The Dark Defiles (59 page)

The legate bowed his head. “My humblest apologies, my lady. It was not my intention to imply—”

“No.” She waved it off. “I know that. Raise your head, my lord. The apology should be mine; you are trying to help. But this is a blood debt, and I have no choice.”

Han looked up meekly. “Perhaps if you returned next year, my lady. With a larger force.”

“No, that’s not going to work. Do you really see the Emperor sparing me several hundred of his best fighting men to march up here and make a personal point, while the Empire’s still locked in war with the League?”

Not to mention my own chances of having the time to spare. Great big fucking mess there’ll be to clear up once I get back.

For a moment, the bitter old krin-addicted aspect of herself stepped forth grinning; she was almost tempted to forget about Yhelteth and just fucking
stay
up here for a couple of years. Ride some horses, learn to speak Majak, camp out under the stars, and watch the big-sky seasons turn. Or failing that, maybe catch one of the trade barges down the Janarat, stay on it past the Dhashara jump-off, drift all the way down to Shaktur and the Great Lake instead. Blag a place to stay and funds from the imperial embassy there, maybe have another go at waking the comatose Helmsman in the ruins of An-Naranash.

Let the war in the west sort itself out, let the Empire live with its stupid mistakes. Let Jhiral fend for himself for a change, just let it all
go.

In slanting rays of morning sun, Ishgrim rolls over in the sheets of the big bed, gives her that smeared mouth look, reaches for her
… 

Going to let that go, too, are we, Archidi?

She saw the girl again, standing at the rail, not waving, as the flotilla drifted downriver with the current and away.

Back before you know it,
she’d told her.

She jerked her chin—actually did it physically. Curt dismissal for the krin-eyed apparition in her head. She watched, fascinated, as her own bitter ghost raised its brows, grinned savagely at her, and then walked forward like a duel opponent.

Shouldered rudely past, was gone.

“Look,” she said to Cerdan Han. “This is going to get done, one way or the other. And I don’t have much time. If you can’t put a force together that lets me do it head-on, what are the other options? Doesn’t this shaman ever come here, to Ishlin-ichan?”

Han shook his head. “Not for a couple of years now. We kept tabs on him, of course, just like any other influential Skaranak when they blew into town. According to my spies, he used to be a regular at a pretty well-known whorehouse out by the eastern wall. But then something happened. The story we got is that he hurt one of the girls pretty badly, and she died from her injuries. Not really a problem in itself—she was a foreign slave, dragged here from one of the League cities if my memory serves me correctly. No Majak ties, no family to want blood vengeance, you see.”

“I see.”

“Yes, so, anyway,” Bemusement in the legate’s voice now—all this fuss over one bloody slave girl. “If this Poltar had just paid out the madame, no one would have cared. But he skipped instead and just never came back. No one’s very sure why. The madame put out a bounty on him, of course, but from what I hear, it wasn’t very high. More of a gesture than anything; certainly not enough to attract serious talent. So now there’s a stand-off—Poltar can’t ever walk the streets of Ishlin-ichan safely again, but it doesn’t look like he wants to. And meantime, no one’s stupid enough to ride east and go up against the Skaranak for such a paltry sum.”

She grunted. Stared out into the dark of the steppe. Daydreamed scenarios dancing in her head.

“No Skaranak malcontents, then? This Poltar must have enemies within the clan as well, surely.”
Certainly works that way back in Yhelteth.
“Is there really no way we could get this done from the inside? Bribe someone, maybe? Blackmail them?”

Well, look at you, Archidi—all political manoeuvring and manipulation, just like a real imperial adviser.

Grashgal and Dad would be proud.

Han sighed. “I will check our files for you, but I think it’s unlikely. The steppe clans tend to be tight knit, and the Skaranak more so than most. To act against the shaman, unless he can somehow be dishonored, is to act against the clan as a whole, against the clanmaster and all he stands for. It’s an oath-breaking matter, and you won’t find many Majak willing to do that.”

“They did it fast enough when they drove out the Dragonbane,” she grumbled.

“Perhaps. But that is not the official version of events we have. As far as my spies were able to ascertain at the time, the story told by the Dragonbane’s younger brother is that Egar went berserk and slaughtered all his other siblings unprovoked, using black arts that were blamed on his time away in the south.”

“Ershal.” She nodded grimly. “And now the little fucker’s sitting pretty as clan master, right?”

“In fact, I understand the situation is a little more akin to a governing council at whose titular head he sits. Senior herd owners and other notable wise heads, that sort of thing. It does appear to be a stable arrangement.” The legate cleared his throat delicately. “I have no wish to offend, my lady, especially as you still mourn your friend. But it’s my understanding that the Dragonbane, mighty warrior though he may have been, was not much of a clan master. Apparently, he did the job distractedly and with poor grace. He was far more interested in, ehm, shall we say, more carnal pursuits.”

The underside of her eyes pricked with tears. She found out of nowhere that a small, sad smile had crept out onto her face.

“Yeah, that sounds like him,” she whispered.

Han spread his hands. “Leadership is not for everyone.”

Fucking tell me about it.

Ishgrim, Jhiral, an Empire on the brink. The men she led, who now trusted her to get them all home. Could she really hold it all hostage to some pointless vow of vengeance for an ageing, irresponsible tomcat thug whose ignominious departure no one apparently even regretted?

Is that what he was? Really?

Perhaps. But he was the Dragonbane, too.

She bowed her head for a moment and sighed. Could not decode the riddle at all.

Still staring into the dark, she spotted the faint reflected glimmer of firelight on the sky at the horizon. Skaranak encampment or something else, no way to know. Her gaze locked to it regardless and held there, unblinking, until the cool breeze through the window rinsed tears into her eyes once more.

On the same wind, out of the same encompassing dark, came a moment of clarity, something as near to understanding as she reckoned she’d ever get.

You don’t have to decode it, Archidi. It isn’t about who he was.

It’s about who you are.

She closed her eyes for a moment, took the soothing relief it gave. Then she straightened up from the window ledge, turned away from the dark outside, and faced the nervously waiting imperial at her side.

“Let’s have a look at these files of yours,” she said briskly.

“
ou know anything about a sword the Illwrack Changeling carried?”

“I think it’s safe to assume he had one,” said Anasharal in his ear. “He was, after all, a warrior king.”

Gil set his jaw. “Yeah, thanks. I’d got that far myself. Could you manage something a little less fucking obvious?”

“Is this really important? To know, at this exact juncture, how some chieftain four thousand years dead was once armed? Commander Nyanar is becoming very nervous with all this holding station and waiting. Are you not nearly done in there?”

Down the deserted, dimly lit corridors of Findrich’s labyrinthine warehouse palace. They’d seen no one since the skirmish ranger ambush. No signs of life but the lit lamps, no sound but their booted footfalls on stone and the rearguard calling clear every twenty paces. Standard precautions against bushwhack. They moved at a wary pace, weapons out and watchful. Gil carried the Ravensfriend low in his right hand, shield hanging ready on his left arm at his side. The
ikinri ‘ska
prowled in and out of his head like a marsh spider looking for prey.

“If it wasn’t important,” he said evenly, “I wouldn’t be asking you about it. And no, we are not nearly done. The sword is here in Etterkal. I’m told the Illwrack Changeling’s soul is still trapped inside, and the dwenda plan to use the blade in some way to make me a host for his return. Ring any bells?”

“None at all. It sounds fanciful.”

But he thought he picked up the faintest shadow of hesitation, of doubt maybe, laid across the Helmsman’s dismissive tone.

“Fanciful, perhaps. But you’re the one sent us up to the Hironish looking for a legendary warlord back from the dead, and now it looks like there might actually be one. I’m no great believer in coincidences, Helmsman.”

“I have already told you that the Illwrack Changeling legend was a pretext, a means to get
kir
-Archeth Indamaninarmal safely out of the city and have her rub shoulders with potential cabalists. I did not expect you to find anything, in fact I anticipated a convenient vacuum in which discontent and plotting could emerge.”

“But it didn’t.”

“There is no need to state the obvious.”

“Yeah. Irritating, isn’t it.”

They reached a crossing of corridors. Ringil, nerves cranked like bowstrings in the gloom, raised a clenched fist to halt his men. He set loose the
ikinri ‘ska,
sent it billowing out ahead of him, sniffing for anything that might wish him ill. Eased forward a soft step at a time until he could peer around the corner both ways.

Nothing.

He puffed out a breath, tried to rid himself of a creeping sensation that somewhere, the jaws of a trap were poised to snap shut on his head. If Findrich had sent Kaad and son out to slow him down, it was to buy time to prepare some greater, more unpleasant surprise further in. Just a matter of what and where.

“There is something you might try,” Anasharal volunteered unexpectedly. “The scheme to seek the Illwrack Changeling was drawn by the Warhelm Ingharnanasharal and implanted in me without depth or detail. I was literally incapable of knowing more. But the glyphs you inflicted on me have broken some of the constraints I exist under. I know now, for example, that I once
was
Ingharnanasharal, and that something of that self may still survive separate from me, high up over the curve of the Earth. If you … 
compel
me once again, command me to reach out to what is left of the Warhelm, I may be able to transcend the separation between us and find answers for you in Ingharnanasharal’s full memory.”

“All right.” Ringil mustered the glyphs in his mind. “Do that. I, uhm, I
compel
you.”

It felt strange, imposing the
ikinri ‘ska
at a distance. But like the gathering of the storm elementals at his command back in the Hironish, he felt the power stir, out at the edges of his perception. And then, he felt it hit home.

Anasharal
shrieked.

Long drawn out, grinding, inhuman—it came at him like something fanged and clawed, chilling his blood with the sound, building out of some incalculable depth, swelling, scaling upward, shredding at his ears—

And then, abruptly, gone.

He felt the sudden absence as clearly as the shriek itself. It was a silence that stuffed itself deep into his ears like wool.

“Anasharal?”

Nothing. Whatever battle was being fought now, between the
ikinri ‘ska’s
compulsion glyphs and the antique Kiriath sorceries that governed what Helmsmen could and could not do, resolution would take time. Anasharal was out of the game.

He was surprised by how suddenly naked it made him feel.

“Something wrong, my lord?” Rakan, close at his side.

They peered together down the empty, lamplit perspectives of the cross corridor. Ringil shook his head, tried to shake some of the woolen silence out of his ears. He clapped the other man on the shoulder with what he hoped was an approximation of manly camaraderie. Pitched his voice for general consumption.

“Nothing we can’t fix with some cold, sharp steel,” he lied brightly.

T
HERE ARE FORCES LOOSE IN THIS PLACE, HE’D TOLD THEM BACK AT THE
atrium,
that you would very likely call demonic. And we will probably have to face and fight them before we can get our people back. I am sorry. I had hoped these creatures wouldn’t be present, or that if they were, that we’d be able to surprise them. That is now impossible. They are warned.

Faint muttering through the gathered half circle, some of it none too happy. He couldn’t blame them. He waited it out.

But I want you to remember one thing as we push forward. Two years ago, I defeated these same creatures with only a handful of men for support. Those men were imperial soldiers like you.
He pointed at Rakan.
And this man is brother to their commander. Imperial warrior blood, the same blood that runs in all your veins, the blood that has laid the world at Yhelteth’s feet.

A couple of low cheers, hushed to silence.

With those few warriors at my back two years ago, I discovered a very simple truth about these supposed demons that we face. They fall down just like men. They may come from the shadows, they may glow like the blue fires of hell, they may be lightning swift and alien, but in the end none of this could save them from good imperial steel. They bleed just like men, they hurt just like men, they die just like men.

And if they stand at any point between us and those we have come to save—we will cut them down and butcher them just like men.

Assent boiled snarling out in the wake of his words. It was the same low ugly growl he’d gotten from them by the watchtower at Dako’s point back in Ornley.

Getting good at this shit again, Gil,
he allowed to himself as they marched out of the atrium cloisters and into the corridors beyond.
Just like Gallows Gap.

Yeah, let’s just hope it doesn’t come to that.

But he knew at some level that his real wishes were nowhere near as clean-cut or as clean. And he could feel the Mistress of Dice and Death put her icy arm around his shoulders once more.

In the end, he found Slab Findrich by the simple expedient of tracking the dwenda stench to its heart. Turn this way down a corridor, and the sensation of eldritch presence ebbed; turn back and it swelled again. It took him a couple of wrong turns to get the full hang of it, but once he did, the
ikinri ‘ska
seemed to quicken and shake itself more fully awake—as if, he thought, rousing itself from a sated doze after the carnage in the atrium. It took him, with growing confidence and exultation, through passages and galleried storage halls, across another unroofed atrium space, and finally, to the foot of a single ornate staircase, leading up to an unsuspected third level that must, he supposed, sit right under the warehouse roof.

They went up quietly, no bravado this time, no charge. There were double doors at the top, in clear echo of the heavy oak portal they’d broken in through downstairs. But this time the wood was lighter, more delicately carved, set with two fussy-looking curled iron handles, and it opened inward. Ringil took up station on the left, pressed a palm gently to the paneling between the handles, found the lock unengaged. He nodded at Rakan. They took a handle each—the Throne Eternal swapping sword smoothly to his left hand for the moment it would take—and stood poised.

Ringil met his lover’s eyes across the short space between them and the corner of his mouth quirked. There was an itching in his belly, and he couldn’t honestly tell if it was proximity to the Throne Eternal’s young muscled frame, so long untouched, or just the longing for slaughter. He raised three fingers erect on his left hand. Rakan nodded. Gil put his hand back on the handle.

Shaped the numbered count slowly, exaggeratedly, silently, with his lips.

Three
… 
two
… 
one!

They dropped the handles hard, flung the doors open, and Ringil went lithely through the gap. Shield up to guard, Ravensfriend raised. From the way the doors went back, he knew there was no one waiting pressed up against the jamb to jump him. Peripheral vision confirmed it. He stalked into the hall beyond, cleared the doorway, and let his men follow him in. Surveyed the vaulted interior for threat.

“Good evening, Gil. You took your time.”

Slab Findrich, in the murderous flesh.

Ringil had been expecting, it only now dawned on him, some kind of formal throne at the end of this regal space, maybe even set up on a little dais. It would have fitted with Findrich’s undisputed dominance of the Etterkal slavers association, his reputed captaincy of the cabal, his shadowy reach into the chambers of Trelayne’s political heart. It would have fit the man as Gil remembered him, tall and gaunt and grave.

But there was no throne. No outward show of power at all.

Findrich sat instead in a simple armchair under a window halfway down the right-hand wall of the chamber. It was one of a pair of seats set around a table strewn with sheaves of heavy parchment, a sample couple of which he still held loosely in one hand. A full size Yhelteth water pipe stood on the floor beside the armchair, still smoldering from its crucible top. The thick, cloying scent of flandrijn tinged the room. Sipping tube and mouthpiece rod were draped neatly over the arm of the chair. Set against the lordly dimensions of the hall, the slaver looked like some vagabond clerk, squatting in the ruins of a glory long fled.

Looks like exactly what he fucking is.

“Well? Are you just going to stand there all night, oh great avenger? You’ve kept me waiting quite long enough, don’t you think?”

“Got held up,” Ringil told him. “Nice of you to feed me the Kaads like that, father and son in one juicy bite.”

Findrich smiled and set the documents aside. “I didn’t imagine they’d get the better of you for long.”

“No. They didn’t.”

He looked around—it was the same honeycombed stone floor and ornate friezework as the atrium where the Kaads had died, this time roofed in with antique—or maybe fake antique—stained glass. There was some heroic statuary looming in corners, a wood paneled shrine to the Dark Court against the back wall with candles lit, but aside from these features, Findrich’s chairs and table were the only furnishing in a wholly vacant and deserted space. If the dwenda were as close as Gil’s senses insisted, they either weren’t ready to spring their trap yet, or they looked to be suffering from some sudden, massive bout of shyness.

All right, then.

He heard the footfalls, the rustle and clink of his men massing at his back. He moved up closer to the table.

“Let’s get this over with Slab. Where you keeping the imperials?”

The slave merchant took off a pair of reading spectacles that Gil only now registered he’d been wearing. His hair was full white these days, but cropped savagely short, so it looked like a sparse fall of snow across his pate. On some men, it would have conferred a mild, grandfatherly air, but on Slab Findrich, it just looked cold and hard. Age had not softened the old thug; it looked instead to have cured him like some strip of hung and salted meat. The pox-scarred Harbor-End features were just as impassive, the leaden, predatory eyes unchanged.

“You know, you’ve caused us all a great deal of trouble, Ringil.”

“Glad to hear that. Where are my friends?”

“You took our Aldrain warlord from us just as things were building toward a promising new day for the League. Then you set about slaughtering so many of my associates that our whole way of doing things up here almost fell apart.” Findrich took up the mouthpiece rod of his pipe and wagged it admonishingly at Gil. “Did you know there were riots in the street against the slave laws after your little rampage last year? Serious questions raised in the Chancellery about repealing Liberalization? That’s how close we came.”

“I’m sure you quashed it all easily enough. You always were pretty fucking slick when it came to protecting your coin.”