The Dark Defiles (23 page)

“To an incomplete extent, yes. The Changeling’s … soul was obliterated, and he fell in battle. The Aldrain forces were routed, and not long thereafter, the Aldrain themselves were driven entirely back into the undefined planes.”

“Sounds pretty complete to me.”

“But?” Archeth prompted.

“But the mirrored copy of his self remains, stored in the substance of the sword.” More hesitation, hanging in the empty air. To the Dragonbane at least, it sounded like embarrassment. “There were those among both Kiriath and humans who believed this meant the Changeling could one day be brought back to life.”

Egar traded a glance with Archeth. “Oops.”

“Yes, oops,” said the Warhelm unexpectedly. “There were solutions to this, but as I explained earlier,
kir
-Archeth, your father did not want them applied.”

“My father,” bitten emphasis on Archeth’s words, “would not have left the job of liberating this world half done. What solutions are you talking about?”

“For Cormorion to return would require a fresh human host—a new body for his soul. For that matter, for the Aldrain themselves to return would require human collaboration of some sort. It seems from the detail we were able to glean out of myth and legend belonging to both races that it was human sorcery of some kind that summoned the Aldrain into the world in the first place. And whatever form that initial relationship took, by the time the Kiriath arrived here, Aldrain supremacy was wholly dependent on vassal support from human rulers. There were simply not that many of them, compared to humanity’s numbers. They might easily have been overwhelmed, had humans been able to perceive them as an enemy and to act in concert against them. But humans did not. In fact, it was notable how much of humanity seemed to actively crave their presence, their disruption of the natural order, their
magic,
if you will. Many actively preferred it to the science the Kiriath brought, and even those who did not could often not tell the difference.”

Egar grunted. “Tell me about it.”

“Are you … are you saying humanity didn’t
want
to be liberated?”

“You have fallen deep into their ways, daughter of
kir
-Flaradnam.” Hard to be sure, but the Warhelm seemed amused. “You think as they do, you abandon all rational grasp. Do you think your father would be proud? Here you stand, attributing will and intent to abstractions. Humanity, even then, was a race many tens of millions strong. Do you really believe that such numbers could have a single, unified wish or purpose?”

“But the Indirath M’nal—”

“The Indirath M’nal was written seven centuries after the events it relates. It was a document designed to rationalize what had gone before, and to vindicate the new Kiriath mission. You should not expect too much accuracy.”

“But if humans were happy with Aldrain rule—”

“Some were, some were not. Most lived with it as they lived with the weather and the shape of local terrain—as an unalterable fact of life. But there were enough malcontents and dreamers, fortunately, for our purposes.”

“Our
purposes?
Our
purpose
was to rid the world of a demonic foe. To liberate humanity from their yoke.” She was almost shouting now, shouting at the impassive roofing over her head.
“My father told me that!”

“Then perhaps by then he believed it.” No irony in the demon’s voice as far as Egar could tell. “Certainly, he worked hard to destroy or make obscure the original records of those times and what was done in them. But the hard truth is, daughter of
kir
-Flaradnam, that in the early years of the Arrival, the Kiriath purpose was to survive. No more, no less. They were few in number, stranded in a world they were struggling to understand, a world that appeared not to fully obey the laws of physics they had believed to be universal, and they were faced with a dominant civilization that wanted them gone. What else could they do but go to war?”

The Dragonbane watched as Archeth floundered for a hold, for something to fling back at the dispassionate voice from the ceiling. She was drowning, as surely as if she’d just been pitched off
Lord of the Salt Wind
’s rail once again.

He cleared his throat ostentatiously.

“Can’t help remembering,” he rumbled, “that we were talking about your solution to the Aldrain’s return.”

“Yes. We spoke of this.”

“So what was it? Your solution?”

“I thought I had made that obvious, Dragonbane. The relationship between Aldrain and human was tightly woven and symbiotic. Without—”

“Simi—what?”

“He means they depended on each other,” said Archeth sickly. “And I see now what my father would not let you do.”

“Yes, you do appear to have grasped it now.” The Warhelm fell silent, then, as if struck by an afterthought. “Would you like me to explain it to your friend?”

“That’d be nice,” growled Egar.

“Very well. Without
humans,
Dragonbane, the Aldrain would have no hope of a foothold against us, would perhaps not even be interested in a return. Extermination of the human race was the obvious safety measure.”

“Extermination?” Not that he hadn’t heard the word before—work the imperial borders long enough and you didn’t just hear it, you saw the tactic in action. But that was villages, hill tribes, the odd major town that wouldn’t see sense. This,
this
was … “You talking about
everybody
?”

“There were only forty-seven million of them left at the time,” the Warhelm said modestly. “It would have been a simple matter.”

“
ou know, I didn’t actually kill your friend Venj.”

“Fuck you—lying faggot piece of shit.”

Ringil made a pained face. “Says the man who told me I was the only prisoner on this ship.”

He twisted left and right in his chair, gestured with elaborate irony at the grim-featured imperial marines who flanked him. They’d not been out of their irons long, and their faces still bore the marks of the rough handling they’d had from Klithren’s men. They stood like statues at attention in the torchlight, but they stared across the table at Klithren like he was food.

Along with Klithren himself, they probably thought they had a pretty good idea of what was coming next.

Ringil was feeling tired and pissed off enough that he’d be sorry to disappoint them.

F
INDING OUT ABOUT THE MARINES WAS SHEER LUCK.
I
T SEEMED THEY’D
been brought aboard in chains and confined belowdecks early in the day, long before Ringil was stretchered down to the wharf that evening under Klithren’s watchful eye. Noyal Rakan wasn’t there to see it; he was still hiding somewhere out on the upper fringes of Ornley, waiting for nightfall. And he spoke no Naomic in any case, could not have understand anything he overheard the privateers saying even when he’d stowed away to rescue Gil. He’d never had any reason to suspect there might be any other imperials aboard.

And you, Gil, let an overweening sense of your own importance beat out any suspicion Klithren might not be telling the truth.

Nice going.

In fact, if one trembling young privateer hadn’t cracked and started babbling when Ringil quizzed him about the whereabouts of the Ravensfriend, neither he nor Rakan might have been any the wiser.

Senger Hald had been confined, with the rough courtesy due a noble and a commander, to a lower-deck bosun’s cabin—Gil supposed they might have stumbled on him sooner rather than later. But the dozen or so other marines Klithren had chosen to bring along as secondary trophies were not as lucky. They’d all been crammed into a damp holding space down in the stern, built for exactly this purpose, but with about half that number in mind. They’d had no food or water, and they’d had to share the space with rats that hadn’t reacted well to the encroachment. They were in a fine mood by the time Rakan went to let them out—ready to take on the entire privateer crew empty-handed if they had to, and a little disappointed to discover that particular piece of heavy lifting had already been done.

Suddenly having a dozen loyal men at his disposal made Ringil’s immediate situation a lot easier, but it didn’t change the basic problem he faced.

“Check the armory,” he told Hald, when the more immediate business of lowering an anchor and locking down the privateers in the forward hold was complete. “Chances are there’s a portable torture table packed away down there somewhere. When you find it, bring it to me here.”

“With pleasure.”

“We’ll need some torches for those brackets there, too. Oh, and have someone get me a soft chair from the captain’s cabin. I have a feeling this is going to be a long session.”

The marines found the table without too much trouble—it couldn’t have looked much different from similar imperial equipment they’d be used to working with. They brought it up to the main deck in pieces and set it up for him. Square and sturdy-legged once locked together, it was built of well-seasoned marsh oak and was broad enough to play chess across, or would have been but for the black iron manacle rail in the center. It had seen a lot of use. The surface around the rail was scarred and stained with accumulated wear and tear. Hammers and nails, carpenter’s drill-bits and chopping blades, poorly scrubbed away blood—all had left their mark.

He ordered the mercenary brought up on deck. Sat in his chair on the inquisitor’s side of the table and watched as three imperial marines forced Klithren down onto a stool opposite, cut his bonds, then yanked his arms forward and cuffed his wrists into the appropriate manacles on the rack. Aside from a livid bruise across the forehead and a broken lip, the mercenary looked in reasonable shape. He’d flinched when they first got him up the companionway onto the deck and he saw where he was headed, but it was momentary and then he had it together. The only resistance he offered was a gritted snarl.

Gil supposed he knew they’d just break his arms if he gave them any real trouble.

“Neck, too?” asked one of the marines hopefully, gesturing at the chain-link loop and ratchet that would lock Klithren’s head flat to the board.

“No, that’s fine. Leave him the way he is for now.”

They finished checking the manacles, stood back. Waited expectantly in the flicker from the bracketed torches set about the deck. A couple of them, the ones who’d put the table together, had tooled up from the ship’s store for the occasion—pincers, hammers, galley knives.

He turned his attention back to Klithren.

“Comfortable?” he couldn’t resist asking.

“Fuck you, faggot.”

“Don’t go giving me ideas.”

Klithren bared his teeth like a street dog at bay.

W
HICH WAS ABOUT AS GOOD AS IT GOT.

Even cuffed to the torture board, Klithren was hard as nails and taut with hate. A professional lifetime spent rubbing shoulders with death and screaming agony gave him the reserves. He awaited the pain of torture with fatalistic calm, the way any rank-and-file captured soldier would; he lived and breathed the moment-by-moment luxury of its absence and meantime built what strength he could for when it must finally come. Any fear he had was stashed away deep to make way for more usefully savage emotions. Any ghost of the uncertainty he’d seemed afflicted with when he held Ringil prisoner was good and buried.

Gil hadn’t seen such a depth of will glaring back at him since he murdered Poppy Snarl in the scrub outside Hinerion.

And Klithren was no use to him dead.

Try again.

“Look, I’m not saying I wouldn’t have killed the prick if I’d got the chance. But I didn’t get the chance. Venj came looking for me, looking to cash me in for the price on my head. Something else cashed him in first.”

Klithren sneered. “Yeah, I remember—marauding Majak tribesmen.”

“Okay, that was some lizard-shit I fed you to get your back turned. Fact remains, it wasn’t me.” Gil bent the truth a useful fraction. “I didn’t even see it go down.”

“No?” The rage leaking back into the mercenary’s tone again. “You were standing over his fucking corpse when I got there.”

“I was surrounded by corpses when you got there. Remember? Some of them were torn in pieces. You really think I did all that myself?”

Klithren leaned closer across the table, maybe the better to sneer, maybe just to ease the strain on his stretched arms. “Why do you give a flying fuck what I think, Eskiath?

“Because I need your help.”

“Then I guess you’re fucked.”

Gil lost his temper.

“You know, I could just as well have these boys here applying heated irons up your arse right now,” he snapped. “Or let them burn your prick and balls off to make way for a new cunt. Both very popular punishments down south for recalcitrant slaves.”

“I ain’t your fucking slave.”

Got to be smarter than this, Gil. Got to find another angle.

Actually, he knew what he was probably going to have to do.

He just didn’t want to do it.

“Look,” he said evenly. “You’re a mercenary. Down in Hinerion, you were a bounty hunter for whoever paid. It’s not such a reach for you to take Empire silver. All I—”

“Go fuck yourself, faggot. I’m a knight commander in the United Land Armies of the Trelayne League. Commissioned in League
gold
to bring in your backstabbing coward skull.”

“Well you’re doing a bang-up job of that so far.”

“Fuck you—”

“—faggot, yeah. I think we’ve covered this ground already.” Ringil gestured impatiently. The torchlight made jumpy shadows off the motion. “You know, Klithren, you’re coming across a lot more stupid than I took you for. You really think that shiny new rank they gave you counts for anything? It’s just a license to stand between richer men than you and their enemies, and bleed on their account. I don’t know who hired you exactly—actually, scratch that, I do have a pretty good idea—but do you
really think
that fuckwit cabal plans to do any of the dying in this new war they’ve got cooking?”

He was watching the mercenary’s face—saw the faintest flicker of reaction on the word
cabal,
barely there, but enough. He stowed the confirmation, pressed the point, some genuine anger creeping in and warming his tone.

“Findrich, Kaad, the rest of them—they’re using you the exact same way they used us all last time around. What benefits did you see for fighting the Scaled Folk after it was done? Five years we bled, and when it was safely over, those fuckers crawled back out of their holes and built a whole new slave trade on the back of what we’d saved from the lizards. Proud of your new employers, are you?”

Klithren shrugged as best he could with the manacles tugging at his arms. “Proud of yours? Last time I checked, it was your imperial friends started this ball rolling. The Empire walked into a chartered League city unprovoked, a city that also happens to be my hometown by the way, and they set loose the troops. You got any fucking idea what that looks like from the inside, sir Glades noble war hero?”

Actually, yes.

Ringil sat silent, wrapped in bloodshot recollection. When the war against the Scaled Folk wound down, he’d spent altogether too long witnessing the depredations of imperial soldiery in disputed border towns. Had, in fact, gotten himself badly hurt trying to stop it on one occasion, before he wised up and went home.

That the League’s forces were engaged in entirely similar behavior elsewhere in the borders, that the chaos was general and the men committing it as often as not just as bewildered as their victims, that the whole thing was in the end resolved with a flurry of save-face negotiation and the forced relocation of thousands—none of these facts had ever done anything to wash out the bloodied tinge of those memories.

Klithren had him.

Ringil looked across the table into his face and saw that the other man knew it, too.

“What’s the matter, war hero?” Klithren sat back as far as the iron cuffs would let him. “Nothing smart to say about that? One scumbag mercenary to another?”

One of the marines stooped to speak beside his ear. “Want me to slice off a couple of his fingers for you, my lord?” he asked helpfully. “Just the little ones to start, give him something to think about?”

Ringil grimaced. “No, that won’t be necessary. Thank you.”

“As you like, sir. Happy to do it, though—just give the word. I trained with a torture detachment at Dhashara, sir. Very tough bandits up there, I know what I’m doing.”

You’re going to have to do it, Gil. You know you are.

A tiny, trickling calm now that he’d accepted it.

“Tell me something, sellsword,” he said quietly. “How do you think you beat me, back in Ornley?”

Klithren snorted. “You looking for tuition?”

“I tagged you twice before you took me down. What happened to those wounds?”

“Wounds?” But this time, the snort rang forced. “I’ve had worse scratches off the kingsthorn around Tlanmar.”

“Yes, probably.” And now he leaned in toward the other man, certain that this was the weak point, the source of the restless uncertainty he’d spotted in Klithren down in the cabin before their roles were reversed. “But your mail was sliced right through, wasn’t it?”

The mercenary said nothing. His gaze skittered away over Ringil’s shoulder. Gil waited a couple of beats, kept his voice soft.

“The Ravensfriend is a Kiriath blade. Kiriath tempered steel, an eternal edge. You’ve been in this game long enough, you know what that means. Deliver that edge right, it’ll go through chain link like it was cotton. And I delivered it right, you know I did. Right through your mail—twice. Big fucking holes, both times. But somehow, all you scored under that damage was a couple of scratches.” Ringil was watching the mercenary intently. “That’s not possible, is it?”

Klithren sniffed. Met Gil’s eyes. “All I know about yesterday is you lost, Eskiath. Make up whatever lizardshit you need to, if it makes you feel better. Do whatever you’re going to do here. But Kiriath steel or no Kiriath steel, I took you down, motherfucker.”

Ringil shook his head.

“There’s a lot more to it than that. You think you’ve stepped inside the charmed circle back in Trelayne? Seen the real power behind the Chancellery? It goes way deeper than you think. Findrich and his pals are fucking with powers they can’t control, powers that are going to roll right over them when the time comes, like a cartwheel over dung.”

“Yeah,
right.
The Dark is abroad, it prowls the marsh. The Aldrain winter is coming.” Klithren spat on the table between them, jerked his chin at Ringil. “Black mage lizardshit, you think I haven’t heard it all before? Go fuck yourself with your Kiriath steel.”