The Dark Defiles

by Richard K. Morgan

  That sat between them for a while, like the night and the cold questing reach of the breeze. When the silence started to mount up, he glanced across at her, but she was still staring fixedly out into the darkness.

  “You don’t understand, Eg.” Quietly, but with a steely conviction infusing her tone. “You don’t know what it was like before the Empire. The whole south was just a bunch of fucking horse tribes slaughtering each other left, right, and center when they weren’t riding down out of the hills and butchering the farmers and the fishermen on plains, carrying off women and children as slaves. The Empire put a stopper in that, it brought peace and law to the whole region in less than twenty years.”

  “Yeah, think we got this lecture at imperial barracks induction.”

  “Jhiral isn’t so bad, Eg.”

  “He’s a cunt.”

  “He’s a young man handed too much power too soon, that’s all. A boy who spent his whole boyhood learning to fear his own brothers and sisters and stepmothers and aunts and uncles and cousins, never mind anybody else at court; a son whose father never had time for him because he was always too fucking busy off making war at one end of the Empire or the other. You’re surprised Jhiral’s turned out the way he is? That he acts the way he does? I’m not.” Voice rising now, an obscure anger piling onto the conviction, lending it force. “And now he’s had to watch the whole race of magical beings that protected his father—that protected his whole dynasty before him—cut and run as soon as he takes the throne. He’s the first one, Eg, the very first one who’s had to deal with that, since my father walked into the Khimran encampment nearly five hundred years ago and told Sabal the Conqueror’s flea-bitten thug grandfather that his bloodline were going to be kings. Try and imagine what it’s like for a moment—there’s this five-hundred-year-old magic carpet your family’s always had, to raise them up above the crowd and keep them safe and special, and now suddenly it’s yanked out from under your feet just when you need it most. Jhiral’s the first one who hasn’t had the Kiriath behind him, building wonders in the city to amaze his people, riding with him to war to terrify his enemies, lending him weapons and knowledge and power, promising him that whatever happens, history is on his side.”

  “He has you,” Egar rumbled.

  “Yeah, he has me.” A mirthless sneer flitted across her face in the gloom. “Every solid thing he grew up thinking he could count on turns to dust in his hands, and he gets me as the consolation prize. One burned-out, krin-fried Kiriath half-blood juggling five thousand years of heritage she doesn’t fucking understand. Is that supposed to make him feel better?”

  He shrugged. “Dunno, he’s a cunt, isn’t he? But I’d take you at my shoulder over anyone else I know with a blade, and be grateful for the company.”

  The moment locked and held solid, until she broke it apart with her laughter. He looked at her and saw in the low light the tear sheen in her eyes. But she sniffed and grinned when she spoke.

  “Anyone else you know with a blade, eh? Thought that’d be Gil.”

  “Well.” He gestured. “He’s got the other shoulder.”

  And they both broke up laughing, loud enough that faces turned toward them across the blue-lit platform ruin.

  But later, as they lay side by side in their bedrolls and stared up past the jagged loom of ruins into a clouded sky, she said very quietly “You’re right, Eg. Jhiral is a cunt. But I can’t help it, I’ve known him too long. He’s been in my life ever since he was a squalling little bundle I could lift on one palm.”

  He grunted. Bleakly, he remembered Ergund; playing raiders with him about the encampment when they were both not much older than six or seven; staring down at his mutilated corpse in the steppe grass two years past. We’re all small and harmless once, Archidi. But we all grow up. And some of us grow up needing killing.

  You’re talking to a brother slayer here.

  Let it go, Eg. Let her talk it out.

  He didn’t want to fight with Archeth, whatever spiky balls of rage might be rolling about in the pit of his stomach, looking for release.

  Yeah, save that for whatever’s waiting for us down the boulevard tomorrow.

  Or out on the steppe when we get there.

  For the first time, he allowed himself to think fully about what he might find if he went back. How it might boil down if he asked around in Ishlin-ichan, got word of the Skaranak and their herds and tracked them down. How his people might react if he just showed up one night like some wronged ancestor ghost in the campfire glow.

  And put a gutting knife into that fucking buzzard Poltar.

  That little shit Ershal, too.

  “Probably held him in my arms more times than his own father ever did, you know.” Archeth, still musing up at the clouded darkness overhead. “Akal was never around when it mattered. I still remember hugging Jhiral at four fucking years old, Eg, the night the Chaila pretenders sneaked into the palace and tried to murder him. I’m clutching him to me, I’m trying to cover his eyes so he can’t see the carnage, trying to hide the fact I’m checking him for wounds at the same time, and he’s weeping, screaming, covered in blood from where I took down the guy that had him when I burst in, and all he wants is his big sister to come and hold him instead of me. And I’m trying to explain to him that he can’t really see his sister right now, in fact, uhm, well, Chaila’s got to go away for a while.”

  “Yeah. Ten years in a House of Prayer in the Scatter, wasn’t it?”

  “They pardoned her home after six. Big mistake, as it turned out.” Archeth blew a weary sigh up at the cloud cover. “Fucking joys of Empire-building. Course, by the time she came home, Jhiral knew what it was all about. No way to keep it from him, and he’d survived another couple of attempts to scrub him out in the meantime, it was getting to be part of the palace decor. When Chaila came back, he wouldn’t have anything to do with her. Never let her even touch him again. So, yeah, I look at all that and I think, sure, you’re right, he’s a cunt. But what chance did he have?”

  Rustle of blankets as she shuffled around to look at him across the small space between them.

  “And he’s smart, Eg, that’s what counts. He’s smart and he sees the point of the Empire. You can work with that, you can build something on it. Whatever bloody mess he makes protecting himself, it’ll pass. He won’t live forever, but what I can help him build might. He’ll leave heirs, and I can work with them, give them the wisdom he never had the time to acquire. Make one of them into the ruler he’ll never be.”

  “Or,” he said mildly, “you could just save some time and look for a better king right now.”

  She sighed. Rolled back to face the sky.

  “What, throw out five centuries of stable dynastic rule, probably set off a civil war, and let everyone and his horse think the throne’s up for grabs? No thanks, Eg. I may not much like the way things are right now, but I’m pretty sure it’s better than the alternatives. And I am done with bloodbaths.”

  “You hope.” He yawned, cavernously. “Better put some big fucking prayers behind that, you want it to stick. Like a certain hard-nose faggot said at Demlarashan that time—we live in bloodbath times …”

  “… and looks like tonight is bath night.” Eg heard the smile in her voice, the glint of the memory. “He did say that, didn’t he.”

  “Yeah. Witty little fucker when he wanted to be.”

  They were both silent for a while after that, staring up at the shrouded face of the heavens. If the shamans were right and you really could read the future in the stars, then tonight was a shit night to be trying it.

  “You think he’s all right?” she asked finally.

  He thought about it. “I think he’s alive, definitely. Gil was a tough-to-kill motherfucker even before he started in on all this black shaman stuff. Now, I can’t see anything short of the Sky Dwellers stopping him.”

  “Or the dwenda?”

  He snorted. “Yeah, a whole fucking legion of them, maybe. Which that shit-he
ad Klithren didn’t look to me like he had.”

  She didn’t say anything for a few moments, maybe because they could both feel the shape of what was coming next.

  “You didn’t answer my question, Eg.”

  He grimaced up at the hidden stars. “No?”

  “No. You said you were sure he was alive, but I didn’t ask you that. I asked if you thought he was all right.”

  Egar sighed, caught. Said nothing, because, well …

  “Well?” she prodded.

  “Well.” He gave up trying to see anything in the sky above. Turned on his side, away from her so he wouldn’t have to meet her eyes. “All depends on your definition of all right, doesn’t it?”

  CHAPTER 36

  Menith Tand

  Klarn Shendanak

  Yilmar Kaptal

  Mahmal Shanta

  e wrote the names out in his cabin back aboard Dragon’s Demise. Sat and stared at them as the ink dried. He’d lived cheek by jowl with these men for nearly five months now, the ones who’d chosen to come along. He’d grown used to them, got to know them somewhat. Had built what amounted to a friendship with Shanta, a wary mutual respect with Tand, and a gradual appreciation that Shendanak was not quite the thick-skulled swaggering Majak thug he generally liked to appear before his men.

  Kaptal was an obnoxious tub of guts, but there you go, can’t have everything.

  And before that, back in Yhelteth, there’d been meetings, endless fucking meetings, with the whole expeditionary board of sponsors, those four and the others.

  He wrote the others out, too.

  Andal Karsh

  Nethena Gral

  Shab Nyanar

  Jhesh Oreni

  Watched the fresh ink soak into the parchment and dry to an even color with the previous names. Outside, indistinct shouts between men in the rigging as they got the sails dressed, worked at keeping Dragon’s Demise tight with the other two ships. The noon sun put bright, high-angled beams of light through the cabin windows around him and caught the swirl of dust motes in the air. It spilled pools of radiance across the writing desk he sat at, touched one corner of the parchment he’d written on, lit it to blazing like a sly hint.

  He picked up the list and stared at it some more. Thought about it, about what he knew firsthand, what he’d gleaned from Archeth and the others over the previous year of hustling and prepping for the expedition. The gossip, the rumors, the moments of unguarded candor and drunken admission.

  He read the names over again.

  Saw, with slow-dawning comprehension, the gathered tinder they represented.

  Shanta—landed, titled, and colossally well-heeled coastal clan patriarch, the foremost naval engineering authority in the Empire and a presiding member of the Yhelteth shipwright’s guild. Which body already served, if Archeth was to be believed, as chief cauldron for a bubbling centuries-old coastlander resentment of the Khimran dynasty’s overlordship, and might now be coming to something of a boil. And if it did, Shanta would likely be more than happy to give the pot a stir—he’d seen a few too many friends and acquaintances lost to Jhiral’s purges in the years since the accession, and with each loss the memory of his close friendship with Akal Khimran the Great was further tarnished, his traces of nominal allegiance to the dynasty further scrubbed away. On his own admission, age was the knife edge Shanta balanced on now, lacking on the one hand the indignant impulse of a younger man to leap in and act with violence against a ruler he had come to hate, on the other hand not having anything much to lose in terms of future years if he did act and it turned out badly. He’d once joked rather grimly with Ringil that whatever unpleasant, long-drawn-out fate the inventive young Emperor might someday decree for him, his aged heart would give out at the first infliction of even moderate sustained pain. And he’d long ago seen his children grow up and navigate into safe harbors within the imperial hierarchy where it would, frankly, be impossible to do them much harm without fatally destabilizing the whole edifice of rule.

  SHANTA HAD LIVED HIS LIFE FOR WHAT IT WAS WORTH; HE WAS LOOKING now only for a good and significant death. And if the quest didn’t provide it for him via chest infection or drowning, Ringil thought he might well go looking for that death in a defiant rising against Jhiral.

  Nyanar and Gral—coastal clan worthies of note, perhaps not quite in Shanta’s class, but not far behind, and both harboring the same basic sense of superiority over the Khimrans’ horse-tribe bandit origins. The Nyanars were generationally wealthy and wielded substantial political influence in the ranks of both the imperial navy and the marine levies—a dozen or more scions of the house held command posts in one service or the other, some of them apparently earned on actual merit. A nominal loyalty to the palace came along with that, of course, service oaths of allegiance and so forth, but what it really amounted to was a loyalty to the sea-faring heritage of the coastal clans and a preexisting naval warrior tradition that the Khimran dynasty had co-opted whole, once it got through with defeating them.

  No one had really forgotten that defeat.

  House Gral’s reach apparently leaned more to the civil and legislative, and the wealth was more recent, but weighty nonetheless. Reigning daughter of a former shipbuilding family that had come back from prior ruin via judicious, cutthroat speculation in property and law, Nethena Gral had learned at her father’s knee that a court sword on your hip’s worth nothing much compared to the weight of a magistrate in your pocket. That was word for word—she’d told Ringil the tale herself in an unguarded and slightly drunken moment one celebratory spring evening as Pride of Yhelteth launched. Perhaps she’d felt some gush of aristo empathy with Gil, scion of an exiled-into-ruin Yhelteth noble line, as Shanta was currently parading him, or perhaps she’d simply wanted—thirty-something summers now and a determined spinster—to get laid. Which was a service that Gil rendered her later in one of Pride’s newly outfitted sawdust and lacquer scented cabins. He was philosophical about the task, quite pleased with his powers of concentration and fakery during the act, wrote the whole thing off as part of his duties as combined midwife and shepherd to the quest, and listened absently to her post-coital ramblings once they were done.

  Gral’s father, it seemed, had salvaged the family fortunes by the simple expedient of converting once-disused shipyards and slipways into desirable waterfront residences for a rising merchant class that craved imitative proximity to the palace. Twenty years later, he stepped up his wealth again through the equally simple process of turning said residences back into shipyard space under handily finessed compulsory purchase legislation with the outbreak of the war, and then selling imperial sublicenses on the family’s hereditary right to construct warships for the crown. And maybe, a sweat-dewed Nethena mused amid throaty laughter as she straddled his face in the lacquer-reeking cabin bunk, just maybe she’d see about reversing the whole trend again in a couple more years, once the postwar economy staggered back to its feet and imitation of the bloody horse emperor’s every belch and gesture came back into fashion. Lot of money to be made that way, a lot of money, yes, like that, yes, yes!

  But anyway, she allowed later, toweling herself down with his shirt, dressing with rapid care while he lay like a used rag on the bunk and smoked a krin twig with eyes on the ceiling, there was always good money to be made in Yhelteth, always, if you just kept your weather eye to the changing times, paid well for good information, and kept your pocket dignitaries sweet. House Gral, Ringil gathered, was aggressive, dynamic, proudly ahead of the pack, and saw the Khimran ascendancy as just one more feature of a landscape it had to navigate. Detect a coming shift in that landscape, a volcanic demolition, say, of the Khimran peak, and Nethena Gral would respond with no more reluctance than the next hungry shark in bloodied waters.

  And speaking of sharks …

  Tand—broad slave trade interests both north and south of the border, like some far-reaching commercial echo of his mixed-blood heritage. Liberalization had made him, but he was already int
o the trade before the war, already a significant player with underworld connections in Baldaran, Parashal, and Trelayne, balancing risks against big profits, smuggling the pale, voluptuous flesh of carefully selected and kidnapped northern girls out through the Hinerion borderlands to where it could be legally sold in the Empire to high demand. In the postwar slump, with debt slavery made suddenly legal again throughout League territory, Tand had all the right friends and trade experience to go from significant player to one of the five richest slave magnates in the Empire He’d taken imperial citizenship by blood-right—father a minor noble from Shenshenath—but it was mainly for convenience. On the voyage north, he talked, often with surprising nostalgia, about Baldaran and the Gergis hinterland where he’d grown up, and Ringil got the impression he might settle back there one day. Menith Tand, it was frequently said, had quite as many friends in the League Chancellery as he had at court in Yhelteth—where he was, in any case, held severely lacking by the horse tribe nobles for his mixed blood. He had nothing to gain from a holy war in the north, and quite a lot to lose. He’d be a handy sea anchor for any negotiations that might close out the war, and if that meant a dynastic shake-up into the bargain, well, maybe that haughty horse tribe element had it coming …

  Shendanak—like most Majak, he had an easygoing contempt for what these once fearsome southern horse clans had become in their luxurious city by the sea. But it didn’t stop him from getting rich off the Empire’s insatiable craving for good horseflesh, nor adopting the trappings of said coastal luxury himself when it suited him. He was an imperial citizen in good standing, and had learned how to read and write, for all he didn’t like to talk about it much. He wore silk about town, he kept a modest harem. He even sent his sons to school. Owned homes of palatial extent in Shenshenath and the capital, not to mention ranches, stables, and stringer staging posts throughout the vast hinterland sprawl between the imperial city and the pass into Majak lands at Dhashara. It was said that every fifth horse in the Empire bore the Shendanak brand, and that once introduced, Akal the Great had refused to ride stallions of any other provenance. Legacy of that relationship, Shendanak now had royal charter to provide mounts for the entire imperial cavalry corps.