The Dark Defiles (66 page)

“Oh, that.” The slave merchant pulled a face. “Well, yes, the Citadel may rant and proscribe to its rabid heart’s content, but that’s strictly for the rabble. Among the noble classes in Yhelteth, we prefer, let us say, a more nuanced approach. It’s helpful to have the proscription and associated punishments in place, of course, but actual exposure is far too valuable a political tool to be deployed on”—an airy gesture—“vulgar principle.”

“Vulgar principle, huh?” Ringil shook his head, riding down a brief urge to smash in sophisticated, accommodating Menith Tand’s face in with the pommel of his sword. “You know, Tand, if you’d based yourself up here instead of at the Empire end of things, it might have been your warehouses I was burning down. Your merchandise I set free.”

“Yes, but it was not.” The slave merchant offered him an urbane smile. “If anything, I believe I may even have benefited somewhat from your depredations among my Trelayne competitors. You see, my lord Ringil, I am above all a pragmatist.”

“Yeah.”

“And you were, by the time the caravan grapevine carried this news to me, a very significant asset to us all. You whipped our quest fellowship into shape as no one else available could have. You carried
command.
Men followed you instinctively, looked to you for leadership as a matter of natural course. Under the circumstances, I saw no good reason to trouble the lady Archeth or our other sponsors with what I knew, to set fresh ripples in water we had already spent all winter calming.”

“Hsst!” Klithren’s arm raised, fist clenched. “Hold up.”

They slammed to a halt, on a road surface that had begun to tilt very slightly downward. Charred, collapsed structures on either side of the street, a carpet of shattered glass and crockery stretching ahead, a tavern sign still on its brackets, torn loose and flung flat to the cobbles. Flames still licked and crackled amid the shattered remnants of the building on the right, but the rain was beating out the blaze. Elsewhere, it was smolder and low-drifting acrid smoke. Bodies everywhere, tangled up untidily across the cobbles like bundles of dirty washing, or spread-eagled and staring blindly up into the rain that fell on their faces. The clothes had been torn off at least every one in three.

Ringil cast about for signs of threat or life, saw some few quivering figures huddled into walls or niche spaces. From somewhere came a high, endless keening. Impossible to tell which, if any, of the visible survivors were making the noise.

“Nice one,” said Klithren, loud in the murky air.

The eastern harbor lay before them, devoid of life in the fitful flicker of flames from a dozen different fires across the wharves.

A
GAINST THE ODDS, THEY’D BEATEN
N
YANAR’S PICK UP TO THE MEETING
point. Outlander’s wharf was deserted, unless you counted the dozen or so corpses of convicts and harbor Watch strewn along its worn stone length. Most of them still held the weapons they’d died with, which in the case of the convicts didn’t amount to very much—lengths of chain and clubs made of rotten, torn-up deck timber, here and there the odd looted ax or knife. From the pincushion look of the bodies, somebody had panicked, ordered repeated crossbow volleys across the wharf, and taken out almost as many of their own watchmen as they had attackers.

“So where the fuck is our ride?” Klithren wanted to know.

Ringil scanned the burning harbor, looking for— “There.”

He pointed. Motion, low in the water, off to their left. Two longboats, rowers bent-backed at their task, coming in across water speckled with flame in oily patches and spiked with the spars of burned and scuttled ships. Add to that the wind and rain and dark, and he supposed, grudgingly, that it couldn’t have been an easy passage to make.

Klithren squinted through the rain.

“Hoiran’s aching cock—two fucking boats? Is that it? We’re going to struggle to get everybody in those and not capsize soon as we hit open water.”

Ringil shrugged, masking similar misgivings. “I told the Helmsman twenty-two men. Nyanar must reckon this is enough. Maybe he’s right.”

“Yeah, and maybe my prick’s a fucking mainmast.” The mercenary scowled. “Well, I just hope you can keep a tight leash on those merroigai horrors of yours. Because we’re going to be riding very fucking low in the water.”

Privately, Gil doubted he could get the merroigai to do anything very much that they didn’t want to. About the only binding magic he’d been able to work on the swimmers, aside from summoning them to his aid in the first place, was an injunction to stay in the water, which, according to Hjel, was where they liked to be anyway.
The merroigai speak highly of you,
the Creature at the Crossroads had assured him, but he had no idea what that meant. And while Dakovash claimed he’d sent one to save him when Gil let himself be carried too far out to sea at Lanatray in his youth, that was a long time ago and the affection apparently didn’t extend to anybody else, even if they were under his command.
Best bet,
Hjel says unhelpfully when asked,
just stay out of the water and tell anyone you have any affection for to do the same.

Right.

Useless fucking
ikinri ‘ska.

“You just let me worry about the merroigai. Flag them in, will you? They haven’t seen us yet.”

He watched the mercenary put hand to mouth and vent a piercing whistle, then cross-wave both arms slowly and steadily over his head. Faint cries went back and forth among the rowers as they spotted the signal. Both boats altered heading by a fraction and arrowed in directly toward them. Ringil peered over the side of the wharf.

“You see a ladder anywhere?”

In the end, they had to settle for a knotted rope that Klithren spied poking out from under an upended fishing skiff further along the quay. They looped and tied one end around a mooring post, dangled the rest down to the water just as the first longboat’s rowers shipped oars on a natty little swerve that brought them bumping gently in against the wharf. Marine sergeant Shahn, crouched in the bow, grabbed the rope end out of the water, secured it, and clambered handily up to meet them. He saluted, fist to chest, grinning.

“Commander Nyanar sends his regards, sir. He asks for haste.”

“That’s a good idea,” said Klithren, with bright malice. “Why didn’t we think of that?”

Ringil shot him a warning glance. “Start getting the wounded aboard. Shahn, you come with me, I want to set a rearguard cordon while we board.”

“Sir.”

He had the remaining Throne Eternals and half the marines form a line across the wharf, left Shahn in charge of it while everyone else got the first longboat tied in tight and then loaded. Yelps, then clenched screams from the wounded as they were lowered more or less gently down into the boat and tried to take the pain. Some urgent shouting as one of the marines with a chopped thigh started bleeding out around his tourniquet. Men scrambled about in the boat, worked frantically to tighten up the binding. A fresh scream floated loose and the man passed out. More marines climbed down. Mahmal Shanta turned to Ringil just before it was his turn to descend, eyes wet and bright with reflected light from the burning fires. He snagged Gil’s arm with an old man’s fierce, bony grip.

“We are going home thanks to
you,
Ringil. I will never forget that.”

Ringil forced a grin. “Don’t worry, I’m not going to let you.”

The stretcher bearers moved to help the naval engineer away, get him down the rope. But he hung on to Gil’s arm a moment longer.

“Something better will be built on this,” he said. “I promise you.”

Faint, enduring chuckle and crack of fire, everywhere across the sacked harbor. Drifting smoke in the rain. Somewhere back the way they’d come, a blazing wooden structure that might once have been a storage shed groaned and fell in on itself. Ringil turned back to look. The quarrel-spiked bodies along the wharf caught his eye. Flames leaping and climbing out of first-and second-story windows along the harbor frontage. Above the skyline of the city, patches of smoky orange fire glow stained the murk.

Hard to see what you’d build on foundations like these.

“You sure you got no steppe nomad in you?” Klarn Shendanak asked at his shoulder, and barked a laugh. “Mess you made here, I got to wonder.”

“Thanks.”

Where are you, Risgillen? Where the fuck are you? You really going to let me get away with this?

With Shanta and his stretcher bearers aboard and settled, the first longboat was visibly filled to capacity. As Klithren had predicted, it sat low in the water, though not alarmingly so. Unless the weather out in the bay was really atrocious, they wouldn’t even have to bail. Gil watched as the marines cut the tie ropes and shoved off, got the prow pointed out. The oarsmen dipped in, someone started calling cadence. They pulled away. The second boat nosed in to take its predecessor’s place.

“No more wounded,” Klithren shouted down at them. “Don’t bother tying in, just hold station and hang on to that fucking rope. We’ll be right there.”

Ringil lifted an arm, signalled Shahn to fold down the rearguard line. The marine sergeant nodded, sent men back one by one to board the boat. They spidered rapidly down the knotted rope, leapt from the midpoint, directly into the boat. Oarsmen caught and steadied them as they landed, got them seated. Shendanak nodded Menith Tand ahead of him in the queue, clapped Gil on the shoulder just before he followed.

“Cheer the fuck up, man.” He unhooked his sling, flexed his injured arm and gestured at the burning harbor, the fire in the sky. “All this? Dragonbane himself would have been proud.”

He squatted and swung himself down onto the rope with his good arm, nimble as a man half his age despite his injuries, clambered a bare couple of knots lower, and then leapt the rest of the way with a harsh whoop. The boat rocked violently as he hit. There was enough echo of Egar in the bravado to put the ghost of a reflexive smile at the corners of Ringil’s mouth.

He blinked, caught Klithren staring at him. Gestured down at the boat.

“Go on, Hinerion. Your turn. Don’t hang about.”

The mercenary didn’t move. Gil felt his pulse trip over itself. The ghost smile soaked away like spilled wine into straw.

“All that black mage shit you pulled tonight,” Klithren said slowly.

“Yeah?”

“You didn’t need me to get this far. You could have dropped me, like a Tlanmar bunny for the pot, anytime. Couldn’t you?”

Ringil shook his head impatiently. “Not and keep my word, no. Come on, get down that fucking rope. We haven’t got all—”

“Hostiles!”
Shahn bellowed from up the wharf.
“Blue fire!”

I
T TOOK HIM A MOMENT TO IDENTIFY THE FEELING THAT COURSED THROUGH
him as he spun.

Relief.

Flat-out sprint. Klithren at his back, then at his side as they ran—splintered moments, scarcely time to draw breath, out to where the marine sergeant stood staring back down the wharf. Gil scanned the same space, eyes eager for the telltale splinters of light. Pulse up for real now, right hand itching for the Ravensfriend in his grip. No sign he could see. His gaze flickered to the frontages beyond, the crawling collage of flame and black-shadowed ruin that spread there.

“Where? Where are they?”

Shahn turned, one arm up and out—

—something wrong with his eyes?—

—swung the doubled-up, gore-clotted length of chain in his hand, smacked Ringil full around the head with the links.

Dropped him to the wharf, exactly like one of Klithren’s Tlanmar bunnies for the pot.

hey made camp early, still plenty of warmth in the air and light in the crystal clear sky. She estimated the sun had at least another hour to fall. No particular features in the landscape to recommend stopping, either, at least not as far as Archeth could see. Then again, what did she know—to her eyes, the whole fucking steppe was one big grass-grown wilderness. They’d ridden for two days now, and aside from the disappearing river and the chimney smoke trails of Ishlin-ichan crawling up the sky behind them, she hadn’t seen a single navigable landmark along the way.

But if Marnak Ironbrow said this was the place, well then, probably this was the place.

“Sacred ground,” he grunted when she asked him why they’d chosen it. “Long ago in legend, a great god’s sword fell to earth here. My people took the sky iron it left in the earth and forged the weapons we used to chase out the Long Runners. See, this is where it lay.”

She followed the gesture he made. Saw a long, low ridge along the ground that she hadn’t spotted before. It curved outward on either side of where they stood, encircling a broad, shallow scoop in the landscape whose final extent she had to guess at, as she lost the ridge in the endless nodding waves of waist-high grass. She made the connection, understood what she was looking at. They were camped out at the edge of a huge crater, filled in and blurred with the centuries since it was formed.

“Sky iron, eh?” she said, and looked back at the wagon they’d brought. “Appropriate enough, I guess.”

“Yes. The shaman will approve. The spirits remaining here will lend strength to the ceremonies he must perform. Added to which”—no apparent irony in the Ironbrow’s tone—“if your intent is not as honest as you claim it to be, the Dwellers will likely notice it on ground such as this. They will watch over us here.”

“Good to know,” she said tonelessly.
Let’s just hope they don’t bear grudges.

She watched Marnak’s men unharness the draft horses and lead them away for feed. A couple of them sketched wards at what hulked on the wagon’s flatbed as they left. You couldn’t really blame them. Beneath the heavy canvas wrappings in which it was shrouded, the half-melted remnant of the Kiriath catapult projectile loomed massive and jagged, like the recovered statue of some ancient alien god. Even to Archeth, there was something stark and ominous about the way it rose against the early evening sky.

Sky iron—the dead heart of a comet fallen to earth.

It was the one thing they’d been able to come up with that might drag the shaman out of camp.

“And you’re sure he won’t come tonight?”

Marnak snorted. “The shaman might, but Ershal won’t. He’ll want daylight for the cleansing rituals. Come to that, I probably would, too. It doesn’t pay to mix darkness and things that fall out of the sky.”

She wondered absently if there was a barbed comment in there about her skin. Decided that Marnak probably meant it innocently enough. He seemed to have had a genuine respect for her father, a genuine lack of fear of the Black Folk in general.

She wished half the imperials she knew could manage as much.

“My lady?”

She looked up, saw Selak Chan advancing toward her through the sunlit grass. She made her excuses to Marnak, went to meet the Throne Eternal captain halfway.

“We in good shape?”

“We are, my lady. I’ve assigned a watch.” He gestured back to where the camp was taking shape. “The nomads will mount one, too, they say, but I’d rather trust our own men.”

“Fair enough. But let’s try not to tread on any toes. They’re twitchy enough as it is. We do outnumber them two to one.”

“Yes, my lady.”

She wished she felt as comfortable with the numbers as she pretended. Twenty horsemen—lined up in mounted pairs at the embassy gate, they’d looked a tidy enough little force. But out here under the vast steppe skies and forging steadily into Skaranak territory, it didn’t seem like a whole lot of muscle anymore. She was beginning to wish she’d brought double.

But she had Marnak Ironbrow’s finer feelings to worry about, and he wouldn’t countenance a larger invasion. And anyway, Carden Han’s men weren’t exactly chomping at the bit to get out into Skaranak territory any more than their legate was keen to send them—she’d be hard-pressed to get more than a handful of volunteers, and morose conscripted soldiery was not what she needed for this.

Fucking politics, the bane of her existence.

In the end, she’d opted to take the marines and the few Throne Eternal she’d brought out of the Wastes—their loyalties to her were forged far deeper than mere formal oath by now. The problem was, they numbered only thirteen out of the company—Tand’s men, she still didn’t fully trust, and the privateers were out of the question—and none of them knew anything about the local terrain. She’d have liked to use the Majak survivors from her party, but they were Ishlinak, albeit from the far southern end of the steppe, and once again Marnak would not hear of it.
Enough that I’m siding with outlanders against my own shaman and clanmaster,
he grumbled.
I’ll not have Ishlinak riders at my back into the bargain.
So that was that.

She went to talk to Carden Han.

The legate, of course, was delighted at the compromise. No doubt steeling himself against a request for the forty-five imperials he’d originally promised her, he’d almost grinned with relief when she told him what she actually wanted. Seven men, at least two drawn from the Upland Free scouts, but the rest could be grunt imperials, auxiliaries, whatever, as long as they knew the steppe like the wrinkles on their dicks and took their duties seriously … 

Chan still hovered, looking uncomfortable. “Uhm, my lady?”

“Oh. Yes, Captain, what is it?”

“Uh … my lord Kaptal has some misgivings. Will you speak with him?”

“Oh, for f—” She bit it back. She was the one who’d caved in when Kaptal insisted he come along. This was her mess. “All right, I’ll talk to him.”

Again.

W
HEN HE CAME OUT WITH IT LIKE THAT, THERE ON THE CANDLELIT STAIRS
in the embassy, she just stood for a moment and gaped. Legacy of the night she’d had so far, a slightly hysterical giggle cracked her lips.

“Empress? You’re joking, right?” She saw the set of his mouth, the furrowed brow. Her grin fell off her face. “You’re not joking.”

“I understand your surprise, my lady—”

“Yeah?” She came down the stairs at him. “How about you understand my desire not to set off a palace feud that’ll split this Empire six ways to the sea just when we can least afford the dissent?
Get back in there!
”

She shoved him bodily through the opened door to his apartment, hooked it closed with her heel as she followed him in. He was a bit harder to shift than she’d expected, felt bulky and well anchored on his feet, but the twitch and flare of her combat with Kelgris was still in her, itching just under the skin. Bad enough she’d spent the night climbing in and out of brothel windows like some not-very-bright Majak in a tale, then swapping pillow talk and threats of violence with an oversexed local god. Now she had to deal with
this
shit? She slammed the door-bolt across, whirled on Kaptal in the low light from his lobby lanterns, and stabbed the blade end of her fingers into his chest.

“Have you talked to anyone else about this?”

Kaptal looked impassively back at her. “No one, my lady. I am neither suicidal nor a fool.”

“Well, you’re doing a very good impression of both at the moment. Let’s leave aside the fact that I’m sworn in service to Jhiral Khimran, and could have your skull on a spike for what you’ve just said to me. Let’s leave aside the fact you’re suggesting high treason out loud on the staircase of an imperial embassy with who the fuck knows how many unwanted ears wagging at every corner. The rather more pertinent point is that
we are at war.
Right now, what the Burnished Throne needs more than any other single thing is solidarity. Loyalty.”

“Loyalty to the Burnished Throne, my lady, is not the same thing as loyalty to the Khimran dynasty. And even loyalty to clan Khimran is not the same as loyalty to the whore’s dreg idiot who walked us into this war in the first place.”

She turned away. “None of that is a good excuse for trying to put
me
on the throne. I don’t want it, I’m not qualified. I’m not even fucking
human.
”

“That is precisely what qualifies you so well, my lady. You are immortal. You would provide a continuity not possible for any human ruler.”

“That—”

She stopped. Peered back at him suspiciously. She’d made no great study of Yilmar Kaptal in the months of the quest—had been too absorbed in her own obsessive hopes and fears to bother—but this didn’t sound like him at all. There was a measured precision to his speech that reminded her more of Tand or Shanta or—

—a Helmsman?

The thought came fleeting through her mind and jammed there. Just now, back out on the landing—Kaptal had sounded hesitant, as if woken from some dream he was still half in. And now he was arguing with her in tones that—

She saw him again, hauled up off the ocean floor in a sack, spilled dead and chewed upon, across the iron floor at her feet.

Cleansing is required, and substantial surface repair. But aside from this, I foresee no real difficulties.

And the Warhelm’s bland assertion to the Dragonbane in the same clanging, echoing workshop, as dark iron machines went about their work and Tharalanangharst spun plans for them all like some great ancient spider in its web:
if either of you knew what end was intended from your actions, your knowledge would damage the equilibrium of the model, in all probability to an extent that would prevent said end from ever being achieved.

This
was Anasharal’s scheme? This was what the emasculated iron demons out of her father’s past had in mind? Usurp the imperial throne and dump it on
her
fucking head?

And whom exactly am I talking to here?

She thought again of the spidering silver machines everywhere underfoot and in the walls of An-Kirilnar, the one that might even now be sitting somewhere inside the once-drowned brain behind Kaptal’s eyes, steering the words to his tongue and watching her for response.

She closed up the gap between the two of them. Tapped Kaptal or whatever was in him on the chest.

“I don’t know where you got this idea—”

“The idea that Jhiral Khimran is not a worthy successor to his father is common currency in certain court circles. But you surely know this, my lady. Associating so closely with Mahmal Shanta, you could scarcely fail to.”

“My associations with Mahmal Shanta are none of your fucking business.”

“Don’t be naive, my lady, please.” A sudden snap in his voice that sounded a lot like the old Yilmar Kaptal. “There is very little at court and around that I have not made my business at one time or another in the last several years. Coastlander discontent smolders stronger now than it has in over a century. Asked to produce names and proof, I could. Asked to bring others into the same fold, whether willingly or kicking and screaming, I could. Do not underestimate what I can do for you in this arena, my lady.”

She nodded grimly. “Yeah. Well, right now what you can do for me in
this
arena is keep your fucking mouth shut.”

A
ND STAY OUT OF MY WAY, SHE SHOULD HAVE ADDED.

Because here he was, hanging around amid the Skaranak and the imperials like a virgin in a brothel and twice as useless, just one more thing to worry about in terrain already stacked high with hazard she couldn’t predict. She supposed, rather sourly, it was safer that way—in the end, if she gave in to his dogged insistence on joining them, it was because she was more afraid of what unpredictable thing he might do in her absence.

Yeah, like go to the legate with this sudden insurrectionary fervor. See if he can’t fan that wistful bitterness of Han’s into something more stroppy. Start sounding out some of the men, maybe. The auxiliaries, even. See what recruits might be had from out on the steppe by word of mouth.

She felt a chill blow through her at the thought.

Wouldn’t be the first time a pretender gathered together a bunch of savage horsemen and rode on the capital in hopes of taking the throne.

There was no one human left to remember the last time it happened—which would make it all the more appealing in the hearts and minds of men, of course—but
she
did. A century and more after the event, she still had flash recall of the bloody mess it made. The sacked towns and scorched earth, the chaotic scramble for response; the stinking summer slaughter at the eventual battle that broke the rebel forces; then the reprisals, the towns burned and razed in retribution for declaring sympathy, the columns of slaves marched out, and the bodies, the bodies everywhere—piled on charnel pyres that smoked and smoldered for days, left out unburied in fields and streets for scavengers to chew apart. Crucified along the An-Monal road as exemplary punishment, mile after mile of them, hung there until they rotted enough to fall.