The Dark Defiles (60 page)

“Says the noble son who never lacked for any.” The slave merchant sipped delicately at the pipe, sieved smoke out between his teeth. “You’ll forgive me if I’m not mortally wounded by your contempt.”

Ringil grinned and hefted the Ravensfriend. “If I wanted to mortally wound you, Slab, I’d just take this thing and shove it through your purse.”

“And Klithren of Hinerion!” Booming false cheer in Findrich’s voice, but the gaze that slipped past Ringil’s shoulder was heavy-lidded and cold. “Well, well. We thought you defeated and dead, knight commander, but I see it’s worse than that. You seem to have found something you like, sniffing around our faggot war hero here. Been initiated into the dark arts of buggery and stubble-cheeked blow jobs, have we?”

Klithren cursed thickly and stepped past Ringil on the right, sword arm rising. Gil put out a hand to block him. Soft brushing touch of the
ikinri ‘ska,
in case the mercenary’s command discipline wasn’t enough.

“Stand down,” he said firmly. “That’s not what we’re here for.”

“I know what you did to me, Findrich,” Klithren snarled. “I know what you fucking did!”

Findrich raised an eyebrow. “What? Made you a knight of Trelayne and handed you a command fit for a man of ten times your social standing? Well, I’m deeply sorry for it now, especially seeing as how you’ve pissed it all away.”

Klithren lurched forward again. Gil lifted his arm again, murmured a glyph and looped the
ikinri ‘ska
subtly tighter about the mercenary.

“Easy there.” He produced a thin smile for Findrich. “Thing is, Slab, we’re not all as in thrall to rank and standing as Harbor-End dregs like you. Some of us are just fighting men. Some of us actually stood against the reptiles—as opposed to just sending our sons off to stand and die in our stead.”

Viciously unjust, and he knew it. Findrich had done everything he could, pulled every string at his command, to keep his only son out of the war. Pointless effort—the boy defied his father, volunteered for the southern shores defense levy, and subsequently died, either at Rajal beach or somewhere on the brutal fallback march that followed. Gil saw the slaver’s dead-eyed stare catch fire on the old pain, saw his upper lip lift fractionally from his teeth.

Something savage in him rejoiced at the sight.

The legend cracks and crumbles. Not every day you get a rise out of Slab-face Findrich.

“I hear they never did find a body,” he went on mildly. “That’s the thing about the Scaled Folk, though. You could always rely on them to clean up after a battle. Right, Klithren?”

“Right,” said the mercenary somberly.

“Yeah, how do you live with something like that, Slab? I mean—knowing your son died, roasted and eaten by monsters, and you put him out there because you were too much of a coward and a coin-grubbing thief to go and fight yourself.”

The pipe mouthpiece clattered to the floor. Findrich surged halfway to his feet, knuckles white on the arms of the chair. Rage in his eyes, and a low growl rising from his throat. Ringil gave him an unfriendly smile, and he froze.

“Just so you know—you get up out of that chair, I’ll chop your fucking feet off. Sit
down.
” Gil let the point of the Ravensfriend drift lazily up from the floor, waited while the slave merchant lowered himself by glaring inches, back into his seat. “Right. Small talk’s over, Slab. I just set this entire city on fire to get my friends back; you think I’m going to go easy on you for old times’ sake? I killed Grace, I killed Poppy, and the only reason you’re not following them is that I’m short of time. So let’s stop fucking about, shall we? You want to live? You want to keep your appendages and your manhood intact?
Where are my friends?
”

He felt the change shiver through the room like a cold wind. Saw Findrich bare his teeth in triumph.

“Right fucking behind you, faggot.”

O
UT OF THE SHADOWS AT THE BACK OF THE CHAMBER, THE DWENDA CAME.

Some of them were the statues in the corners, melting now back into life and motion, shedding their stone glamour the way a snake sheds skin, shaking off their held poses in shimmering splinters of blue fire. He saw a couple of them tilt their necks to shake off stiffness as they came. Others just walked out of the blue fire haze he’d seen them emerge from at Ennishmin, as if curtained portals drew back in the air itself, edged with the same blue fire, and let them through. Tall, ghost pale of face, eyes like pits of gleaming black tar, and they moved with a terrible unhuman grace and poise. Beneath cloaks of shimmering velvet blue and gray, they were armored head to neck in smooth, seamless black garb that seemed to repel the light. They bristled with weapons, glimmering long-sword blades and ornate axes, and Risgillen of Illwrack was at their head.

Ringil surveyed them bleakly for a moment, shot a brief glance back at Findrich.

“Not those friends,” he said patiently.

The slaver spat on the floor at his feet. “Fuck you. Arrogant aristo prick. You’re fucking done.”

“Well, we’ll see.” Ringil caught Klithren’s eye. Nodded at Findrich. “Keep an eye on our pal here. I got this.”

He strode out to meet Risgillen, across the expanse of honeycombed stone floor. Was vaguely aware of Noyal Rakan, barking orders at the gaping imperials, trying to snap them out of their shock, trying to mask his own. Ringil felt a twinge of sympathy. He remembered his own first dwenda encounter, two years back, the icy terror that had seized him at the time. The imperials had had more warning, true enough, but still, they were mostly young and unseasoned. He’d seen them give a solid account of themselves against human foes, but he could not predict how they would cope here.

Best not to risk finding out.

He passed Rakan, put out his shield, and touched him on the arm with its cold steel edge.

“Keep them tight,” he murmured. “Bowmen deployed, but no move unless I call it, or these motherfuckers try to jump me. Got that?”

“Yes, my—” Voice taut and hoarse, he heard how Rakan swallowed to clear his throat. “My lord, are these truly—”

“They fall down just like men,” Gil told him. “Remember that. Just like men.”

And left the young captain there. Moved out to meet the dwenda wedge and their commander. He’d forgotten how coldly beautiful Risgillen was—sculpted ivory features, jutting cheekbones and smooth pale brow, black silky fall of hair, framing the face. Long, mobile mouth, long slim-fingered hands.

He’d forgotten how much she resembled Seethlaw. How hard the blood resemblance struck at him, and what it left welling up in the wound.

He wiped it all away. Stored it, behind a stony battlefield mask.

“Risgillen,” he called amiably across the space between them. “You really are a stubborn fucking bitch. I warned you not to come back here again. Now I’m going to have to kill you, just like your fuckwit brother.”

She tilted her head, wolflike, and smiled. “This world is ours, Ringil, and we will have it for our own. We owned it before men learned to build their first campfires out on the arid plains, we will own it long after you are all gone. Look to your own legends if you think I’m lying. We are the Aldrain, the Elder Race; we are the Shining Immortal Ones.”

“Yeah.” Ringil came to an easy halt, a couple of yards away from her. If she raised her long sword at him now, they could touch blades “Legends I’ve been reading say you got your arses handed to you by the Black Folk four thousand years ago, and they drove you out. What have you been doing since—sulking?”

He heard indrawn breath along the dwenda line. Looked like they’d all learned pretty good Naomic, which suggested they’d been deployed here for a while. A dwenda warrior on Risgillen’s flank twitched in the ranks, bleached features stretched in outrage, long ax raised. Ringil lifted the Ravensfriend casually, pointed it,

“You—don’t even fucking think about it.”

Risgillen turned and said something softly in the Aldrain tongue. The outraged dwenda subsided, fell back in line. Risgillen smiled again, thinly. She looked back at Ringil with an intensity that bordered on adoration.

“You should have stayed in the south,” she said very softly. “But I’m glad you came. I would not have wanted to miss your doom.”

Ringil nodded. “Let’s get on with it, then. Where’s this sword?”

For just a moment, he had her. He saw the way she froze. Gave her a lopsided grin.

“Risgillen, Risgillen.” Gathering the
ikinri ‘ska
stealthily to him, like the folds of some heavy net for casting. Meantime—
misdirection, Gil, loud and bright as you can manage.
“Did you really think I was coming to you unaware? You really thought you were going to have your last fuckwit human stooge just
crawl up
out of whatever jinxed Illwrack heirloom he got magicked into five thousand years ago, and take
my
soul? You really haven’t understood who you’re fucking with here, have you.”

She stared at him for a long, cold moment, black empty eyeballs catching glimmers of light from the torches around the chamber, twisting them into something else.

“It’s you who hasn’t understood,” she whispered.

He felt it lash out for him, the dwenda glamour in all its binding force. Flash recall of his time with Seethlaw in the Grey Places, the subtle webs of compulsion he would only later understand had been spun around him. It fell all about him, at angles he could not see or name, coiled inward, made a soundless hissing as it came—

He reached for the
ikinri ‘ska.
Grinned as it came on in his head like icy fire. Struck.

Nothing.

He tried again, cast hard. The dwenda compulsion drew savagely tight, crushing out the glimmer of the
ikinri ‘ska
a scant moment after it arose. He yelped. Something tore in his chest with the reversal; it felt as if his rib cage would crack like a nutshell between clenching teeth. His arms hung at his sides as if weighted there with ballast. The Ravensfriend fell through his fingers, his shield tore loose from his left arm. Clank and clatter as they hit the honeycomb floor. His head lolled back a second, then straightened through no effort of his own. He would have gone to his knees if the choice had been his to make, but whatever forces Risgillen had unleashed held him upright, as if suspended there by a spike through the sternum.

He twisted his head to the side, rolled his eyes like a panicked horse, trying to see his men … 

“They are bound as you are.” Risgillen told him. “The power of Talonreach, the storm-callers’ art enacted. The glamour ripples outward. It’s a simple enough matter—whatever power you summon is deflected, taken from you, pushed away and used in binding your followers ever tighter. You have already made them breathless with your efforts so far. I daresay if you keep pushing, you’ll suffocate them.”

At the extremity of his vision, he saw the truth of it—Noyal Rakan’s straining face, the locked-up posture. He heaved once more against the binding, got no single fraction of leverage anywhere. He let go. Hung from his failure as if nailed there.

Risgillen stepped closer to him, long sword lowered. She put up her free hand to touch his face. He felt the trembling in her fingers as she did it.

“You see?” she said, voice a shaky caress. “I have understood exactly who I am fucking with.”

Ringil made a noise through gritted teeth.

“Oh, yes. You wanted to see the sword.”

She let go of his face, raised her hand, and snapped her fingers in the chilly air. More words in the Aldrain tongue and a name, one he thought he recognized.

A dwenda shouldered through the ranks, unarmed, limping a little. There was an ornate bordering on his cloak, glyphs worked into it in strands of red and silver, and the rest of the company gave him respectful ground. He stood beside Risgillen, fixed Ringil with his empty black stare. Risgillen made an elegant gesture of introduction.

“This is Atalmire, ordained storm-caller for clan Talonreach. The glamour that holds you is of his making. You’ll remember him, of course. You crippled him in the temple at Yhelteth.”

Fractional easing in the pressure on his chest—Gil found, abruptly, he could speak.

“You all look the same to me,” he husked. “Hello, Atalmire, you crippled fuck. Tell me, what kind of mage can’t fix his own leg?”

The storm-caller looked impassively back at him.

“He has chosen not to heal,” Risgillen said. “He chooses to remember instead. But have no worries on that account. When you end, so will the wound you gave him.”

Following Atalmire, two more dwenda came through carrying a slim, six foot ornately worked wooden casket between them. Risgillen darted a smiling glance at Ringil, like a mother at a patient child finally about to receive a long-promised gift. She leaned close again.

“They tell me that some small part of you will survive this,” she said very gently. “That it will sit behind the eyes of the risen Dark King, eyes that were once your own, and see everything that he sees with them, everything that he does as he takes back this world for us. I hope that pleases you as much as it pleases me.”

“Big mistake,” he hissed at her. “You don’t want to leave me alive, Risgillen.”

“No, I do,” she said seriously, and nodded at Atalmire.

The storm-caller uttered a single, harsh syllable and made a sharp beckoning motion at the casket. The wooden lid splintered, then cracked violently apart. Exploded away from the base in five jagged chunks. Splinters stung Ringil’s cheek.

The sword lay within.

arnak Ironbrow rode to Ishlin-ichan irritable and combative, and what he found there didn’t put him in any better mood.

They didn’t know him at the gate—no sign of the usual crew; they had a quad of callow herd boy types propping up the gateposts instead. None of them looked old enough to be wiping their own arses yet, let alone wielding the staff lances they’d been given. Not a beard between them. He looked around in the early evening gloom for a familiar face, saw only a corpulent captain sat outside the guard hut, picking his teeth with a fowl bone. Old line command instincts prickled along his nerves—down south, he’d have had all five of these on a slouching charge, quick as slitting a throat. Couple of strokes each at the posts, double for the captain, and docked pay all around. He reined in the impulse, reined in his mount, too, a prudent dozen yards from the gates. Raised his hand to the riders behind him to do the same.

“Nine men seek entry,” he intoned loudly. “We bring no word but peace.”

The staff lancers fumbled about a bit, glances back and forth between them. They looked hopefully over at the man by the hut. The guard captain dug a chunk of something out on the end of his improvised toothpick, looked quizzically at it, and then popped it back into his mouth. He stood up, stretched, and yawned.

“Skaranak, eh?” He looked them over with calculated insolence. “Coming in for a bath, are we, lads?”

Marnak felt how his men bristled at his back. He offered the man a bleak grin. “Come to fuck some of your Ishlinak whores, actually.”

Barked laughter behind him. The corpulent captain flushed. Marnak leaned forward in his saddle, kept his grin but never let it touch his eyes.

“Is there going to be a problem?”

From long habit, he’d measured the logistics of the fight reflexively as they rode up. Nine of them, hardened herd outriders all, versus the four kids with their staff lances on the gate and this bag of guts. Marnak and his crew were all riding with lances sheathed, but against this kind of opposition, it wouldn’t much matter. It’d be over in less time than you’d need to tell it around the campfire afterward. At worst they’d collect a couple of gashes between them.

And a whole new raiding war, with summer still a month to run.

Tensions were never far off between Skaranak and the Ish, but the two clans had not fought hard now for over a decade. The odd drunken tavern brawl in Ishlin-ichan, maybe, that got out of hand and went to knives. And a couple of inconclusive skirmishes over grazing up near the Bow-of-Bandlight meander three years back—but both sides hastily ascribed those to renegade elements, buried their dead, and paid out blood debt to the families, kissed and made up. It just wasn’t worth getting into anymore; there was too much at risk that was good for both sides now.

Yeah—tell that to your gut-sack captain here.

No matter. He couldn’t butcher the Ishlin-ichan gate watch over nothing but bad temper and balls-out tribal idiocy. Those days were long gone.

The guard captain appeared to have reached a similar conclusion. Or perhaps he saw the look in Marnak’s eyes. He sniffed and spat, courteously far from the Skaranak’s horse’s hooves. “No problem, graybeard, if you don’t bring one yourselves. Pay the levy and in you go. Nine of you—that’ll be ninety.”

“Ten star a man? Bit steep, isn’t it?”

A shrug. “You got imperial coin, I could let you in for—let’s see—eight elementals.”

“That’s still steep.” Marnak looked significantly around at the four staff lancers, one by one. Gate toll was meant in principle for the city’s coffers, but there was no way hard imperial coin was going to end up anywhere but in these men’s pockets. “Call it six. That’s a spinner each for your lads here and two for you. Can’t say fairer than that now, can we?”

He patted at the purse he wore under his coat and it clinked merrily. Not a noise you’d easily get out of the crude, star-stamped bronze octagons that passed for coinage among the Majak. The guard captain made a show of chewing the offer over, but Marnak could see the man’s hand twitch at his side and he knew, looking into the Ishlinak’s face, that the motion wasn’t any urge toward the sword he wore at his belt.

They were in.

“Oh, yeah,” he wondered, as they were waved through. “What happened to Larg, anyway? This is usually his shift.”

A shrug. “Coughing fever. Him and half a hundred like him. Even the imperials are coming down with it this year. That and the comet, it’s not looking good.”

Marnak’s men made warding gestures, so did the staff lancers on the gate. He sketched one himself, more for solidarity and appearance than anything else. Poltar had made a big song and dance about the comet, of course, dark muttered implications of character flaw among the council, angered Sky Dwellers, great impending threats. All the usual shit. Marnak didn’t set much store by portents; he’d traveled too far and seen too much over the years. But when the sky woke up, so did the shaman, and that in itself was worth a sleepless night or two—once Poltar Wolfeye was roused, there was no telling where the dance might go, how out of hand it might get. And it wasn’t as if he’d grown any more stable with the rise of his fortunes over the last couple of years, either. All those holes he liked to make in his own hide, the look in those eyes. He hadn’t wanted anyone to stray out of Skaranak territory in the wake of the comet’s fall, let alone ride the three days to Ishlin-ichan—Marnak had to get into an eye-to-eye facedown with the mangy old fuck just to make this trip, and now he was wondering whether it was going to be worth it.

You need to wrap this brooding shit up, horseman. Not why you came into town, is it? You can bitch and brood to your heart’s content back in your yurt.

He stowed his misgivings and tried to summon a decent degree of anticipation as they trotted on into the low rise of the town. Behind him, his men managed just fine—trading crude jokes and laughter, calling out brightly to passersby and women at upper windows. Fair enough, it was a big trip to town for them; not one of these lads had been off the steppe in their lives. But Marnak had seen the spires and domes of the imperial city, the crenelated towers of its northern rivals in the League. He’d lived and fucked and caroused in those places for the better part of his youth and then some. Next to all of that, Ishlin-ichan just didn’t measure up. Oh, sure, it was
all right,
but there were times when these trips felt like a paltry pleasure, a ride on a sullen pack mule when you’d been used to war-bred stallions. Lately, even the whoring didn’t seem to help.

You’re just getting old. This fifty-summers thing is kicking your arse, and you know it.

A few years back, right enough, it had been easier. He came back from Yhelteth wealthy and stocked with war stories enough to get him into Sky Home a dozen times over. He bought shares in the Skaranak herds, hired younger son loose ends from good families to help mind his investment. Married a canny, curvaceous widow, adopted her kids as his own and had a couple more. With time and the ebb of the initial fire, he found himself sloping off to Ishlin-ichan now and again for a taste of strange, but Sadra was canny in more ways than one and she didn’t sulk or rage all that much. He waited out her cold-shoulder treatment each time with the patient equanimity of a man whose professional years had accustomed him to waiting out far worse things; meantime, he spoiled her with gifts and apologies and steady affection until she cracked.

In the end, an unspoken agreement settled in between them—that he’d do what he liked in other beds as long as it was done far enough from the encampment not to embarrass her and wasn’t done all that often. Rules he found it easy enough to follow—Sadra, in a good mood, wasn’t something many whores could hold a candle to anyway. Day to day, he was happier than he’d ever thought he’d end up—well, he was alive for one thing—and if only the Dragonbane hadn’t gone stark raving berserk and run off like that, he reckoned even these vague misgivings would not trouble him half so much. Almost as if when Egar was still around, bitching noisily about life back on the steppe, it was that much easier to quell his own quiet nostalgia and get on with living.

Urann’s balls, Eg, where’d you go? What the fuck really happened to you out there?

They had Ershal’s story, of course, and evidence that seemed to back it up. He rode haggard and exhausted into camp on a limping mount that same night, startle-eyed and gabbling tales of southern mercenary friends of the Dragonbane, demons in the grass. Showed them the thin bleeding lash-mark wounds on his horse’s limbs and lower flanks. The scene of slaughter he led them back to the next morning bore him out, was like something out of a tale, and the shaman certainly made the most of it.

It is as I always thought. The Dragonbane has sold himself to the southerner’s demon god. He has angered the Sky Dwellers with his corrupt foreign ways. How else to explain such an atrocity worked on the flesh and blood of the Skaranak
… 

So forth.

None of it made a lot of sense, if you stopped to actually think about it. But you got used to that with shamanry. And in the end, whatever had really happened out there the previous night, the Dragonbane wasn’t around to tell his side of the story. No body, and no tracks out, or at least none that any of the scouts could find, but his gear was all gone. Staff-lance, saddle pack, knives—all vanished without trace like their owner, something that with every passing hour was starting to look dangerously like both sorcery and an admission of guilt. The only evidence Egar had ever been there at all was his Yhelteth-bred warhorse, lying dead on its side, feathered with Ershal’s arrows—
it reared up at me and lashed out, eyes glowing with fire, gifted with demonic speech, cursing me in the southern tongue so my heart chilled at those alien syllables,
he told them.
What else was I to do but take it down?

And Poltar, nodding soberly along at his side.

Marnak grimaced at the memory. He’d never stood against Ershal’s rapid elevation to the clan mastery in the weeks that followed because it made all kinds of sense. The clan needed the continuity, they could ill afford a scramble for power between majority herd owners in the wake of all this spooky horror. The shaman was in favor of it, which by extension meant the gods were, too. Gant, the Dragonbane’s only other surviving brother, gave it the nod. And Ershal was, truth to tell, a pretty good candidate for the job. He was young, but shrewd with it, and he had an instinctive grasp of the political necessities that the Dragonbane had either never owned or maybe just never seen fit to bother with. He listened respectfully to the herd owners and other clan graybeards, he won over the younger men and women around the encampment with his prowess in archery and horsemanship. A couple of months in, and everyone was saying, in somewhat relieved tones, that he should have been the one right from the start … 

Whoops from his men stirred him back to the present. They were calling out his name and laughing. Marnak blinked and looked around. Saw he’d been so sunk in recollection that he’d nearly ridden right past their destination.

The Feathered Nest.

Three stories high, cheap brickwork and timber daubed with Tethanne script in red, the whole structure sagging alarmingly to the left—one of these days he was going to wake up here and find himself buried under rubble. A couple of underemployed working girls slouched about outside on the porch, calling out to passersby and flaunting themselves tiredly. They were kohled up in what they fondly imagined was the Yhelteth fashion, and their slightly grubby robes approximated harem-wear, more or less. There was the customary joke in the name of this place, of course, a double meaning just like most of the other whorehouses in town. But the joke was in Tethanne; it didn’t translate very well into Majak, and he’d grown tired over the years of explaining it to fellow carousers who didn’t really care one way or the other.

He reined in, harder than strictly necessary, brought his horse’s head around to the hitching rail. Swung a leg up and over with a show of Skaranak horseman insouciance, skidded down out of his saddle look-no-hands. His boots hit the dirt and sent up little puffs of dust, he tried not to grunt as the impact snagged in his knees. A couple of the girls made oohing sounds, but their hearts weren’t really in it. Horseman wanker tricks. He guessed they saw this shit nine times before breakfast most days.

He made an effort for his men. “All right, lads. Let’s get out of the saddle and right back into the saddle, eh?”

Ready roars of approval. One man whooped and leapt up onto the rail, balanced there on dipping, twisting legs, and then commenced prancing back and forth with arms spread wide. The porch girls unfolded, yawning, from their posts. He jumped down grinning into their arms.

“Open up girls, here we come,” crowed the man at Marnak’s side. “Going to get me some of that
imperial
pussy!”

Yeah, that’s what you think,
Marnak thought sourly.