The Dark Defiles

by Richard K. Morgan

  “Pure?” Metallic taste on her tongue; she’d bitten through the folds of flesh in the side of her mouth when she hit the ground. She turned her head and spat out blood. “Fuck are you talking about, pure?”

  “A hundred thousand years.” The shaman’s voice grew almost crooning. “This much I have learned from Her. Ever since the birth of the band itself, our world has been beset by unhuman races and unnatural creatures. The ascendancy of man slipped and fell, a hundred thousand years ago, and still we struggle to arise and claim it back. But it will come. Men will drive out the other races and make the world their own once more. Your people knelt on the neck of the tribes in the south for centuries and bent them to your will, but where are your people now? You are the last of your kind, demon. This I know.”

  “Well, there’s only one of you, too,” she muttered, sitting up.

  “You know nothing! I am Chosen!” One naked arm slipped loose of the wolf-skin cloak. “See! The mark of the Goddess upon me.”

  Archeth stared.

  The arm was a mess—rows of small circular scars and half-healed punctures, all along the skinny length of flesh and muscle from armpit to wrist, like some kind of methodical torture or the repeated fang marks of a wild beast that had for some reason decided not to just chew the limb right off …

  “Very nice,” she said carefully.

  From the Dragonbane and then Marnak Ironbrow, she’d formed an impression of Poltar that painted him both dangerous and deluded. But it hadn’t ever occurred to her that he might be stark raving mad.

  “She chose me,” the shaman ranted at her, “to lead the Skaranak, to keep them pure. You will not corrupt them with your alien ways.”

  She coiled for the leap to her feet. “You got any more, uhm, marks of the Goddess you want to show me?”

  The tortured arm whipped away, back beneath the cloak. Poltar grinned craftily at her.

  “You think you’ll trick me? I know you, demon, I know your schemes. You think I did not come here prepared? I am wrapped against your weapons, as against the cold.”

  I’ve seen good steel swung at the shaman and somehow not bite, Marnak told her in the brothel. Blades turned by nothing but that filthy cloak he wears. Arrows that fail to find their mark, punches that never land. You wouldn’t be the first to try. But you’d be the first for a good long while. No one else is that stupid anymore.

  You’re that stupid, Archidi.

  Now move!

  “You do not belong here, burned black witch, and it falls to me to drive you—”

  She moved.

  Up and away, ignore—fuck, that hurts!—the clutch of agony down through ribs and side. Get some distance from this rambling cloaked asshole, try to work out what to do. She opened her hand to the side and Falling Angel came to the call. Grunt of satisfaction, heft and aim. From five yards out, she hurled the knife at Poltar’s eye.

  And this time, she saw.

  Blurring in the air around him, like sudden heat-haze, but … shaped. As if some invisible tentacle lashed out to knock the knife away, and must somehow become apparent with the motion. Her hands swept back at her hips—jagged pain on the right with the move—Quarterless and Laughing Girl leapt from the sheaths in the small of her back and fell to her grip. She circled warily, arms out like a courtesan dancing, weight of the knives in each hand like balance. Eyes fixed on the shaman and the space he occupied.

  Their gazes met.

  “Well then,” he called. “So it ends. Go back to the shadows you came from, demon. Here is your doom!”

  He lifted his naked arm out of the cloak again, held it forward at a low angle. She saw the same wavering through the air around the limb and then, abruptly, the most recent of the puncture marks were leaking thick, dark blood. As if something unseen were sucking it out.

  Something was.

  The air around the shaman began to stain an oily black. At first, it was only hints, like some assemblage of restless curving shadows in the sunlight, but as she watched, it took nearly solid form. It coiled and undulated around Poltar, almost like a thick, second cloak except it had a form all its own and …

  Once, more than a century ago in Trelayne, she’d watched fascinated as some ignorant fuck claiming to be a doctor placed leeches on a fevered man’s flesh. More than anything, the thing twined around the shaman reminded her of one of those creatures grown vast. But it had wings, too, like an ocean ray, and it raised itself up like a cobra poised to strike. It looked altogether too lithe and poised for something that must crawl along the ground. And as it darkened into full visibility, it tipped back its headlike appendage and uttered a dull, droning cry.

  Poltar’s voice rose exultantly to match the sound.

  “It was not a god’s sword that fell to earth on the plain a hundred thousand years ago, it was a vessel, a ship made to carry back allies from a place beyond this world. And the ghosts of its crew endure. Behold, the wraith that heralds your end!”

  The thing, whatever it was, had unwrapped fully from the shaman now. It flapped heavily up into the bright morning light, turned languidly over on its back, and seemed to swell to twice its size with the motion. The sun gleamed on its flanks, made them seem wet. It writhed about a little, as if to get its bearings, and then, with abrupt, gut-swooping speed, it came slithering through the air at her.

  She ducked left, favoring her injured side. Stabbed upward with Laughing Girl, but the wraith flapped its whole body like a wing on that side and lifted clear. Her ribs screamed, she stumbled on the missed stroke. Out of the corner of her eye, she glimpsed the wraith snap about like a shark in a feeding circle, come back at her again. She threw herself sideways and this time she fell headlong. The wraith gusted past like a slick black cloud, tilted one effortless wing upward and banked about. She thrashed backward as it sank down toward her, heard it make a noise like a pan filled with seething water, hurled Quarterless and Laughing Girl in sheer, panicked revulsion.

  The knives hit; she saw how the flapping wraith clenched around the wounds—and then spat them back out, apparently not much harmed. She bounced to her feet, pain buried now under the avalanche of combat need and fear. Hands out and reaching—Quarterless and Laughing Girl flew up out of the grass like startled birds, were in her hands again. But how the fuck—

  “My lady Archeth!”

  She swung at the shout, saw a tottering, wounded horse, arrow shafts still spiking from its neck and rump, ridden near to collapse. Astride it, an awkward-looking Yilmar Kaptal, brandishing a commandeered short sword he pretty clearly didn’t know how to use. He was twenty yards off and waving frantically at her. Under different circumstances, it would have been comical.

  Archeth gaped. “Kaptal?”

  But if the portly ex-pimp cut no lethal figure in her eyes, Poltar the shaman thought otherwise. Perhaps he saw only a mounted warrior and jumped with Skaranak tribal instinct to an immediate conclusion. Perhaps he saw through Kaptal’s flesh to what lay beneath. Or perhaps he just didn’t like surprises. A string of harsh syllables coughed from his mouth, he gestured with one lean arm. The flapping wraith flexed upward, rippled away over Archeth’s head, gibbering and hissing to itself as it dived at Kaptal and his mount.

  “Salgra Keth, my lady,” he bellowed desperately. “Salgra Keth!”

  The horse saw it coming. It screamed and reared, tried to throw Kaptal—who was showing some uncanny horsemanship, all things considered—then stumbled and went to its knees at the fore. There was no time for more. Blur of glistening black, like a drenched washcloth hurled across a kitchen—the wraith fell on horse and rider like some huge tarpaulin, wrapped them both wetly in its folds, settled to the ground.

  Horror held Archeth unstirring, as the vague shapes of Kaptal and his mount rose and wallowed beneath the shrouding black. It was like watching a horse and rider with pitch poured over them, struggling to get out of a bog.

  Salgra Keth.

  The shout rang in her ears. The art of fucking juggling, what t
he—

  She stared down at the knives in her hands.

  That’s very impressive. The words of an irritable god, in the wind that blew across the steppe. Can you do it with all of them at once yet?

  All of them at once.

  The art of—

  Under the billowing drape of the wraith, she saw the injured horse’s neck arch. Its head rose and lunged valiantly against the monster that had it wrapped. The wraith made a hissing, clucking sound and convulsed tighter …

  The rage erupted behind her eyes. She hurled both knives. Had Wraithslayer and Bandgleam in her grip a split second after, and hurled them, too. Some barely aware portion of her mind registered that she was staring blindly at the wraith and its victims, but it didn’t feel that way. It felt instead as if she floated, loose and free above the steppe, saw only a constantly shifting tracery of molten wire, saw she stood at its heart, saw at last she was its heart.

  My Father’s House!

  The ancient, silent walkways at An-Monal, the stilled machines. The watchful spirits that lived in the walls. The Helmsmen, the Warhelms, the naming of blades …

  Bandgleam, Laughing Girl, Falling Angel, Quarterless and Wraithslayer, oh yes, Wraithslayer—

  She took up the molten traceries the way she would the reins on a horse. She opened herself, finally, entirely, to the calling of the Kiriath steel.

  She brought her knives, all of them.

  She tore the wraith apart.

  SHE CAME BACK DOWN SLOWLY, BACK INTO HERSELF AND A SUDDEN AWAREness that she stood with arms raised in graceful arcs over her head, like a dancer poised to begin.

  The steppe was quiet around her, the fight was done. She saw it all without really needing to look—the raw, bloodied corpses of Kaptal and his horse, as if they’d been boiled or scorched with acid. The feebly flapping remnants of something oily black and shredded, strewn through the grass, draped here and there in fragments not much larger or thicker than a handkerchief. Her knives like luminous beacons, each pegged neatly in the earth at points about equidistant around the place where she stood.

  Poltar in his moth-eaten wolf-skin cloak, gaping at her like some halfwit taken for the first time to the village fair.

  Bandgleam leapt unbidden to her right hand.

  She lowered her arms and stalked toward the shaman. Summoned the memorized Majak phrases once more.

  “The Dragonbane sent me,” she called across the wind. “Egar is dead, but—”

  He threw both scrawny arms upward, shucked his cloak with the motion. Tipped back his head and yelped something at the sky. Beneath the cloak, he was naked to the waist and starved. She saw the puncture marks, in various stages of healing, stitched across rib cage and hollow belly, up and down both arms. The tired trickle of blood here and there, the yellowish white roundels of old scars everywhere. The spell he chanted sounded like the whining of a whipped dog.

  But it seemed to work.

  As if a cloud passed across the morning sun, as if evening stole the day and fell across the steppe early. The light around them dimmed, the breeze stopped on her face. Even the sound it made through the tall grass went away.

  A familiar figure stood in her path.

  “Behold, demon!” Poltar, voice cracked and reedy on the High Kir he still seemed able to speak. “The Sky Dwellers attend me! Kelgris herself rises as my protector, I shall not want for aid. I command her.”

  Archeth met the amber-eyed gaze, the ambiguous smile that played about the mouth like an invitation. Glimpse of sharp white teeth within. Brief, warm twinge through her groin as she recalled the night in the alley, she couldn’t help it. She grimaced to cover the heat.

  “Nice work you’ve got.”

  The Sky Dweller slanted her eyes, shrugged minutely. What are you going to do?

  “She will tear the life from you before you can lay a finger on me,” ranted the shaman at her back. “That is my will. Even if I fall, she will av—”

  Voice abruptly choked off.

  Eyes staring, bulged in shock.

  One hand creeping up to his throat and the knife buried there at the base, gone hilt deep. Then the hand skittered away again, as if terrified of what it had touched. The shaman stared at his own bloodied fingertips, disbelieving. His mouth worked soundlessly.

  And here was her own hand, empty, extended, slim lethal Bandgleam gone from it in the heartbeat moment of impulse she could barely understand as her own.

  Poltar gurgled and fell down.

  Kelgris cleared her throat delicately. “I think that might have been avenge he was trying to say there. High Kir is your tongue, not mine. What do you think?”

  “Might have been.” She forced herself to meet the Sky Dweller’s eye again. “Hard to say for sure.”

  “Yes, well.” The provocative smile slipped and licked at the corners of the mouth. “Leave it at that, then, shall we? I have other work to be about, and I’m sure you do, too.”

  The wind blew again. Light leaked back into the sky. Archeth stared through the empty air where Kelgris had been. Still trying to work out just exactly what had just happened.

  After a while, she gave up trying to understand.

  She went to collect her steel.

  CHAPTER 66

  hey stand there like some temple frieze brought to sudden life. The Dark Court in all their glory. Hoiran the Dark, tusked and grinning fanged. The lady Firfirdar, flames dancing about her in a restless high-collared cloak of orange red. Kwelgrish, blood-drenched towel pressed to the wound in her head with one hand, wolf-skin robe hanging off one shoulder by the teeth in its upper jaw. Dakovash, slouch hat slanted across a shadowed face, high-collared patched leather cloak swept about his form. Astinhahn, ax in one hand, foaming tankard in the other. Morakin, wrapped about in serpents, each as thick as his upper arm. Harjellis, starved and skullish beneath his cowl …

  They’re smiling at him, all of them. He swears he sees Dakovash wink.

  You’ve done well, Ringil. Oddly, it’s not Hoiran who steps forward to speak for the court he’s supposed to rule. It’s Firfirdar instead, arm wreathed in little coiling bracelets of flame as she lifts a hand toward him. Not one mortal in a million could have come this far.

  Yeah, he growls. Thanks for all the help.

  She smiles brilliantly at him. We knew you would not need it. And now look at you—a destiny fulfilled, a dark lord arisen. You even have the crown. You’ve thrown down the dwenda, you walk at will in the Grey Places, and now you command the Talons of the Sun. The Kiriath steel has crept inside you, as you have soaked into it, and the union serves your will. The vengeful dead gather to your command—actually, you don’t seem all that adept at using them yet; perhaps we can help you there. But I digress. Your blood is mingled Yhelteth nobility and marsh dweller heritage stretching back to the original Core Command from the Great War and the Death of the Moon. You are the pivot on which it all turns, Ringil. It remains only for you to step back into the world, depose the Emperor of All Lands and take your rightful place on the Burnished Throne.

  Oh, not you lot, too. He rolls his eyes, genuinely weary. For … Hoiran’s sake, why would I want the Burnished Throne? What would I do with the fucking thing?

  Firfirdar shrugs. Anything you wish. March on Trelayne, make your father bow down and eat dirt at your feet, perhaps. Abolish the slave trade. Crush the Citadel. We do not much care as long as it is a human who holds the reins of Empire.

  I told you once before—I am not your motherfucking cat’s-paw.

  Of course not, she says soothingly. Your victory is your own. Do with it as you will. Only be warned of the cost.

  You’re too kind. He turns about to face the Talons of the Sun. Codes—I want to speak to the Source; is that possible?

  If it deigns to reply, yes. It has been uncommunicative these last several thousand years, though.

  I wonder why. All right, let’s go—open up.

  Another indefinable unfolding around him and the upward rippling tent
acles seem to gain a fresh density, as if they’re somehow more solidly here before him. A tiny prism of light opens eight inches away from his eyes and something tightly coiled weaves within it.

  Ringil peers into the light, but his vision shies away from fully seeing whatever’s in there. It’s tangled, is all he knows, and at angles that threaten to tear his mind open. He blinks and looks off to one side. He clears his throat.

  I, uhm—I think I’ve been sent to set you free.

  Something gusts to life in the chilly air. Yes … so it seems …

  And if confirmation were needed, here it is; at base, the voice is a match for the hoarse whisper of the Creature at the Crossroads. But there’s something else woven into the tone of it, a limping pain that stings tears into his eyes and a weariness that echoes the voice of the Codes and the Binding Forces, as if somehow, over immense stretches of time the two entities, prisoner and jailer, have somehow interchanged and merged at the edges.

  My sister’s mark is on you, the Source whispers. Overhead, the slow weaving of tentacles seems to yearn towards the sky. She has stitched you through at levels that should have destroyed you. Such a doubtful, patchwork scheme. Such delicate abuse of the limits and laws that govern it all. Such … fragility.

  Yeah, well, he says sourly. Seems to have worked out though, doesn’t it. You want these chains off or not?

  I would be indebted to you for the eternity you must spend trapped here.

  That’s what I—Ringil blinks. What?

  Was this not made clear to you?

  Nothing—no fucking thing—has been made clear to me. Apparently that’s not how things get done around here. I’m just the hero.

  Well then—it is simple enough, hero. Like the Creature at the Crossroads, the Source seems able to mock and take the title seriously at one and the same time. Its tone is almost kindly. The only reason that the wounds of the world remain unhealed is that my sisters could not bear to abandon me. They could not, by the laws of their own work, intervene in the repaired scheme of things for me, but they left their repairs unfinished, in the hope that through some small gap or other an escape might become possible.