The Dark Defiles (47 page)

It’s not like I can spend it anywhere around here,
she complained to Tharalanangharst as she dressed in her new clothes.

Nor can I,
said the Warhelm tartly.
Like so many other things, it will have to wait until your safe return to Yhelteth.

Now she pulled it out of her pocket, offered it glinting on her palm. The Dragonbane looked startled for a moment, then he smiled.

“Joking, Archidi. Just joking. You can stay here.”

“Yeah, like fuck.”

She stowed the coin and crept after him through the jagged maze of masonry. He tried to wave her back, but she forked an obscene gesture at him. He rolled his eyes. They crouched and crawled and clambered through the shattered structure of the building, losing height as they moved. Pale, cold light filtered down from the opened roof space above. She thought she heard the dragon scrape against a wall somewhere outside. Men watched them both from their various vantage points, and she saw them murmur to each other and point.

The gateway Nash had mentioned came into view, broad enough for a carriage and horses in width, but filled at base with debris and reduced to not much more than a couple of yards in height. The spiced reek was there, strong again, the same spikes of aniseed and cardamom through the sandalwood. Light from outside spilled inward under the arch, left long, dagger shadows across the rubble.

She spotted Alwar Nash crouched one floor up, huddled with another Throne Eternal in a corner where an interior wall had slumped sideways and dumped its various floors like a hand of bad cards thrown down. She prodded the Dragonbane’s shoulder—he was fixed on the gateway and its shadows—and pointed. They moved carefully up the sloping mess of cracked tile and stone, reached the two imperials, and hunkered down beside them. Nash bowed briefly to her. Pointed downward at the gate with the pommel end of his broadsword.

“It got its head inside there and twisted—you can see the marks where it gouged chunks out of the arch stones. Tried to tear the rest down with a claw, but there was no space for leverage. Structure was too strong, I guess.” He gazed up and around at the ruined walls. “Whoever built all this knew what they were—”

“Hsst!” The other Throne Eternal, gesturing. “It’s back!”

Shadows moved, under the gateway arch. There was a sound she knew, expelled breath like the shaken tail of some colossal rattlesnake, then ragged dragging noises, and the rubble just outside the gate shifted.

“All right,” said Egar softly.

“What is it?” Nash wanted to know. “What’s it doing?”

“Digging,” she told him. “Seen one do it at Shenshenath. Going to try to clear out enough of that debris so it can get inside, or maybe just dig up the foundations and topple the wall. They’re smart like that. Eg?”

No response. She looked at him, saw him staring down at his hands where they held the staff lance midway along the burnished alloy shaft. It was as if he’d forgotten what the weapon and the hands that held it were for.

She nudged him. “Eg. What’s next here?”

He stirred. Hefted the lance in both hands and looked around at her. “Archidi, I told you all about that piece of shit Poltar, didn’t I?”

She blinked. “The shaman? Sure, uh … Sold you out to your brothers up on the steppe, got them all fired up to kill you or chase you out. But—”

“That fuck needs killing, Archidi.” He held her gaze. “One way or the other.”

Something dripped like melting ice in her belly. “We talked about this already, Eg. Him and your brother Ershal. First order of business, soon as we get to Ishlin-ichan, we’ll track your people down. You got my word. But, uh … got to kill
this
fucking thing first, right?”

He sniffed hard. “Yeah, all right.”

She watched him cock his head, listen for a moment to the stony scrabbling sounds from outside. His face was unreadable. But when he looked up at his companions, his tone was as breezy as a man discussing a horse he might buy.

“Okay, she sounds pretty busy out there, plenty of noise to cover us. Nash—and you, what’s your name?”

The other Throne Eternal bowed. “Shent, my lord. Kanan Shent.”

“Shent, right. Hope you’re handy with that ax. You two follow us down, you got the lady Archeth’s back.”

Grim nods from both men.

“I’m going out as bait—”

“You are not!” she snapped.

“Archidi—”

“If anyone goes as bait, it’s me. I’m smaller, I’m lighter on my feet, I don’t have that staff lance to trip over—”

“Archidi, I used to do this for a living, remember?”

“My lady—”

“Nash, shut the fuck up.” She kept her eyes on the Dragonbane. “Eg, I’m in command here. I’ll decide the battle appointments.”

“I know what I’m doing, Archidi. You don’t.”

“Oh, three and a half fucking years fighting the Scaled Folk, and now I find out I didn’t know what I was doing. It’s funny, I led—”

“It’s not the same
thing!
It’s a fucking dragon!
”

“Hsst!”

The digging noises outside had stopped. They froze in place, listening. Long beats of silence—she watched the shadows coming in the rubble-drowned gateway, saw them shift about. The snorting, rattling breath outside seemed to nose up to the wall they crouched against. Scrape of scales on masonry, a sudden explosive snort.

The digging resumed.

She fished in her pocket, brought out the coin.

“All right, then,” she hissed. “We settle it like this. Heads or manes. One toss, whoever wins goes outside.”

He stared at her for a long moment. Put out his hand.

“Give me that,” he said. “Call it.”

She swallowed hard. “Heads.”

“Right.”

They all watched intently as the Dragonbane tossed the three-elemental piece in the air—caught it in the cup of his hand—hefted it—slapped it across onto the back of his other hand where he still held on to the staff lance—took the covering hand away—

“Manes.” Nodding down at the worn horse-head motif on the upward face. “Can we get on with this now?”

He offered the coin back to her. She glowered at him, certain she’d just been duped, unable to quite work out how.

“Fucking keep it.”

“Okay, thanks.” A wink as he stowed the coin away. “Reckon I’ll blow that down at Angara’s place, soon as we get back.”

“Very funny.”

He knew she’d been a customer at Angara’s herself, back in the day, because she’d let it slip one drunken campfire night on campaign in the south. He knew also what crazy sums she’d paid, for the watertight anonymity and discretion the establishment offered. He’d rocked back from the campfire and whistled low when she told him.

Now he patted the pocket where the coin had gone. “Yeah, should buy me at least a thimble full of ale and thirty seconds with Angara’s best whore.”

“Are we going to fucking do this or what?”

They moved down the sloping, fallen flooring as one. Stopped on the rubbled ground a good distance from one side of the gate. Egar crept forward and squatted, peered cautiously out. A satisfied grunt. He came back.

“Right, it’s busy digging. Nash, you get on the other side of this gate. Archidi, you stay here with Shent, that way we hit it from both sides. Now I’m not planning to be out there long, so be ready. Soon as that cunt pokes its head in here, you hit it with everything you’ve got. Get to an eye if you can, or try for wounds around the mouth. Main thing is—hurt it as much as you can. You cause enough pain, it’s going to start doing stupid things, and that’s when we get to kill it.”

They moved up on the gateway. Nash hefted sword and shield, drew breath. Scuttled rapidly across to the far side and crouched there with evident relief. Egar waited a moment longer, looked back at Archeth and grinned.

“Pay attention,” he said. “I’m only going to do this once.”

He went with careful steps to the edge of the gateway arch. She saw him drop his left hand from the staff lance, hold the weapon loose and balanced at his right side. He lowered himself into a crouch for the sprint. She saw him summon breath.

And the rubble floor caved in under them all.

here were times he dreamed that the cage had taken him after all; that he made some impassioned speech confessing guilt and repentance on the floor of the Hearings Chamber, and offered himself up for the sentence instead. That the Chancellery law-lords in their enthroning chairs and finery murmured behind their hands, deliberated among themselves for a space, and finally nodded with stern paternal wisdom. That the manacles were unlocked and his wife and children set free. He saw it with tears in his eyes and a sobbing laugh on his lips, saw Sindrin kneel on the cold marble, weeping and hugging at little Shoy and Miril, while Shif junior just stood and looked back at him across the chamber with mirrored tears standing in his own young eyes.

Then he woke, to his chains and the memory of what had really been done.

Sprayborne
tilted on her anchors beneath him, yearned seaward on the currents from the river’s mouth. The damp cold of dawn seeped in through the portholes over his head and brought with it from the mudflats a stench like death.

At other times, maybe triggered by that reek, it was nightmare that took him—he dreamed, keening deep in his throat as he slept, that the rusted locks fell off the gibbet cages where they’d been heaved over the side and come to rest on the estuary’s silted bed, and now Shoy and Miril swam free, glitter-eyed and skeletal in the murky water, rising into the light to knock at
Sprayborne
’s hull and call for their father to come out and play … 

Living punishment, as severe as the law allows,
pronounced law-lord Murmin Kaad grimly into the anticipatory quiet of the Hearing Chamber.
Meted out to reflect the severity of your sins against the Fair City and its allies, and to serve as clear example to others. Shif Stepwyr, you will see your bloodline extinguished, you will be imprisoned in the vessel you used to commit your crimes, and you will be given the rest of your natural span to reflect upon the evil you have done in this world.

He screamed when he heard it, and sometimes, waking from the dream, he echoed those screams again. Screamed and tore at his fetters until he bled from the old scarred wounds once more, screamed as he had in the Hearing Chamber, for the Salt Lord to come for him, for the
whole fucking Dark Court
to come if they willed it, to take his soul, to take him away, to any kind of torment but this, if he might just first pay back the rulers of Trelayne for the justice they had meted out.

No one came.

Four years now, as near as he could reckon it, since the last of his children’s weakened cries ceased and he knew he could count them dead. Since he heard the splash of the gibbet cages thrown overboard, and then the steady grating back and forth of the band saw they used to cut through
Sprayborne
’s masts and topple them. Four years trying to sell his soul to every demon god whose name he knew, and no takers yet. Four years, chained the same way his ship was chained, in a space meant to break body and mind alike.

For the craftsman jailers of Trelayne knew what they were about. They were well versed in the art of converting ships into dungeons—in a rapidly burgeoning city where every new square yard of building space had to be reclaimed from the marsh, prison hulks had long been the most economical way of shelving undesirables not considered worthy of execution. Better yet, there was a helpful, finger-wagging symbolism in the trick, especially where piracy was the crime for which punishment was to be exacted. The prison hulks were visible from the city walls on the south side, and from the slums in Harbor End, too, if you had a good enough eye; clearer still from the spread of reclaimed land beyond the city’s skirts, where Trelayne’s agricultural workforce bent their backs to earn a barely sustaining crust, and from the broad sweep of marshland beyond that, where the marsh dweller clans held to their encampments and grubbed a living in whichever way they could.

For anyone in those places who cared to look, then, the hulks were a grim, gathered presence, like storm clouds on the horizon. Think your life’s hard? Transgress the laws of the Fair City, and look where you could end up. Look what became of criminals, of sweet-keeled pirate vessels and their crews when the force of that law was invoked.

Inside
Sprayborne,
the same didactic sensibility held sway for the inmates, but seasoned with an additional twist of cruelty. They’d built the cells into the hull like the chambers in a wasp’s nest, each one sitting just above the bilges and served with light by portholes too high up to peer out of without the prisoner gouging at wrists and ankles when his restraining chains went taut. You might see the outside world you had forgone for your crimes, but only at painful cost.

For the rest, you sat chained in damp, stinking gloom and watched the days of your life march in filtering fingers of light from the portholes, across the opposing wall of the cell from one side to the other, and down again into darkness.

Wyr availed himself of the option to look outside only on those occasions that he felt his sanity going, slipping quietly away from him in the rank confines of the cell. At other times, he refused to torment himself with what he could not have. He was, despite himself, a survivor. He shook off his dreams each day, fed them as fuel to the rage in his belly. He cleaned the bowls of thin stew they served him, he devoted the few clear-headed hours of strength the slop gave him to simple, mindless exercises that didn’t pull on his chains. The evenings, he spent filing away at his fetters with one of the iron nails he had worked loose from the hull planking, until it grew too dark to see what he was doing. It would take years to cut through a single manacle, probably a decade to free all four limbs, always assuming he didn’t run out of nails first. And if they caught him at it, they’d go right ahead and replace the irons with fresh ones or maybe just kill him.

But it gave him something to do. It gave him a daily focus for his fury. It gave him hope, and he knew how vital that was.

In the other cells, he could hear how the men from his crew went slowly, gibbering mad with the isolation and the death of hope. They started out four years past with thumped messages in code through the wooden walls, shouted vows of solidarity to each other from cell to cell. But all too soon the structure of their communication began to break down. They hammered on the planking in incoherent rage. They yelled, they screamed, they wept. Eventually, they began to cackle and crow incomprehensibly to themselves. In the first couple of years, he’d been able to recognize voices, put individual names of men to the yelling, but that time was long past. Now,
Sprayborne
’s whole hull echoed faintly with their mingled mutterings and laments, as if the men themselves were gone and only ghosts remained.

Footfalls, in the corridor along the keel.

Wyr propped himself up from the planks where he lay, stared at the filtering fingers of light over his head. It was early in the day for food; they’d not usually feed him much before noon. The tiny shift in routine, the trickle of difference it made, set an unreasonable jag of excitement chasing through his veins.

Something was going on.

Scrape of a key in the lock, the heavy wooden door thumped back, and a familiar figure stood in the space it left. Wyr blinked and straightened up in his chains. Coughed and shuddered with the damp.

“Gort?” Voice a choked husk. Stifle the coughing, force it down. “What you doing here at this hour?”

“Same as fucking ever.” The jailer hefted a pail at his side, bigger than the usual. It made a slopping sound that set Wyr’s mouth running with saliva. “And I’m telling you now, this might be all you get till day after tomorrow, depending. Don’t scoff it all at once, eh.”

“Right, yeah. What’s going on?”

Gort heaved a world-weary sigh. He was a gutty sack of a man, lugubrious and slow and full of complaints. But by the standards of prison hulk jailers, he was a prince. He appeared to pass no judgment on the men he attended, saw them as unfortunates just like himself, caught up in the same atrocious web of chance that had landed him with this gods-forsaken job. Previous jailers, equally unhappy with their lot, had never missed a chance to take it out on the prisoners at the slightest provocation or sometimes with none at all. It was a casual brutality, no different than stomping a cat or hurling stones at a street cur—they mostly used boots or fists, only occasionally resorted to the short, studded lash they carried at their belt as the closest thing there was to a badge of office in this line of work. But Wyr had never seen Gort’s lash come off his belt, and the worst he’d had to endure at the man’s hands were the interminable monologues on the many, many ways in which life had conspired to treat his jailer unjustly.

“Got to do the whole fucking ship and be back to Harbor End before noon, if you can believe that shit. Like to see them up at the Chancellery manage that. They must think—here, cop hold of this, stash it or eat it now, up to you—must think I’ve got a fucking longboat and full complement to row me out and back, ’stead of what I
have
got, which is two broken-down old war veterans with more scar tissue than skin barely know one end of an oar from the other. Course, that’s not the best of it, neither.” Gort took a morose seat on the doorsill. “After this round, we’re right back out again with provisions and medicines for the yellow ’n’ blacks. Well, they needn’t think I’m setting a single foot on one of
those
fucking decks, not on what they pay me. Let the fucking bone men go, earn their money for a change—”

“Yellow and black?” Voice still husky with lack of use, but a fresh pulse of interest prickled along Wyr’s nerves. “Out here, you mean? With the hulks?”

“Yeah, fucking plague ship, where else they going to stick it? Navy picket brought them in last night, a whole squadron of them.” A vague nod up at the portholes. “Three ships, and two of them are captured imperials. Probably where they picked it up; those southerners got some filthy fucking habits from what I hear. All flying the pennants, anyway.”

“Plague.” He said it like the name of a god he might worship. The bucket of stew was forgotten at his feet.

“Yeah, just what we fucking needed, right? On top of the war and all? Don’t really know why they’re making us feed them in the first place, if it’s anything like back in forty-one, they’ll all be dead by end of week. And then we’ll just have to burn the ships to the waterline. Waste of good food, waste of
my
fucking time coming out an extra trip every day.” Gort’s eyes narrowed with freshly aggrieved suspicion. “Might be, you know, this is all some Empire trick to fuck us over. Maybe the imperials let them capture those ships on purpose, crewed them up with men what were already infected and
let
us take them, so we’d carry the plague right into the city. Sort of thing they’d do, treacherous fuckers, they pretty soon forgot how we drove out the lizards for them. And now look. Hinerion taken like a peach, Empire columns marching right into the peninsula like it was their backyard. You ask me, that raiding you did down south after the war, they should of given you a fucking medal for it.”

“What I thought,” said Sharkmaster Wyr quietly.

“Yeah, guess we all got to carry other men’s fuckups, don’t we. Like I should of had that harbor watch job when old Feg died. Everyone knew I was his favorite for it. Still can’t believe that little shit Sobli got it instead. Nah, don’t worry, not going to bore you with that story again. Like I said, don’t you go eating all that at once, mate. With this shit boiling up, could be a couple of days before I get back here again.” The jailer slapped his thighs and stood up. “Anyway, that’s it, got to get on. Let’s hope your old bosun’s calmed down a bit since yesterday. Last thing I need on top of everything else, that is—him flinging his own turds at me like the fact he’s in here is
my
fucking fault.”

The door clubbed shut again, the key grated around, and Gort went grumbling away. Wyr got up and hobbled stiffly to a portion of the cell floor under the nearest porthole. He took a long breath, then hauled himself up on the porthole’s lower edge, wincing as his fetters dug into recently healed flesh from a dream he’d had a few days back.

He gritted his teeth and hauled harder, got his chin over the edge and peered out.

Bright morning light, long angled ladders of it propped up against the clouds, as if the sky itself was ripe for boarding. The new ships sat at anchor about a quarter league off, marked out from the hulk fleet by their masts, at the top of which the yellow and black plague pennants flopped slackly about in the breeze. One League caravel, looked like Alannor yard work from the lines, and two bigger, fatter Empire merchantmen, the sort that would have raised a low, predatory cheer from his crew back in the day. All three vessels flew the colors of Trelayne. It was hard to tell in the glare of early daylight off the water; his eyes were stinging from the unaccustomed brightness, but it didn’t look as if there was anyone up on deck.