The Dark Defiles (70 page)

Believe that if you like, storm-caller.
Her sneer is distant now, she must be almost on the far side of the circle. He imagines her there, pacing past the granite uprights like some war cat prowling the barred perimeter of its cage.
I don’t see how the Changeling—

Can he actually use this sword? It doesn’t feel like it. The binding was tight around his arm when it was living steel, but now it feels like loose jewelry, like bangles made for some unfeasibly big-limbed courtesan. The tang lolls loose from his palm. Whatever it once was, it isn’t a sword anymore, it isn’t a weapon.

That’s what he needs. To finish this, he needs a fucking
weapon.

The dragon-tooth dagger is gone, just like the man who gifted it to him, lost who the fuck knows where. He recalls Ingharnanasharal said nothing about Egar surviving, only Archeth. It’s an omission that paints the likely truth in stinging script behind Ringil’s eyes. He can only hope it wasn’t a shit death, hope the Dragonbane found the clean end he’d always said he wanted, and under open sky.

Speaking of which
… 

Yeah.
Half a dozen dwenda in the circle with him, all of them armed. He can feel the flicker of their disquiet as they watch Risgillen and Lathkeen argue.
And a few thousand of them down on the slope below.
Looks pretty much like the end of your run, too, Gil.

Better make this good.

I am at your side, and will be until the end of the road,
he recalls sourly.
Not so I’ve fucking noticed—whoever you were, wherever you’ve fucked off to now it counts.

My name is a complicated thi—

It hits him, then, like a drenching in cold water. And he knows abruptly what he has to do with the finger-width sliver of the
ikinri ‘ska
he can just about reach.

His heart commences a heavy, preparatory pounding. His veins flood with cool fire. He feels how it snags Lathkeen’s attention, knows his time is up. The storm-caller can’t miss the truth of this, surely, can’t fail to grasp what’s happened.
This is going to go bad, Gil, and fast—

You see, my lady! You see!
Lathkeen’s voice, raised to a cry of triumph. He bends over Gil, one hand pressing into his chest. He’s laughing, bubbling over with blind joy.
See here! The heart responds, Cormorion returns. How could you doubt?

Ringil snaps his eyes open, grabs Lathkeen’s alien gaze with his own. Grabs the dwenda’s jerkin with both hands.

C’mere, motherfucker!

He hauls down, hard. The dwenda starts backward, staggers, features contorted with shock, trying to get away. Ringil uses it, flexes to his feet, matches the retreat, step for stumbling step, still hanging on. Plants a head-butt in Lathkeen’s face, smashes the rim of the iron crown into the bridge of that elegant arched nose. It knocks the storm-caller back into the nearest of the standing stones. Vaguely, he hears Risgillen yell—assume she’s worked out that something’s
really
wrong now—but there’s no time to worry about that. The
ikinri ‘ska
wakes right up in the gap it’s been left, and he uses it like a troop muster loudhailer. He bawls out into the Grey Places … 

Ravensfriend! Bring the Ravensfriend!

My name is a complicated thing
… 

I am Welcomed in the Home of Ravens and Other Scavengers in the Wake of Warriors, I am Friend to Carrion Crows and Wolves, I am Carry Me, and Kill with Me, and Die with Me where the Road Ends, I am not the Honeyed Promise of Length of Life in Years to Come, I am the Iron Promise of Never Being a Slave.

Lathkeen comes snarling at him, nose streaming blood, fingers sprouting lupine talons, reaching like a winter tree. He’s fast, Hoiran’s
balls
he’s fucking fast—but he’s no soldier and it shows. Eldritch alien rage, sure, but it isn’t channeled where it needs to go. Ringil stand his ground, face like stone. Chops down the storm-caller’s attack with brutal blows—some talons get through, rip the skin of his throat, but hey—he locks Lathkeen up, spins him. Grabs him by the hair and neck, runs him savagely face first into the standing stone.

Where the Road Ends
… 

Echoing in his head like some sunken ship’s bell, fathoms and ages drowned, but coming up fast. … 
until the End of the Road
… 
what matters is that I will be at your side
… 

Call for me
… 

BRING THE RAVENSFRIEND!
He screams it out as he smashes the dwenda’s face apart on the rough-hewn stone.

And out there on the edge of his senses, he thinks he hears an answering cry.

Risgillen is incoming, long sword drawn; he can feel her sprinting in across the circle toward him. But Lathkeen is dead now or not far off it, and Gil’s shrugging off the bindings on the
ikinri ‘ska
like coilings of frayed and rotted rope. He grabs something handy, some minor distraction glyph, tosses it, lets it detonate in Risgillen’s eyes. Feels her stumble, swings around and brings whatever’s left of Lathkeen with him. He hurls the dying storm-caller into Risgillen’s path, tangles her up for the time he needs, the time he
knows
he needs, and knows is nearly up.

Behind her—the rest of the dwenda from inside the circle. He sees them scrabbling belatedly for their weapons, moving hesitantly in. He casts again, the glyph that staggered Risgillen, three times more, like a dagger repeatedly into flesh—the dwenda flinch and then start flailing about them at empty air. But they don’t go down; he’s not sure what it would take to achieve that much, not even sure what he’s done to them except that it’s
enough for now,
and some stitched-in
ikinri ‘ska
impulse is telling him not to invest too much effort in this, this is not the battle, this is only—

Unnerving keening—Risgillen looks up from the shattered mess of Lathkeen’s face in disbelieving rage. No understanding yet of what’s gone wrong, who’s still standing there in Ringil’s flesh. Gil grins at her, gets his back against the standing stone, splays his arms, crooked hands empty of anything but cold air and the will to do harm. It’s enough—something in stance or grin—he sees her face change, sees her eyes narrow with fury, and knows she’s made him.

Come on then,
he pants.
Time you went to join your brother.

Her eyes go on narrowing, down to slits, tilting into something demonic as her jaw lengthens and her mouth splits with fangs. Trace memory from another time and place spikes up the side of his face and into his eye. He forces it down, keeps the grin, waits for her to make her move, blade or magic, he’s past caring now, he—

Stone splinters, shatters, stings his face with shards.

The Ravensfriend.

There, standing out of the rough-hewn blood-splattered granite at his side like an arrow shaft from a body—as if some hurrying, hopelessly delayed courier god hurled the Kiriath blade the last hundred paces to its owner and instead struck the standing stone through with mortal force.

Risgillen recoils.

And somewhere distant, just faintly, there’s the pale sense of something huge, some vast balance, tipping—toppling—falling flat on its fat fucking face

Ringil’s right hand leaps sideways for the sword. It barely feels like his own act, hand up and out across his chest, fingers folding around the grip. His left arm is up, bracing against the stone by his face, he tugs hard on the sword—there’s one heart-stopping moment when it doesn’t move—
pull, hero, fucking pull—
he presses with his other arm for purchase and here it comes, grating up out of the stone with an almost musical clang. Brief scatter of sparks as the point and leading edge drag finally clear of the granite, and the Ravensfriend is his again.

A single, harsh bark of joy is in his throat. He coughs it out, takes the sword two-handed, holds it out at Risgillen like an offering. She’s rising now, like something from the war, like some hissing slithering warrior caste reptile at bay. The blue-lit sword weaves but there’s no conviction to it, no power, and she’s trying to summon something, some—

The
ikinri ‘ska
leaps in, tears it down before it can form.

He shivers with the force of the counter. Hjel was right, the glyph magic isn’t in him anymore, it
is
him, it wears him like a suit of mail. He can no longer tell where it ends and he begins.

Can you feel it, Risgillen?
he’s screaming in her face.
Can you feel how thin the pages left?

The rest of the dwenda rush in on her flanks—perhaps they’re an honor guard, he’ll never know—he glimpses long-hafted ax and raised shield to his left, a scything long sword blade to the right, and then he’s gone, into the fight and a high, thin, unwinding sound in his head that might be the Ravensfriend’s song or his own battle scream. Kiriath steel meets dwenda glimmer, impossible speed for any human-forged blade—it turns the long sword, comes back for the ax. The
ikinri ‘ska
summons the grass to life underfoot, tangles it around the staggering dwendas’ feet, snatches fragments of splintered stone from the broken megalith at Ringil’s back, sews them through the air like horizontal hail. Ravensfriend locks up the ax haft, drags it down. Stamping kick into an exposed knee, the shield defense fails, the sword finds a thigh and bites a gash down through dwenda armor and flesh alike. The dwenda tumbles, mouth gaping open on a yell, and Gil has time to chop the pale face open before he’s spinning away, hurling granite shards into his attackers’ eyes, tripping them with the coiling, lashing blades of grass, barely needing now to trade and repulse blows at all, the dwenda are too busy trying to drive off the
ikinri ‘ska
assault with glyphs and calls of their own … 

He stalks among them, iron spike crowned.

Grabs and kicks to take them off balance, hacks and maims as their defenses crumble and horror sets in. It’s the Dark King returned all right—it’s bloody slaughter to match anything at Gallows Gap, and he doubts, he
really fucking doubts
that Cormorion could have done any better if he’d ever got loose and tried. It’s bloody slaughter and it’s—

Done.

Seven dwenda—in the time it’d take to draw a deep breath for each one and let it out, he’s taken them down. Left them strewn crippled, eviscerated and screaming across the grass of Cormorion’s stone circle. The reek of their spilled blood is in his nose, he’d swear he can almost taste it on his tongue. The circle is his, he feels the air shiver with his dominion. It’s protection thrown around him, a space he owns, a space that’s been waiting for him always. He casts about like a hound, sees Risgillen among the fallen, trying to drag herself back upright, leaning on the pivot of her long sword. Looks like her leg is chopped, though he doesn’t remember doing it.

She snarls up at him as he approaches, nothing human in it. He sees her fingers lengthening into claws, digging into the blood-matted grass she lies on. Her jaw distending for the fangs. He lifts his left hand, pushes the iron crown back up his brow a little from where it’s settled too low. He readies the Ravensfriend for the blow that will slice Risgillen apart.

You never fucking learn, do you?
Oddly, he finds his voice is almost gentle across the wind.
There’s no place for you in the world anymore. It does not
want
you back.

Tell that to our acolytes by the thousand in Trelayne.
Her fangs distort and crisp the words. She gags on a bite reflex, gathers herself again.
Tell that to every soul that cannot endure the arid modern march your Black Scourge masters have imposed on humanity, every soul that secretly craves the darkness and the sweet delirium it brings. You have understood nothing, mortal—you kneel and beat your breasts in your temples and shrines, you seek the spirit within—we are your eternal soul, we, the dwenda, the eternal ones.
She’s leaving her human form behind as he watches. Her tongue is forked and blackened, slipping out between her teeth, tasting the air for him. He has to strain now to get meaning from the noises she makes.
We are your darkness, we are your soul. We have haunted your dreams since the beginning of time, we bring you the gift of dark joy and escape. If we are your masters, it is because you cannot live without us.

Yeah?
He sniffs and tilts the Kiriath steel invitingly.
Just watch us.

The thing Risgillen is turning into makes a rattling sound behind its teeth. It takes him a moment to identify it as laughter.

You think killing me will stop us now? Look about you, fool.
A predator claw gestures out at the ranked dwenda waiting silent below the circle. At the boiling, tightly bound darkness on the slope above.
Our armies wait only for the breach. The Talons of the Sun wait to be unleashed, clan Talonreach will see it done.

Feels to me like Talonreach got their hands full right now.

The truth of it hits him even as the words leave his mouth. The sense of distraction from inside the heart of the Talons has shifted, lurched into something resembling panicked effort. He finds a lopsided grin.
I don’t think this is just about me anymore, Risgillen. Something
else
is coming. Can’t you feel it?

And maybe it’s recognition of that truth that drives her, finally, up off the bloodied grass and at him, talons reaching, jaws gaping, a scream in the throat and the demon slanting, burning eyes, a wild challenge there and, perhaps, a plea.

He doesn’t need the
ikinri ‘ska,
unless that’s what lends him the inhuman speed and poise. He doesn’t need the magic, or even the hate anymore.

All he needs is the steel. All he
is,
is the blade.

He sways, just barely, out of the way of the leap, chops upward with the Ravensfriend and follows through to the side. Kiriath steel catches the snarling thing that was Risgillen somewhere at the midriff, slices upward through armor and the body it sheathes. The Ravensfriend snags, briefly, on the spine, Ringil grunts and hauls hard, the blade slices clear. The dwenda comes apart in an explosion of lifeblood and entrails. The severed sections hit the ground, he spins about, Ravensfriend at low guard.