The cool, dark calm of everything around him—dislocating shock after the fight below.
“All right,” he said, not quite steadily. “Let’s go see if our ride’s there.”
THEY GOT DOWN THE SIDE WALL WITHOUT INCIDENT, LOWERED THE girl first in the sling, secured the rope at the top and slid rapidly down after her. No time to fuck about, and no gloves—so add scorched palms to the damage tally for the night. They stood, braced either side of the girl for a couple of moments, knives out. But there was no sign of the night patrol.
“All inside by now,” Harath guessed. “Turning the place upside down, see what the fuck just went down.”
Egar nodded, wordless—still breathy from all the exertion. Still working out what the fuck went down himself. Harath tapped at the dangling rope with his knife tip, instinctive herdsman’s thrift in face and tone. “Hate to leave that hanging there, you know.”
“I’ll buy you a new one. Come on.”
They skulked away from the silent, darkened bulk of the temple and down to the river, Egar with a small survivor’s grin now hanging crookedly off his mouth by one corner. He found he had time for sudden carnal recollection, what the girl’s arse had looked like, going up with that rope slung under it. Stir in his groin at the thought, but oddly it was Imrana’s face that he saw.
Sort that out if you could.
The boatman was waiting in midriver, just where he’d dropped them before. Harath whistled sharply, stood up and windmilled his arms. It took a moment or two, but finally the man bent to haul in his anchor, paddled the boat about with his oars so it was facing them, and dug in on the stroke.
They went down through weeds and yielding mud, waded out to meet him.
“Not safe coming in like this,” he greeted them reprovingly. “There’s been a lot of commotion up there the last little while.”
“Yeah, tell us about it.” Egar hooked an elbow around the prow of the boat to hold it steady, shoveled the girl aboard with his other arm.
“And an extra passenger? Well, that will be … extra, of course.”
Harath heaved himself up over the side with a grunt. “One more word out of you, I’ll slit your fucking throat and row home myself.”
“Then you would be cursed,” said the boatman evenly. “And the unholy maraghan this place is named after would creep from the waters to avenge me, to track and drag and drown you and all your kin.”
Harath barked a laugh. “They’d have a long walk for my kin.”
“No one’s slitting anybody’s throat.” Egar got himself into the boat with an effort. The wound in his thigh was beginning to throb. “And we’re not paying extra for her, either, so settle down and row. Plus, they told me the maraghan were all driven out of this place centuries ago. Cleansed by the Revelation’s sacred word and fire, right?”
The boatman fiddled sulkily with his oars.
“They have been sighted in the river still,” he muttered. “And along the coast. They have an affinity with those who ply the water for their trade. They can be called upon.”
Egar grinned. “And there I was thinking you were a devout son of the Revelation. Bet you’re wearing an amulet under that shirt and everything.”
“What the fuck is a maraghan anyway?” Harath wanted to know.
“Sea demons,” Egar told him absently, squeezing some of the water out of his breeches. His hands came away bloody. “Like a waterhole lurker, but they’re always female. Supposed to sing to sailors sometimes, lure them out of the boat.”
The Ishlinak peered dubiously over the side. The boat was coasting on the current now, turning idly as it drifted downstream.
“Doesn’t sound like much to worry about. I had an uncle once, half Voronak, said he fucked a waterhole witch. Caught her on his line, dragged her up through a hole in the ice, and did her right there on the bank.”
“Yeah? Sounds to me like he fucked a fish.” Egar found the wound in his thigh and pressed experimentally at its sides. Grimaced. Shallow, and really fucking painful. “Then again, if he’s anything like the Voronak I know, that doesn’t surprise me at all.”
Harath coughed a laugh. Stopped it up abruptly, and gave the boatman an unfriendly stare. Switched back to Tethanne. “What are you looking at? You going to pull on those fucking oars, or what?”
“Yeah, come on, man.” Egar nodded at the boat’s lazy, swirling motion. “We’re not paying for the current to take us home. I can swim downstream faster than this.”
The boatman gave him a venomous look, but he bent to the oars. In the bottom of the little vessel, the girl picked herself up and crouched shivering. Her shift was drenched through, her legs were plastered with river mud.
Harath went back to Majak. “So, Dragonbane. You going to tell me what the fuck that was we were fighting in there tonight?”
Egar’s good humor guttered a little. He stared back upriver, to where the silent bulk of the Afa’marag temple crouched on the rise, like something that might spring after them at any moment, like something not yet unleashed.
“Different kind of demon altogether,” he said.
“But …” The Ishlinak gestured, at a loss. “I thought … Like you said. The invigilators. They chased all the demons and witches out with their book and incense and shit. What the fuck are they doing giving them house room?”
Something that had occurred to Egar as well a few times in the last half hour. Not in any worded or well-thought-out form, but still—it had been nagging at him, ever since they found the glirsht statues. A colossal lack of sense, building with every new piece that fell into place. And now he found, oddly, that he had an answer.
“I think they think they’re angels,” he said slowly.
“Angels?” Harath spat over the side. “Fucking twats.”
“Yeah. Tell me about it.”
CHAPTER 27
othing in the known world reeks like this.
Ringil’s seen grown men piss themselves in terror at the smell, seen hardened soldiers turn pale beneath their campaign tans. It is unmistakable. Those who’ve faced it, never forget. Those who haven’t, feed on the handed-down tales, and misrepresent it as a foul stench, which it is not. At sufficient distance, in fact, it’s drowsily pleasant—a sunbaked summertime blend of spice and perfume on the wind, sharp notes of aniseed and cardamom rising through a backdrop of sandalwood and there, right there, the wavering but ever-present hint of scorching …
Dragon.
Slammed awake like a cheap tavern door.
He sat up with the force of it, instant cold sweat, hand groping after a sword hilt nowhere to be found. Breath locked up in his throat, staring around.
Where the fuck …?
The shape of his surroundings resolved—he lay in a bunk under a gently tilting ceiling lamp whose flame was turned down low. The fittings of a well-appointed ship’s cabin, painted back and forth with shadows from the tilting lamp. Shelves, a sea chest against one wall, a cramped desk and cushioned chair. The back of the door was hung with a Yhelteth ward against evil, the painted image of some saint or other bordered in tiny significant writings from the Revelation. Above him, he heard the hurrying thud of footfalls across planking, voices calling out. Soft squeaking punt of wood on wood somewhere, a steady rocking.
He was aboard a vessel, sure, but—
He hauled himself out of the bunk and sat, elbows on knees, face in hands, memories skipping off the surface of recollection like flung flat stones …
The fjord. The black-rigged caravel. Rowing out.
Hjel’s valedictory figure, there on the shore and not. Were there specks of rain in the air? In his eyes?
The caravel’s cabins had been musty and coffin-cramped. Narrow, unlit spaces supplied only with rough straw mattresses on the floor—retiring to them and trying to sleep was like being buried alive. He’d kept to the decks.
Crew of cerement-wrapped corpses on deck, all facing into the wind, eloquently silent in his presence. Only the captain speaks t
o him, and then only to deflect his questions in cold and cryptic monosyllables. What, after all, do the dead have to converse about with the living? He is cargo pure and simple.
Yeah—cargo to where, Gil?
A reflexive thought. He reached under the bunk and found his boots, stacked neatly side by side. The Ravensfriend lay scabbarded next to them.
Who …?
He was out of the Margins, that much was clear. The cabin around him had that same hard-edged feel he was used to on waking from time in the Gray Places. But …
More voices from up on deck, shouting. He tipped a glance toward the cabin ceiling as the feet came thumping back the other way. Someone was getting excited up there.
The reek of dragon washed in stronger. He felt a muscle twitch in his cheek.
Indistinct instructions called back and forth over his head, and abruptly the whole room tipped. Around the cabin, small items slid and toppled. The lamplight shifted crazily. The Ravensfriend crept out a few inches from under the bunk.
They were coming about.
Ringil was dressed and armed and through the door in what seemed like seconds. A broad companionway led up from just beside his cabin. He climbed it at speed, cleared the hatch at the top, spilled out onto the thinly bandlit deck with a little less elegance than he would, on reflection, have liked.
No one noticed—the rail was lined with crewmen lifting lanterns and staring out into the darkness. Others pressed in behind. Murmured dispute laced the air above their craning heads.
“… see anything out there anyway?”
“… smell that?”
“Could be it’s the Hurrying Dawn. They say this time of year she—”
“Yeah, like fuck. You and your lizardshit ghost-boat stories.” The skeptical sailor put his head back and yelled into the rigging. “Hoy, Kerish. You got anything up there yet?”
A laconic negative floated back down to them. Debate resumed.
“… ever did believe that shit, it’s just not …”
“… probably a couple of leagues off …”
“… might be from landward. Like a spice barn or something. We’re pretty far south by now …”
“… always thought the Hurrying Dawn was—”
“Look, I’m telling you, my uncle fought at Rajal Beach and he told me himself, that’s what dragons smell like.”
Ringil took the stage. “He’s right.”
Heads turned. The boat swayed a couple of times before anyone thought of anything to say. Striped in bandlight through the rigging, Ringil nodded in the direction they’d all been looking.
“He’s right, that is dragon you can smell. Or, more likely, it’s dragondrift, in which case it’s probably harmless. But I’m still not sure turning us around like this was smart. Who gave the order?”
The company looked at one another.
“Fuck’s it to you,” somebody muttered from the rear.
“Pipe down, Feg, you stupid shit. That’s a paying passenger.”
“Look at that sword he’s got, man. That’s …”
“I gave the order.”
Lightly amused, like footsteps tripping out a dance measure. A voice he knew, but took a moment to place.
But …
He turned to face her, aware that he’d been upstaged with exactly the same mannered affect he’d used to make his own entrance. The Lady Quilien of Gris stood a little distance from him, head tilted with inquiry. She had wrapped herself shoulders-to-floor in a smooth gray cloak with a ruff at its neck, her hair was gathered back at the temples in a pair of silver clasps, and she appeared as thoroughly competent now as she had seemed insane in the tavern upper room in Hinerion. She held his eye in the lantern glow, tilted her head the other way with an intent precision that was almost lupine.
Silence across the deck.
“It’s good to see you up and about, sir. We were concerned for your health. Tell me, have I committed an error, then, with this change of course?”
“Not necessarily an error, my lady.” He held her gaze, held down his own unease. “If the ship is yours to command, then it is merely a question of how lucky you feel.”
Quilien took a couple of paces to one side, still eyeing him up.
“Would you class yourself an expert in dragons, sir?”
Ringil shrugged. “Well, I did kill one once.”
As if someone had just cracked a wasps’ nest onto the deck, the assembled crewmen’s voices rose and buzzed about, jeers and jumbled oaths. The Lady Quilien raised one groomed eyebrow in the midst of it. Ringil opened a hand at her.
“Not alone. Had a little help.”
“Such modesty. Perhaps you’d care to—”
“Reef! Reef to starboard!”
Bellowed down from the lookout, a panic-stricken edge on it because—Ringil grasping the fact with told-you-so smugness and a nod—this was a reef not marked on any local chart.
“Reef!”
The crew boiled about, leapt for the rigging, ran to look for the ship’s officers. Ringil took the opportunity to move up and lean on the vacated rail.
“It’s not a reef,” he said to no one in particular.
WHEN THE VAST, FLOATING RAFTS OF PURPLISH BLACK MARINE MUCK first started washing up on western shores in the summer of ’49, no one took it for an invasion.
It was a shock, sure enough, to see what looked like huge mattresses of tangled, flowering kelp twice taller than a man, piled up along the strand as far as the eye could see. It was problematic for communities who made their living from open access to beaches and coves that were now clogged and covered over, because whatever this stuff was, it didn’t appear you could burn it, harvest it, or eat it. And it was a major inconvenience for shipping, not least when one of these colossal mats drifted into a major harbor mouth or caught in the throat of a useful channel between offshore shoals. The Trelayne sureties funds hiccupped, squabbled over payouts, rewrote their terms. In Yhelteth, by all accounts, the merchant guilds went through something similar. In both the League and the imperial territories, some few dozen affected villages packed up and moved, north or south along the coast, in search of new fishing or rock-pool scavenging grounds. There was a certain amount of small-scale starvation here and there, but not enough to warrant military intervention by either power.
Up at Strov market, the soothsayers presaged doom—but then they always did.
And on the abandoned coastal reaches, the purple-black tangled ramparts loomed in trickling quiet, and waited.
It was almost four months before the first of them hatched out.
THE LADY QUILIEN OF GRIS LEANED ON THE RAIL AT HIS ELBOW AND watched as they came up on the drift. You could understand the lookout’s error easily enough now. In the darkness, it looked the way any exposed reef would, low-lying in the water, jagged, darkened bulk ripped through with the white of foam where the ocean swells broke across it.
By now the dragon reek was overpowering.
“So it was not the Hurrying Dawn after all,” she said conversationally.
“The Hurrying Dawn is a myth, my lady.” He didn’t look at her. He was busy staring down the memories of the scent. “The usual thing. A doomed Yhelteth spice clipper, driven onto rocks by a master and commander impatient to beat the competition to market in Trelayne. It’s a tale, made up to frighten cabin boys on the midnight watch.”
“Yes, I believe I’ve heard it. We are not as rural as you might imagine in Gris. The captain called up a sorcerous storm to hurry his passage, did he not? And the Salt Lord drowned him for his presumption, then condemned him to run before the wind with his vessel for all eternity?”
“Something like that.”
“And now, by some set of circumstances or other, the same wind is supposed to carry the scent of his lost cargo. It’s a warning to—”
“It’s a senseless yarn is what it is, my lady. Ignorant chatter to make sense of a world that resists any more robust interpretation.”
“Chatter that
you do not lower yourself to, I take it?” Something like delight trickled into her voice. Dilettante salon sacrilege, he imagined, must be as popular among the upper echelons in Gris as anywhere else. “You reject belief in the Dark Court?”
Dakovash stalked at the margins of his memory. He held down a shiver.
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