The Dark Defiles (62 page)

“Ringil!
Ringil!
”

A hand on his shoulder, shaking him. Gil swung blindly about and Klithren of Hinerion stepped deftly into the move, blocked the blow, arm to locked-up arm.

“It’s done!” he shouted into Gil’s face. “Stand down, it’s done! It’s over. We took them.”

“We … ?” Ringil tried to piece the words together, tried to make sense.

“We took them down. The Aldrain. Look.” He waved an arm through the last of the settling spice dust. Not a struggling figure to be seen, just the imperials bent with vengeful blades over the last few injured dwenda where they lay. “All of them. It’s over.”

Ringil coughed on something that might have been a laugh. Klithren nodded. His eyes were streaming, his face was clogged with sweat and yellow powder and the spice-reeking blood of the dwenda. But he was grinning. He gestured up at the ceiling, the ragged fifty-foot hole where the honeycombed stone had come crashing down.

“You do that?”

Ringil wiped at his eyes. “Yeah, had to distract them.”

“Some fucking distraction, eh?”

“Seemed to work.” He stared at the tear-dampened powder caked on his fingers, as if it were some vital clue. “You know what this is?”

Klithren ran his tongue along his upper lip, tasted. “Chili powder, right?”

“Yeah, and the rest. What are you using for taste buds? There’s turmeric in there. Ginger. Ground coriander. This is a Yhelteth curry blend.”

The mercenary chuckled. “Secret weapon from the imperial south, eh? If you can’t meet ’em blade for blade, just choke ’em and blind ’em first.”

“Something like that.” Ringil looked around again, sobering. “You find me that bitch Risgillen’s body, though. I want her twice as dead as the others, I want her fucking heart.”

“Don;t you worry—if she’s down here, she’s done.”

“Yeah, well. Believe it when I see it. How many did we lose?”

“Haven’t done the count yet.” A grimace on the scarred freebooter face. “Looks like about half to me.”

“Do the count. And find Findrich too, he’s got to be down here somewhere. We still have to—”

“My lord! Come quick!”

One of the Throne Eternal, voice urgent, and Ringil’s stomach dropped out at the sound. He turned to face the man, already knowing, reading it there in the strained features before the imperial could speak again.

“It’s the captain, my lord.”

Gil made his face a mask. “How bad?”

The Throne Eternal’s face alone would have been answer enough. “He’s asking for you, my lord. There’s not much left.”

N
OYAL
R
AKAN LAY PROPPED UP AGAINST THE SHATTERED REMNANTS OF A
crate, shivering and bloodied from the chest down, blood running out of him and clotting in the drifts of spice he lay on. But he smiled through his clenched teeth when he saw Ringil approach.

“Con—” A cough racked him and he had to start again, voice a whisper. “Congratulations … on your victory, my lord. The day is yours.”

“Captain.” Ringil knelt at his side, everything in him screaming against the formality. “Is there anything I can do for you?”

Rakan shook his head, shivering violently. They’d made him as comfortable as they could, put a rolled cloak under his head for a pillow, wrapped another about him for a blanket. But the blood would not be stopped; it soaked steadily through the cloak, spread in the spice beneath him, and his face had gone the dirty yellow of old parchment.

“Give me … your hand,” he mumbled, groping with his own.

Ringil grabbed it, clasped it tight. “There. Can you feel that?”

“Yeah.” Faintly, voice still trembling. “Feels … feels hard. Good and hard.”

Wavering triumph in his smile—tables finally turned, nothing to lose now,
his
turn to make the jokes with double meanings. Ringil pressed his lips together, made a small noise through them. He put his other hand on Rakan’s, made a double clasp, as if he could cup in the Throne Eternal’s ebbing life. Rakan nodded jerkily.

“They fall down just like men,” he husked. “Good advice, my lord. I have … put it to some good use, I think.”

A weak gesture with his free hand, perhaps intended to indicate the various slaughtered dwenda lying around them. He coughed again, and blood flecked his lips. A spasm of pain twisted his features, and when it passed, there was something almost pleading in his eyes.

“But they’re fast, Gil. They’re so fucking fast.”

“I know.” Clenching his fists around the dying man’s hand. “I know they are.”

“I tried … I was … too many of them.” More coughing, wet and gurgling now. “I’m sorry, my lord. You’ll have to … have to go on alone now.”

“It’s all right,” said Gil numbly. “It’s all right.”

Rakan spat out blood. His eyes rolled about, taking in the silently watching men. He mustered breath. “Come … closer. I have … some private … instructions to pass on.”

Ringil leaned in and placed his head next to Rakan’s. Rasp of stubble on stubble, the press of the Throne Eternal’s cheek to his own. Rakan made a convulsive sobbing sound. Ringil let go his hand, cupped his face.

“Talk to me,” he murmured. “I’m here.”

“Don’t … trust the iron demon, Gil.” The Throne Eternal’s voice was down to a desperate, throaty hiss. Ringil could feel him pouring the last dregs of his strength into it. “It has no love for us … nor good intentions. It lies to us all. It plots … treachery, to bring down everything good. I love … the lady Archeth. But she is no empress.”

“I know that, Noy. And she knows it, too.” He squeezed his eyes tight shut for a second, opened them again on fresh tears.
This motherfucking spice.
He planted a kiss on the other man’s cheek. “Noy, the throne is safe. Let go. Take your ease.”

“You … will not … help her overthrow Jhiral? Place her … on the throne? The truth, Gil. She is … your friend, I know.”

“She wouldn’t want the fucking throne if you handed it to her on a plate, Noy. I promise. Rest now, you’ve done enough.”

He felt something inside the other man slip, give way like a bad step. Rakan made a soft sound and tried to nuzzle at his neck.

“Smells … like home,” he whispered wonderingly, and stopped.

Ringil closed his eyes. Held them closed for what felt like quite a while. Then, very slowly, he pulled back from Rakan’s body, spread his hands flat in front of the Throne Eternal’s softened, blood-flecked features, like a man trying to warm himself at a meager fire. Long moments while he stared through the spaces between his spread fingers, looking for what, he could not have said. Then he lowered his hands. Sniffed hard, and got up.

They were all looking at him.

“Anyone got anything to say?” He cleared his throat, gestured at the body. “Get it said now. We don’t have a lot of time.”

A couple of the Throne Eternal came hesitantly forward. Ringil backed off, stood aside, left Noyal Rakan to the care of his comrades.

“Here’s a little something for you!”

Klithren of Hinerion, booming cheerfully from amid the strewn dead, propelling Slab Findrich before him with one arm twisted up into the small of his back. The slave merchant stumbled, struggling to keep upright on the chaotic, tilted surface. Klithren let go his arm, gave him a brutal shove in the back that pitched him at Ringil’s feet in a brief cloud of spice dust.

“Slab Findrich, for your delectation.” The mercenary grinned. “Pretty much intact, too.”

“That’s good,” said Ringil bleakly.

Findrich tried to get to his feet. Klithren booted him hard in the gut, and the slave merchant collapsed again. The mercenary glanced aside to where the Throne Eternal were gathered, heads bent in prayer, around Noyal Rakan’s corpse. He jerked a thumb at them.

“Your boy get off okay?”

Ringil nodded. Wiped at his eyes. Klithren pulled a sympathetic face.

“Fucking chili powder, right?”

“You find Risgillen?”

The mercenary shook his head. “Got a few females in the ranks, all chopped up pretty good. Boys are taking trophies. But she’s not here.”

Like the slip of a foot on battlefield blood, like a lethal error made. He grimaced with sudden lightness that it left in his belly. At his feet, Findrich coughed a sneer.

“Don’t you worry, faggot. She’ll be back.”

Gil stooped and grabbed the slaver by his collar, dragged him up onto his knees. “I’m going to ask you once more, politely, Slab. Where are you keeping my friends?”

Findrich looked back at him out of sullen, reddened eyes. “Fuck you. Aristo prick.”

Ringil made a fist and punched Findrich solidly in the face. He felt the nose break as the slaver went down. He dragged him back up, leaned in close.

“I’m in no fucking mood, Slab. Where are they?”

The slave merchant grinned at him through the streaming blood and snot. Four or five decades of Harbor End street in his eyes. He spat in Ringil’s face. “Get on with it, you faggot aristo waste. You don’t have the fucking time or balls to break me and you know it. And she’ll be back for you, don’t think she won’t. Oh, she wants you bad. Back for you, too, you turncoat borderland fuck.”

Klithren made a pained face.

“Want me to open him up?” he asked. “Pull out a few feet of guts and dance on them? Usually does the trick.”

“No, that’s going to make him difficult to move.” Ringil let go of Findrich, let him slump back to the floor. “Just keep him there a moment, I’ve got a better idea.”

he cut the bonds and gag she’d put on Marnak’s Yhelteth whore, left her weeping and shuddering in the Ironbrow’s arms and bid them both good night. Privately, she thought the girl was milking it a bit—beyond showing her Bandgleam’s naked blade for a threat and manhandling her, all right, a
little
roughly perhaps, she had done her no actual harm at all. A glimpse of the Kiriath steel, a look into the burned-black witch’s eyes—
look at me, girl, you’re not going to give me any trouble, are you?
—was about all it took. By the time the Ironbrow showed up at the door, Archeth had her neatly trussed and quiescent in the back chamber. But now, she turned her eyes away as Archeth spoke, pressed her face hard into Marnak’s leather-clad shoulder, and sobbed as if some demon from the bowels of the Earth had come for her.

Let’s just hope we can get the same reaction out of the Skaranak.

She left the way she’d come in, via the window. Outside on the tiny balcony, she swung a leg over the rail and found purchase for the toe of her boot in the poorly cemented brickwork. Similar chinks higher up gave her fingers something to cling to as she stepped off the balcony altogether, worked her way around the brothel’s façade and into the shadows of the side alley. There, she down-climbed until she was about four or or five yards off street level, then jumped clumsily the rest of the way to the ground. She staggered a little on impact, grabbed the wall to stop herself going down. The horses out front, whinnying and snorting, shifting about on their tethered reins … 

Eyes!

It was a flash glimpse as she straightened up, the slanted amber gleam of a wolf’s gaze at her shoulder—

She spun about. There was a knife in each hand, Wraithslayer and Bandgleam, though she’d later swear she’d made no move to draw either one of them. The balanced weight of the steel seemed to anchor her to the ground, settle her better into the fighting crouch … 

Nothing.

The alley was as deserted as it had been when she slipped into it an hour earlier—dust and grit and the odd discarded shred of rags too small to be usefully scavenged away. A thin breeze blew out of the gloom and past her, sat briefly on the nape of her neck, then was gone. She held the crouch for another couple of moments, pivoted slowly about to be absolutely sure, and then straightened up again, one tense muscle at a time.

Nerves.

Yeah, right.

She shook off the chill on her neck. Put her knives away and walked out of the alley to where the horses were beginning to settle down once more. Absently, she patted a couple of them on the neck, murmured soothing words to them in High Kir. Up by the brothel doorway, the Feathered Nest’s bouncer, a blocky, grizzled Majak with a leather eye patch, spotted her and nodded. She tripped lightly up the steps to meet him, some slight excited giddiness pulsing in her veins, and counted the balance of his bribe into his outstretched palm. Imperial coin—it was Carden Han’s very own brand of magic; up here, he told her, you can make the most remarkable things happen with even the tiniest handful of this stuff.

“My men still inside?” she asked

The doorman nodded. She went past him, pushed her way through a short series of dyed cloth drapes, each consecutively thinner and finer than the last, until she parted a final curtain of translucent silk and stepped into the pipe-fume-clogged air of the brothel’s main lounge. Her appearance stirred a slight ripple through the reclining figures scattered about the place, but most were too smothered in their pleasures to give even this new arrival more than cursory attention. Maybe, she thought sourly, some of them just assumed she was a flandrijn hallucination.

She found Selak Chan and Kanan Shent with the embassy’s spymaster, sprawled amid a welter of cushions and young, semiclad female flesh. For appearance’s sake, they had a standing water pipe of their own, but none of them appeared to be smoking from it. Their eyes were serious and watchful on the surroundings. Chan saw her as soon as she came through the drapes, prodded his companions, and came to some sort of half-crouched attention as she approached.

“My lady? Is all well?”

“Well enough.” She bent low and tipped a glance at the spymaster, a wiry, soft-spoken character whose Majak affectations of hair and clothing did nothing much to hide the imperial edge on the man beneath. The legate had told her he was ex–King’s Reach, and it showed. “Your sources were correct, it seems, my lord Eshen. Your recommended key is ready to turn in the lock.”

“This is heartening, my lady. But there is no need for codes.” Eshen smiled and gestured at the women surrounding them. “The Feathered Nest doesn’t waste its Yhelteth stock on lobby duties. None of these understand more than service fragments of Tethanne. You may brief us freely without fear of eavesdropping.”

Archeth let her eyes wander across the bodies on display, saw it was very likely true. The whores were made up in Yhelteth fashion—though decades out of date in their use of kohl traceries, she noticed—but the faces beneath the gilding were broader, coarser featured, and paler than anything you’d see in most Empire lands. Their figures were stockier, too, big in the shoulders, less delicate curve in hip and waist than most women from the imperial capital would have had, though with a fuller, enticing load on behind, sure enough, and big, ripe breasts that … 

One of the whores caught her looking, caught her eye over the mouthpiece of the flandrijn pipe as she toked on it. She giggled, and breathed out smoke at Archeth in a long, sickly sweet plume. Nudged one of her coworkers and murmured something in her ear in Majak. The second girl looked up at Archeth and her mouth split in a loose, inviting grin. The two of them blinked in drugged unison, staring at her with paired candor, frank and open curiosity painted in their eyes. Archeth felt desire trickle and ache in her, snaking up from her crotch into belly and breasts like soft, slow fire.

Ishgrim,
she reminded herself severely.
You are going home to Ishgrim.

She cleared her throat and looked away. “The Ironbrow will turn for us, if we meet a few conditions he insists upon. Safeguarding clan integrity, basically. But there’s more than enough rage in him against this Poltar to start the fire we need.”

Eshen inclined his head. “And even more so now, I suspect. The spy who brought us news of Marnak’s coming also tells me he tangled with the shaman over fraternizing with Ishlinak city dwellers so soon after the comet. Auspicious, the way the heavens align with your requirements.”

“I was in that comet,” she said shortly. “There’s nothing auspicious about it.”

“Yes, so I understand.” The spymaster eased his crossed legs into a fresh posture. “Some antique machine of your people, I’m told. I have been in the capital, my lady, I have seen the Span. I understand that it is engineering, not magic. Nonetheless, the manner of your arrival is a story we might do well to sow widely among the locals in the run up to your confrontation with the shaman. We think of these people as primitive in their beliefs, but it’s worth remembering that they hold those beliefs every bit as firmly as we our faith. A woman of your hue, delivered out of the heart of a comet … well, there are some real tactical advantages to be derived here.”

She nodded. “All right, get it done. Marnak told me he came here to do deals for ironware and horseflesh—”

“That will certainly have been his excuse, yes.”

“—so his men should be around for a few days. Long enough for them to catch the word?”

“I will see to it.” The spymaster stroked his beard. “Is it your intention, my lady, to stay here longer tonight?”

The whores were still looking at her. She kept her gaze rigidly on Eshen. “No. I’m going back to the embassy. You three stick around, see if the Ironbrow goes anywhere interesting or sends his men out. I think this is going to work, but I don’t know the man, and I don’t want to get tripped up for not paying attention.”

Eshen looked approving. Selak Chan just looked worried.

“You intend to walk back alone, my lady?”

“I do.” She flashed him the edge of a grin as she stood up. “After what we’ve all been through, I don’t think the streets of this glorified horse camp can have much in them to worry us. Stay and enjoy yourselves. I’ll be fine.”

And if I’m not, I have my knives.

Not very sure where that had come from. She managed to glance only briefly at the whores as she turned to leave, to put them at her back and walk away, to fill her mind with Ishgrim’s face instead. The leashed desire inside her guttered low, began to seep away.

Curdling in her guts to an ugly hope that the streets might give her some cause to use her Kiriath steel after all.

T
HE TANGLED ROADS AND FOOTWAYS OF
I
SHLIN-ICHAN DREW HER IN, EN
folded her in quiet gloom.

Carden Han had told her to expect as much. A scant hundred years of settlement had not yet purged the Ishlinak inhabitants of their steppe nomad heritage; a preference for fireside huddling by night prevailed. Anyone with a place to be was generally in it by the time darkness fell, and torchlit thoroughfares were few and far between. Now and then, a pony clopped by with a rider drunk or nodding sleepily in the saddle; once it was a woman astride a mule with two small children clinging on in front. A couple of times, she thought she heard the patter of urchin feet up side alleys. For the rest, she had the streets to herself.

The embassy building stuck up in the middle distance ahead, five stories studded with warm orange-lit oblong eyes. But she steered toward it in near darkness, navigating by patchy bandlight through cloud and the dim glow of hovel windows showing the ruddy flicker of a hearth somewhere within.

And she was being followed.

The knowledge grew on her by increments. It was small sounds at her back, glimpsed motion out of the corner of her eye as she looked back at corners. At first, it blended with the other occasional noises of brief traffic on adjacent streets, but by the time she was halfway back to the embassy, the coincidences were too many to accept. Someone or something was behind her, dogging her steps, and not making much effort to hide the fact.

The blunt longing for violence in the pit of her belly rejoiced. Flaradnam had taught her from a very early age not to walk afraid—
this world is not a civilized one,
he told her when she was still a girl.
And so you really only have two choices. You can become a fighter, and let it show. Or you can go in constant terror of every cut-rate thug who thinks he’s special because his mummy saw fit to birth him with a pair of balls and a prick. I am sorry, Archidi, really I am. I would have liked you to grow up in a better place, but that place will be centuries in the making. This is the best I can do.

Grashgal brought her the knives the next day.

She felt them stirring now, tiny points of warmth in the small of her back, across her chest, and down in her right boot where Falling Angel lurked. Perhaps they felt the proximity of pursuit the way she did, perhaps they were just responding to the quickening of her blood. Perhaps, as the Warhelm had tried to make her see, it was all part of a single response.

So she couldn’t fuck those two hot-eyed whores back at the brothel.

She’d fuck up whomever this was instead.

On a crossroads street corner, she came on the noisy, iron-ringing brightness of a smithy, where black silhouettes worked late with hammer and tongs against the furnace glare. Three men, looked like the smith and two younger apprentices, maybe his sons. She made as if to walk past, paused abruptly and spun about, put the furnace at her back and scanned back along the path she’d taken.

Yep. Right there.

Slanting amber eyes in the darkness, a couple of dozen yards back down the street, blazing with reflected glare from the smithy’s fire.

The palms of her hands tingled.

Come on then, you bitch.

As if it heard her, the creature moved out into the light. It was exactly the wolf the eyes had promised. Six feet from nose to tip of tail, a yard high at the shoulder, sleek and gray with summer fur. Lips peeled back off front teeth in a silent snarl.

Archeth felt her own upper lip lift in response. Reflexive, violent pumping of heart and lungs, readying for the fight. She flexed her hands at her sides and the knives quivered eagerly in their sheaths.

Sparks blew off the forge and out across the street, like incandescent snow.

Come on, then.

And gone.

She stood in shock, unsure quite how it had happened. One moment the wolf was there, the next it seemed to rear up impossibly on its hindquarters and step back into the cloaking darkness. The slanting amber eyes blinked once at her, and went out.

Archeth looked dubiously at the patch of darkness that had swallowed the wolf, probing the gloom, then shrugged.

That all you got, Kelgris?

Beside her, she noticed the hammering from the forge had stopped. She glanced at the smith and his sons, saw them frozen and staring, implements in hand. A stormbolt flash of insight lit inside her head, a vision of herself, seen through their eyes—night-black, tall and immobile in the glow from the furnace, the glint and gleam of the Kiriath knife harness, wrapped tight around her frame in alien artistry, the upside-down hilts of Wraithslayer and Bandgleam laid on her chest, the kaleidoscope light in her eyes.