The Dark Defiles

by Richard K. Morgan

  The ceiling bumped her head, forced her facedown into the fluid. She kicked upward, hard, banged her head again. Tried to claw her way through the press of struggling bodies, closer to the center of the dome. Rational thought was gone; she fought blindly for one more lungful of air. Someone clouted her, an elbow caught her in the neck. She hit back, hampered by the heavy drag of the fluid. A panicked grip hauled hard on her shoulder, shoved her down into the chaos of tangling, kicking limbs beneath the surface. In the instant it happened, she tried to breathe, took in fluid instead. A foot hooked her in the stomach, she gagged, another foot scraped across her face, trod her down. Fluid cramming into her throat and lungs and stomach, pressing on her eyeballs, dimming sight. She grabbed weakly at something, an ankle maybe, felt her grip slip. Felt herself falling away.

  A weird, metallic-tasting calm came to collect her then. It slowed her churning limbs, took strength from her muscles, closed her eyes.

  Wiped her away.

  CHAPTER 48

  tterkal without river transport was a stiff march across town, and they didn’t have a lot of time to do it in. Ishil had been pretty astute in her assessment of the situation. The chaos and panic he’d sown might last a couple of hours past dawn if they were lucky, but after that Sharkmaster Wyr and his starveling associates were done. Gil had seen Trelayne on a war footing before and he knew what it meant—the city was going to be stuffed full of freshly levied troops waiting to ship out south, and the Watch would have been bulked up, too. There’d be more than enough loose iron in town to put down this half-arsed rampage, and the Watch’s embarrassment at quite how easily they’d all been panicked would only add to the savagery with which it was done.

  He had to be long gone by then.

  They passed Wrathrill house, now well alight, gave it a wide berth to their left. Screams in the night, shouting and gusts of coarse laughter, a vague sense of siege seen through the intervening trees. Figures capered about outside, silhouetted black against the fire, or appeared at windows in the upper stories, throwing things out. The west wing was wrapped in flames to the roof, would not be long in coming down. As they left it behind, the glow lit their way, painted long dancing tongues of yellow light and shadow on the path ahead.

  “You think they’ll stop with that one?” Klithren asked him.

  Ringil shot him a glance. “Would you?”

  “Well. They’ll have found booze in there by now, probably a lot of it. Women, food. Finery to cavort in.”

  “And weapons. They’ll have a lot more weapons now.”

  Across the Glades then, and out, into the genteel avenues of neighboring Linardin, a kind of antechamber for audience in the ruling district they’d just left—merchants and shipmasters on their way up rubbed shoulders here with Glades scions waiting on inheritance and the higher ranking among the Chancellery’s officials, all of them yearning toward the riverside opulence of the Glades itself and imitating it as best they could. Linardin was curving, tree-lined boulevards and facing rows of modest little mansions sat side by side in grounds barely worthy of the name, like so many portly matrons squatting in bathtubs made for infants. Gingren junior and Creglir both had places here, which just about said it all.

  They double-timed along the avenues, wet slapping rhythm of booted feet on the rain-drenched boulevard paving, and night watchmen came hurrying to the locked iron gates of each property, peering out between the bars. Some would be veterans of the war no doubt, and might recognize imperial garb when they saw it; most would simply register the arms and armor, and assume this was a levy troop for the war, marching to muster somewhere and likely lost in the filthy weather. Nobody, in any case, showed any inclination to come out from behind their gates and find out what was going on for sure.

  “Anasharal? You listening?”

  “Always.” The Helmsman’s voice at his ear, with immediate, unnerving intimacy.

  “There’s been a change of plan.” Breathing hard with the pace of the march. “Tell Hald and Nyanar they won’t need to come upriver after all. The captives have been moved to the Salt Warren, and I’m on my way there now. We’ll come out through Tervinala and see you at Outlander’s wharf, by the eastern harbor wall.”

  “Will they know where that is?”

  “Believe it or not, they call it the eastern wall for a reason. Even Nyanar ought to be able to work out which way is east.” Ringil did brief logistics in his head. “This is going to take a good few hours, so don’t look for us anytime soon. Stay out of the harbor, it’s got to be chaos in there by now. Stand well off from the walls, drop anchor in the delta, and don’t engage anyone unless they come looking for it. And have boats ready to lower. We’ll likely be in a hurry when we come.”

  “I will convey your instructions. Will there be anything else?”

  “Not right now, no.” He found time to grin. “But don’t go anywhere.”

  Linardin’s mansion rows fell behind, became the tenement-lined streets of Kellil. Still a well-to-do neighborhood compared to the districts near Harbor End, but this was no longer the home of anything you’d call actual wealth. Around here, you worked for a living, and staying out of the weather just because it was unpleasant ceased to be an option. For the first time, they started to see substantial numbers of people in the streets, despite the hammering rain. Delivery carts and handbarrows were in evidence here and there, horses and haulers trudging alike through pothole puddles or standing patiently in the downpour while other men loaded or unloaded what they carried. Taverns and shops spilled customers onto the streets, breathed others in. Individual men and women hurried on errands that the rain would not excuse. Urchins and whores and young thugs schooled enough in subtlety not to get chased out of the neighborhood stood under doorway lintels, watching the deluge with bleak, empty eyes.

  No sign of the Watch, but that wasn’t unusual in weather like this; Ringil was willing to bet they’d be found in the nearest tavern, warm and dry and cadging drinks.

  Or they’ve already been pulled to Harbor End to fight the flames.

  But he didn’t think that was likely. The streets they were on showed no signs of the panic you’d expect, once word of the assault got out. In the meantime, the drilled tramp of their passage drew some inevitable attention along the way, but nothing that caused any fuss. People heard the boots, turned and looked, but did nothing much else. The rain drew a curtain across their interest, kept vision indistinct. Now and then, men cheered at them with damp martial fervor, but mostly it was just pointing and muttering. And once a female urchin ran up and stole a kiss from Noyal Rakan, much to the amusement of everyone watching. Ringil turned casually, left hand cocked for the choking glyph, in case the girl registered the Throne Eternal’s dark, hawkish features and made him for the alien he was. But either the urchin was used to southern-looking men—to be fair, Rakan could just about have passed for mercenary talent out of Hinerion or Baldaran—or she didn’t care. She dropped back from the kiss, which she’d had to stand on tiptoe to get, and ran back to her friends where they sheltered under a wine merchant’s eaves. There was some more cheering.

  “Wave and grin,” said Ringil behind his lips. “Everybody loves you.”

  Rakan mustered a weak smile, a gallant twirl of the wrist and arm for his young admirer, and they marched hurriedly on. The incident washed away in their wake. Ringil realized he’d been holding his breath, and let it out with relief. Klithren drew in nearer to his side.

  “That was too fucking close for comfort,” he muttered, hand still resting on the hilt of the short-sword at his hip.

  “Relax, Hinerion. Nearly there now.”

  At which point, more or less, their luck ran out.

  THE TAVERN WAS CALLED THE LIZARD’S HEAD—ABOUT THE FOURTH OR fifth they’d passed so far of that name—and displayed a lumpy, misshapen chunk of something in a cage hung out from the wall on an iron bracket. It might have been a mummified Scaled Folk skull, it might not, but it was a clear sign they were getting c
lose to Etterkal. Nice neighborhoods didn’t go in for that sort of thing anymore—you’d get a painted sign, or maybe a carved wooden likeness, but real rotting flesh and bone was frowned on these days where people ate and drank. The Salt Warren, on the other hand, didn’t much care about social norms—it catered to appetite, pure and simple, and if you didn’t like that, well, you could always stay at home. If veterans of the war wanted to drink someplace where no prissy veil was drawn across the savage times they’d lived through and survived, then Etterkal would offer that place, and places like it on any given corner, until the demand was well and truly met.

  Ringil cast about for street signs, a name he’d maybe know. It was a decade or more since he’d been in this part of town, and nothing looked familiar. On previous occasions, he’d preferred to hit the Salt Warren from the other side, using the crooked thoroughfares and teeming outlander populace of Tervinala for fallback. Thing was, you could always lose yourself in the diplomatic quarter, you could hide in its exotic churn of visiting foreign dignitaries, embassy mission staff and merchants from far flung places. By comparison, an assault through well-to-do, nosy neighbored Kellil made no kind of sense for anyone with the twin luxuries of time and well-laid plans.

  Yeah, pity we don’t have much of either this time around.

  Thus forced to it, his navigation had been haphazard, based on a mix of vague recall and compass instinct. But he guessed they couldn’t be far off Caravan Master’s Rise, where it swept up from the city’s Eastern Gate like the edge of a scimitar blade, cutting what amounted to the formal boundary between Etterkal and Kellil. Ringil didn’t know if the Salt Warren still ran Watch barricades and braziers along its nominal borders. It certainly had the last time he crossed over, but now, with the war to focus attention outward …

  The tavern door cracked inward, and a tongue of yellow lamplight ran out into the street. A small knot of men reeled out, stood blinking in the slash and splatter of the rain.

  “Hoo, look at that!”

  “Salute for the brave troops, lads!”

  “Yeah, all hail th—” Spluttering out to a sudden, spiking yell. “Fuck! Girt, hoy, look! That’s … that’s fucking imperial rig!”

  Ringil already turning, some predictive grasp of what was coming already in his mind. He cast the choking glyph at the man who’d made them, saw him clutch at his throat and stagger. Too late, though, far too late. The others went for weapons.

  “Southern scourge! Southern scourge!”

  “Empire’s here! Stand to arms!”

  They were soldiers, or had been once. No flinch in stance or voice, and the motley assortment of short blades and blunt instruments they carried were brandished with a canny economy of intent. Ringil made hasty count—nine of them, not counting the one choking to death on the cobbled ground, and two at the back already ducking back inside to raise further hue and cry. They were all clearly drunk, but they shed that inconvenience like a split shield. They came straight in, swinging and roaring.

  Gil met the first of them with empty hands, no time for spells, no time even to get the Ravensfriend off his back or Eg’s dragon-tooth dagger down out of his sleeve. The man had a club fashioned from the business end of a boathook, evil rusted metal claw backed with a yard of seasoned oak, and he swung the whole thing one-handed from about a third of the way down the shaft. Ringil took the blow on a rolling, rising forearm block, snapped a grip on the shaft with his left hand, and wrestled his attacker for possession. The rusted hook dipped and slashed, nearly took out his eye, left a scrape down one cheek instead. He pivoted about and let the other man’s momentum carry him past, kicked down savagely at the back of one knee, collapsed the League veteran to the floor. A marine stepped in obligingly with a mace, smashed the back of the man’s head open where he lay.

  Ringil was already spinning back to face the tavern door and the source of the attack. Around him, the other veterans were locked in desperate, uneven struggle with his men—seven on twenty-four, even allowing for the relative youth and inexperience of most of the imperials, was no kind of fight that could last. But through that door might be any number of similarly hardened survivors of the war, not to mention serving maids, tap boys, whores and their customers, pimps and barmen, some of whom might right now be scrambling out through some other exit to raise a more general alarm …

  He strode to the door, ducked beneath the lintel, and stepped into lamplit chaos. Men clambering over trestles to get to their fellows or maybe to weapons held behind the bar, others being shaken awake from a drunken doze. Serving maids and boys recoiling, grabbing tableware before it could be knocked to the floor and shattered. Shrieks. A pimp, flapping his arms at his whores like a panicked hen, trying perhaps to gather in his wards and ferry them out the back. A barkeep, cleaver in hand, glaring—

  “Good evening,” Gil said. “All of you, sit down.”

  The ikinri ‘ska snaked out among them, like lightning forked across a steppe sky, like veins through the back of an aged hand. Most of them sat, dropped back into their seats like stones, or hurried back to where they’d been. Some few were strong-willed enough to resist, or maybe just hard of hearing enough to miss the command. No time to worry about that. He sketched a claw at the beamed ceiling, made the bowed wooden members creak and groan, tore down one entire beam by its woodworm hollowed end. Plaster exploded in the close yellowish air, the roof sagged, the beam end crashed to the floor. Yelps and screams, and thick clouds of downward-sifting dust. With his other hand, he made a sweeping gesture, coughed a glyph that swept lamps and candles off table tops across the room. Flame flew, splashed and glinted to the floor, kindled in the straw underfoot.

  Someone ran at him. The barkeep with the cleaver, bellowing rage—

  “Broken,” he hissed, and the man shrieked as his forearm snapped, midway to the elbow, with an audible crunch. The cleaver flew loose, clattered on the floor.

  I see what you could become if you’d only let yourself.

  Not long ago, this much magic would have tired him. Now, each glyph felt like the flex of a muscle just warming up, like preparatory swashing motions with the Ravensfriend before any real duel began, building strength and focus, feeding a rising fire …

  Better, a clicking, rasping voice whispers at his ear. You have an appetite for it after all. Let us see then, what we can do with the raw material at root …

  And for just a naked second—the high stone altar on the screaming, empty plain, the figure crouched there over him, blur of tentacular limbs and the tools they hold, and he’s pinned, he’s—

  No, no, let’s not go back there, Gil.

  He blinked back to the burning tavern, flames waist high now across the interior, the air clogged with smoke, and most of the crowd was concerned with nothing more than getting away from the fire and the terrible figure in the doorway that had called it down. Through smoke and wavering heated air, he glimpsed a few stolid figures still sat where he’d ordered them, apparently ready to stay there and burn to death rather than break the spell he’d laid on them. But the rest was screaming panic.

  He turned away, ducked back outside into cooler air and the rain.

  Out in the street, his men had finished the veterans and stood over their slaughtered remains, looking at him expectantly. No one seemed to have collected worse than scrapes and bruises. He gestured at the tavern, the merry flicker and glow through its door and windows, the crackling and the screams within.

  “That should keep everyone around here pretty busy. Means we’re covered to the rear. Let’s pick it up, gentlemen.”

  They hit Caravan Master’s Rise a couple of cross streets later. There was a barricade set and two braziers smoldering weakly in the downpour, but the post was unmanned, the Watch pulled away, likely to Harbor End. Ringil checked for street names on the Etterkal side, found one he knew well enough to plan a route by.

  Findrich’s place was less than ten minutes away.

  CHAPTER 49

  oft, insis
tent hushing, like a whole roomful of mothers trying to soothe their infant offspring to sleep. Her clothes were waterlogged, cool and damp against her skin.

  Raining?

  It was not. She opened one eye, squinting against brightness. A hollow blue sky vaulted high overhead; nothing fell out of it but sunlight. The only visible cloud was in thin white striated layers, high up at the top of all that azure expanse. Beyond, and angled slanting across the dome of blue, the band made a warm golden hoop, fading in from nothing at one side to a sharp scimitar edge at the other. And she was warm, too, despite her soaked clothing, despite the lack of any apparent shelter and the wind that …

  … sifted hushing through the long steppe grass she lay in. That was the noise, that was the—

  She was out on the steppe.

  She sat up with a jolt, and the last several weeks came down on her like a landslide. Failure and fury in Ornley, the wreck of the quest; Klithren’s privateers, the sudden new war; captivity, the storm; An-Kirilnar and the Warhelm, the march on the ancient shattered city, reptile peons, warrior caste lizards, the dragon, the death of Egar—a tight, hurt noise in her throat as the grief fell on her anew—the arcane tunnel into the pit and the cryptic, murderous Helmsman that dwelled there …

  Except … you’re not murdered, Archidi.

  In fact—

  It dawned on her that she felt good, impossibly good, impossibly whole. Better than she had done in months, maybe in years. The stitching in her side no longer nagged with pain, there was just the deep itch of healing tissue. The myriad aches and pains she’d collected crossing the Wastes were gone. Even the remembered grief at Egar’s death couldn’t blunt the sense of well-being that suffused her.

  She yawned and stretched against a soft, pleasing ache through the muscles in her lower back. She was hungry, she noticed, but it was mild, it was appetite, not grinding need. Her head was clear and clean, her thoughts unfogged by any residue of krinzanz or recrimination. Curtains of grass nodded gently around her with the breeze, rose higher than her head, blocked out clear view of anything but the sky. She felt nested there, cozy, but ready to move sometime soon. She wanted to explore, to understand what had happened. Felt strong and eager to start, with none of the clenched desperation that usually came when she drew on that strength.