The Dark Defiles (40 page)

“Archeth? You’re trying to put fucking
Archeth
on the Burnished Throne?”

The glyphs flared violently.

And abruptly, Ringil was laughing.

It started small, a disbelieving chuckle at first, but then his mouth split around the sound like a badly sutured wound, and suddenly he was laughing hard.

Perhaps it was the pent-up horror of his time in the dark defiles and gullies,
the
sense of endless, restless sets of eyes hung up above and brooding on his inch-slow progress, the tight, twisting confines of the paths and the scuttle of multiple limbs overhead, the scrape of claw-tipped fingers creeping across wet limestone at his back, tapping with skeletal irony on the glyphs he has passed and noted
… 

Yeah, well, enough of that.

He stuffed the laughter away, got it back down to a chuckle, obscurely glad to find that somewhere inside him, the capacity for genuine mirth still remained. He leaned back in the arms of chair with a broad grin still painted across his face.

“Okay, seriously though. Just so we’re absolutely clear on this. You really plan to depose the Khimran dynasty and make Archeth Indamaninarmal Empress? That’s the big idea?”

“Initially regent.” The words dragged out of Anasharal. “But as time passes and she does not age, as perception of her changes from human to goddess, as the remaining Helmsmen stir to their fullest capacity to serve her, there will be no imaginable replacement for her on the throne or at the head of the Empire. She will reign as God-Empress Eternal.”

“That’s if the dwenda don’t just roll over us all first.”

“If there is any hope of repelling the dwenda, it must come from Yhelteth.” Anasharal’s voice was picking up momentum now, and the glyphs had dulled. It was as if Ringil’s laughter had stung the Helmsman into finally coming clean. “Your own homeland is in thrall to the Aldrain legend, its people will welcome them back with open arms and not question until it is too late. Their own founding myths will eat them alive. The Empire has cultural distance—”

“Yeah? Try telling that to Pashla Menkarak and his fuckwit friends up at the Citadel. They thought the dwenda were angels.”

“That would not have happened under Kiriath leadership.”

“And how exactly do you propose to secure Archeth her seat on the throne?” He gestured, grin crimped down to a sour smile in one corner of his mouth. “It’s not like she’s returning home in triumph from a heroic quest fulfilled.”

“She never needed to. The quest itself was pure pretext, a skein of borrowed legends and half-truths knitted together to provide the necessary impulse in the key players.”

That stopped him. Wiped out the last traces of his amusement.

“You metal motherfucker,” he said wonderingly. “I always knew there was something wrong with this gig. I
knew
you were playing us, right from the start.”

“Then you repressed your doubts remarkably well.”

“I didn’t come along for the fucking quest.”

“Ah, yes—protective loyalty. Strange how much she inspires that, isn’t it?”

“Oh, fuck off.”

He glowered at the upended Helmsman while his head seethed with the new revelations. At his shoulder, he sensed the rigidity that had taken hold of Noyal Rakan. He was, after all, a Throne Eternal. And while Gil had detected in him on more than one occasion a bitter disappointment with the quality of the man now occupying the Burnished Throne, that wasn’t really the point. Rakan’s oath, like all his comrades, was to the throne
itself,
the idea and ideal of the throne, not the Emperor who sat on it at any given moment. That, plus fond memories of Akal the father and a couple of generations of family bond to the Khimran dynasty, would be more than enough to overwhelm any personal dislike for Jhiral the son.

Though now, of course, with earthquake and war and streets full of the ranting idiot faithful, loyalty to Jhiral might be a rather moot point. There were any number of ways a young, unpopular Emperor could die in chaos like that, leaving a gap to be filled and no real time or inclination to worry about who exactly was to blame.

Still … 
Archeth?

“You’re going to have to explain this to me slowly,” he said. “You sell Archeth Indamaninarmal a city in the sea and an undying Kiriath vigil to get her out of town before the shit starts to fly. You sell the Emperor a possible sorcerous threat to his Empire that he can’t ignore so he’ll let her go. Plus, the way this expedition was set up, he’s got a shot at acquiring some easy loot for very little up-front outlay, and the chance to have some of his stroppier rich-men-about-court launch themselves into handy self-imposed exile on seas that …”

And stop.

As howling winds rinsed out the rest of the sand, and the whole ornately carved and crenellated edifice stood out of the desert, revealed for what it was, and bigger than he’d ever imagined it might be. He felt himself stumble before it, felt the sandstorm winds of realization tear through his head.

“Captain,” he heard himself say distantly to Rakan. “This hand is really starting to bother me. Can you get me a couple of grains of flandrijn, powdered into water?”

The Throne Eternal hesitated. Gestured at the Helmsman. “My lord, this is, this sounds like—”

“Yes, it’s compelling, I agree.” Gil turned in the chair and looked into Noyal Rakan’s eyes. “And we’ll resume just as soon as I can think straight with this fucking hand. You can go, Captain, I’ve got this. I don’t believe I’m in any danger. Just … in a lot of pain.”

He flexed his bandaged fingers and grimaced for effect, not entirely faking it. He hissed in through his teeth, pressed his lips together, still holding the young Throne Eternal’s gaze. It wasn’t the
ikinri ‘ska,
wasn’t any kind of sorcery the Creature from the Crossroads might recognize. But it was that old Ringil Angel-eyes magic. Noyal Rakan moistened his lips and his eyes crinkled with concern.

“I’m sorry,” he said softly. “Be right back.”

Ringil watched him go, let him get out of earshot before he turned back to the Helmsman. Voice a hiss not much louder than the noise he’d made to signal his pain.

“You’re building a fucking
cabal
?”

he sprite led them a twisting, looping route through the darkened streets, following some planned path obvious only to itself. Egar couldn’t be sure—cloud cover had crept in from the east, and band and stars were muffled up—but he thought they doubled back and zigzagged a lot. The city became a maze around him, dim towering mounds of broken architecture and seemingly random twists and turns between. Once or twice he saw the distant gleam of a campfire out among the ruins, and the breeze brought him the scent of roasting meat, but that was all. The sprite always veered well away from such signs.

For all the doubling back, though, they moved at a good pace. The sprite flickered briskly on ahead, only pausing or coming back when they hit some awkward obstruction or bottleneck. On these occasions, it brightened itself helpfully and hung about, darting back and forth, throwing warm reddish light across the falls of collapsed masonry or torn-up street surfacing that were slowing them down.

Finally, a couple of hours into the march, it led them up a series of detritus-strewn staircases in one rubble mound and out onto a broad, jutting platform forty feet above street level. Surprised satisfaction muttered among the men. The ruin they’d climbed through was mostly intact—it gave them towering vertical walls at their back, the single staircase entry point to defend and a two hundred degree sweep of vantage out over the city to the front.

It was pretty much an ideal place to make camp.

Yeah, and if you hadn’t been in such a fucking hurry before, Dragonbane, we might have been sitting here nine stronger than we are.

He sat cross-legged at the edge of the platform, away from the others and glowering out at the shattered city skyline. It was not normally in his nature to brood on such things, but the encounter with the lizards had opened a door somewhere in his head, and now all the long-stored memories of the war were back out to play.

Back in the Kiriath Wastes, back in combat with the Scaled Folk.

There’d been a savage intensity to it all back then, a vivid day-to-day urgency that, if he was honest, he’d thrilled to and still sometimes missed. But now, dealt a handful of the very same red-edged cards, all he felt was old and weary of the game. As if everything he’d done back then, every battle he’d fought, every scar he’d collected, had all been for nothing. As if something fanged and grinning dragged him off the mount of his fate and back down into a past he’d done everything he could to leave behind … 

“See anything good out there?”

He glanced up at Archeth’s slim form and tilted, inquiring look. Shook his head.

“More of the same. I don’t think we’ve come all that far as the crow flies. Going to take us a good few days to cross this shit heap.”

“Dodging the Scaled Folk as we go.”

“Yeah, that’s right. Cheer me up, why don’t you?”

She sighed. Lowered herself into a loose sprawl beside him. “It was an honest mistake, Eg, and we all made it, not just you.”

Yeah, but I’m the one supposed to be leading these men out of this mess. It’s my job not to make mistakes that get them killed.
But he didn’t say that, not least because he was beginning to wonder if it was true. They’d all walked into An-Kirilnar behind the Dragonbane, this ragtag assortment of fighting men, but they’d marched out again behind a flickering Kiriath firefly and Archeth Indamaninarmal.

“Honest or not,” he growled, “we can’t afford many more mistakes like that.”

“Agreed.”

They sat for a while, staring off the edge of the platform. She shifted and cleared her throat a couple of times.

“You see Tand’s guys turning out their dead pal’s pockets?” she asked finally.

“Yeah. Took the rings off his fingers as well. The old freebooter’s farewell.” He glanced sideways at her. “What, you were expecting speeches and flowers?”

“I was expecting …” She shook her head. “Doesn’t matter. Fucking sellsword scum.”

“Talking to an old sellsword here, Archidi.”

“Don’t tell me you would have done the same.”

He considered for a moment, brooding on the skyline. “Well, no, maybe not. Not to a comrade-in-arms, anyway. But hey, I’m a barking mad Majak berserker. No accounting for the way us steppe barbarians act.”

She snorted, but he saw a thin smile flicker on her lips.

“Look, you don’t want to read too much into it either way, Archidi. They sat his death vigil, they prayed over him while he was alive. And it’s not like he’s going to miss any of that stuff they took.” He gestured out over the ruined city. “Not like it’d serve any useful purpose left out there with him.”

“Yeah, I know.” The smile had flickered out, left her looking grim and tired. “I just wonder sometimes, what’s the fucking point? Here we are, trying to get everybody home safe, and for what? So Tand’s thug freebooters can go back to bullying slave caravans up and down the great north road for him? So Kaptal can get back to his high-class whore-mongering and his blackmail around court? So these asshole privateers can slink off home through the borders, sign on with a new ship, and go back to their fucking pirating …”

He nodded. “So Chan and Nash and the others can go back to their job safeguarding the wanker on the Burnished Throne?”

“Well, that’s … different.”

“Is it?” Another time, he might have left it alone. But he was raw from the fight and the errors that had caused it, and twitchy from this whole forced march back into his own past. “How is it any different, Archidi? Jhiral’s a cunt, and you know it. He’s every bit as big a cunt as Tand or Kaptal or any League pirate captain you want to name. And the Empire pays a phalanx of its very best fighting men to stand around him and let him go on being a cunt without anyone able to touch a hair on his head, while you stand at his shoulder, whispering advice into his delicate little cunt ear. Doesn’t mean we won’t try to get you and our Throne Eternal pals home, though, does it?”

That sat between them for a while, like the night and the cold questing reach of the breeze. When the silence started to mount up, he glanced across at her, but she was still staring fixedly out into the darkness.

“You don’t understand, Eg.” Quietly, but with a steely conviction infusing her tone. “You don’t know what it was like before the Empire. The whole south was just a bunch of fucking horse tribes slaughtering each other left, right, and center when they weren’t riding down out of the hills and butchering the farmers and the fishermen on plains, carrying off women and children as slaves. The Empire put a stopper in that, it brought peace and law to the whole region in less than twenty years.”

“Yeah, think we got this lecture at imperial barracks induction.”

“Jhiral isn’t so bad, Eg.”

“He’s a cunt.”

“He’s a young man handed too much power too soon, that’s all. A boy who spent his whole boyhood learning to fear his own brothers and sisters and stepmothers and aunts and uncles and cousins, never mind anybody else at court; a son whose father never had time for him because he was always too fucking busy off making war at one end of the Empire or the other. You’re surprised Jhiral’s turned out the way he is? That he acts the way he does? I’m not.” Voice rising now, an obscure anger piling onto the conviction, lending it force. “And now he’s had to watch the whole race of magical beings that protected his father—that protected his whole dynasty before him—cut and run as soon as he takes the throne. He’s the first one, Eg, the very first one who’s had to deal with that, since my father walked into the Khimran encampment nearly five hundred years ago and told Sabal the Conqueror’s flea-bitten thug grandfather that his bloodline were going to be kings. Try and imagine what it’s like for a moment—there’s this five-hundred-year-old magic carpet your family’s always had, to raise them up above the crowd and keep them safe and special, and now suddenly it’s yanked out from under your feet just when you need it most. Jhiral’s the first one who hasn’t had the Kiriath behind him, building wonders in the city to amaze his people, riding with him to war to terrify his enemies, lending him weapons and knowledge and power, promising him that whatever happens, history is on his side.”

“He has you,” Egar rumbled.

“Yeah, he has me.” A mirthless sneer flitted across her face in the gloom. “Every solid thing he grew up thinking he could count on turns to dust in his hands, and he gets me as the consolation prize. One burned-out, krin-fried Kiriath half-blood juggling five thousand years of heritage she doesn’t fucking understand. Is that supposed to make him feel better?”

He shrugged. “Dunno, he’s a cunt, isn’t he? But I’d take you at my shoulder over anyone else I know with a blade, and be grateful for the company.”

The moment locked and held solid, until she broke it apart with her laughter. He looked at her and saw in the low light the tear sheen in her eyes. But she sniffed and grinned when she spoke.

“Anyone else you know with a blade, eh? Thought that’d be Gil.”

“Well.” He gestured. “He’s got the other shoulder.”

And they both broke up laughing, loud enough that faces turned toward them across the blue-lit platform ruin.

But later, as they lay side by side in their bedrolls and stared up past the jagged loom of ruins into a clouded sky, she said very quietly “You’re right, Eg. Jhiral is a cunt. But I can’t help it, I’ve known him too long. He’s been in my life ever since he was a squalling little bundle I could lift on one palm.”

He grunted. Bleakly, he remembered Ergund; playing raiders with him about the encampment when they were both not much older than six or seven; staring down at his mutilated corpse in the steppe grass two years past.
We’re all small and harmless once, Archidi. But we all grow up. And some of us grow up needing killing.

You’re talking to a brother slayer here.

Let it go, Eg. Let her talk it out.

He didn’t want to fight with Archeth, whatever spiky balls of rage might be rolling about in the pit of his stomach, looking for release.

Yeah, save that for whatever’s waiting for us down the boulevard tomorrow.

Or out on the steppe when we get there.

For the first time, he allowed himself to think fully about what he might find if he went back. How it might boil down if he asked around in Ishlin-ichan, got word of the Skaranak and their herds and tracked them down. How his people might react if he just showed up one night like some wronged ancestor ghost in the campfire glow.

And put a gutting knife into that fucking buzzard Poltar.

That little shit Ershal, too.

“Probably held him in my arms more times than his own father ever did, you know.” Archeth, still musing up at the clouded darkness overhead. “Akal was never around when it mattered. I still remember hugging Jhiral at four fucking years old, Eg, the night the Chaila pretenders sneaked into the palace and tried to murder him. I’m clutching him to me, I’m trying to cover his eyes so he can’t see the carnage, trying to hide the fact I’m checking him for wounds at the same time, and he’s weeping, screaming, covered in blood from where I took down the guy that had him when I burst in, and all he wants is his big sister to come and hold him instead of me. And I’m trying to explain to him that he can’t really see his sister right now, in fact, uhm, well, Chaila’s got to go away for a while.”

“Yeah. Ten years in a House of Prayer in the Scatter, wasn’t it?”

“They pardoned her home after six. Big mistake, as it turned out.” Archeth blew a weary sigh up at the cloud cover. “Fucking joys of Empire-building. Course, by the time she came home, Jhiral knew what it was all about. No way to keep it from him, and he’d survived another couple of attempts to scrub him out in the meantime, it was getting to be part of the palace decor. When Chaila came back, he wouldn’t have anything to do with her. Never let her even touch him again. So, yeah, I look at all that and I think, sure, you’re right, he’s a cunt. But what chance did he have?”

Rustle of blankets as she shuffled around to look at him across the small space between them.

“And he’s
smart,
Eg, that’s what counts. He’s smart and he sees the point of the Empire. You can work with that, you can build something on it. Whatever bloody mess he makes protecting himself, it’ll pass. He won’t live forever, but what I can help him build might. He’ll leave heirs, and I can work with them, give them the wisdom he never had the time to acquire. Make one of them into the ruler he’ll never be.”

“Or,” he said mildly, “you could just save some time and look for a better king right now.”

She sighed. Rolled back to face the sky.

“What, throw out five centuries of stable dynastic rule, probably set off a civil war, and let everyone and his horse think the throne’s up for grabs? No thanks, Eg. I may not much like the way things are right now, but I’m pretty sure it’s better than the alternatives. And I am done with bloodbaths.”

“You hope.” He yawned, cavernously. “Better put some big fucking prayers behind that, you want it to stick. Like a certain hard-nose faggot said at Demlarashan that time—
we live in bloodbath times …
”