The Dark Defiles

by Richard K. Morgan

  The quiet darkness curtains in behind his shout.

  Ringil studies the flames for a while.

  Well, he says mildly, at least your father’s dead. He’s not running around somewhere trying to have you killed.

  He looks up. Hjel meets his eye and sighs. Ahh, Gil, look—

  No, it’s fine. Skip it. Roughly now. I’d be dead if it weren’t for what you’ve done for me already. Worse than dead. I tend to forget that sometimes.

  You needed to forget. The sorcerer prince’s voice is soft and urgent. You told me the tale, but those memories come from a place I have not yet been, a time that has yet to pass for me. It makes sense that such premonition would fade. That kind of forgetting is how we deal with the Margins.

  That’s not what I meant.

  No. I know.

  I meant I can be a selfish, graceless fucker sometimes.

  Well. Hjel looks away. I, uh—that wasn’t the warmest welcome I could have given you, either, was it?

  Had warmer. Gil risks the crooked corner of a smile. So Daelfi was right. This Destiny of the Gods shit is chewing you up.

  Hjel gives him back his half smile, but there’s pain in the corners. Look, it doesn’t matter right now. Why don’t you just come over here, Gil?

  No, you’re all right. Best if we just get some rest and talk about it over breakfast.

  There’ve been times in the past, and other men, where he would have bounced back from the quarrel. Used the slosh of raised emotions to fuel the arousal for a grudge fuck or maybe just the hot, hugging collapse into mutual remorse. But he doesn’t want to grudge fuck Hjel, and he feels no remorse. And Daelfi’s right on the money—something is very clearly eating away at the dispossessed prince, despite his protestations to the contrary.

  Hjel watches him rearrange himself on the bedroll.

  I am sorry, he says. What do you think is coming, that you’re so unready for? Did you somehow unleash this Illwrack creature you went looking for?

  Over breakfast, like I said. Gil smiles to rob his firmness of offense, lies flat, turns his face to the sky. We’ll talk about it then.

  But as he lies there, he’s well aware that Hjel is not following suit, that he sits instead, unmoving on the other side of the fire, and after a while, the pressure to talk to him is just too great. Gil wonders briefly if it’s some minor glamour that the dispossessed prince knows how to cast, is casting even now. Then he gives up caring one way or the other—there’s too much pressing up inside him that he wants to share, to lay out in words, if only so he can consider how it all sounds when it’s said out loud.

  You’re right about one thing, he says, without moving or looking away from the stars overhead. We’re none of us ready. No, we didn’t unleash the Illwrack Changeling, we didn’t even find him. We didn’t find the floating city of An-Kirilnar, either. Meanwhile, there’s a war started down south behind my back, we’re three thousand miles the wrong side of the battle lines, and my friends are captives of the enemy. And just to really spice things up, I’ve had a friendly visit from the Queen of the Dark Court and it looks like the dwenda are bringing the Talons of the Sun to the party.

  Silence, and he thinks for a moment that he’s wrong, Hjel has fallen asleep sitting there after all, and he’s talking to himself. Then the dispossessed prince speaks, and there’s a guarded tension in his voice that Gil makes for disbelief, or maybe even faint envy.

  You summoned Vividara the Dark?

  Ringil watches the stars. Yawns. No, I think it’d be fairer to say she summoned me.

  Hjel’s pantheon, he knows, isn’t really the same as the one honored in the temples of the League, or even the rough analogue worshipped out on the steppes by Egar’s people. But some of the names the Ahn-foi bear are close, and there are enough similarities to detect a common underlying pattern. An assembly of enigmatic absentee overlords, demanding absolute obedience at all times but rarely showing up to collect it; a rough hierarchy, blurred and shuffled by an inconsistent mythos that suggested the relationships were a little less formal, a little more complicated than temple officiators liked to admit. Hoiran and Firfirdar on their wedded thrones, a close circle of courtiers—mostly—at their beck and call.

  But then there were tales of insurrection, resentment, infidelity, squabbling …

  At times, Gil can understand the longing for simple order that drives the southerners’ arid faith. How comfortable it must feel to know that there’s just the one overlord, just the one set of edicts he’s handed selflessly down for your personal benefit, and that everything from the depths of the ocean to the starry sky is safely in hand.

  Yeah, Egar snorted one campfire night out on the steppe. And if you believe that, I’ve got a string of unicorns out back I want to sell you cheap.

  Ringil feels a grin touch the corners of his mouth at the memory. He shifts a little on the bedroll, seems to sink fractionally deeper into it. His fed belly gurgles a little; there’s a spreading warmth right through him now, and a letting go. It’s as if unburdening himself to the dispossessed prince has cut some cable deep inside, let him finally drift loose on the swells of a weariness whose extent he only now starts to grasp.

  Vividara manifest portends destruction, Hjel says quietly. Death and flames about her, the confusion of human hopes and fears where she passes, and the creep of chaos in her train.

  Yeah, Gil mumbles. Same where I’m from, more or less.

  How did she appear to you?

  Uhm—regal. A bit chilly with it. He yawns again, cavernously. Reminded me of my mother, actually.

  The other gods you’ve told me about were circumspect in their approach. Hjel’s voice seems to be coming from farther away than before. They played games. Disguised themselves or walked in your dreams.

  Mhmm.

  That Vividara came to you so directly cannot be good. It suggests that the game they play is building to its climax. That fire and destruction are coming, and that most likely you will be the Dark Queens’s agent in bringing them on.

  Ringil is vaguely aware of turning on the bedroll, putting Hjel’s voice and the heat of the fire at his back, turning his face away into the dark.

  Certainly fucking will if I can get into Etterkal and find Findrich, he says drowsily.

  And sinks away.

  CHAPTER 25

  gar prowled seemingly endless corridors and companionways of iron, or some dark alloy that looked a lot like it. In places the metal glowed to life to light his way—soft, red light on the surfaces, as if they were heated from within, painting the close surroundings with a dull furnace glow. But when he put the back of a cautious hand close to the source, there was no heat at all. The alloy felt the same wherever he touched it, cool and smooth, and the glow faded not long after he passed—he looked back once and saw it inking out, closing up the corridor behind him with slightly unnerving dark.

  He was, he supposed, lost.

  He’d been wandering for the best part of an hour now, not much caring where his feet took him, though tending only to take stairs or ladders where they led upward. He assumed he was safe under the Warhelm’s watchful eye—and if he wasn’t safe from the demon itself, then it didn’t much matter where in An-Kirilnar he wound up—but he’d carried the length of chain along anyway, wound twice around his fist and clinking reassuringly at his side as he walked.

  Part of him longed for the chance to use it.

  Some of those crab-legged spider things, maybe, run somehow out of the Warhelm’s control. Or some species of giant rat that lived in the walls …

  You don’t need a fight, Dragonbane. What you really need is sleep.

  He’d thought he was exhausted—he was exhausted, he ached from it—but sleep would not take him, no matter how long he rolled and flopped in the half-acre bed. His limbs itched and tingled when he tried to lie still, his belly ached from all the plums he’d eaten. In the end, he got up but that was no better. The apartments would not hold him, they stank of mannered confinement.
Like the cell the imperials had held him in back in Yhelteth, there was a surface comfort that felt like some stilted apology for the truth—that he was trapped in the belly of a beast the size of a city, and it would not let him go. He felt the craving for open air and access to the horizon like some nagging hangover he couldn’t shake off.

  Fucking tent-dweller.

  It hit him then, abruptly, how much he missed the steppe—the big open skies, the endless flat expanse of land with no visible limit on how far you could ride. In the last three years, he’d been in swamps and on ships, in pipe houses, whorehouses and taverns, in slums and palaces and jails, up and down the tangled warren streets of the imperial city herself, out to Rajal, Lanatray, Ornley for more of the same. Now he felt suddenly as if none of it had ever been more than a distraction, a series of cheap whore’s tricks he’d bought to keep him from missing the peace you felt sitting at a campfire out on the endless plain, band and stars close enough to reach up and touch, buffalo grazing close …

  Yeah—take you back there, Dragonbane, and you’d be screaming for Imrana’s perfumed arms and the streets of Yhelteth inside three fucking days.

  You … are … tired.

  He prowled about. Stared at his own rumpled bed like a beast he had to somehow kill. Oh, for Urann’s sake. He dressed, grabbed up the chain from where he’d left it beside the bed, hurried out of the apartments in search of … something.

  Hadn’t found it yet, whatever it was.

  He did find, finally, a set of laddered steps that led somewhere other than into a new corridor. Climbing them, he felt a cool breeze on his face and thought he might have made it up to whatever skyline An-Kirilnar might offer. But instead, the top of the companionway gave out into a vast, gusty cargo space, where crane hooks hung in immobile and silent silhouette, and looming, tangled piles of scrap littered the floor. Fitful traces of bandlight crept in through a row of huge windows set high up in one wall. From equally massive openings in the floor came the distant sound of the ocean below.

  Egar stood for a moment, taking it all in.

  He wasn’t overly impressed by the size or the gear; he’d seen similar spaces at An-Monal. But back then the Kiriath had still been around, the cranes had been in motion, hauling loads up through the hatches and shuttling them back and forth. There’d been noise and light. Hammering, shouting, the brilliant cascade of sparks from the Black Folks’ metalwork tools.

  This just felt like a mausoleum.

  He moved cautiously up to the nearest of the enormous hatches, thankful for what thin light there was. Peered down to the faintly luminous roil and surge of waves, a hundred feet below. He wasn’t sure quite how he’d managed to end up in the lowest levels of An Kirilnar despite all his choices of upward stairs and ladders, but this was, he supposed, as good a place as any to rein himself in and stop wandering aimlessly about.

  He stood there in the near dark for a while, looking down, listening to the ocean and the sound of his own breathing.

  “The fall would in all probability kill you,” said the demon in his ear. “I would advise against it.”

  “Do I look like I’m going to fucking jump?” he snapped, because the sudden voice had, in fact, made him jump quite severely.

  “It is hard to tell with humans. But many of the others did.”

  “The others?”

  “Yes. The others who were harbored here. After the victory at Inatharam, most of this coast was rendered uninhabitable for both Kiriath and humans. The land died and so did most who lived in it.”

  The Dragonbane grunted. “Doesn’t sound much like a victory to me.”

  “The region was rendered uninhabitable for the Aldrain as well, which was the purpose of fighting in the first place. Their cities were obliterated, their populations exterminated or driven out. I use the term victory in this sense. In the aftermath, however, some small bands of survivors from the Kiriath side made their way here in the hope of refuge. Where their allegiance could be proven, they were taken in. They waited here, with the existing garrison, for rescue from the south.”

  “You’re talking about human survivors?”

  “Human and Kiriath both.” A delicate pause. “The Kiriath weathered the waiting better than the humans.”

  Egar thought about the architecture he’d wandered through and imagined having to live with it on a siege basis. “I bet. So how long was it before a rescue showed up?”

  “Six hundred and eighty seven years from the date of the victory at Inatharam. External conditions would not permit an approach any sooner.”

  “Six hundred … ” His voice died away, his gaze tipped down through the hatch to the ocean below. He nodded bleakly, imagining the choices made by men and women thousands of years ago on the edge of this drop. “I wouldn’t worry. I don’t think I’ll be staying that long.”

  “Quite. In fact, this is something we should discuss.”

  “What is?”

  “Your departure. Your exit from the Wastes.”

  As if unleashed by the words, one of the massive iron cranes overhead jolted into sudden motion. For the second time in as many minutes, the Dragonbane startled back. He shot a sour, accusatory look at the ceiling, then watched the crane, fascinated as it juddered and screeched and showered sparks along the long unused track it ran on. The noise was deafening.

  “What’s this for?” he yelled over the din.

  “I have spoken with kir-Archeth Indamaninarmal regarding the Warhelm Ingharnanasharal’s recent sacrifice, and have formulated a model of the campaign vector it seems to intend.” The demon’s voice was still an intimate, unnerving presence at his ear, somehow managing to come through the racket the crane was making without apparent effort. “If I have understood the strategy well from the evidence, it remains a bold stroke for all its shortcomings, and deserves to succeed. Certainly, it is the only faint hope I see in light of the Aldrain’s impending return. But to have any hope of success now, it will require some significant adjustments. Your return to the steppes is one such requirement. Retrieval of certain necessary implements and aids is another.”

  “The steppes?” Egar bellowed, and the crane jolted to a halt over a hatch, left him bawling into abrupt quiet. “Who said anything about … the steppes?”

  “Have patience. All will become clear.”

  “Yeah? So who’s this Warhelm Ingharn—”

  Lights sprang up everywhere, bright rose and orange variations on the dull red he’d followed through the corridors, glaring from bulkheads, ceiling, and floors like the multiple, puddled reflections of a fiercely setting sun. The shadows fled out, and somewhere behind him, a door clanked open.

  He pivoted about, chain length swishing low. Saw Archeth standing on an iron gallery about head height above him on the nearest wall. She was, he noticed, dressed in completely fresh garments, cut and colors he’d never seen before, still visibly Kiriath but nothing as grim and minimal as he was used to her wearing. And she was the one gaping down at him.

  “What are you doing down here, Eg?”

  “Might ask you the same thing.”

  “He was led,” said the Warhelm blithely. “Subtly, through lighting cues and … other measures. My powers, albeit severely truncated, are good for that much at least.”

  “Motherfucker.”

  “Eg, listen, never mind, it’s—” She grabbed the rail in her fists, leaned over at him. Her voice echoed in the iron space. “There’s a way we can do this. There’s a way we can get home and make a difference. But it means—”

  “Yeah, going back to the steppes. I just heard.”

  Behind him, the crane began to unwind its huge hook and cable, downward through the hatch. It made a noisy whining, like some giant hound out of myth wanting to be fed, but nothing to compare with the shriek and clash before. You could talk over it without having to shout. Egar gestured helplessly at the machinery.

  “Archidi, you want to catch me up here?” He held out his arms, palms upward. “I mean, al
l I did was go out for a fucking walk.”

  THEY SAT TOGETHER ON A CONVENIENT PILE OF SCRAP AND WATCHED THE cable spool down through the hatch. It seemed to be going down a long way.

  “Anasharal’s a … a fragment, I guess.” Archeth set her hands half a yard apart in front of her, framing empty space with them as if trying to trap the concepts there. “It’s a piece of the Warhelm Ingharnanasharal, cut loose and dropped out of the sky. It’s like, I don’t know—remember those big armored lizards that used to smash the barricades in with their skulls and then just die in the breach?”

  Egar nodded. “Blunderers.”

  “Yeah, well you remember how the tail end didn’t use to die for hours afterward? How it’d still be thrashing around, grabbing at things, trying to spike them, and the front end’s dead and leaking brains? That’s Anasharal, the tail end.”

  “So that makes Inghawhatsit, the one still up in the sky, what, dead? Dying?”

  “I don’t know.” She jerked a thumb at the ceiling. “Tharalanangharst says it’s talked to the other Warhelms, and none of them can get Ingharnanasharal to answer. They don’t talk to each other very often, so there’s no way to know how long Ingharnanasharal has been silent. Might be recent, might have been as much as a couple of centuries. Anyway, Tharalanangharst says there’s no precedent for a Helmsman falling to Earth, didn’t even know such a thing was possible. Ingharnanasharal would have had to tear itself apart to make Anasharal, and there’s no telling what’s left up there or what state it’s in.”

  The whining stopped. They glanced up and saw the cable hung motionless down through the hatch. The Dragonbane gestured at it.

  “Your got any idea what it’s bringing up for us?”

  She shook her head. “Just that it’s something we’re going to need.”

  “Never tell the troops anything they don’t absolutely need to know, huh?” He pulled a glum face. “Had a squad commander like that once.”