The Dark Defiles (22 page)

Ringil nodded up at the cabin ceiling. “That one of your flotilla up there, is it? Drifting with the wind?”

“What did you do to that ship? What filthy piece of sorcery did you work on those men?”

“Me? Nothing. We sneaked past your picket in the fog, close enough to hear their hour call on the breeze.”

Klithren glared up at him. “You lie. There are … fucking
pieces
of dead men all over her deck. Blood everywhere. They’ve been … 
chewed
on, you piece of shit.”

Ringil knew. He’d seen the Sileta brothers after the merroigai got through with them.

“Let’s just say I’ve got some friends you’d prefer not to meet,” he said. “And if you don’t want your crew meeting them, either, I suggest you do exactly what I tell you.

He crouched over Klithren.

“Now where’s my fucking sword?”

A
RAPID SEARCH OF
K
LITHREN FOR WEAPONS YIELDED A COUPLE OF NASTY
little knuckle blades tucked up in interesting places, as well as the big killing knife on his hip and a slimmer, nicely balanced piece of cutlery in his right boot.

It wasn’t the Ravensfriend, but it was a start. They shared out the blades and took Klithren up on deck.

The companionway was the trickiest part. Gil had Rakan lead; he at least knew the ship’s layout a little, would have some sense of what they were climbing up into. The Throne Eternal went up, lifted the companionway hatch by inches to check for close bystanders, then flagged an all clear to them and clambered up and out. Klithren went next, far enough behind not to grab at the Throne Eternal’s ankles, and Gil brought up the rear, the slim, balanced blade pressed close against the artery in the mercenary’s inner thigh as he climbed. The moment the mercenary’s head cleared the top of the companionway, Rakan’s dagger snicked in under his chin, and the Throne Eternal drew him painstakingly up and out like some big, vicious fish he’d just hooked. Gil came swiftly up behind and settled the slim blade in Klithren’s back.

“Easy there,” he murmured.

They crouched in a corner of the raised foredeck, shadowed by the rail and the foremast rigging in band-lit bars and squares.

By now, the hubbub down on the main deck was total. The other vessel was roped in tight to the port rail and a mob of men crowded there, yelling and brandishing weapons. Others clung to the mainmast rigging for a ladder and stared down onto the other ship’s deck. Even the steersman and his boy had left the wheel and were crowding the poop deck rail in an attempt to see what was going on.

You’re not going to get a better chance than this, Gil.

He took the slim balanced knife out of Klithren’s back and weighed it loosely on his palm. Knew, with a sudden conviction, that the weapon was worth less to him now than his two empty, unbound hands.

“Don’t you fucking move,” he warned the mercenary. “Noy, you take this blade, keep it right-handed, ready for a throw. Dagger in your left and hard up against our pal here’s kidneys. Soon as I give you the nod, get him up against the rail to my left. And get your mask back up. Try to look, uhm, shadowy. Hunched.”

He ignored the look the Throne Eternal shot him, flexed his fingers, wishing they weren’t still quite so stiff, and drew in one deep, hard breath. Then he nodded at Rakan and went to stand upright at the rail.

“Men of Trelayne!”
Voice pitched to roll sonorously out across the main deck below.
“Look upon my work, and repent! I hold your souls in the balance!”

The men in the rigging heard him first, swung from their points of purchase to stare. So far so good—no one climbs rigging with a primed crossbow, and the range was too great for accurate throwing of knives or clubs.

Down on the deck, though—that was going to be a different matter … 

“Noy, this is going to be your moment.” He figured the muttered Tethanne was safe enough, was likely going to sound to the rattled northerners below like some kind of spell or incantation, if they heard it at all. “They’ll all have their eyes on me. Reckon you can throw down there accurately, take out the first man that gets too close?”

The Throne Eternal hefted the slim knife below the level of the rail without change of expression or stance.

“What, and
still
looked hunched and shadowy?” he muttered back, deadpan.

“Good lad.” Gil raised his hands, switched back to sonorous Naomic.
“Look
upon what I have done! Know the power you face!”

Curses now, panicked and raging in about equal measure. The crammed pack of men at the ship’s rail loosened, unknotting itself, spreading back out across the ship’s waist as the privateers turned and saw the dark figure up on the foredeck.

A new chaos of voices boiled up among them.

“He’s loose!”
one of them yelled.
“He’s out!”

“How the f—”

“Look,
Klithren
—he’s sold us out!” A panicking bellow.
“He’s traded our fucking souls!”

“No, no, use your
eyes
—the mage’s familiar has him!”

“Black mage, black mage! Hoiran ward us!”

“Shit, it’s true, like that fat git Hort said, he’s—”

“Black mage!
In Hoiran and Firfirdar’s name,
ward us!”

So forth.

Out of the mess, Ringil tracked the dangerous men—snaking their way through the press, largely silent, eyes fixed balefully on the foredeck rail and the dark lord stood there who’d apparently butchered their comrades. Perhaps predictably, at least half of them wore Skirmish Ranger rig. He let them come on, tried to stave off the rising itch of unarmed exposure it set loose in his guts. Trusting to Rakan’s eye and arm
rather a lot here,
actually.
If the
ikinri ‘ska
had spells for taking thrown weapons safely out of the air or deflecting them away—and he supposed it probably did—Hjel hadn’t gotten around to teaching them to him just yet. And the men down on deck were going to cut loose as soon as they thought they were in safe range, which might or might not be inside a distance Throne Eternal training allowed for, so if even one of them looked like … 

That one for example, Ranger rig, out now ahead of the pack, spiked killing club in hand, still moving fleet-footed forward but settling into this sliding crouch that presaged—

Fuck this shit.

He threw up his arm and pointed. Shouted in Tethanne, words spaced in his best attempt at sounding like a spell.
“That one there, Noy!”

The privateer got his throwing arm up, almost back—went choking, stumbling backward instead with Rakan’s knife in his throat. The tipped weight in his stance took him over in a tumble, no time to see if he landed with the knife clearly visible or not, if anyone was interested in checking such details with the black mage calling at them from the rail … 

“Will you harm me with your petty blades and clubs?”
he roared at them.
“Will you stand against me? Will I bring the kraken’s doom upon you all?
Don’t touch him!”

This last to a privateer pacing up to the newly made corpse. There was nothing of magic in the shout, just the years of desperate command from the war, but the man froze as if turned to stone. Gil, balanced on the hard edge of the seconds it bought him, saw what had to be done next to keep control—

Did it.

Leapt without thinking.

Up and over the rail, gut-swoop moment of the fall and his cloak flapping out behind him like tattered black wings—with luck they’d see that and believe he flew. He hit the main deck in a solid crouch, dared not roll to absorb the impact—it was only going to wreck the hard-bought dark lord poise of it all—took it in the knees and spine instead, jagged tug and flare through the bone, then straighten up out of the crouch, as if the pain were not there.

You jumped out of raided warehouse windows twice that high, back in the day, back in Trelayne.

Yeah, you were half the age as well.

Flickering stab of nostalgia for the youth and long withered innocence of those years—it hurt almost as much as the fall. He shook off both, stalked into the scattered ranks of the privateers with hands rising in finger-splayed claws at his sides.

“Who wants to die next then?”

Now it was time for the
ikinri ‘ska,
and he welcomed it in—the liquid stir it made through him, the trembling potential in his fingertips.
Yeah and half a hundred more subjects than you can put away with it here, Gil. Let’s not get cocky.
He still had the positions of the men he’d marked from the rail, the dangerous ones. He saw a raised hand ax out of the corner of his eye, swung on the man who wielded it. Carved a glyph from the air and pointed.

“You. You’re on your knees.”

And the privateer dropped there, like a puppet with strings abruptly cut.

“That’s not an ax, it’s a snake.”

The man let go his weapon with a yell of revulsion. Exultation surged through Ringil. He saw a wave of reaction run through the other privateers, steps stumbling backward in most, away from the black-cloaked thing walking into their midst. He picked another man who’d still not given ground. A glyph like tearing open, another pointing finger—

“You, you’re choking.”

And watched him go down, clutching at his throat. Another Skirmish Ranger off to his left—

“Corpsemite! It’s on your back!”

The victim, screaming and staggering, thrashing fit to snap his own spine backward … 

“You—where are your weapons? What’s that on your
thumbs
?”

And the privateer rearing back, hands held up in horror. The exhilaration of the
ikinri ‘ska
washed through Ringil now like flandrijn, washed
around
him like the summery blue and white slop of waves on the beach at Lanatray in his youth. Something had changed, something had shifted inside him. Somehow, the overreach he’d forced through on the sloping street in Ornley had pulled something along with it. Like a knot threaded back through itself and then hauled on so hard it pops out of existence and leaves the cable running clean. Like a muscle, torn up with too much strain, knitting harder and tougher again … 

A man in Ranger rig came at him howling, cutlass raised for the chop. He locked gazes, spoke the simple word
No,
not even very loud. Saw the waver of the upflung blade, the sudden stammer in the Skirmish Ranger’s step. He stepped in, blocked the cutlass blow with an imperial empty-hand technique, hooked and hauled the arm down, smashed an open palm into the man’s chest, put him on the deck on his back—

“Lie
still
—you are in your grave!”

The Skirmish Ranger convulsed on the planking, as if pinned there by an iron spike. He flailed with hands in front of his face, weeping. Ringil turned away, on to the next … 

He should be weakening, this should be tiring him by now.

“Marsh spider—there in your shirt!”

But all he feels is the appetite for more. He strides unarmed into the midst of his enemies, and it’s as if he’s wearing tailored plate; as if the Ravensfriend is there in his hand. The privateers are backing away now, scrambling to get clear of him, clear of the clawing, raking, stabbing gestures from raised hands he barely seems to own anymore … 

“Oh, you think you’re going to shoot me with that? It’s not
strung,
you twat. And your
eyes
are bleeding!”

The arbalest, tumbling to the deck, landing—reach in there and
flip
—upside down, muffled
twank
and the bolt discharged, spent into the deck planking. The man who’d held it clapped hands to his face and bawled something incomprehensible … 

Enough
.

He bent and gathered up the crossbow, held it briefly aloft in one hand.

“You think
this
is going to save you?”

And threw it to the deck at his feet. Raised his voice for them all.

“There are two kinds of men aboard this ship! Those who oppose me—and those who will live to see the dawn!”
He snapped out the blade of one hand, gestured at a trembling privateer on his left. Stared into the man’s face. “Which are you?”

Frozen pause.

Then the man’s head bowed and he dropped on one knee to the deck. He threw his club away.

Ringil turned his head, and it was like a wave sweeping through the privateers wherever his gaze fell. They began to kneel. By ones and twos at first—then more—then most—and finally the very few stiff-backed resilient ones, broken by his stare as it swept over the bowed heads of their comrades and found them, put the same silent question to them that the others had already faced and answered for themselves.

Soft clatter and thump of discarded weaponry across the deck.

And the slow leak inside of a feeling Ringil couldn’t place at first. He thought it might only be the sinking away of the
ikinri ‘ska
as it faded into the background again, and he looked around at the men he would not now need to fight and kill … 

Then he had it. Saw the sensation for what it really was.

Disappointment.

t seemed like a very long time they stood in silence, while the Warhelm’s accusation soaked away into the quiet. Archeth might have been a statue, rooted to the polished alloy floor where she’d leapt to her feet.

“You said what?” Staring balefully up at the iron-beamed ceiling now. “You’d better back that shit up, Warhelm. You’d better fucking explain to me why my father would
cripple
and
blind
one of his most powerful allies in the fight against the dwenda. Are you accusing him of
treachery
? Why would he commit such an act of violence against you?”

“It was not treachery, no. But we differed over how to end the Aldrain threat.” Near as Egar could tell, the screech-edged amiability in the demon’s voice hadn’t changed. If it had ever been pissed off about what ’Nam had supposedly done to it, the passing of a few thousand years certainly seemed to have taken the edge off. “More precisely,
kir
-Flaradnam believed that the threat
was
ended, and I did not. He did not like my plans for further action, and he knew I would not obey him when he told me to stand down.”

“But it
was
ended,” Archeth blurted. “You drove out the dwenda. The Aldrain. It was over, the Indirath M’nal says so. You ended the threat.”

Egar sniffed. “Till now, anyway.”

“Ah, so it begins.”

“Begins?” The Dragonbane looked suspiciously around. “What begins?”

“The Aldrain reconquest, I imagine. I did wonder about the seismics. I have wondered every time, in fact. They fit so well into the model, each time it was hard to believe that the Aldrain would not see their opportunity and seize it. Though apparently not until now.” Tharalanangharst had seemed for a moment to be drifting away. Now, its voice came back tighter. “A pity your father is not here to see this,
kir
-Archeth—he was adamant that it would not occur.
Could
not occur, in fact. He was a tower of rhetorical passion on the subject. It was the kind of conviction one only sees in a man when he knows beyond any doubt, beneath all speech and emotion, that he is utterly wrong.”

“What
seismics
?” Archeth asked the ceiling rigidly.

“Yeah, what is a
size-mix
anyway?” He liked to think his Tethanne was pretty good, but it wasn’t a word he’d heard before.

“I have detected vibrations from the south, consistent with a significant earthquake event. My
these days
somewhat limited
senses tell me its origin is in the Hanliagh fault.”

“Fucking
earthquake
?” Egar blinked. “What, wait a minute—you talking about the Drowned Daughters?”

One tavern night in Yhelteth, not long arrived in the city, he’d felt the floor lift and sway beneath his feet and thought it was just the drink—until a serving maid shrieked at his elbow, and things started toppling off shelves and tables around him. He rode the shaking with a—drunken—horse breaker’s calm, watching faintly bemused as his hardened mercenary colleagues grabbed at the talismans they wore or made forking wards in the air. It was a solid few minutes before everything calmed down and he could grab someone, with bruising, inebriated force, and ask
what the fuck just happened here, brother
?

The Drowned Daughters twist and yearn in their sleep. They dream of waking and rising from their ocean bed in memory of their great father.

There’d been other tremors on and off in the years that followed, mostly of lesser force, nothing you didn’t get used to with time. They were far from the weirdest thing a Majak lad might experience, living in the imperial city But some of the local tales on the subject were pretty dark. They told of a cataclysmic ruin visited upon Yhelteth in earlier times, and the tellers could point you easily enough to cracked and slumped buildings amid the older architecture to vouch for the truth of the account. It was said that out to sea, the ocean had boiled, and the Drowned Daughters of Hanliagh had risen from it vomiting fire to scorch the sky.

“Well?” Archeth, looking slightly sick now. “Is he right? Have the Daughters risen?”

“The nature and intensity of the tremors suggests not, at least not yet. But if these vibrations are only a precursor, then it is not impossible that the submarine caldera at the heart of the Hanliagh scatter could vent again.”

Archeth twitched about, then just as abruptly seemed not to know what to do with her sudden will to motion. She stood irresolute on the stark black carpet, glaring through the Dragonbane at something he had no way to see.

“If there are earthquakes in Yhelteth,” she said tightly, “then those assholes up at the Citadel are going to be touting it for evidence that God’s angry with the Empire, and that means angry with the Emperor, too. This is going to be their wet-dream comeback moment, Eg. They can march right up to the palace gates at the head of a mob ten thousand strong, demand audience, and ask for pretty much anything they like. Prophet’s prick! No wonder Jhiral’s taken us to war.”

Egar nodded. “Looks like he’s taking a leaf out of Daddy’s campaign manual.”

“Yeah—a new holy war, against the infidel north. Except when Akal did it, he was expanding the Empire for real. Jhiral’s going to do it just so he can hang on to the throne.”

“Still—not going too shabbily, if he’s taken Hinerion like Klithren said.”

Archeth pulled a sour face. “He can lose it again just as fast. That border’s been back and forth like a wanker’s hand as long as I’ve been alive.”

“Yeah, seen some action there myself, back when I was starting out.” The Dragonbane brooded for a while. “You reckon Anasharal saw this coming, Archidi?”

“What?”

“Well, look at it this way—Helmsman gets us all fired up for a three-thousand-mile quest north after things that aren’t there—”

“An-Kirilnar’s there. Here, I mean.”

“Archidi, come
on.
You’re reaching. There’s no Illwrack Changeling, there’s no fucking Ghost Isle. And this place is nowhere near where we were told it was going to be.”

Archeth looked thoughtful. “Anasharal said south and east of the Ghost Isle. You know, that’s not technically a lie. This coast is east of the Hironish, and the storm did blow us a long way south before we wrecked.”

“Yeah, whatever. Point is, we were sold a nag and told it was a unicorn. So I’m thinking maybe Anasharal just wanted you out of the city before all this earthquake and war shit broke loose. Maybe this whole thing was just one big fucking excuse to protect you.”

He watched her digest the idea. Stare at the carpet underfoot, then shake her head. “No. Can’t be, Eg. It’s too elaborate. Helmsmen falling out of the sky? Portents and legends come to life? A quarter million elemental venture, complete with imperial charter, drawing in half the uncrowned heads of Yhelteth commerce? All that to coddle one washed-up, krin-soaked half-breed?”

He heard the old, tangled damage, the pain and self-loathing in her voice.

“Well,” he said, very gently. “Got to depend on how much the washed-up, krin-soaked half-breed in question matters to you, I guess. Didn’t you tell me Angfal’s sworn to the single purpose of your protection? Manathan, too, right?”

“Manathan is sworn to the Kiriath mission, not me. Anyway, that’s not the fucking point. If this is all about protecting me, why didn’t Angfal just tell me to head out to Dhashara for the duration? Or sit things out in the imperial embassy at Shaktur?”

“Dunno, because you wouldn’t have gone, maybe?” Egar grinned. “I’ve been your bodyguard less than two years, Archidi, and I already know you’re a pain in the arse to keep out of harm’s way. I don’t envy Angfal. You do what’s good for you about as often as a shaman gets a shag.”

He thought she smiled, just barely. “Thanks.”

“Just pointing out some obvious truths here. Anasharal sold you the one pony that would get you a thousand miles out of Yhelteth without blinking. And he sold Jhiral a matching saddle to get you there in style.”

“No.” She shook her head again, emphatically. “I’m not buying this, Eg. You set out a good stall, but there’s too much else that doesn’t fit. There’s the dwenda. Anasharal didn’t make them up. There’s Klithren, and the fact that somebody in Trelayne thought it was worth sending him and a whole fucking flotilla of privateers up to the Hironish isles to detain us. There’s the fact somebody in Ornley was told to dig up that sword and take it back to Trelayne before we arrived. That can’t all be—”

“What sword?”

A hard edge on the Warhelm’s voice, unmistakable even to Egar. And he saw how Archeth shot a surprised look at the ceiling.

“What do you care?” she asked curtly.

Into the abused air evolved a twist of light that rapidly became a writhing calligraphic stroke, then some kind of long tool, then—recognition sidling quickly in—a broadsword.

“If,” said the Warhelm distinctly, “it is this sword, then I care a great deal, and you had better tell me all about it right away.”

Egar stared at the image floating in the air before him. He’d been a lot of different places in his time under the imperial standard, slaughtered a lot of different peoples, and seen the—usually inferior—weapons they defended themselves with.

He’d never seen anything like this.

The blade glinted blue along its edges and did not taper, was the same slim width from guard to jagged tip. He’d seen similar in the hands of the dwenda when they came to Ennishmin two years ago, right enough, and again in the musty stone depths of the temple at Afa’marag last year. But at the guard end of the weapon, any further familiarity died. This sword was equipped there with a heavy slope-sided cross-piece, studded on the underside with hooked little teeth that gave it the appearance of iron jaws wrenched open to vomit out grip and pommel. And grip and pommel, well … Egar caught himself shaking his head as he tried to make sense of what was there. No defined place for hands to grip, no pommel counterweight, just a long, snakelike coil of metal that also gleamed blue in the low light and terminated in a sharp, inward-angled spike.

The whole lower section of the weapon looked more like an instrument of torture than the handling end of a broadsword.

“Is this the sword?” A hint of impatience in the demon’s voice now.

“We haven’t seen the fucking sword,” Archeth snapped. “It was taken from a grave in the Hironish isles before we arrived there. How are we supposed to know what it looks like? You want to tell us what this … thing is?”

“This is
Betrayal Becomes You
,” said the Warhelm crisply. It is the Illwrack Changeling’s Doom. A synthesis—a Kiriath reverse-engineered simulacrum of the Aldrain weapon
Out of Twilight Leaping
, which was gifted by the Illwrack clan to their human champion Cormorion Ilusilin Mayne, called Cormorion the Radiant, on his appointment as battle marshal supreme in the
until right now, it seems
final dwenda war.”

Archeth prowled around the floating image of the sword, fascinated. “
Betrayal Becomes You?
Reverse-engineered why? What for?”

“As its name
I would have imagined
tends to suggest, the Illwrack Changeling’s Doom was designed to murder Cormorion when he drew it in battle.”

“Murder him how?” Archeth was still peering at the sword, either oblivious in her absorption to the Warhelm’s sour point-scoring, or just ignoring it.

“The Illwrack Changeling’s Doom was reverse-engineered to cut the Changeling’s connection with undefined existence and the opportunities for sorcerous strength that it provides, instead of feeding and channeling them as the original weapon was forged to do. It was to then mirror and store Cormorion’s selfhood, oppose that copy to his existing self in his own mind, and let them obliterate each other.”

Egar frowned. “You what?”

“To steal his soul,” said the demon more slowly. “All right?”

“No, it’s not all right,” Archeth interjected. “I’ve read the Indirath M’nal. That’s not science the Kiriath have ever had. There are speculations about the possibility of stealing or mirroring a, whatever you want to call it, a soul. But that’s all they ever were. Speculations.”

“I did not say,
kir
-Archeth, that the forces at the heart of the sword’s design were Kiriath. I said only that the Kiriath did the engineering work.”

“On whose instigation?”

Another pause. “We knew them as the
Ahn Foi
—or the Immortal Watch. Humans on both sides of the conflict called them by a variety of names. Judging by the curses and prayers that I have overheard some of your followers utter in the last several hours, it seems they are currently known as the Dark Court.”

“The fucking Sky Dwellers?” A disbelieving grin on the Dragonbane’s face.

“That, too.”

“They’ve been in this fight for that long?” He looked at Archeth, still grinning. “On your side, against the dwenda from the start? Man, they must be pretty fucking pissed off ‘Nam and Grashgal opted for the Revelation.”

She shrugged, a bit defensively. “We had our reasons. Monotheism’s handy if you want a rational development of … Oh, never mind.” Her voice pitched up again. “So. This assassination plot. Presumably, it worked?”