The Dark Defiles (51 page)

Yeah, and if they don’t get hold of some decent weapons pretty sharpish, that’s still going to be the way it ends.

Because if
Sprayborne
’s crew was poorly armed, they were princes in plate compared to the liberated prisoners aboard the other hulks. There’d been no more supply boats to ambush—the weather he’d summoned had seen to that—and while the lack of attention made freeing the convicted men that much easier, the corresponding lack of jailer’s escorts to murder and shakedown for steel had meant a real dearth of arms. The best most of the prisoners could do were sections of rusty chain or long splinters of half-rotted deck timber prized up and fitted out with ship’s nails through the business end. All right for a shock attack, maybe, but once the Watch woke up and found its feet, well … 

There were prisoners aboard the hulks, Gil knew, whose minds and wills were long ago broken, others whose crimes never involved violence of any sort. Some of these would cower, some would hide, some would skulk and run. Some might never even crawl out of the cells whose doors he’d torn off their hinges. But crewing the hulks alongside these were a majority of men—and a tiny handful of women—once counted lethally dangerous by the courts. With luck, some of them would still merit that judgment. And no small number of those would have been pirates once, the kind for whom storming a harbor was second nature. They’d manage somehow, they’d work something out. Beat down and butcher the first few squads of watchmen while the element of surprise lasted, frisk them and take what weapons they carried. Break into the harbor-side arsenal, maybe—in time of war like this, it had to be stocked to the ceiling. Gear up, carry fire and steel onward, into the heart of the city.

What they did after that, Ringil told himself he didn’t much care. Just as long as it lasted the time he needed to get in and out.

The rat-hole tenements and rickety jetty walkways of Harbor End began to thin out, gave way to the more salubrious housing of halfway decent neighborhoods like Ekelim and Shest. Rain had driven other traffic off the water, and the people off the promenades. He saw lights in windows, smoke from chimneys, but little other sign of life. Once, down at the water’s edge alongside a jetty, he thought he saw a ferryman huddled in a cloak at his oars. Thought he saw the shadowed opening under the ferryman’s hood turn to follow him as they passed.

He shivered and looked away.

Sprayborne
drifted on upriver like a phantom in the murk.

By the time they got to the Glades district, its manicured mangroves and ornamental jetty water frontage, there’d been a couple of graunching knocks to the hull, and Ringil was starting to worry about draft. A generation or two ago, the noble families whose mansions littered the Glades all owned warehouses across the river, and it was quite customary for League merchantmen to come up this far to load and unload. But the custom waned—cheaper land for warehousing came up for grabs near the newly expanded harbor, shipmasters preferred not to navigate the twists and kinks in the river if they didn’t have to and started charging a premium to do it. Anyway, the old plots across the river could now be sold at a huge profit as new wealth crowded in, seeking upriver cachet. Great stone mansions sprouted on the warehouse side—though none quite as imposing as the originals they aped on the opposite bank—and river traffic dwindled. Silt built up and was no longer dredged out, as a couple of incautiously overloaded mason’s barges discovered to their cost back in Ringil’s youth.

Later of course, with the war, a lot of that new wealth collapsed again and the land was reacquired in the reconstruction, designated for thanksgiving temples and shrines, ornamental gardens, and expensive memorials to the noble clans whose sons had done, if the truth were known, not much more than a single-figure percentage of the dying. It was about the time Gil left town, so he didn’t know if there’d been any dredging done since.
Sprayborne
was a raider, not a merchantman. Even fully laden she’d have been a pretty shallow draft vessel, and now, with no cargo but the skin and bone of her starved down, decimated crew—plus, okay, a scant two dozen imperial shock troops with assorted outlaws, mercenary turncoats, and faggot degenerates for officers—she was traveling light indeed. But then there was that thick crust of barnacles to think about, and whatever clearance they had below that, things had to be getting pretty cramped for the merroigai towing them … 

He spotted the stretch of waterfront he’d been looking for. Laid hands on the starboard rail, leaned out to scan for signs of life.
Sprayborne
responded, as if to the rudder she’d been stripped of years past. The hulk angled and heeled, she surged in hard, rammed into the bank between two of the carefully kept, stilt-fingered mangroves. Crushed a dinky little jetty under her bow and jammed in place. Ringil barely kept his feet, and he’d seen it coming, was hanging on to the rail at the time. Down on the main deck he heard curses and bodies tumbling.

“Ride’s over,” he told Sharkmaster Wyr. “Hold your men until I give the word. I’ve got some instructions you need to follow.”

The pirate uncoiled from where he’d been crouched. It was a lot like watching a reptile peon get up from its nesting hollow. He hefted the ax-head pike. “I thought the instructions were blood from the ocean to the Eastern gate. Now all of a sudden you want to get particular?”

“There’s a mansion nearby,” Ringil said evenly. “A couple of hundred yards in. It has a family name graven into the gateposts, in the unlikely event you or any of your men can read, and Hoiran and Firfirdar in effigy on top if you can’t. Neither you nor your men will go anywhere near that mansion. Do I make myself clear?”

Wyr bared his teeth. “Let me guess. Eskiath house?”

“Just so. That’s where I’m going with my men, and I want a clear run at it. Is that understood? Or are we going to have a problem?”

A shrug. “I won’t get in the way of any man’s revenge, if doesn’t cross my own.”

“Good. Then we are in accord.”

Down on the main deck, Rakan already had the men formed up and ready to disembark. Boarding rope ladders borrowed from
Dragon’s Demise
were tossed tumbling over the side as Gil arrived. Wyr’s starveling pirates milled about, watching. Ringil nodded and Rakan called it. The imperials went over the rail and down, began to pick their way out of the tangle of mangrove roots below. Klithren went with them; Rakan hung around, gaze mistrustful on the freed pirate crew. Gil made a smile for him.

“You go. I’m fine, I’ll be right there.”

The Throne Eternal bowed his head, swung over the rail, and clambered handily down to join his fellow imperials. Ringil stood for a long last moment on
Sprayborne
’s grotty main deck, staring around at the ragged, barely clad company of men he’d freed and was about to unleash. His final gift to the fair city of Trelayne—pallid, fish-belly faces staring back, eyes sunken and feverish-bright with rage, filthy thinning hair plastered down in rat’s-tails by the rain. Bodies still hunching instinctively from long confinement and casual brutality, manacle-scarred wrists and ankles on limbs like the gnawed bones of a fowl platter, rib cages you could count each rib on from yards away. Closer in they stank to a man, despite all the rain could do.

He’d seen corpsemite-animated zombies that didn’t look much worse than this. Stalking the manicured paths and pastures of the Glades, they’d probably be taken for such.

How the fuck did it come to this, Gil?

He looked at them, as if they might give him the answer. But they only muttered and growled among themselves like feral dogs, and none would meet his gaze. He grunted, gave up, and looked up to the foredeck above, where Sharkmaster Wyr stood in command.

“All yours. Blood from ocean to Eastern gate. You make them pay.”

Wyr lifted the pike and jerked his chin in what Gil later deciphered as a salute. “Die well, my lord.”

It was an age-old commendation to battle from the founder legends of Trelayne, resuscitated and made fashionable again during the war. Odd, coming out of the mouth of a man set to slaughter and burn his way across the heart of his own city, but Ringil supposed he was hardly in a position to judge. He nodded soberly, uttered the formula response.

“As well as circumstance and the gods allow.”

“Hey, fuck the gods. This is what we’ve got left. You die well, sir.”

Ringil shrugged. “Yeah, you, too.”

He went over the rail.

I
N THE TREE-SHADED DARK OF THE
G
LADES, THEY WERE SPARED THE WORST
of the rain, though it hammered unseen into the foliage over their heads and made a sound like pebbles tossed constantly against glass. They ignored the winding ornamental paved paths Gil knew from his youth, cut directly across the sward instead. It was easy going, and the few inhabitants they came across ran screaming from their advance. The first time it happened—a young, bedraggled woman servant, out cutting marsh mint for the kitchen—the vanguard marines made to follow and bring her back. Ringil put out a barring arm, shook his head.

“Let her tell her tale. She’ll magnify numbers, likely make trolls of us, too. The more panic she sows, the better.”

Grins from the marines. The idea appealed. They let the other chance encounters run without comment. They tramped on across the sodden turf, dodged the odd thicket of mangrove roots, scared a few more servants, and came finally upon house lights through the gloom.

The iron spiked gates were chained up, as he’d expected. He tipped a bleak look up at the statues on the posts—King and Queen of the Dark Court, fanged and tusked Hoiran, Firfirdar in flames, angled slightly in toward each other as if enjoying a sly exchanged glance amid the more po-faced business of watching over the affairs of all humankind.

Yeah, well—watch over this.

He laid hands on the wet links of the chain, he uttered the glyph. The iron rusted and crumbled and broke apart under his touch. The gates blew back on their hinges as if hurled by the wind. They hit the blocking posts set to catch them at the sides of the carriage path with a resounding iron clang.

Bit overstated, Gil—you could have just pushed them open.

Did the timeworn grin on Firfirdar’s graven face broaden just the faintest bit?

He inclined his head fractionally at the effigy’s stony gaze, then stalked past it and up the gravel path, toward the house that once gave him birth.

hey hauled the Dragonbane out from under the corpse of the dragon he’d slain, but by then there wasn’t a lot left. Venom had eaten him down to the bone at arms and skull and shoulders, left his rib cage exposed in patches against the charred meat of his chest. The stench of cooked flesh was overpowering; even the sandalwood reek of the dead dragon couldn’t mask it.

She squatted beside him. Stared numbly down at the damage and the mess, at the skull’s anonymous rictus grin. Tried to make sense.

“Not a shit death,” she whispered.

Could have fooled me,
grinned the skull.

Between two of the charred ribs, something glinted at her. She squinted closer, took a couple of uncertain moments to work out what she was looking at—the three-elemental coin, the one they’d tossed to choose who’d play decoy. The venom had scorched apart the pocket he’d stowed it in along with the rest of his clothing, had even melted the coin itself a little around the edges, glued it into the seared flesh. She touched the metal with one finger, and in that moment it dawned on her suddenly how he’d faked that toss.

Let the coin fall into the cup of your palm. Single, lightning-swift beat while you snatch a glance. If it came up the way you wanted, you let it lie, flexed your palm flat and offered it for inspection. If not—slap it across onto the back of your other hand, uncover it there instead.

Walked into that one, Archidi.

The wraith of a smile at her lips. She blinked rapidly, sniffed hard. Let the coin lie where it was, kissed her fingertips where they’d touched it, and laid her hand gently back on the blackened rib cage.

Presently, the Majak came across and stood by the corpse. One of them held Egar’s staff lance. She knew none of their names, understood almost none of what they murmured to each other. There were fragments, names of deities she’d heard before—
Urann, Vavada, Takavach
—words for fire and light, a phrase they used more than once that sounded like it might have been their dialect version of the Skaranak term for the band, the Sky Road that the Majak dead must walk. She supposed they were talking about where the Dragonbane was now.

Because he sure as shit isn’t here anymore.

She snorted back the tears behind her eyes, levered herself back to her feet. The Majak gave her respectful space.

“We can’t—” She cleared her throat. “We can’t take him with us. I’m sorry. There’s enough to carry as it is, and we still don’t know what’s down in that pit.”

The Majak who held the lance shook his head. “The whole world shelters beneath the Sky Road’s bow,” he said in accented Tethanne. “It will take the Dragonbane home, as well from here as any other place of rest.”

She nodded tepidly.

“Would he want burial?” one of the others asked. “It’s custom among the Skaranak. They cairn their dead. Would he want that?”

“I don’t know,” she said, because she didn’t.

The Majak with the lance coughed a laugh. He nodded at the slumped mountain of dragon flesh behind them.

“Memorial enough there, I reckon. I’ll bet no Skaranak that ever lived had a cairn the size those bones are going make.”

“The bones don’t last,” she said quietly. “They rot away with time. Everything does, apart from the teeth and the gut lining. It’s the venom. In ten years, there’ll be nothing left to show a dragon died here.”

“And the skin, the scales?” The one who seemed to know Skaranak custom looked pretty put out. His hand strayed down to a pouch at his belt. She guessed he’d taken time, like some of others among the men, to hack off some small trophy. “Doesn’t the skin last?”

Archeth shrugged. “Soak it in water for a day, scrub it well on both sides. Hang it out to dry in the sun. That usually does the trick.”

“Water?” The Majak cast about the gray, rubbled landscape, dismayed. “In the
sun?
”

“Yeah.” She turned to walk away, stopped. “You know what? We are going to bury him. Get him up out of this fucking crater, find someplace with a decent view. That’s where we dig.”

T
HEY LAID HIM OUT SO HE’D FACE THE RISING SUN, IF IT EVER CAME UP
free of this endless fucking cloud cover. The Majak consulted among themselves, then decked the grave out with a couple of judiciously chosen talismans. They drove the staff lance down hard between the stones at the foot of the cairn they’d made, packed it tight with smaller chunks of masonry, so it stood a rigid yard and a half upright, gleaming in the pallid light.

They buried Alwar Nash alongside, laid the Throne Eternal’s sword and shield on the piled rubble the way his family would have done on his tomb back home. The men stood around, said what words there were. Selak Chan led the rest of the Throne Eternal in formal prayer. The Majak chanted and ululated a bit.

The rest drifted off down to the dragon corpse to see about souvenirs.

Archeth stood like a statue at the cairn, head bowed, as stiff and motionless as the upward jutting staff lance in front of her. Couldn’t believe she was leaving him here. Couldn’t yet believe that he
was
here, that those charred, buried remnants were all that was left of the Dragonbane. It was as if she expected him back at any moment, was just waiting for him to stick his head around the corner of the ruin, wink at her, grin.

What? You thought I’d go down that easy? It’s Dragon
bane,
Archidi. Dragon
Bane.
Not Dragonsbitch. I used to kill these fucking things for a living.

You certainly killed the fuck out of that one.

Hey—all part of the service.

The Majak and the Throne Eternal finished up their respective rituals, cast uncertain glances in her direction, and then left her alone. She heard them muttering among themselves as they headed down the slope to join the others. Rain blew about in the wind, specked at her face. Overhead, the clouds were in turmoil—massing thicker and darker, hastening off somewhere else, leaching what miserable light there was from the day and taking it with them.

She took the hint. Followed the men down.

She found the bulk of them gathered at a cautious distance from the dead dragon, squatting or standing in their respective groups. One or two were still toying with the mementos they’d carved from the corpse. She saw the Majak she’d talked to about hide curing—seemed he’d thought better of his initial trophy and somehow managed to gouge loose a fang from the dragon’s jaw instead. He was busily flensing the root end, scraping off the last stubborn leavings of tissue with his knife. He nodded at her as she arrived, perhaps in thanks.

Yilmar Kaptal stood apart, statue still, staring at the dragon as if it might come suddenly back to life. She cleared her throat, in advance this time, and like the others he turned to look at her. She lifted her voice, clear and loud against the ruffling wind.

“We have done what honor we can for those who gave their lives. It’s time now to give their sacrifice meaning.” She pivoted about and pointed to where the fire sprite hung about at the sinkhole rim. “That way is our means of returning home. The path is cleared, it remains only to walk it.”

A couple of the privateers exchanged a look. One of them leaned and muttered something in Naomic to one of Tand’s crew. The mercenary nodded soberly at what he was hearing, cleared his throat, and spoke in Tethanne.

“They want to know, my lady, what if there’s another dragon waiting for us down in the pits.”

She shook her head. “Dragons are solitary in adulthood. That much we did learn in the war. One this size would not tolerate any competition within its range.”

“But they act as brood mothers to the reptile folk.” Another mercenary, pitching in unhelpfully. “On the beaches at Demlarashan, they protected the lizard advance.”

“Yes, that’s true.”

“Then there may be Scaled Folk lairing in the pits.”

“Then we’ll kill them,” snapped Kanan Shent. He was banged up from the fight with the dragon, had two fingers on his left hand wrapped and splinted, wore thick bandages around both legs, right arm, and head. But there was a feverish, impatient gleam in his eyes. “As we killed them yesterday, as we slew this beast here today.”

“We lost nine men yesterday,” someone called out. “Fighting on open ground. In those pits, we could find ourselves—”

Shent rounded on the speaker. “Will you stand here bleating about losses and risk like some merchant negotiating cost? You were quick enough to cut trophies from the dragon that you did not earn, but will not face creatures one fiftieth its size? Did Menith Tand hire fighting men for his guard, or faggots?”

“Hey, fuck you, imperial. You don’t—”

“Gentlemen!”

No need to force it, there was enough undischarged grief and rage in her to fuel the sack of a city. They heard it in her voice, saw it in her face when they jerked around to look. They shut up. She worked at not showing her surprise, grabbed the advantage, and kept going.

“There will
be no need,
gentlemen, for these deliberations.” She gestured once more up at the waiting fire sprite. “Our guide has consistently steered us clear of the Scaled Folk and any other dangers we might face. Our only encounter came when we did not wait for its lead, and we were saved from the dragon because it held us here among the ruins until the beast showed itself. I think it’s safe to conclude that it will not now lead us into ambush.”

They quietened, but she spotted a couple of mutinous faces among the privateers. She held back a sigh.
Well, you did warn me about this, Eg. Could have wished for better timing, but
… 

“You.” She indicated the mercenary who’d acted as translator. “Ask those two at the back what their problem is.”

Tand’s man glanced across the gathered men and caught the same expressions she had. He raised his hands in a gesture that needed no translation. The scowling privateers looked taken aback. There was a brief exchange in lilting Naomic, the mercenary, from the look of it, weighing in with a few brusque comments of his own above and beyond the brief Archeth had given him. One of the privateers got angry, the mercenary trampled his words down. There was some bristling on both sides, then Tand’s man waved his arm disgustedly and turned away, back to Archeth. He looked embarrassed.

“Well?”

“They, uh—my lady, they say they are not happy about following the fire guide. They do not trust the demon spirit at An-Kirilnar. They say if it murdered Sogren Cablehand on a whim, why should it not intend to do the same with them?”

Archeth shot the privateers a dirty look. “Little late in the day for these qualms, isn’t it?”

“What I told them, my lady.”

She drew a deep breath. What was it Gil was always saying?
The men under your command may well hate you.
And then some rambling drivel about learning to live with it, leaving it alone, transmuting it somehow into loyalty in the heat of battle, whatever. Didn’t sound very likely, but then Gil had led some very hard-boiled men into some very tight spots, and somehow always managed to come out the other side alive.

Let’s see if we can’t do the same thing here, Archidi.

She marshaled the slop of anger and loss inside, harnessed it again. She jerked her chin at the glowering privateers.

“Tell them,” she said, with biting force, “that the Great Spirit at An-Kirilnar did not act on a
whim
when it killed Sogren Cablehand. It acted for
me.
And it continues to act for me through this fire guide. If they do not want to follow Sogren to his fate, then there’s a very simple way for them to avoid it.
Obey me, in all things
.”

The mercenary gaped. She saw a similar look on a fair few other faces among the Tethanne speakers.

“Make that clear to them,” she said.

“Uh … Yes, my lady.”

“And then go get your pack on.” She turned her head slowly to take in the whole gathering. “All of you. Go find your packs and gear up. We’re going home. Throne Eternal Alwar Nash and the Dragonbane died for that. So did the nine men who fought and died yesterday. I will not piss away their sacrifice, and nor will any of you.
We are going home.
”

T
HEY GOT DOWN TO THE NEAREST EDGE OF THE PITS WITHOUT INCIDENT.
There was some on-and-off muttering in the ranks, mainly among the privateers, but it died away as they got up close to the great black metal clamping arms, and the scale of the Kiriath construction dawned on them. The clamps were three times the height of a man where they came up out of the pit, tailing off only gradually to something you could have hauled yourself up onto when they were nearly fifty yards back from the lip. They crushed the Aldrain stone under their weight; she saw where dressed blocks of masonry had shattered and sheered.

She moved up closer to the lip of the pit, peered down, and saw a dizzying progression of scaffolding built along the inner surface, reaching away downward and out of clear view. There were interlocking stanchions and cross-struts, snaking cables and pipes the width of a man’s waist, huge angled dishes of alloy and wire, whole tilted panels of mesh as big as a mainsail, all giving back a sheen of purple or blue where they rose high enough into the neck of the pit to catch the light. She felt the steady rise of warm air up the shaft like a summer breeze on her face and hands. She caught the brewing stack reek of alloy husbandry below.