She gestured. “Yeah, well. These uhm, aerial conveyances are going to take us. Right?”
“You’re asking me?”
“Telling you.”
The conviction was oddly easy to come by. She realized abruptly that for all that Tharalanangharst harped on constantly about its these days severely limited senses, she’d never once entertained any doubts about the accuracy of the Warhelm’s intelligence. Somewhere in the iron bowels of An-Kirilnar, a trust and certainty seemed to have hardened in her - or maybe just an acceptance, that this was her path and she’d better get on and walk it.
Could have used some krin for the road, though. That too much to ask?
Apparently, it was. The Warhelm assured her it was unfamiliar with the substance, that krinzanz had not been known five thousand years ago, or at least had not been in known and common use. And when she started sketching out its properties, Tharalanangharst grew evasive on the subject of substitutes or whether some could be synthesized. There was much else to be done, it maintained. Many other, more vital preparations to be made. Perhaps later.
She’d found, oddly, that she didn’t much mind. She’d quit the drug before; you could ignore the craving if you had enough else to do. And by then she’d been caught up in the preparations herself, fascinated by her returned knives and the way the Warhelm talked to her about them. Practicing with them, hefting and juggling and throwing, walking through the centuries-ingrained Hanal Keth katas until she was exhausted, trying to adopt and adapt to what Tharalanangharst taught her—it was an entrancing, all-consuming process that mostly took away any residual nagging need for the krin.
And now, sitting here in the blue gloom, she struggled to locate the place inside herself where that need had sat. The locked conviction filled her instead—they were underway, they were on their way home. Let that be enough for now.
“You’re taking a lot on trust, you know.” As if the Dragonbane could read her thoughts.
“Warhelm hasn’t been wrong yet, has it?”
Egar stood up and stretched. She heard cartilage crack somewhere in his massive frame. He faced out from the overlaid glowing blue circles of light that defined their camp against the surrounding craggy darkness. Crouched back to her level again, and nodded east.
“That’s another ridge out there,” he said quietly. “It’s still a fair way off, but it looks to me at least as high as this one. And you can see there are peaks beyond it. I’d kind of hoped we were over the high line by now.”
She said nothing. She had, too.
The Dragonbane sat back down on his bedroll. Offered her a tight little smile. “Don’t want to be the one grumbling in the ranks, Archidi. Urann knows, we’re going to have enough of that a couple of days from now without me joining in. So this is just between you and me. But over this kind of ground, it’s another day to get up there, minimum. More likely, it’s two. And who knows what’s on the other side? We’re starting to get beyond the bounds of two to three days here.”
“Tomorrow’s day three,” she pointed out.
“Yeah. All day. Talk to me when we’re over that ridge and it’s still not dark and there’s a big fuck-off ruined city waiting for us on the other side.”
She remembered his twitchiness from the previous night, made this for more of the same—the pinch of knowing at every step that he was on his way back to something he’d abandoned two years ago the way you leave a sinking ship.
Change the subject, Archidi.
She made a gesture, low in her lap, toward the glowing bowl where Yilmar Kaptal sat alone.
“You talk to him yet?” she asked softly.
The Dragonbane followed her gaze. “Couple of times, yeah. Why?”
“When?”
“Once when we stopped to eat. And then back when our fiery friend was off checking out that cave entrance.”
“And?”
“And what? Surly as fuck at the cave; before that he talked at me like I’d rob him at knifepoint if he stopped. You still worrying about what he might really be? Archidi, let it go. He was put back together by a demon that feeds you five-thousand-year-old fruit, sends iron spiders to do its will, and lends you glowing fucking turtles in place of firewood. Who knows whether that’s really Yilmar Kaptal in there or not? And you know what—as long as he’s on our side, who gives a shit? Not like he was a prancing little pony of joy to have around before he drowned, is it?”
“Fair point.”
“Yeah.” The rant seemed to have eased Egar’s temper a little. “Well.”
“I just wish I knew why Tharalanangharst thought it was so important to have him back. What it’s got to do with this grand purpose Anasharal had.”
An elaborate shrug. “Like someone I know said recently—Warhelm hasn’t been wrong yet. Right?”
She grimaced. “Yeah, all right. But seriously, Eg. Kaptal’s a fucking courtier. He’s got nothing we need.”
“Right now he doesn’t. Maybe we’ll find out he’s got some useful contacts in Ishlin-ichan.”
“If he does, he’s keeping very quiet about it. He’s been briefed along with everybody else, he knows where we’re headed. Anyway, I can’t see that. Don’t let current circumstance fool you—the only reason Kaptal made the trip north with us is because he couldn’t let Shendanak and Tand upstage him. And even then, he’s bitched every inch of the way. From what I hear around court, he’d barely ever been outside the Yhelteth city walls before this. He wouldn’t know Ishlin-ichan from a hole in the ground.”
Egar grunted. “It is a fucking hole in the ground.”
“He’s useless, Eg.” She plowed on, refused to sidetrack back into conversation about a steppe they hadn’t even reached yet. “He’s twitchy as fuck, and he’s an entitled little shit into the bargain. You saw how he reacted to the idea of carrying any of his own gear And if we do get in a fight somewhere along the line, I doubt he’s picked up a sword his whole fucking life.”
The Dragonbane yawned cavernously. “Used to be a pimp, didn’t he?”
“So they say.”
“Probably very handy with a knife, then. Maybe you should give him one.”
“Very funny.”
But behind the sourness she feigned, she was secretly relieved to see Egar relaxing. Because if the Warhelm’s much-vaunted aerial conveyances were really going to get them to Ishlin-ichan as promised, the journey after that was wholly on Majak turf. And whether they then took passage on one of the infrequent trade barges down the Janarat, or simply procured horses and rode directly south to the Dhashara pass, successful progress was going to hinge rather a lot on exactly how well the Dragonbane coped with his homecoming.
THE SKY CLEARED UP OVERNIGHT, AND THEY WOKE EARLY TO A ROSE-EDGED vision of the band, arcing overhead against an almost cloudless dawn. The lifeless landscape around them seemed softer with the change, somehow less jagged and threatening, as if the new light had warmed something stony away. Archeth felt how it loosened the men up as they bustled about, breaking camp. She didn’t blame them. Not for the first time, she realized how much she missed the habitually clear night skies of the south. How much she missed—
Ishgrim.
Memory uncoiled and struck, like keen knives in her belly and eyes. Lying together in cooling sweat on a balcony divan, Archeth pointing out the Kiriath constellations by name, and both of them laughing as Ishgrim tried stumblingly to copy the pronunciation.
They’d both wept when it was time for Archeth to board ship at the Shanta yards.
You’ll see, Archeth lied. Back before you know it. Nothing to worry about.
Ishgrim said nothing. Despite some of the games they played in bed, she was no innocent. Slavery had stamped a hard, unwavering vision of the world into her, and they both knew the risks the expedition was going to face.
I will pray to the Dark Court for you, she blurted as Archeth turned to go.
Uhm. If you like.
I know that you do not believe. Defiantly, chin lifted in a w
ay that gouged into Archeth’s heart. But Takavach the Salt Lord answered my prayers in captivity. He brought me to safe haven with you. Perhaps he has a purpose for us both.
Her last view of the girl was her slim, erect figure in sunlight, immobile amid the cheering crowd along the viewing platforms as the flotilla rode the current downriver toward the estuary and the sea. Ishgrim had not waved at any point, and Archeth, squinting before distance took the possibility away, saw that the girl’s hands were knotted tight on the platform’s rail.
She took the ache of memory in both hands. Twisted it into a strength.
Hold on, girl—I’m coming for you. Fucking nothing going to live that gets in my way this time.
“Looks better,” she said brightly to Egar as their paths crossed later in the bustle.
He grunted, still buttoning himself up at the fly. “Yeah, the sun came out. Let’s hope it’s a fucking omen.”
If it wasn’t, it was the next best thing. They crossed the suddenly sun-gilded terrain at a brisk pace now, along a path of paving increasingly intact. The fire sprite scudded ahead of them, pale and hard to see at times but rarely hesitating for more than a few seconds before darting onward. There were no obvious branches or breaks in the paved way and they were into the cool shade of the next ridge and climbing not long after midday. The hairpin terraces were a match for the path, in far better repair than those they’d walked in the previous two days, broader and more forgiving in incline, too. With the fresh energy the change of weather had given them, they made the ridgeline with a solid few hours of daylight left.
The path went up and over in deceptively undramatic fashion, broadened as it dropped on the other side and passed almost immediately between the massive paired stumps of two pillars flanking what seemed once to have been a colonnaded gateway.
Beyond the jagged, upward jutting fangs of the pillar remnants, the uplands lay spread out below them.
“Urann’s fucking prick … and balls …”
The oath fell out of Egar’s mouth in something close to reverence.
They stared down on the remains of a city that would in its heyday have swallowed Yhelteth whole.
It carpeted the soft slopes and plains of the landscape ahead, to all intents and purposes it was the landscape ahead—a vast chessboard of crisscrossing boulevards and piled-up, jagged pieces of ruin, stretching out to the horizon wherever you looked. In some places, squinting hard, you could make out the defiant spike of a surviving structure, a wall or dome or tower, but it didn’t really matter, was almost beside the point. There were piles of rubble down there that, by Archeth’s estimate, must rise higher than the tallest towers humans ever built.
A cold, impatient wind blew at them out of the northeast, stropped at their faces, tugged at their hair, and carried particles of a fine grit that stung their eyes in sudden gusts. To Archeth, it seemed to be blowing from the far end of the world.
“Where’d our fiery dancing friend go?” asked the Dragonbane.
She looked around. No sign of the fire sprite.
“Saw it down in the street there,” volunteered Selak Chan. He pointed. “Went along that … oh no, it’s gone now. Must be behind that cracked dome thing. With the pale blue roof?”
Great.
“All right,” she said, with a glance at Egar. “This is as good a place to make camp as any, I guess. Want to call it?”
The Dragonbane frowned and squinted at the sky. “There’s a fair bit of daylight left. Might be good to make use of it, get down onto level ground. And somewhere out of this wind, if we can.”
She shrugged. It was a fair point—she’d forgotten the wind. “As you say, then.”
So they mustered up again, still without sight of the elusive fire sprite, and marched down into the ruined city.
It may range ahead or double back sometimes to check on conditions. Try to be patient when that happens; let it do its work and protect you as best it can.
But she was weary and frayed with the journey, impatient to be done with it all, and by the time she recalled the Warhelm’s warning, they were already well into the city’s shattered, silent precincts, night was in the streets with them, and it was far, far too late for warnings of any kind.
CHAPTER 30
own the trackless gray-green slop and chop of ocean between the Hironish isles and the northern shores of Gergis, Dragon’s Demise led the makeshift flotilla in what seemed like a charmed dance. These were sea-lanes notorious among mariners for their unpredictable weather and legendary monsters from the deep. The whalers that ran north from Trelayne to pit toothpick harpoons and cord against beasts bigger than their entire vessels came back with yarns of the kraken and the merroigai, of savage, fast-moving squalls that blew up over the horizon in minutes, struck with ship-killing force and as suddenly were gone. They told tales of creeping sea mists and eyes looming over their vessels at mast-tip height in the murk, of the scrape of huge nameless things on their hulls and sudden, swamping waves out of nowhere, of weird lights in the sky and glowing fire in the deep, of heaving, breathing islands that came and went according to no known chart …
Of this, the men aboard Ringil’s ships saw nothing at all. The skies stayed clear and navigable, the winds steady. Once or twice, there were lookout calls on approaching storm weather, but always, by the time the vessels reached any kind of intercept point, the unfriendly clouds seemed somehow to have veered, left them at worst with a few skirts of rain and some halfhearted chop.
“Toldya,” an imperial marine on second watch one night informed his companions at changeover, as they all stood around on the rear deck with the more-or-less trustworthy co-opted privateer steersman. “Heard my lord Eskiath promise plain sailing to the captain before he went to his cabin, and look—plain sailing’s what we got.”
“Yeah,” another man sniggered. “Plain enough even old gripe-guts Nyanar can handle it.”
“You belay that shit, marine.” The ranking watchman roused himself from the rail, turned to his men. “That’s an imperial nobleman you’re talking about there, and he happens to be your skipper, too.”
The offending marine shrugged. “Still couldn’t navigate his way up a whore’s crack, you ask me. Fucking riverboat captain.”
“Prefer to put your trust in some infidel outland sorcerer instead, do you?” sneered one of the retiring watch. “Where’s your holy faith, brother? Where’s your purity?”
“Hey, fuck purity. Infidel cutthroat sorcerer or not, he’s brought us this far. Given us victory over”—a jerked thumb at the silent steersman—“this pirate scum. Besides, what I hear, he’s got about as much Yhelteth blood as northerner on his mother’s side.”
“Yeah, noble house, too.” The man who’d commented on the weather nodded sagely. “Remember that speech we got from my lord Shanta on launch day?”
“Forgotten all about that. Seems like another fucking lifetime, don’t it? But yeah, that’s right. Mother’s family got driven out of Yhelteth, like three generations back or something. They were Ashnal deniers, right?”
“Well, then they were no better than infidels themselves,” snapped the pious one. “Ashnal is the Living Word, no less than any other verse in the Revelation.”
“She did look kind of southern, though. The mother. Didn’t think about it at Lanatray, but now you come to mention it. That nose, the cheekbones and all.”
“Not those cheeks I was looking at.”
Lewd snorts and chortles. A few groans.
“No, but she did, didn’t she. Looked kind of—”
“Looked kind of fuckable, you ask me. Who cares where she’s from? Arse on her like a woman half her age, that’s what counts.”
“Dream on, Nagarn. Dream’s about as close as you’re ever going to get to noble pussy.”
“Oh yeah, what the fuck do you know? There was this one time in Khangset—”
“Gentlemen.”
Hoarse rasp of a voice—it came from the forward corner of the deck, whe
re the companionway steps came up from the ship’s waist below. For all that it wasn’t very loud, it cut through the scuttlebutt like a whip. The marines turned about as one. Even the steersman blinked from his focus on the horizon.
Ringil Eskiath stood propped sideways against the rail, one booted foot still resting on the last rung of the companionway. A harsh, down-curved grin held his face, but there was something huddled about the rest of him, as if beneath the cloak he wore, he’d been badly wounded; as if despite the balmy night, there was a freezing wind blowing from some unacknowledged quarter that only he could feel. The knuckles of his left hand were tight on the rail and from the hunch of his shoulder, it looked as if he was holding himself upright mostly on that grip. The scabbarded Ravensfriend showed at his right hip, over his left shoulder, like some gigantic tailor’s pin shoved diagonally through to hold him in place. Even in the kindly gleam of bandlight, he looked pale and ill.
“My lord?” said someone tentatively.
The ugly grin flexed. “You talking about my mother?”
And he fell forward, flat on his face across the decking.
HE KNEW, VAGUELY, THAT THEY PICKED HIM UP AND BORE HIM BACK DOWN to the door of his cabin, where it gave out onto the main deck. He heard the stifled exclamations as they peered inside and decided not to carry him in there after all. A weak smirk flitted across his face.
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