The Dark Defiles

by Richard K. Morgan

  The Dragonbane leaned back on his elbows across his bedroll, stared up at the clouded night sky. It made him look oddly youthful.

  “Where I’m from? They’d call Kaptal a Hollow Walker. Drive him out of camp with stones and spells, most likely. Saw that happen once, when I was a kid. Some guy was supposed to have drowned in the Janarat when they were crossing ponies, poor fucker. He hadn’t, but no one believed it when he finally managed to get himself back to camp. He had to go and live in Ishlin-ichan in the end; the clan would never take him back. Even his own family wouldn’t let him get within hailing distance.” He gestured, like throwing something away. “But hey, that’s fucking steppe nomads for you, with their pig-shit ignorant superstitions and fears.”

  “If my father’s people went around doing this kind of thing to corpses a lot five thousand years ago,” she mused. “Maybe the Majak superstitions are tapping into that. Maybe they’re based on something concrete after all.”

  “Yeah. Archidi, I’ve seen a Sky Dweller step out of thin air and summon the spirits of the angry dead from the steppe grass to defend me. I’ve spent a fair bit of my professional life killing things that everybody—including you—thought were myths until they showed up looking for a fight. I don’t really need any convincing there’s something concrete behind all this magical shit. Got pretty much all the evidence I need, thanks, and a few scars to boot.”

  “Then—”

  His voice rose to cut her off. “I just wish my dumb-as-fuck, dozy-as-sheep half-asleep people would wake the fuck up and demand that kind of evidence themselves, before they buy whatever string of sky-fisted nags the nearest fucking apology for a shaman happens to be hawking at the time. Is that so fucking much to ask?”

  Movement at the other glowing bowls. People were craning to look. Egar, almost on his feet with whatever emotions had driven the sudden outburst, shot her a sheepish glance. Subsided.

  They sat quietly for a while.

  “Not looking forward to going home then?” she asked mildly.

  CHAPTER 28

  e’s forgotten about the ladders.

  They see them as they get up close, ladders by the thousands, scattered about in the long grass along the bottom of the cliffs, like toothpicks in sawdust at the base of some heavily frequented tavern bar. Or—here and there, you could still see one or two set against the cliffs for use—like the leavings of some vast, suddenly abandoned siege against the ikinri ‘ska walls, carried on by a hundred or more different allied nations and races.

  Which, Ringil supposes, isn’t too far from the truth of what he’s seeing. However long the glyph cliffs have been here, it seems men and other creatures have been here too, trying to prise their secrets out. There are wooden ladders, iron ladders, ladders of alloys Ringil has no way to name, ladders of substances he’s never seen before in his life. Resinous smooth honey-colored ladders, woven ladders of creeperlike plants, some of which still twitch with some kind of life if you touch or tread on them. Ladders out of what looks suspiciously like human bone.

  Some are simple, the most basic sketch of their function in whatever substance their owners were happiest using. Some are ornate, carved or molded or tempered with crests and curlicues, symbols to supplement and adorn the functional heart of their uprights and cross-bar steps. Some are clearly made for races with limbs of no human proportion. Some are visibly ancient—wood darkened and rotted through, iron eaten away to rusted leavings, resin that has bubbled and snapped apart in some alien process of decay. But some are new, out of wood so freshly carpentered that you can still see the rough edges, as if they were thrown down and abandoned only moments before he and Hjel arrived. It gives the cliffs a haunted aspect, a sense of eyes forever at your back, watching to see if you do better than those who came before, those who, in some hard-to-grasp fashion, have always only just left.

  Looks like we missed the rush again.

  Hjel rolls his eyes. It’s not a new joke for either of them.

  Get hold of the other end of this, he says, indicating a silvery-looking ladder five yards long. Ringil knows from previous experience that implements of this metal weigh next to nothing; they’ll lift it between them with no more effort than hefting a similar length of mooring cable. Set it up there, see where that tree’s growing out of the rock. That’s where you’re going up.

  They get the ladder braced with a minimum of fuss. Ringil unfastens the Ravensfriend and sets it aside against the cliff face—he’d swear it shivers slightly inside the scabbard as it touches the glyph-carved rock. He looks hard at it for a moment. Shrugs. Unhooks his cloak and lets it puddle richly on the long grass at his feet, puts his foot on the ladder’s first step. Oh, yeah. He turns back to Hjel.

  Want to tell me what I’m looking for?

  Past the tree, there’s a fissure. The dispossessed prince holds up his hands, makes a span. About that wide. The glyphs go in. I want you to reach in as far as you can see, trace out one of the sequences.

  Which one?

  Doesn’t matter. You’ll see what I mean.

  Ringil shrugs and starts to climb. Up past the endless piled up lines of glyphs, skewed and leaning and crammed together, like sketched streets of hovels on some map of the slum housing in Harbor End. The ladder bounces a little with his weight as he gets higher. A cold wind comes snuffling along the eroded limestone expanses, as if searching for something. It moans in crannies and over sharp edges, ruffles affectionately at his hair and moves on. Glyph sequences catch his eye through the rungs as he gets near to the top and closer in to the stone. By now he’s learned enough to spot certain tendencies in them, certain phrasing—in the eyes of men … the known unknown … a change of entanglement … failings unleashed … stop, I want to get off … Some of them, he knows how to use in longer sequence. Some he’s had patiently explained to him by Hjel, but does not yet have any comprehensible context in which to deploy them.

  Some, for reasons he’s unsure of, just make him shiver.

  He reaches the outgrowing tree. Its trunk is about as wide around as his forearm, and comes with a tightly twisted attendance of lesser branches and thickets of gray-green, rough-edged leaves. There’s a reasonable amount of flex in the whole thing; he’s able to force his way past and up, but it’s work. He collects a couple of scratches on face and hands in the process, comes out breathing hard and dusted in some dark green scent.

  Just beyond, he finds the fissure Hjel’s talking about, a broadening gully at whose base the tree is rooted. True enough, the glyphs bend inward with the rock and march back into the gloom there. He can’t see how far the crack runs into the body of the cliff; the light runs out before the glyphs do, and then it’s just impenetrable dark.

  Reach in as far as you can see.

  He works his way up the last couple of steps on the ladder, braces a boot into the web of tree branches, and wedges his upper body into the gully. It’s not too uncomfortable, and there’s just about space for his arms to move.

  Trace out one of the sequences.

  The ones under his nose are too tight a fit; he can’t get his elbows back down far enough to work there. He twists his head up and focuses on a line that seems to end just into the beginnings of the shadow. He works his hand closer, puts his middle finger into the groove of the first glyph in approved fashion, and begins to trace the pattern out. He has to work mostly by touch as his vision is partly blocked out by his own arm.

  The first glyph isn’t one he knows—though it bears some resemblance to the symbols Hjel refers to as throat-clearers. The second is the change of entanglement motif, though oddly skewed. The third and fourth are related, but—

  Shock slams through him.

  It’s the shock of a warrior-caste lizard’s barbed tail-lash to ribs you left unguarded on that last swing with your badly chewed-up shield. It’s your father’s casual blow across the face, knocking you out of your child’s-height chair for answering back at the dinner table. It’s the kick and clutch under the pit of
your stomach as you see your screaming, pleading lover impaled to the jeers and cheers of the gathered crowd, and you puke out your soul in sympathy. It’s the freezing, boiling chase of blood through your veins when you think back later and truly understand for the first time that it could have been you.

  It’s all those doors and others, swinging open in your memory, gutting you, laying you bare.

  Back in the deeper recesses of the fissure, he hears a bony rattling, like long, emaciated limbs rearranging themselves, like talons digging into the rock to propel something violently forward into the light. And for just a moment, it’s as if a massive stirring tremor runs through the whole body of the cliff wall, as if the cliffs themselves are some vast sleeping creature whose skin you’ve finally gouged deep enough to wake …

  He flails backward out of the gully.

  Loses any footing he might have managed on the ladder, inadvertently kicks it away below. He falls scrabbling at the rock face, grabs frantically at the tree with his left arm. Stops his fall with an abruptness that wrenches his shoulder. The toes of his boots scrape the rock below him, twisting and digging for any scant purchase. Somehow, the dragon-tooth dagger is in his right hand, out and up in as much of a guard as he can manage. He stares under the curve of its yellowish blade, into the gloom at the back of the gully, waiting for whatever it was he heard in there …

  Silence.

  A vexed creak in the tree somewhere, the soft whoop of the wind. Tiny patter of displaced dirt, falling away

  The ladder clinks tinnily back in place under him. He dares to look away from the gloom in the fissure, glances downward, gets both feet firmly on a rung. Hjel stands at the bottom, holding the ladder in place. Calls up to him between cupped palms.

  See what I mean?

  YOU KNEW THAT WAS GOING TO HAPPEN?

  Ringil storms back and forth in the long grass at the base of the cliff, like some beast chained to a baiting pole. He’s too angry, too churned up with currents of emotion he doesn’t fully understand, to stay still and look Hjel in the eyes—and the way he’s feeling right now, there’s just far too much danger he’ll punch the other man out.

  I did not expect quite such a violent reaction. The dispossessed prince’s face is troubled and not, Gil suspects, out of any mundane concern for his near fall from the ladder. The ikinri ‘ska is not a training manual or a map, it is the inscribed living will of the Originators. It flexes and flows and breathes in a way I do not understand well myself. It is only one side of the equation. Each man or woman who wields it brings a different self to the union. Some are demure brides to the power, some are … not.

  Yeah. Ringil stops in front of Hjel, jabs the blade of his hand at the other man’s face. Well, if I’d known you wanted demure, I’d have brought a motherfucking veil!

  He stomps away again, nearly trips on the ornately curlicued end of a fallen ladder in black iron. Kicks savagely at it and stubs his toe. Fuck!

  You need to calm down, Gil.

  Ringil stalks back to face the dispossessed prince again. I am fucking calm. You want to see me not calm, you keep right on feeding me surprises and half-truths like this. Now you tell me, in words a piped-up wharf whore can understand—what happened up there?

  Hjel nods. Fair enough. What happened up there is that you had a taste of real power. You dug into the darker reaches of the ikinri ‘ska for the first time, and it appears that neither you nor it enjoyed the experience very much.

  A day ago you tell me it’s like the ikinri ‘ska wants me. Now all of a sudden it doesn’t like me anymore? The tail end of his anger is still twitching, lashing irritably about. Make some fucking sense, would you?

  The dispossessed prince stares out across the marsh plain they’ve crossed together. A horse may like you well enough as a rider across summer meadows. That doesn’t mean the same horse will stand easy under you in battle.

  Oh, again with the martial metaphors. You’re saying I’ve got to break the ikinri ‘ska now?

  No. You could not, no one can. Not even the Ahn-foi could manage so much, and they have tried more than once. Some say that not even the Originators themselves can command what they built and set in place now that it’s done. Hjel reels his gaze back in, looks at Gil again. I am simply showing you a different form of mastery, one that carries a different risk and ultimate cost. You are in need, you say. You ask for more, faster. This is more, faster. You’ll have to decide for yourself what it’s worth to you, if you want it after all.

  Ringil looks up at where the ladder is leaned, the tree jutting out of the rock, the gully beyond.

  How deep does that fissure go back? he asks quietly.

  Hjel gives him a faint, sad smile, claps him on the shoulder and chest as he walks past to a point about twenty feet out from the cliff wall. That’s what I thought.

  What’s that supposed to mean?

  Come here, I’ll show you. Hjel waits until Ringil joins him, then sweeps one arm out wide. Look along the line that way. See the cracks? The shadows?

  Ringil nods, fighting an odd reluctance. The dispossessed prince nods with him. His voice is gathering a fresh intensity, the tone of a man talking about the object of his longtime desires and obsessions.

  It’s not a clean surface, you see, any more than the world the Originators were forced to write upon was fresh or whole when they saved it. Perhaps the echo is intended, perhaps it is metaphor made concrete. The cliffs march for hundreds of miles across this plain and there are fissures and gullies and defiles going back into the rock everywhere. Some of them are only a few feet deep and will barely admit a man’s arm to the shoulder. Some of them are paths whose end no one has seen. But all of them, all that I have seen or heard tell of, are inscribed with the most powerful iterations of the ikinri ‘ska. It is there, in the dark recesses, in the cracks through the surface of things, that you will find what you seek.

  You didn’t answer my question, Ringil says gently.

  Hjel shrugs. Because it was meaningless. You shouldn’t be asking how deep this or that fissure goes—ask yourself instead how deep into the defiles you are prepared to go.

  Ringil looks along the line of the cliffs, the strewn toothpick ladders scattered at their base. Somewhere, there’s a whisper of bleak comfort in knowing how many have come here before him and gone again. He recognizes the sensation from the war—the anonymous camaraderie of a thousand ghosts, the realization that while death may be a gate you must pass through alone, the approach road is thronged with traffic and you walk its cobbled rise in constant company, just one trudging part of an endless caravanserai homing in on journey’s end. He remembers the abandoned confidence in his own acts that the knowledge gave him back then—a gut-swoop feeling so close to desperation it was hard to tell the two of them apart. He welcomes it back now with open arms. And somehow, chained to all of this, the half-grasped chilly dance of the glyphs he touched in the fissure has left its traceries in his mind, touched his fingers and throat with what they are required to do to open that door once more.

  He’s as ready as he’ll ever be.

  And the Ravensfriend, leaning there against the cliff wall, like some louche friend in a harbor end alley, awaiting decision from him on where next to take their carousing.

  He takes the sword up, settles the harness back on his shoulders. Shoots Hjel an expectant glance.

  All right, then, he says. How about you show me a crack where I don’t have to fall out of a tree. And then we can get started.

  CHAPTER 29

  hey crossed the ridgeline around noon, as the Dragonbane had predicted they would, and stood there looking down. A chorus of groans rose from the company at what lay beyond.

  Far from the upland plateau they’d been hoping to reach, the path spilled them down the other side of the mountain’s shoulder almost as far as they’d climbed up the previous day, and into a landscape even more bleak. They spent the back end of the day plodding across what felt like a vast bowl filled with chopped and fi
re-blackened onion. Peaks rose on all sides and the terrain between was jagged and frayed, all oddly curving spires and fractured bluffs. In places, the rock was glassy to the touch and glinted dully where wandering shafts of sunlight passed over it. Elsewhere, it showed growth of some iridescent crimson moss that smelled faintly of burning. It was the first sign of life they’d found in the landscape and seeing it should have felt better than it did—instead, the men mostly passed by with warding gestures and hurried steps.

  As if unnerved by the chaotic ground it had to cross, the path itself grew hesitant and ill-defined. It forked and unwound seemingly at random, and the fire sprite started taking them off it entirely, to dodge around rockfalls and strange frozen eruptions in the stone underfoot. By late afternoon the paving had all but vanished, reduced to single slabs at violently tilted angles every couple of dozen yards. If it really was an Aldrain road, Archeth reflected grimly, then the Aldrain, in these parts at least, looked to have had their arses handed to them on a plate.

  For the first time, she found herself brooding on the geographical absurdity of what they were doing, wondering if Tharalanangharst’s smoothly persuasive argument had been worthy of the trust she placed in it after all.

  There is no easy path south through the Wastes, it told them bluntly. The entire region is hazardous, often lethally so.

  Yeah, no shit. And marching east from here instead is going to be what, safer?

  No, Dragonbane. Such a march would in all probability not be any more secure, and would in any case leave you on the wrong side of a mountain chain it’s doubtful you are equipped to cross. Fortunately, that is not the itinerary I have in mind.

  Seemed there was this ruined city, two or three days’ march inland …

  “I don’t know, Archidi.” Egar brooded as they sat at camp that night. “I’m not saying your iron demon’s sending us off to die exactly, but the steppes are fucking huge. My father rode up north and west of the Janarat once, back before Ishlin-ichan was much more than a bunch of hovels on its banks. He was going to circle round and raid the Ishlinak from the far side, take the whole clan unawares. Stuff he talked about finding out there—steppe ghouls all over the place, things like giant spiders that jumped like grasshoppers, could knock a man right off his horse if they hit right. And some kind of, I don’t know, deformed giant wolves or something. I mean, stuff straight out of a campfire tale. Plus no decent grazing for the horses and nothing much to hunt that you’d want to eat. They had to turn back in the end; the terrain was just too tough. And he never even saw these mountains the demon talks about, so that’s even further out. Now we’ve got to cross all of that somehow, just to make Ishlin-ichan.”