The Dark Defiles (13 page)

It took them almost the whole winter to put the scheme together. To find a suitable vessel along the ramshackle riverside moorings that passed for Trelayne’s harbor in those days, to identify a captain and crew willing not only to make the trip but to have any truck with these jet-skinned demon folk from the south in the first place. And then, with a price agreed for passage and provisions, they had to slowly siphon off the necessary cash from embassy funds without anyone in the mission noticing. It was all painfully gradual, with frequent disappointments and setbacks. But if an immortal life span was good for anything, it was the learning of methodical patience and planning. Two days into spring, and a month before the mission was due to go home, they cast off from a quay in Trelayne harbor aboard a grubby-looking longship, and they headed upriver to the estuary and the sea.

By the time Grashgal realized they were gone—and set about tearing the city apart to find them—Archeth and her pals had raised the Wastes coast, made landfall, established an initial camp, and pretty soon had a major fight on their hands trying to stop the longship captain sailing straight back home again. The sky above the Wastes shoreline burned as often as not with luminescent greenish fire. Strange cracking and whistling sounds could be heard from farther off into the interior. The strand they’d anchored off was replete with all sorts of exciting stuff—outlandish mobile vegetation that seemed as happy in the water as it did on the sand and was given to tangling affectionately around your limbs if you walked or swam near it; clumps of shredded alloy wreckage that looked and mostly was inert, but would occasionally shudder and talk to them beseechingly in High Kir; creatures that might once have been crabs, but were now, well, quite a lot
bigger
for one thing, more lopsided, uglier all around, and made an unpleasant hissing sound if approached … 

The captain lasted three days at anchor, nailed in place initially by some apparent sense of contractual integrity, then, as tensions built, by improvised threats of Black Folk sorcery if he broke his signatory oath. But when Archeth insisted they proceed into the interior and would need porters, the crew delivered a quiet ultimatum of their own, and the three young Kiriath woke the next morning to find the longship gone.

They had their provisions—the captain had been decent enough at least to off-load these—and a decision to make. Stay on the beach and wait for rescue, or head southeast along the coast with what they could carry and try to walk out. Archeth was all for walking out, but got voted down by her two rather more chastened male companions. Lucky as it happened—a Trelayne navy picket boat carrying an incandescently angry Grashgal showed up off-shore two days later. He came ashore tight-lipped and icily controlled, unwilling to loose his rage on them in front of the humans, but you could see in his face that they were going to catch it as soon as he got them alone. He wouldn’t even let them take specimens home, despite Archeth’s muted protests. She managed to sneak a cutting of the friendly mobile vegetation aboard in a bottle nonetheless, but she had no idea how to care for it and it died not long after they got back to Trelayne.

They went home to An-Monal in deep disgrace, not least on account of the diplomatic strain caused by Grashgal’s rampage through the city in search of them. He thought they’d been taken by slavers, or some weird religious sect or other, and had got pretty heavy-handed with representatives of both constituencies before the Trelayne Chancellery stepped in, posted a reward, and turned up the shamefaced longship captain a day or so later. But by then quite a lot of damage had been done. It didn’t quite set relations back between League and Empire the hundred years Grashgal ranted at them that it had—the League had in any case only been around in its current form for a couple of decades, as Archeth tried to point out before she was bellowed into silence—but it certainly hadn’t been any kind of diplomatic triumph, either.

For Archeth, the disgrace lasted a year or so after she got back, though her father, still deep in mourning for Nantara, was halfhearted in his disapproval. He didn’t much care how many fucking humans she’d offended in the north—protests that
she
wasn’t the one who’d done the offending washed right over his head—he was just glad to see her home in one piece. There were some harsh words between Flaradnam and Grashgal on the subject, though nothing that Grashgal couldn’t later forgive as the grief talking, and the millennia-old friendship was never at any real risk. But for well over a century after, they all avoided anything but casual mention of the Kiriath Wastes.

Then the Scaled Folk came, and avoidance was no longer an option.

Year of fifty-two. The great floating purplish-black migration weed rafts, spotted drifting northward on strong coastal currents, up past the Gergis peninsula and onward. Some premature celebration at the realization that this fresh wave would not wash ashore in either Empire or League.

And then the Helmsmen, doing the math, talking with iron certainty of what would happen if the rafts hatched out on the shores of the Wastes, of what would come sweeping south in the autumn after.

Archeth was with the Kiriath delegation that went to Trelayne behind Akal the Great and laid it out for the League. She still remembered her father, pacing back and forth in the Chancellery hall, giving a flesh-and-blood face to the Helmsmen’s unhuman wisdom. Seamed ebony features intent as he walked the northerners through the need for yet more sacrifice, yet more blood, yet more men drawn from the war-weary ranks for an expeditionary force into the Wastes.

The lizards can endure some cold, slower though it makes them. But they are drawn to warmth. We estimate there may be enough residual heat among the ruins of the Wastes to keep them happy through the summer months. But with autumn and the chill, they will inevitably turn south. At best, they will be a force as powerful as anything we have yet seen or fought against; at worst, the sorceries at work in the Wastes may have twisted them into new and more dangerous forms.

In either case, the war will begin anew on your northern flank before it is even ended in the south. All we have achieved here in brotherhood will be for nothing.

This time, Archeth was certain she’d get to go.

But Flaradnam would not hear of it.
Your mother was right,
he told her.
And I was foolish beside her wisdom. Enough that we devastated the land back then and poisoned it for centuries to come. Enough that we must now drag more human lives back into that hell. I will not risk my own flesh and blood there, too.

But you’re going,
she said bitterly.

I am going because somebody has to. The humans cannot operate our engineering without help, they will need Kiriath leadership to see it through. Naranash is no longer with us; Grashgal is needed in the south. That leaves me.

I’ll be more use at your side than I will in the south. The fighting’s all but done, it’s just politics down there now. Grashgal doesn’t need me for that.

No—but I need you to go.
And as fresh protests rose to her lips.
Please, Archeth, don’t make this harder for me than it already is. I made your mother a promise on her deathbed. Don’t ask me to break it.

It was a rarely used appeal, but it was one that in all the years since her mother died Archeth had never learned to resist.

So she went back to Yhelteth with Grashgal and the others.

And she never saw her father again.

“
ou hear that?”

“Hear what?” The second privateer stifled a yawn. “Only thing I can hear is Kentrin snoring. Kick him for me, willya?”

“Let the kid sleep. I mean, did you hear water dripping just n—”

“Let him
sleep
? He’s on fucking watch!”

“We’re all on watch—all three of us. Doesn’t take six eyes to peer through this murk and see nothing all night. Leave him alone.”

“Leave him a—? What’s the matter with you, Lhesh? You after a portion of pert buttock pie or something?
We’re on fucking watch.
”

“Yeah, like you never dozed off when you were his age?”

“Yeah, I did. And the first mate put stripes on my back for it. You give him a kick in that pretty arse of his and bawl him out, he’s getting off lightl—”

Ringil came over the watchtower rampart like a grinning black shadow.

He was chilled and drenched through from his brief swim to the tower’s base, his teeth were locked tight to stop them chattering, and his fingers and unshod toes ached from the thirty-foot climb. He landed right at the feet of the grumbling privateer. Hit the stone flags on haunches and one braced palm, exploded up out of the crouch, dragon-fang dagger already reversed in his right hand, while the man just gaped down at him in disbelief. He struck upward for the soft underside of the jaw, up through tongue, mouth, soft palate, and on into the brain.

He lifted the privateer backward on the force of the blow.

Yanked the knife free.

The man crumpled, eyes rolled up to the whites. Ringil was already turning away.

The other privateer, Lhesh, was a scant five yards off across the flagstone roof of the tower. He turned as his comrade stopped speaking, curious more than alert, and the difference killed him. He had time to glimpse motion, the collapse of a body to the stones, dull red splatter across the fogged palette of the dawn, and a twisted black shape, spinning about … 

The dragon-tooth blade was useless for throwing; it didn’t have the balance or the elegance of form. Ringil dropped it. Raked a glyph into the chilly morning air instead, uttered harsh whispered syllables, and Jhesh choked on the cry in his throat. He gaped, staggered, made hoarse sounds and pawing gestures. Ringil crossed the five-yard gap in what seemed like a single leap. He reached in, left hand swept across the man’s eyes like the gesture of a servant wiping a window, right palm slapped in against the upper ribs. He hissed out the two-syllable command.

Stopped the man’s heart in his chest.

Jhesh’s eyes bulged for a brief moment - shock, terror, and the struggle to understand. Then he sagged and went bonelessly to the flagstone floor. Ringil held on to the dead man’s chest like a lover, softened the drop, lowered the body down.

Soft snores from one gloomy corner of the tower wall.

Ringil looked around, slightly incredulous. Kentrin, it seemed, had managed to sleep through the whole thing. He was still there, legs pulled up for warmth, leaned slightly into the corner, face slack with sleep. Gil approached, cat-footed, momentarily unsure what to do. He glanced back at the dragon fang blade, sticky with blood where he’d left it, too far to easily fetch. And now, almost as if Kentrin sensed the danger looming over him, he stirred. Muttered something, eyes sliding halfway open, still glazed with sleep … 

Drop to one knee, press the killing palm into the boy’s chest. Ringil made the window-wiping gesture again, again the two grating irrevocable words from the
ikinri ‘ska.
Kentrin’s eyes jerked wider open at the sound, his mouth fluttered, the beginnings of panic surfacing on his face. Gil put fingers to the boy’s lips and pressed. Made his voice soft as warm wool.

“Hsss. Sleep, go back to sleep, it’s fine.”

“N-n-no, but—” Body twitching sideways, legs shoving for support—in a moment he’d struggle to his feet against the hollow wrongness in his chest. “You’re—”

“A bad dream. That’s all I am. Shsssh.” Singsong soothing, wiping the fear away. Watching the boy’s features soften again as death took him back down. “You’re having a bad dream, go back to sleep. Rest now, rest …”

The boy’s head lolled sideways in the angle of the wall. His legs slid down under their own weight, straightening slowly out. He looked almost as peaceful in death as he had asleep.

His comrades lay less cozily, but still like sleeping men, flat out on the gray stone flooring, curled just fractionally into themselves as if against the cold. Blood pooling around the first man’s head told a different tale, but in this uncertain light even that was easy to miss.

And Ringil was gone.

H
E MET
S
ENGER
H
ALD AT THE BASE OF THE TOWER.

He’d stopped to kill two more men on the way down, but in the twisting spiral confines of the tower’s only staircase, it was easier work than he’d had on the roof. Each sleepy privateer heard unhurried motion on the stone steps overhead, glanced up in expectation of a comrade coming down with something to report, saw instead a looming, unfamiliar figure, jagged knife in hand. Ringil stepped down, stepped in close, and it was done.

He used the dragon fang dagger both times—stopping the hearts of the two on the roof had tired him for magic, and anyway, trying to cast glyphs under the low stone roofing of the staircase was asking for trouble and barked knuckles besides.

The
ikinri ‘ska
works better in open areas,
Hjel tells him apologetically.
Best of all under open skies. The powers are not always attentive in tight or hidden places.

Great. Some fucking sorcery you’re teaching me here.

The dispossessed prince smiles.
Did you think it would be easy?

Not to learn, no—but I thought it might be a bit handier than this once I had it down.

Your mistake, then.

Yeah.

He edged out of the watchtower doorway, squinted around the curve of the wall to his right. From the raised promontory of Dako’s Point, a broad, stepped causeway descended southward over a chaotic tumble of boulders and chunks of collapsed cliff façade each the size of a modest galleon. Beyond, dimly through the fog and the strengthening glimmer of dawn, the lights of Ornley harbor beckoned.

Footfalls to his left. He whipped around and saw Hald emerge from the gloom, sword in hand. Black marine combat rig and cloak, soot-smeared features—Ringil was expecting him, but it was still a little like meeting an unquiet ghost.

“All right?”

The marine commander gestured over his shoulder. “They’re coming up now. Had to brace our way up a chimney from that inlet. Higher than we thought.”

“Yeah, well, the good news is it looks like we guessed right about these guys. I don’t see anyone on the causeway.”

Hald grunted and took his own peek round the curve of the tower.

“It is sense,” he allowed. “If I held the town, and could assume a good watch in the tower, I would not waste men, either, by stringing them out this far from the harbor.”

More black-clad figures, out of the gloom at his back as he spoke—the marines gathering, two and three at a time, blades out, sooted faces grim. Hald snapped his fingers, gestured for positions. They formed up in a small phalanx. Someone brought up helm and shield for Ringil, the Ravensfriend in its scabbard, a marine-issue cloak and his boots—he put it all on, hefted the shield a couple of times to settle it on his arm, then he faced the men and drew the Ravensfriend from his back. Most of them hadn’t seen that trick before, how fast the Kiriath sheath would deliver up the blade. It sent a brief murmur through the ranks. Gil showed them the slice of a smile.

“I’m afraid I don’t know how many of these motherfuckers we’re dealing with down in the harbor,” he began. “But I can tell you this much for nothing—the ones in the tower died pretty easily. These are League privateers we’re dealing with, not soldiers. They’re pirate freebooters, out for easy coin. No match for imperial marines,
and they do not know we’re coming
.”

Carnivorous grins on some of the faces now, and the murmuring in the ranks grew. Hald tried to look aloof from it, but he couldn’t keep the gleam of anticipation off his face, either. Ringil kept his smile, wore it like a mask. He was underselling the privateers, he knew; they were generally a pretty hard-bitten lot, the League’s hard-nosed mercantile version, in fact, of the Empire’s marine soldiery. Back before the war, privateer crews under men like Critlin Blacksail and Sharkmaster Wyr had shown themselves pretty effective in routing imperial forces both aboard ship and on land. They were maybe not as intensively trained nor regimentally committed as the marines, but most among them would be similarly seasoned in the acts of piracy and coastal assault that passed for naval warfare on the western seaboard. They’d be as savage, as hungry for the slaughter.

Truth was, barring terminology and the ink on a few contractual documents signed by men who could barely read what they’d put their names to, there really wasn’t a lot to choose between the two sides here.

But now was not the time for that truth. Some of these men would be dead before the hour was out, and collectively they knew it.
So keep up the incentive beat, Gil. Let’s give them that at least.

“You have the element of surprise,” he said. “And you have your training. Follow my lead, keep my pace. We start slow, but we’ll be taking the harbor wall at a charge. They’re never going to know what hit them. We clean them out, kill anything that gets in our way. And—this is important—if any of them go into the water in the fight, forget them, they’re done. They won’t be getting back out again, that’s a promise.”

“Yeah, and what if
we
fall in?” called someone at the back, a grin in the voice.

“Don’t,” he told them, and the grins all evaporated at the chill in his tone. “I won’t be able to help you, there won’t be time. Now enough of this advisory shit—
who wants to open some pirate throats
?”

Growling assent. It wasn’t dissimilar to the elemental thunder he’d set prowling the sky the night before.

He let it in, he let it carry him forward. Raised an arm. Let it fall.

Down the broad stepped flow of the causeway, skulking at first, some caution in the pace. Shields carried low, eyes and ears sharp for any straggling resupply coming up for the watchtower guard. Soft, hurried trample of booted feet behind him, no sign of anyone in their path. And now, sketched in fog below, the blunt outlines of the harbor wall looming closer. Nothing to indicate they’d yet been seen. Caution crumbling, flaking away before the heated fact of what they were about to do. Pace already picked up way past any chance of braking—they were sprinting now, they were
falling
forward, pouring down the steps unstoppable, the heads of men becoming vaguely visible here and there above the line of the harbor wall, there’d be bowmen among them, keep it tight and silent, keep that shrill, hooting cry fenced back behind your teeth. Lips peeling back, grinning hard from the sprint, breath beginning to cost something now each time it’s drawn—

“’ware raiders!”

It rang out, high and panicky, from somewhere on the wall.

Way too late.

G
IL LEAPT THE LAST TWO STEPS TO THE WALL, LANDED AMONG MEN NOD
ding at the edges of sleep. They had perhaps a glimpse of him—a darkened form unfolding, the terrible hiss and glide of the Ravensfriend in the gloom, then it was all blood and screaming as the Kiriath steel found flesh and laid it open. He barely saw the men he killed—pale, blurred faces in the whirl of first contact, shocked, gaping mouths—he knew only that he took the throat out of one—chopped open the neck on a second—took down a third with a slice to the thigh, batted him into the harbor waters with a blow from his shield, the man screamed once, was pulled down, was gone—gutted a fourth on his way past. None among them had managed to even clear their weapons. None among them got out any kind of articulate word before they died.

Ringil hooked back his head as the howl inside him came loose. The fog eddied, seemed to tear apart around him with the sound.

And back came cries from along the wall, as if in answer.

“’ware raiders!
This is it, lads!
”

A sneer painted itself on his lips like a lover’s smeared kiss. He piled forward, full tilt into the eddies of fog and vaguely seen forms ahead.

If the harbor wall was for defense against seaborne enemies and the elements, the causeway behind was made with blunt haulage and commerce in mind. It was wide enough to take an ox cart—or a dozen armed and armored men abreast. Ringil led the imperials in an iron wedge, short swords out to hack and stab. They tore into the disarrayed ranks of the privateers, rolled up a dozen yards of the wall before anyone could grasp what was going on.

Then, somewhere down the line, a voice of gruff command.

“They’re coming off the fucking stair!”