The Dark Defiles (7 page)

Archeth drew Quarterless from the sheath in the small of her back. The knife blade glimmered in the low light.

“Where is the sword now?”

“Taken back, my lady.” His eyes were fixed dully on the blade. For one chilly moment, Archeth thought she saw a longing in that gaze that made no distinction between Quarterless cutting his bonds or his throat. “Back to Trelayne. There will be a ceremony. The lodge elder says rejoice, the Aldrain are returning.”

She shivered, not sure if it was his words or the look in his eyes that caused it. She shook it off. Knelt at his side and sliced through the cords binding his legs to the chair. He began to weep, like a small child. The stench from where he’d pissed and shat himself was stronger this close in. She cut the cords off his chest and arms, ripped them loose with unneeded violence. She swallowed hard.

“Go to your family,” she said. “You will not be harmed further. You have my word.”

Critlin staggered upright, clutching at one arm. He limped away into the other room. Archeth stared after him, locked up in a paroxysm of something she could not name.

Menith Tand cleared his throat. “Perhaps, my lady—”

“Give me your purse,” she said distantly.

“I
beg
your pardon?”

She stirred as if awakening. Turned on him, Quarterless still in her hand. Words like hammered nails into wood.
“Give me your motherfucking purse!”

Tand’s lips tightened almost imperceptibly. The same chained rage she’d seen in his eyes at the inn was there again. But he reached carefully beneath his cloak and fished out an amply swollen soft black leather purse. Weighed it gently in the palm of his hand.

“I do not care for your tone, my lady.”

“Yeah?” She reached back and put Quarterless away in its sheath. Safer there, the way she felt right now. “Then take it up with the Emperor when we get back. I’m sure you’ll be able to buy yourself an audience.”

“Yes, no doubt. Using the same funds that have made me a significant sponsor of this expedition—”

She chopped him down. “Of which I am nominated imperial commander. Are you going to give me that purse, or am I going to take it from you?”

Brief stillness between them. The faint reek of shit from the stained torture chair she stood beside. Horseplay commotion from Tand’s men out in the street. Raised voices—they seemed to be squabbling about something. In the next room, the keening went on as if Critlin had never been released.

Tand tossed the purse at her, hard. Two centuries of drilled reflex took it out of the air with knife-fighter aplomb.

“Thank you.”

The slave magnate turned away and headed for the door. He paused, hand on the latch, and looked back at her. The fire was out in his eyes now, and he looked merely—thoughtful.

“You know, my lady—you would be ill-advised to make an enemy of me.”

She should have left it alone, but the krin still sputtered and smoked in her like a pissed-out campfire. The words were out of her mouth before she knew it.

“I think you have that backward, Tand. I’ve seen better than you strapped to an execution board in the Chamber of Confidences.”

He held her gaze for a sober moment, then shrugged.

“Understood,” he said tonelessly. “Thank you for your candor.”

He turned the latch and went outside to his men. Archeth watched the door close on him, then cast about in the dampish, shit-smelling room as if she’d dropped something of value somewhere on the earthen floor. She closed her eyes briefly, too briefly, then forced herself to the door into the next room and the source of the keening. She leaned there in the doorway, curiously unwilling to actually step over the threshold.

On the big sagging bed that constituted the room’s only real furniture, like huddled shipwreck survivors on some fortuitous raft, a young woman sat and hugged two young boys to her. All three had had their clothing torn or sliced apart and now only the woman’s tight embrace held the remnants against their pallid flesh. The eldest boy looked to be about ten or eleven, the younger more like six or seven. Both their faces and bodies were marked, beginning to bruise. The woman’s eyes were closed tight, one swollen cheek was gouged where someone had struck her, most likely with a belt-end or maybe just the back of a heavily ringed hand. Her lips were moving in some voiceless litany, but it was her throat the keening came from, the only sound she made, and she rocked in time with it, back and forth, back and forth, a rigid couple of inches either way.

Critlin was slumped on the ground near the doorway in a way that suggested he’d simply leaned there and slid down the stonework until the floor stopped him. He was less than four feet from his family and staring at them as if they’d just sailed from some harbor quay without him. His left hand reached helplessly out for them, rested on one of his own up-jutting knees, hung there limp and lifeless.

Archeth swallowed and stepped into the room. Crouched at Critlin’s side, tried to fold his nerveless fingers around the purse. “Here. Take this.”

He barely looked at her.

“Take—look, here—just fucking
take it,
will you?”

The purse hung in his hand a scant second. Then it tugged loose with its own weight, fell from his slackened grip and into the dirt he sat on.

Muffled clink of imperial silver within.

Greetings from the Emperor of All Lands.

She got up and backed out.

Went back through the room they’d tortured Critlin in, as if pushed by a gathering wind. Yanked open the door and stepped out into the murky evening street.

Found a sword tip at her throat.

e woke to the crash of waves and the cold coarse press of damp sand against his cheek. Harsh gray light insisted at his eyelids until he opened them. He blinked, lifted his head, and saw eyes on stalks, watching him from less than a foot away.

Shudder and shiver with the chill.

He pushed himself more or less upright and the crab scuttled away. Seen clearly, it wasn’t much bigger than the palm of his hand. It found a burrow in the sand some distance off and stood half in, half out, still watching him. Ringil sat and stared back for a while, trying to put his head back together.

Along the curve of the beach, away from bonfire glow, she told him the Truth behind Everything, and then he forgot it.

OR MORE PRECISELY, HE DROPS IT, CANNOT HOLD ON TO IT WITH SUFFICIENT
strength—the Truth, it turns out, is a delicate, ineffable thing. It will not fit in his head any more than the wind will fit in a helmet. It tumbles and falls away instead. Bruises on impact, like fruit lost off some heavily overladen market barrow, while Ringil Eskiath, sorcerer warlord apparent, runs around grabbing and groping for the scattering, rolling pieces.

HE RUBBED FEROCIOUSLY AT HIS FACE AND FOREHEAD WITH BOTH HANDS,
but it was gone, scrubbed away, leaving only a truth-shaped stain on his memory and a loose, sandy feeling in his head.

The rest came back presently, in tawdry chunks—sparse fragments of recall, like soiled pieces of crockery from some lavish feast he’d attended and then been ejected from for lack of sufficiently noble blood.

THEY STEERED YOU AS BEST THEY COULD, SHE TELLS HIM. DAKOVASH AND
Kwelgrish, juggling the myriad factors between them, with a little side help now and then from Hoiran and myself. They made the introductions, so to speak. Borrowed scrapings of steppe nomad myth, crafted them into a U-turn just beyond the shadow of death. Your tithe for the Dark Gate, paid. But in the end, we of the Dark Court can only request such passage. Permission is for the Book-Keepers to give or withhold. And even that permission may be qualified, truncated, subject to change.

Ringil’s lip curls.
You’ll forgive me if I say this all sounds rather clerkish. The gods of the Dark Court stooping to abject negotiation.

Well, now—most human prayer is exactly that, is it not?
He thinks he can hear pique in the dark queen’s voice, and the waves seem to crash a little harder on the sand.
Abject negotiation with higher powers for aid, for intercession, for benefits not otherwise obtainable?

Yes, but that’s humans. We’re a conniving, carping bunch.

As above, so below,
she says tartly.
And since the results have saved your life on more than one occasion, perhaps you should be a little less snide.

HE GOT TO HIS FEET, SWAYING.

The Ravensfriend lay in the sand beside him—evidently at some point he’d taken it off, but he didn’t remember that, either.

He bent, clumsy-limbed with the cold. Gathered the sword to him like the body of some dead and broken lover.

T
HEY STAND TOGETHER ON A PROMONTORY OVERLOOKING THE OCEAN.
They must have climbed there from the beach below, though his memory on this is vague. The sky has darkened, but there’s a loose, buttery glow from the
muhn
, seeping through the torn-up cloud like a weaker version of band-light, dusting the sea with soft gold. Around them, the wind cuts through the long coarse grass, bending it in circles so it seems to be making obeisance to the dark queen.

You are seeking the Ghost Isle, the Chain’s Last Link.
There’s no question in her voice.

Among other things, yes.

You found it a week ago. You have been deceived.

Ringil makes a restless gesture.
An island that comes and goes from existence with the wind and weather? With respect, my lady, I’m fairly certain we would have noticed such a thing if we’d stumbled on it.

Would you now?
Firfirdar’s eyes glitter in the sparse light.
And how exactly would you do that? How would you recognize such an island, unless you had seen it materialize? How, in its manifest form, would it be any different from any other island? Would you expect it to glow with witch fire as the chronicles claim?

No, I’d expect the locals to know about it and be able to point it out to me.

They do. And they did.

You are mistaken, my lady. Outside of myth and old wives tales, the locals made no mention of any island at all. The closest they came was—

And realization dawns. He hears the rough Hironish-accented voice again, one among the many
many
they’d listened to in and out of Ornley’s taverns until they all began to blur into a single incoherent stream.
On approach, Grey Gull may seem a separate island, but do not be deceived. Certain currents cause the inlets to fill enough at certain times to make it so—but you can always cross, at worst you might have to wade waist deep. And most of the time, you won’t even get your boots wet.

He closes his eyes.
Oh, for Hoiran’s fucking sake.

Just so. As I said, you have been deceived. More specifically, you have been tricked into thinking that a legend distorted over millennia of telling and retelling can still be taken literally.

It comes and goes with the weather,
Ringil said heavily, laying it out like some theological proof.
There’s an island there, then it’s gone—because there’s a peninsula in its place. I’m going to fucking drown that Helmsman.

The Helmsmen have agendas of their own. It would be a mistake to believe they are your friends.

He snorts.
Yeah, they told me the same thing about you.

H
E SLUNG THE
R
AVENSFRIEND ACROSS HIS BACK BY ITS HARNESS AND FELT
immediately somewhat better. The ache the truth had left in him receded, became more or less manageable. He’d had worse hangovers.

He cast about, trying to get his bearings. The beach wasn’t one he recognized, either from his time in the Grey Places or anywhere he’d been in more prosaic realms. But the landscape behind was a close match for what he’d seen of the Hironish isles so far—windswept and low-lying, not much in the way of trees, some low rock outcroppings and what looked like cliffs out at one distant headland. He wondered for a brief moment if Firfirdar had sent him back to Grey Gull peninsula with his newly minted understanding, to finally face the Illwrack Changeling. He dismissed the idea after a moment’s groggy thought.

We dug that grave up. It had a sheep in it.

For a moment, it seemed he recalled the dark queen advising him that looking for the Illwrack Changeling’s corpse was in itself a mistake, a waste of time. But he couldn’t be sure. There was too much missing around the ragged wound in his memory where the gift tore loose.

Yeah, yeah. You had the truth, and then you dropped it, and it broke. Poets weep, the sky falls down. Get a fucking grip, Gil.

He shook his head to clear it. Found a high point on the spine of the land behind him and started walking toward it.

The churned-up memories scampered after him.

Y
ES, YOU MAY ASK.

What?
She’s fallen behind so he turns to look back at her.
Ask what?

She grins, not fooled.
The question that echoes through your thoughts so clearly. All those adolescent evenings at temple back in Glades House Eskiath—you remember the cant. Now you’re wondering how much truth lies in it. You’re wondering—does the dark queen really grant favors to those bold enough to face her and ask?

They face each other across a half dozen steps in the sand. The wind buffets noisily between them. It’s a tense little moment.

Well?
Ringil gestures impatiently.
Does she?

It has been known. What would you ask for, supplicant?

He grimaces at the epithet. Hesitates, then plunges in.
Grashgal the Wanderer told me once that the Ravensfriend will hang behind museum glass in a city where there is no war.

That is one possible end for it, yes. I ask again—what do you want?

He swaps the grimace for a weary smile, and turns away. His words trail back over his shoulder like a scarf caught up in the wind.
Well, if you can really catch the echo of my thoughts, Mistress of Dice and Death, then you already know that.

Ah, grim and gritty little Ringil Eskiath. Yes, walk away, why don’t you?
And then, abruptly, she’s close at his side again, voice intimate, a caressing whisper at his ear.
The fractured heavens forbid that Gil Eskiath should ever beg a favor of anybody, even of the gods themselves. That he should ever show weakness or need. How unbecoming that would be in the scarred bearer of the dread blade Ravensfriend. Oh yes, I can see why they both like you so much.

He kept his eyes straight ahead, kept walking. Voice just about steady.
Like I said, if you can catch the echo of my thoughts—

You want to go there.
It’s out in a rush, and then Firfirdar is abruptly silent. She seems, in some indefinable way, to have surprised herself. For just a moment, her tone grows almost wondering.
They’re right, you do it every fucking time. Alright, Ringil Eskiath, you want to play the game that way, let’s lay down those pathetic cards you’re holding. What do you want? What is your heart’s desire? You want to go there, to that city without war. You want to live out the rest of your days in the peace it offers. Standard twilight-of-a-warrior happy ending shit. Your basic profession-of-violence retirement dream. There. Satisfied? Did the goddess read your mind? Or did she read your mind?

It’s his turn to be silent, oddly embarrassed to hear his own barely conscious longing laid out so brutally naked in words. He clears his throat to chase the quiet away.

Grashgal told me there was no way to reach it. He said the quick paths are too twisted for a mortal to take, and the straight path is too long.

True as far as it goes, yes.

He glances sideways at her.
But?

But it misses the larger point. Grashgal’s vision was incomplete. Like so many of his Kiriath kin, he never fully recovered from the passage through the veins of the Earth and the gifts it inflicted. He had the sight, but not the critical instinct to interpret it well. In the case of the Ravensfriend, he saw the resting place, but not how it came to be. He did not appreciate the irony of that sword in that museum.

For what it’s worth, nor do I. You want to explain in words a mere mortal can understand?

Well, irony really does better unelaborated, but if you insist.
The dark queen’s voice drifts, as if reciting some empty cant.
The city you speak of will be built—will stand in all its undeserved serenity—on the bones of a billion unjust, unremembered deaths. Its foundation stones are mortared with the blood of ten thousand suffering generations that no one there recalls or cares about. Its citizens live out their safe, butterfly lives in covered gardens and brilliant halls without the slightest idea or interest in how they came to have it all.
She comes abruptly back to the here and now. Turns and flashes him a hard little smile.
Do you really think that you could stand to live among such people?

Ringil shrugs.
I lived among my own people nine years after the war. Most couldn’t forget the past fast enough. The fortunate among them spend their lives now forgetting the misery their good fortune squats upon. If I have to live amid ignorance, I’ll take a people who’ve forgotten what suffering is any day over a society that eats, sleeps, and breathes it daily and still turns a blind eye to the pain.

Very well.
She walks ahead of him now, raising her voice a little.
Then ask yourself another question, hero. Do you think
they
could stand to have
you
in their midst—a bloody-handed monster, a living, breathing reminder of all they do not appreciate or understand?

I’m used to that, too,
he says curtly.

They’ve reached the end of the beach’s sweep. A darkened tumble of rock looms ahead of them, fringed along its edges with the luminous shatter of waves. Windblown spray from the breakers dampens the air, puts a faint sheen on everything. The dark queen picks her way up onto the outcrop without apparent effort, turns and beckons him after her.

Disappears.

He follows awkwardly, places each booted step with care on the wet, unyielding tilt of the rocks. A couple of times, he slips and curses, nearly goes over—the long habit of battlefield poise keeps him up. Further along, with some relief, he finds small pale expanses of barnacles he can gain some crunching purchase on. His steps firm up.