The Dark Defiles (24 page)

A tight silence. The marines twitched, yearning etched into their young faces.

You’re going to have to do it, Gil. Let’s just get on with it, shall we?

He sighed. “You know the real problem here, bounty hunter?”

Klithren showed him the street dog snarl again, but Gil thought he saw a tremor at the edge of it this time. Hard as nails or not, and contrary to Ringil’s earlier insult, the mercenary wasn’t stupid. He would have picked up on the new calm in his captor, would understand how it presaged the endgame.

He offered Klithren a thin smile.

“The real problem is that you took my friends. And I want them back.”

“Yeah?” The mercenary spread his fingers, studied his hands in their cuffs with affected boredom. His voice missed steady by an inch. “Well, I want to fuck a Yhelteth virgin princess. Let’s see who gets lucky first, shall we?”

Ringil laughed politely. “No, you haven’t understood,” he said.

And launched himself forward.

Grabbed Klithren’s fingers between his own and snapped his fists closed. The mercenary reared back in shock, then tried to mend his failed nerve by leaping straight back in with a full force head-butt. Ringil jerked his own head clear by fractions and Klithren’s forehead went all the way down. Hit the table and the iron manacle rail with a solid clank.

The marines leapt forward on either side, curses and drawn blades—

“No!” Gil kept his hold on Klithren’s fingers, shut the imperials down on voice alone. “It’s okay, we’re fine here. We’re fine.”

The marines eased back, one muscle at a time. Gil saw them shoot each other glances about equal parts bemusement and anger. A fair bet they’d never attended an interrogation session quite like this one before.

You know you’re going to have to—

He lowered his head carefully beside Klithren’s. “Just fighting men, shooting the breeze. Right Hinerion?”

The mercenary groaned. Lashed sideways with his head, but Ringil was too close for him to make it into a blow of any consequence. Gil pressed back, skull to skull, feeling Klithren’s stubble rasp against his own cheek. Both their faces dipped to within inches of the torture table’s ravaged wooden surface. He let go Klithren’s right hand with his left, slammed his palm up hard against the other side of the mercenary’s skull to keep the clinch.

“I
said
you haven’t understood,” he hissed low. “I am going to have my friends back. If I have to burn the whole—”

Klithren bucked against his grip. Ringil clinched harder with head and hand, dug his nails into the mercenary’s face.

“—the whole fucking city of Trelayne into the marsh to bring them home,
then I will do exactly that.
Those fucks in the cabal, the Chancellery, my own fucking father—if they think I caused trouble last time I was in town, they have seen and understood
nothing.
Are you beginning to get which way the wind blows here, Klithren of Hinerion?”

Grunt of muffled rage, another attempt to butt sideways. He felt Klithren’s feet thrashing about for purchase beneath the table.

You know you’re going to—

He reached down, reached inward. Spoke in rasping tones, hauled hard, as if pulling some massive root crop fruit up through the dry-baked earth of a pitiless summer. Felt in the pit of his stomach how the power built with each glyph, how it washed about seeking an exit, any exit other than the one he now demanded. Let the rumbling, answering snarl come up his throat and out through his gritted teeth, the sequenced cant, the savage warning to whatever he was struggling against here, living thing or insensate matter or something somewhere in between, to
get the fuck out of his way.
He kept his grip on Klithren, kept his weight locked in,
kept on pulling
at the stubborn edges of the rip he’d made, the damage he’d done to whatever fabric this was … 

And
through.

Like a fist punched into mud, and out an unexpected other side.

Into weeping quiet.

Ringil shudders and lets go. They’re here.

He hears it for sure now—the low keening, like the wind in tall grass, but he knows that’s not what it is. He grips Klithren’s head for a moment like a drowning man clinging to some smoothly rounded rock. He turns his face and drags a hard, smearing kiss up over the other man’s cheek to his ear. Lets go and stands shakily back. Jerks his chin at Klithren’s huddled form where it’s slumped over the torture table.

He gets his breathing mostly back under control.

Now let’s stop fucking about,
he says unsteadily.

The Grey Places spread out around them, marsh flats to the horizon in every direction and a vast pale sky above.

S
OME THINGS SHIFT IN SUBSTANCE OR FORM WHEN THEY COME THROUGH
to the Margins, some things melt completely away. Hjel tells him he suspects it depends on how likely or unlikely the item in question is to exist across a whole range of different times and places.

The torture table hasn’t changed very much at all.

The wood is a little more worn and cracked, perhaps, and whitened in the cracks with some lichen or mildew he doesn’t recognize. He thinks the scarring on the tabletop looks different, too—suddenly unfamiliar patterns among the scatter of dents and gouges, changed outlines to the blotched and faded stains, a whole new map of atrocity to get used to. The manacle rail is rusted, the manacles themselves are no longer iron; they look to be made of some cured bluish gray hide.

The keening around him is growing louder now, or maybe just imprinting itself more clearly on his scrambled senses. Ringil casts a glance around him, knowing already what he’ll see, still hoping somehow that he won’t.

Klithren twitches on the table and mumbles something. Gil turns back and leans over him, glad of the focus. He’s not sure how conscious the other man is. Coming through has left him feeling like a morning after too much cheap rum and krin, and he’s more or less used to the transition. No telling how the passage must have felt to the mercenary.

Nonetheless … 

He digs out his dragon-tooth dagger, cuts the blue-gray hide bindings. It’s harder work than you’d expect from the frayed and faded look of them. He hooks Klithren under the shoulder with one arm, heaves and drags him up off the table, dumps him onto the marshy ground beside it. Stares down at him for a moment.

Black mage lizardshit, is it?
He kicks the mercenary solidly in the ribs. Stands over him, breathing harder than his exertions merit.
Why don’t you take a look around, Klithren of Hinerion? See what you think.

Another kick. Klithren rouses with a groan. He rolls over on the waterlogged, spongy turf, comes up with a bump against what looks at a glance like some ancient, rotted mooring post, driven here untold centuries ago to mark the edge of a river long since dried up or diverted. The mercenary blinks, rubs the back of his hand across his eyes, and then reaches up to steady himself on the protrusion. He props himself blurrily to his knees, glances at the post—

Screams—recoils—falls back over on his arse again.

No, but, no, no, that’s, no, no
… dribbles from his lips as he stares at the thing he’s just rested his hand on.

It’s a human head. And it’s alive.

They took them, Miri, they shone like stars, I tried, I tried, but they took them, please believe me, I couldn’t stop them, please forgive me, they shone like stars, they took them
… 

It’s the head of an old man, sparsely bearded with white whiskers and mostly bald, mumbling and weeping, endless tears that ribbon down through the grime on his cheeks and into the deep-cut lines that mark his sunken face. His neck has been severed a handbreadth below his chin and then somehow cemented to a tree stump that matches its circumference perfectly. If his faded blue staring eyes see them at all, he shows no sign.

—took them, please, I couldn’t, they shone, shone like stars—

Klithren has seen enough—he’s scrabbling backward on the heels of his hands, still staring, as far away as he can get. Until he bumps solidly into something behind him, jerks his head around to look at what he’s hit, and screams again—

It’s a young woman this time, disheveled long hair half obscuring her face, trailing down to brush at the humped and twisted roots of the stump she’s mounted on. Her voice whispers out, as if jolted into speech by Klithren’s clumsy shoulder.

—
left me, he said he’d come, trust him he said, he’d come for me, it aches, it hurts, please don’t, I’m tired, he’d come he said, he swore, I trusted, I’m tired, where is he, oh, it hurts, it
hurts,
he left me, he
… 

Klithren staggers to his feet. Backs away, tearing his gaze from the babbling woman’s face, looking for escape.

He’s wasting his time.

The severed heads stretch away in all directions, studding the marsh in endless random succession as far as the eye can distinguish them from the tufted marsh grass. They number in the thousands, maybe the tens of thousands, and all of them are weeping, some low, some high, some screaming their pain, some mumbling, but not a single one at any kind of lasting rest … 

Ringil can almost see the moment that Klithren makes the connection, understands the low susurrus of moaning on the wind for what it really is.

No, that can’t be, that, no
… he’s shaking his head, muttering to himself with a kind of hollow confidence.
No, that, no, no
… 

Oh, yes, yes, fucking yes.
Ringil stands at his shoulder, feeling an unwelcome stab of empathy for the other man. Grinding it back down into anger.
And no, in case you wondered, you are not fucking dreaming. Each one of these is a living soul, kept alive as long as the tree roots draw water from the soil. Look out there and try to count. Some of them will be children.

The mercenary hangs there for a moment, and then a deep shudder runs through him. He swings on Ringil, sharp enough that Gil’s reflexes put up a blocking arm between them, a hand pressed to the other man’s shoulder ready to trip him back onto the marshy ground. They’re close enough that he can smell Klithren’s soured breath. Their eyes lock.

What … ?
The mercenary shakes his head numbly.
What is this?

This?
Ringil presses firmly back a couple of inches to make the point, then drops his arm. He looks around at the harvest of human misery they stand amid.
This is what’s coming—if I can’t stop it in time.

Klithren makes a noise, not even a word. Ringil steps away from him and gestures with the dragon-tooth dagger.

You wanted to see some black mage lizardshit? You’re looking at it. This is what happens when the original black mages cut loose. This what the dwenda leave in their wake.

Fucking dwenda?
Klithren’s still numb by the sound of it, still dislocated and stumbling.
You
… 
talking about the Aldrain?

More steps away—then Gil turns to face the other man.
Call them what you like. They’re the power behind Findrich and the rest, just like the cabal is the power behind the Chancellery. You do a deal with Findrich and the cabal, you’re doing a deal with the creatures that did this—that do this
habitually
when they’re pissed off.

So like I asked you once before, Klithren of Hinerion—proud of your employers, are you?

Klithren shakes himself like a wet dog. Breathes in hard. Gil watches. Knows what the other man’s doing because—
there’s that fucking empathy again, Gil, going to get you killed one of these days
—he’s done it himself enough times. Close down focus, shut out what you can’t stand or can’t do anything about, stare down the blade of what needs to be done.

And then do it.

How do you know all this?
Klithren asks him.

Ringil smiles bleakly.
The dwenda and I are old friends.

That’s not an answer.

It’s the only one you’re getting on that subject. Ask me something else.

Why did you bring me here?
Klithren talking deliberately louder now, to drown out the keening around them. But there’s a wavering crack in his voice.
Why are you showing me this?

I told you—because I need your help.
Ringil looks away to the horizon. One part of him registers with a tiny shock how used he’s grown to this horror, how little it touches him anymore.
See, I think I can probably take back Ornley without you. I’ve got your crew terrified into submission, I’ve got the ship, and for a little bonus I’ve got a handful of my own men to season the mix. I could torture some details out of you—

You could fucking try!

I could fucking succeed.
He says it matter-of-factly, doesn’t even look around.
You’re from the borders, you know about imperial marines. Well, there are marines back on that ship trained specifically in inquisition, and they’re leaping at the leash for a shot at you. I let them loose, you’d spill, you know you would. You’d give up everything I need to know before you died. And the noises you make doing it are just going to hammer home my grip on your crew.

Silence at his back that he takes for assent. Ringil waits regardless. The lost-soul moaning rises to fill the gap. He lets it chew at Klithren for a while before he goes on.

So like I said, I could get the detail. Find out where the prisoners are being held, what defensive setup you’ve left in place.
Now he turns back to the other man. Sees that Klithren has started, faintly but perceptibly, to tremble.
But here’s the thing—it’s still going to cost too much. It’s another fucking sneak attack, another battle uphill, and I’m going to lose men I can’t afford. Some bright spark on shore is likely going to run off to wherever they’ve stashed the prisoners and start cutting throats—it’s what I’d do, anyway. And there’ll be reprisals when we’re done. We’ll probably end up burning the town.