The Dark Defiles

by Richard K. Morgan

  “I do not ask such questions,” his father said stiffly. “Because I do not care. I am a soldier, not a politician. Enough that Findrich and his kind represent the spine and ambition the rest of the Chancellery cannot muster. Enough that they’ll lead us to a clean victory over Yhelteth this time, and not just one more mucky compromise.”

  “Just like the battle hymn says, eh?”

  “Fuck you, Gil, you traitorous piece of—”

  Creglir’s voice dried up as Ringil swung to face him. Gil, eyes gone blank, left hand rising, cocked and crooked …

  He saw, out of the corner of his eye, the look on his mother’s face. Heard the husked murmur of her voice—Gil, please don’t—perhaps only in his mind, and his hand fell back as if of its own accord, as if severed of all nerve and sinew by some ax blow to the arm. He quelled the rising glyph, stubbed it out like a krin twig ember in the fold of his palm. He stared his brother down.

  “You’re in luck,” he said drably when Creglir had looked away. “For a moment there, I forgot she’s your mother, too.”

  Gingren stepped in, some threadbare vestige of previous command in stance and tone. He was trying to thrust out his chest.

  “You will leave now, outcast. Degenerate. Hmm? Stain, yes, pus-seeping stain on my family’s honor. You will leave us now in peace.”

  His voice trembled and cracked on the attempted rage, scaled to something that rang more like some desperate plea.

  Gil nodded. Found a smile and put it on.

  “Yeah, I’m going. Good luck with your clean victory, Dad. You keep me posted, let me know how that works out. Mother—always a pleasure, your beauty never fades.”

  “Ringil,” she said, very softly.

  He stepped toward her and she raised one languid arm from where she sat. He bowed his head, took her fingers loosely in his, brushed his lips across the back of her hand. It was a touch as formal as the scratch of quill on vellum, as dry and cold as broom twigs. But in the moment of the kiss, her fingers folded and clenched fiercely on his, and for the time it took, they tugged hard against each other like a climber pulling his fellow up dangling out of some bottomless crevasse.

  He never knew, then or ever after, which of them was the rescuer and which hung dangling over the drop.

  The grip parted. She let him go. He straightened and cleared his throat.

  “As I said, you’d all better stay inside and have your men-at-arms maintain a perimeter, at least until noon. I told Wyr to stay away from this place, and I think he’ll honor that. But I can’t answer for the rest.” He looked Ishil in the eye, voice momentarily low. “Good-bye.”

  Then he turned and left them with each other.

  Strode out of Eskiath House, into the rain and dark to gather his men. Smudges of ruddy light on the low-bellied murky sky, just as his father had claimed, as the first of the Glades mansions burned.

  CHAPTER 47

  n the tunnel, Selak Chan gave Archeth back the lead with evident relief. He’d already dropped a good twenty feet back from the fire sprite, ground she started to pick up again immediately. Her professions of confidence about their safety were hollow, she had no idea what was down here, but the one thin faith she had was in the sprite’s concern for their well-being.

  They marched in silence for a few minutes before Chan came up close on her shoulder and broke into the rhythmic clanking echo of feet on the latticed metal.

  “My lady, we have been walking for … some hundreds of yards now.”

  “Yes. And?” Impatiently, because her ghosts had followed her into the simple, vectored promise of the tunnel and didn’t look like leaving her alone anytime soon.

  “And it was only forty or fifty yards back to the edge of the pit, my lady. Sixty at the very most.”

  “That’s …” Undeniably true, Archidi.

  She fought down the urge to jam to a halt right there. Let her pace ebb a little instead, glanced back over her shoulder with every appearance of casual unconcern. Chan’s expression was tight in the striping orange glow, not yet afraid but not far off it. Behind him, she saw other queasy faces in the same flickering light, all struggling to fight down their fear. She faced forward again, before they could catch anything in her own features that she didn’t want them to see. She summoned a noncommittal grunt.

  “Is this some Kiriath sorcery, my lady?”

  “Yes, it is,” she said airily. “Nothing you need to worry about. My people were skilled in working with the forces that hold us to the Earth, in, uh, bending them, to suit their purposes, you see.”

  “Then.” Chan cleared his throat. “Where are we, my lady?”

  “We are in the shaft.” She fervently hoped. “We are walking downward into it. But the tunnel, uhm, saves us from the fall that would entail. You understand?”

  A brief pause, filled thankfully by the iron tramp of their feet.

  “Is it then the same, my lady, as the magic that raised the elevator in An-Kirilnar?”

  “Uhm—yeah. Pretty much.”

  “And so …” Dubiously. “We cannot fall, then?”

  “No, no—impossible.” She grimaced to herself, into the gloom of the tunnel ahead … below … whatever. “Can’t happen. The, ah, the powers at work here would not permit anything like that to befall us.”

  “Should I tell the other men of this, my lady?”

  “Good idea, yes. Pass it on back.” Maybe you’ll sound a bit more convincing than I do.

  She affected not to listen as the murmur went back along the file, the troubled low surf of voices it provoked. Tried not to worry how deep this pit might actually be, how far they might in fact fall—face forward, into poorly lit darkness—if it turned out she was as full of shit as she felt.

  NO WAY TO RECKON TIME EFFECTIVELY IN THE ORANGE-LIT GLOOM, BUT she thought it was getting on for an hour before they saw a brightening ahead. They were not at marching pace—despite his protestations, Kanan Shent’s wounds were slowing him down, and there were others in the company who’d taken damage in the skirmish the day before as well—but however you looked at it, they must be at least a couple of miles deep in the earth by now.

  Yeah, well. Got delvings at Monal go deeper than that.

  Truth to tell, although the sheer scale of the pit’s construction and the magic of the tunnel made some impression on her, none of it hit that hard. She was, in the end, Kiriath in instinct and upbringing both. Going underground was what her people did.

  The patch of brighter light resolved into a doorway, similar in outline to the one that had cracked open for them on the surface. The sprite went through without hesitation, hung there expectantly on the other side.

  Well, what else are we going to do? Turn around and go back?

  Archeth stepped gingerly through the opening. Found herself in a huge chamber whose walls were raw rock sealed behind some kind of glassy resin and rose into a dim vaulted space overhead filled with angular iron structure and dangling cables. She felt an easing go through her at the sight. Familiar ground. They coated the tunnels and shafts at An-Monal pretty much the same way. In fact, this might easily have been—she glanced around at the piled iron junk that crammed the chamber on all sides—any storage hall in the dry dock complex at Monal’s volcanic harbor. It certainly held the same chaotic assortment of discarded gear.

  Chan and the others came hesitantly through, peering about them in awe. They stared upward into the gloom, they shielded their eyes from the light. She heard a couple of stifled oaths. It wasn’t that the hall’s illumination was much different from that in the tunnel, but there was a lot more of it to go around. Broad, glowing patches and veins pulsed in the resin—and she saw more of them blinking to life, in response, she supposed, to their arrival—throwing down a warm, orange-gold radiance that felt almost like being back home on the sunset-drenched streets of Yhelteth an hour before summer dusk. The same soft heat in the air as well—she looked down and saw the transparent resin surface underfoot, knelt to touch it with one
hand and felt the warmth seeping through. The rock itself, she knew from experience at An-Monal, would be hot enough to burn flesh at this depth, but the resin did double duty, providing safety insulation and structural support in one simply brewed substance.

  Flicker of motion in the corner of her eye—the fire sprite drifting suddenly upward toward some notional center of the space they were in, a couple of dozen yards off the ground. Archeth straightened up slowly to look, saw the sprite flatten and fatten itself until it became a perfect globe, then begin to slowly rotate. At the same time, the constant undulating ripples along its sides that had so resembled stubby, gesturing limbs of flame during the trek now damped away to a barely visible trembling line, a restless equator that swept back and forth around the spherical surface, as if in search of something.

  “My lady?” Kanan Shent, possessively attentive at her side, as he’d been since the dragon went down.

  She nodded. “Yeah, I see it. Get the impression this might be journey’s end.”

  “So, then—humans.”

  The Helmsman’s voice—sonorous High Kir tones booming from the ceiling somewhere, undercut as ever with slightly hysterical good cheer—unmistakable as anything else. A grim smile twitched momentarily at Archeth’s mouth, then was gone.

  She stepped out, away from Shent and the others. “Take a closer look, Helmsman. I am kir-Archeth of clan Indamaninarmal, custodian regent at An-Monal, and last remaining executor of the Kiriath Mission. The Warhelm Tharalanangharst sends me to you.”

  “Yes. With humans.”

  “Is that going to be a problem?” she snapped.

  “Not for me.”

  Apparently content with this riposte, the Helmsman fell silent. The fire sprite came drifting gently down toward them, squeezing itself back into its former shape. Shrieking iron machinery awoke in the vault above, the same bright flurry of sparks through the gloom that she’d seen with Egar on the retrieval decks at An-Kirilnar when the hoists jerked to unaccustomed life. She saw something huge and tentacular swing sluggishly into motion at one end of the hall’s roof space. Thought she recognized it.

  Sharp indrawn breaths behind her, the multiple rasp of drawn steel. She lifted a hand to stop the panic before it got started.

  “Stand down.” Still absently speaking High Kir—get a grip, Archidi. She dropped back into Tethanne. “Stand down, all of you. There’s nothing to worry about here.”

  The tentacular thing swung down out of the shadows, was revealed as nothing more alarming—to Archeth, anyway—than a straightforward craning appendage running on an iron track across the vaulted roof. It hovered for a moment over the seemingly random strew and stack of dark iron equipment that bulked fifty feet high at the far end of the hall. Then the various articulated arms plunged down as one and commenced rooting around with clanging abandon in the mess. They tilted and upended containers the size of small ships, rearranged huge stacked sheets of alloy material to clear space, lifted and set aside big bulky devices of unguessable function. There seemed to be no rationale to the process, and the noise it made was deafening.

  “Have we angered it, my lady?” Shent shouted in her ear.

  She shook her head, still watching. “It’s just looking for something.”

  In the end, the crane retrieved three items from the piles it was searching through and backed off, seemingly satisfied. It brought its haul forward up the hall on its track, screeching and showering sparks as it came—a lengthy coil of what looked like giant metallic intestines, a dome-topped circular container nearly thirty feet across and at least the same in height, and a device that reminded Archeth of nothing so much as a huge, stiff-winged gold metal bat, balancing a dull gray fruit dish on its head.

  The crane paused when it got closer to them. Three of its arrayed arms set the container down on its flat side, so delicately it barely made a sound on impact. Another two manoeuvred one end of the intestinal metallic tube into a connecting position somewhere on the dome’s curve. Colors awoke on the surface of the container, swirled giddily about, and then condensed to a single iridescent patch, directly under the poised end of the tube. The patch brightened until it was too dazzling to look at directly, there was a sharp, violent hissing and a pop, and then the glare faded out, leaving blotches on Archeth’s vision. Where the light had been, an opening now waited in the alloy dome, perfectly smooth and apparently a perfect fit for the metallic gut end held over it. The crane’s arms slid the tube into place and it sealed there with another brief rotating flare. The arms pulled back, and then the whole crane was rising, retreating upward, carrying the other end of the intestinal coil and the huge gold-winged bat and dish device with it, back up into the shadowed reaches of the roof space.

  The grinding and showering of sparks stopped.

  They all stood staring at the container, waiting. Archeth felt their glances on her. She cleared her throat.

  “We require passage via your, ah, aerial conveyance, to—”

  “Yes, I am already aware of your situation. The Warhelm’s messenger has not only brought you here, it has brought specific instructions as well. Observe.”

  The swirl of color awoke once more on the domed container’s surface, converged once more into a single brilliant blotch. Where it faded out, there was a narrow doorway. The fire sprite darted forward, hovered a moment in the freshly made entrance, then slipped inside.

  Archeth frowned. “What is this?”

  “The next stage of your journey. Lead your human companions inside, and we will begin.”

  She hesitated. Something about that narrow aperture that she didn’t like, some vague misgivings about the confinement …

  Come on, Archidi—you just marched directly down the side of a cliff over a mile deep, with no more effort than strolling up the Boulevard of the Ineffable Divine. You came here behind an animate campfire flame that watches over you with a mother’s care. The only time you came to harm was when you ignored instructions.

  Time to stop second-guessing your father’s antique servant spirits from the void, and just get in the saddle.

  She glanced around at the men at her back.

  “With me,” she said, and led them through the narrow doorway into the space beyond.

  INSIDE, IT WAS WARM AND A PEARLY GRAY LIGHT SUFFUSED THE AIR. THE dome curved over their heads and showed scurrying smears of color—faint trace repetition of the swirl she’d seen on the outside, pink and gold, pale orange, bluish tinges out of the gray. The curving surface seemed less like a solid roof now and more like some low and limited dawning sky. The doorway’s edges flared and radiated bright white fire as the last man passed inside, the glare filled the entrance and spread beyond. When it inked out again, the wall was whole, so smooth you could not have told where exactly the door once was.

  Distant gurgling, echoing off the curve of the enclosing walls.

  They all heard it. She traded a wary glance with Shent and Chan, followed the injured Throne Eternal’s gaze up to where the opening to the intestinal tube gaped above them in the dome. The gurgling built, gathering force, became a hollow roar piping down from that hole. The men around her stared upward in united, dawning horror. She heard a bitten off curse in Tethanne. A sick certainty came and kicked her in the pit of her stomach.

  In the center of the container space, the fire sprite flickered and went out.

  The opening over their heads seemed to explode. Fluid burst into the chamber like a waterfall in full spate, crashed down with brutal force on their heads, knocked more than one of the company to the floor.

  Somehow, Archeth stayed upright. She floundered through liquid—it was not water, it was thicker, more viscous stuff—already to her knees, to where Kanan Shent had gone over and was flailing to get back on his feet. She grabbed his arm and hauled him toward one side of the container, out of the immediate blast of liquid from above. She helped him upright, braced herself against the curve of the chamber wall. Dinning thunder of the flood in her ears, the Thron
e Eternal was shouting something at her, but she couldn’t make out the words in the roar. Around her, there was yelling and the sound of desperate thrashing to stay afloat.

  “Motherfucker!” she screamed at the domed ceiling. “What are you doing?”

  “I am protecting you to the best of my ability.” The Helmsman’s voice cuddled into her ear, as intimate as if it spoke from just behind her, as low as if they stood in some museum quiet instead of the thundering chaos of the drowning chamber. “Exactly as the Warhelm has ordered. Do not be concerned.”

  Her feet left the floor, the viscous fluid buoyed her up. The container had filled to over half its height in less time than it took to mount and settle a restless horse. Through the massive surge, the heavy slop and splash of fluid into her eyes, she saw the level boiling upward, taking them all toward the domed roof above.

  “We did not build for humans here,” the Helmsman added, as if in afterthought. “We built to win the war.”

  “Fuck y—”

  And her mouth filled with fluid she must spit violently out. It tasted faintly metallic, almost like blood, but cold. She felt herself swallow some, coughed and spluttered to get it back up. And then she must abandon anything except the attempt to keep her head above the rising fluid level. The men around her had stopped shouting and were focused grimly on treading water as best they could, but it was a hopeless battle. The curve of the dome was crowding them inward, tangling them up in each other’s limbs, and the waterfall blast from the opening above turned the remaining space as much into churning fluid as air. She heard a single intense screaming above the general roar, had time, briefly, in her own struggle to cast about and see Yilmar Kaptal, mouth gaping wide around the shrieks that poured out of him, some deeply buried memory of how he had died before perhaps torn loose and back to haunt him in his final moments. He took a mouthful, his screams turned gagging, his eyes went wide in horror, and down he went amid the close-packed, bobbing heads. He didn’t come up again.