The Dark Defiles (56 page)

So we back up. We cast about. What about this shaman
—again, the Salt Lord stirs the mist, and a gaunt, sour-faced old man emerges, wrapped in a wolf skin that’s seen better days—
he has no love for the clanmaster, he could be that authority. But he cannot simply be handed the tools and incited to act, either, unless he prays for it, and to date he has not done so. Poltar is bitter but weak, he contents himself with sulking about the fading of the old ways and the terrible failings in the youth of today. So back up once more. Can we provoke a fight, perhaps, between clanmaster and shaman? That might kindle enough rage to trigger the necessary prayers. But neither man is angry enough to start this fight. We’d have to stir things up. Grief, guilt, rage, then—these are some of any god’s favorite tools, after all, and the Dragonbane has been known to hurt people in the past when subject to such feelings. Perhaps, let’s see, if someone died badly enough, someone of the clan, and the clanmaster felt somehow responsible, then the necessary sparks might fly.

But how to arrange that death?

Oh, wait—here’s a young man—quite a number of young men in fact—all dreaming of battling monsters out of Skaranak legend, praying fervently for some opportunity to test their heroic mettle. Wolves, steppe ghouls, flapping wraiths, it really doesn’t matter which, their prayers are vague—as long as it’s a monster, bring it on. Well, we choose one of these idiots and we answer his prayers.
Takavach gestures, the mist boils. She gathers a confused impression of monstrous, lanky creatures, twice the height of a man, lashing out with taloned limbs at a horse and rider. The rider goes down in the grass, reels briefly to his feet, is struck back down.
The young man in question dies, heroically more or less, so there’s his prayer answered, and our clanmaster neatly assumes the burden of guilt as we’d hoped. He tangles with the shaman, decks him in front of the whole clan.
She sees it in the mist, sees Egar throw the punch.
And the shaman calls down the rage of the gods to avenge his sullied dignity.

Now we’re getting somewhere!

Oh, but wait again—whichever god answers the shaman’s prayers is going to find themselves in direct conflict with the Salt Lord, who is after all charged with protecting the Dragonbane from exactly this sort of thing. The two gods will be compelled, by the codes the Book-Keepers wrote, to do actual battle. And we can’t have that. So back up all over again. Let’s see—perhaps Poltar can be subtly encouraged to seek his own vengeance, to gather and shape his own tools. But how is a god to appear to him in direct answer to his prayers, only to refuse direct aid? The codes won’t allow that, either; they’d tear us apart for a breach like that. We need another avenue of approach, an indirect point of entry. And by a stroke of luck, here’s a young girl from Trelayne—
the Salt Lord draws her from the mist, huddled and weeping on a grimy pallet—
sold into whoring by whichever Majak mercenary brought her home and then tired of her, praying desperately to the Dark Court for intercession, revenge, and escape. All of which we can provide, though not quite in the way the girl imagines, but no matter—there, finally, is our point of contact with the shaman. He’s a frequent visitor to this brothel the girl finds herself in, and he’s not the nicest of clients. He vents himself upon the girl
—Archeth watches grimly as the scene coalesces. Some part of her wants to look away, but she doesn’t—
Kwelgrish manifests in answer to the girl’s prayers, gives her a peaceful escape into oblivion and the shaman the shock of his life, which we can more or less call revenge. Prayer obligations discharged once again, the codes are, if not wholly obeyed, at least appeased. And Kwelgrish has the holy man on the hook, but is free of any obligation to fulfill any direct prayers. We’re in business. Poltar is incited, and a couple of tantalizing myth-derived dreams later, so is one of the brothers. A plot is hatched, the clanmaster is at long last in mortal danger as required. Finally, we’re where we need to be. Time to usher in the protecting Salt Lord, to provide warning and escape, by means of which the clanmaster can be placed where he needs to stand on the board.

And then, after all this work, the Dragonbane chooses not to run.

I mean, he has every incentive. He’s sick of being a clanmaster, life on the steppe, the whole thing. He’s bored rigid. He dreams like a boy less than half his age, of running away from his obligations, back to the freebooter life he knew in the south. He ought to jump at the slightest chance to get out, that’s the way it ought to go.

Instead, he chooses to ignore the Salt Lord’s timely warning, he decides to stay and fight.
And the fight boils up for her viewing, riders and horses out of mist, the ghostly silent clash of blades, a magnificent Yhelteth warhorse spiked through chest and eye with arrows, rearing up. The Dragonbane unhorsed and down.
Nearly gets himself killed in the process, of course, and the Salt Lord then has to leap in and save him, using some frankly rather unsubtle supernatural means—like this.
Silence, while she watches in horror as the Dragonbane’s brothers are slaughtered.
One of the brothers—and there he goes—escapes the fray, rides back to the shaman and reports. The shaman does exactly what you’d expect, goes straight to Kelgris to demand similar supernatural support. And meantime our clanmaster is all set to storm back to camp, all the way on foot if need be, and go head to head with Poltar and whatever else gets in his way.

Now, the codes are rather clear on this—her initially oblique approach notwithstanding, Kelgris has become the shaman’s patroness, and in matters of protection, she has no choice but to grant his wishes—answer his prayers, if you will. So, despite our very best efforts, the scene is now set for exactly the battle of powers we wanted to avoid. Only some very fast talking on the part of the Salt Lord manages to hustle our clanmaster—ex-clanmaster now, of course—out of range and so place the whole conflict in suspension. But the problem has not gone away.

I tell you, it isn’t easy being a god.

T
HE WORLD RETURNED, SLAMMED DIZZYINGLY BACK INTO PLACE AROUND
her, as if she’d been snapped upright into it from a prone position beneath the earth. Bright blue sky, wind through the grass, sunlight slanting. The cloaked and slouch-hatted figure stood opposite her once more. Quarterless was still in her hand.

“The Dragonbane is dead,” she said drably.

“Yes, I know.”

“So then.” She looked at her knife. Hefted it, spun it on the palm of her hand, and put it away in the sheath at the small of her back. “I’d say your problem’s solved for you.”

“For me, perhaps. But this is a blunderer kind of mess, if I might borrow a war metaphor, and the tail is still very much alive. If you go up against Poltar, burned black demon witch that you are, then he is going to call on Kelgris for support. Believe me, he’s done it for enemies a lot less imposing than you over the last couple of years. And if he calls, Kelgris will have no choice but to notice you, to answer the shaman’s call, and to deliver her protection. And you don’t want that.”

She looked down at the harness she wore, down to where the blade called Wraithslayer sat in its inverted sheath on her chest.

“I made the Dragonbane a promise,” she said tonelessly.

“He was your sworn bodyguard. He would want you to go home alive.”

Her clothes were almost dry, she realized. Absently, she squeezed at her sleeve again, searching for dampness, finding barely a trace. She gave the god a grim little smile.

“I will go home alive,” she said.

“My lady!”

A shout in Tethanne, from down the slope. She turned about, squinted, and made out Selak Chan, on his feet in the grass and waving madly. She lifted an arm in salute. Looked back toward Takavach, already knowing at some level, as she turned, that the Salt Lord was gone.

She stared at the sunlit space where he’d stood, could almost see the outline of his figure still hovering there in the empty air. She nodded to herself. Flexed both hands on the hollow feeling in the cup of her palms.

“I will go home alive,” she murmured once more.

She started down the slope toward Selak Chan. Halfway there, she almost tripped over the spread-eagled body of a privateer. She stopped and knelt beside him. Ascertained that he was alive, if deeply asleep and still quite damp. She left him there. Eyes sharper on the ground now as she descended the slope, and she spotted another two bodies hidden in the grass, one of Tand’s sellswords and a Majak. Neither of them seemed to be any the worse for wear.

Chan bowed his head in brief obeisance as she reached him, then gestured around. There was a bemused delight in his voice, and more than a little relief.

“My lady, this is … Where
are
we?”

“Exactly where we’re supposed to be,” she told him. “The Majak steppes.”

“I’d thought us betrayed and drowned.”

“I thought so, too.” She held up her sleeve and sniffed at it again. The medicinal scent was still there, but all trace of moisture had gone. “Apparently not.”

“But how …” He gestured around. “How did we come here, my lady?”

She looked back up the slope to the remnant loom of the cracked container, the scorched grass path it had taken. Understanding itched at the edges of her mind, maddeningly just out of reach. Images came to her out of memory, seemingly at random, wheeling in her head like the mist-drawn pictures the Salt Lord had shown her. The track marks of burning ballista load through the scrub at Tlanmar, when the garrison came under Scaled Folk siege and the catapult defenses saved the day; the shimmer of dissipating heat through the air in the crater where Anasharal fell to earth, the lethally heated shell the Helmsman came in; delicate Kiriath war munitions that mostly hadn’t worked come the crunch, but were packed warily in sand anyway for the jolting wagon haul south to Demlarashan; a Scaled Folk hatchling that Grashgal had kept preserved in fluid in a jar at the An-Monal workshops … 

“We were … catapulted,” she groped. “A great height into the sky, I think, and then … let fall again, somehow. The liquid in the chamber was … not for drowning. It kept us from harm instead. And the chamber … Well, it must have cracked open when it hit the ground. Spilled us out here, in safety. I think.”

Chan’s eyes widened. “But the Dragonbane told us the steppes had to be at least a thousand miles to the east, maybe more. Does the reach of the Kiriath’s iron demons really extend so far?”

Brief flaring of a pride she hadn’t felt for a very long time.

“When need be, yes it does,” she said.

But she couldn’t help wondering—rather sourly—why, with such capacity, Tharalanangharst had not just ordered the Helmsman to catapult them all back to Yhelteth instead; why it was so bloody important that they come out here to the steppes and find themselves still a good thousand miles or more from home.

If it’s something the Dragonbane was supposed to do, then I guess we’re shit out of luck.

“My lady?”

Chan was nodding out across the shoulder of the slope she’d just walked down. She looked and saw figures picking themselves up out of the grass. One at least was Majak.

“Good,” she said. “Maybe Shendanak’s guys can tell us how far we are from Ishlin-ichan. All this fucking grass looks the same to me.”

She watched as a couple of the waking men hugged each other and crowed with delight. Whoops and shouts floated back and forth. More figures, stumbling upright, woken presumably by the exuberant din. More shouting, Naomic mingled with Majak and Tethanne. Closer in, a little way up the slope, she saw a privateer reach down grinning and pull Kanan Shent to his feet. The banged-up Throne Eternal nodded his thanks.

Yeah. Put them a thousand miles southwest of here, and they’d be busy trying to carve each other’s innards out. Go figure.

But she found herself grinning nonetheless.

“Right,” she told Chan. “With me. Let’s go see what the locals reckon.”

They headed back up the slope toward the nearest Majak figure.

They hadn’t made more than halfway when the man they were heading for stiffened, stared around at his fellows, then jabbed out an arm eastward and started shouting. Archeth swung about to follow the gesture, shaded her eyes. The fading traces of the grin fell abruptly off her face.

Riders.

At least a dozen of them, coming at speed.

indrich’s place stank of dwenda presence from five blocks off. Gil almost grinned as he felt it, the gossamer soft settling of its traceries over him, the creep of its threads through his mind. There was a time his nape would have cooled at that touch, a time it would have frozen him in midstep, sent his hand rising to the pommel of the Ravensfriend, his lip curling back off his teeth in the instinctive, defensive snarl of any fanged animal at bay.

Now he barely broke step in the rain.

“What is it, my lord?”

Noyal Rakan, brow furrowed with concern beneath his crested Throne Eternal helmet, young eyes intent on Ringil’s face.
Appears you don’t have it quite as nailed down as you thought, Gil.
He smiled at his Throne Eternal lover with what he hoped was reassurance.

“Nothing to worry about, Captain. Everyone’s where they need to be.”

The streets of Etterkal were eerily silent around them, as if emptied by some abrupt and brutal curfew. They passed barrows abandoned in the middle of thoroughfares, doors left open on deserted tavern interiors with stools flung over and tables still crowded with tankards and platters. Once or twice, they saw wary faces watching them from upper-floor windows, the odd hunched figure in a side alley or begging niche. But most of the Salt Warren seemed to have found pressing business to attend to elsewhere.

Yeah—one guess where that is.

Above the loom of tenement and warehouse walls, through the murk of rain and low-hanging ragged cloud, the sky toward Harbor End was tinged a deep, dull red. A safe bet by now that the news and its many embroidered exaggerations would have reached at least as far as that glow. And in a quarter like Etterkal, word of that sort would work like a flung fistful of coins in a market square. Everyone would be scrambling, fighting through, grabbing for something. Some would have gone to exploit the chaos, to break and enter, to loot, or maybe to settle old scores while the city’s equilibrium was tilted out of true. Some might have family or other, less warm-blooded Harbor-End interests to protect. Some would simply want to try their young thug mettle in the firelit streets, regardless of who or what against. Add to that those who’d go just to gawk, to say they were there, to have a tale to tell their fellows in years to come, and you could count the whole Salt Warren emptied out, faster than a knifed nobleman’s purse.

The dwenda presence strengthened, but he still had no sense that their eyes were on him. Back in the Glades what seemed like a lifetime ago, Seethlaw had stalked him through the mangrove dawn, followed him almost home through the mist, leaned in then at some unimaginable Grey Place angle, and bent his gaze on this mouthy, bad-tempered young swordsman who’d shown up to plague him. Gil wasn’t ever likely to forget what that felt like, and he couldn’t feel it now.

Still
… 

He put up a shrouding glyph, one of the stronger ones. It wouldn’t make him invisible to Aldrain eyes, but it should at least render him uninteresting. Just another human soldier, marching somewhere in a hurry with his comrades at his back. What was it Seethlaw’s lieutenant had said of human soldiery—
like the lost souls of apes.
Gil could still hear the wealth of disdain and distaste in those words, and he was counting on it. With a bit of Dark Queen luck, all eyes in the Findrich residence right now, human and dwenda, were turned the other way, out toward the conflagration at the harbor and the spilling, spreading rage behind it.

Boots through puddles, boots on cobbled stone—they reached the corner of Dromedary Row, swung crisply into Court’s Honor Rise. Slab Findrich’s converted warehouse palace gleamed in wet, dressed-stone frontage less than a hundred yards away at the end of the street. It wasn’t much of a rise—
it isn’t fucking Gallows Gap, that’s for sure
—but trust Findrich to find a hill to squat on, even here.

He bared his teeth. The rain trickled into his mouth.

He drew the Ravensfriend.

“All right,” he shouted through the downpour. “With me. Let’s get this done! For Empire, and for honor! Cut down anything that stands in your way!”

They stormed the scant distance to Findrich’s front door as one. Wet, drumming splatter of boots up the puddled street as they charged, the thin lash of rain across his face, and it felt as if something hard in the small of his back was driving him on. Ten yards out, he dropped the shrouding glyph, built a fast pyre of force in the gap it left. Brought up a howl from the pit of his stomach, raised one clawing hand at the double doors in his way—tore them apart. The oak locking bar on the other side snapped across like a toothpick; he felt it go, felt the upper hinge on the left-hand door panel tear out like a rotten tooth. The doors blew back into the stonework on either side, rebounded, sagged and hung.

In through the gap.

They met no opposition, they met no one at all. Inside, it was all torchlit vaulted space and twinned stone stairways sweeping grandly to the upper levels, as empty of human life as a ruin. Findrich’s place was one of the quarter’s original Marsh Brotherhood stockhouses, put up in a time when the harbor was still a silty undredged anchorage good for fishing skiffs and not much more. Trelayne’s commerce came and went overland in those days, long trailing caravans guided in and out through the mazes of the marsh by sworn men, and paying handsomely for the license. The merchants who built in Etterkal back then were men of cabalistic power and wealth, and their architecture reflected the fact. In the jumping shadow and glow of his men’s torches, blown wild by the sudden entry of the storm he’d let in, Ringil saw expensively finished bas relief and statuary everywhere—friezes depicting heavily laden beasts of burden amid lush marsh vegetation, piled gluts of goods and market stalls, stacked coin and assayer’s scales, and everywhere the repeating motif of masked men at guard. Masked figures led the caravans, masked overseers pointed imperiously at the gathered wealth, masked swordsmen stood with arms folded behind the tables of coin. And the paired stone balustrade staircases were watched over by twin statues of hugely thewed Marsh Brotherhood heroes, caped and masked, stern jawed and smiling faintly, as if in contempt at Ringil’s presumption in daring to enter here.

From the look of the stonework, there’d been some restoration work done recently. Gil snorted, wiped dripping water from his nose. “Fucking poser. Same as it ever was, Slab. The old brotherhood wouldn’t have wiped their arse with the likes of you, and now you want to pretend you’re the heir to it all?”

Rakan blinked at him in the torchlight. “What?”

At his side, Klithren looked perplexed. Gil sighed.

“Doesn’t matter. Upstairs, let’s go.”

No sign of life as they mounted the right-hand stairway. He reached for the dwenda presence, found it still there but churned up now, flickering disconcerted in a way he could only ever remember tasting once before.

“That’s right,” he singsonged softly in the gloom. “I’m
behind
you.”

Down a torchlit corridor flanked by heavy locked doors, nothing living behind them as far as he could tell. The air was stale and musty, and now that he was out of the rain, he could smell his own soaked clothes. He wrinkled his nose.

Funny, would have expected some resistance by now. Not like Slab at all, this.

“Keep your eyes peeled,” he muttered at Klithren.

The corridor gave out onto a kind of broad raised atrium with a honeycomb stonework floor. Rain fell in from the opened roof above, soaked the stone, and rinsed through to the floor level below. It made a hollow, almost musical splashing down there. Under the eaves that edged the central expanse and offered cloistered cover from the rain, the walls were worked with the same bas relief friezes he’d seen in the entry hall below. Torchlight guttered from the corners.

“Degenerate and oathbreaker! Stand where you are!”

Oh, here we go
… 

But it wasn’t Slab Findrich. Too much youth and pomp in those tones, too much jerky excitement, nothing of Findrich’s dead-eyed aplomb.

Vaguely familiar, though … 

“You ran and hid from me once, outcast. Shirked your appointed time on Brillin Hill fields and left a beggared drunk to face me in your stead. Will you turn tail again now?”

Ah.

Like a warm flush through his nether half, like the twisting of some obscure lust in his guts. He made a damping gesture to the men at his back, lowered the Ravensfriend until its point touched the honeycombed floor.

“Hello, Kaad,” he said into the gloom. “This is a pleasant surprise.”

From the corners of the atrium space came skirmish ranger uniforms, crossbows cranked and cradled on the hip of at least a third of them, and the rest with swords or axes drawn. He guessed the count at about fifteen, it was hard to tell in the jumpy light. Not bad odds, now the element of ambush surprise was gone. From amid their number came two slim, erect figures, one older but still spry of step, the other taller, more muscle about him, and a sword in his raised right hand. A silver gleaming mail shirt glinted to midthigh, looked like it had been pulled on in a hurry. Iscon Kaad—Lord Watchman of Administrative … something or other, Gil couldn’t now recall the exact shape of that sinecure title. Swift emissary of the aspiring Kaad family name, anyway, keen avenger of slights to its fledgling honor. Blade salon graduate and pretty nifty with it, by all accounts, as the poor sozzled ghost of a certain war veteran called Darby would probably attest, if he could only be summoned back from wherever his bewildered soul had fled.

And look, he’s brought his daddy with him.

Chancellery counselor Murmin Kaad, smooth-smiling puller of strings, hungry climber of carefully placed strategic ladders into the upper echelons of Trelayne society. The man who nearly two decades past sent Jelim Dasnal to die in the cage for unclean acts of congress, the man who let the Eskiath clan buy Ringil free of the same sentence with who knew what fistful of slow-burning political favors. He wore an eye patch now—Gil’s guts seethed with joy at the sight—but was otherwise unchanged from the last time they met. Grace of Heaven Milacar had once commented on how the climb to power that might age and wring out some men, but seemed only to have energized Kaad. It was true. He stood now with the bearing of a man not much more than half his age, hair still thick and dark but for the two graying patches at his temples, face still unpouched, body still unswollen with all the years of fine living he’d managed to claw from Trelayne’s outmanoeuvred aristo cliques.

Ringil ignored the son, gave the father a harsh, brilliant smile.

“Hello, little man. How’s the eye?”

“Scum! You will not—”

Murmin Kaad put a hand on his son’s shoulder, and Iscon Kaad shut up like a drawbridge gate. He glowered silent, smoldering hate at Ringil across the atrium. Kaad senior let go his son’s shoulder, offered up a thin smile.

“The eye is dead jelly, as I’m sure you already know by now. We are sent to stop you, Ringil. Will you lay down your weapons and save your men’s lives at least, or will you sacrifice them all as you did poor old Darby?”

“Where’s Findrich?”

“He will see you once you are disarmed,” snapped Iscon Kaad. “Or he will see your corpse. Yield now, or do you prefer that we kill you all?”

“You could try that.”

“And succeed, I believe.” Kaad senior gestured left and right at the men he’d brought. “These are skirmish ranger veterans you see. No finer fighting men in the known world.”

“Fuck would you know about fighting, lickspittle?”

“That’s fucking it!”
Iscon Kaad, shouting in rage, turning to look at the men behind him. His arm came up.

Ringil beat him to it—left hand rising, crimping for the glyph. Eddies of
ikinri ‘ska
force, out across the atrium like ripples on a pond.

“Heavy, those crossbows,” he intoned. “Far too heavy to hold.”

He didn’t need to hear the multiple clunking impacts as the bowmen lost grip on their weapons, let them tumble to the floor. He raised his hand, made another glyph.

“Broken.”

It went like a wave through the skirmish ranger ranks, screams and crumpling bodies as this limb or that snapped, sent them variously collapsing to the floor or staggering and clutching at the broken bone of an arm. Screams rose up and drowned out the fall of the rain.

“Sit down,” he said quietly to Murmin Kaad. “Watch.”

The counselor dropped to the rain-soaked atrium floor almost as fast as the men whose legs the
ikinri ‘ska
had broken. His jaw clamped, straining to resist the spell. But he stayed there as if nailed in place.

“Now then,” Ringil told the son. “Let’s pretend we’re back at Brillin Hill, shall we?”

Iscon Kaad came in yelling, sword a looping blur. Ringil didn’t even bother trying to get his shield down off his shoulder. He hacked sideways two-handed with the Ravensfriend, met the blow with everything he had, stopped Kaad dead in his tracks with the force of the block. Spun on the locking point, heaved upward, and stepped sharply back past the straining blades—spooning as close as any lover, back to the other man’s front. It was a thuggish, close quarters reverse, like nothing you’d find in any gentleman’s blade salon manual, and Iscon Kaad had no working defense against it. Ringil stamped savagely backward, boot heel to shin for distraction, right hand dropping from the double grip he had on the Ravensfriend. He hacked up and into Kaad’s sternum with his elbow so the other man convulsed. Let his arm straighten, twist—dropped the dragon-tooth dagger from his sleeve into his waiting palm, stabbed back and down. Buried the jagged blade deep in the low end of Iscon Kaad’s thigh.