The Dark Defiles

by Richard K. Morgan

  Weird.

  Like waking late one sun-soaked morning beside Ishgrim’s sleeping form, knowing they had the whole day to themselves.

  I’m coming home, Ish, she knew with perfect calm. Nothing going to stop me now.

  She clambered to her feet and stood in the waist-high grass, trying to get her bearings. Tried to squeeze the wet out of one sleeve with her fist, got a scant few drops for her trouble—her clothing was drying out far faster than you’d expect, and when she held the sleeve up and sniffed it, there was a faint medicinal reek underlying the damp. She shrugged, put out the arm at waist height, and brushed idly with the palm of her hand at the swaying surface of the grass around her. The steppe stretched away in all directions, as undistinguished as an ocean. No features to the landscape, or at least none that her unaccustomed eye could—

  She stopped in midturn, staring.

  The structure loomed behind her; it couldn’t be more than fifty yards away in the grass, and for a few moments she couldn’t work out what she was looking at. Towering broken curve twenty or thirty feet high, cavernous empty interior shadowed from the sun, like a two-thirds part of some colossal smashed earthenware tankard left rolling in the straw on a tavern floor. It gleamed wetly inside, seemed to have some woven texture to it, exposed at the oddly softened edges where …

  Was it melting?

  Archeth narrowed her eyes, gave up trying to guess, and made her way through the sighing grass toward the structure. She knew what it was now—recalled the dimensions of the drowning chamber they’d been hustled into by the Helmsman, made the match, could not accept this as coincidence. But how that solid alloy dome became this overturned, soft-edged shell was still beyond her. She reached the area of crushed—and, she now saw, scorched—grass where the shattered artifact lay. Saw a similarly burned and flattened trail leading up what she now understood was a slight incline, at whose brow the …

  Shell? Chamber?

  … had stopped … rolling?

  “Ah, daughter of Flaradnam. What plans they have for you now.”

  Acrid chemical whiff on the breeze, and the words whispered in her ear as if the wind itself had been given sudden voice—she spun about and found herself five feet away from a figure in a slouch hat and patched sea captain’s cloak.

  “Who—” Quarterless, there in her right hand like a dream. She blinked at it, had no recollection of pulling the blade at all. “Who the fuck are you?”

  The cloaked figure nodded at her knife-filled hand. “That’s very impressive. Can you do it with all of them at once yet?”

  She brandished the knife. “I asked you a fucking question.”

  “Yes. Not very politely, though. I believe if you make just a touch more effort, you’ll find you already know who I am. Ah—there you go.”

  As if he’d parted a curtain for her in the back of her mind. The Dragonbane’s words, two years ago in the garden of a Pranderghal tavern, the faint chill that seemed to come on the breeze as he spoke. He’s from all the places the ocean will always be heard. Cavorts with mermaids in the surf and so forth. Cloak and hat’s like a symbol for it.

  Takavach. Lord of the Salt Wind.

  “You’re the fuck that poisoned my horse?”

  Beneath the hat brim, she thought the eyes kindled like tiny flames. “Don’t push your luck, kir-Archeth Indamaninarmal. You’re not exactly popular with the Dark Court right now.”

  “Then what do you want?”

  “Oh, well, I don’t know. How about a little respect? Yes, that’d be nice, now I come to think about it. Under the circumstances. Not too much to ask, is it? Mutual respect, one immortal being to another?”

  Archeth shrugged. “Respect is earned.”

  “Earned?” It came out a whisper, built rapidly to a rasping fury. “Fucking earned? You cheeky half-blood bitch. You know what? I give up. No, I’m done. Really. This is too hard. It isn’t fucking worth it. Cannot believe you just said that. To me, to a demon god, a noble of the Dark Court. I’m trying to fucking help you here.” One cloaked arm slashed angrily at the waist-high grass. Trail of glinting, splintering light, and the tall, nodding blades withered and smoked where the Salt Lord’s hand passed. “We run around, we answer prayers. We grant wishes and favors by the shovel-load, try to fucking balance everything along the way—because, guess what, it doesn’t actually work too well if you don’t balance it—and after all that, after all that fucking effort, when you actually make yourself known, you manifest the way every bleating fucking supplicant for the last ten thousand years has been asking you to, this is what you get? You know what that is, daughter of Flaradnam? It’s fucking ungracious.”

  “I don’t pray. To you or anybody else.”

  “I didn’t say you did.” The Salt Lord seemed to calm a little. “Prayer is a tapestry, a system of permissions sewn into the world by the Book-Keepers. A way in. It’s leverage, and it reaches everywhere, it touches you all. I don’t need you to pray before I can get into your self-absorbed miserable little life. There’s always someone else.”

  “Book-keepers?”

  “Forget it. It doesn’t fucking matter. I’m not talking to you, anyway. Go on, blunder into your ill-conceived little revenge fantasy for your dead friend and see how far you get. See how close you get to Poltar the shaman before one or other of the horrors Kelgris has gifted him with chops you down.”

  She blinked. “How do you know ab—”

  “Oh, come on!”

  They stood facing each other across the gently swaying grass. She wondered vaguely if she should feel afraid.

  Her knives hummed and chuckled soothingly in the back of her head. Told her no.

  She cleared her throat. “Sorry. My father’s people had no gods. I am not accustomed to—”

  “No, evidently not.”

  She hesitated again. “You mention Kelgris—Kwelgrish of the Dark Court, I guess. Ringil Eskiath told me you and she appeared to be, uhm, acting in concert?”

  “Yes, well, he’s another one,” said the god grumpily. “Can’t muster the least shred of respect for his clan deities, sooner fucking die than drop his chin an inch, let alone get on his knees. Well, you work with the tools to hand, I suppose. Just don’t be surprised when they turn in your grip and gouge you.”

  “So you’re not on the same side?” A little impatiently, because the demon god’s constant bitching was starting to grate on her. “Kwelgrish and you? You’re opposed?”

  Takavach sighed. “Sides. Oppositions. Good and evil. Heroes and villains. Them and us. The old brain-dead binary tribal cant. Look, would it melt your little head away completely to take on board the awful truth that it’s actually a bit more complicated than that?”

  “Don’t you fucking patronize me. You think I don’t understand complexity? My people steered human affairs for five thousand years—”

  “Not without a little quiet help from us, you didn’t.”

  “—and I’ve spent nearly two centuries doing the same job myself.”

  “Well, you wouldn’t think so, to hear you talk. Call yourself an immortal? Sides? You sound just like the next fucking human, you know that?”

  “My mother was human, you arrogant fuck!” It feels as if she’s teetering on the brink of something here, yearning to finally fall. “So—you know what? Fuck you. My father, my immortal father? He married her. He stood with humans his whole life, in battle and in counsel. They were good enough for him. They’re good enough for me, too.”

  Brief pause—for just a moment, under the brim of the slouch hat, she thinks she sees Takavach smile.

  “I’m very glad to hear that,” he says quietly.

  “Are you and Kelgris on the same fucking side or not?”

  “It doesn’t work like that.” Almost, there was a plea in the Salt Lord’s voice. “You of all people, kir-Archeth, should understand that. Think about those five thousand years your people tried to manage human affairs. Think, in not much more than your own lifetime, of the ma
nipulation it took your father to unify the southern hill tribes, to steer the Khimran clan into imperial ambition and beyond. You think being a god for these people is any easier?”

  “I wouldn’t know.”

  “Well, it isn’t.” Snappish flare of temper, but then Takavach’s tone softened once more. “Look, try to understand. Try to grasp the magnitude of what we’re facing here, the mess we have to work with. The storm is coming, we see it massing on the horizon. We’ve been here before, we know how bad it can get. The dwenda are coming back, in all their idiot beauty and power, determined to claw back their beloved ancestral home. Stopping them without the Kiriath in place is going to be … a challenge. Certain things need to be done, certain pieces moved on the board, certain men put in place. Everyone has their own ideas about how to do it, but one constant remains—the Book-Keeper codes. By the codes used to repair the world aeons ago, we are forbidden direct intervention without supplicant request. And the major pieces, the ones best suited to the game we’ve chosen, do not fucking pray.”

  The Salt Lord sighs. Looks away across the endless steppe.

  “Perhaps they never did, perhaps it was never in them. Or perhaps they’ve just seen too much random horror to believe any longer in the power of the gods. Whichever the case, the gods must make do, must find what fragments of leverage they can—a heroic slayer of dragons turned poor excuse for a clan master, for example, a man whose long-dead father once laid down sacrifices and chanted explicit prayers to the Salt Lord for his son’s safety; the sour rage of a disenchanted holy man at the dying of tradition and respect this clan master represents; restless sibling rivalry and envy among the clan master’s brothers—yes, all right, out of random elements like these, we can build a hand of sorts, and then play out the cards. But it’s a complex, tangled game, daughter of Flaradnam, fenced about at every turn with limitation and compromise.

  “You want to see how it’s played?”

  THE STEPPE PLAIN AND THE SKY ABOVE IT TILT AND WHEEL AWAY. IT’S AS IF she’s ducked very rapidly into a tent and left the world outside. She stands in soft gloom, amid streamers of mist that coil and drift, seemingly at random. The god is at her side.

  Take our failed clanmaster—Takavach’s voice is soundless in her head. He passes his hand through the drift of mist closest to them. It eddies and coils in the wake of the gesture, forms a passable image of the Dragonbane. He cannot simply be whisked from safety and comfort, and placed on a path of heroic doom by the god charged with watching over him and keeping him safe. That would go against the codes. An actual threat must be made, one that would justify such an extraction, and it must be credible. Let’s see—other faces now, ones she doesn’t know, but among them she sees the blood resemblance—the jealous brothers might serve in this, but they would have to be incited. They are restless, you see, but that’s all they are. Too much tradition vested in the clanmaster’s office for them to go against it alone. They need some kind of authority to unify them, to reassure the less enthusiastic among them when it comes to brother slaying.

  So we back up. We cast about. What about this shaman—again, the Salt Lord stirs the mist, and a gaunt, sour-faced old man emerges, wrapped in a wolf skin that’s seen better days—he has no love for the clanmaster, he could be that authority. But he cannot simply be handed the tools and incited to act, either, unless he prays for it, and to date he has not done so. Poltar is bitter but weak, he contents himself with sulking about the fading of the old ways and the terrible failings in the youth of today. So back up once more. Can we provoke a fight, perhaps, between clanmaster and shaman? That might kindle enough rage to trigger the necessary prayers. But neither man is angry enough to start this fight. We’d have to stir things up. Grief, guilt, rage, then—these are some of any god’s favorite tools, after all, and the Dragonbane has been known to hurt people in the past when subject to such feelings. Perhaps, let’s see, if someone died badly enough, someone of the clan, and the clanmaster felt somehow responsible, then the necessary sparks might fly.

  But how to arrange that death?

  Oh, wait—here’s a young man—quite a number of young men in fact—all dreaming of battling monsters out of Skaranak legend, praying fervently for some opportunity to test their heroic mettle. Wolves, steppe ghouls, flapping wraiths, it really doesn’t matter which, their prayers are vague—as long as it’s a monster, bring it on. Well, we choose one of these idiots and we answer his prayers. Takavach gestures, the mist boils. She gathers a confused impression of monstrous, lanky creatures, twice the height of a man, lashing out with taloned limbs at a horse and rider. The rider goes down in the grass, reels briefly to his feet, is struck back down. The young man in question dies, heroically more or less, so there’s his prayer answered, and our clanmaster neatly assumes the burden of guilt as we’d hoped. He tangles with the shaman, decks him in front of the whole clan. She sees it in the mist, sees Egar throw the punch. And the shaman calls down the rage of the gods to avenge his sullied dignity.

  Now we’re getting somewhere!

  Oh, but wait again—whichever god answers the shaman’s prayers is going to find themselves in direct conflict with the Salt Lord, who is after all charged with protecting the Dragonbane from exactly this sort of thing. The two gods will be compelled, by the codes the Book-Keepers wrote, to do actual battle. And we can’t have that. So back up all over again. Let’s see—perhaps Poltar can be subtly encouraged to seek his own vengeance, to gather and shape his own tools. But how is a god to appear to him in direct answer to his prayers, only to refuse direct aid? The codes won’t allow that, either; they’d tear us apart for a breach like that. We need another avenue of approach, an indirect point of entry. And by a stroke of luck, here’s a young girl from Trelayne—the Salt Lord draws her from the mist, huddled and weeping on a grimy pallet—sold into whoring by whichever Majak mercenary brought her home and then tired of her, praying desperately to the Dark Court for intercession, revenge, and escape. All of which we can provide, though not quite in the way the girl imagines, but no matter—there, finally, is our point of contact with the shaman. He’s a frequent visitor to this brothel the girl finds herself in, and he’s not the nicest of clients. He vents himself upon the girl—Archeth watches grimly as the scene coalesces. Some part of her wants to look away, but she doesn’t—Kwelgrish manifests in answer to the girl’s prayers, gives her a peaceful escape into oblivion and the shaman the shock of his life, which we can more or less call revenge. Prayer obligations discharged once again, the codes are, if not wholly obeyed, at least appeased. And Kwelgrish has the holy man on the hook, but is free of any obligation to fulfill any direct prayers. We’re in business. Poltar is incited, and a couple of tantalizing myth-derived dreams later, so is one of the brothers. A plot is hatched, the clanmaster is at long last in mortal danger as required. Finally, we’re where we need to be. Time to usher in the protecting Salt Lord, to provide warning and escape, by means of which the clanmaster can be placed where he needs to stand on the board.

  And then, after all this work, the Dragonbane chooses not to run.

  I mean, he has every incentive. He’s sick of being a clanmaster, life on the steppe, the whole thing. He’s bored rigid. He dreams like a boy less than half his age, of running away from his obligations, back to the freebooter life he knew in the south. He ought to jump at the slightest chance to get out, that’s the way it ought to go.

  Instead, he chooses to ignore the Salt Lord’s timely warning, he decides to stay and fight. And the fight boils up for her viewing, riders and horses out of mist, the ghostly silent clash of blades, a magnificent Yhelteth warhorse spiked through chest and eye with arrows, rearing up. The Dragonbane unhorsed and down. Nearly gets himself killed in the process, of course, and the Salt Lord then has to leap in and save him, using some frankly rather unsubtle supernatural means—like this. Silence, while she watches in horror as the Dragonbane’s brothers are slaughtered. One of the brothers—and there he goes—escapes the fray,
rides back to the shaman and reports. The shaman does exactly what you’d expect, goes straight to Kelgris to demand similar supernatural support. And meantime our clanmaster is all set to storm back to camp, all the way on foot if need be, and go head to head with Poltar and whatever else gets in his way.

  Now, the codes are rather clear on this—her initially oblique approach notwithstanding, Kelgris has become the shaman’s patroness, and in matters of protection, she has no choice but to grant his wishes—answer his prayers, if you will. So, despite our very best efforts, the scene is now set for exactly the battle of powers we wanted to avoid. Only some very fast talking on the part of the Salt Lord manages to hustle our clanmaster—ex-clanmaster now, of course—out of range and so place the whole conflict in suspension. But the problem has not gone away.

  I tell you, it isn’t easy being a god.

  THE WORLD RETURNED, SLAMMED DIZZYINGLY BACK INTO PLACE AROUND her, as if she’d been snapped upright into it from a prone position beneath the earth. Bright blue sky, wind through the grass, sunlight slanting. The cloaked and slouch-hatted figure stood opposite her once more. Quarterless was still in her hand.

  “The Dragonbane is dead,” she said drably.

  “Yes, I know.”

  “So then.” She looked at her knife. Hefted it, spun it on the palm of her hand, and put it away in the sheath at the small of her back. “I’d say your problem’s solved for you.”

  “For me, perhaps. But this is a blunderer kind of mess, if I might borrow a war metaphor, and the tail is still very much alive. If you go up against Poltar, burned black demon witch that you are, then he is going to call on Kelgris for support. Believe me, he’s done it for enemies a lot less imposing than you over the last couple of years. And if he calls, Kelgris will have no choice but to notice you, to answer the shaman’s call, and to deliver her protection. And you don’t want that.”