The Dark Defiles

by Richard K. Morgan

  “My lord?”

  Let’s hope they steer well clear before one of the other hulks flattens them.

  Yeah, and while we’re at it, black mage, let’s hope your merroigai are all too well fed or busy towing to stop, capsize the skiff and drag all of three of them under for a snack.

  “My lord!”

  A firm hand on his shoulder through the storm. Noyal Rakan, tugging him around. A depth of concern and adoration on the boyish face he could barely stand to look at.

  “The men are mustered and ready, my lord.”

  “Right.” He cleared his throat. Wiped some of the rain off his face. “Yeah. Coming down.”

  He’d taken the same approach to picking his landing party as he had the wedge that helped him put Klithren’s men to flight on the sloping streets of Ornley. He asked for volunteers. Now two dozen men awaited him in ranks on Sprayborne’s main deck, mostly marines but one or two Throne Eternals sown into the mix. They stood at ease, mailed and stone-faced against the rain, darting occasional looks of cool disdain at the freed pirates who huddled in the corners of the deck, jeering and muttering among themselves. There was a tension in the air that might have led to fighting if the prisoners had been a little less starved, or had had more than one weapon per half dozen men.

  But they didn’t.

  Ringil came down the companionway behind Rakan, tipped a nod at Klithren where he stood at one front corner of the ranked assembly. Rakan stepped forward.

  “My lord Ringil will address you now.” He had to shout against the bluster of the wind. “Salute!”

  They did, a bit raggedly. Ringil took the cue, raised his voice.

  “Empire men,” he called. “We are at war, and we find ourselves in the heart of the enemy’s domain. I imagine some soldiers might count this a misfortune. Do you?”

  “No!” Ready chorus—he’d heard Rakan stoking them earlier.

  “We are here to reclaim those noble prisoners taken from us by sneak attack, and to strike a blow at the northerners’ arrogance that they will not soon forget. Are you ready to do these things?”

  “Yes!”

  “Now, I anticipate some small resistance to these aims …” He let the grim laughter break and run among them, waited it out. “And I imagine we may have to show the locals some blood before they’ll let us have what we want. Are you ready for that?”

  “Yes!” Bellowing now.

  “Are you ready for blood?”

  “Yes! Ready!”

  He nodded. “Then follow me, and I’ll see what I can do.”

  Cheers.

  He threw out a salute, turned them back over to Rakan for weapons check. Went back to the companionway, had one foot set on the bottom rung when Klithren sidled up to him, face closed up against the rain like a fist. Gil beat down a sudden tension in his stomach, made himself relax. Klithren leaned in close.

  “Not telling them about the dwenda, then?” he asked in Naomic.

  “Not unless there’s cause to, no.”

  “And you don’t think there’s cause? Behind the Chancellery stands the cabal, we both know that. And if the dwenda stand behind the cabal as you say they do, they aren’t going to take kindly to you marching in and taking away their bargaining counters.”

  “We’ll deal with that as and when it arises.”

  “Yeah?” Klithren grinned through the ribbons of rain on his face. “When’s that, black mage? When we’re at the Chancellery gates and they jump us?”

  “We’re not going to the Chancellery,” Ringil told him shortly, and turned away to climb the ladder.

  SPRAYBORNE BURST INTO TRELAYNE HARBOR LIKE THE RISEN GHOST OF some long wrecked warship from the city’s embattled past. Mastless, darkened, she cleared the harbor wall to starboard close enough for a brave man to leap down onto her deck as she passed. But no one did. Ringil heard shouting, saw movement on the wall and torches jerking about as watchmen ran up and down in disbelief, but that was about it. The hulk swept in past the confusion, crossed the rain-thrashed harbor without slowing at all, and trod down the timber boom fastened across the inner river entrance. Creak and splintering crack of the wood giving way under the bow. There were some vessels the boom might have kept out, but Sprayborne’s hull was long uncared for, thickly encased in barnacles that gave it a shell like iron. The whole ship rose in the water an instant, then crunched solidly back down and plowed on through.

  Wyr’s ragged crew roared.

  As they cleared the river mouth, Ringil looked back along the mastless deck and saw the second hulk come careering in behind them, heeling sharply in the harbor space, aimed directly at the western wharf and the merchantmen moored there. There was no time to see the impact—Sprayborne was already at the first bend in the river, and he lost any view he’d had behind the slum tenement façades that lined the bank. But he thought he heard the grinding crunch it made, thought he heard a second collective roar of triumph float loose in the night.

  Bare-handed, half-starved wretches unchained, celebrating a release they’d only ever expected to see in death.

  Yeah, and if they don’t get hold of some decent weapons pretty sharpish, that’s still going to be the way it ends.

  Because if Sprayborne’s crew was poorly armed, they were princes in plate compared to the liberated prisoners aboard the other hulks. There’d been no more supply boats to ambush—the weather he’d summoned had seen to that—and while the lack of attention made freeing the convicted men that much easier, the corresponding lack of jailer’s escorts to murder and shakedown for steel had meant a real dearth of arms. The best most of the prisoners could do were sections of rusty chain or long splinters of half-rotted deck timber prized up and fitted out with ship’s nails through the business end. All right for a shock attack, maybe, but once the Watch woke up and found its feet, well …

  There were prisoners aboard the hulks, Gil knew, whose minds and wills were long ago broken, others whose crimes never involved violence of any sort. Some of these would cower, some would hide, some would skulk and run. Some might never even crawl out of the cells whose doors he’d torn off their hinges. But crewing the hulks alongside these were a majority of men—and a tiny handful of women—once counted lethally dangerous by the courts. With luck, some of them would still merit that judgment. And no small number of those would have been pirates once, the kind for whom storming a harbor was second nature. They’d manage somehow, they’d work something out. Beat down and butcher the first few squads of watchmen while the element of surprise lasted, frisk them and take what weapons they carried. Break into the harbor-side arsenal, maybe—in time of war like this, it had to be stocked to the ceiling. Gear up, carry fire and steel onward, into the heart of the city.

  What they did after that, Ringil told himself he didn’t much care. Just as long as it lasted the time he needed to get in and out.

  The rat-hole tenements and rickety jetty walkways of Harbor End began to thin out, gave way to the more salubrious housing of halfway decent neighborhoods like Ekelim and Shest. Rain had driven other traffic off the water, and the people off the promenades. He saw lights in windows, smoke from chimneys, but little other sign of life. Once, down at the water’s edge alongside a jetty, he thought he saw a ferryman huddled in a cloak at his oars. Thought he saw the shadowed opening under the ferryman’s hood turn to follow him as they passed.

  He shivered and looked away.

  Sprayborne drifted on upriver like a phantom in the murk.

  By the time they got to the Glades district, its manicured mangroves and ornamental jetty water frontage, there’d been a couple of graunching knocks to the hull, and Ringil was starting to worry about draft. A generation or two ago, the noble families whose mansions littered the Glades all owned warehouses across the river, and it was quite customary for League merchantmen to come up this far to load and unload. But the custom waned—cheaper land for warehousing came up for grabs near the newly expanded harbor, shipmasters preferred not to navigate the t
wists and kinks in the river if they didn’t have to and started charging a premium to do it. Anyway, the old plots across the river could now be sold at a huge profit as new wealth crowded in, seeking upriver cachet. Great stone mansions sprouted on the warehouse side—though none quite as imposing as the originals they aped on the opposite bank—and river traffic dwindled. Silt built up and was no longer dredged out, as a couple of incautiously overloaded mason’s barges discovered to their cost back in Ringil’s youth.

  Later of course, with the war, a lot of that new wealth collapsed again and the land was reacquired in the reconstruction, designated for thanksgiving temples and shrines, ornamental gardens, and expensive memorials to the noble clans whose sons had done, if the truth were known, not much more than a single-figure percentage of the dying. It was about the time Gil left town, so he didn’t know if there’d been any dredging done since. Sprayborne was a raider, not a merchantman. Even fully laden she’d have been a pretty shallow draft vessel, and now, with no cargo but the skin and bone of her starved down, decimated crew—plus, okay, a scant two dozen imperial shock troops with assorted outlaws, mercenary turncoats, and faggot degenerates for officers—she was traveling light indeed. But then there was that thick crust of barnacles to think about, and whatever clearance they had below that, things had to be getting pretty cramped for the merroigai towing them …

  He spotted the stretch of waterfront he’d been looking for. Laid hands on the starboard rail, leaned out to scan for signs of life. Sprayborne responded, as if to the rudder she’d been stripped of years past. The hulk angled and heeled, she surged in hard, rammed into the bank between two of the carefully kept, stilt-fingered mangroves. Crushed a dinky little jetty under her bow and jammed in place. Ringil barely kept his feet, and he’d seen it coming, was hanging on to the rail at the time. Down on the main deck he heard curses and bodies tumbling.

  “Ride’s over,” he told Sharkmaster Wyr. “Hold your men until I give the word. I’ve got some instructions you need to follow.”

  The pirate uncoiled from where he’d been crouched. It was a lot like watching a reptile peon get up from its nesting hollow. He hefted the ax-head pike. “I thought the instructions were blood from the ocean to the Eastern gate. Now all of a sudden you want to get particular?”

  “There’s a mansion nearby,” Ringil said evenly. “A couple of hundred yards in. It has a family name graven into the gateposts, in the unlikely event you or any of your men can read, and Hoiran and Firfirdar in effigy on top if you can’t. Neither you nor your men will go anywhere near that mansion. Do I make myself clear?”

  Wyr bared his teeth. “Let me guess. Eskiath house?”

  “Just so. That’s where I’m going with my men, and I want a clear run at it. Is that understood? Or are we going to have a problem?”

  A shrug. “I won’t get in the way of any man’s revenge, if doesn’t cross my own.”

  “Good. Then we are in accord.”

  Down on the main deck, Rakan already had the men formed up and ready to disembark. Boarding rope ladders borrowed from Dragon’s Demise were tossed tumbling over the side as Gil arrived. Wyr’s starveling pirates milled about, watching. Ringil nodded and Rakan called it. The imperials went over the rail and down, began to pick their way out of the tangle of mangrove roots below. Klithren went with them; Rakan hung around, gaze mistrustful on the freed pirate crew. Gil made a smile for him.

  “You go. I’m fine, I’ll be right there.”

  The Throne Eternal bowed his head, swung over the rail, and clambered handily down to join his fellow imperials. Ringil stood for a long last moment on Sprayborne’s grotty main deck, staring around at the ragged, barely clad company of men he’d freed and was about to unleash. His final gift to the fair city of Trelayne—pallid, fish-belly faces staring back, eyes sunken and feverish-bright with rage, filthy thinning hair plastered down in rat’s-tails by the rain. Bodies still hunching instinctively from long confinement and casual brutality, manacle-scarred wrists and ankles on limbs like the gnawed bones of a fowl platter, rib cages you could count each rib on from yards away. Closer in they stank to a man, despite all the rain could do.

  He’d seen corpsemite-animated zombies that didn’t look much worse than this. Stalking the manicured paths and pastures of the Glades, they’d probably be taken for such.

  How the fuck did it come to this, Gil?

  He looked at them, as if they might give him the answer. But they only muttered and growled among themselves like feral dogs, and none would meet his gaze. He grunted, gave up, and looked up to the foredeck above, where Sharkmaster Wyr stood in command.

  “All yours. Blood from ocean to Eastern gate. You make them pay.”

  Wyr lifted the pike and jerked his chin in what Gil later deciphered as a salute. “Die well, my lord.”

  It was an age-old commendation to battle from the founder legends of Trelayne, resuscitated and made fashionable again during the war. Odd, coming out of the mouth of a man set to slaughter and burn his way across the heart of his own city, but Ringil supposed he was hardly in a position to judge. He nodded soberly, uttered the formula response.

  “As well as circumstance and the gods allow.”

  “Hey, fuck the gods. This is what we’ve got left. You die well, sir.”

  Ringil shrugged. “Yeah, you, too.”

  He went over the rail.

  IN THE TREE-SHADED DARK OF THE GLADES, THEY WERE SPARED THE WORST of the rain, though it hammered unseen into the foliage over their heads and made a sound like pebbles tossed constantly against glass. They ignored the winding ornamental paved paths Gil knew from his youth, cut directly across the sward instead. It was easy going, and the few inhabitants they came across ran screaming from their advance. The first time it happened—a young, bedraggled woman servant, out cutting marsh mint for the kitchen—the vanguard marines made to follow and bring her back. Ringil put out a barring arm, shook his head.

  “Let her tell her tale. She’ll magnify numbers, likely make trolls of us, too. The more panic she sows, the better.”

  Grins from the marines. The idea appealed. They let the other chance encounters run without comment. They tramped on across the sodden turf, dodged the odd thicket of mangrove roots, scared a few more servants, and came finally upon house lights through the gloom.

  The iron spiked gates were chained up, as he’d expected. He tipped a bleak look up at the statues on the posts—King and Queen of the Dark Court, fanged and tusked Hoiran, Firfirdar in flames, angled slightly in toward each other as if enjoying a sly exchanged glance amid the more po-faced business of watching over the affairs of all humankind.

  Yeah, well—watch over this.

  He laid hands on the wet links of the chain, he uttered the glyph. The iron rusted and crumbled and broke apart under his touch. The gates blew back on their hinges as if hurled by the wind. They hit the blocking posts set to catch them at the sides of the carriage path with a resounding iron clang.

  Bit overstated, Gil—you could have just pushed them open.

  Did the timeworn grin on Firfirdar’s graven face broaden just the faintest bit?

  He inclined his head fractionally at the effigy’s stony gaze, then stalked past it and up the gravel path, toward the house that once gave him birth.

  CHAPTER 45

  hey hauled the Dragonbane out from under the corpse of the dragon he’d slain, but by then there wasn’t a lot left. Venom had eaten him down to the bone at arms and skull and shoulders, left his rib cage exposed in patches against the charred meat of his chest. The stench of cooked flesh was overpowering; even the sandalwood reek of the dead dragon couldn’t mask it.

  She squatted beside him. Stared numbly down at the damage and the mess, at the skull’s anonymous rictus grin. Tried to make sense.

  “Not a shit death,” she whispered.

  Could have fooled me, grinned the skull.

  Between two of the charred ribs, something glinted at her. She squinted closer, t
ook a couple of uncertain moments to work out what she was looking at—the three-elemental coin, the one they’d tossed to choose who’d play decoy. The venom had scorched apart the pocket he’d stowed it in along with the rest of his clothing, had even melted the coin itself a little around the edges, glued it into the seared flesh. She touched the metal with one finger, and in that moment it dawned on her suddenly how he’d faked that toss.

  Let the coin fall into the cup of your palm. Single, lightning-swift beat while you snatch a glance. If it came up the way you wanted, you let it lie, flexed your palm flat and offered it for inspection. If not—slap it across onto the back of your other hand, uncover it there instead.

  Walked into that one, Archidi.

  The wraith of a smile at her lips. She blinked rapidly, sniffed hard. Let the coin lie where it was, kissed her fingertips where they’d touched it, and laid her hand gently back on the blackened rib cage.

  Presently, the Majak came across and stood by the corpse. One of them held Egar’s staff lance. She knew none of their names, understood almost none of what they murmured to each other. There were fragments, names of deities she’d heard before—Urann, Vavada, Takavach—words for fire and light, a phrase they used more than once that sounded like it might have been their dialect version of the Skaranak term for the band, the Sky Road that the Majak dead must walk. She supposed they were talking about where the Dragonbane was now.