The Dark Defiles (32 page)

Then one morning, she wandered into one of the common dining areas Tharalanangharst had made available—
humans thrive on company,
she’d explained patiently to the Warhelm;
they don’t do well alone
—and there was Yilmar Kaptal seated in the flood of early gray light from the windows, intact and apparently none the worse for his drowning, feeding himself hungrily from a broad breakfast spread. He had some story of his survival—clinging to wreckage all night amid the dark waves, washing finally ashore with the dawn, wandering along the shoreline until he found the city—and he told it with a slightly repetitive, slightly emphatic force. He seemed very pleased to see her for a man she remembered as having such solitary tendencies. He asked her to join him at the table and plied her with a constant stream of questions about how she’d survived the wreck and come to An-Kirilnar herself. He nodded constantly in response to the answers she gave, made rapid, repeated noises of assent and understanding at every juncture, and did not appear to be really listening at all.

Archeth sat and picked at some food with him, hunger driven from her by memories of the creature that had climbed out of his eye socket. She chewed and swallowed mechanically, tried not to avoid his gaze too much. Was inordinately glad when Alwar Nash and another couple of Throne Eternal showed up to breakfast with them.

Now she remembered that jerky, insistent energy again, and wondered if there was a good reason for Kaptal’s newfound dynamism—wondered if perhaps when he stayed still for too long, left himself without occupation or distraction and started to reflect, then black, icy doubt started welling up inside him like seawater, as the truth of what had really happened to him tried to break through into his consciousness and tell itself to him.

The fire sprite darted past her, as if checking what she was looking at for a moment, then danced back and up along the ridgeline, wavering from its base like an agitated candle flame. Earlier in the day, she’d thought it had arms and was shaped somewhat like a child about eight or nine years of age. But as she followed the sprite’s beckoning flicker upward through the rocks, she saw this was just her mind, demanding a human form from something so outrageously animate and creating the illusion to fit. What she’d thought were appendages were just undulating frills along the edges of the flame, sometimes well-defined enough to seem like gestures, sometimes damped down to no more than a faint ripple. Now that full daylight was spilling down over the mountains, she was glad of that undulating motion and the sheepdog twitchiness—the sprite was noticeably paler and harder to see against the brightening morning air and she reckoned if it ever stood still there was a good chance you’d blink and lose track of it.
It will never actually leave you,
the Warhelm had told her,
but it may range ahead or double back sometimes to check on conditions. Try to be patient when that happens, let it do its work and protect you as best it can. Once you cross into the uplands, it is the only support I can lend you.

Once again, she had cause to curse her father’s lack of moderation.

Couldn’t you have just burned out the
big
weapons, Dad? Left a little something for local use? Shown a little fucking restraint and foresight for once in your life?

Your father is what he is,
Nantara had consoled her once, when a nine-year-old Archeth fled sobbing into her arms after a particularly hardheaded run-in with Flaradnam.
He is not balanced, there
are
no balanced Kiriath—their passage through the Veins of the Earth took that away from them, if they ever had it in the first place. But your father loves you with every last ember of his passion, which is why he is so angry now. The anger will pass, will be gone by tomorrow. But the love will not. Your father will love you for all eternity. Never forget that, Archidi, because it’s something no one else
—a sad, wincing smile—
not even I, will be able to do.

No Scaled Folk in her mother’s tranquil hopes for the future, of course. No fear there might ever be another Great Evil to ride out and face.

You were wrong, Mum. Even Dad couldn’t do it in the end.

Always some fucking thing coming down the track that’ll kill you if it can.

She shook off her thoughts. Glanced at the Dragonbane, who nodded.

“All right, people.Got a long march ahead of us.” She gestured up at the rearing mountain landscape. “And it isn’t going to get any easier till we’re over that lot. Let’s get on with it, let’s get it done.”

S
LIGHTLY PESSIMISTIC, AS IT TURNED OUT—THE PATH THE SPRITE LED
them on was actually an increasingly good one, starting to show signs as they climbed higher not just of prior traffic but of actual construction. Some ancient paving in a pale, grained stone she didn’t recognize, shelved into upward steps that had worn smooth with use, and were faintly luminous in the gloom where they passed beneath overhangs or through choke points in the rocky terrain.

“This is an Aldrain road,” She heard one of the privateers mutter to his comrades while they were all bunched up at a split in the paved way, waiting for the sprite to make up its mind on which fork to take. “We are under dwenda protection as long as we walk it.”

Ha.

The sprite came back, opted for the lower of the two paths, which skirted the shadowed base of a broad, jutting bluff, then zigzagged briskly back upward on terraced hairpins built out of the same pale dwenda—
or not
—stone. And with Aldrain protection or not, they made it to the end of the first day without incident. They pitched camp at the foot of an ancient scree spill under the southern shoulder of the highest peak in the range, with the sea a distant gray gleam behind and below them, and An-Kirilnar long ago hidden from view by the intervening chains of rising ground they’d crossed.

“Not bad going,” the Dragonbane allowed, nodding in that direction. “I thought we’d be lucky if we made half this distance today.”

His face was tinged an odd blue by the glow from one of the radiant bowls Tharalanangharst had gifted them in place of campfire fuel.
Nothing grows in the Wastes that will make a decent fire,
the Warhelm told them soberly.
Better you take these.
The bowls would, it claimed, give more or less warmth according to the conditions around them, and could be made, with simple commands in High Kir, to brighten or darken without affecting the level of heat, though they would apparently dim anyway when they detected sleep in the bodies around them. Archeth and Egar decided not to pass on these latter details to the other men—they were going to have enough misgivings about something that gave out blue light and perfect campfire heat but looked like a headless turtle, without being told that you could also talk to it and that it would notice when you fell asleep.

Archeth jerked a thumb over her shoulder at the loom of the mountain behind them. “How long you reckon to get over that ridgeline?”

The Dragonbane shrugged. “Your guess is as good as mine. I would have said the best part of a day, lucky to make it by nightfall. But the way we’ve been covering ground, could be a lot less. We might make it before noon.”

“And then the real work starts.”

“One way to look at it.”

“Got to find this city Tharalanangharst was talking about, get across it, find these
aerial conveyance pits
on the other side, find a way down into them …”

“Yeah.”

They were hedging, hovering, rehashing things that were already evident. Pussyfooting around the real issue like some wincing courtier suing for extended credit.

“You reckon it’s really him?” she said abruptly.

They both looked over to where Kaptal sat alone in the glow of another bowl. Originally, he’d been sharing its warmth and light with three Throne Eternal, but one by one they’d apparently found good reasons to wander off into the rest of the encampment and leave him there. He didn’t appear to care, had not really been talking to them anyway. Then as now, he sat and stared into the blue light, murmured to himself under his breath, and appeared to be doing some kind of obsessive calculation on his fingers.

Egar shook his head. “Anybody’s guess. He looked pretty fucking dead to me when your demon pal brought him up out of the water. And last I heard, you don’t get to come back from the dead without some pretty heavy penalties.”

“Gil says he did. Or something like it.”

“Yeah, well. Case in point. He’s not really been the same cuddly little faggot since he came out of Afa’marag, has he?”

She couldn’t argue with that. She didn’t think Ringil had ever been what you’d call
cuddly.
But after the events of the previous summer there was a distance in him that even she found new and strange. He smiled, he sometimes even laughed aloud, and he had the same old rolled-eyes sophisticate-and-barbarian thing going on with the Dragonbane, veiling an intensity of feeling beneath that neither man would ever own up to. But beyond that, she could no longer guess where Gil went away to when his gaze drifted and his eyes emptied out and the mobility fell off his face like a thin paper mask.

The Dragonbane leaned back on his elbows across his bedroll, stared up at the clouded night sky. It made him look oddly youthful.

“Where I’m from? They’d call Kaptal a Hollow Walker. Drive him out of camp with stones and spells, most likely. Saw that happen once, when I was a kid. Some guy was supposed to have drowned in the Janarat when they were crossing ponies, poor fucker. He hadn’t, but no one believed it when he finally managed to get himself back to camp. He had to go and live in Ishlin-ichan in the end; the clan would never take him back. Even his own family wouldn’t let him get within hailing distance.” He gestured, like throwing something away. “But hey, that’s fucking steppe nomads for you, with their pig-shit ignorant superstitions and fears.”

“If my father’s people went around doing this kind of thing to corpses a lot five thousand years ago,” she mused. “Maybe the Majak superstitions are tapping into that. Maybe they’re based on something concrete after all.”

“Yeah. Archidi, I’ve seen a Sky Dweller step out of thin air and summon the spirits of the angry dead from the steppe grass to defend me. I’ve spent a fair bit of my professional life killing things that everybody—including you—thought were myths until they showed up looking for a fight. I don’t really need any convincing there’s
something concrete
behind all this magical shit. Got pretty much all the evidence I need, thanks, and a few scars to boot.”

“Then—”

His voice rose to cut her off. “I just wish my dumb-as-fuck, dozy-as-sheep half-asleep people would
wake the fuck up
and demand that kind of evidence themselves, before they buy whatever string of sky-fisted nags the nearest fucking apology for a shaman happens to be hawking at the time.
Is that so fucking much to ask?
”

Movement at the other glowing bowls. People were craning to look. Egar, almost on his feet with whatever emotions had driven the sudden outburst, shot her a sheepish glance. Subsided.

They sat quietly for a while.

“Not looking forward to going home then?” she asked mildly.

e’s forgotten about the ladders.

They see them as they get up close, ladders by the thousands, scattered about in the long grass along the bottom of the cliffs, like toothpicks in sawdust at the base of some heavily frequented tavern bar. Or—here and there, you could still see one or two set against the cliffs for use—like the leavings of some vast, suddenly abandoned siege against the
ikinri ‘ska
walls, carried on by a hundred or more different allied nations and races.

Which, Ringil supposes, isn’t too far from the truth of what he’s seeing. However long the glyph cliffs have been here, it seems men and other creatures have been here too, trying to prise their secrets out. There are wooden ladders, iron ladders, ladders of alloys Ringil has no way to name, ladders of substances he’s never seen before in his life. Resinous smooth honey-colored ladders, woven ladders of creeperlike plants, some of which still twitch with some kind of life if you touch or tread on them. Ladders out of what looks suspiciously like human bone.

Some are simple, the most basic sketch of their function in whatever substance their owners were happiest using. Some are ornate, carved or molded or tempered with crests and curlicues, symbols to supplement and adorn the functional heart of their uprights and cross-bar steps. Some are clearly made for races with limbs of no human proportion. Some are visibly ancient—wood darkened and rotted through, iron eaten away to rusted leavings, resin that has bubbled and snapped apart in some alien process of decay. But some are new, out of wood so freshly carpentered that you can still see the rough edges, as if they were thrown down and abandoned only moments before he and Hjel arrived. It gives the cliffs a haunted aspect, a sense of eyes forever at your back, watching to see if you do better than those who came before, those who, in some hard-to-grasp fashion, have always only just left.

Looks like we missed the rush again.

Hjel rolls his eyes. It’s not a new joke for either of them.

Get hold of the other end of this,
he says, indicating a silvery-looking ladder five yards long. Ringil knows from previous experience that implements of this metal weigh next to nothing; they’ll lift it between them with no more effort than hefting a similar length of mooring cable.
Set it up there, see where that tree’s growing out of the rock. That’s where you’re going up.

They get the ladder braced with a minimum of fuss. Ringil unfastens the Ravensfriend and sets it aside against the cliff face—he’d swear it shivers slightly inside the scabbard as it touches the glyph-carved rock. He looks hard at it for a moment. Shrugs. Unhooks his cloak and lets it puddle richly on the long grass at his feet, puts his foot on the ladder’s first step. Oh, yeah. He turns back to Hjel.

Want to tell me what I’m looking for?

Past the tree, there’s a fissure.
The dispossessed prince holds up his hands, makes a span.
About that wide. The glyphs go in. I want you to reach in as far as you can see, trace out one of the sequences.

Which one?

Doesn’t matter. You’ll see what I mean.

Ringil shrugs and starts to climb. Up past the endless piled up lines of glyphs, skewed and leaning and crammed together, like sketched streets of hovels on some map of the slum housing in Harbor End. The ladder bounces a little with his weight as he gets higher. A cold wind comes snuffling along the eroded limestone expanses, as if searching for something. It moans in crannies and over sharp edges, ruffles affectionately at his hair and moves on. Glyph sequences catch his eye through the rungs as he gets near to the top and closer in to the stone. By now he’s learned enough to spot certain tendencies in them, certain phrasing—
in the eyes of men
… 
the known unknown
… 
a change of entanglement
… 
failings unleashed
… 
stop, I want to get off
… Some of them, he knows how to use in longer sequence. Some he’s had patiently explained to him by Hjel, but does not yet have any comprehensible context in which to deploy them.

Some, for reasons he’s unsure of, just make him shiver.

He reaches the outgrowing tree. Its trunk is about as wide around as his forearm, and comes with a tightly twisted attendance of lesser branches and thickets of gray-green, rough-edged leaves. There’s a reasonable amount of flex in the whole thing; he’s able to force his way past and up, but it’s work. He collects a couple of scratches on face and hands in the process, comes out breathing hard and dusted in some dark green scent.

Just beyond, he finds the fissure Hjel’s talking about, a broadening gully at whose base the tree is rooted. True enough, the glyphs bend inward with the rock and march back into the gloom there. He can’t see how far the crack runs into the body of the cliff; the light runs out before the glyphs do, and then it’s just impenetrable dark.

Reach in as far as you can see.

He works his way up the last couple of steps on the ladder, braces a boot into the web of tree branches, and wedges his upper body into the gully. It’s not too uncomfortable, and there’s just about space for his arms to move.

Trace out one of the sequences.

The ones under his nose are too tight a fit; he can’t get his elbows back down far enough to work there. He twists his head up and focuses on a line that seems to end just into the beginnings of the shadow. He works his hand closer, puts his middle finger into the groove of the first glyph in approved fashion, and begins to trace the pattern out. He has to work mostly by touch as his vision is partly blocked out by his own arm.

The first glyph isn’t one he knows—though it bears some resemblance to the symbols Hjel refers to as throat-clearers. The second is the
change of entanglement
motif, though oddly skewed. The third and fourth are related, but—

Shock slams through him.

It’s the shock of a warrior-caste lizard’s barbed tail-lash to ribs you left unguarded on that last swing with your badly chewed-up shield. It’s your father’s casual blow across the face, knocking you out of your child’s-height chair for answering back at the dinner table. It’s the kick and clutch under the pit of your stomach as you see your screaming, pleading lover impaled to the jeers and cheers of the gathered crowd, and you puke out your soul in sympathy. It’s the freezing, boiling chase of blood through your veins when you think back later and truly understand for the first time that it could have been you.

It’s all those doors and others, swinging open in your memory, gutting you, laying you bare.

Back in the deeper recesses of the fissure, he hears a bony rattling, like long, emaciated limbs rearranging themselves, like talons digging into the rock to propel something violently forward into the light. And for just a moment, it’s as if a massive stirring tremor runs through the whole body of the cliff wall, as if the cliffs themselves are some vast sleeping creature whose skin you’ve finally gouged deep enough to wake … 

He flails backward out of the gully.

Loses any footing he might have managed on the ladder, inadvertently kicks it away below. He falls scrabbling at the rock face, grabs frantically at the tree with his left arm. Stops his fall with an abruptness that wrenches his shoulder. The toes of his boots scrape the rock below him, twisting and digging for any scant purchase. Somehow, the dragon-tooth dagger is in his right hand, out and up in as much of a guard as he can manage. He stares under the curve of its yellowish blade, into the gloom at the back of the gully, waiting for whatever it was he heard in there … 

Silence.

A vexed creak in the tree somewhere, the soft whoop of the wind. Tiny patter of displaced dirt, falling away

The ladder clinks tinnily back in place under him. He dares to look away from the gloom in the fissure, glances downward, gets both feet firmly on a rung. Hjel stands at the bottom, holding the ladder in place. Calls up to him between cupped palms.

See what I mean?

Y
OU KNEW THAT WAS GOING TO HAPPEN?

Ringil storms back and forth in the long grass at the base of the cliff, like some beast chained to a baiting pole. He’s too angry, too churned up with currents of emotion he doesn’t fully understand, to stay still and look Hjel in the eyes—and the way he’s feeling right now, there’s just far too much danger he’ll punch the other man out.

I did not expect quite such a violent reaction.
The dispossessed prince’s face is troubled and not, Gil suspects, out of any mundane concern for his near fall from the ladder.
The
ikinri ‘ska
is not a training manual or a map, it is the inscribed living will of the Originators. It flexes and flows and breathes in a way I do not understand well myself. It is only one side of the equation. Each man or woman who wields it brings a different self to the union. Some are demure brides to the power, some are
… 
not.

Yeah.
Ringil stops in front of Hjel, jabs the blade of his hand at the other man’s face.
Well, if I’d known you wanted
demure,
I’d have brought a motherfucking veil!

He stomps away again, nearly trips on the ornately curlicued end of a fallen ladder in black iron. Kicks savagely at it and stubs his toe.
Fuck!

You need to calm down, Gil.

Ringil stalks back to face the dispossessed prince again.
I am fucking calm. You want to see me not calm, you keep right on feeding me surprises and half-truths like this. Now you tell me, in words a piped-up wharf whore can understand—what happened up there?

Hjel nods.
Fair enough. What happened up there is that you had a taste of real power. You dug into the darker reaches of the
ikinri ‘ska
for the first time, and it appears that neither you nor it enjoyed the experience very much.

A day ago you tell me it’s like the
ikinri ‘ska
wants me. Now all of a sudden it doesn’t like me anymore?
The tail end of his anger is still twitching, lashing irritably about.
Make some fucking sense, would you?

The dispossessed prince stares out across the marsh plain they’ve crossed together.
A horse may like you well enough as a rider across summer meadows. That doesn’t mean the same horse will stand easy under you in battle.

Oh, again with the martial metaphors. You’re saying I’ve got to break the
ikinri ‘ska
now?

No. You could not, no one can. Not even the Ahn-foi could manage so much, and they have tried more than once. Some say that not even the Originators themselves can command what they built and set in place now that it’s done.
Hjel reels his gaze back in, looks at Gil again.
I am simply showing you a different form of mastery, one that carries a different risk and ultimate cost. You are in need, you say. You ask for more, faster. This is more, faster. You’ll have to decide for yourself what it’s worth to you, if you want it after all.

Ringil looks up at where the ladder is leaned, the tree jutting out of the rock, the gully beyond.

How deep does that fissure go back?
he asks quietly.

Hjel gives him a faint, sad smile, claps him on the shoulder and chest as he walks past to a point about twenty feet out from the cliff wall.
That’s what I thought.

What’s that supposed to mean?

Come here, I’ll show you.
Hjel waits until Ringil joins him, then sweeps one arm out wide.
Look along the line that way. See the cracks? The shadows?

Ringil nods, fighting an odd reluctance. The dispossessed prince nods with him. His voice is gathering a fresh intensity, the tone of a man talking about the object of his longtime desires and obsessions.

It’s not a clean surface, you see, any more than the world the Originators were forced to write upon was fresh or whole when they saved it. Perhaps the echo is intended, perhaps it is metaphor made concrete. The cliffs march for hundreds of miles across this plain and there are fissures and gullies and defiles going back into the rock everywhere. Some of them are only a few feet deep and will barely admit a man’s arm to the shoulder. Some of them are paths whose end no one has seen. But all of them, all that I have seen or heard tell of, are inscribed with the most powerful iterations of the
ikinri ‘ska.
It is there, in the dark recesses, in the cracks through the surface of things, that you will find what you seek.

You didn’t answer my question,
Ringil says gently.

Hjel shrugs.
Because it was meaningless. You shouldn’t be asking how deep this or that fissure goes—ask yourself instead how deep into the defiles you are prepared to go.

Ringil looks along the line of the cliffs, the strewn toothpick ladders scattered at their base. Somewhere, there’s a whisper of bleak comfort in knowing how many have come here before him and gone again. He recognizes the sensation from the war—the anonymous camaraderie of a thousand ghosts, the realization that while death may be a gate you must pass through alone, the approach road is thronged with traffic and you walk its cobbled rise in constant company, just one trudging part of an endless caravanserai homing in on journey’s end. He remembers the abandoned confidence in his own acts that the knowledge gave him back then—a gut-swoop feeling so close to desperation it was hard to tell the two of them apart. He welcomes it back now with open arms. And somehow, chained to all of this, the half-grasped chilly dance of the glyphs he touched in the fissure has left its traceries in his mind, touched his fingers and throat with what they are required to do to open that door once more.