The Dark Defiles (73 page)

Well, well, well,
he calls down the slope in Naomic.
The Elder Race in all its ancient glory. Got some bad news for you guys.

From the front ranks of the dwenda, a figure steps forward. A gloved hand reaches up and tears the smooth helm off. The face beneath is pale and perfectly boned—
yeah, aren’t they all
—a poem in pallid beauty. Lips drawn back from teeth, brow furrowed in noble rage. The dwenda commander raises his free hand and points. His voice rings out across the space between them. His Naomic isn’t bad

You can cower in the circle’s scope, mortal. But your face and name are fixed in our mind’s eye now and forever. You have earned the undying hatred of the Aldrain.

Thought I had that already.

The finger trembles visibly. The dwenda’s voice rises to a yell.
We will haunt you! The rest of your life will be lived in fear of the twilight and the shadows from which we can slip at will. Your loved ones will never be safe, as long as you live; your children will be raised in horror of darkness and our touch, we will age their hearts with early terror, ruin the sinews of their growth, make them trembling and infirm before their time. And when you are old and helpless, we will come for you and them, and your living heads will be mounted out here in the Grey Places for all eternity.

I have no children,
Ringil tells him, impassive as the monoliths that ring him around.
And if you plan on haunting me, you’d better get in the fucking queue. But nice try. Now let’s get down to the blood and bone, shall we?

Yes!
Shouted, vicious with joy.
Yes! Face me!

That’s not what I meant. Got a history lesson for you here. You think you’re an elder race, you think you’ve been around since the dawn of time? It’s a lie, all of it.
And suddenly he’s shouting at them, some jagged chunk of dislodged rage, like some frustrated schoolmaster with recalcitrant students.
There’s nothing in you,
nothing
that wasn’t once human. You’re not ancient immortals, you’re fucking children. You’re the bastard-bred offspring of men who needed something monstrous to fight their wars for them and twisted their own blood to make those monsters, then sent them out into the Grey Places and lost them there.

You lie.
A thin smile smears across the pale features, but uncertainty hovers at the corners.
You think you can confuse us with these
… 
fantasies?

I think I don’t have to.
Ringil masters his rage, raises his hand.
Codes—you want to get this for me? Put it into their heads the way you did into mine?

I am not sure if—

I’m a, what was it, Core Blood commander, right?

The voice of the Codes and the Binding Force hesitates a beat.
Yes
… 

Then I’m giving you a Core Blood command. This is a fresh protocol. Tell these fake antique fuckwits who they really are.

Another pause, but shorter now.
As you command.

Thank you.

And he watches it fall on them.

Like a wind through the steppe grass at evening, like chop in the wake of a big ship’s passing, he sees the armored ranks sway. Sees hands raised to helmed heads as if pain. Hears a choked sobbing rise from a thousand armored throats. A hard glee fills him at the sound, a crackling, laughing sheet of flame licking up from the pit of his stomach. The words rise to his lips as if chosen by some other speaker.

That’s right,
he bawls down at them.
That’s who you really are, you stupid fucks—the lost and wandering bastard children of men. And we don’t want you back, we never did.

Say good-bye to your weapon, dwenda—this is demob. I’m here to melt it down.

He raises his hand again.

Codes—

Something changes.

The cold breeze stops blowing, the light shifts and tilts away. Time stands still, he feels it stop like the breeze on his face. Figures stand there in the gloom, about a dozen strong. They are not dwenda—too varied, too ragged around the edges. It takes him a couple of seconds to understand who he’s looking at.

The Dark Court, come at last.

alling Angel—up out of her boot and in her hand, faster than thought. She lashed out with the blade, drove a gutting stroke up and at the belly beneath the wolf-skin cloak.

Something stopped the blow in its tracks.

For the count of six thudding heartbeats, she strained to complete the stroke. Saw Falling Angel’s tip tremble with the locked forces that held the blade immobile in the air. Looked up in disbelief and saw a wintry smile on the lined face opposite. Then the figure made an abrupt upward gesture with one arm, like hurling something in her face. She blinked, but the gnarled open hand never touched her. Instead, another unseen force hit her in the chest like a warhorse kick. Lifted her fully off her feet, punched her backward, dumped her brutally on the ground.

Jagged agony spiked through her side all over again. Falling Angel flew from her grasp. She grunted.
Feels like that lance blow broke a couple of ribs after all, Archidi.
She tried to breathe through the pain.

Poltar the shaman—
yeah, got to be him, who else going to dress that badly around here
—took a couple of paces closer. Stood looking down on her and then, inexplicably, spoke to her in High Kir.

“So the Goddess was right. The Dragonbane sends a demon from the veins of the earth to do his dirty work for him.”

She blinked dazedly up at him. Heard the words in her head well enough, but the shaman’s lips didn’t seem to be mouthing the same syllables. She shook her head to clear it. Poltar grinned at her and nodded.

“Yes, She has given me your tongue to speak, so that I may explain to you your doom. It is her way. The Goddess serves me in all things, so that I might serve Her and help make this world pure again.”

“Pure?” Metallic taste on her tongue; she’d bitten through the folds of flesh in the side of her mouth when she hit the ground. She turned her head and spat out blood. “Fuck are you talking about, pure?”

“A hundred thousand years.” The shaman’s voice grew almost crooning. “This much I have learned from Her. Ever since the birth of the band itself, our world has been beset by unhuman races and unnatural creatures. The ascendancy of man slipped and fell, a hundred thousand years ago, and still we struggle to arise and claim it back. But it will come. Men will drive out the other races and make the world their own once more. Your people knelt on the neck of the tribes in the south for centuries and bent them to your will, but where are your people now? You are the last of your kind, demon. This I know.”

“Well, there’s only one of you, too,” she muttered, sitting up.

“You know
nothing
! I am Chosen!” One naked arm slipped loose of the wolf-skin cloak. “See! The mark of the Goddess upon me.”

Archeth stared.

The arm was a mess—rows of small circular scars and half-healed punctures, all along the skinny length of flesh and muscle from armpit to wrist, like some kind of methodical torture or the repeated fang marks of a wild beast that had for some reason decided
not
to just chew the limb right off … 

“Very nice,” she said carefully.

From the Dragonbane and then Marnak Ironbrow, she’d formed an impression of Poltar that painted him both dangerous and deluded. But it hadn’t ever occurred to her that he might be stark raving mad.

“She chose me,” the shaman ranted at her, “to lead the Skaranak, to keep them pure. You will not corrupt them with your alien ways.”

She coiled for the leap to her feet. “You got any more, uhm, marks of the Goddess you want to show me?”

The tortured arm whipped away, back beneath the cloak. Poltar grinned craftily at her.

“You think you’ll trick me? I know you, demon, I know your schemes. You think I did not come here prepared? I am
wrapped
against your weapons, as against the cold.”

I’ve seen good steel swung at the shaman and somehow not bite,
Marnak told her in the brothel.
Blades turned by nothing but that filthy cloak he wears. Arrows that fail to find their mark, punches that never land.
You wouldn’t be the first to try. But you’d be the first for a good long while. No one else is that stupid anymore.

You’re that stupid, Archidi.

Now
move!

“You do not belong here, burned black witch, and it falls to me to drive you—”

She
moved.

Up and away, ignore—
fuck, that hurts
!—the clutch of agony down through ribs and side. Get some distance from this rambling cloaked asshole, try to work out what to do. She opened her hand to the side and Falling Angel came to the call. Grunt of satisfaction, heft and aim. From five yards out, she hurled the knife at Poltar’s eye.

And this time, she saw.

Blurring in the air around him, like sudden heat-haze, but … 
shaped.
As if some invisible tentacle lashed out to knock the knife away, and must somehow become apparent with the motion. Her hands swept back at her hips—jagged pain on the right with the move—Quarterless and Laughing Girl leapt from the sheaths in the small of her back and fell to her grip. She circled warily, arms out like a courtesan dancing, weight of the knives in each hand like balance. Eyes fixed on the shaman and the space he occupied.

Their gazes met.

“Well then,” he called. “So it ends. Go back to the shadows you came from, demon. Here is your doom!”

He lifted his naked arm out of the cloak again, held it forward at a low angle. She saw the same wavering through the air around the limb and then, abruptly, the most recent of the puncture marks were leaking thick, dark blood. As if something unseen were sucking it out.

Something was.

The air around the shaman began to stain an oily black. At first, it was only hints, like some assemblage of restless curving shadows in the sunlight, but as she watched, it took nearly solid form. It coiled and undulated around Poltar, almost like a thick, second cloak except it had a form all its own and … 

Once, more than a century ago in Trelayne, she’d watched fascinated as some ignorant fuck claiming to be a doctor placed leeches on a fevered man’s flesh. More than anything, the thing twined around the shaman reminded her of one of those creatures grown vast. But it had wings, too, like an ocean ray, and it raised itself up like a cobra poised to strike. It looked altogether too lithe and poised for something that must crawl along the ground. And as it darkened into full visibility, it tipped back its headlike appendage and uttered a dull, droning cry.

Poltar’s voice rose exultantly to match the sound.

“It was not a god’s sword that fell to earth on the plain a hundred thousand years ago, it was a vessel, a ship made to carry back allies from a place beyond this world. And the ghosts of its crew endure. Behold, the wraith that heralds your end!”

The thing, whatever it was, had unwrapped fully from the shaman now. It flapped heavily up into the bright morning light, turned languidly over on its back, and seemed to swell to twice its size with the motion. The sun gleamed on its flanks, made them seem wet. It writhed about a little, as if to get its bearings, and then, with abrupt, gut-swooping speed, it came slithering through the air at her.

She ducked left, favoring her injured side. Stabbed upward with Laughing Girl, but the wraith flapped its whole body like a wing on that side and lifted clear. Her ribs screamed, she stumbled on the missed stroke. Out of the corner of her eye, she glimpsed the wraith snap about like a shark in a feeding circle, come back at her again. She threw herself sideways and this time she fell headlong. The wraith gusted past like a slick black cloud, tilted one effortless wing upward and banked about. She thrashed backward as it sank down toward her, heard it make a noise like a pan filled with seething water, hurled Quarterless and Laughing Girl in sheer, panicked revulsion.

The knives hit; she saw how the flapping wraith clenched around the wounds—and then spat them back out, apparently not much harmed. She bounced to her feet, pain buried now under the avalanche of combat need and fear. Hands out and reaching—Quarterless and Laughing Girl flew up out of the grass like startled birds, were in her hands again. But how the
fuck—

“My lady Archeth!”

She swung at the shout, saw a tottering, wounded horse, arrow shafts still spiking from its neck and rump, ridden near to collapse. Astride it, an awkward-looking Yilmar Kaptal, brandishing a commandeered short sword he pretty clearly didn’t know how to use. He was twenty yards off and waving frantically at her. Under different circumstances, it would have been comical.

Archeth gaped. “Kaptal?”

But if the portly ex-pimp cut no lethal figure in her eyes, Poltar the shaman thought otherwise. Perhaps he saw only a mounted warrior and jumped with Skaranak tribal instinct to an immediate conclusion. Perhaps he saw through Kaptal’s flesh to what lay beneath. Or perhaps he just didn’t like surprises. A string of harsh syllables coughed from his mouth, he gestured with one lean arm. The flapping wraith flexed upward, rippled away over Archeth’s head, gibbering and hissing to itself as it dived at Kaptal and his mount.

“Salgra Keth, my lady,” he bellowed desperately. “
Salgra
Keth!”

The horse saw it coming. It screamed and reared, tried to throw Kaptal—who was showing some uncanny horsemanship, all things considered—then stumbled and went to its knees at the fore. There was no time for more. Blur of glistening black, like a drenched washcloth hurled across a kitchen—the wraith fell on horse and rider like some huge tarpaulin, wrapped them both wetly in its folds, settled to the ground.

Horror held Archeth unstirring, as the vague shapes of Kaptal and his mount rose and wallowed beneath the shrouding black. It was like watching a horse and rider with pitch poured over them, struggling to get out of a bog.

Salgra Keth.

The shout rang in her ears. The art of fucking
juggling,
what the—

She stared down at the knives in her hands.

That’s very impressive.
The words of an irritable god, in the wind that blew across the steppe.
Can you do it with all of them at once yet?

All of them at once.

The art of—

Under the billowing drape of the wraith, she saw the injured horse’s neck arch. Its head rose and lunged valiantly against the monster that had it wrapped. The wraith made a hissing, clucking sound and convulsed tighter … 

The rage erupted behind her eyes. She hurled both knives. Had Wraithslayer and Bandgleam in her grip a split second after, and hurled them, too. Some barely aware portion of her mind registered that she was staring blindly at the wraith and its victims, but it didn’t feel that way. It felt instead as if she floated, loose and free above the steppe, saw only a constantly shifting tracery of molten wire, saw she stood at its heart, saw at last she
was
its heart.

My Father’s House!

The ancient, silent walkways at An-Monal, the stilled machines. The watchful spirits that lived in the walls. The Helmsmen, the Warhelms, the naming of blades … 

Bandgleam, Laughing Girl, Falling Angel, Quarterless and Wraithslayer, oh yes,
Wraithslayer—

She took up the molten traceries the way she would the reins on a horse. She opened herself, finally, entirely, to the calling of the Kiriath steel.

She brought her knives, all of them.

She tore the wraith apart.

S
HE CAME BACK DOWN SLOWLY, BACK INTO HERSELF AND A SUDDEN AWARE
ness that she stood with arms raised in graceful arcs over her head, like a dancer poised to begin.

The steppe was quiet around her, the fight was done. She saw it all without really needing to look—the raw, bloodied corpses of Kaptal and his horse, as if they’d been boiled or scorched with acid. The feebly flapping remnants of something oily black and shredded, strewn through the grass, draped here and there in fragments not much larger or thicker than a handkerchief. Her knives like luminous beacons, each pegged neatly in the earth at points about equidistant around the place where she stood.

Poltar in his moth-eaten wolf-skin cloak, gaping at her like some halfwit taken for the first time to the village fair.

Bandgleam leapt unbidden to her right hand.

She lowered her arms and stalked toward the shaman. Summoned the memorized Majak phrases once more.

“The Dragonbane sent me,” she called across the wind. “Egar is dead, but—”

He threw both scrawny arms upward, shucked his cloak with the motion. Tipped back his head and yelped something at the sky. Beneath the cloak, he was naked to the waist and starved. She saw the puncture marks, in various stages of healing, stitched across rib cage and hollow belly, up and down both arms. The tired trickle of blood here and there, the yellowish white roundels of old scars everywhere. The spell he chanted sounded like the whining of a whipped dog.

But it seemed to work.

As if a cloud passed across the morning sun, as if evening stole the day and fell across the steppe early. The light around them dimmed, the breeze stopped on her face. Even the sound it made through the tall grass went away.