The Dark Defiles (12 page)

Ringil felt himself relax a little with the motion. He thought it had been touch and go for a while back there. Not for the first time, he wondered if the powers he was acquiring under Hjel’s tutelage were really worth the trouble spent getting them.

What point, after all, in racking yourself to produce a handy sorcerous mist if the men you led wouldn’t follow you into it?

T
HEY’D ALL WATCHED HIM RAISE HANDS TO THE SKY AND CONTORT HIS
face, like some barking mad market square prophet of doom. A knot of sailors not otherwise occupied gathered on the main deck below to stare. They’d heard the muttering sounds he made deep in his throat, seen the splay-fingered traceries he cast across the air. He supposed they must have done some muttering themselves, some more clutching at their precious talismans, but he’d been too lost in it by then to notice. Too busy pouring his entire focus into the glyphs he made, because in the end that was the only way it would work.

You must write upon the air like a scribe,
Hjel tells him on a cold stony beach somewhere at the margins of the Grey Places.
The air itself is parchment, read continually by powers waiting for command. But such powers can only read what is written clearly, can only answer commands clearly expressed. Cast poorly and you are no better than a clumsy scribe, blotching or scrawling your script. Cast poorly or in error, and there will be no answer.

Now try again.

It takes days.

It takes morning after bleak early morning, going down to the shore again and again from the cold, coarse-grassed dunes where Hjel’s gypsy band are camped; it takes day after day of standing there facing the ocean like an enemy, clawing at the air, grating the learned strings of polysyllables until his throat is raw. It takes days, and not even Hjel’s caresses under canvas at night can take away the impatient frustration it stirs in him.

But finally, one morning, he goes down to the shore in an odd, emptied-out mood. He goes alone—Hjel turns over under the blankets when he rises, mumbles something, does not open his eyes—and he stands there on the beach, and he casts, and this time he does it right.

The mist rolls in from the sea, blots out everything around him, wraps him in its damp gray embrace.

Now, aboard
Dragon’s Demise,
it came as second nature. His throat had long since accustomed itself to the harsh sounds he needed to make, his fingers had grown supple with practice. And whatever elemental powers lurked in the coves and straits of the Hironish, now they leapt to do his bidding. He sensed them—rising off the darkened ocean’s surface like cold steam, pouring down out of gullies and caves in the ancient cliffs along this coast, circling the anchored vessel in fitful band-light like curious wolves, darting in now and then to stalk the decks unseen by human eyes, to ruffle the flames of a torch, or brush past crew members with wild, unhuman hilarity, leaving the brief touch of chilly tendril fingers and shivers on the spine.

He felt them gather on the helm deck at his back.

He felt them breathing down his neck.

He gathered their cold breath to him like a cloak, he breathed it in. He smiled as the
ikinri ‘ska
came on like some icy battlefield drug.

He heard, as if in a dream, the lookout overhead, calling out the fog as it rolled in and wrapped them.

The
ikinri ‘ska
syllables died away in his throat, scuttling back down under cover, their work done. The muscles in his cheeks and jaw eased, his arms sagged to his sides. His aching fingers hung loose, his eyes—he wasn’t aware he’d closed them—snapped suddenly open, and he found himself staring into Senger Hald’s face.

The marine commander shuddered visibly in the torchlight.

Turned away.

D
RAGON’S
D
EMISE MADE CURIOUSLY GOOD TIME DOWN THE COAST, AS IF
the same elemental forces that had brought the fog now clung to the masts and filled the cautiously rigged canvas with their breath. As if they were anxious to see the ship arrive. Once or twice, the steersman remarked that it felt as if something was dragging on the hull. But they were a prudent distance out from the shore in five fathoms or more of water, and when Nyanar glanced askance at Ringil, Gil just shrugged.

Now and then, off the port bow, they heard the rumbling prowl of a storm. But it was faint and distant to the east, and showed no signs of coming after them.

These are not trivial sorceries,
Hjel warns him, when he has the magic down.
The elementals are capricious, and their range is wide. Unleash them, and their mischief will be general. Try not to worry about it too much, it’s a price you have no choice but to pay. That they do your will in your immediate vicinity is the trick. What havoc they wreak elsewhere need not be your concern.

Ringil shrugs.
Sounds no worse than most men I’ve had under command.

He stood alert though, throughout the night, listening intently to the storm and ready to pull down the
ikinri ‘ska
on the elementals’ heads if they showed signs of getting cute.

The fog held. The storm stayed away. He heard it fading, chasing away southeast; some other vessel’s problem now.

They made Ornley harbor with the cold pale seep of dawn.

“
rcheth? Archeth?”

There was a numb, pulsing heaviness in her head that she took to be krinzanz crash. She groaned and twitched, thankful it still seemed to be dark outside. Or at least—some hints of light filtered in and prodded at her eyelids, but not enough to force them open. Ishgrim’s arm was heavy across her chest, did not shift as Archeth moved. No surprises there—the northern girl habitually dosed herself with wine or flandrijn as night came on, or simply with Archeth’s repeated attentions—
again, mistress, do me again
hissed frantically up from the pillows she lay crushed back into, mouth smeared slack and smiling with spent passion, driving a sleepy Archeth back into fresh arousal she hadn’t known she owned—until sleep came and took Ishgrim down like prey. Thereafter, she either thrashed with nightmares or slept like the dead, a coin-toss guess as to which it would be any given night. But by morning … 

“Archeth!”

Sounded like the Dragonbane’s voice—be banging through the door and into her bedchamber any moment, by the tone of it. Yeah, any excuse to leer and peer at Ishgrim’s curves. Archeth felt the twitch of a smug, possessive smile at her lips. Reached up to grasp the girl’s fingers in her own. Trying now to remember what the hell they’d been playing at last night because she had aches in places that—

Memory crashed in on her, like shutters blown back in a—

—storm—

She found the fingers at the end of the heavy arm. Yelped in shocked revulsion and let them go in a hurry. They were corpse-cold, thick and blunt—

The storm.

Waking to its violence, hurled casually from her bunk as the deck tilted up and the cabin door slammed open, tearing out its feeble lock.

Stumbling out, thankful she’d slumped on the bunk without the will to undress or even pull off her boots. Slapped in the face with driving rain and spray, heels skidding on a deck awash with water—men stampeding back and forth yelling—and then a sound overhead like the sky tearing open. The savage pitch and roll of the ship, the heaving ocean lit by fitful lightning flash, like some vast angry beast hunching and flexing awake
… 

She opened her eyes.

She was flat on her back on unyielding rock, arms trailing up past her head and curiously weighted down. Pallid light filtered up from somewhere between her feet.

Screams from the lookouts—
Lord of the Salt Wind
wallowing like a pig in mud, the veil of rain and spray torn suddenly aside as they washed sideways—the shore coming at them like a cavalry charge—some kind of bay, a jagged lower jaw of rocks like fangs, the sky-high burst of surf like geysers, the roar of it all in her ears
… 

Wrenching, groaning impact.

Her grip on a companionway rail torn loose, her whole body flung into the rain-filled, thunderous air.

And flight—like magic from a tale.

She was upside down.

Dreams of Ishgrim, memory of the storm—it all flew apart in fragments as she woke up for real. The heaviness in her head was not from krinzanz or its lack, it was gathered blood, clogging there as she hung upside down in some damp and narrow, salt-smelling space with the echoing
drip-drip
of water around her and a dead man heavy on her chest. The light between her feet wasn’t shining upward, it was spilling down from above.

“Archeth?”

“Here!”
But it came out a strangled squawk, barely louder than the drip of the water and the thud of blood in her ears. She arched up as far as the dead man would let her, coughed and spat sideways, cleared her throat out for a decent attempt at a yell. “Eg! Down
here!
”

The corpse on her chest pressed her back down. Her head and shoulders hung in empty space, but it seemed the rest of her body lay on solid stone, albeit at an atrocious backward angle. She heaved an arm up and out to the side, touched slick, wet rock—forget it, no chance of purchase on that, even without the dead man’s insistent weight to contend with. And back up at the other end of her body, her feet were caught up, tightly wrapped by something and numb inside her boots from the shins down. She and the corpse seemed to have tumbled headfirst down a steep incline in some kind of cleft and in each others’ arms, and whatever had caught them by the feet had apparently stopped them going over the lip of the incline and into the lightless space beneath.

“Archeth?”

“Eg!” Voice stronger now. “Yeah, I’m down here! I’m caught up! Must be wreckage or someth—”

Something moved, stealthily, in the space below her hanging head.

Fuck!

She flinched violently, tried to lift herself bodily up, and this time the strength of her fear let her shift the corpse off her chest and aside. She twisted about, flailed in vain for handholds anywhere,
anywhere
in the smooth stone she lay on. She craned up at the faint light beyond her boots and yelled again.

“Eg!
Egar!
”

Movement, definitely, and noises like a beggar sucking on midden-heap bones.

She hinged up, hard, elbowed the dangling dead man aside. His slack, lugubrious features wobbled away from her in the gloom, as if offended by the blow.

“Eg!”

“Archeth!” The light blotted out, his voice boomed down into the cleft. “Right here. You’re caught up in the bowsprit lines. We’re going to have to clear—”

“Never mind that shit, Eg!” Some real panic in her tone now. Briefly, an image flared in her mind—Jhiral’s Hanliagh octopods, tearing the condemned apart in the pool in the Chamber of Confidences. She heaved violently up again, felt muscles in her stomach tearing with the force of it.
“Pull me the fuck up! There’s something down here!”

The sucking sound built, rose closer to her ears.

Yelling from overhead, more than one voice. A repeated cracking and suddenly she was whisked a foot up the incline. The corpse came up with her; she could hear grunting effort from above.

“He’s dead,” she shouted frantically. “The other guy, he’s dead. Cut him loose!”

Egar gritted something she couldn’t hear. They hauled her another couple of feet upward; the corpse came spindling and cuddling at her. A door opened somewhere in her head and abruptly she remembered him in life—some young sailor, not one of the privateer force,
running at her yelling, gesturing, some communication she had no hope of making out in the chaos of the storm, mouth distorted wide around his shouted words and—

Gone.

Washed away as they hit and her grip was ripped from the railing and she flew—

The thing that was making the sucking noises came up over the lip of the incline.

Vision upside down, dizzied by the tugging and swaying as she was dragged upward, Archeth fixed on it and could make no sense. There were tendrils, she saw that much, a thick, muddy fringe of them like the made-up eyelashes on some gargantuan whore’s eye, and they seethed about in search of prey, tasting the surface of the rock as they came, but the body, there was no body, there was only … 

Icy clutch around her heart as she understood.

The creature filled the cleft like water. It flowed and swelled, was a single amorphous thing rising in the confines of the space it owned. Patterning like giant eyes or plague rings swilled around on the surface of its flesh like oil in a hot pan—

“Get me the fuck out of here!”
she screamed.

Another yard. She felt hands on her boot, heaved desperately from the waist again and stuck up an arm, somewhere close to her own feet. A calloused hand grabbed her around the wrist, she felt one of the creature’s tendrils brush stickily into her hair at the same instant. Pure revulsion wrung the shriek out of her—it dinned in her ears, involuntary, her right hand curled for the grip of a knife that
wasn’t fucking there—

Then she was in the air.

Burst of light and space, the thin roar of the ocean.

She had time for one backward glimpse of the creature rising behind her, cramming up into the cleft like vomit in a throat. Then the Dragonbane swung her up bodily by one hand and boot, tilted, and dumped her way off to the side on cold flat rock. Her breath exploded out of her with the impact. Shocked yells rose around her; she twisted about on the rock and saw men staggering back. The creature burst into the open among them like a pan of milk boiling over. Her corpse companion from the cleft was gone, swallowed down somewhere in that heaving mass. Tendrils lashed back and forth, one of the men toppled and was caught by the leg, another seemed to stumble face first into the creature’s fronds.

The Dragonbane whirled about. He had something like a huge broken lance or harpoon held aloft in both hands—later she would realize it was
Lord of the Salt Wind
’s snapped and splintered bowsprit, still trailing lines and fragments of netting. His eyes were wide with berserk fury, and there was a rising, grinding roar from his mouth. Like some statue of a warrior god, he lurched forward and over on the yell, buried the length of splintered wood deep into the heart of the seething, tendriled mass.

Twisted and leaned in. Roared again, dug deeper still.

The tendrils spasmed, some pale fluid leapt across the air, spattered down on the rocks. The rising mass of the creature seemed to deflate. It was, she noted numbly, quite beautiful in the light—all patterned purples and pale violets flowing in and out of each other in the vaguely circular patterns she’d taken for eyes … 

“Get on this,”
bellowed Egar.
“Gouge this fucker with me!”

Two men threw themselves on the leaning bowsprit, hung off it, swinging with all their weight. More splattering leakage, a low gurgling, hissing sound, and it was done. The two men dropped off the end of Egar’s improvised harpoon, someone dragged the ones who’d been grabbed by the creature’s tendrils out of harm’s way. The thing sank back down into the cleft as swiftly as it had risen, taking the bowsprit with it. Egar let go of the shaft with a kiss-off gesture. Spat into the hole after his retreating adversary.

He turned about to check on her—by then she was back on her feet, a little shaky, but otherwise holding up. He grinned at her, still panting.

“Hey, Archidi.” Pause for a mustered breath. A sweeping gesture with one arm “Welcome to the Kiriath Wastes.”

I
N TWO HUNDRED YEARS, SHE’D BEEN THERE JUST ONCE, AND THEN ONLY TO
the southern fringes, on what amounted to a glorified child’s dare.

When she was younger, Grashgal and her father continually talked up the possibility of expeditions north to see what had become of the land. It had been thousands of years, they argued, nature would have absorbed and repaired most of the damage done; it
had
to be safe by now. And who knew what they might find that had been lost to memory and record all those centuries? She remembered those conversations, the earliest of them barely comprehensible to her infant ears as she sat in Flaradnam’s lap or played on the rug while the adults talked. On later occasions, she perched on the arm of her father’s chair and joined in the speculating as best she could. She’d always assumed she’d be going with them.

Her mother put paid to that notion pretty sharply one summer evening.
The Cursed Lands? Are you insane, girl? Do you know what’s waiting up there?

No, Mum.
She would have been about eleven at the time; the answer was meant innocently enough.
Do you?

Don’t you smart mouth me, young lady.

Mum, I’m
not.
Dad says
no one
knows what’s up there.

Yes, and that’s precisely why you’re not going.

In the end, it didn’t matter. Like so many of the Kiriath’s latter-day schemes, nothing came of it. The years of talk guttered and went out, focus wavered and was gone. Grashgal and Flaradnam went back to their hobby of tinkering with the Empire’s political framework instead.

Forty-odd years slipped by.

Archeth was never sure if it was just the nature of her father’s people and their subtly damaged mental state that killed the expedition, or if, as her mother feared, there really were things up in the Waste better left undisturbed. Or if those two factors were linked, and Grashgal and her father abandoned their plans because they came to fear that an expedition would somehow—
guilt? ghosts? strange infectious airs?
—further corrode their ability to live in this adopted world as if it were their home.

Then her mother died, as humans were wont to do, and Archeth got the chance to see the Wastes for herself firsthand.

Taken north one year by Grashgal as part of an extensive diplomatic mission to the recently formed League, she found herself wintering in Trelayne. Nantara’s death was barely a couple of years past and Archeth was still raw, ripe for mischief. Part of Grashgal’s intent had in fact been to get her away from An-Monal and her perennially grief-stricken father for a while, in the hope that it would maybe calm her down, get her back on an even keel—all of which pretty much showed how poorly he understood the half-blood girl he’d helped raise. Fuck her mother’s ghost, fuck her father in his endless self-absorbed gloom, now she was going to
get even
with both of them. While Grashgal and the imperial legate busied themselves with sounding out their new northern neighbors, putting out cautious feelers, getting useful ink on documents of trade and peaceful coexistence, Archeth and a couple of Kiriath lads near to her own age talked each other into mounting an expedition across the northern sound and into the Wastes.