The Dark Defiles (20 page)

What’s
in
here?
he pants at Hjel.

The sorcerer prince shrugs.
You’re asking the wrong man. You can’t get them open, and they will not break. Many have tried.

Ringil lets go with a gasp, leaps back to save his toes, and proves Hjel’s point as the released canister crashes down against one rusted corner of the rack, then tumbles to the floor apparently none the worse for the impact. He crouches and rolls it carefully over on the ground a couple of times but can find no damage, not even a scratch.

He does, however, in the course of his search come up with a single imperfection in the jar’s surface—about a third of the way down from the cap, minute lines of script are etched lengthwise into the smooth black glass curve, in an alphabet he cannot read. Next to them is set an equally tiny etched image—a human skull apparently fracturing apart under the influence of what might have been the sun’s rays, except that they fall not from a sun but from a curious symbol like a double looped knot or maybe a pair of empty oval eyes just touching in the middle and staring outward.

He can’t read it, can’t decipher it at all. But if that’s not a warding, a binding spell of some sort, then he doesn’t know what is.

Hjel shifts impatiently behind him.
If we spend so long poring over every lost thing the Margins offer up, we’ll never reach the glyph cliffs at all.

Are they all marked like this?

The sorcerer prince sighs.
Yes. Every one I’ve ever looked at is marked like that. And no, I have no clue what it says. Hang around in the Margins long enough, you get used to that sort of thing. Now come on, let’s get out of here.

Ringil brushes his fingertips across the minutely carved glyphs, feels their tiny tracks through the callouses a lifetime of swordsmanship has left on his skin. Then he looks away across the marsh plain around them, the empty gray sky these things have lain abandoned under for who knows how many thousands of years, and a shiver comes to walk up his spine.

Can’t read it, can’t decipher the spell. And suddenly he doesn’t want to.

Later on in the journey—what feels like days later, but in the Grey Places who can tell—Hjel relents a little and takes them off the paved track they’re following to show Ringil a place between standing stones where the ground is scattered with more of the same jars, all of them opened. Gil goes to pick one up and finds it almost weightless. It’s a comical moment, he staggers upright with the surplus force he’s unleashed to lift the thing, nearly goes over on his arse as a result. He recovers, catches Hjel smirking.

Very fucking funny.

Yeah, thought you’d like it.

Gil tips the canister cautiously back and forth on his open palms, mindful of nesting marsh spiders or worse, but nothing falls out. At the narrower end, the glans-shaped stopper is gone entirely, nowhere to be seen on the surrounding ground. The jar’s surface is cool to the touch, almost cold, and the black glass has turned a pale, smudged gray, marked out now that he looks closer in tightly whorled patterns continuous along its length. When he upends the jar to peer inside, there’s nothing to see but a slim empty space and the same whorl pattern filtering the light that gets through the glass so it dapples the interior in the weirdly restful shades of a charcoal sketch.

You’d think something would nest in these,
he says, hefting the vessel in both hands.

Hjel nods.
Yes, but nothing ever does. Smell.

Suspecting another joke at his expense, Gil lifts the open jar end closer to his face and sniffs. Catches a scent like thunder recently departed—must sniff again to be sure he hasn’t imagined it—catches it again, clearer and closer this time—the same thick odor the air carries after lightning strikes close by, but pared down to a wavering remnant of itself, as if you could somehow pick up the trailing reek of some storm that passed this way a thousand years ago … 

He looks up, disbelieving.

Right.
Hjel has lost any trace of a grin he might have had.
Now listen to it.

Past any fear of pranks, Gil lowers one ear to the open end of the jar, and this time his senses are sharpened enough to be sure first time.

Right down at the limits of hearing, he picks it up—a constant seething, chittering, like specks of oil on a heated pan in another room. Or the hisses and clicks of the million invisibly tiny snakes and beetles Grashgal had once told him—
thanks, pal, really needed the extra nightmares
—existed on every patch of his and every other human being’s skin no matter how often they washed. Or—his mind groping about ever more feebly for comparison to cling to—like a constant succession of newly tempered swords plunged into a cooling trough down at the end of some unlikely palace hallway a thousand twisted, echoing yards in length.

He lifts his head again, cannot prevent the impulse to peer down into the dappled gray light at the bottom of the canister as if, despite Hjel’s words and his own previous check, there’s something insectile living down there after all.

Hear that?

Ringil nods numbly. Something about the noise has unnerved him out of all proportion to its volume or provenance. The hairs on the nape of his neck are erect in the cool air. He wonders if this is what dogs feel when there’s a storm closing in.

Makes you a young man, then.
The sorcerer prince’s expression is somber, his smile doesn’t quite make it through.
My father told me there’s an age you get to, you just can’t hear it anymore. Not too old, either; he was only in his thirties.

Gil shakes his head.
Wouldn’t bother me if I never heard that again.
He looks warily around at the scattered canisters.
Are they—

Yeah. All like that. Try another one if you like.

Thanks, I’ll pass.

And later, as they put the stone circle behind them and head back to the paved path, he asks Hjel quietly what he thinks the long jars were for, whether he’s ever heard anything that might explain them.

Hjel walks in silence at his side for a while before he speaks.

There’s nothing in what I’ve mastered of the
ikinri ‘ska
about them,
he says finally.
Nothing in the tales my people tell, either. I think they’re too old for that.

More quiet, the soft squelch of their boots across the boggy ground. They regain the paved path and pick up their pace.

That looked like some kind of spell written on them,
Gil ventures.
Some kind of ward.

Maybe.
Hjel stops and looks back to where the standing stones still puncture a skyline growing dark with some faded simulacrum of evening. He sighs.
Look,
I’m just a cheap trick mage, a scavenger along the cliffs of the
ikinri ‘ska.
I’ve got nothing but some vague, eroded hints and my own feelings to go on. I’m just guessing here. But I think something bad happened in the Margins, a very long time ago, so long ago maybe even the gods don’t remember it very well. I think men—or beings
like
men anyway, you saw that death’s head—were in it somehow, and I think they brought those vessels here as tools to play whatever part they had. Tools, or maybe weapons.

He faces Ringil in the gathering gloom on the road.

Whatever it was those men came to do, I think they failed. I think they were, I don’t know—
a helpless gesture
—swept away somehow, and their tools were the only thing left behind. But whatever it was they did, I think it caused harm that’s still not fully healed today, maybe harm that can’t ever completely heal.

He draws a deep breath and looks up and down the faintly luminous dirty white paving of the path they’re on.

And I think that’s what you can hear. The echo in time of the harm those canisters did when they were opened.

T
HE RASP OF THE CABIN DOOR LATCH WOKE HIM FROM REVERIE THAT HAD
somewhere slipped into a fitful doze. No real sense of how much time had passed. He looked down the length of his roped-up, immobilized body in the gloom and saw no useful change—dreams, it seemed, would not get you into the Grey Places unaided after all.

The door creaked open, somewhat less violently than Klithren had banged it on his way out. Maybe he’d calmed down a bit, taken a few turns around the decks and let the fact of his victory sink in. Maybe there’d be some water after all. Ringil’s throat clutched and worked with craving at the thought. He fought the urge, the eagerness to twist his head and look.
Give him nothing, Gil. No weakness to work with, no satisfaction, no submission that isn’t torn out of you by the fucking roots
… 

Low, swaying glimmer of the lantern carried into the cabin, the shadows it set dancing on the ceiling and walls. He heard it set down.

A calloused swordsman’s hand fell on his cheek. He had a moment to wonder if, under all of Klithren’s rough sellsword camaraderie in Hinerion, there had lurked something less rough and manly after all. Some twinge of attraction, maybe, that.… 

The swordsman’s fingers stroked up against his stubble. Touched the jut of his cheekbone below the eye. He recognized a sly, torturer’s mockery in the caress, prelude to some brutal abuse or other.

So it’s going to be like that.

He shut down hope of water, hope of anything at all.

The caressing hand fell away.

t took Archeth a numb couple of seconds to understand.

The sudden, violent upwelling of the ocean in front of her gave rapid way to structure beneath. A broad array of nestled five-sided platforms, rumbling up out of the water, filling the gap inside the ring and rising higher still, in stepped succession, toward the support column at the center. Churned gallons of seawater, roaring and streaming down off the jagged alloy terraces like some vast, mounded waterfall, as the platforms built themselves into an even conical ziggurat reaching up in easy steps to touch the support column at about half its full height.

Where, abruptly, there was an opening.

“Have you been tortured, child?”

Water was still pouring down off the sudden structure. Archeth, entranced by the risen spectacle before her, barely registered the voice at all, let alone the language it used or the words it spoke. She glanced at Egar, who stood equally spellbound at her side.

“What?”

“Hm?” The Dragonbane, evidently unable to tear his eyes away from the newly formed ziggurat, either. “What’d you say?”

“I didn’t say anything, I asked you what you said.”

“Didn’t say anything,” Egar murmured. “You realize—”

“
I
spoke to you, child!” There was a note of sharp reproach in the voice this time, enough to sting her out of her trance. “I
asked
if you had been
tortured.
”

High Kir—only now did she register the stark, marching syllables for what they were, only now did she understand, seeing Egar’s utter lack of reaction, that the voice spoke only for her. And a scant moment after that, realization crashed in on her; that tight, wavering edge on the avuncular tones, like a scream held back—she was listening to a Helmsman.

“I, uhm …” She mustered command of her people’s tongue. Looked upward at the ravaged underside of the city for want of any other direction to address herself. “Why would you think I’d been tortured?”

Out of the corner of her eye, she caught Egar gaping at her. Raised one rigid flat palm—
give me a minute here.

“Others have been,” said the voice matter-of-factly. “Many prisoners were brutalized to gain entry past the species portcullis. And your state corresponds with theirs to some extent—you have not fed well or drunk sufficiently for several days, your body carries substantial bruising, and your mind shows signs of torment. But you need have no more fear, child—I can withdraw the structure you stand upon to the level of the seabed just as easily as I have raised this entry. You will be rescued with precision and your tormenters will be drowned the same way. You have my promise.”

“No!”
She made an effort at calm. “No, that won’t be necessary. These men are my … uhm … friends.”

“Are you sure, child? You seem to be lying to me. There really is no need to lie on these creatures’ behalf. There is not the least risk that they can harm you further, and to accomplish their deaths is a small matter for me.”

She thought she detected a hint of leashed eagerness in the voice, a touch more of the withheld shriek behind the avuncular. Over her head, An-Kirilnar seemed abruptly to squat lower on its supports, to loom that much more menacingly. The roar of the water pouring off the ziggurat of steps in front of them had muted to the tick and trickle of some mountain brook, and an ominous quiet was building in the space it left. Egar mouthed at her.

Who the fuck are you talking to?

Unsure of the answer herself, she shook her head.

“Look, there’s no
further
about it,” she said rapidly. “These men haven’t harmed me
at all.
In fact, some of them saved my life earlier today. My privations are not the fault of anyone here. Well, that is, some of them did, uhm … Look, I bear them no ill will
now,
that’s the thing.”

“You lie again, child. A small lie, but—”

“Yes, yes, all right. I know.”

She fought off a panic-stricken vision of Egar and the others, yelling knee-deep in the ocean as the causeway pentagons sank away under their feet. Knee-deep, waist deep, and then just floundering to stay afloat, thrust back into the nightmare of shipwreck once again, and this time a couple of miles offshore.

She was beginning to guess at what the An-Kirilnar Helmsman was. She formulated her words with care.

“There is one, yes. He put his hands on me when I was his captive, the one with—”

“I am aware of him, child.”

“But that’s done, it’s over. The uhm, the circumstances have changed, the uh … Look, it’s complicated, all right? Just take my word for it, we’re all friends now.”

“I am not ill-equipped for complexity.” The hint of reproach was back. “But little can be taken on trust in these troubled lands. The Aldrain have grown cunning of late.”

“Maybe so, but … 
What did you say?
”

“I said I am not ill-equipped for—”

“No—about the dwenda. The Aldrain. You said they’re getting more cunning of late?”

“That is correct.”

“Of late?” Her nerves prickled. “You’re saying that there’ve been dwenda around here recently? And—and my people, too, the Kiriath?
Recently?
”

“Most certainly. The last local clashes were considerably less than five thousand years ago. And inconclusive, despite some opinion to the contrary.”

Her shoulders sagged. All the privations the Helmsman had so neatly listed seemed to fall on her again, harder. She was cold, she was hungry and thirsty, she ached from head to foot. The krinzanz need was beginning to bite.

“Five … thousand years?” she asked drably.

“Less, my child, far less.”

But that’s not fucking recent!
she felt like wailing.
Not even my father on one of his bad days would have called that recent.

Get a grip, Archidi
… 

“I am
kir
-Archeth,” she said evenly. “Daughter of
kir
-Flaradnam of the clan Indamaninarmal. Current overall mission commander of the Kiriath Project, based out of An-Monal. To whom am I speaking?”

There was a long pause. Through the quiet, she heard the wind hoot in the gaps and crannies of the massive structure overhead.

“I am the Warhelm Tharalanangharst, chief among the Seven Summoned from the Void. Please excuse my lack of manners. I have not had visitors for a while.”

“That’s, uhm … fine.” She nodded, suspicions confirmed. “I take it we are permitted to enter here, then?”

“But of course.” She couldn’t be sure if surprise etched the Warhelm’s tones or she just read it there herself. “The species lock is open, you are of the People. And these others are your allies, however
variegated
their allegiance may be. I have opened portals at three points around the entry tower now. Some of your men are already mounting the steps.”

She shot an alarmed glance at Egar, remembered he could not hear half of the conversation, and the half he heard was gibberish to him anyway. He looked back at her expectantly.

“Explain later,” she told him. “We’d better get in there.”

L
ED BY OUTSIDE APPEARANCES, AND BY HER SOUR MEMORIES OF
A
N-
Naranash, she expected dilapidation and decay within.

Instead, the space inside An-Kirilnar’s central support column was neatly kept and spotlessly clean. Illumination sprang up as they entered, struck a sheen from burnished dark alloy surfaces in a dozen different colors that all flowed into each other. It was subtly done, it took her awhile to work out where exactly the lights were ensconced and even then, her eye was led back to where their radiance fell instead - on walls and pentagon-patterned floor, the first turn of steps and then the climbing underside of a huge spiral staircase where it swept upward around the curve of the column, and the gold and steel thicket of concertina metal fencing on a massive cage set in the center.

The men stood and gaped about them. The Dragonbane, who’d seen the inside of An-Monal a couple of times, worked visibly at not being impressed. Archeth went to the cage and worked the mechanism that opened it. There was a smooth clicking, snipping, the sound of a hundred brisk tailor’s scissors at work, and the concertina fencing folded up on itself to the side.

The men looked dubiously at the opening.

“It’s an elevator,” she told them. “It’ll carry us to the top.”

“Yes, just a moment.” From the way they all looked fearfully upward and around, it seemed Tharalanangharst had given up speaking in her ear alone. “There are one or two matters to be gone through before we proceed. First of all, allow me to welcome you formally to the Overwatch Platform An-Kirilnar. I am the Warhelm Tharalanangharst, I govern here. Please forgive the somewhat archaic use of your various native tongues; this will improve as I converse with you further. In the meantime, here are some basic ground rules.”

On three sides, the doors they’d come through dropped shut with a rapid triple clang. Out of nowhere, something spiderlike and gleaming leapt down onto one man’s shoulders—she realized who it was, felt the pit of her stomach fall out—and bore him to the floor. There was a moment of thrashing, a scream, and the crimson glint of blood, then the man lay still. His panicked panting came to her across the air.

“This man,” the Warhelm told them in the same genial tones, “laid unwanted hands on the lady
kir
-Archeth Indamaninarmal when she was powerless to repel such attention.”

She stared fascinated at the thing that had Sogren pinned. It was a machine like the charred crab remnant the men had carried back from the south side of the bay, but poised and menacing and alive. It glimmered and gleamed in the lighting, crouched atop Sogren’s head and shoulders for all the world like some arcane helm and shoulder piece he’d somehow fallen over wearing. Or, she thought queasily, some beautifully crafted instrument of torture from the imperial dungeons. Sogren had tried to rise, to cast the thing off, but a narrow, bladed appendage was out near the creature’s head - it had drilled the privateer neatly through the right hand, sprouted multiple holding pincers and twisted his arm out and over, locked the elbow joint out. It held him flat to the floor like a wrestler’s trick.

One of the other privateers darted forward to help. Soft scuttling sounds came from the walls as he moved.

“I really wouldn’t if I were you,” the Warhelm advised.

The man froze where he was.

“Needless to say,” Tharalanangharst went on, into the general, horror-struck stillness, “such violation of the body of one of the People is also a violation of the alliance terms between the Kiriath and those noble humans who wish to throw off the yoke of dwenda oppression. It is therefore punishable by death. Sogren Cablehand, do you have anything to say?”

Appendages like long, extending jaws clamped on Sogren’s head at either side, dragged his face up from the floor. He snarled and thrashed, spat out his rage.

“Nothing of consequence, then,” the Warhelm decided, and the clamping appendages hauled sharply up and to the right. Sogren’s eyes bulged with the sudden pain, he made a desperate choking sound, like some giant startled hen, and then his neck snapped with an audible crunch. His contorted features slackened on the instant, but his neck went on making tiny crunching noises as the crab twisted his head around until it faced neatly backward on his shoulders.

Among the men, she heard shocked oaths, Naomic and Tethanne alike.

The executioner unseated itself from Sogren’s neck, prodded once or twice at the newly made corpse, as if to make absolutely sure the job was done. Then it stalked spider-legged away into the shadow beneath the first turn of the staircase, found a small hole in the wall there that Archeth hadn’t noticed before, and was gone.

“The body of
kir
-Archeth Indamaninarmal is sacred,” said the Warhelm Tharalanangharst mildly. “Other acts of violence here, though lesser in degree, will not be looked well upon, either. You would do well to remember this while you are guests in An-Kirilnar. With that proviso, you are, as I have already said, most welcome.

“The elevator will take you to more adequate accommodation.”

“
I
T’S A
W
ARHELM,
E
G.
W
HAT CAN
I
TELL YOU?
T
HEY’RE NOT LIKE OTHER
Helmsmen.”

“Yeah, no shit!” The Dragonbane stalked back to her across the sumptuous black carpet in her rooms, voice savage. “Think I noticed that about the time it was snapping the head off one of my men!”

“
Your
men? And anyway - don’t exaggerate. It broke his neck.”

“And then turned his face around to look backward on his shoulders! Let’s not forget that little detail, shall we? Because it’s fixed pretty fucking clearly in my head, and I doubt any of Sogren’s privateer pals are going to have trouble remembering it, either. I have to
lead
this rabble, Archeth. Sogren Cablehand was a key part of that.”