The Dark Defiles (31 page)

No,
Hjel tells him quietly.
I’m worried about where I have to take you next.

igh up on the shoulder of the first jagged ridge, the fire sprite paused in its restless onward dance, as if to allow them a last look back.

Archeth didn’t mind—she was pretty winded from the climb. She stood there, breathing hard, letting the breeze off the ocean cool her brow. Way below them, An-Kirilnar sat in the sea like some crumpled white lace handkerchief dropped in passing and still afloat on the surface of a pothole puddle. If you stared for long enough, you even got the illusion of movement, as if the city were drifting on the ruffled waters with the wind. It took Archeth a moment to understand why. The sun had just struggled up over the inland horizon, and as it struck the ocean below, she saw with a tiny shock that there was something under the water, a hazy scatter of geometric patterning in every direction for miles, and that it was moving, pulsing in and out of visibility in random patches, all with the regularity of a sleeping man’s breath, like some colossal living thing. The causeway, she suddenly understood, had been a choice, a thin piece of stability sliced out of a massive, intricate overall structure and raised just high enough to permit human passage. A scant scrap of lamplight left in the window of the long-forgotten Kiriath victory by a mind that made no real distinction between the passing minutes and millennia and saw no reason to ever let the past go.

Small, welling sadness, somewhere down at the base of her being.

Stow that shit, Archidi.
Over the past months, she seemed to have soaked up the argot of the marines and sailors she’d been surrounded with, was still surprised when it popped up in her thoughts.
Got a few other things to worry about right now, don’t we?

“What’s the matter, leave something behind?”

Egar, grinning, puffing up the arid slope of the path to where she stood. No one was very keen on getting too close to the fire sprite, so the vanguard had fallen to Archeth by default. Selak Chan, Alwar Nash, and the few other Throne Eternals had followed her at what distance their regimental pride would allow, and the Dragonbane came after them, at the nominal head of everybody else. There was a subtle, fresh alignment to be detected in the order, a change that sat uneasily on her shoulders like the new harness the Warhelm had gifted her for her knives.

“Something like that,” she agreed.

She watched the men filing up onto the ridge after the Dragonbane. Judged no small number of them could use the break as much as she could. Tharalanangharst had fed them unstintingly, worked some minor medical magic on their various injuries, gifted them all with fresh weapons and clothing, but still—after nearly three weeks of comfort and warmth in An-Kirilnar’s somber iron belly, the return to the Wastes felt like an eviction. The pre-dawn air outside when they left was cold and leaden, sitting sullenly in their lungs, burning if you drew it in too deep. The clouded dawn sky was the texture of old porridge, stirred through with weird spiral formations, brightened just barely to the east by a sun rising somewhere unseen behind the looming mountains. And the path they took up off the coast was bleak, a twisting defile through jagged bluffs and across broad spills of scree, devoid of vegetation or any visible sign of animal life. Without the insistent back-and-forth sheepdog chivying of the sprite, they likely would have lost their way more than once.

Egar stood at her shoulder, getting his breath back. Looked down at the city in sea.

“Useful friend to have,” he said. “Shame we can’t take him with us. Didn’t your people ever build anything
small
?”

She nodded minutely down at Wraithslayer, where the knife sat upside down in the new sheath on her left breast. It had taken her awhile to accept that it wouldn’t fall out, no matter how hard she jumped up and down or flung herself about trying to dislodge it. It had taken even longer to get the hang of pulling and throwing Bandgleam from the identical inverted sheath on her right breast. Both knives had lived on her belt before, the sensible way up, slightly forward of her hips and angled for ease of draw. It was the habit of a couple of hundred years and leaving it behind had tugged hard. But she couldn’t really argue with the benefits.

The other three knives were at least approximately where they’d always been—Quarterless still in the small of her back, though now off to one side and paired with Laughing Girl, the final refugee from the empty frontal portion of her belt. Falling Girl, she’d insisted on keeping in her boot and the Warhelm, lacking an obvious harness point elsewhere, had grudgingly agreed.

“Yeah, well, apart from
blades,
obviously.” The grin still there in the Dragonbane’s good-natured grumbling. He sniffed. “Goes without saying, doesn’t it. Kiriath steel and all that.”

But beneath the bluff Majak nonchalance, Archeth thought she detected an enduring trace of unease. And his features were troubled as he watched Yilmar Kaptal come trudging up the slope, nowhere near as out of breath as you’d expect for a man his age and size.

T
HE THING THAT CAME UP THROUGH THE LOADING HATCH THAT NIGHT,
still streaming thin, high spouts of seawater from various openings and edges, looked like nothing so much as a colossal black spider-legged crab caught in some thick-roped metallic net.

Shouldn’t really be a shock, Archidi,
she’d been surprised to find herself thinking.
Not like you haven’t seen them running around the place since we got here—replacing fruit, bringing you fresh clothes. Executing random humans. All the same basic breed. This is just a big one.

It took about that long to realize that the thick, shiny cone of netting the crane hook held up was in fact part of the crab’s upper structure, presumably designed to allow exactly this kind of retrieval. And as the crane cranked in the final couple of yards of cable and stopped, she saw that the webbing on top was mirrored on the crab’s underside by a sagging belly of translucent material within which hung … 

At her side, the Dragonbane had climbed to his feet. She stood up to join him.

“Is that a body in there?” he asked her quietly.

The crane screeched and groaned its way back along its track until the crab’s monstrous span of legs hung clear of the hatch. Inside the swaying translucent bag, the blurred human outline flopped bonelessly back and forth. There looked to be quite a lot of liquid in there, too. The crane cable jolted downward and the crab settled to the floor on its huge restlessly twitching limbs. It faced them as if poised to spring—she felt Egar tense beside her, felt the same instinctive quailing in her own flesh. The cable ran down, the netting settled back flat to the crab’s upper carapace, and tiny upward reaching metal arms emerged to detach the hook. Thus freed, the crab took big, spidering steps toward them, still drizzling water onto the iron deck like an overflowing gutter.

“Archidi …” The Dragonbane’s grip, firm on her upper arm. He was pulling her backward, putting himself in the way.

“Eg, it’s fine.”

As if it heard their voices, the crab locked to a halt. Its front legs were less than fifteen feet from where they stood, went up like shiny black palm trunks to the first hinge, then down again to the looming mass of the body where it hung over them at twice head height. The carapace tilted without warning, the translucent bag split open somewhere, and its contents gushed out over the deck in a sluicing of seawater and silt. Small, vaguely fang-shaped objects slid and skittered about. It would be awhile before she fixed on them and realized what they were. Too much of her immediate attention was grabbed by the body as it washed to a soggy halt at their feet.

It took them a moment or two to recognize Yilmar Kaptal.

He was a mess. Bleached, bloated, chewed on. Something had already made ragged holes in his cheeks and eaten out his eyes, and as they watched, it climbed on myriad filigree legs out of one of the raw hollows where an eye had been.

“Oh,
lovely.
”

“Eg, shut up.” Staring fascinated. “Look.”

Because here across the bleached and ragged landscape of Kaptal’s torn-up face came some tiny, rapidly spidering silver thing. It grabbed the filigree-legged length of deep sea life at the midpoint, lifted it up out of the eye socket and held it aloft, then methodically ripped it apart. It discarded the pieces, passing them back delicately over its own body to the rear, then dipped itself into the eye socket and began dragging out other, less recognizably living stuff. Behind it, even tinier gleaming flecks of machinery had welled up out of Kaptal’s nose and mouth like silver foam and started to carry off the bits of butchered sea creature.

“Cleansing is required,” said the Warhelm with melodious good cheer. “And substantial surface repair. But aside from this, I foresee no real difficulties. Your friend has not been in the water long.”

The words washed over her, made no real sense at the time, and besides, she was still entranced by the realization that Yilmar Kaptal’s entire bloated body appeared to be a similar battleground between the creeping creatures trying to eat him and the tiny silver machines that fought to stop them. The sodden clothing twitched and moved, things emerged squabbling here and there from under a flap of cloth or torn flesh … 

“Hoy, Archidi. Look at the floor over there. Aren’t those your knives?”

“
W
HAT ARE WE STOPPING FOR?”

“What’s your rush, Kaptal?” Archeth, still staring down at An-Kirilnar, feigned an absence of tone she didn’t feel. Even now, she found it hard to look at the resurrected man directly. “We’re well provisioned, we’ve got a long way to go and maybe a fight when we get there. No point in overexerting ourselves this early on.”

“So who’s overexerted?” The portly imperial put his hands on his hips, an uncharacteristic posture as far as she could recall. “These are fighting men, they’re used to keeping a pace. Not like we haven’t all had plenty of rest.”

“Yeah, well we didn’t all get off as lightly as you,” Egar rumbled. “Some of these men took injuries in the wreck. Some of them didn’t have as much stored fat to manage on until my lady Archeth found us aid.”

She glanced around. The Dragonbane had drifted into a vaguely protective bodyguard stance, blocking Kaptal from her. Ludicrous overreaction, if you hadn’t been there in the crane hall that night—she hoped the men would write it off to retainer outrage that Kaptal was questioning the will of
kir
-Archeth Indamaninarmal, proven mistress of ghost mansions and succoring demons in iron, apparent favorite of the Salt Lord, and bearer of haunted blades.

Still … 

Better break this up, Archidi. In case it goes somewhere none of us are ready for.

Because she still had no real idea what Kaptal had become since his resurrection, whether there was now some steely, silver-limbed thing bedded deep in the gore of his brain and steering him, or whether the Warhelm had simply summoned him back to life in a shower of sparks, like the cranes on their rusted overhead tracks in the hall. Above all, she had no idea why Tharalananagharst had found it necessary to bring the imperial merchant back in the first place. It wasn’t as if he had any skills that were worth anything where they were going.

She met his eyes. Had they been that color before? She seemed to remember darker.

“I’m glad you’re feeling so energetic, Kaptal,” she said. “Perhaps you’d like to help carry some of the gear.”

Some sniggering among the men, quickly stifled as Kaptal looked around.

“I am a noble of the imperial court,” he said loudly. “And a chief sponsor of this expedition. I am Yilmar Kaptal, worthy under charter by the hand of Akal Khimran the Great. I do not … 
carry gear
.”

But she thought that the outrage rang a little hollow, compared to the way the man had sounded before on the expedition north. She thought that behind it, she heard a scrabbling, as if Kaptal himself wasn’t quite convinced of anything he’d just said, was talking as much for his own benefit as anyone else’s, was trying to reassure himself, to
remind
himself, of his own identity.

She’d heard something similar in the voices of a few other first-generation courtiers, men still settling into the privilege of their newfound positions, still not quite able to believe the life they now owned, and determined to drive it home to their lesser fellows until it could become confident custom. But she’d never heard it as intense as this, as quietly desperate as it came through in Kaptal’s tightened tones.

She didn’t want to push him.

“Well, then,” she said colorlessly. “Enjoy your chartered privilege and let those not lucky enough to share it take some ease.”

It got a couple of low cheers among the men, and Egar grinned in his now neatly trimmed beard. She gave him a faint smile back, but most of her was still haunted, still wondering.

After the crane hall, she hadn’t seen Kaptal for days. A pack of dog-sized crab devices showed up while she and Egar were still marveling over her recovered knives, and they dragged the body away through a hole in the iron wainscoting. Nothing to worry about, Tharalanangharst assured them breezily. It would all be taken care of. By tacit agreement, neither she nor the Dragonbane had said anything to the other men. They were in any case all too busy by then, looking at maps and drawing up lists, talking to the Warhelm about weaponry and provisions and, in her case, practicing with her newly harnessed knives.