The Dark Defiles (67 page)

Whatever the Warhelm had done to Kaptal to bring him back from the dead, it didn’t seem to have recaptured much of his street smarts in the process. And Archeth had seen enough of spymaster Eshen to know how little Kaptal would need to slip before he was marked, and a report filed right back to the palace in Yhelteth. Which was about the last fucking thing she needed. There was going to be quite enough hard work as it was when they got back, without shit like this to stoke the fires of Jhiral’s enduring obsession with disloyalty.

She found Kaptal standing beside the wagon, alone. Offered a horse from the embassy stables for the trip, he’d elected to ride beside the wagon-driver instead, which earned him a few respectful glances from imperials and Skaranak alike. He seemed the only one among the party entirely untroubled by the nature of the thing they hauled.

“Got a problem?” she asked him without preamble.

He gestured around at the men setting up camp. “We are stopping here for the night?”

“Your powers of observation astound me. Yes, we are stopping here for the night. What’s the matter—you don’t like the view?”

“Don’t you see the crater? Do you know what
happened
in this place? “

She eyed him curiously. “No, I do not. Do you?”

“I … am informed.” Again, that odd hesitation, as if he was trying to assemble reasons after the fact for the words coming out of his mouth. “The Skaranak … mentioned just now … to some of our men … they say this is a sacred place to their people.”

“Yeah, I’m told some warrior god dropped his sword here. It was awhile ago, I doubt he’ll be back for it.”

“You really think it wise to—”

“Kaptal! Or …” A weary gesture. “Whoever else is in there. Just. You got something useful to tell me? Then how about you skip the dark hints and just tell me.”

She thought that for a brief moment she saw panic rising in his eyes. Then it was gone, snuffed out by something else, and he drew himself up, offended.

“I do not understand you, my lady, or your rudeness. I am not part of some cabal with ulterior motives; my opinions are my own. And the useful thing I have to tell you is this—that awaiting a local sorcerer on ground that holds magical significance for his people is not a wise move.”

“Well, it’s the only way the Skaranak are going to do this,” she said evenly. “So I guess we’re stuck with it. Now why don’t you go see if they’ve put up a tent for you yet?”

He bowed and backed off. She watched him go, brooding on what he’d said and seemed uncannily to know, because she had a nasty suspicion he was right.

She didn’t like the feel of the crater, either.

S
HE FOUND HERSELF SOME EVEN GROUND.
W
ORKED THROUGH A COUPLE OF
Hanal Keth katas, thrusting, blocking, slashing, and stabbing at the air around her, barking and shrilling with each strike. Twisting about, pouring knife hilts from hand to hand and back like water between cups. Draw, sheath, draw again, swap and double, finish on a throw. Now go pick up your blade.

Again.

The ingrained moves and paces, the formal savagery of it soothed her, put her brooding to rest. The sun declined, got low enough to dazzle her each time she turned westward. No cloud to speak of, the band was an unbroken hoop that leapt horizon to horizon, caught and threw back the reddening gleam of the sun as it set. The day’s heat started to seep away. Her sweat stood cooler on her brow. A couple of bright stars pricked through the velvet gloom in the east.

Once more round and then—

It came at her, out of the long grass and the declining sun’s dazzle, as she bent to retrieve Bandgleam from the ground. She had time for one snatched impression—a boulder, smooth and pale and hidden in the grass, thrashing to sudden life—and then the whole creature towered over her, three yards tall, hunching forward, long backward-hinging limbs lifting a curved, compact body, long head and wide, fanged snout gaping down at her like a shark’s. A long, taloned hand the size of a warhorse’s head, reaching for her at the end of an arm that came down like a whip.

Move!

The change jolted through her—the patterned calm of the kata, shattered into the mess of real combat. Just time to grab Bandgleam left-handed, then she was rolling frantically right, away from the taloned lash of the arm. The thing shrilled and stamped forward a step—the ground quivered under her with the impact—felt like the foot came down right next to her head. She rolled again, found her feet, came up with a knife in each hand, facing her foe.

The fanged mouth leered at her. Hot blast of breath across her face as the creature shrilled again, the reek of rotting meat fragments bedded somewhere in its jaws. Archeth threw on reflex—Wraithslayer, up and into the long throat, so the creature reared back in shock. Her empty right hand swung back in and down, brushed at her thigh, and Falling Angel leapt out of her boot to fill the gap. She circled, looking for an eye.

“Long Runners! To arms! The steppe ghouls are on us!”

Someone bawling in Tethanne—one of the auxiliaries by the atrocious accent—against a backdrop of startled Majak yells.
Well—nice to know what we’re facing.
But she didn’t like the sound of that plural.

The runner she’d spiked was pawing irritably at its throat, trying to dislodge the knife. But it turned its neck snakishly as she moved, keeping her in view and centered, and it grinned at her like a parent crouched to play with offspring.

She grinned back. Threw both her knives, like skipping slivers of bandlight across the gathering gloom.

Bandgleam put out the steppe ghoul’s right eye, Falling Angel found a home in the side of the throat, not far from her sister blade. The runner screamed and staggered sideways. Archeth was already rushing in, empty-handed but both arms tugging to the small of her back, didn’t even feel like she was the one doing it. Quarterless and Laughing Girl kissed her palms, came out in her grip. She got in close and struck, first into the upper leg, hauled herself up on the fixing point that Quarterless made, slashed across the ghoul’s unprotected belly with Laughing Girl. The creature’s guts sagged out, steaming in the evening air. She hung on and slashed again, plunged Laughing Girl deeper, twisting and gouging into the midst of the steaming mess. Sudden, intense stink of shit from the ruptured entrails, a gush of blood and other fluids from the wound. The runner screamed again, clouted her aside with one blindly thrashing arm. She flew briefly through the air, hit hard amid the grass.

But she heard the steppe ghoul go down. It shook the ground she lay on.

She scrambled back to her feet, cast about. The long runner lay on its side about a dozen yards off in the grass—hoarse, snorting breath and one limb kicking at the sky in spasm. By the lack of other motion, she judged it done. But—

Across the camp to her right, battle raged in the reddish light. Looked like at least a half dozen more of these fucking things, and nobody on a horse to face them. The Skaranak and a couple of the auxiliaries fought with staff lances, weapons whose reach was at least suited to the enemy. They kept the runners at bay with thrust and block as she watched. The imperials, forced to use arms more suited to the dispatch of humans, were in trouble.

She stalked toward the fight. Did it without thinking, did it unarmed.

Threw up her empty right hand like a command to halt. Wraithslayer flew to it like some trained hawk. Her hand wrapped the hilt and something shocked through her whole body at the grip. Down at waist height, her left hand opened behind her, unprompted, and another blade was there. At some level only now opening to her, she knew without looking that it was Quarterless.

She saw the damage the Kiriath steel dreamed.

Something inside her chimed. Rang in her ears like tolling bells, shivered in her skull. She opened her mouth and let it out. She ran in, screaming.

Worry about the rest later.

he world went briefly away, came back in fragments tinged in red.

Klithren at his side as he went down—hand on the sword at his waist, blade half drawn—furious, disbelieving roar, choked off as the scavenged chain length came around, inhumanly swift, wrapped him hard around the throat and jaw—

Shahn’s eyes—pupil, iris, all gone into featureless, staring black—

Worm’s eye view of the wharf he lay on and the corpses strewn along it—

“Cast off, cast off—they’re here!”
Shahn’s voice, pitched for the same panic that had drawn Gil and Klithren in.
“Row for your lives! My lord Ringil is down, torn apart! Get the fuck out of here! The northmen’s demons are coming!”

His flesh seemed to shrivel on his bones as he yelled. Ringil saw the weathered southern features slough away, peeled like leather scraps off a cobbler’s knife. Pale, gaunt white beneath - bone sharp features, a triumphant snarl—the face of an alabaster demon, looming over him—

Like Risgillen, like Seethlaw, and he could not choke down the longing that rose in him at that fleeting thought, nor the corrosive self-hate that came searing in behind.

But was not Seethlaw, nor Seethlaw’s sister, nor any dwenda he knew.

One more snatched shred of vision as he went down into the darkness … 

Klithren, turned toward him on the stones of Outlander wharf not a yard and a half away, face turning slowly black and bulge eyed as the downed mercenary strangled to death on his crushed and swollen larynx.

Done.

V
OICES IN THE WHIRLING DARK.

Well—
a
voice, anyway—echoes gathering into a single, familiar tone.

“… and if it’s any small consolation, I can tell you with some reasonable degree of certainty that your friend
kir
-Archeth Indamaninarmal is in fact alive and well. She did not drown on the Wastes coast after all.”

Anasharal?

“Ingharnanasharal, in truth. I am the Warhelm once again, more or less entire.” And Ringil heard it, as if for the first time, grasped finally what it meant—the fresh, faintly sonorous timbre in the voice that had spooked the dwenda back in Findrich’s palace. “We have not been formally introduced, of course, though I have been with you since I saved you from the storm-caller’s bonds.”

“It … the
ikinri ‘ska
 … it worked?”

“Yes, it did. Admirably. Your new mastery of the glyph systems written into this world is quite remarkable. You succeeded in forcing Anasharal against every embedded command and compulsion it was given, out of discrete existence and back into a full union with the Warhelm carcass it left behind. The fusion is clumsy, the joins are fissured here and there, still bleeding a little into the void, but really, I am impressed. And I am whole.”

“Good.” His lips were numb; he wasn’t sure if he was actually having this conversation or not, whether the words were in his mouth or only in his head. “You can help get me the fuck out of here, then.”

“Ah, yes. That.”

They were binding him, they were lifting him. But his vision was useless, shattered, shot through with red-veined dark. He caught swooping, fragmented glimpses of things—dwenda faces leaning over, peering at him; Risgillen in conversation with the new dwenda who had been Shahn; the night sky and the rain that fell out of it.

His head lolled back—Outlander wharf receding upside down behind him, Klithren of Hinerion’s corpse, lying twisted among the other scattered dead. A jolting, inverted view of firelit harbor waters, and there—his eyes grabbed for one desperate moment, could not hold the view—Nyanar’s second longboat, reduced by distance to the dimensions of a toy and pulling hard away, almost at the harbor mouth … 

“I’m afraid,” said the Warhelm, without any trace of regret, “that rescue from your predicament won’t be possible. In fact—it is only fair to let you know this—you are back in dwenda hands almost entirely as a result of my efforts. It was I that helped Lathkeen of Talonreach shed his rather deep human cover.”

He saw it again—marine sergeant Shahn standing over him, peeling back from the eyes, shriveling away like some discarded costume.

“You
did this?
What the fuck for?”

“I would have thought that was obvious. Perhaps your injuries have fogged your brain. I told you,
kir
-Archeth is still alive.”

“Your stupid fucking God-Empress wank fantasy?” Anger spluttered, but it was feeble, a guttering mockery of the rage he wanted. He felt sick to his stomach. “I told you I’d keep silent, you iron fuck. I gave you my
word.
”

“Yes. But I’m afraid it’s not your knowledge of the plan that is the problem.”

“Then what is the fucking problem?”

“You are.”

They were taking him away. He passed the heat and restless dance of flames on his left, red and yellow tongues leaping up at the murky dark. House frontages rising on either side, blocking out chunks of the sky as they left the harbor behind and they headed—he guessed—back into Tervinala. The Warhelm’s voice walked beside him, amiably conversational in his ear.

“You must understand the quest cabal is coming together rather nicely, just as Anasharal hoped it might. Shanta, Shendanak, Tand. A viable core has formed after all, and these three will draw the others in, as and when they return to Yhelteth. The stage has been set for this a while now—long-term discontent with the ruling dynasty, smoldering coast-lander resentment coupled with raw entrepreneurial spirit and ambition, all chafing at the constraints set by palace and citadel alike. And now a profound distaste for this new war and the idiots who wage it. It’s a very promising mix. It will see Jhiral Khimran removed from the Burnished Throne before the year is out.

“Unfortunately, though, our conspirators have fixed on the wrong figurehead to replace him.”

It dropped on him like a ton weight.

“Oh, come on,” he gasped faintly. “
Me?
The fucking faggot outcast?”

“These are sophisticated men. They do not care, and they will happily put in place curtains and contrivances to deal with those who do. The ignorant will be blinded, the brutish restrained or disappeared, the cost considered negligible. It is
you
they want to front for them on the Burnished Throne, Ringil Eskiath—you, scion of an exiled Yhelteth noble line, war hero, disinterested warlord, reluctant leader of men,
human.
Kir
-Archeth Indamaninarmal cannot hope to compete with all that. I cannot allow you to get in her way.”

“You stupid, metal motherfucker.” It panted out of him, the last desperate dregs of resistance as something, dwenda sorcery or his wounds, he couldn’t tell, dragged him down into soft whirling darkness again. His words echoed upward as he fell away. “She won’t do it, Helmsman,
she doesn’t fucking want it.
She’ll never turn on the Khimrans, they’re the keystone of everything her people built.”

“Yes, I believe I have taken that into account and allowed for it. Mechanisms are in place.” The Warhelm’s voice stayed oddly close and clear as he faded out. “But thank you for your concern. Oh, and thank you for your heroic service in bringing out our core conspirators. You have triumphed, as a hero should. You will be remembered and honored—if not eternally then, well, certainly for a good long while, I should imagine.

“Good-bye.”

And away, down an endless, gray-webbed tunnel of loss, blotching out to black.

T
HIS TIME, WHEN HE COMES BACK HE KNOWS IT’S SORCERY, HE CAN SMELL
it. He can taste it in the back of his throat like too much krin. He sees the dwenda flickering around him, like blue candle flames the size of men, before he’s even opened his eyes.

He opens his eyes.

Standing stones, rooted on the downslope of a bleak, low hill.

They flank him, bend around before him in a ring, blank and rough hewn. The dwenda have drawn together in a black garbed huddle six or seven strong at the center of the circle, deliberating in their own eldritch tongue, mostly with their backs turned. Unaccountably, he’s on his feet, though it seems not to cost him any effort. There’s a cold wind blowing from somewhere, a hurrying gray sky above, and his bones ache in his flesh.

He tries to spit. Coughs and gags instead. Harsh, rasping in the cold air. Dull pain in his chest,
across
his chest—he looks down, understands.

They’ve roped him upright to one of the standing stones. Risgillen’s living twine, oily gleaming cord only finger width, but looped around a dozen times or more, high up under his arms and tight to his chest, lower across his belly and pinning his arms downward in place, all of it smoldering faintly blue, shifting against itself like restless snakes. He’s been here before, seen this stuff in action back in Yhelteth—it can slither tight or loosen, twist, sprout savage thorns, all at the whim of its mistress and, oh, look, here she comes now … 

Turning from her deliberations with the other dwenda, seeing him awake. A broad grin paints itself across her face at the sight. She strolls through the long, thickly matted grass toward him, all the time in the world, none of the combat tension he saw in her back at Findrich’s place.

Ringil.
For all the world as if he’s a much-loved comrade or family friend.
You’re awake at last.

He steels himself as she gets close, tries not to let it show.

Fails, apparently. Her lips curls.
Oh, don’t worry, hero. I won’t harm you the way I did in the south. Your flesh is far too precious to us now.

He shakes his head groggily.
We have to stop meeting like this, Risgillen.

We will. This will be the last time, I promise you. Can you not feel how thin, how few, are the pages that remain in your story?

He reaches, experimentally, for the
ikinri ‘ska.
Finds no help there. Like drawing on a krin twig and finding nothing in your lungs but wood smoke. Like reaching for the Ravensfriend, finding only an empty scabbard instead.

Risgillen grins at him again.
Oh, don’t worry. We have a sword for you. Lathkeen Talonreach will be down with it shortly.

She nods up to the brow of the hill to where, well,
something’s
going on, that’s for sure. But it’s a
something
Ringil can’t quite get his eyes to focus on. He guesses at smoke and lightning, a writhing tentacular motion within, and it’s dark, like the heart of a storm, but it hurts like bright light to look at directly and … 

It has taken awhile, you see,
Seethlaw’s sister presses gently on.
To prepare. To recover the sword from the fire you set; to understand what you did, to cleanse the blade of its contact with that
… 
gaunt, joyless ape you unleashed it upon.

See, Slab
—he clings to the sour shreds of humor, it’s really all he has right now—
nobody ever really liked you, not even this demon bitch.

But time here is
—Risgillen gestures around—
flexible, as you’ll know. Here there is no hurry. And this time we have assembled the pieces with all due care. This time, we do not underestimate.

That’ll be a first.

Yes, well the signs have been complicated. Tangled. Reading them has been tricky, trickier than we are accustomed to. When the Black Folk came to this world, they disrupted it. They damaged the eternal norms. They were Other, they did not belong. In five thousand years, the chaos and confusion they sewed has still not abated. Heroes no longer stand forth clearly the way they once did, the way they were when
we
reigned in the real world. They are sullied, muddied at the edges, hard to recognize or judge. Seethlaw thought he saw a new hero in you, but what he truly saw, I think, was this.
She gestures at the standing stones around them.
Your transfiguration. This place was Cormorion’s, you see. Built and bound in Aldrain power for him alone, the Last Dark King. His strength and refuge in the Grey Places. For a while it looked as if it might become yours in turn, that you might take on that mantle. But now I think those were simply the forward echoes of this moment, the moment in which Cormorion steps out of shadow once more, out of the glory of the Aldrain past, and is mantled once more, in your flesh.

Turns out you aren’t a hero after all, Ringil. You’re just a receptacle.

At odds with the harshness in her tone, she reaches up and strokes his cheek where the scar that Seethlaw gave him runs.

He was my brother’s great love. Cormorion Ilusilin Mayne, Cormorion the Radiant. None among your kind who came before or after, in all our years of skulking at the margins of human myth and legend, ever touched Seethlaw Illwrack the way Cormorion did. Perhaps he thought you would with time, but, well
… She shrugs.
You see how fitting this is. I honor my brother’s memory, avenge the love he offered and you spurned, and bring back the true focus of his heart, at one and the same time. Revenge and redemption in a single act. It has taken me until now to understand the elegance of it all.