The Dark Defiles

by Richard K. Morgan

  For the craftsman jailers of Trelayne knew what they were about. They were well versed in the art of converting ships into dungeons—in a rapidly burgeoning city where every new square yard of building space had to be reclaimed from the marsh, prison hulks had long been the most economical way of shelving undesirables not considered worthy of execution. Better yet, there was a helpful, finger-wagging symbolism in the trick, especially where piracy was the crime for which punishment was to be exacted. The prison hulks were visible from the city walls on the south side, and from the slums in Harbor End, too, if you had a good enough eye; clearer still from the spread of reclaimed land beyond the city’s skirts, where Trelayne’s agricultural workforce bent their backs to earn a barely sustaining crust, and from the broad sweep of marshland beyond that, where the marsh dweller clans held to their encampments and grubbed a living in whichever way they could.

  For anyone in those places who cared to look, then, the hulks were a grim, gathered presence, like storm clouds on the horizon. Think your life’s hard? Transgress the laws of the Fair City, and look where you could end up. Look what became of criminals, of sweet-keeled pirate vessels and their crews when the force of that law was invoked.

  Inside Sprayborne, the same didactic sensibility held sway for the inmates, but seasoned with an additional twist of cruelty. They’d built the cells into the hull like the chambers in a wasp’s nest, each one sitting just above the bilges and served with light by portholes too high up to peer out of without the prisoner gouging at wrists and ankles when his restraining chains went taut. You might see the outside world you had forgone for your crimes, but only at painful cost.

  For the rest, you sat chained in damp, stinking gloom and watched the days of your life march in filtering fingers of light from the portholes, across the opposing wall of the cell from one side to the other, and down again into darkness.

  Wyr availed himself of the option to look outside only on those occasions that he felt his sanity going, slipping quietly away from him in the rank confines of the cell. At other times, he refused to torment himself with what he could not have. He was, despite himself, a survivor. He shook off his dreams each day, fed them as fuel to the rage in his belly. He cleaned the bowls of thin stew they served him, he devoted the few clear-headed hours of strength the slop gave him to simple, mindless exercises that didn’t pull on his chains. The evenings, he spent filing away at his fetters with one of the iron nails he had worked loose from the hull planking, until it grew too dark to see what he was doing. It would take years to cut through a single manacle, probably a decade to free all four limbs, always assuming he didn’t run out of nails first. And if they caught him at it, they’d go right ahead and replace the irons with fresh ones or maybe just kill him.

  But it gave him something to do. It gave him a daily focus for his fury. It gave him hope, and he knew how vital that was.

  In the other cells, he could hear how the men from his crew went slowly, gibbering mad with the isolation and the death of hope. They started out four years past with thumped messages in code through the wooden walls, shouted vows of solidarity to each other from cell to cell. But all too soon the structure of their communication began to break down. They hammered on the planking in incoherent rage. They yelled, they screamed, they wept. Eventually, they began to cackle and crow incomprehensibly to themselves. In the first couple of years, he’d been able to recognize voices, put individual names of men to the yelling, but that time was long past. Now, Sprayborne’s whole hull echoed faintly with their mingled mutterings and laments, as if the men themselves were gone and only ghosts remained.

  Footfalls, in the corridor along the keel.

  Wyr propped himself up from the planks where he lay, stared at the filtering fingers of light over his head. It was early in the day for food; they’d not usually feed him much before noon. The tiny shift in routine, the trickle of difference it made, set an unreasonable jag of excitement chasing through his veins.

  Something was going on.

  Scrape of a key in the lock, the heavy wooden door thumped back, and a familiar figure stood in the space it left. Wyr blinked and straightened up in his chains. Coughed and shuddered with the damp.

  “Gort?” Voice a choked husk. Stifle the coughing, force it down. “What you doing here at this hour?”

  “Same as fucking ever.” The jailer hefted a pail at his side, bigger than the usual. It made a slopping sound that set Wyr’s mouth running with saliva. “And I’m telling you now, this might be all you get till day after tomorrow, depending. Don’t scoff it all at once, eh.”

  “Right, yeah. What’s going on?”

  Gort heaved a world-weary sigh. He was a gutty sack of a man, lugubrious and slow and full of complaints. But by the standards of prison hulk jailers, he was a prince. He appeared to pass no judgment on the men he attended, saw them as unfortunates just like himself, caught up in the same atrocious web of chance that had landed him with this gods-forsaken job. Previous jailers, equally unhappy with their lot, had never missed a chance to take it out on the prisoners at the slightest provocation or sometimes with none at all. It was a casual brutality, no different than stomping a cat or hurling stones at a street cur—they mostly used boots or fists, only occasionally resorted to the short, studded lash they carried at their belt as the closest thing there was to a badge of office in this line of work. But Wyr had never seen Gort’s lash come off his belt, and the worst he’d had to endure at the man’s hands were the interminable monologues on the many, many ways in which life had conspired to treat his jailer unjustly.

  “Got to do the whole fucking ship and be back to Harbor End before noon, if you can believe that shit. Like to see them up at the Chancellery manage that. They must think—here, cop hold of this, stash it or eat it now, up to you—must think I’ve got a fucking longboat and full complement to row me out and back, ’stead of what I have got, which is two broken-down old war veterans with more scar tissue than skin barely know one end of an oar from the other. Course, that’s not the best of it, neither.” Gort took a morose seat on the doorsill. “After this round, we’re right back out again with provisions and medicines for the yellow ’n’ blacks. Well, they needn’t think I’m setting a single foot on one of those fucking decks, not on what they pay me. Let the fucking bone men go, earn their money for a change—”

  “Yellow and black?” Voice still husky with lack of use, but a fresh pulse of interest prickled along Wyr’s nerves. “Out here, you mean? With the hulks?”

  “Yeah, fucking plague ship, where else they going to stick it? Navy picket brought them in last night, a whole squadron of them.” A vague nod up at the portholes. “Three ships, and two of them are captured imperials. Probably where they picked it up; those southerners got some filthy fucking habits from what I hear. All flying the pennants, anyway.”

  “Plague.” He said it like the name of a god he might worship. The bucket of stew was forgotten at his feet.

  “Yeah, just what we fucking needed, right? On top of the war and all? Don’t really know why they’re making us feed them in the first place, if it’s anything like back in forty-one, they’ll all be dead by end of week. And then we’ll just have to burn the ships to the waterline. Waste of good food, waste of my fucking time coming out an extra trip every day.” Gort’s eyes narrowed with freshly aggrieved suspicion. “Might be, you know, this is all some Empire trick to fuck us over. Maybe the imperials let them capture those ships on purpose, crewed them up with men what were already infected and let us take them, so we’d carry the plague right into the city. Sort of thing they’d do, treacherous fuckers, they pretty soon forgot how we drove out the lizards for them. And now look. Hinerion taken like a peach, Empire columns marching right into the peninsula like it was their backyard. You ask me, that raiding you did down south after the war, they should of given you a fucking medal for it.”

  “What I thought,” said Sharkmaster Wyr quietly.

  “Yeah, guess we all
got to carry other men’s fuckups, don’t we. Like I should of had that harbor watch job when old Feg died. Everyone knew I was his favorite for it. Still can’t believe that little shit Sobli got it instead. Nah, don’t worry, not going to bore you with that story again. Like I said, don’t you go eating all that at once, mate. With this shit boiling up, could be a couple of days before I get back here again.” The jailer slapped his thighs and stood up. “Anyway, that’s it, got to get on. Let’s hope your old bosun’s calmed down a bit since yesterday. Last thing I need on top of everything else, that is—him flinging his own turds at me like the fact he’s in here is my fucking fault.”

  The door clubbed shut again, the key grated around, and Gort went grumbling away. Wyr got up and hobbled stiffly to a portion of the cell floor under the nearest porthole. He took a long breath, then hauled himself up on the porthole’s lower edge, wincing as his fetters dug into recently healed flesh from a dream he’d had a few days back.

  He gritted his teeth and hauled harder, got his chin over the edge and peered out.

  Bright morning light, long angled ladders of it propped up against the clouds, as if the sky itself was ripe for boarding. The new ships sat at anchor about a quarter league off, marked out from the hulk fleet by their masts, at the top of which the yellow and black plague pennants flopped slackly about in the breeze. One League caravel, looked like Alannor yard work from the lines, and two bigger, fatter Empire merchantmen, the sort that would have raised a low, predatory cheer from his crew back in the day. All three vessels flew the colors of Trelayne. It was hard to tell in the glare of early daylight off the water; his eyes were stinging from the unaccustomed brightness, but it didn’t look as if there was anyone up on deck.

  “Hoy, look—No! Fucking pack that in!”

  Gort’s muffled bellow from a couple of cells down the keel. Something nearly like a smile touched Wyr’s lips, then passed slowly away. He lowered himself back down to the plank flooring and slid fingers under the fetters on his wrists, massaging the abused flesh there as best he could.

  He crouched there, thoughtful, trying to understand why the arrival of the plague ships should feel so much like something good.

  HE FED HIMSELF WITH RIGID CONTROL FROM THE BUCKET.

  Gort hadn’t lied, it was pretty much a double helping by jail standards and still retained a faint trace of oven warmth despite the long crossing from Harbor End. The hunk of bread floating on top seemed massive. He tore off the portion that was already soaked through with broth and ate it first, to take the edge off his hunger. Then he sieved out some of the miserly ration of solid pieces with his fingers, soft chunks of carrot and crumbling potato, a stringy shred of meat with a blubbery lump of fat still attached, and ate them one savored piece at a time.

  He was still chewing when the sounds started under the hull.

  For a brief, fuddled space, he thought that Sprayborne must have slipped her chains. Was being carried on the current across boulder-studded shallows. Irregular, spaced bumping along the keel. Like that time in the Scatter, skulking to avoid imperial patrols, nearly lost the whole fucking ship that time, had to put stripes on ever member of the watch for fucking up so badly …

  It took a moment or two for common sense and recollection of where he was to catch up—there was no sense of motion in the hull other than the faint, eternal rocking in place he was used to, and anyway, he would have heard the ring of hammers if the anchors had been struck. And the riverbed was pure silt out here, shallowing to nothing but the broad expanse of mudflats and marsh.

  Yeah, silt and the bones of your murdered children.

  Sharp, fast spike of rage to drive out the musing. Before he could stop himself, he lashed out with his foot, caught the food pail and sent it flying.

  He sat staring sickly at the mess.

  Four years, four fucking years, of starvation diet and enclosure, and here he was, brought to this. Mind left loose and slow, clarity fogged by drifting banks of exhaustion and weary self-pity, losing himself in spirals of memory and addled reflection it could take hours to shake off.

  And then, suddenly, he was scrabbling forward to right the pail before it dribbled out every last trace of the stew within. Mumbling to himself.

  “Oh no, no—no, no …”

  Flinging himself flat to lick up the remaining spill before it leaked away between the planks, scooping up the solids on trembling fingers, dropping them back into the bottom of the bucket, peering whimpering in after them to see how much he’d managed to salvage.

  “Sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry … ”

  More soft bumping, right beneath him where he crouched. He froze, staring down at the cell floor as if he could see right through it, through the bilges below and the hull, out to whatever was hanging there in the murky gloom under the keel, knocking to get in.

  The planking under him sprung a leak.

  At first it was small, a sudden darkening of the already age-stained wood, like a man pissing his breeches under torture. If his naked foot had not been resting in the center of the patch, he might not even have noticed it. But then the water began forcing its way through in earnest, welling up out of the wood, mounding three full fingers above the floor and—as he jerked his foot out of the patch in alarm—following his moves like a living creature.

  He backed up against the far wall of the cell, shaking his head. Watching in dazed fascination, saw the mound of water cast about where he had been, as if confused by his sudden disappearance. It went on swelling as it moved, welling steadily upward, and now it radiated a faint phosphorescence into the cell, like seaweed spores he’d once seen floating in the southern seas.

  He wondered numbly if some cunt back at the kitchens in Harbor End had spiked his food with mushroom powder for a laugh. Wouldn’t be Gort, but maybe one of the others. Had to be, because it was either that or—

  The water seemed to have detected him again. The mound ceased its circular motion and began to slip like a purposeful jellyfish across the planking toward him. It was over knee height now, and he thought he could discern movement within—soft churning and the spindling turn of pinprick luminescent points.

  Fascination chilled away into dread—this was no fucking ’shroom dream.

  “Salt Lord,” he croaked, desperate. “Salt Lord, stand by me now and all—”

  But his voice caught and stuck. He started to back away again, and his chains brought him up short. An attempted shout caught in his throat. He could feel his eyes starting from their sockets. His new cellmate was almost on him. He shrank from its glistening curve in dread, wrenching his wrists and ankles on the fetters as he fought to escape.

  A terrified, inarticulate scream tore its way finally up his rusted throat, shrilled into the damp prison air, just as the water engulfed his legs.

  From down the corridor, another shriek answered. And the clatter of something being dropped. He knew the voice for Gort’s, but had no time to care. At his feet, something in the water began to bubble, and a long, thin stain swam up through the commotion. It was the color of blood. He thrashed at his fetters as he saw it, screaming hard now, already feeling the pain, the suction as this thing—

  The left manacle gave. His leg came loose.

  After four years in chains, it was like the jolt of a dislocated limb. He stumbled with the shock, and his right leg came free, following the left. He floundered and fell, out of the watery mound, backward on his arse on the planking.

  His feet …

  He became abruptly aware that he was still screaming, and shut his mouth with a snap that hurt.

  His feet were free.

  Up on deck, more screams.

  He dared to stop watching the bubble of water—it had made no move to follow him—and snatched a glance downward instead.

  His feet were free.

  The manacles were gone. He could see the shiny bands of scar tissue they had laced around his legs just above the ankle, could see the full extent of the scarring for the fir
st time. He would have reached down to touch, but the manacles that still held his arms would not allow it. At his side, the mound of water had grown to waist height and now sat there, like a faithful hound. He peered into it, through the distortions of the faintly glowing water to the other side, where his chains lay loose on the floor. They ended abruptly at the bubble’s edge, and within there was nothing but smears and turdlike crescents of rust.

  The bubble quivered impatiently.

  Wonderingly, he looked at the wrist cuffs he had worn for the last four years, then back to the mound of water. He drew a deep breath, raised his arms, and sank them into the softly glowing heart of the bubble. It was, he noticed this time, not as cold as seawater should have been and—

  Fierce seething around his wrists, and once again he saw the blood-colored stains spinning off through the water, as centuries of corrosion took place in seconds. He felt the first cuff snap apart and fall and he snatched that arm up to his face, feeling tears now as he saw the unfettered flesh. His other arm was free seconds later and suddenly he was shouting, laughing, and crying at the same time. He pushed deeper into the heap of water, crouched so that it covered his body to the shoulders. It was warm and soothing. He ducked his head under and shook it madly. The first bath he had had since capture, unless you counted the buckets of cold water with which his jailers sluiced down prisoner and cell a couple of times each month. He laughed in the water, spewing bubbles. He thrashed his arms about. He erupted from the body of his new friend, kicking and splashing like a child.