in, but there wasn’t much of it. Krinzanz need pounded in her veins like the ocean. Her mind churned the events of the day—near death hanging upside down, hunger and cold and a meager fire on a beach, fresh hope rising with the news, An-Kirilnar growing closer along the causeway, the species portcullis, the death of Sogren. Now the Warhelm’s guided tour of the ancient past, the sword and Cormorion Ilusilin Mayne, the truth about the Illwrack Changeling, the shattering revelations about her father and the mission.

  Or had it been lying about that bit … ?

  You know the truth when you hear it, Archidi.

  Really? We came north because you thought you’d heard the truth, and look what happened there. Look where we could have been otherwise.

  Oh, give it a fucking rest. You heard the Dragonbane.

  Yeah, the wisdom of buffalo herders turned mercenary captains. Precious beyond the price of pearls. Maybe he can recommend you some whores as well.

  She tried masturbating to thoughts of Ishgrim, her pale honey limbs and curves, her hooded eyes and undone mouth, but despite her best efforts, climax was as out of reach as the girl herself. She gave it up, flopped back hot and irritable in the covers.

  What would Ishgrim do when the sky turned black?

  What was she doing now, come to that, with tremors shaking the city, and the tramp of hot-eyed religious morons through the streets, fired up by fear and Citadel cant, on their way to glorious martyrdom somewhere in the north, but happy, more than happy, to start trouble right here, right now, at the faintest hint of anything they could take righteous offense at, above all if it was committed by a woman …

  You have to get back. You have to stop this from happening.

  You have to get some rest.

  She felt as if someone had hammered her into very small pieces that somehow still retained all their links with each other. The enormity of what her father had done to the Warhelms towered in her head, the enormity of the crime they’d
planned to commit if Flaradnam had left them empowered. The enormity of the power they’d had.

  What she wouldn’t give for that power now.

  For a fraction of that power.

  To have just one intact Warhelm at her back. Never mind the luxury half dozen that her father’s generation had apparently summoned from the void to fight the dwenda the last time—she’d settle for a single one and count herself well-armed.

  Would that have been so fucking much to ask? That just one of those colossally empowered creatures could have come up with a better fix for the problem than extermination, that it could have come to some kind of agreement with Flaradnam and preserved its strength for later days. Anakhanaladras in the south or Ingharnana—

  Wait a minute …

  She snapped bolt upright in the bed.

  Ingharn … anasharal?

  What kind of coincidence would that have to—

  She leaned back on her elbows, dug back through the messy whirl of her thoughts, sifting for Tharalanangharst’s words. Up in endless circuit between the world and the band …

  That’s no fucking coincidence, Archidi.

  She sat up again, got herself cross-legged under the covers. Noticed absently that her ruined clothes were gone from where she’d stepped out of them beside the bed.

  “Warhelm?”

  “I hear you, daughter of kir-Flaradnam. What is your will?”

  CHAPTER 24

  hen Dragon’s Demise stood about half a league out of Ornley for what looked to be—thank Firfirdar’s flaming cunt for that—the very last time, he went up on deck to watch the sun set and have a quiet word with Nyanar. The noble captain was still somewhat shaken by his captivity at the hands of the privateers—all thirty-odd hours of it—and wasn’t much in the mood for conversation. He was also, Ringil discovered, nursing a deep resentment that Klithren had chosen to leave him imprisoned in Ornley and take Senger Hald back to Trelayne instead. It reflected badly on the Nyanar clan that he hadn’t been considered worthy of immediate ransom and the marine commander had. Didn’t this League pirate scum know who he was?

  “Klithren of Hinerion is a commoner,” Ringil consoled him. “Recently and rapidly promoted with the war. He’s a pragmatic man, knows nothing of nobility. Doubtless, he saw only commander Hald’s military value for interrogation. And the risk of leaving him behind with his men. Ornley jail is not what one would call secure holding for soldiers of marine temper.”

  “That’s as may be,” snapped Nyanar. “But it is a gross breach of wartime etiquette to privilege such crass pragmatism above recognition of rank. And bad form to assign a knight’s command to a commoner in the first place. This is not the same League that my father went to war with in the twenties. That was a war between gentlemen.”

  “Indeed,” said Ringil absently, watching the dun cluster of sails on Sea Eagle’s Daughter and the League vessel Mayne’s Moor Blooded off to stern and starboard. Beyond them, the sun declined into torn cloud the color of bruises, stained the sky bloody enough for omens to please the most exacting of black mages. He gazed west into it all, soaking up the rich and violent colors while he could.

  Where he was going next, there’d be none of this.

  “Do you know, I was not permitted water to wash in for the entire day? And they only fed me from the tavern’s leavings at nightfall?”

  Well, at least they didn’t roast and eat you.

  “Can you manage with this crew?” Gil asked him bluntly. He thought if Nyanar whined on much longer about his ordeal, he might end up putting him over the side.

  “In this weather? Oh, yes.” The captain pulled a sour face. “But if we have to deal with storms such as we met coming north …”

  “There’ll be no storms.” Ringil was not honestly sure he could deliver on that just yet, but he handed out the cheap reassurance anyway, for what it was worth. Hoped the Dark Court would take the hint.

  Nyanar sniffed. “Well, let’s hope you’re right. With this few reliable hands to count on, we’re spread very thin.”

  He had a point. It had been a tricky balancing act—how many of Klithren’s men to leave behind in Ornley, how many to co-opt for the voyage south. In the end, Ringil decided to take both remaining Empire vessels home, mainly because he couldn’t be bothered moving Anasharal from Sea Eagle’s Daughter to Dragon’s Demise, but also because he might need to split his forces once they reached the Gergis coast. And then, for appearances, they needed at least one League warship to play the role of conquering escort. Mayne’s Moor Blooded was there for the taking—rather than adrift somewhere up the coast, decks soaked with blood and littered with the akyia-butchered remnants of crew—so that was that. Three vessels to crew with the sailing complement of one, plus the sparse crop of imperial marines, sailors, and Throne Eternal they’d liberated from holding in Ornley. Even as supervisors of co-opted privateer manpower, that left them stretched.

  Ringil longed silently for Mahmal Shanta’s supremely competent hand on the tiller, but, well, nothing to be done about that for the time being. Nyanar was what he had.

  He glanced sternward, where Ornley and the whole Hironish coastline were shrinking and sinking into the early evening gloom. If the Illwrack Changeling was still back there somewhere, still buried someplace long twisted out of memory by the elaborations of lazy chroniclers or epic storytellers chasing something more dramatic and sonorous than true—well, then, his bones could rest in peace. Gil was done digging holes. He’d told Archeth back in Yhelteth that the whole quest was likely a waste of time, a wild ride after phantom fancies, and now he had Firfirdar’s word for it that he’d been right all along.

  “I’m going to my cabin,” he told Nyanar. “I’m locking the door and taking out the key. I may be some time. You or any of the men hear anything scratching at that door and asking to be let out, even it sounds like me, you don’t listen and you don’t open. Got that?”

  The captain looked queasy. Like everyone else, by now he’d have heard the story the marines told about Klithren’s interrogation—how Ringil, a recalcitrant Klithren and the torture table itself had all disappeared for the solid count of sixty, left nothing behind but wisps of smoke and flickers of blue light and a scorch mark on the deck where they’d stood. And how they’d come back—Klithren uncuffed from the table and apparently unharmed, but cringing like a dog in a thunderstorm, the iron cuffs on the manacle rail sliced open and bent back as if they were nothing more than stiff leather, a faint scent of burning in the air. And how the air around that burn mark on the deck had seemed to emanate faintly heard moans and wailing right through until dawn …

  “But … will you be gone long?” Nyanar’s voice was almost plaintive.

  “Quite possibly.” He thought about it. They had a good few weeks at sea ahead of them for sure. “Look—at worst, I’ll be back by the time you raise the Gergis coast or I’ll be dead and not coming back at all. In which case, you run west for the cape and head home under full sail. And don’t let Klithren of Hinerion across onto this ship at any point—I don’t think he’s going to be any trouble; we’ve struck a gentlemen’s agreement and he seems to be holding to it, but—”

  A mannered snort, presumably at the epithet gentleman attached to someone like Klithren. Gil ignored it, pressed on.

  “—but I have been wrong once or twice in my illustrious career, so best not to take any unnecessary chances. He stays aboard Mayne’s Moor Blooded, where Hald can keep an eye on him.” Scratching around, hoping he’d thought of everything that could … “Oh yeah, and if you’ve raised Gergis, I haven’t shown, and there’s something else in that cabin, scratching to get out, then you get everyone across to Sea Eagle’s Daughter and you scuttle this fucking ship. That clear?”

  Nyanar swallowed. “And if … if something … untoward … occurs before that, during the voyage? If we need you? What then?”

  Gil clapped him cheerfully on the shoulder. “Then I’ll know, and I’ll be back,” he lied. “But I’ll
come back through the door myself; I won’t need any help. Tell the men that, make sure it’s clear. Can’t answer for your safety if you don’t.”

  He was probably laying it on a bit thick, but better that than leave this pampered noble idiot any latitude for error. Better to cover all the angles as best he could, and hope the ramshackle makeshift command structure he was leaving would hold.

  Time to go.

  Down in his cabin, he locked the door as promised, took the reclaimed Kiriath steel carpenter’s bradawl he’d blagged from Shanta back in the shipyards at Yhelteth, and scratched wards into lock plate, door hinges, and jamb. He made himself go slow, make sure of each stroke. He’d nearly burned down a waterfront tavern in the upriver districts of the city last year, pissing about with fire wards for practice and getting the cross strokes out of true.

  Faint flicker of blue, etching the door’s dimensions, fading out.

  Done.

  He took the key out of the lock, etched glyphs down its shaft, and put it under the pillow in his bunk. He put on his cloak, took the Ravensfriend, scabbard, and harness, lay back on the bunk with his sword hand draped over the side to the floor, boots up on the foot bar and crossed at the ankles. He put his free hand behind his head and stared up at the ceiling.

  Began to recite the slow, unwinding cadences Hjel taught him. Described the glyphs to the ceiling with the fingers of his left hand.

  Anticipation prickled through him.

  He wasn’t sure if it was the slow seep of blood into his prick at thoughts of Hjel, the siren song of the white ikinri ‘ska cliffs, waiting in endless glyphed mystery, or simply the thought of what he and the Ravensfriend would need to do once he reached Trelayne.

  Then, as the trance state Hjel had taught him came steadily on, he saw that, really, there might not be much difference or distance between any of those three things.

  The cabin ceiling grew less significant overhead, the bunk seemed to drift like an unmoored boat. He felt himself slipping toward the Grey Places. Compared to the raw force it had taken to punch himself and Klithren through last time, this was almost languid. Lesson one, grim scar-faced swordsman sorcerer—some places in the Margins are easier to reach than others. Hjel smiles as he says it, pillowed only inches away, and traces the scar on Gil’s cheek with one gentle fingertip. The reason so few aspiring witches and warlocks make it through is because they’re so bloody single-minded. They aim for the heart of the ikinri ‘ska every time—which is a bit like trying to swim up a waterfall in spring spate. Trick is, look for kinder waters. If you’ve got any natural aptitude, the Margins want you here anyway. Use that. Loosen up, float and swim wide. Relax and let the currents bring you. You can always walk the rest of the way in, once you’re here.