The Dark Defiles (25 page)

He sees it in his mind’s eye.

In other words, it’ll be a bloody fucking mess for all concerned. And when that’s done, I’ve still got to sail to Trelayne, get my friends back somehow, slaughter Findrich and his pals, and find some way to stop the dwenda.

That’s a lot of work with no intelligence to go on.

Whereas—you give me your allegiance here and now, I can go back to Ornley without drawing a blade. I collect my men in good order, imprison yours. Get my ships back, provision them, set sail. Nobody gets hurt. Then you tell me what I need to know about the cabal. You come back to Trelayne with me, and help me gain entry. Then, when we’re done, I’ll give you what you want.

Klithren makes an effort to master his trembling.
Which is what?

Your much-vaunted revenge. The chance to kill me blade to blade, and no need to hand me over to anyone else.
Gil considers for a moment.
And no lizardshit black mage protection for either one of us. You can find out for real what the gods want done about this.

The mercenary stares at him.
You’ll do that?

Gil sighs.
Yeah, I’ll do that. Like I already told you, I didn’t kill your friend. But the truth is, I would have cut him apart given half a chance; it would have made my day. And the thing that
did
cut him apart—well, that was a power sent to protect me, so
… A careless shrug.
You want payback? You want a piece of me? I’ll give you your shot.

What p-power?
There’s no masking the tremors now—Klithren is breaking down. The desolate unhuman chill of the Grey Places is eating into him like fever. But he clings to the last vestiges of his hate.
The thing that
… 
what, what are you
talking
about? What
thing?

Do you really want to know?
Ringil crushes out another inconvenient flicker of sympathy for the mercenary. Opens a palm to the marsh plain around them and what it contains.
Have you really not seen enough?

It feels almost cheap this time, the little it takes to break down the other man’s gaze and have him look away. Klithren shudders.

And—what, what if I—refuse this? Turn you down?

Oh, that’s easy,
Ringil tells him.
I’ll just leave you here.

ou didn’t see the Dragonbane at a loss very often.

Archeth was one of the few who had, and she couldn’t remember the last time she’d seen that expression on his face. She’d forgotten how suddenly young it could make him look. For just those few moments, she was watching the features of a Majak buffalo herdsman not yet out of his teens.

“But—forty-seven … 
million
?” he murmured. “You could really have killed forty-seven
million
people?”

“Oh, yes. Sadly no longer, though. Her father saw to that.”

“But.” Egar shook his head. “Why did you let him? You said you wouldn’t obey his orders, why’d you sit still for him to … to mutilate you?”

“I was summoned from the void to protect the People, at any and all cost to anything else including myself. That was the pact, those were the terms of my containment. I could not act directly against
kir
-Flaradnam Indamaninarmal, or against any Kiriath, even in self-defense. It was not in my intrinsic nature. I could no more do it than you, Dragonbane, could breathe beneath the waves. And since I could not act against
kir
-Flaradnam, he was free to commit such surgery on me as he chose.” A longish pause, an unmistakable note of sour satisfaction creeping into Tharalanangharst’s voice. “I only hope his daughter does not live to regret the fact too much, now that our concerns about humanity have proven accurate.”

“The Kiriath mission,” snapped Archeth, “is to
nurture
humanity, to bring the human race eventually to the same levels of civilization as the Kiriath themselves enjoy.”

“Yes, it is
now.
Didn’t use to be. Good luck with that, by the way, when the Aldrain finally wake up to the benefits of volcanic eruption at Hanliagh and give it a little helping hand with their weapon of last resort.”

“You’re talking about the Talons of the Sun?”

“Well, well, you are better read than I expected. Yes,
kir
-Archeth, I am referring to the Aldrain’s chief engine of destruction. Which can in all likelihood pour enough destructive force into the volcanic vents at Hanliagh to burst the caldera like a rotten egg.”

“In all likelihood?” She let scorn edge her tone. “You don’t
know
?”

“No.” If the Warhelm noticed or cared about her affected lack of esteem, it didn’t show. It lectured methodically on, as if to a none-too-bright student. “The
rather melodramatically named
Talons of the Sun remain, I’m afraid, a largely unknown quantity. The Aldrain used them several times against us during the war, to obliterate cities and armies or to create obstacles in the landscape. Once they evaporated the ocean at Inatharam harbor and so created an incoming wave of colossal force. But for all this, the weapon itself never manifested in the real world. It was deployed from, and seems resident in, an undefined plane to which we did not have access.”

“And now? Do you have access now?”

“I have access to very little these days, daughter of kir-Flaradnam. I thought I’d made that clear.” The Warhelm paused again, presumably to let the poetic justice sink in. “So, no, in answer to your rather obtuse question, I am no more able to locate and quantify the Talons of the Sun now than I ever was.”

Archeth went, as if called by something, to stare out of the run of broad windows in the chamber’s south-facing wall. There was an ornamental rail below the glass expanse and she placed her hands on it with a conscious effort at calm. The krinzanz crash itched through her grip, made her fingers twitch. She watched evening crowd the thin sunlight westward and out to sea.

“If the dwenda use the Talons of the Sun to force an eruption at Hanliagh,” she said evenly, “then it’s going to affect the whole fault system. Will An-Monal erupt as well?”

“It did not happen the last time the caldera blew. The pressure walls at An-Monal are among the most powerful defensive engineering ever conceived by Kiriath science. The heat exchangers and diversion channeling were all built with exactly such a contingency in mind. And the Helmsman Manathan was called from the void primarily to hold the volcanic forces there in safe equilibrium.”

“But last time was not a dwenda incursion.”

“No.”

Her hands tightened on the rail. “Then it could happen. Manathan could be overwhelmed.”

“Possibly, yes. But I think you have missed the rather more important consequence of an eruption at Hanliagh, both for Manathan and for everybody else.”

“Which is what?”

“Which is that the ash cloud thrown up when the caldera detonates will darken the skies over Yhelteth for days, veil the sun’s force for even longer, and so render the region positively hospitable for any invading Aldrain force. After that, whether Manathan is overwhelmed by lava at An-Monal or by Aldrain sorcery is really academic. The Kiriath mission, such as it is, will have failed.”

Archeth leaned in hard against her own grip. Stared out at the darkening ocean and coast, as if she could somehow will herself southward and back to Yhelteth along the line of her own gaze. She was in the wrong place, she was in the wrong
fucking
place. She felt the bitter flood of vindication—could briefly appreciate how Tharalanangharst must feel—and the impotent rage that it brought. She’d known. From the moment their disappointments began at Ornley, she’d fucking
known.

Hold it down, Archidi. Someone’s got to deal with this, and it looks like it’s you.

Again.

My father would not have left the job of liberating this world half done.
She would have laughed if she hadn’t felt so near to weeping. They’d left
everything
half done or worse, Grashgal and her father; it was practically their defining characteristic. The Empire—the brutal and bloodthirsty men they’d somehow let hold sway over it, let warp its envisaged purposes into the same dreary mash of conquest and slaughter, tribute and oppression, as ever was. The plan to reclaim the Wastes, the plan to cross the western ocean—both abandoned on the drawing board. The search for the Estranged Clans—wherever they’d wandered off to over the slow millennia—abandoned. Redecorating An-Monal. Her own fucking education. All left half done or badly handled. About the only thing her father had followed through on in the end was getting himself killed. And then Grashgal and the rest had left
her,
one badly trained half-breed caretaker novice, fumbling to hold up the towering, badly stacked, awkward-to-balance weight of their ridiculous fucking mission to civilize—

All right, Archidi. Old wounds, leave them alone.

“You are powerless to prevent any of this?” she asked tonelessly.

“In direct terms, yes.”

“Are there other Warhelms still in existence?”

“Oh, yes. The Aldrain were only able to bring down three of us in the end. Valdanakrakharn in the east—”

“I don’t need the names of the dead. Who’s left?”

“In the far south, Anakhanaladras. Up in endless circuit between the world and the band, Ingharnanasharal. And on the shores across the western ocean Gohlahaidranagawr. But I’m afraid they are each as crippled and reduced as I am. They had all reached the same conclusions as I, you see. And your father was most thorough in his determination not to allow the housecleaning we wished to embark on.”

“Housecleaning,” she said grimly. “Right. Did you at least—any of you—manage to gather any useful intelligence about the Talons of the Sun?”

“Useful? No.”

“Well, I don’t see how that can be.” She worked at keeping the tinge of desperation out of her voice. “Even ordinary fucking Helmsmen can make assumptions, projections based on evidence. And you were summoned specifically to fight the dwenda. It was your whole purpose
.”

Tharalanangharst’s tone turned acidic. “Be that as it may, daughter of
kir
-Flaradnam, we were only ever able to determine two basic truths about the Talons of the Sun,
busy as we were
fulfilling our purpose and ensuring that the Aldrain did not obliterate the People. First, despite the name, the weapon does not appear to have anything to do with the sun, or at least not the sun that this world orbits around. And second, the uses to which the dwenda put their device appeared neither to tax it very much nor suit its capacities particularly well. It was a weapon immeasurably more powerful than anything the People had access to, but equally, it seemed hopelessly out of place in the Aldrain armory. It was, if you like, a broadsword used by schoolchildren to cut twine.” Another of the Warhelm’s characteristic blank pauses. “So, then. Do you wish me to make an assumption based on this evidence,
kir
-Archeth?”

“Yeah, why don’t you do that.”

“Then assume this: we are talking about a weapon held over from the cataclysm visited upon this world tens of thousands of years before the Kiriath arrived here through the veins of the earth. A battle relic of what some of your more well-read human protégés five thousand years ago liked to hark back to as
the Time of Dark and Angry Ancient Gods
.”

Archeth watched the sky through the window. Early stars glimmered in the gaps between soft mounded cloud, the band leaned in from the horizon at a drunken angle. She glanced upward at the roof, expectant. Got nothing in return. It took her a couple of moments to understand that Tharalanangharst had stopped talking for good. Had chosen to absent itself in the wake of its last, charged words, and leave her swimming for herself in the implications.

An odd quiet made itself felt, dropping into place like shutters across her view, forcing her back to the room, a half-turn to look at the Dragonbane still sitting there on the couch. He met her gaze and shrugged.

“Dark and Angry Ancient Gods, eh? Doesn’t sound too clever.”

She felt the chilly, dead breath in the phrase, tickling the short hairs at the back of her neck. She shook it off, impatient.

“We have to get out of here,” she said. “We have to get home. Jhiral isn’t going to be able to handle any of this alone.”

“
Jhiral isn’t going to be able to handle any of this
at all.
But that doesn’t put us one foot farther south than we already are. And I don’t see how we can get back to Yhelteth in time to make a difference.”

“You said you could walk us out of the Wastes.”

“Yeah.” Egar nodded at the fruit bowl beside him. “Given enough of this five-thousand-year-old grub, some packs to carry it in, something resembling decent weapons, we might make it to Gallows Gap, sure. Might.”

“This morning you were talking about doing it on a few mouthfuls of ham and oil, and some sea-soaked biscuits. You seemed pretty comfortable with the idea then.”

“What can I tell you? Didn’t want to spoil anyone’s mood.” The Dragonbane stooped forward on the couch, leaned elbows on his knees, and looked down into his own cupped and empty hands. “Archidi, if we hadn’t found this place, chances are we would all have died in the Wastes. I doubt we’d have made a hundred miles south. But you don’t ever say things like that to the people you have at your back. I mean, they know it as well as you do, but that doesn’t mean they want to fucking
hear
it. What they want is for you to take charge. Distract them from it, give them some hope, some reason to keep putting one foot in front of the other.”

“Even if it’s a crock of lizardshit?”

“
Especially
if it’s a crock of lizardshit.” He looked up at her, gave her a bleak smile. “We’re all bound for the Sky Road, sooner or later. How we walk it depends on how we walked in the world beneath. So you don’t sit on your arse whining and waiting for your death to come find you. You go looking for it. Track the fucker down, force the issue. You walk, Archidi, you find the strength to walk, and you keep walking till you drop. Now some men don’t have that strength, so you have to lend it to them.”

She gestured. “So we get walking.”

“Not saying we don’t. But I still don’t see us riding to the rescue in Yhelteth. We’ve got the Wastes to cross, and if we do make it as far as Gallows Gap, we’re still deep in League territory, four or five hundred miles north of a border that’s on fire. And half our company is men who see the League as their side in the fight. Remember what I said about Sogren, how they’re going to feel? Not going to help the balance any, is it?”

“So what do you want to do?”

“I don’t know.” He got up from the couch, yawned and stretched like a man crucified. “Get some sleep might be a start. Then, tomorrow, we take stock. Feed up the men, lay some plans. And yes, try to get home. But you got to stop worrying about how fast we can get back to Yhelteth. Let that wanker Jhiral fight his own fucking battles.”

“I promised—” She chopped off the retort, but not before the Dragonbane spotted where it was going.

“I know, I know. The Great Kiriath Mission. But they fucking
dumped
it on you, Archidi. They cut and ran, and they left you holding the pieces. So give yourself a break, why don’t you? Let’s just worry about what’s possible here and now. Not get hung up on some cobbled-together dream your father had a few thousand years ago when his demons couldn’t persuade him to wipe us all out.”