The Dark Defiles

by Richard K. Morgan

  They’d both been a lot younger back then.

  You have something to contribute? Flaradnam, seamed black features glaring into the ranks. He waited a beat, got no response. Then shut the fuck up and listen, all of you. What we tell you here today could save your life.

  Across the shattered predawn city, then, threading through empty streets and plazas, picking their way up and over mounds of rubble bigger than any intact building he’d ever seen, even in Yhelteth. Once again, the fire sprite led them a crooked, seemingly senseless path through the ruins. They backed up and twisted and turned. They followed thoroughfares straight as arrows for miles, then turned abruptly off them into tangled, broken ground, worked difficult, meandering routes, only to spill out onto what Egar would have sworn was the same thoroughfare an hour later and head onward as if they’d never left it. Once, some way along a broad boulevard similar to the one they’d been attacked on the night before, the sprite led them directly off the street and up a punishingly steep rubble slope, then along a windy, exposed cliff face of ruined façades that ran for at least half a mile and tracked the boulevard directly. It was tricky work, and in some places involved clinging and edging their way forward with the risk of a lethal fall, while all the time below them, the boulevard stretched on, devoid of apparent obstacles and utterly deserted.

  “You think,” he asked Archeth, breathing hard, as they rested at one of the infrequent safe sections, “that this thing has a sense of humor?”

  She looked out to where the sprite hung blithely suspended a couple of yards away in empty space and a hundred feet off the ground.

  “Either that, or it thought we’d like the view.”

  “Yeah. Well worth the climb.” Egar glowered out across the fractured landscape, and the pale gray wash of another cloud-shrouded morning. “Like Gil would say if he was here, I’m particularly enamored of the … ”

  She glanced around curiously as he trailed off. He squinted, wanting to be sure, then pointed outward, what he estimated had to be northeast from their position and a dozen miles off or less.

  “You see that? Past that torn-up pyramid thing? Where the three boulevards cross, then back a little and left. See the … what is that? Looks like …”

  Talons.

  As if a broad expanse of the city’s structure had broken like pond ice under the weight of some vast, lumbering black iron creature, which now clung to the ragged edges of the hole it had fallen through with huge claws sunk in, struggling not to go down into an abyss below. As if several gargantuan black spiders out of one of his father’s tales hung suspended in a shared, irregularly shaped ambush burrow, only their limbs extending up and out to grip the edges of the gap on all sides, poised to spring. As if dragon’s venom had splattered on the city’s flesh in overlapping oval pools, had eaten its way in and left splayed black burn marks all around, or …

  It dawned on him then, full force.

  It looks like Kaldan Cross.

  As if the Kiriath had labored here as they had at Kaldan in Yhelteth, delving down into the bedrock for their own obscure purposes, reinforcing the sides of their pit with outward clamping iron struts, but on a massively larger scale.

  “Look familiar?” he asked.

  “Well, it’s Kiriath built, that’s for sure.” Archeth, shading her eyes against the glare the rising sun had put into the clouds. “And whatever it is, it goes down. Aerial conveyance pits, right?”

  “You reckon?”

  “I reckon it’d be a pretty huge coincidence otherwise.” She propped herself carefully upright against the façade at their backs. “Come on, let’s see if our flickery friend there feels the same.”

  THEY FOLLOWED THE FAÇADE ALMOST TO ITS END BEFORE THE SPRITE dived into a gap in the stonework and led them down through a series of collapsed and angled spaces that might once have been rooms. They crowded in behind, relieved to get away from the sheer drop, but none too happy with the confined quarters and gloom.

  Our scaly pals show up now, they’ll have us quicker than a shaman’s shag. Egar’s gaze flickered about, making the odds. Barely enough room in here to swing a fucking long knife, let alone a sword or ax. And gaps on every side—floors, walls, ceilings, it’s all up for grabs.

  Still, he slapped down any comments in that direction from the men at his back, told them to shut the fuck up and watch where they stepped. While ahead and below him, Archeth’s lithe form braced its way downward with boots and elbows and arse, backlit into silhouette by the sprite’s onward beckoning fire.

  Not bad, Archidi, for someone with a sewn gash across the ribs big enough to stick your whole hand in. And not a grain of krinzanz to sweeten the ride.

  He didn’t know if she’d used any of the powders they were gifted with at An-Kirilnar, but somehow he doubted it. There was a gritted edge on Archeth right now—if anything, she seemed to be using her pain for something, maybe as a substitute for the fire the krin habitually lent.

  “You all right?” he asked her when they finally spilled out into the light at street level and he stood close at her shoulder.

  She didn’t look at him, took no break from scanning the street ahead, for all that the sprite was already drifting steadily along it. “Yeah, why wouldn’t I be?”

  “Stitches holding up?”

  “Well, you should know—you put them in.” She glanced around at him, face tightening up into a grimace as her body twisted. “Stings worse than getting head from a cactus, if you really want to know. But it’s some beautiful fucking work, Eg. I don’t reckon Kefanin stitches my riding leathers this well.”

  He shrugged, mask for the enduring bitter taste the skirmish the night before had left. “All part of the service. If I can’t keep you from getting hurt, at least I can patch up the damage afterward.”

  “Works for me.”

  The last of the men dropped out of the gap in the masonry behind them and straightened up with vocal curses of relief. Egar shut them up, got them formed into a loose wedge, and led them out once more behind Archeth and the sprite.

  The rest was hard marching but uneventful. They cut across the mounded rubble a few times more, leaving one boulevard in favor of another, trading plazas for streets and vice versa, but it was all open ground, ruined masonry packed solid underfoot or sections of stairway and raised platforms that had taken no more than superficial damage in whatever cataclysm had snuffed the city out. Clear views on all sides now, no real risk of ambush, and their pace picked up accordingly. Egar began to catch traces of a familiar reek on the wind.

  He jogged forward, caught up to Archeth who was striding a few yards ahead.

  “You smell that?”

  “Yeah. Like the stacks at Monal. Must be getting close.”

  Sometimes at An-Monal, the winds blew in from the south, and then you caught an acrid whiff of the chemicals at play in the Kiriath brewing stacks on the plain below. The Dragonbane had never been very sure what it was Archeth’s people made in those towers, he’d only understood that they preferred to make it at some considerable distance from where they lived. Watching at night as huge, unnaturally colored flames leapt and gouted atop the miles-distant darkened towers, he didn’t much blame them. Whatever they had trapped in there, you wouldn’t want to be standing very close if it ever got loose.

  He remembered asking Flaradnam about it once, one banquet night out on the balcony shortly before they all headed out for Trelayne and then the Wastes. He might as well not have bothered—as was so often the case with the Kiriath, any reply you got left you with more questions than you’d started with, and this time was no exception to the rule. ’Nam glanced around the table at the various commanders’ faces in the bandlight, then dropped some cryptic comment to the effect that most of the Kiriath’s more useful alloys had to be grown to full complexity or some such shit. That it was in fact a process less like smelting and smithing, and more akin to raising crops or, in its finest expressions, breeding warhorses or—a fond side-smirk at an embarrassed
Archeth—children. What all that actually meant, Egar had no fucking clue and was too half-cut at the time to pursue any further. And later there was no time, they were all too busy, and a couple of months after that, Flaradnam was beyond all asking.

  The smell was growing stronger, there even in the gaps between the bluster of the wind. He sneaked a glance at Archeth, wondering if it kicked her back as thoroughly to memories of her father.

  But in the gray morning light, her face was as impassive as the flat of a blade.

  They came over steeply piled mounds of rubble the size of hills, started a descent through isolated crags and outcrops of architecture that looked like the drowned upper levels of buildings once dizzying in height. And then, abruptly, they were looking down at the edge of the Kiriath earthworks from not much more than five hundred yards away. The holes gaped there, larger than some lakes he knew back on the steppe, but empty, shadowed, and dark. More than ever, it looked as if these were wounds the city had sustained, and the vast black iron protrusions that sprouted from them on all sides some kind of surgical clamps to prevent healing. As if the Kiriath had dropped something from a great height on their enemies here, and then left it in place to grow and sprout, just the way all those complex alloys were supposed to grow in the stacks at An-Monal.

  The fire sprite came to a flickering halt just past a standing ruin a handful of stories high, paused there perhaps to give them time to take in the view down across the rubble. The air was warmer now. Even the occasional gusts of wind carried some stale-tasting heat along with the brewing stack odors. Egar fetched up at Archeth’s shoulder again.

  “See a way down inside?”

  She cupped both hands above her eyes to shade them, peered, and shook her head. “Not from here.”

  “At Kaldan Cross, you got those things like big mason’s hods running on cables, but they’re sort of tucked away, under the lip.”

  “Yeah, I know. I was there when they built it, remember? This is a fuck of a lot bigger than anything at Kaldan.”

  “Well,” he shrugged. “Bigger hods and cables then. Maybe.”

  The warm wind came and went, gusts and gaps, blowing directly across the open plain and the huge iron-clamped holes in it. The acrid chemical reek rolled in again, but it brought something else with it this time, another note to the mingled odors that—

  Sandalwood … ?

  Or not. He’d lost it again, in the buffet and gust of the wind. He turned his head, breathed deep trying to get it back. He cast about, a sliding sense of doom behind his eyes. Saw the fire sprite turned jumpy and irresolute, slipping back and forth in the air beside them. Archeth, lost in peering down at what her people had built here …

  Sudden, sharp spike of aniseed in his nostrils. The wind came banging back, brought with it the sandalwood again, stronger now, no room left for doubt. He heard comment murmur among the men, men too young or too lucky to know what it meant. He stared down at the gaping holes ahead of them. Felt the warmth in the air again, as if for the first time, and understanding fell on him like the ruin at his back.

  Oh no …

  But he knew it was.

  And now the stealthy chill, waking and walking through his bones. The grinning skull of memory, the bony beckoning hand.

  Well, well, Dragonbane. Here it comes, after all these years.

  He grabbed Archeth by the shoulder. “Snap out of it, Archidi. We’ve got trouble.”

  “Trouble?” She blinked, still lost in thought “What’s the …”

  She caught the blast of spices on the breeze. Her eyes widened in shock. Egar was already unslinging his Warhelm-forged staff lance. He shed the soft fabric sheaths at either end, let them drift to the ground without attention. Plenty of time to chase them up later.

  If there was a later.

  “Clear your steel,” he snapped to the men at his back, as they gathered in around him. “And get back inside that ruin, find yourselves some cover, fast.”

  “Is it the lizards again, my lord?” someone asked.

  He had time to offer one tight grin. “I’m afraid not, no.”

  “Then—”

  Across the wind, out of Kiriath pits below them, it came and split the air. A shrieking, piercing cry he’d thought he’d never hear again outside of dreams. A cry like sheets of metal tearing apart, like the denial of some bereaved warrior goddess, vast, immortal grief tipping over into the insane fury of loss. Like the drawn-out, echoing rage of some immense, stooping bird of prey.

  “It’s a dragon,” he told them simply. “Pretty big one, too, by the sound of it.”

  CHAPTER 40

  he term pirate was one that gave the League a few semantic difficulties.

  The word in current popular usage was in fact a corruption into the Parash dialect of an older term used in the southern cities, borrowed in when Parashal was the ascendant power in the region. The southern coastal states of Gergis had long been traders by sea, knew very well what the scourge of piracy looked like, and their descriptor was condemnatory in no uncertain terms. But Parashal was an inshore city, tucked away in the upland spine of Gergis and several hundred very safe miles from the nearest ocean. Its citizens had about as much chance of being carried off by a dwenda succubus as they did of suffering the predations of a real, live pirate, and so they leaned to a rather more romantic view of the profession. Colorful tales abounded of bold young men, invariably handsome and chivalrous, seeking their fortunes on the high seas, striking out heroically against corrupt port authorities and unjust maritime power. Thus resident in the Parash overculture, the word pirate collected all the selective drama and romance these narratives entailed, much the way a half-sucked sweet picks up a shielding layer of dust and lint from lying in a pocket untasted.

  Subsequent cultural and political shifts—put more bluntly, war—brought regional ascendancy north to Trelayne, but by then the Parash dialect was the dominant form of Naomic throughout the Gergis peninsula, taught in schools and temples, used in treaties and legal contracts, seen as the civilized and sophisticated norm by which all truly educated men were measured. So the accepted form of the word pirate would retain all its attendant Parash ambiguity, along with a peacock tail of fanciful heroic narrative made up and written down by men who, had they ever been faced with the real thing, would doubtless have run screaming to hide in the nearest privy.

  It didn’t hurt this trend that Trelayne was as much a military as a trading power, at least in aspiration, and that to a large degree the city depended on legalized piracy to enforce its influence at sea. Handing out letters of marque to known coastal raiders was a cheap and useful substitute for building a navy, not to mention a powerful stimulus to seagoing trade, since you ensured at the stroke of a quill not only that your own merchant shipping was left comfortably alone but that your competitors were severely hampered until they saw fit to pay you for protection.

  Prosecuted over time, this privateer-based strategy allowed Trelayne to extend and consolidate dominance over every coastal city in the Gergis region and even a couple that had liked, sporadically, to think of themselves as belonging to the Empire in the south. And along with the dominance came a whole new crop of heroic tales, where the terms pirate and privateer grew more or less interchangeable and the bloody specifics of the work were glossed over in general celebration of the triumphant end result. Thus, pirates as warrior princes, as conquerors and standard bearers, as sober martial guardians of righteous commerce and selfless servants to the Greater Glory of Trelayne—eventually becoming the Greater Glory of the Trelayne League - in its tussles with the encroaching imperial might of Yhelteth.

  Perhaps inspired by all this confused and confusing etymology, Shif Grepwyr began his career in piracy young. He was a privateer cabin boy at eleven years old, a boarding party bravo at fourteen. Was bossing his own boarding gang a month shy of his fifteenth birthday, rose to boarding party chief on the raiding caravel Salt Lord’s Sanction a year after that. Three years later, he killed S
anction’s skipper in a squabble over spoils, leveraged the murder into a full mutiny, and then showed up in Trelayne that winter, requesting a transfer of charter and willing to pay for it with a hold full of plunder. Always sensitive to commercial promise, the Trelayne Chancellery acquiesced.

  The name on the new letter of marque was Sharkmaster Wyr.

  “Oh, right, him.” Klithren poured himself another shot of rum, knocked it back, and wiped his mouth. “Yeah, back when I was a kid he used to winter at Hinerion sometimes, coming back up from raiding the Empire coast. But that ship wasn’t called Salt Lord’s Sanction, it was something else. Shorter than that.”

  Ringil nodded. “Sprayborne. Wyr pulled in so much plunder those first couple of years, sank so much imperial shipping, they made him an honorary commander in the Shipmasters’ guild and gave him a new hull. Purpose-built raider, something to compete with the Yhelteth naval pickets. That’s the one you remember.”

  Klithren poured again. Held it up to the gently tilting lantern over their heads and squinted through the liquor at the light. He was beginning to slur his words a little.

  “Yeah, this is all really fascinating memory lane shit, fascinating, but.” The rum, down in one again. He banged the empty glass on the table. “Fuck’s it got to do with us?”

  Ringil’s rum sat untouched before him. He picked it up delicately between finger and thumb. “Would you like to know where Sprayborne is now?”

  “I’m sure you’re going to tell me.”

  “It’s anchored at the delta mouth of the Trel, out by the mudflats. You probably sailed right past it when you shipped out for Ornley. Sprayborne is a prison hulk now. Masts sawn down to stumps, hull chained fore and aft into river silt. Sharkmaster Wyr is still aboard, along with those of his crew who weren’t punished by decimation.”

  “Say what?”

  “Yeah. Seems after the war our friend Wyr lost track of which side his bread was buttered and started taking ships pretty much at random. They say it was Liberalization that knocked him off the perch, that he lost some friends or family to the auction block, but who knows?” Ringil shrugged. “Maybe he just didn’t like the moratorium on attacking imperial traffic. Pretty lean times all around back then.”