The Dark Defiles

by Richard K. Morgan

  He locked it carefully away. He made his features stone.

  But as Rakan knelt by Iscon Kaad and opened his throat, as Kaad senior’s screaming soaked abruptly away, left only a high, tight keening in its place, he could not quite close out the thought, the insistent wondering if Gingren might ever have shown as much fury and love for him. What it might have taken to earn it, what it might have cost.

  Whether either of them, father or son, could ever have paid enough.

  Get a fucking grip, Gil. Kind of busy here.

  Rakan stooped over Murmin Kaad. He thought the counselor might have been smiling in welcome as the knife dipped down.

  CHAPTER 51

  “he war?” Carden Han, imperial legate for the Majak steppe, bit into a pear and chewed with a lot less decorum than you’d expect for a man of his rank. He talked right through the mouthful. “Going well, the last I heard. Hinerion taken by storm, gains in the Gergis hinterland, so forth. But that news is months old, of course. We don’t exactly have our finger on the pulse up here.”

  She caught a splinter of bitterness in that last comment. Ishlin-ichan was strictly a backwater posting, too far from the Empire to have any real political significance, or afford much in the way of opportunities for advancement. Career diplomats avoided it altogether if they could; failing that, they got it out of the way early on. Time served out here on the steppes as a younger man could always be parlayed into some weightier office closer to the heart of things once you came home. But Carden Han was not by any stretch of the imagination a younger man. The face Archeth sat across from was lined and tired-looking, hair receding from a deeply creased brow, beard gone mostly to gray.

  Which could only mean a couple of things, really. Either a mediocre diplomatic career, now guttering low, or some form of exile. And she’d not paid nearly enough attention at court the last few years to know which was the case for Han.

  She chose her words with according care.

  “Nonetheless, my lord, you do seem to run a tight ship.” She nibbled at a sweetmeat she didn’t really want. “Your intervention out there today was nothing if not timely.”

  The legate flushed. “You are too kind, my lady. Really. It was just a routine precaution. The locals here set much store by anything that happens in the sky—portents and so forth—and a sudden comet in the west, an hour before dawn, falling sky iron, well … you can imagine the fuss something like that would set off among a people like these.”

  Or any other people I ever ran into, she managed not to say. Han might have gone native as far as table manners were concerned, but like some others she’d seen in similar posts over the years, he was still gnawing what sustenance he could from the chewed-over rind of his own assumed cultural superiority.

  Yeah—not unlike a certain sulking young Kiriath half-blood we know back in Yhelteth, eh, Archidi?

  Behind her, a cool night breeze blew in the feasting chamber’s window, touched her at the nape of the neck. The Dragonbane’s lonely ghost come to call, perhaps. Or just the messaged death of that other Archeth, left so far behind now she could scarcely believe she’d been the same woman not six months ago. Up to the arse end of the world, back down again, through death and storm and dragons, and here she suddenly was, like some odd, graceful stranger to herself. The abrupt stab of empathy with Han startled her. She was not accustomed to seeing herself in the humans around her, and certainly not used to seeing her failings writ large in theirs. Her introspection was rarely so lucid.

  Nothing a quarter ounce of krin won’t fix for you, some grim old shard of her personality advised. But like the night breeze, she shrugged it off without much effort. Other, more pressing concerns crowded it out—Jhiral, alone on the throne and poorly served by sycophant advisers, likely fumbling the war’s course by now and stumbling toward some policy catastrophe or other; the Citadel rampant, tipping the Empire’s hard-won pragmatic cosmopolitanism back over into tribal intolerance, conquest, and rage. Ishgrim, caught up in it all.

  Getting home for all of them, before it was too late.

  “Yes, I’d have been remiss indeed,” the legate went nattering on. “To let an Ishlinak scavenger party ride out there without imperial observers along. It doesn’t take much to show the flag, really. A handful of men, a medical officer we can pass off as our very own shaman. They don’t differentiate, you see; healing and augury, diseases and portents, it’s all the same big mysterious mess to the steppe peoples. Fortunately, our man Sarax—the one who conveyed you back here—well, he’s become adept at playing the role. Poor fellow, he thought he’d come here to treat gashes, fevers, and broken bones, and at least three times in the last year he’s found himself pronouncing sagely over chunks of smoldering dross dropped out of the sky. I remember one incident last year when …”

  She drifted a little, let Han’s eager-to-please chatter fade out. Let the man talk; he’d clearly been starved of imperial company for far too long. The room they sat in said it all—dull, functional brickwork for walls, rough-sawn timber beams for the roof. Here and there, a floor tile was glazed to include a Yhelteth crest and emblem, but the effect was crude, clearly the work of craftsmen for whom the symbols held no significance beyond the wage it brought in. The rugs on the floor were of Majak design, the furniture had the same blunt lines as the roof timbers. The fireplace was modest for the size of room, as was the blaze within it. And she’d seen no glass in any window since she arrived at the embassy.

  The only apparent artifact of Yhelteth origin was Han’s family coat of arms—a silk drape banner hung on one wall, looking lonely and out of place.

  “… but the Majak do at least listen to us on these matters now—that is, the Ishlinak in these parts do, and increasingly the more outlying clans too. Such basic medical successes are slowly winning them over to a broader respect for our learning and faith, you see, and with that kind of—”

  “Yes, fascinating indeed.” She worked at keeping the impatience out of her voice. It was a big favor she needed from this man, and she wasn’t sure the simple fact of her rank back in Yhelteth was going to swing it. She sipped at her wine, tried to sound casual. “This, uh … respect—would you say it holds sway with other clans out across the steppe?”

  “Oh, certainly.” Han swallowed and helped himself to another piece of fruit from the table. “We see to it that our presence is felt well beyond the walls of Ishlin-ichan. Not easy to do with a garrison this small, but any legate worth his salt knows the value of projection.”

  “That’s good. There are a couple of things I need to do out there before I head south. And it’s going to take some projection.”

  “Oh?” Sudden shift in the legate’s tone.

  She drained the rest of her wine, set down the empty goblet like a chess piece. “Yes. How much influence do you have with the Skaranak?”

  “The Skaranak?”

  And just from the way he said it, she knew she had trouble.

  WHEN HE’D CALMED DOWN A BIT:

  “Look, my lady, I would like to help you, really I would. Any other clan, and we could have this Poltar quietly murdered for you, no problem. Even abducted so you could torture and kill him yourself, if that’s your pleasure. I’d be delighted to arrange it for you, really. But this is the Skaranak we’re talking about. I don’t know that you understand quite what that means.”

  She shrugged. “All right. The Skaranak. Tell me about them.”

  “Yes. First you have to understand that things have changed a lot up here in the last ten years. Ishlin-ichan is a lot bigger than it used to be, and there are a couple of secondary settlements sprouting on the other side of the river, too. The western clans are getting more and more comfortable with idea of staying in one place, getting used to rubbing along with their neighbors with a minimum of violence, too. But the Skaranak are old school. They’re the die-hard horse tribe remnants of what the rest of the Majak used to be. They never settled like the Ishlinak, you see, and they pride themselves on that fa
ct. Nomad to the bone, still the same basic thug raiders they were a century ago. That gets them a lot of respect. And with the Ishlinak sticking mostly to the city environs and the other side of the river, there’s been no one to challenge them for primacy on the eastern steppe for the better part of a decade. The recruiting sergeants love them, of course; they’ll take Skaranak in preference to any other clan. And for every ten young thugs they send south to become soldiers, at least two or three are bound to trickle back here at some point as seasoned veterans, which just adds to their fighting capacity.”

  Archeth nodded. “Common dynamic. Seen it get us in trouble more than once in the past.”

  “Yes, but try telling that to the recruiters.” Carden Han leaned forward in his chair, a man trying to drive home the valid point of his refusal to help her. “Quite seriously, my lady, if the Majak plains were not so vast, if we were a few hundred miles closer to Dhashara and the frontier, I’d be flagging the Skaranak as a significant future threat to Empire. Now all of that was true even before your friend Egar Dragonbane quit the clan mastery and disappeared. These days”—a rueful grimace—“to the Skaranak’s military prowess and territorial dominion, you can now add rumors of black shamanry and night powers magic. This shaman you want taken off the board—from what they tell me, he’s supposed to have the personal favor of the Sky Dwellers. Rumor says he can conjure demons from the steppe rim to do his will.”

  Archeth studied the grain in the table top. She rubbed at a knot in the wood that looked a little like a screaming face.

  “You surely don’t believe that sort of thing, though, do you?” she asked mildly. “Demons and magic? An educated man of faith such as yourself?”

  Han gave her a mirthless little smile. “What I believe has very little bearing on the matter, my lady. It is what the Skaranak themselves believe, and what the rest of the steppe believes about them, that defines the game. Have you ever seen a Majak berserker in action?”

  Flurry of recall—the frozen moments of the dragon fight, the Dragonbane’s howl as he called the beast around to face him.

  “Yes, I have,” she said quietly.

  “Well.” A little disappointed at the way she’d stolen his thunder. “Then you’ll know what I’m talking about, my lady. A Skaranak warrior who believes he has the night powers on his side may as well actually have them, for all the difference it makes. He will think himself capable of superhuman feats in battle, whether he actually is or not, and in this part of the world, his enemies will think it, too. More than half my men here are local auxiliaries, most of them not even converts. I can trust them to guard the compound and carry out basic patrol duties. But I could no more order them to march on a Skaranak encampment than you could get the Ninth Southern Guard to lay siege to the Citadel.”

  Archeth grimaced. Got up from the table and the rather sparse spread Han had laid on for her. She’d barely touched her food anyway, wasn’t really hungry. Since waking out on the steppe, she was touched with a keen-edged, wakeful energy that put the best krin she’d ever had to shame. She went to the open window behind her, leaned there and stared out over the sparse yellow scatter of torches and firelit windows that marked out the town below.

  At five stories high, the imperial mission was by far the tallest building in Ishlin-ichan. You could see it as you rode into town, rising over the huddle of cabins and low houses like some chunky priest bestowing blessings on the backs of a multitude abased in prayer. Now it gave her a view through thin palls of chimney smoke to the city walls and beyond, where the lights ended and the steppe stretched away like some vast dark ocean. The sky had clouded from the west as night fell, the band was muffled up like a sneak assassin’s blade. Here and there, she thought she could make out the glimmering spark of campfires far out in all that darkness, but it was hard to be sure.

  “You must have some homegrown muscle, too,” she mused without turning from the view. “I saw Upland Free colors on your scouts this afternoon.”

  “Yes.” She heard him get up from the table and move to join her. “A seven-man scout detachment, plus a regular levy troop of eighty, of whom about a dozen are currently down with the local coughing fever. Allowing for that and the fact I need to maintain a strong command presence here among the auxiliaries, I could perhaps spare you forty to put into the field. Forty-five at most. I can tell you right now that isn’t going to be enough.”

  “No.”

  “You’d need five times that number to contemplate even marching into Skaranak country uninvited, let alone picking a fight once you get there.” The legate hovered awkwardly at her shoulder, not daring the familiarity to lean at her side. He pointed past her instead, out at the darkness beyond the city. “There are local legends here that say a vast army once marched out onto that plain to do battle with demons, and just … disappeared. No survivors to tell the tale, no trace of a battlefield, just—gone. But they say sometimes at night, when the wind is blowing hard out of the north east, you can still hear the sounds of a great battle, carried very faintly, as if that army is still out there somewhere, still fighting whatever it ran into.”

  “Have you heard it yourself?” she challenged him.

  “No, my lady. Nor do I think it ever really happened, at least not the way the legends tells it. But I do think it’s a clear warning, meant perhaps for overambitious warlords and generals. You underestimate the steppe and what it contains at your peril.”

  She turned to look at him. “My lord Han, in case you weren’t listening earlier, I have just survived the better part of a month in the Kiriath Wastes, a place even my own people considered lethally dangerous. I have lived through a shipwreck and a skirmish with the Scaled Folk, a fight with a dragon and a sorcerous catapult that sent me flying a thousand miles or more through the air before crashing to earth here. If you think I’m going to be put off by tales of wailing ghost armies and black shaman conjuring, then it is you who is guilty of underestimation.”

  The legate bowed his head. “My humblest apologies, my lady. It was not my intention to imply—”

  “No.” She waved it off. “I know that. Raise your head, my lord. The apology should be mine; you are trying to help. But this is a blood debt, and I have no choice.”

  Han looked up meekly. “Perhaps if you returned next year, my lady. With a larger force.”

  “No, that’s not going to work. Do you really see the Emperor sparing me several hundred of his best fighting men to march up here and make a personal point, while the Empire’s still locked in war with the League?”

  Not to mention my own chances of having the time to spare. Great big fucking mess there’ll be to clear up once I get back.

  For a moment, the bitter old krin-addicted aspect of herself stepped forth grinning; she was almost tempted to forget about Yhelteth and just fucking stay up here for a couple of years. Ride some horses, learn to speak Majak, camp out under the stars, and watch the big-sky seasons turn. Or failing that, maybe catch one of the trade barges down the Janarat, stay on it past the Dhashara jump-off, drift all the way down to Shaktur and the Great Lake instead. Blag a place to stay and funds from the imperial embassy there, maybe have another go at waking the comatose Helmsman in the ruins of An-Naranash.

  Let the war in the west sort itself out, let the Empire live with its stupid mistakes. Let Jhiral fend for himself for a change, just let it all go.

  In slanting rays of morning sun, Ishgrim rolls over in the sheets of the big bed, gives her that smeared mouth look, reaches for her …

  Going to let that go, too, are we, Archidi?

  She saw the girl again, standing at the rail, not waving, as the flotilla drifted downriver with the current and away.

  Back before you know it, she’d told her.

  She jerked her chin—actually did it physically. Curt dismissal for the krin-eyed apparition in her head. She watched, fascinated, as her own bitter ghost raised its brows, grinned savagely at her, and then walked forward like a duel opponent.
/>   Shouldered rudely past, was gone.

  “Look,” she said to Cerdan Han. “This is going to get done, one way or the other. And I don’t have much time. If you can’t put a force together that lets me do it head-on, what are the other options? Doesn’t this shaman ever come here, to Ishlin-ichan?”

  Han shook his head. “Not for a couple of years now. We kept tabs on him, of course, just like any other influential Skaranak when they blew into town. According to my spies, he used to be a regular at a pretty well-known whorehouse out by the eastern wall. But then something happened. The story we got is that he hurt one of the girls pretty badly, and she died from her injuries. Not really a problem in itself—she was a foreign slave, dragged here from one of the League cities if my memory serves me correctly. No Majak ties, no family to want blood vengeance, you see.”

  “I see.”

  “Yes, so, anyway,” Bemusement in the legate’s voice now—all this fuss over one bloody slave girl. “If this Poltar had just paid out the madame, no one would have cared. But he skipped instead and just never came back. No one’s very sure why. The madame put out a bounty on him, of course, but from what I hear, it wasn’t very high. More of a gesture than anything; certainly not enough to attract serious talent. So now there’s a stand-off—Poltar can’t ever walk the streets of Ishlin-ichan safely again, but it doesn’t look like he wants to. And meantime, no one’s stupid enough to ride east and go up against the Skaranak for such a paltry sum.”

  She grunted. Stared out into the dark of the steppe. Daydreamed scenarios dancing in her head.

  “No Skaranak malcontents, then? This Poltar must have enemies within the clan as well, surely.” Certainly works that way back in Yhelteth. “Is there really no way we could get this done from the inside? Bribe someone, maybe? Blackmail them?”

  Well, look at you, Archidi—all political manoeuvring and manipulation, just like a real imperial adviser.