The Dark Defiles (30 page)

He waits to see if it’ll go away, but it doesn’t. So he holds its eye in silence, holds down a shiver, and waits some more.

All right, then,
he tells it finally. But only when he’s sure it lowered its eyes first.

He gets up and crawls into the tent after Hjel.

H
E’S NOT SURE IF IT’S NEED FOR REFUGE OR SOMETHING ELSE THAT DRIVES
him.

The dispossessed prince is feigning sleep, as Ringil slides under the mound of blankets and spoons in behind him. But when Gil slips a hand down the telltale unrelaxed tension of muscle in his belly, cups his prick and balls and whispers into the nape of his neck,
I know you’re awake,
Hjel moans and opens his eyes. He stiffens in seconds under Ringil’s gently squeezing touch, reaches back for Gil and finds him already hard.

I want you,
Ringil mouths in his ear, and it’s true enough. He tugs hard on the other man’s erection, tugs him around under the covers, then sweeps the blankets away and slips the head of Hjel’s cock into his mouth. The dispossessed prince groans and tangles his fingers in Ringil’s hair, but Gil pulls back, grips hard.

Now what’s all this black mage shit, hmm?

I, it’s nothing, I—don’t stop, Gil, don’t fucking
stop … 

He draws on the pool of his role-playing memories with Grace.
Want me to be your black mage master, is that it, creature?

No, I no, it isn’t that
… Ringil puts his mouth back and Hjel arches like a drawn bow.
Yes, yes, all right. Please, please. Take me, dark lord, fuck me, fuck me.

Then you’d better get me slick, hadn’t you?

He gets to his knees over Hjel, still working him with his hand. Rubs his prick back and forth across the dispossessed prince’s face and questing mouth, finally lets the other man take him in. He cups Hjel’s head with the gentleness of a nursing mother, a gentleness held in monstrous tension against the savagery of the feelings roaring through him now, and he guides the dispossessed prince’s sucking mouth softly back and forth. He lets go of the other man’s pulsing cock with a flourish, gathers saliva in his mouth, and spits copiously into his free hand. Reaches down to the crack between Hjel’s heaving, clenching cheeks, works the spit in with soft circular motions of his fingers until he judges the prince ready.

Pulls loose, swiftly now, rolls Hjel in his arms—it feels suddenly effortless. A last wipe of spit across the head of his own pulsing prick and then he gathers the dispossessed prince under him, presses Hjel’s legs wide and thrusts carefully in. He dips his face to within an inch of Hjel’s, whispers into his eyes.

Your black mage is fucking you now, dispossessed prince.

Hjel makes an incoherent noise of assent in his throat. Gil pushes deeper, working a rhythm to fit his words.

Taking everything you have, taking you deep.

Hjel’s head, weaving back and forth under his. He snatches kisses from the panting mouth like a striking snake.

Give in to the dark,
he hisses.
Let go, let me in.

And suddenly—hot, sticky splatter up over his belly, Hjel’s fountaining cock shuddering against his flesh like a stabbed man, his own deeply buried response coming instantly behind, like white fire exploding back down the iron hard shaft of his prick and into his groin—it’s over for both of them now, and the rest is quivering tremors, tight grasping, clasping, wet kisses and moaning, and feverish collapse … 

Afterward, as they lie sprawled across each other, tangled limbs and half-shed clothes and the blankets dragged haphazardly back in place, Ringil glides out of cover and strikes. Puts a grin in his voice that he doesn’t really feel.

So, uhm—black mages, Hjel? What’s that all about?

The dispossessed prince doesn’t move, but abruptly there’s a new stillness in him, a tension in his body that wasn’t there before. Ringil feels it in all the places they touch, as if Hjel’s flesh was somehow pulling back from his of its own accord. When the other man speaks, he sounds oddly lost.

It’s not important.

Hoiran’s balls, it’s not important. We both just came like storm surf back there.
Gil plants a kiss on the other man’s neck, spoons closer behind him, gathers him tighter in.
Now come on, spill. What’s going on?

Hjel shakes his head. It’s a small motion, but it’s like he’s trying desperately to get loose of something. His words come out in hesitant, jerky little bundles.

I don’t know, it’s
… 
my people have legends. About how we ended up
… 
like we are. I told you
… 
about the Southern Scourge. How they tore down our palaces and temples. Burned our cities into the marsh. Scattered us, chased us into the Margins.

Yeah, I remember.

Privately, Ringil has always thought the legends Hjel’s people tell sound like the same old
We Were a Great Civilization Once
routine you heard trotted out by the subjugated coastal clans on the Yhelteth seaboard, or by haughty Parashal families visiting Trelayne who still hadn’t gotten their heads around the way the more northerly city had wrested control of the League from them way back when.
Lo, We Were Torn from Ascendancy by Upstarts, Oh, the Lost Glory That Was Ours,
so drearily forth. As if there was some kind of conferred nobility in the fact that your distant ancestors did something significant once. But he’s never said that to the dispossessed prince; it’s always seemed unnecessarily cruel, and he doesn’t say it now.

Yeah,
says Hjel.
Well, they say the Scourge was led by a black mage. They say he came to Trel-a-lahayn at the head of an army of the walking dead, that he had storms at his command.

Ah.

Ringil looks at the other man’s back, the just visible cheekbone edge of his averted face. Some small part of him is appalled at the chilly detachment in his mind as he thinks this through.

That’s right.
Hjel is not going to turn and meet his eye. Maybe he can feel the chill as well.
A dark lord emperor, they say. Or a sorcerer empress, a witch queen, it’s not always the same story. When I was a little kid
… 
I used to dream about—defeating this black mage in battle. Then, when I got a bit older, I started to fantasize
… 
different stuff.

Ringil kisses him again, on the nape of the neck.
So I see.

Hjel clears his throat.
But fantasy wears thin, you know. It can’t keep the real world out forever. You grow up. You start to crave human detail. You put mud on his boots, bags under his eyes. Scars and lines, regrets. He starts to talk, to
really
talk, not just recite the same shabby fantasy lines and postures you need to get off. You end up wondering what he was like when he was young, before you cloaked him in this convenient darkness.
The dispossessed prince hesitates, on the edge of something for a moment, then plunges on.
You wonder how he learned the darkness in the first place. You wonder who taught him his power.

Longish silence. In the gap it leaves, an abruptly violent gust of wind strops at the canvas over their heads, like something hungry trying to get in. Ringil wonders for a moment if his ghosts are gathered out there, a silent assembly of figures with heads bowed around the tent, honor guard and impending threat at one and the same time, waiting for him to emerge.

He puts the thought aside. Chooses his words with care.
So you’re having some second thoughts here, are you? Scared you’re training up a new dark lord?

Now Hjel turns toward him, twisting around in his embrace, and just for a moment, Gil’s jolted by the urgency in his face.

It isn’t that. But
… 
I see the way you drink down the
ikinri ‘ska.
You take to it like hunted geese to the sky. It’s like it
wants
you, Gil. Like there’s something hurrying the changes along, something neither of us has any control over. And I don’t know what that is.

Ringil snorts.
Didn’t want me so much back when I was trying to pull down that fucking elemental fog at Sempeta beach, did it?

Siempetra beach.

Whatever. I don’t recall that one getting hurried along by anything.

Hjel stares at him.
You did it in five days, Gil.

Yeah, five long fucking days.

But
… The dispossessed prince coughs out a disbelieving little laugh.
I’ve seen men work
months
to master those sequences, Gil. Months. Some never
manage it. You did it like you’d been doing all your life. You made it look
easy.

Why’d you take me to see those canisters again?
Ringil lets him go. Pushes back in the confined space of the tent, trying to shake something loose with the sudden change of tack.
You knew I wouldn’t be able to hear them anymore, didn’t you? You were expecting it.

Hjel looks away.
I don’t know.

Yeah, you do.
When the other man stays silent, he starts to get angry.
Come on, Hjel. Fucking talk to me.

I—
Hjel shakes his head.
Look, there’s a tradition. Used to be, they don’t do it now, I forbade it. Among my people, if a child committed a crime—something serious—if they stole, say, or hurt someone badly, or told dangerous lies about them—used to be they’d take the kid out into the Margins. Make them listen at the mouth of a long-jar. They’d tell them what they could hear was the sound of the world’s first evil, back before it was loosed on humanity. And if they continued on the path they’d chosen, that evil would come looking for them. That they’d hear it at their back, creeping up, getting louder.
A quick, convulsive gesture that looks like shame.
Then, if the crime was particularly bad, they’d cut them loose, you know, leave them in the Margins for a given time, like a—a sentence to be served.

Charming.

I already fucking said they don’t do it anymore!

Good to know. And what does this have to do with me?

There were—
Hjel swallows.
They say that sometimes, some kids, the really destructive, vicious ones, the ones that really liked to hurt and cause chaos, they say those kids listened to the long-jars, but they couldn’t hear anything. They couldn’t hear the evil.

Yeah, or—try this—they were just tougher than the rest, and they said they couldn’t hear anything just to piss off their elders. To not bow down on demand.

Hjel bows his head, as if in echo.
That may be. But it’s said that the ones who couldn’t hear the sound would always grow up to be dangerous, violent men. Rapists, killers, oath breakers. The kind that end up driven out.

And you figure that’s what I’m turning into?

I didn’t say that.

Not quite, no. You didn’t have to.
His voice is rising now.
Did it ever occur to you—or to these fuckwit guardians of youth you’re telling me about—that they probably left the ones who said they couldn’t hear anything longer in the Margins than the others? Maybe too long? And that maybe leaving them there was what turned them into the men they became? Not some innate fucking evil your people were pig-shit ignorant enough to believe in?

He isn’t sure why he’s suddenly so angry. Killer and oath-breaker can both be laid at his door, and while he might never have committed a rape, he’s certainly stood by at a few. He’s nobody’s idea of clean, and he’s never made any secret of the fact. It shouldn’t take listening at the open end of some ancient, discarded piece of magical junk for Hjel to read any of that in him.

And it shouldn’t hurt or surprise Gil that he has done.

Perhaps, then, it’s just that over the disjointed, hard-to-measure time of his apprenticeship in the
ikinri ‘ska,
he’s grown accustomed to the easygoing humanity of Hjel’s band of followers, come to appreciate their tolerance and wry humor, their lack of rage. He’s learned to love the way they fill themselves with life like it’s a well-cooked banquet, the way they refuse to gnaw on bones of cheap hate and discord like every other fucking culture he’s seen or read about in thirty-something years of standing up and taking notice. He’s come, perhaps to take it all for granted, to live it like a dream or a child’s tale. Escape out the window of your strictured, sutured life, out to the lights of campfires on the great marsh plain under vast open skies. Go find refuge and live among the kindly marsh dwellers. And perhaps it’s the shock of waking up from that dream, banging your head on something real and understanding suddenly that no, these are real people just like you, and they have their murky corners and little cruelties just like everybody else.

Perhaps it’s that.

Ringil draws a deep breath and puts his anger away. He manufactures a grin for his lover and teacher.

Sorry. I got a lot of hard discipline growing up. And look what it did to me.

Hjel makes a helpless gesture. Says nothing. An answering smile flickers on his face, never manages to stick. In the confines of the tent, still warm and scented with their fucking, he has never seemed so far away. Ringil tries again.

Look, maybe I’m just older, eh? Like you said. Maybe your tales of recalcitrant youth are so much self-fulfilling lizardshit, and I’m just getting old.

Yeah. That’s probably it.

I’m—
Gil spreads his hands. Open palms empty, offering nothing.
I’m not the pure-at-heart hero seeking arms and armor against the forces of evil, Hjel. I never pretended to be that.

I know.

But you’re worried about what I’m turning into anyway?