The Dark Defiles

by Richard K. Morgan

  Because he sure as shit isn’t here anymore.

  She snorted back the tears behind her eyes, levered herself back to her feet. The Majak gave her respectful space.

  “We can’t—” She cleared her throat. “We can’t take him with us. I’m sorry. There’s enough to carry as it is, and we still don’t know what’s down in that pit.”

  The Majak who held the lance shook his head. “The whole world shelters beneath the Sky Road’s bow,” he said in accented Tethanne. “It will take the Dragonbane home, as well from here as any other place of rest.”

  She nodded tepidly.

  “Would he want burial?” one of the others asked. “It’s custom among the Skaranak. They cairn their dead. Would he want that?”

  “I don’t know,” she said, because she didn’t.

  The Majak with the lance coughed a laugh. He nodded at the slumped mountain of dragon flesh behind them.

  “Memorial enough there, I reckon. I’ll bet no Skaranak that ever lived had a cairn the size those bones are going make.”

  “The bones don’t last,” she said quietly. “They rot away with time. Everything does, apart from the teeth and the gut lining. It’s the venom. In ten years, there’ll be nothing left to show a dragon died here.”

  “And the skin, the scales?” The one who seemed to know Skaranak custom looked pretty put out. His hand strayed down to a pouch at his belt. She guessed he’d taken time, like some of others among the men, to hack off some small trophy. “Doesn’t the skin last?”

  Archeth shrugged. “Soak it in water for a day, scrub it well on both sides. Hang it out to dry in the sun. That usually does the trick.”

  “Water?” The Majak cast about the gray, rubbled landscape, dismayed. “In the sun?”

  “Yeah.” She turned to walk away, stopped. “You know what? We are going to bury him. Get him up out of this fucking crater, find someplace with a decent view. That’s where we dig.”

  THEY LAID HIM OUT SO HE’D FACE THE RISING SUN, IF IT EVER CAME UP free of this endless fucking cloud cover. The Majak consulted among themselves, then decked the grave out with a couple of judiciously chosen talismans. They drove the staff lance down hard between the stones at the foot of the cairn they’d made, packed it tight with smaller chunks of masonry, so it stood a rigid yard and a half upright, gleaming in the pallid light.

  They buried Alwar Nash alongside, laid the Throne Eternal’s sword and shield on the piled rubble the way his family would have done on his tomb back home. The men stood around, said what words there were. Selak Chan led the rest of the Throne Eternal in formal prayer. The Majak chanted and ululated a bit.

  The rest drifted off down to the dragon corpse to see about souvenirs.

  Archeth stood like a statue at the cairn, head bowed, as stiff and motionless as the upward jutting staff lance in front of her. Couldn’t believe she was leaving him here. Couldn’t yet believe that he was here, that those charred, buried remnants were all that was left of the Dragonbane. It was as if she expected him back at any moment, was just waiting for him to stick his head around the corner of the ruin, wink at her, grin.

  What? You thought I’d go down that easy? It’s Dragonbane, Archidi. Dragon Bane. Not Dragonsbitch. I used to kill these fucking things for a living.

  You certainly killed the fuck out of that one.

  Hey—all part of the service.

  The Majak and the Throne Eternal finished up their respective rituals, cast uncertain glances in her direction, and then left her alone. She heard them muttering among themselves as they headed down the slope to join the others. Rain blew about in the wind, specked at her face. Overhead, the clouds were in turmoil—massing thicker and darker, hastening off somewhere else, leaching what miserable light there was from the day and taking it with them.

  She took the hint. Followed the men down.

  She found the bulk of them gathered at a cautious distance from the dead dragon, squatting or standing in their respective groups. One or two were still toying with the mementos they’d carved from the corpse. She saw the Majak she’d talked to about hide curing—seemed he’d thought better of his initial trophy and somehow managed to gouge loose a fang from the dragon’s jaw instead. He was busily flensing the root end, scraping off the last stubborn leavings of tissue with his knife. He nodded at her as she arrived, perhaps in thanks.

  Yilmar Kaptal stood apart, statue still, staring at the dragon as if it might come suddenly back to life. She cleared her throat, in advance this time, and like the others he turned to look at her. She lifted her voice, clear and loud against the ruffling wind.

  “We have done what honor we can for those who gave their lives. It’s time now to give their sacrifice meaning.” She pivoted about and pointed to where the fire sprite hung about at the sinkhole rim. “That way is our means of returning home. The path is cleared, it remains only to walk it.”

  A couple of the privateers exchanged a look. One of them leaned and muttered something in Naomic to one of Tand’s crew. The mercenary nodded soberly at what he was hearing, cleared his throat, and spoke in Tethanne.

  “They want to know, my lady, what if there’s another dragon waiting for us down in the pits.”

  She shook her head. “Dragons are solitary in adulthood. That much we did learn in the war. One this size would not tolerate any competition within its range.”

  “But they act as brood mothers to the reptile folk.” Another mercenary, pitching in unhelpfully. “On the beaches at Demlarashan, they protected the lizard advance.”

  “Yes, that’s true.”

  “Then there may be Scaled Folk lairing in the pits.”

  “Then we’ll kill them,” snapped Kanan Shent. He was banged up from the fight with the dragon, had two fingers on his left hand wrapped and splinted, wore thick bandages around both legs, right arm, and head. But there was a feverish, impatient gleam in his eyes. “As we killed them yesterday, as we slew this beast here today.”

  “We lost nine men yesterday,” someone called out. “Fighting on open ground. In those pits, we could find ourselves—”

  Shent rounded on the speaker. “Will you stand here bleating about losses and risk like some merchant negotiating cost? You were quick enough to cut trophies from the dragon that you did not earn, but will not face creatures one fiftieth its size? Did Menith Tand hire fighting men for his guard, or faggots?”

  “Hey, fuck you, imperial. You don’t—”

  “Gentlemen!”

  No need to force it, there was enough undischarged grief and rage in her to fuel the sack of a city. They heard it in her voice, saw it in her face when they jerked around to look. They shut up. She worked at not showing her surprise, grabbed the advantage, and kept going.

  “There will be no need, gentlemen, for these deliberations.” She gestured once more up at the waiting fire sprite. “Our guide has consistently steered us clear of the Scaled Folk and any other dangers we might face. Our only encounter came when we did not wait for its lead, and we were saved from the dragon because it held us here among the ruins until the beast showed itself. I think it’s safe to conclude that it will not now lead us into ambush.”

  They quietened, but she spotted a couple of mutinous faces among the privateers. She held back a sigh. Well, you did warn me about this, Eg. Could have wished for better timing, but …

  “You.” She indicated the mercenary who’d acted as translator. “Ask those two at the back what their problem is.”

  Tand’s man glanced across the gathered men and caught the same expressions she had. He raised his hands in a gesture that needed no translation. The scowling privateers looked taken aback. There was a brief exchange in lilting Naomic, the mercenary, from the look of it, weighing in with a few brusque comments of his own above and beyond the brief Archeth had given him. One of the privateers got angry, the mercenary trampled his words down. There was some bristling on both sides, then Tand’s man waved his arm disgustedly and turned away, back to Arche
th. He looked embarrassed.

  “Well?”

  “They, uh—my lady, they say they are not happy about following the fire guide. They do not trust the demon spirit at An-Kirilnar. They say if it murdered Sogren Cablehand on a whim, why should it not intend to do the same with them?”

  Archeth shot the privateers a dirty look. “Little late in the day for these qualms, isn’t it?”

  “What I told them, my lady.”

  She drew a deep breath. What was it Gil was always saying? The men under your command may well hate you. And then some rambling drivel about learning to live with it, leaving it alone, transmuting it somehow into loyalty in the heat of battle, whatever. Didn’t sound very likely, but then Gil had led some very hard-boiled men into some very tight spots, and somehow always managed to come out the other side alive.

  Let’s see if we can’t do the same thing here, Archidi.

  She marshaled the slop of anger and loss inside, harnessed it again. She jerked her chin at the glowering privateers.

  “Tell them,” she said, with biting force, “that the Great Spirit at An-Kirilnar did not act on a whim when it killed Sogren Cablehand. It acted for me. And it continues to act for me through this fire guide. If they do not want to follow Sogren to his fate, then there’s a very simple way for them to avoid it. Obey me, in all things.”

  The mercenary gaped. She saw a similar look on a fair few other faces among the Tethanne speakers.

  “Make that clear to them,” she said.

  “Uh … Yes, my lady.”

  “And then go get your pack on.” She turned her head slowly to take in the whole gathering. “All of you. Go find your packs and gear up. We’re going home. Throne Eternal Alwar Nash and the Dragonbane died for that. So did the nine men who fought and died yesterday. I will not piss away their sacrifice, and nor will any of you. We are going home.”

  THEY GOT DOWN TO THE NEAREST EDGE OF THE PITS WITHOUT INCIDENT. There was some on-and-off muttering in the ranks, mainly among the privateers, but it died away as they got up close to the great black metal clamping arms, and the scale of the Kiriath construction dawned on them. The clamps were three times the height of a man where they came up out of the pit, tailing off only gradually to something you could have hauled yourself up onto when they were nearly fifty yards back from the lip. They crushed the Aldrain stone under their weight; she saw where dressed blocks of masonry had shattered and sheered.

  She moved up closer to the lip of the pit, peered down, and saw a dizzying progression of scaffolding built along the inner surface, reaching away downward and out of clear view. There were interlocking stanchions and cross-struts, snaking cables and pipes the width of a man’s waist, huge angled dishes of alloy and wire, whole tilted panels of mesh as big as a mainsail, all giving back a sheen of purple or blue where they rose high enough into the neck of the pit to catch the light. She felt the steady rise of warm air up the shaft like a summer breeze on her face and hands. She caught the brewing stack reek of alloy husbandry below.

  Dragonbane’s right—

  Was, she reminded herself silently. Lips pressed hard together on the ache. Dragonbane was right. Looks like Kaldan Cross.

  But as if Kaldan Cross were some kind of rough scale model built in advance, a quick proof of concept before the real work began. Human eyes had to work hard to see the bottom of the pit at Kaldan Cross—and idle human superstition said there was none—but it was there. Now she stared downward into the shadowed depths and even she could make out no end to this shaft. The scaffolding below her was broad and extensive in its own right, would have filled the Kaldan excavation almost to the center. Here—she followed the broad sweep of the pit’s lip around like the shore of a minor lake—here it clung to the edges going down like the flimsiest of lace borders on a court gown collar. It extended no thicker in comparison to the excavation’s full extent than the growth of moss coating an old well shaft.

  You could hide an entire colony of Scaled Folk down there, Archidi.

  Even a couple of dragons might manage to coexist across that much space, if the reptile packs they belonged to learned to stay out of each other’s way, lived on opposite sides of the pit, say.

  If we really have to climb down through all that …

  She made her face stone. Looked around for the fire sprite.

  “Over here, my lady.”

  Kanan Shent, calling and beckoning from back toward the tail end of the clamping structure. The sprite hovered and flickered there beside the alloy wall. The Throne Eternal gestured with his injured hand.

  “It refuses to move from here, my lady. And there seem to be colors in the metal, as there were at An-Kirilnar …”

  Stone, stone, your face is stone. Nothing here surprises you, Queen of Kiriath steel and murderous demonic spirits. You take it in your stride.

  She came forward and peered at the black iron surface, now mottled and bleaching into lighter shades, colors shifting about like chemicals spilled on a rainwater puddle in a laboratory courtyard at Monal. She nodded briskly.

  “This is our way down.”

  She spoke the colors out in clearly enunciated sequence. Each one winked out as she named it, returning the alloy finally to its blank black norm. Then nothing. Long moments, piling up in the quiet and nothing else to see—she made herself wait it out, keenly aware of the gazes fixed on her as the seconds slipped by. They’d had the same delay at An-Kirilnar. She kept her face impassive until—

  Ah.

  A thin tracery whispered awake on the black alloy surface—sweeping, spilling, unreeling lines like the rapidly sketched outline of a rose in bloom, but taller than a man. She caught the tiny seething sound it made, down near the limits of her hearing, heard the hissing intensify as the sketch lines deepened into cracks, then began to split apart. The whorl patterning in the center of the design seemed to roll and fold into itself, down to one side and gone. The hissing stopped. Warm orange light sprang up in a hollow interior space.

  She stuck her head inside and peered around. Saw a tall, vaulted corridor with curving sides leading from a blank bulkhead on her left and back the twenty-odd yards toward the edge of the pit—though she thought, uneasily, that it seemed to reach a lot farther than that. Farther, in fact, than was possible, given the way the clamp bent and dropped away down the side of the shaft. The floor was the same pentagonal-patterned iron latticework they’d walked on to reach An-Kirilnar, touched here by fleet-footed shadows and orange glimmerings that chased each other merrily away down the tunnel. She frowned for a moment, not understanding the effect, until it hit her that the glow she’d seen from outside was caused by distinct blots of light and dark that marched away in repeating sequence at about shoulder height along the sides of the bore, as if to hurry her in that direction. As if an endless procession of ghosts with invisible torches moved methodically down the tunnel already, and only the reflection of their flames could be seen, puddled in curving alloy surface of the walls and glinting off the latticed metal underfoot.

  The fire sprite slipped past her shoulder and into the tunnel. It danced three or four yards down the bore, blending its colors to match the lights on the walls, then stopped and hung there flickering.

  She pulled her head back out.

  “Right, this is us. Selak Chan, you take the lead, I’ll catch you up once we’re all inside. Single file, give each other plenty of space. There shouldn’t be any trouble now, we’re on Kiriath ground. But that doesn’t mean you can’t trip over or fall off something, so keep your wits about you. No gawking.”

  She stood at the entrance and counted them in, something she’d never bothered to do while Egar was alive. Thirty-five men, if you allowed Yilmar Kaptal in that category. Not much of a command, but still more than she wanted. She waited for them all to file past her, nodding them in if any chose to meet her eyes, trying to lock names to faces where she knew them. It might be important later.

  The Throne Eternal and marines all bowed as they passe
d. So, unexpectedly, did the Majak and some of Tand’s crew.

  Then, toward the end of the line, one of the privateers who’d complained earlier about Sogren’s death tried to stare her down, break her gaze with his scowl as he approached. On a different day, she might have laughed. Yeah, stare down the burned black witch, why don’t you. He’d clearly never looked into Kiriath eyes before. She gave him back his stare, well aware of the effect her darkling kaleidoscope pupils had on humans unused to them. He flinched and looked away, well before it was his turn to duck past her into the tunnel.

  She heard his fellows jeering at him in the echoing space, as they followed the file down.

  When the last man was in, she took one lingering look around at the shattered cityscape, the bleak mounds of rubble and forlorn crag outcrops of architecture still standing, the doom her people had brought down on this place. The dragon corpse and the cairns were hidden from view behind the ruins they’d sheltered in, as if already subsumed into the larger, more ancient death that held sway amid all this wreckage. For one aching moment, she wanted to run back up the rubble hillside and stand again at the Dragonbane’s grave, give him one more chance to quit fucking about, Eg, get up out of that hole in the ground and come with me.

  “Come on, Archidi.”

  For just one shaky, ecstatic moment, she was unsure who was speaking to her.

  “We’re all done here, there’s nothing left.”

  Her own voice, raised firm against the blanketing quiet. But it sounded nothing like her, and she could not tell what it meant by that we—if it was referring to her new command, her dead friendship, or her ancestors in their awful, obliterating triumph.

  She turned away and hurried into the tunnel.

  CHAPTER 46

  e wasn’t very surprised to find armed men blocking his path; he’d perhaps even been courting something of the sort. Certainly, someone would have heard those gates slam back—the clang they made, you’d have to be deaf not to. And that someone would have duly sounded the alarm, which would in turn bring out the guard. Like most noble houses, the Eskiath family seat retained its own men-at-arms on site, and now, with the war on, they’d be twitchier than usual, eager to justify their exemption from the levy, their privileged escape from conscription to points of slaughter farther south. They’d jump at the drop of a thin cat, let alone the sound of the front gates being smashed open by an overly flamboyant black mage.