The Dark Defiles

by Richard K. Morgan

  Get some truth from this demon trapped in iron, Hjel tells him over the campfire. You’re fighting blind until you do.

  So let the Helmsman ramble. Invoking the Compulsion glyphs was hard work, it was draining. Not something he wanted to do too much if he didn’t have to.

  And—let’s be honest, Gil—you don’t like the new glyphs very much, do you? You don’t like the sticky-dark way they make you feel when you call them up, the thing that goes through you like coming one too many times at the end of a hard night’s fucking, like giving up something final you really can’t afford to loose, like peeling a fresh scab back from your soul and watching what oozes up underneath …

  Pale sunlight fell through the rigging above his head, put laddered shadow on his face. His left hand ached beneath the bandaging. He felt oddly cold, despite the improved weather.

  But Noyal Rakan was watching him, stood at his right hand as if the commandeered chair were the Burnished Throne itself and Ringil his emperor. From the rigging and the upper decks of Sea Eagle’s Daughter, both fore and aft, they were all watching him, marines and Throne Eternal rank and file and Klithren’s cowed and co-opted privateers, all waiting to see what he would do next.

  He shed his fumbling thoughts, marshaled what he’d so far gleaned.

  “All right, so let’s see—in the war against the dwenda, the Kiriath kick this Warhelm Ingharnanasharal up into the sky, armed to the teeth and burning with a sacred trust. And a few thousand years later you come burning down out of the same sky, barely capable of waddling a couple of yards from here to there and no power to actually harm anyone or anything”—a sour glance at his bandaged hand—“that isn’t touching you at the time. You have no weapons, but your sacred trust is eternal, so we can assume that remains.”

  “I did not say at any point—”

  “Shut up, I’m not finished yet.” Ringil brooded for a moment. “That sacred trust was the protection of the Kiriath and the destruction of the dwenda. The Kiriath are all gone bar one, less than one, if we’re going to be bloodline precise about it, and you saw fit to drag her all the way north to the Hironish isles. That’s where it stops making sense. How is Archeth Indamaninarmal safer on perilous seas three thousand miles the wrong side of a bad political divide than she would be back home and tucked up in bed? I’ve got to assume there was some kind of risk building in Yhelteth and you saw it coming, but what the fuck could be bad enough to justify this trip?”

  “Perhaps there was a reward waiting that mattered more than the risks.”

  “If there was, we didn’t find it. And you weren’t exactly helpful in that direction.”

  “Perhaps the reward was already in your hands and did not need finding.”

  Ringil snapped to his feet.

  “Yeah, and perhaps you’d better start answering my questions cleanly before I lose my fucking temper and send you for a swim.”

  The tension came up in the pit of his stomach again, unbidden. He could feel the glyphs on the tip of his tongue, crowding forward as if anxious to be unleashed once more. The deeper into the ikinri ‘ska you go, Hjel tells him, camped somewhere out on the marsh plain, the less it’s a tool for you and the more you’re a gate for it.

  Well, he’d gone pretty deep this time.

  “You have not made clear what your question actually is,” Anasharal was saying, rather smugly. “Do so and I will answer you gladly enough.”

  “What,” Ringil enunciated tightly, “was the threat back in Yhelteth?”

  “Earthquake.” No trace of strain or resistance in the Helmsman’s tone now. The glyphs were back to thin scratches on metal, no glow remaining “The drowned daughters of Hanliagh are stirring again.”

  Fuck. Ringil made his face impassive, but … fuck.

  “And the Citadel,” Anasharal went on, “will almost certainly use the resulting panic among the faithful to extract concessions from the Emperor and force a holy war in the north.”

  You don’t say, went drearily through his head.

  He sat back down. He saw them in his mind’s eye, thronging the streets—the tramp of their feet, the forested ranks of their raised fists. He heard the shrill, barking hysteria of their chants as if he were there. All those hot-eyed, tight-muscled angry young men, marching by the thousand, yearning to spill blood in the Revelation’s name.

  “Yeah, there goes that Empire you were talking about,” he drawled, still masking his shock. “You know, the one built on reason and science?”

  The Helmsman’s voice scaled upward. “I did not say that the work of the Kiriath mission was well done—”

  “How very humble of you.”

  “—nor that I subscribed to it!”

  He blinked, as much at the chopped off quality of the words as at their meaning.

  This is it, Gil.

  He sat still in the chair, trying not to let the knowledge show on his face. Certainty in his racing mind, as iron as Anasharal’s carapace. This was the slip, the break he’d been looking for, the crack in the Helmsman’s polished façade.

  Just got to lever it open.

  “If you don’t subscribe to ’Nam’s mission,” he said slowly, “then the Empire means nothing to you, except maybe as …”

  And then he saw it.

  Like sand blown off the carved lines of some intricate, ancient piece of architecture, long buried in the deserts around Demlarashan. Stonework and ornamentation slowly etching back into view, no clear sense of the overall structure yet, but—

  He heard the Helmsman’s words again. To forge and temper a weapon …

  Heard his own words, thrown out without reflection. They took your weapons away.

  “Your sacred trust was to exterminate the dwenda.” Feeling his way as he spoke. “And they’re back. You’re trying to turn Yhelteth into a weapon to drive them out again. But how’s that supposed to work? Jhiral’s a spoiled brat, he’s got the vision of a wharf-end bully at best, and without the Kiriath …”

  Faintly, very faintly, the traceries of radiance across the Helmsman’s carapace as the compulsion glyph sequence began to kindle. He was closing in.

  He was—

  “Oh, you’re joking,” he said suddenly. “You must be joking.”

  “You have not asked me a question yet, Eskiath.” Anasharal’s voice was still not strained, but the sulkiness was back.

  “Archeth? You’re trying to put fucking Archeth on the Burnished Throne?”

  The glyphs flared violently.

  And abruptly, Ringil was laughing.

  It started small, a disbelieving chuckle at first, but then his mouth split around the sound like a badly sutured wound, and suddenly he was laughing hard.

  Perhaps it was the pent-up horror of his time in the dark defiles and gullies, the sense of endless, restless sets of eyes hung up above and brooding on his inch-slow progress, the tight, twisting confines of the paths and the scuttle of multiple limbs overhead, the scrape of claw-tipped fingers creeping across wet limestone at his back, tapping with skeletal irony on the glyphs he has passed and noted …

  Yeah, well, enough of that.

  He stuffed the laughter away, got it back down to a chuckle, obscurely glad to find that somewhere inside him, the capacity for genuine mirth still remained. He leaned back in the arms of chair with a broad grin still painted across his face.

  “Okay, seriously though. Just so we’re absolutely clear on this. You really plan to depose the Khimran dynasty and make Archeth Indamaninarmal Empress? That’s the big idea?”

  “Initially regent.” The words dragged out of Anasharal. “But as time passes and she does not age, as perception of her changes from human to goddess, as the remaining Helmsmen stir to their fullest capacity to serve her, there will be no imaginable replacement for her on the throne or at the head of the Empire. She will reign as God-Empress Eternal.”

  “That’s if the dwenda don’t just roll over us all first.”

  “If there is any hope of repelling the dwen
da, it must come from Yhelteth.” Anasharal’s voice was picking up momentum now, and the glyphs had dulled. It was as if Ringil’s laughter had stung the Helmsman into finally coming clean. “Your own homeland is in thrall to the Aldrain legend, its people will welcome them back with open arms and not question until it is too late. Their own founding myths will eat them alive. The Empire has cultural distance—”

  “Yeah? Try telling that to Pashla Menkarak and his fuckwit friends up at the Citadel. They thought the dwenda were angels.”

  “That would not have happened under Kiriath leadership.”

  “And how exactly do you propose to secure Archeth her seat on the throne?” He gestured, grin crimped down to a sour smile in one corner of his mouth. “It’s not like she’s returning home in triumph from a heroic quest fulfilled.”

  “She never needed to. The quest itself was pure pretext, a skein of borrowed legends and half-truths knitted together to provide the necessary impulse in the key players.”

  That stopped him. Wiped out the last traces of his amusement.

  “You metal motherfucker,” he said wonderingly. “I always knew there was something wrong with this gig. I knew you were playing us, right from the start.”

  “Then you repressed your doubts remarkably well.”

  “I didn’t come along for the fucking quest.”

  “Ah, yes—protective loyalty. Strange how much she inspires that, isn’t it?”

  “Oh, fuck off.”

  He glowered at the upended Helmsman while his head seethed with the new revelations. At his shoulder, he sensed the rigidity that had taken hold of Noyal Rakan. He was, after all, a Throne Eternal. And while Gil had detected in him on more than one occasion a bitter disappointment with the quality of the man now occupying the Burnished Throne, that wasn’t really the point. Rakan’s oath, like all his comrades, was to the throne itself, the idea and ideal of the throne, not the Emperor who sat on it at any given moment. That, plus fond memories of Akal the father and a couple of generations of family bond to the Khimran dynasty, would be more than enough to overwhelm any personal dislike for Jhiral the son.

  Though now, of course, with earthquake and war and streets full of the ranting idiot faithful, loyalty to Jhiral might be a rather moot point. There were any number of ways a young, unpopular Emperor could die in chaos like that, leaving a gap to be filled and no real time or inclination to worry about who exactly was to blame.

  Still … Archeth?

  “You’re going to have to explain this to me slowly,” he said. “You sell Archeth Indamaninarmal a city in the sea and an undying Kiriath vigil to get her out of town before the shit starts to fly. You sell the Emperor a possible sorcerous threat to his Empire that he can’t ignore so he’ll let her go. Plus, the way this expedition was set up, he’s got a shot at acquiring some easy loot for very little up-front outlay, and the chance to have some of his stroppier rich-men-about-court launch themselves into handy self-imposed exile on seas that …”

  And stop.

  As howling winds rinsed out the rest of the sand, and the whole ornately carved and crenellated edifice stood out of the desert, revealed for what it was, and bigger than he’d ever imagined it might be. He felt himself stumble before it, felt the sandstorm winds of realization tear through his head.

  “Captain,” he heard himself say distantly to Rakan. “This hand is really starting to bother me. Can you get me a couple of grains of flandrijn, powdered into water?”

  The Throne Eternal hesitated. Gestured at the Helmsman. “My lord, this is, this sounds like—”

  “Yes, it’s compelling, I agree.” Gil turned in the chair and looked into Noyal Rakan’s eyes. “And we’ll resume just as soon as I can think straight with this fucking hand. You can go, Captain, I’ve got this. I don’t believe I’m in any danger. Just … in a lot of pain.”

  He flexed his bandaged fingers and grimaced for effect, not entirely faking it. He hissed in through his teeth, pressed his lips together, still holding the young Throne Eternal’s gaze. It wasn’t the ikinri ‘ska, wasn’t any kind of sorcery the Creature from the Crossroads might recognize. But it was that old Ringil Angel-eyes magic. Noyal Rakan moistened his lips and his eyes crinkled with concern.

  “I’m sorry,” he said softly. “Be right back.”

  Ringil watched him go, let him get out of earshot before he turned back to the Helmsman. Voice a hiss not much louder than the noise he’d made to signal his pain.

  “You’re building a fucking cabal?”

  CHAPTER 35

  he sprite led them a twisting, looping route through the darkened streets, following some planned path obvious only to itself. Egar couldn’t be sure—cloud cover had crept in from the east, and band and stars were muffled up—but he thought they doubled back and zigzagged a lot. The city became a maze around him, dim towering mounds of broken architecture and seemingly random twists and turns between. Once or twice he saw the distant gleam of a campfire out among the ruins, and the breeze brought him the scent of roasting meat, but that was all. The sprite always veered well away from such signs.

  For all the doubling back, though, they moved at a good pace. The sprite flickered briskly on ahead, only pausing or coming back when they hit some awkward obstruction or bottleneck. On these occasions, it brightened itself helpfully and hung about, darting back and forth, throwing warm reddish light across the falls of collapsed masonry or torn-up street surfacing that were slowing them down.

  Finally, a couple of hours into the march, it led them up a series of detritus-strewn staircases in one rubble mound and out onto a broad, jutting platform forty feet above street level. Surprised satisfaction muttered among the men. The ruin they’d climbed through was mostly intact—it gave them towering vertical walls at their back, the single staircase entry point to defend and a two hundred degree sweep of vantage out over the city to the front.

  It was pretty much an ideal place to make camp.

  Yeah, and if you hadn’t been in such a fucking hurry before, Dragonbane, we might have been sitting here nine stronger than we are.

  He sat cross-legged at the edge of the platform, away from the others and glowering out at the shattered city skyline. It was not normally in his nature to brood on such things, but the encounter with the lizards had opened a door somewhere in his head, and now all the long-stored memories of the war were back out to play.

  Back in the Kiriath Wastes, back in combat with the Scaled Folk.

  There’d been a savage intensity to it all back then, a vivid day-to-day urgency that, if he was honest, he’d thrilled to and still sometimes missed. But now, dealt a handful of the very same red-edged cards, all he felt was old and weary of the game. As if everything he’d done back then, every battle he’d fought, every scar he’d collected, had all been for nothing. As if something fanged and grinning dragged him off the mount of his fate and back down into a past he’d done everything he could to leave behind …

  “See anything good out there?”

  He glanced up at Archeth’s slim form and tilted, inquiring look. Shook his head.

  “More of the same. I don’t think we’ve come all that far as the crow flies. Going to take us a good few days to cross this shit heap.”

  “Dodging the Scaled Folk as we go.”

  “Yeah, that’s right. Cheer me up, why don’t you?”

  She sighed. Lowered herself into a loose sprawl beside him. “It was an honest mistake, Eg, and we all made it, not just you.”

  Yeah, but I’m the one supposed to be leading these men out of this mess. It’s my job not to make mistakes that get them killed. But he didn’t say that, not least because he was beginning to wonder if it was true. They’d all walked into An-Kirilnar behind the Dragonbane, this ragtag assortment of fighting men, but they’d marched out again behind a flickering Kiriath firefly and Archeth Indamaninarmal.

  “Honest or not,” he growled, “we can’t afford many more mistakes like that.”

  “Agre
ed.”

  They sat for a while, staring off the edge of the platform. She shifted and cleared her throat a couple of times.

  “You see Tand’s guys turning out their dead pal’s pockets?” she asked finally.

  “Yeah. Took the rings off his fingers as well. The old freebooter’s farewell.” He glanced sideways at her. “What, you were expecting speeches and flowers?”

  “I was expecting …” She shook her head. “Doesn’t matter. Fucking sellsword scum.”

  “Talking to an old sellsword here, Archidi.”

  “Don’t tell me you would have done the same.”

  He considered for a moment, brooding on the skyline. “Well, no, maybe not. Not to a comrade-in-arms, anyway. But hey, I’m a barking mad Majak berserker. No accounting for the way us steppe barbarians act.”

  She snorted, but he saw a thin smile flicker on her lips.

  “Look, you don’t want to read too much into it either way, Archidi. They sat his death vigil, they prayed over him while he was alive. And it’s not like he’s going to miss any of that stuff they took.” He gestured out over the ruined city. “Not like it’d serve any useful purpose left out there with him.”

  “Yeah, I know.” The smile had flickered out, left her looking grim and tired. “I just wonder sometimes, what’s the fucking point? Here we are, trying to get everybody home safe, and for what? So Tand’s thug freebooters can go back to bullying slave caravans up and down the great north road for him? So Kaptal can get back to his high-class whore-mongering and his blackmail around court? So these asshole privateers can slink off home through the borders, sign on with a new ship, and go back to their fucking pirating …”

  He nodded. “So Chan and Nash and the others can go back to their job safeguarding the wanker on the Burnished Throne?”

  “Well, that’s … different.”

  “Is it?” Another time, he might have left it alone. But he was raw from the fight and the errors that had caused it, and twitchy from this whole forced march back into his own past. “How is it any different, Archidi? Jhiral’s a cunt, and you know it. He’s every bit as big a cunt as Tand or Kaptal or any League pirate captain you want to name. And the Empire pays a phalanx of its very best fighting men to stand around him and let him go on being a cunt without anyone able to touch a hair on his head, while you stand at his shoulder, whispering advice into his delicate little cunt ear. Doesn’t mean we won’t try to get you and our Throne Eternal pals home, though, does it?”