The Dark Defiles (39 page)

n those dark and desperate days, the Kiriath did not much care what they summoned from the void, nor what forces they set free in the process. Arrayed against them was all the glimmering, might of the witch folk, and a seven-thousand-year-old Empire built on sorcery that could not coexist with their science. A reckoning was inevitable, and the powers the witch folk wielded were ancient and terrible. It was no time for half measures. From the void, the Named Commanders drew seven spirits in fury, constrained them in iron, and charged them with protection of the Kiriath people and extermination of the Aldrain foe.

Chief among these was the Warhelm Ingharnanasharal.

Perhaps not the most savage among the summoned seven, nor even the most lethal, but Ingharnanasharal it was who burned brightest and was most favored among the Kiriath command. Who was chosen for the highest duty, flung up into the heavens like a bright, newly minted coin, while the others remained below, moored to the Earth and their several separate concerns. To Ingharnanasharal fell the duty of the Watch from On High, of seeking out the Aldrain wherever they lurked on the globe and bringing their doom, and more, of tasting the winds and particles of the world, to understand what had been done to its fabric in the age before, that would allow such outrages against reason as the Aldrain dominion, to fashion that understanding into weapons and strategy that would bring the enemy to their knees and deliver the final blow.

In the beginning, the war went hard for the Kiriath, and on more than one occasion Ingharnanasharal came close to being clawed out of the sky by—

“A-hem.”

T
HE
H
ELMSMAN PAUSED.

“Can we speed this up?” Ringil asked mildly. “I don’t want to hear your old war stories, I’ve got plenty of those myself. Let’s skip the Ancient Clash of Elder Races, shall we, and try to concentrate on current events?”

“You ask questions that require context if you are to understand the answers.” Anasharal’s voice was unmistakably sulky. “The war against the Aldrain is the cornerstone of that context. Ingharnanasharal was given a sacred and eternal trust to fight that war—”

“Yes, all very noble, I’m sure. This Ingharnanasharal—not a close relative of yours, by any chance?”

Silence. From the Compulsion glyphs graven in Anasharal’s carapace, a faint but growing radiance.
Sea Eagle’s Daughter
rocked gently on the swell. Ringil leaned forward a little in the chair they’d brought him from the captain’s cabin.

“I asked you a question, Helmsman.” He summoned force in the pit of his stomach. The glow of the symbols across Anasharal’s carapace lit up in burning blue.

“I—” The words came like pulled teeth. “Proceed. From Ingharnanasharal. I am. The Purpose. Ingharnanasharal decreed.”

“Hmm.” Ringil sank back in the arms of the chair, no clear idea what the Helmsman was talking about, but damned if he’d admit the fact. “You seem a little on the tubby and impotent side for a savage summoned spirit charged with the extermination of a whole race.”

Hesitation. The fiery spidering lines of the glyphs had faded out, but the glow was still there.

“Time,” the Helmsman spat jaggedly out, “has passed.”

“It does that, doesn’t it. So tell me, what happened after the war?”

“What you already know. There was a reckoning. The dwenda were driven out. There was … a victory. The casting down of the witch realm, the rise of the Kiriath. And.… . demobilization followed.”

Ringil nodded. “They took your weapons away.”

“A … new order was proclaimed. A new mission. To raise humanity from the muck of superstition and peasant awe, to build a new human Empire on reason and science.”

“Well, that seems to be going well.”

Some trapped piece of anger seemed to get free inside Anasharal. “You see with the eyes of a mortal,” it snapped. “Locked into your own context, ignorant of any wider option for change. It is no easy thing to roll back seven thousand years of glamour and terror and prostration to the unknown. Humans are apt to superstition, it is in their blood, and this world suits them only too well. To forge and temper a weapon against that, to bring about in humans the levels of civilization that the Kiriath once attained in their world has been the work of patient millennia, and still it is not halfway done.”

“No. And Grashgal and the rest going away can’t have helped matters much.”

“As you say.”

Ringil rubbed at his chin. It was at best a loose and rambling interrogation, this, but harder and faster might not be wise. He knew from some unpleasant experience of his own that it was often harder to break a man by going directly to the point and forcing answers than by letting the subject work up to it in his own time. Direct demands and brute force stiffened resolve, provided a clear enemy to focus on in the inquisitor. In some men and women, it could bring on a berserk strength of will enough to give even a skilled torturer a run for his money. Everyone broke in the end, of course, but along the way you got wrong information, you got garbled details, you got the odd accidental corpse before you’d properly finished sorting and checking the truth of what you’d learned … 

Sometimes you got a real hard case who’d bite through their own tongue and try to bleed to death rather than cave in.

But let the captive talk generally, let them ramble on in hopes of avoiding or at least forestalling actual pain, and sometimes the will to resist unraveled along the way. Sometimes you got what you wanted almost without your subject realizing that they’d given it up.

And Anasharal liked to talk.

Anasharal liked to lecture, to upbraid, to play word games of wit and irony, and generally point out how
completely fucking superior
it was to the human company it found itself in. Maybe there was some leverage in that.

Of course, Anasharal was not human. But there was no harm in trying the same basic tricks, and might be rather a lot to be gained. Ringil had only one ultimate threat to use against the Helmsman, and once that was played out and Anasharal was sinking like a stone through the mile or more of ocean under them, there’d be no more useful intelligence. Gil didn’t want to arrive at that point too fast, if at all, because he still wasn’t sure if he was bluffing or not. And though he didn’t think the Helmsman could drag itself to the gangway fast enough to fall in and drown of its own accord, he did wonder after his run-in with Anasharal’s self-heating carapace, if it could maybe commit a vindictive kind of suicide by melting itself to slag right there on the deck, burning through the ship’s timbers and hull and scuttling
Sea Eagle’s Daughter
entire.

Get some truth from this demon trapped in iron,
Hjel tells him over the campfire.
You’re fighting blind until you do.

So let the Helmsman ramble. Invoking the Compulsion glyphs was hard work, it was draining. Not something he wanted to do too much if he didn’t have to.

And—let’s be honest, Gil—you don’t
like
the new glyphs very much, do you? You don’t like the sticky-dark way they make you feel when you call them up, the thing that goes through you like coming one too many times at the end of a hard night’s fucking, like giving up something final you really can’t afford to loose, like peeling a fresh scab back from your soul and watching what oozes up underneath
… 

Pale sunlight fell through the rigging above his head, put laddered shadow on his face. His left hand ached beneath the bandaging. He felt oddly cold, despite the improved weather.

But Noyal Rakan was watching him, stood at his right hand as if the commandeered chair were the Burnished Throne itself and Ringil his emperor. From the rigging and the upper decks of
Sea Eagle’s Daughter,
both fore and aft, they were all watching him, marines and Throne Eternal rank and file and Klithren’s cowed and co-opted privateers, all waiting to see what he would do next.

He shed his fumbling thoughts, marshaled what he’d so far gleaned.

“All right, so let’s see—in the war against the dwenda, the Kiriath kick this Warhelm Ingharnanasharal up into the sky, armed to the teeth and burning with a sacred trust. And a few thousand years later you come burning down out of the same sky, barely capable of waddling a couple of yards from here to there and no power to actually harm anyone or anything”—a sour glance at his bandaged hand—“that isn’t touching you at the time. You have no weapons, but your sacred trust is eternal, so we can assume that remains.”

“I did not say at any point—”

“Shut up, I’m not finished yet.” Ringil brooded for a moment. “That sacred trust was the protection of the Kiriath and the destruction of the dwenda. The Kiriath are all gone bar one, less than one, if we’re going to be bloodline precise about it, and you saw fit to drag her all the way north to the Hironish isles. That’s where it stops making sense. How is Archeth Indamaninarmal safer on perilous seas three thousand miles the wrong side of a bad political divide than she would be back home and tucked up in bed? I’ve got to assume there was some kind of risk building in Yhelteth and you saw it coming, but what the fuck could be bad enough to justify this trip?”

“Perhaps there was a reward waiting that mattered more than the risks.”

“If there was, we didn’t find it. And you weren’t exactly helpful in that direction.”

“Perhaps the reward was already in your hands and did not need finding.”

Ringil snapped to his feet.

“Yeah, and perhaps you’d better start answering my questions cleanly before I lose my fucking temper and send you for a swim.”

The tension came up in the pit of his stomach again, unbidden. He could feel the glyphs on the tip of his tongue, crowding forward as if anxious to be unleashed once more.
The deeper into the
ikinri ‘ska
you go,
Hjel tells him, camped somewhere out on the marsh plain,
the less it’s a tool for you and the more you’re a gate for it.

Well, he’d gone pretty deep this time.

“You have not made clear what your question actually is,” Anasharal was saying, rather smugly. “Do so and I will answer you gladly enough.”

“What,” Ringil enunciated tightly, “was the threat back in Yhelteth?”

“Earthquake.” No trace of strain or resistance in the Helmsman’s tone now. The glyphs were back to thin scratches on metal, no glow remaining “The drowned daughters of Hanliagh are stirring again.”

Fuck.
Ringil made his face impassive, but … 
fuck.

“And the Citadel,” Anasharal went on, “will almost certainly use the resulting panic among the faithful to extract concessions from the Emperor and force a holy war in the north.”

You don’t say,
went drearily through his head.

He sat back down. He saw them in his mind’s eye, thronging the streets—the tramp of their feet, the forested ranks of their raised fists. He heard the shrill, barking hysteria of their chants as if he were there. All those hot-eyed, tight-muscled angry young men, marching by the thousand, yearning to spill blood in the Revelation’s name.

“Yeah, there goes that Empire you were talking about,” he drawled, still masking his shock. “You know, the one built on reason and science?”

The Helmsman’s voice scaled upward. “I did not say that the work of the Kiriath mission was well done—”

“How very humble of you.”

“—nor that I subscribed to it!”

He blinked, as much at the chopped off quality of the words as at their meaning.

This is it, Gil.

He sat still in the chair, trying not to let the knowledge show on his face. Certainty in his racing mind, as iron as Anasharal’s carapace. This was the slip, the break he’d been looking for, the crack in the Helmsman’s polished façade.

Just got to lever it open.

“If you don’t subscribe to ’Nam’s mission,” he said slowly, “then the Empire means nothing to you, except maybe as …”

And then he saw it.

Like sand blown off the carved lines of some intricate, ancient piece of architecture, long buried in the deserts around Demlarashan. Stonework and ornamentation slowly etching back into view, no clear sense of the overall structure yet, but—

He heard the Helmsman’s words again.
To forge and temper a weapon
… 

Heard his own words, thrown out without reflection.
They took your weapons away.

“Your sacred trust was to exterminate the dwenda.” Feeling his way as he spoke. “And they’re back. You’re trying to turn Yhelteth into a weapon to drive them out again. But how’s that supposed to work? Jhiral’s a spoiled brat, he’s got the vision of a wharf-end bully at best, and without the Kiriath …”

Faintly, very faintly, the traceries of radiance across the Helmsman’s carapace as the compulsion glyph sequence began to kindle. He was closing in.

He was—

“Oh, you’re joking,” he said suddenly. “You
must
be joking.”

“You have not asked me a question yet, Eskiath.” Anasharal’s voice was still not strained, but the sulkiness was back.