The Dark Defiles (55 page)

Someone ran at him. The barkeep with the cleaver, bellowing rage—

“Broken,” he hissed, and the man shrieked as his forearm snapped, midway to the elbow, with an audible crunch. The cleaver flew loose, clattered on the floor.

I see what you could become if you’d only let yourself.

Not long ago, this much magic would have tired him. Now, each glyph felt like the flex of a muscle just warming up, like preparatory swashing motions with the Ravensfriend before any real duel began, building strength and focus, feeding a rising fire … 

Better,
a clicking, rasping voice whispers at his ear.
You have an appetite for it after all. Let us see then, what we can do with the raw material at root
… 

And for just a naked second—the high stone altar on the screaming, empty plain, the figure crouched there over him, blur of tentacular limbs and the tools they hold, and he’s pinned, he’s—

No, no, let’s not go back there, Gil.

He blinked back to the burning tavern, flames waist high now across the interior, the air clogged with smoke, and most of the crowd was concerned with nothing more than getting away from the fire and the terrible figure in the doorway that had called it down. Through smoke and wavering heated air, he glimpsed a few stolid figures still sat where he’d ordered them, apparently ready to stay there and burn to death rather than break the spell he’d laid on them. But the rest was screaming panic.

He turned away, ducked back outside into cooler air and the rain.

Out in the street, his men had finished the veterans and stood over their slaughtered remains, looking at him expectantly. No one seemed to have collected worse than scrapes and bruises. He gestured at the tavern, the merry flicker and glow through its door and windows, the crackling and the screams within.

“That should keep everyone around here pretty busy. Means we’re covered to the rear. Let’s pick it up, gentlemen.”

They hit Caravan Master’s Rise a couple of cross streets later. There was a barricade set and two braziers smoldering weakly in the downpour, but the post was unmanned, the Watch pulled away, likely to Harbor End. Ringil checked for street names on the Etterkal side, found one he knew well enough to plan a route by.

Findrich’s place was less than ten minutes away.

oft, insistent hushing, like a whole roomful of mothers trying to soothe their infant offspring to sleep. Her clothes were waterlogged, cool and damp against her skin.

Raining?

It was not. She opened one eye, squinting against brightness. A hollow blue sky vaulted high overhead; nothing fell out of it but sunlight. The only visible cloud was in thin white striated layers, high up at the top of all that azure expanse. Beyond, and angled slanting across the dome of blue, the band made a warm golden hoop, fading in from nothing at one side to a sharp scimitar edge at the other. And she was warm, too, despite her soaked clothing, despite the lack of any apparent shelter and the wind that … 

 … sifted hushing through the long steppe grass she lay in.
That
was the noise, that was the—

She was out on the steppe.

She sat up with a jolt, and the last several weeks came down on her like a landslide. Failure and fury in Ornley, the wreck of the quest; Klithren’s privateers, the sudden new war; captivity, the storm; An-Kirilnar and the Warhelm, the march on the ancient shattered city, reptile peons, warrior caste lizards, the dragon, the death of Egar—a tight, hurt noise in her throat as the grief fell on her anew—the arcane tunnel into the pit and the cryptic, murderous Helmsman that dwelled there … 

Except … 
you’re not murdered, Archidi.

In fact—

It dawned on her that she felt
good,
impossibly good, impossibly
whole
. Better than she had done in months, maybe in years. The stitching in her side no longer nagged with pain, there was just the deep itch of healing tissue. The myriad aches and pains she’d collected crossing the Wastes were gone. Even the remembered grief at Egar’s death couldn’t blunt the sense of well-being that suffused her.

She yawned and stretched against a soft, pleasing ache through the muscles in her lower back. She was hungry, she noticed, but it was mild, it was appetite, not grinding need. Her head was clear and clean, her thoughts unfogged by any residue of krinzanz or recrimination. Curtains of grass nodded gently around her with the breeze, rose higher than her head, blocked out clear view of anything but the sky. She felt nested there, cozy, but ready to move sometime soon. She wanted to explore, to understand what had happened. Felt strong and eager to start, with none of the clenched desperation that usually came when she drew on that strength.

Weird.

Like waking late one sun-soaked morning beside Ishgrim’s sleeping form, knowing they had the whole day to themselves.

I’m coming home, Ish,
she knew with perfect calm.
Nothing going to stop me now.

She clambered to her feet and stood in the waist-high grass, trying to get her bearings. Tried to squeeze the wet out of one sleeve with her fist, got a scant few drops for her trouble—her clothing was drying out far faster than you’d expect, and when she held the sleeve up and sniffed it, there was a faint medicinal reek underlying the damp. She shrugged, put out the arm at waist height, and brushed idly with the palm of her hand at the swaying surface of the grass around her. The steppe stretched away in all directions, as undistinguished as an ocean. No features to the landscape, or at least none that her unaccustomed eye could—

She stopped in midturn, staring.

The structure loomed behind her; it couldn’t be more than fifty yards away in the grass, and for a few moments she couldn’t work out what she was looking at. Towering broken curve twenty or thirty feet high, cavernous empty interior shadowed from the sun, like a two-thirds part of some colossal smashed earthenware tankard left rolling in the straw on a tavern floor. It gleamed wetly inside, seemed to have some woven texture to it, exposed at the oddly softened edges where … 

Was it
melting
?

Archeth narrowed her eyes, gave up trying to guess, and made her way through the sighing grass toward the structure. She knew what it was now—recalled the dimensions of the drowning chamber they’d been hustled into by the Helmsman, made the match, could not accept this as coincidence. But how that solid alloy dome became this overturned, soft-edged shell was still beyond her. She reached the area of crushed—and, she now saw, scorched—grass where the shattered artifact lay. Saw a similarly burned and flattened trail leading up what she now understood was a slight incline, at whose brow the … 

Shell? Chamber?

 … had stopped … 
rolling?

“Ah, daughter of Flaradnam. What plans they have for you now.”

Acrid chemical whiff on the breeze, and the words whispered in her ear as if the wind itself had been given sudden voice—she spun about and found herself five feet away from a figure in a slouch hat and patched sea captain’s cloak.

“Who—” Quarterless, there in her right hand like a dream. She blinked at it, had no recollection of pulling the blade at all. “Who the fuck are you?”

The cloaked figure nodded at her knife-filled hand. “That’s very impressive. Can you do it with all of them at once yet?”

She brandished the knife. “I asked you a fucking question.”

“Yes. Not very politely, though. I believe if you make just a touch more effort, you’ll find you already know who I am. Ah—there you go.”

As if he’d parted a curtain for her in the back of her mind. The Dragonbane’s words, two years ago in the garden of a Pranderghal tavern, the faint chill that seemed to come on the breeze as he spoke.
He’s from all the places the ocean will always be heard. Cavorts with mermaids in the surf and so forth. Cloak and hat’s like a symbol for it.

Takavach. Lord of the Salt Wind.

“You’re the fuck that poisoned my horse?”

Beneath the hat brim, she thought the eyes kindled like tiny flames. “Don’t push your luck,
kir
-Archeth Indamaninarmal. You’re not exactly popular with the Dark Court right now.”

“Then what do you want?”

“Oh, well, I don’t know. How about a little respect? Yes, that’d be nice, now I come to think about it. Under the circumstances. Not too much to ask, is it? Mutual respect, one immortal being to another?”

Archeth shrugged. “Respect is earned.”

“Earned?” It came out a whisper, built rapidly to a rasping fury. “Fucking
earned?
You cheeky half-blood bitch. You know what? I give up. No, I’m done. Really. This is too hard. It isn’t fucking worth it. Cannot believe you just said that. To me, to a demon god, a noble of the Dark Court. I’m trying to fucking
help
you here.” One cloaked arm slashed angrily at the waist-high grass. Trail of glinting, splintering light, and the tall, nodding blades withered and smoked where the Salt Lord’s hand passed. “We run around, we answer prayers. We grant wishes and favors by the shovel-load, try to fucking
balance
everything along the way—because, guess what, it doesn’t actually work too well if you
don’t
balance it—and after all that, after all that fucking effort, when you actually make yourself known, you
manifest
the way every bleating fucking supplicant for the last ten thousand years has been asking you to,
this
is what you get? You know what that is, daughter of Flaradnam? It’s fucking ungracious.”

“I don’t pray. To you or anybody else.”

“I didn’t say you did.” The Salt Lord seemed to calm a little. “Prayer is a tapestry, a system of permissions sewn into the world by the Book-Keepers. A way in. It’s leverage, and it reaches everywhere, it touches you all. I don’t need
you
to pray before I can get into your self-absorbed miserable little life. There’s always someone else.”

“Book-keepers?”

“Forget it. It doesn’t fucking matter. I’m not talking to you, anyway. Go on, blunder into your ill-conceived little revenge fantasy for your dead friend and see how far you get. See how close you get to Poltar the shaman before one or other of the horrors Kelgris has gifted him with chops you down.”

She blinked. “How do you know ab—”

“Oh,
come on!
”

They stood facing each other across the gently swaying grass. She wondered vaguely if she should feel afraid.

Her knives hummed and chuckled soothingly in the back of her head. Told her no.

She cleared her throat. “Sorry. My father’s people had no gods. I am not accustomed to—”

“No, evidently not.”

She hesitated again. “You mention Kelgris—Kwelgrish of the Dark Court, I guess. Ringil Eskiath told me you and she appeared to be, uhm, acting in concert?”

“Yes, well, he’s another one,” said the god grumpily. “Can’t muster the least shred of respect for his clan deities, sooner fucking die than drop his chin an inch, let alone get on his knees. Well, you work with the tools to hand, I suppose. Just don’t be surprised when they turn in your grip and gouge you.”

“So you’re not on the same side?” A little impatiently, because the demon god’s constant bitching was starting to grate on her. “Kwelgrish and you? You’re opposed?”

Takavach sighed. “Sides. Oppositions. Good and evil. Heroes and villains. Them and us. The old brain-dead binary tribal cant. Look, would it melt your little head away completely to take on board the awful truth that
it’s actually a bit more complicated than that
?”

“Don’t you fucking patronize me. You think I don’t understand complexity? My people steered human affairs for five thousand years—”

“Not without a little quiet help from us, you didn’t.”

“—and I’ve spent nearly two centuries doing the same job myself.”

“Well, you wouldn’t think so, to hear you talk. Call yourself an immortal? Sides? You sound just like the next fucking human, you know that?”

“My mother was human, you arrogant fuck!”
It feels as if she’s teetering on the brink of something here, yearning to finally fall. “So—you know what? Fuck you. My father, my immortal father? He married her. He stood with humans his whole life, in battle and in counsel. They were good enough for him. They’re good enough for me, too.”

Brief pause—for just a moment, under the brim of the slouch hat, she thinks she sees Takavach smile.

“I’m very glad to hear that,” he says quietly.

“Are you and Kelgris on the same fucking side or not?”

“It doesn’t work like that.” Almost, there was a plea in the Salt Lord’s voice. “You of all people,
kir
-Archeth, should understand that. Think about those five thousand years your people tried to manage human affairs. Think, in not much more than your own lifetime, of the manipulation it took your father to unify the southern hill tribes, to steer the Khimran clan into imperial ambition and beyond. You think being a god for these people is any easier?”

“I wouldn’t know.”

“Well, it isn’t.” Snappish flare of temper, but then Takavach’s tone softened once more. “Look, try to understand. Try to grasp the magnitude of what we’re facing here, the mess we have to work with. The storm is coming, we see it massing on the horizon. We’ve been here before, we know how bad it can get. The dwenda are coming back, in all their idiot beauty and power, determined to claw back their beloved ancestral home. Stopping them without the Kiriath in place is going to be … a challenge. Certain things need to be done, certain pieces moved on the board, certain men put in place. Everyone has their own ideas about how to do it, but one constant remains—the Book-Keeper codes. By the codes used to repair the world aeons ago, we are forbidden direct intervention without supplicant request. And the major pieces, the ones best suited to the game we’ve chosen,
do not fucking pray.
”

The Salt Lord sighs. Looks away across the endless steppe.

“Perhaps they never did, perhaps it was never in them. Or perhaps they’ve just seen too much random horror to believe any longer in the power of the gods. Whichever the case, the gods must make do, must find what fragments of leverage they can—a heroic slayer of dragons turned poor excuse for a clan master, for example, a man whose long-dead father once laid down sacrifices and chanted explicit prayers to the Salt Lord for his son’s safety; the sour rage of a disenchanted holy man at the dying of tradition and respect this clan master represents; restless sibling rivalry and envy among the clan master’s brothers—yes, all right, out of random elements like these, we can build a hand of sorts, and then play out the cards. But it’s a complex, tangled game, daughter of Flaradnam, fenced about at every turn with limitation and compromise.

“You want to see how it’s played?”

T
HE STEPPE PLAIN AND THE SKY ABOVE IT TILT AND WHEEL AWAY.
I
T’S AS IF
she’s ducked very rapidly into a tent and left the world outside. She stands in soft gloom, amid streamers of mist that coil and drift, seemingly at random. The god is at her side.

Take our failed clanmaster
—Takavach’s voice is soundless in her head. He passes his hand through the drift of mist closest to them. It eddies and coils in the wake of the gesture, forms a passable image of the Dragonbane.
He cannot simply be whisked from safety and comfort, and placed on a path of heroic doom by the god charged with watching over him and keeping him safe. That would go against the codes. An actual threat must be made, one that would justify such an extraction, and it must be credible. Let’s see
—other faces now, ones she doesn’t know, but among them she sees the blood resemblance—
the jealous brothers might serve in this, but they would have to be incited. They are restless, you see, but that’s all they are. Too much tradition vested in the clanmaster’s office for them to go against it alone. They need some kind of authority to unify them, to reassure the less enthusiastic among them when it comes to brother slaying.