The Dark Defiles

by Richard K. Morgan

  Something savage in him rejoiced at the sight.

  The legend cracks and crumbles. Not every day you get a rise out of Slab-face Findrich.

  “I hear they never did find a body,” he went on mildly. “That’s the thing about the Scaled Folk, though. You could always rely on them to clean up after a battle. Right, Klithren?”

  “Right,” said the mercenary somberly.

  “Yeah, how do you live with something like that, Slab? I mean—knowing your son died, roasted and eaten by monsters, and you put him out there because you were too much of a coward and a coin-grubbing thief to go and fight yourself.”

  The pipe mouthpiece clattered to the floor. Findrich surged halfway to his feet, knuckles white on the arms of the chair. Rage in his eyes, and a low growl rising from his throat. Ringil gave him an unfriendly smile, and he froze.

  “Just so you know—you get up out of that chair, I’ll chop your fucking feet off. Sit down.” Gil let the point of the Ravensfriend drift lazily up from the floor, waited while the slave merchant lowered himself by glaring inches, back into his seat. “Right. Small talk’s over, Slab. I just set this entire city on fire to get my friends back; you think I’m going to go easy on you for old times’ sake? I killed Grace, I killed Poppy, and the only reason you’re not following them is that I’m short of time. So let’s stop fucking about, shall we? You want to live? You want to keep your appendages and your manhood intact? Where are my friends?”

  He felt the change shiver through the room like a cold wind. Saw Findrich bare his teeth in triumph.

  “Right fucking behind you, faggot.”

  OUT OF THE SHADOWS AT THE BACK OF THE CHAMBER, THE DWENDA CAME.

  Some of them were the statues in the corners, melting now back into life and motion, shedding their stone glamour the way a snake sheds skin, shaking off their held poses in shimmering splinters of blue fire. He saw a couple of them tilt their necks to shake off stiffness as they came. Others just walked out of the blue fire haze he’d seen them emerge from at Ennishmin, as if curtained portals drew back in the air itself, edged with the same blue fire, and let them through. Tall, ghost pale of face, eyes like pits of gleaming black tar, and they moved with a terrible unhuman grace and poise. Beneath cloaks of shimmering velvet blue and gray, they were armored head to neck in smooth, seamless black garb that seemed to repel the light. They bristled with weapons, glimmering long-sword blades and ornate axes, and Risgillen of Illwrack was at their head.

  Ringil surveyed them bleakly for a moment, shot a brief glance back at Findrich.

  “Not those friends,” he said patiently.

  The slaver spat on the floor at his feet. “Fuck you. Arrogant aristo prick. You’re fucking done.”

  “Well, we’ll see.” Ringil caught Klithren’s eye. Nodded at Findrich. “Keep an eye on our pal here. I got this.”

  He strode out to meet Risgillen, across the expanse of honeycombed stone floor. Was vaguely aware of Noyal Rakan, barking orders at the gaping imperials, trying to snap them out of their shock, trying to mask his own. Ringil felt a twinge of sympathy. He remembered his own first dwenda encounter, two years back, the icy terror that had seized him at the time. The imperials had had more warning, true enough, but still, they were mostly young and unseasoned. He’d seen them give a solid account of themselves against human foes, but he could not predict how they would cope here.

  Best not to risk finding out.

  He passed Rakan, put out his shield, and touched him on the arm with its cold steel edge.

  “Keep them tight,” he murmured. “Bowmen deployed, but no move unless I call it, or these motherfuckers try to jump me. Got that?”

  “Yes, my—” Voice taut and hoarse, he heard how Rakan swallowed to clear his throat. “My lord, are these truly—”

  “They fall down just like men,” Gil told him. “Remember that. Just like men.”

  And left the young captain there. Moved out to meet the dwenda wedge and their commander. He’d forgotten how coldly beautiful Risgillen was—sculpted ivory features, jutting cheekbones and smooth pale brow, black silky fall of hair, framing the face. Long, mobile mouth, long slim-fingered hands.

  He’d forgotten how much she resembled Seethlaw. How hard the blood resemblance struck at him, and what it left welling up in the wound.

  He wiped it all away. Stored it, behind a stony battlefield mask.

  “Risgillen,” he called amiably across the space between them. “You really are a stubborn fucking bitch. I warned you not to come back here again. Now I’m going to have to kill you, just like your fuckwit brother.”

  She tilted her head, wolflike, and smiled. “This world is ours, Ringil, and we will have it for our own. We owned it before men learned to build their first campfires out on the arid plains, we will own it long after you are all gone. Look to your own legends if you think I’m lying. We are the Aldrain, the Elder Race; we are the Shining Immortal Ones.”

  “Yeah.” Ringil came to an easy halt, a couple of yards away from her. If she raised her long sword at him now, they could touch blades “Legends I’ve been reading say you got your arses handed to you by the Black Folk four thousand years ago, and they drove you out. What have you been doing since—sulking?”

  He heard indrawn breath along the dwenda line. Looked like they’d all learned pretty good Naomic, which suggested they’d been deployed here for a while. A dwenda warrior on Risgillen’s flank twitched in the ranks, bleached features stretched in outrage, long ax raised. Ringil lifted the Ravensfriend casually, pointed it,

  “You—don’t even fucking think about it.”

  Risgillen turned and said something softly in the Aldrain tongue. The outraged dwenda subsided, fell back in line. Risgillen smiled again, thinly. She looked back at Ringil with an intensity that bordered on adoration.

  “You should have stayed in the south,” she said very softly. “But I’m glad you came. I would not have wanted to miss your doom.”

  Ringil nodded. “Let’s get on with it, then. Where’s this sword?”

  For just a moment, he had her. He saw the way she froze. Gave her a lopsided grin.

  “Risgillen, Risgillen.” Gathering the ikinri ‘ska stealthily to him, like the folds of some heavy net for casting. Meantime—misdirection, Gil, loud and bright as you can manage. “Did you really think I was coming to you unaware? You really thought you were going to have your last fuckwit human stooge just crawl up out of whatever jinxed Illwrack heirloom he got magicked into five thousand years ago, and take my soul? You really haven’t understood who you’re fucking with here, have you.”

  She stared at him for a long, cold moment, black empty eyeballs catching glimmers of light from the torches around the chamber, twisting them into something else.

  “It’s you who hasn’t understood,” she whispered.

  He felt it lash out for him, the dwenda glamour in all its binding force. Flash recall of his time with Seethlaw in the Grey Places, the subtle webs of compulsion he would only later understand had been spun around him. It fell all about him, at angles he could not see or name, coiled inward, made a soundless hissing as it came—

  He reached for the ikinri ‘ska. Grinned as it came on in his head like icy fire. Struck.

  Nothing.

  He tried again, cast hard. The dwenda compulsion drew savagely tight, crushing out the glimmer of the ikinri ‘ska a scant moment after it arose. He yelped. Something tore in his chest with the reversal; it felt as if his rib cage would crack like a nutshell between clenching teeth. His arms hung at his sides as if weighted there with ballast. The Ravensfriend fell through his fingers, his shield tore loose from his left arm. Clank and clatter as they hit the honeycomb floor. His head lolled back a second, then straightened through no effort of his own. He would have gone to his knees if the choice had been his to make, but whatever forces Risgillen had unleashed held him upright, as if suspended there by a spike through the sternum.

  He twisted his head to the side,
rolled his eyes like a panicked horse, trying to see his men …

  “They are bound as you are.” Risgillen told him. “The power of Talonreach, the storm-callers’ art enacted. The glamour ripples outward. It’s a simple enough matter—whatever power you summon is deflected, taken from you, pushed away and used in binding your followers ever tighter. You have already made them breathless with your efforts so far. I daresay if you keep pushing, you’ll suffocate them.”

  At the extremity of his vision, he saw the truth of it—Noyal Rakan’s straining face, the locked-up posture. He heaved once more against the binding, got no single fraction of leverage anywhere. He let go. Hung from his failure as if nailed there.

  Risgillen stepped closer to him, long sword lowered. She put up her free hand to touch his face. He felt the trembling in her fingers as she did it.

  “You see?” she said, voice a shaky caress. “I have understood exactly who I am fucking with.”

  Ringil made a noise through gritted teeth.

  “Oh, yes. You wanted to see the sword.”

  She let go of his face, raised her hand, and snapped her fingers in the chilly air. More words in the Aldrain tongue and a name, one he thought he recognized.

  A dwenda shouldered through the ranks, unarmed, limping a little. There was an ornate bordering on his cloak, glyphs worked into it in strands of red and silver, and the rest of the company gave him respectful ground. He stood beside Risgillen, fixed Ringil with his empty black stare. Risgillen made an elegant gesture of introduction.

  “This is Atalmire, ordained storm-caller for clan Talonreach. The glamour that holds you is of his making. You’ll remember him, of course. You crippled him in the temple at Yhelteth.”

  Fractional easing in the pressure on his chest—Gil found, abruptly, he could speak.

  “You all look the same to me,” he husked. “Hello, Atalmire, you crippled fuck. Tell me, what kind of mage can’t fix his own leg?”

  The storm-caller looked impassively back at him.

  “He has chosen not to heal,” Risgillen said. “He chooses to remember instead. But have no worries on that account. When you end, so will the wound you gave him.”

  Following Atalmire, two more dwenda came through carrying a slim, six foot ornately worked wooden casket between them. Risgillen darted a smiling glance at Ringil, like a mother at a patient child finally about to receive a long-promised gift. She leaned close again.

  “They tell me that some small part of you will survive this,” she said very gently. “That it will sit behind the eyes of the risen Dark King, eyes that were once your own, and see everything that he sees with them, everything that he does as he takes back this world for us. I hope that pleases you as much as it pleases me.”

  “Big mistake,” he hissed at her. “You don’t want to leave me alive, Risgillen.”

  “No, I do,” she said seriously, and nodded at Atalmire.

  The storm-caller uttered a single, harsh syllable and made a sharp beckoning motion at the casket. The wooden lid splintered, then cracked violently apart. Exploded away from the base in five jagged chunks. Splinters stung Ringil’s cheek.

  The sword lay within.

  CHAPTER 53

  arnak Ironbrow rode to Ishlin-ichan irritable and combative, and what he found there didn’t put him in any better mood.

  They didn’t know him at the gate—no sign of the usual crew; they had a quad of callow herd boy types propping up the gateposts instead. None of them looked old enough to be wiping their own arses yet, let alone wielding the staff lances they’d been given. Not a beard between them. He looked around in the early evening gloom for a familiar face, saw only a corpulent captain sat outside the guard hut, picking his teeth with a fowl bone. Old line command instincts prickled along his nerves—down south, he’d have had all five of these on a slouching charge, quick as slitting a throat. Couple of strokes each at the posts, double for the captain, and docked pay all around. He reined in the impulse, reined in his mount, too, a prudent dozen yards from the gates. Raised his hand to the riders behind him to do the same.

  “Nine men seek entry,” he intoned loudly. “We bring no word but peace.”

  The staff lancers fumbled about a bit, glances back and forth between them. They looked hopefully over at the man by the hut. The guard captain dug a chunk of something out on the end of his improvised toothpick, looked quizzically at it, and then popped it back into his mouth. He stood up, stretched, and yawned.

  “Skaranak, eh?” He looked them over with calculated insolence. “Coming in for a bath, are we, lads?”

  Marnak felt how his men bristled at his back. He offered the man a bleak grin. “Come to fuck some of your Ishlinak whores, actually.”

  Barked laughter behind him. The corpulent captain flushed. Marnak leaned forward in his saddle, kept his grin but never let it touch his eyes.

  “Is there going to be a problem?”

  From long habit, he’d measured the logistics of the fight reflexively as they rode up. Nine of them, hardened herd outriders all, versus the four kids with their staff lances on the gate and this bag of guts. Marnak and his crew were all riding with lances sheathed, but against this kind of opposition, it wouldn’t much matter. It’d be over in less time than you’d need to tell it around the campfire afterward. At worst they’d collect a couple of gashes between them.

  And a whole new raiding war, with summer still a month to run.

  Tensions were never far off between Skaranak and the Ish, but the two clans had not fought hard now for over a decade. The odd drunken tavern brawl in Ishlin-ichan, maybe, that got out of hand and went to knives. And a couple of inconclusive skirmishes over grazing up near the Bow-of-Bandlight meander three years back—but both sides hastily ascribed those to renegade elements, buried their dead, and paid out blood debt to the families, kissed and made up. It just wasn’t worth getting into anymore; there was too much at risk that was good for both sides now.

  Yeah—tell that to your gut-sack captain here.

  No matter. He couldn’t butcher the Ishlin-ichan gate watch over nothing but bad temper and balls-out tribal idiocy. Those days were long gone.

  The guard captain appeared to have reached a similar conclusion. Or perhaps he saw the look in Marnak’s eyes. He sniffed and spat, courteously far from the Skaranak’s horse’s hooves. “No problem, graybeard, if you don’t bring one yourselves. Pay the levy and in you go. Nine of you—that’ll be ninety.”

  “Ten star a man? Bit steep, isn’t it?”

  A shrug. “You got imperial coin, I could let you in for—let’s see—eight elementals.”

  “That’s still steep.” Marnak looked significantly around at the four staff lancers, one by one. Gate toll was meant in principle for the city’s coffers, but there was no way hard imperial coin was going to end up anywhere but in these men’s pockets. “Call it six. That’s a spinner each for your lads here and two for you. Can’t say fairer than that now, can we?”

  He patted at the purse he wore under his coat and it clinked merrily. Not a noise you’d easily get out of the crude, star-stamped bronze octagons that passed for coinage among the Majak. The guard captain made a show of chewing the offer over, but Marnak could see the man’s hand twitch at his side and he knew, looking into the Ishlinak’s face, that the motion wasn’t any urge toward the sword he wore at his belt.

  They were in.

  “Oh, yeah,” he wondered, as they were waved through. “What happened to Larg, anyway? This is usually his shift.”

  A shrug. “Coughing fever. Him and half a hundred like him. Even the imperials are coming down with it this year. That and the comet, it’s not looking good.”

  Marnak’s men made warding gestures, so did the staff lancers on the gate. He sketched one himself, more for solidarity and appearance than anything else. Poltar had made a big song and dance about the comet, of course, dark muttered implications of character flaw among the council, angered Sky Dwellers, great impending threats. A
ll the usual shit. Marnak didn’t set much store by portents; he’d traveled too far and seen too much over the years. But when the sky woke up, so did the shaman, and that in itself was worth a sleepless night or two—once Poltar Wolfeye was roused, there was no telling where the dance might go, how out of hand it might get. And it wasn’t as if he’d grown any more stable with the rise of his fortunes over the last couple of years, either. All those holes he liked to make in his own hide, the look in those eyes. He hadn’t wanted anyone to stray out of Skaranak territory in the wake of the comet’s fall, let alone ride the three days to Ishlin-ichan—Marnak had to get into an eye-to-eye facedown with the mangy old fuck just to make this trip, and now he was wondering whether it was going to be worth it.

  You need to wrap this brooding shit up, horseman. Not why you came into town, is it? You can bitch and brood to your heart’s content back in your yurt.

  He stowed his misgivings and tried to summon a decent degree of anticipation as they trotted on into the low rise of the town. Behind him, his men managed just fine—trading crude jokes and laughter, calling out brightly to passersby and women at upper windows. Fair enough, it was a big trip to town for them; not one of these lads had been off the steppe in their lives. But Marnak had seen the spires and domes of the imperial city, the crenelated towers of its northern rivals in the League. He’d lived and fucked and caroused in those places for the better part of his youth and then some. Next to all of that, Ishlin-ichan just didn’t measure up. Oh, sure, it was all right, but there were times when these trips felt like a paltry pleasure, a ride on a sullen pack mule when you’d been used to war-bred stallions. Lately, even the whoring didn’t seem to help.

  You’re just getting old. This fifty-summers thing is kicking your arse, and you know it.

  A few years back, right enough, it had been easier. He came back from Yhelteth wealthy and stocked with war stories enough to get him into Sky Home a dozen times over. He bought shares in the Skaranak herds, hired younger son loose ends from good families to help mind his investment. Married a canny, curvaceous widow, adopted her kids as his own and had a couple more. With time and the ebb of the initial fire, he found himself sloping off to Ishlin-ichan now and again for a taste of strange, but Sadra was canny in more ways than one and she didn’t sulk or rage all that much. He waited out her cold-shoulder treatment each time with the patient equanimity of a man whose professional years had accustomed him to waiting out far worse things; meantime, he spoiled her with gifts and apologies and steady affection until she cracked.