The Dark Defiles (8 page)

He catches up with Firfirdar at the edge of a minor drop, six or eight feet down to where the waves hurl themselves into the jagged line of the rocks. She’s watching them burst high and spatter, suck back and slide away off wet-gleaming granite surfaces, then surge in again, tireless.

She waits until he’s at her side. Pitches her voice to carry over the sound it makes.

Supposing I could take you to that city—how would you live there? Your blade would be behind glass in a museum, and no use for it even if it were not. The languages you speak would be millennia dead. What would you do for money, for food? Do you see yourself cleaning tables, perhaps, in some eatery whose owner does not mind your halting attempts at the local tongue? A brief career as a tavern whore, maybe, while your looks last? Do you see yourself washing dishes or mucking out horses, as you grow old and gray? Does that appeal?

He grimaces.
Well, now you come to mention it
… 

Quite. And here is our difficulty. Your daydreamed retirement is no more honest than the daydreamed heroics of young boys who’ve never picked up a blade. It is a fantasy staple—stale, learned longing, incurious of any human detail, a mediocre hand dealt out from the grubby, endlessly reshuffled myths and legends and comforting lies you people like to tell each other. There is less weight to it in the end than in all your boyhood fantasies of a life with the gypsies, out on the marsh at Trelayne. That at least was something you might once have attempted, a path you might have taken. But this—this is a lie to yourself that you carry around in your heart because you’d rather not face the truth.

And what truth would that be?

Firfirdar gestures at the waves breaking below them.
That there is rest and there is motion. And that once set in motion, none of us are ever truly at rest again as long as we live. That the only truly important thing is to move well while you can, to go to rest only when rest is all that remains.

Yeah? So where does that leave me?

The dark queen looks almost embarrassed for him.
Well,
she says.
What else, aside from slaughter with sharp steel, are you really good for?

There’s a long, quiet pause, broken only by the roar and suck of the sea. Ringil feels the sound stuffing itself into his ears, emptying him out. They stand, goddess and man, a foot and a half apart, like two statues carved from the granite underfoot.

I suppose a blow job’s out of the question,
he says at last.

She turns to look at him, glitter-eyed.
You said
what
to me, mortal?

You’re not going to take me to Grashgal’s city. I get it.

I cannot.

Cannot or will not?

Cannot. The codes the Book-Keepers wrote are very specific. Though I may grant wishes, they must be genuine, they must come from the heart and soul of the supplicant.
There’s a soft, persuasive urgency to her words now.
I read your mind for you—now I will read you your heart. Look inside yourself, Hero of Gallows Gap, Dragonbane unacknowledged—look deep, find the flame inside, and tell me what you
really
want.

He stares into the crash and foam of the waves below, for what seems like quite a while. Long, vertiginous moments of letting go. Grashgal’s vision of a city at peace receding, sucking back and sliding away, leaving hard wet rock gleaming beneath.

Finally, he sees what she’s talking about.

I want them dead,
he says quietly.
I want them all fucking dead.

Ah.
The Mistress of Dice and Death puts a companionable arm around his shoulders. Her touch bites through his clothes like freezing iron.
Now
that’s
more like it.

F
ROM THE TOP OF THE LONG SLOPE HE’D CLIMBED, THE LANDSCAPE SPRANG
into some comprehensible focus. Familiar folds in the rolling terrain. Off to the west, the long, slumped spine that led up to the cliffs where they’d dug out the grave. He pivoted about, gauging the angles in the wind and the pallid light. He squinted—could just make out the spike and tracery of mast-tips beyond a fold in the land to the east.

Dragon’s Demise,
moored where they’d left her.

It seemed he hadn’t been away for long.

L
ET ME SHOW YOU SOMETHING, SHE TELLS HIM, AS THEY EMERGE FROM A
grotto of tumbled granite blocks onto another beach.
Perhaps it will help.

They leave the shadow of the rocks behind, pass over low white sand dunes and down toward a broad waterline that curves away to the horizon. The waves run in to meet them, soft and muted, lapping up the beach with creamy tongues. But farther out they’re breaking twice the height of a man, and the sound of it echoes off the cliffs behind them like distant thunder.

Something flickers past Ringil’s shoulder.

He tears loose of the dark queen’s arm. Flinches around, fingers twitching.

Sees only a leaf of pale light, something like a candle flame detached from its wick and grown to the size of a man. It skitters around them for a moment, then darts away along the beach.

Fuck was that?
he asks, watching it go.

One of the locals.
Firfirdar presses on down the slope of the beach toward the waves. She calls back to him.
Don’t worry, they’re not interested in us.

True enough—as he follows the dark queen down, he sees a dozen or more of the same living flames flickering about on the sand, gathering briefly then scattering apart again, sprinting short straight lines, then dodging playfully aside, skidding out over the creamy broken surface of the water in broad curves, then skimming back again. Some of them make wobbling circuits around him or Firfirdar or both, but it’s fleeting, as if there’s simply not enough in either visitor to hold their attention, and soon they’re gone again, out across the water, away … 

It’s a little like watching energetic moths at play on some lamplit balcony.

He joins the dark queen at the waterline.

So what are they interested in?
he asks her.

She gestures out over the ocean.
See for yourself.

Out where the waves are breaking big, the same flickering lights dance up and down, back and across the smoothly rising, advancing face of each breaker. It looks weirdly as if some naval vessel has left small patches of float-fire burning fiercely on the surface of the waves—but patches that slide giddily around on some unfeasible clash of currents beneath.

Nalumin,
says Firfirdar, as if this is explanation enough.

Ringil watches a pair of the glimmering things race in on a wave. They seem to grow paler as they reach the shallows.

Are they alive?

That depends on your working definition. Once, long ago even in the memory of the gods, the Nalumin were men and women like you. But a flame possessed them at the core, and they spent their lives stripping away all layers that did not feed that flame.
Something changes in the dark queen’s voice and when Ringil looks at her, he sees that distant sadness smoking off her again.
When the book-keepers came, the Nalumin made a choice. Like so many of us, they perhaps did not fully understand what that choice would mean.

And what did it mean?

Firfirdar shrugs.
That all layers were stripped away. That they gave themselves over wholly to the flame. Just as you see.

They burn brighter on the water than on the land.
He’s speaking more to himself than to the goddess at his side. But Firfirdar nods.

Yes. Brighter on water than on land, guttering to nothing if they leave the sea behind for very long. And brightest of all when they ride the waves.
A crooked smile.
It was, by all accounts, what they wanted.

They’re trapped here, then?

To the extent that all mortals are, I suppose.
The dark queen appears not to have given it much thought.
A flickering limen of existence between the saltwaters you all come from and a darkened hinterland beyond. Yes, trapped—you could say so. Though they seem not to mind. Eternity is what you make of it, I’d say.

They’re eternal, then? Immortal?

So far, yes.

It conjures out the ghost of his own smile. He rolls her a sardonic look.
Right. And this is supposed to make me feel better about my own situation, is it?

Firfirdar shrugs again.

There are worse fates, are there not, than being forced into a place where your choice of acts is limited to those that cause your soul to burn the brightest?

He draws a breath that hurts his throat, because he can see where this is going.
Right. And now we get down to where my soul burns brightest, do we?

The goddess looks at him—no, not at him, past him—past his face and left shoulder to where the hilt of the Ravensfriend spikes in silhouette. Her eyes glitter, like the Nalumin dancing on the waves.

Oh, I think you already know that,
she whispers.

H
E CUT ACROSS THE LAND, STAYING OUT OF DIPS AS MUCH AS HE COULD—
climate in the Hironish made for boggy ground wherever water could easily collect. He picked up sheep tracks along his path, used them where they helped, ignored them when they meandered too far wide of the direction he wanted. Less than half an hour in, sweat had collected on his brow and under his clothing. He’d set a marching pace without realizing it.

As if battle lay ahead, or something behind was gaining on him.

About an hour later, he came over a rise, panting the steady rhythm of the march, took in the ruined croft and the short column of men on the sheep track below, not really grasping the detail for what it was.

He stopped anyway, half wary, an alarm bell tolling somewhere gut deep.

A large sheep—no, he narrowed his gaze, saw horns, make that a ram—broke from the path, ambled away through the long grass toward the croft. Guffawing laughter drifted up to him on the damp air. The man in the vanguard of the column looked up.

Long hair, gaunt face, all-around evil-seeming motherfucker, looked like a scar on one ch—

Understanding knifed through Gil’s hangover blur, hit him like a mace blow from some unsuspected attacker off his flank. He staggered backward, cloak flapping around him in the wind. Sat down hard on the wet grass at the top of the rise. Rolled frantically for cover.

You didn’t see me. You
did not
see me.

It came through gritted teeth, part wishful thinking, part statement of fact, part
ikinri ‘ska
incantation.

If magicking against that thing down there was even possible.

We can swim to the shallows, yes.
Seethlaw, on the possibilities of existing within the Grey Places.
With practice, we can step into places where time slows to a crawl, slows almost to stopping point, even dances around itself in spirals
… 

And so could the Dark Court, it seemed.

Not for the first time, he wondered what real difference lay between the dwenda and the gods. What powers and interests they might share.

He lay with his cheek pressed into the soaking grass, and a fresh chunk of memory dropped into his head.

R
ISGILLEN OF
I
LLWRACK TOLD ME SHE NEGOTIATED WITH THE
D
ARK
C
OURT
to bring about my downfall. In essence, that you gave me up to her.

Is that how it seemed to you? Yet you did not fall down, as near as I recall. Or, let us say, you did not fall very far.

He shivers. It’s the best part of a year since the assault on the Citadel in Yhelteth, the horror he was plunged into as a result. He will not revisit those memories if he can avoid it.

The dwenda do not lie,
he says, in a voice not quite even.

Do they not?

That was my understanding, from my time spent with Seethlaw. He saw deceit as a human trait he must learn. He was quite bitter about it. Risgillen was his sister, and junior to him in their schemes. It seems unlikely she would have learned the trick any faster.

Well, then, she perhaps told you the truth as she understood it.

Gil sets his jaw.
You lied to her.

Does that upset you?
A wry smile.
We are human gods, after all.

You set us both up.
He can hear the bitterness surge in his voice.
And then you fuckers sat back and watched us fight it out.

The dark queen shrugs.
Risgillen was coming for you anyway. It might be more accurate to say we provided you with the tools to withstand her revenge.

Yeah—tools I learned how to use only at the eleventh hour, and no thanks to the Dark Court along the way.

But you are the apple of our eye, Ringil. The Court has always had faith in your ability to find your own way. It is what draws us to you.

Oh,
fuck
off.

No, really. Ask yourself—what use does any god have for worshippers who tug constantly at her sleeve like so many overmothered children?
The dark queen’s lip curls and contempt etches her tone.
Wanting, praying, needing, begging, asking for comfort, guidance, confirmation, a great big blanket of righteousness to wrap themselves up in from cradle to grave. We grow weary of it, and faster than you’d think. Give me some arrogant unbeliever over that any day of the week, and twice on holy days.
That’s
how heroes are made.

Yeah? Well, this hero’s done.