The Dark Defiles (17 page)

“Indeed,” said Ringil, deadpan. “But first things first, eh? According to our friend here, there’s some asshole with a personal grudge against me leading this lot. If I can find him, we might be able to wrap this up faster than I thought.”

Shahn frowned. “Single combat, my lord?”

“If he’ll take it, yes.”

“Do we know their strength?” asked one of the others.

“Five vessels. But two are already gone south with prisoners.”

“
Five!
Five fucking—”

“
Silence!
My lord Ringil is speaking.”

“I reckon about two fifty, maybe three hundred men,” he went on evenly. “Most of them ashore. Skeleton crews for the picket ship we passed in the fog, and its sister to the south.”

“And us with less than eighty men.” The same imperial who’d worried over the thousand miles to the front. “Come on—who’d take single combat over those odds?”

“Eskiath!”

It was a raw bellow from up the slope and beyond the turn in the street ahead. A voice bright with rage in the crisp morning air, thick with unreleased longing. Ringil spun toward it with a look on his face the imperials would later describe to their comrades as close to joy.

“Answer your question for you?” he asked absently, scanning the rise.

“Coward! Outcast!”
The roared challenges rolled down on top of each other, echoing between the houses like the fall of heavy stones.
“Come meet your rightful doom!”

“Be right there,” Ringil murmured.

And stalked up the street, as if to something calling him home.

ven for Kiriath architecture, An-Kirilnar was pretty fucking impressive.

Sure, anyone who’d ever lived in Yhelteth knew what the Kiriath could build when the mood took them. Sooner or later, you went out and rubbernecked at the Black Folk Span where it leapt across the river, or the Bracing Twins on the imperial palace’s distressed northern flank. At one time or another, you’d have seen the estuary defense walls and the eternally dancing prism of green and violet light atop the lighthouse tower where they ended. You’d maybe have passed the cordoned end of the imperial shipyards, where the last remaining fireship in the city rested on its dry dock props like some huge pupating iron grub. Or you’d have gone one day to peer into the gaping pit at Kaldan Cross and the eldritch scaffolding there that seemed to lead the eye on downward forever … 

But still.

Pretty fucking impressive.

Egar muttered the words under his breath as the party walked the ocean-drenched causeway into the shadow of the city, tilting their heads back to take in the silent overhead loom of the place. An-Kirilnar stood about a hundred feet above the waves, on five thick supporting columns that would each have dwarfed the estuary lighthouse back in Yhelteth in girth if not in height. From the shore, it had looked distant and unreal—blank walls the dirty white of old river ice, wrapped tight around a central cluster of spires that glistened now and then as some wandering shaft of sunlight made it down through the cloud. It was like seeing a frost-giant fortress out of some Voronak hunter’s tale—something glimpsed through veils of blizzard snow up north along the edges of the Big Ice. Like some tiny chunk of another world dropped into this one. Like something out of myth.

But up close like this, myth melted into something else. The underside of the city, now they were beneath it, looked derelict and used—a vast, dark expanse of stained and variegated alloy surfacing, scarred here and there with patchwork riveting and ugly metal seams that looked to Egar like repairs carried out in haste. He’d seen similar during the war, when the dragons came and the Kiriath engineering corps had to make good the damage to their defenses before the next battle. And still, at intervals across this surface, there were broad gaps, some regular enough to be intended aspects of the structure, others looking ragged and wound-like. The wind swept in and hooted eerily among them, brought with it occasional gusts scented with some indefinable chemical reek. Here and there, cabling drooled down out of a gap, like spittle from the mouth of some drunk collapsed asleep over the edge of a table.

They walked beneath as if afraid of waking something up.

“Think this place is haunted?” he heard at his back in Naomic.

Another privateer hawked and spat. “Nah. Those burned-blacks are fucking immortal, in’t they? How you going to get ghosts if no one ever dies?”

“Yeah, but they could still die in, like, battles and shit. Like at Rajal beach.”

“Fucking
looks
like someone died around here.”

Egar rolled a look back over one shoulder. “Shut up.”

The men fell silent.

Just as well, really. Not exactly the time or place for knocking heads together, this.
A causeway of interlocking five-sided alloy plates each the size of a small shield, but making a path barely a yard and a half across in total, washed a couple of inches deep each time the ocean swell swept across it, and slippery as fuck if you didn’t watch your step. Any punch-ups here and all parties would likely end up in the drink. And having seen what could come crawling up out of cracks in the rock on dry land in these parts, Egar wasn’t all that keen to try his luck in deep water a couple of miles from shore.

You worry like a boy at a brothel door, Dragonbane. These men aren’t going to break ranks on you now and you know it.

It was herdsman’s wisdom first and foremost, gleaned up on the steppe from boyhood on. The buffalo herds followed the big bulls—get the bulls to behave, you had the herd, too. But head south and enlist, and you found that what held for steppe buffalo wasn’t far out for men, either. The pack followed its leaders pretty much the same way.

Yeah, and you broke the big bull back on the beach this morning.
Picked him out of the huddled early survivors at a glance, recognized him from among his and Archeth’s captors when they were brought aboard
Lord of the Salt Wind
the day before—

Only yesterday? Urann’s balls, time flies when you’re having fun.

—beckoned him forward.

You with the hair. What do they call you?

What’s it to you, Majak?
Stirring, rising to a disconcerting two yards plus of muscled height. Fighting scars on the face, and—

And never mind.

Put on a brief grin, Dragonbane, take it off as fast.
What’s it to me? Take a look around, why don’t you.
Voice abruptly raised.
Go on—the rest of you, too. You realize where we’ve washed up?

It’s the Wastes coast,
someone said.

Yeah, it is. Anyone been here before?

Silence.

Well, I have. I was here with the joint expeditionary under Flaradnam Indamaninarmal back in fifty-two. And I was at Gallows Gap on the way back.

A stir of murmurs at the name. If a single battle had caught the imagination of the League populace, it was the stand at Gallows Gap. For the first time, the giant in front of him looked uncertain. Egar locked gazes. Dropped his voice to a more personal level again.

You want to get out of here?
A tight nod toward the huddle around the fire
You want to get these people home in one piece? I’m your man.

Yeah? Last time I checked, you were a fucking prisoner of war.

Egar let his hands hang loose at his sides, put everything into his eyes.
Check again.

Long pause.

The giant shifted.
Sogren,
he said.
They call me Cablehand.

Egar. They call me the Dragonbane.

The causeway ended. More precisely, it opened into what appeared to be an encircling ring shadowing the curve on the central supporting column, a dozen yards out from the structure itself. Ahead of Egar, Archeth had been setting the pace, as hurriedly as the treacherous surface they walked on would allow. Now she came to an abrupt halt and Egar was so busy casting glances upward that he walked into her back. She teetered forward, he grabbed her by the shoulders, just avoided sending them both into the water.

They stood very still.

“Sorry,” he muttered.

“That’s just fucking great.” There was a dull, bitten-off anger in her tone, but it wasn’t for him. She gestured outward. “How the fuck are we supposed to …”

Let her arm fall.

They stood staring across at the support column. The surface of the sea heaved and slopped in the gap between—in the shadow of the city, the water was a murky, impenetrable gray. The face of the column rose featureless from it, dirty white alloy, bloomed here and there with patches of green or purplish brown, as if the metal had somehow bruised. If there was a way in anywhere, it didn’t show.

The men were piling up behind them. The muttering started again.
Better give them something to do, Eg.

He snapped his fingers for attention—his old imperial training, woken to the occasion and rising ready for use. He stayed in Tethanne, looked to one of Tand’s men to translate quietly into Naomic for the privateers.

“Right, listen up, all of you. I want fifteen men to make a circuit that way, another fifteen this way. Sogren, you take the first party, pick ’em out now. Alwar Nash, you pick fifteen more and go the other way. Go
carefully.
You’re looking for a doorway, a bridge, a crack—anything that lets us in. Meet at the midpoint, pass each other, and keep on going—what one man’s eyes miss, another’s may find. The rest of you, back up and check overhead. I don’t see how, but maybe we missed something important up there.”

Hesitation, glances exchanged. They were cold, tired, hungry, and bruised from surviving the storm and the wreck. Caught up in a place they knew only from nightmare tales and legend, armed with nothing beyond a sparse selection of knives, a few salvaged lengths of chain, and one or two shattered ship’s timbers with enough heft to make a halfway decent club. They were kitted out for a tavern brawl at best, and they were facing monsters out of myth.

Egar spread his arms. “Come on, people. Let’s get to it.”

He let his own two-foot piece of chain dangle from the loop he’d made of it around his right hand. He had no intention of using it—could not afford to start maiming or killing men out of a party not fifty strong over some minor issue of discipline. But the chain was a reminder. It still carried the bolts at either end that had anchored it to the chunk of driftwood he’d found it in. And they’d all watched him tear out those bolts one at a time by sheer brute force.

“Yeah, come on.” Sogren gestured impatiently. “You heard the man. You. You. You …”

The tension drained away. Alwar Nash mustered some limited Naomic to make his own selection—though he chose mainly from among the various imperial contingents anyway—and the two search parties formed up. Egar watched them head off, then waved the remaining men back along the main causeway. He turned back to Archeth, who’d sunk into a crouch on the inner rim edge of the ring.

“Any ideas?” he asked her quietly.

“You got any grip on what your ancestors were doing four thousand years ago? No, I don’t have any fucking ideas.”

“I thought Grashgal … your father …”

“Yeah, they were around back then. They didn’t talk about it. I don’t think they even remembered it all that well.”

He crouched at her side. “Well, what about that place you found at Shaktur—that was a city standing in the lake, wasn’t it?”

“An-Naranash, yeah.” She shook her head. “Not like this. It was smaller, and they left the doors open when they abandoned it. Anyway, we had a boat back then.”

Egar studied the blank, color-bruised surface of the support column. Green and reddish-brown blooms like fungus, but no sign of any crack or opening, or even a purchase point for climbing out of the ocean.

“I’d swim across there,” he offered. “But—”

“No, you fucking won’t.” She looked sideways at him and he saw the apology in her face. “You think I’m going to let you put yourself in that water? Let that fuck Sogren do it, see what happens to him.”

Egar blinked. “Sogren’s kind of handy to have around at the moment. He do something to upset you?”

She shook her head wearily. “Forget it. Anyway, what’s the fucking point? There’s no way in, even if he did survive the swim.”

“Okay, Archidi, but we got to come up with something. It’s cold, and it’s going to get colder with the dark. Either we get inside this thing pretty sharpish, or we have to head back to the beach and get a fresh fire built.”

“You think I don’t know that?”

He fixed his gaze on the support column and its bruises. Greenish blue and crimson, purplish black. He sighed.

“I think,” he said carefully, “that you’re cold and tired and pissed off that this isn’t turning out the way you hoped. And you’d probably sit here until you freeze rather than—”

Wait a minute
… 

“Archidi …” Long hesitation because he wanted to be sure. “Look.”

“Skip it, Eg. I don’t want to talk about it.”

“No,
look.
” He leapt upright, pointed. “Look at it, look at the colors. They’re changing, they’re … shifting or something …”

They both stared over the water at the blooms on the dirty white alloy support. The greenish-blue patch lost its last few tinges of green as they watched. The crimson began to darken, tipping toward the color of old meat. The purplish-black mark paled, crept into violet.

“No,” Archeth, climbing slowly to her feet. “Fucking. Way.”

“You want to bet?” For some reason there was a grin on his face. “They’re moving around, too. Look.”

It was like watching the passage of slow clouds across the sky. Some force inched the patches of color along, squeezing them thinner, puffing them out, sculpting fresh lines and curves along their edges, all so gradually that if you looked away too soon—or, say, if you stood around with a bunch of tired and worn shipwrecked men looking for a doorway that wasn’t there—you’d miss it.

“You know what that is?” Archeth asked him with sudden energy.

“I was hoping you’d tell me.”

“It’s a—” She stopped, lips moving silently as she mustered, he guessed, a translation from High Kir. “A species portcullis. Built for the dwenda wars. It locks out anyone who isn’t Kiriath. Can’t believe I didn’t recognize it—the Indirath M’nal talks about them all the time. All I have to do is name the colors out loud.”

“Well …” Egar frowned. “So anyone who speaks High Kir could get in, really.”

“No. Human eyes don’t work the same way as Kiriath—it’s a subtle difference, but it’s there.” A wan smile. “Why my mother and I could never agree on clothes. Even if you knew the words in High Kir, you wouldn’t have the vision to identify them. I guess that must have been true for the dwenda, too.”