The Dark Defiles (41 page)

“
… 
and looks like tonight is bath night.”
Eg heard the smile in her voice, the glint of the memory. “He did say that, didn’t he.”

“Yeah. Witty little fucker when he wanted to be.”

They were both silent for a while after that, staring up at the shrouded face of the heavens. If the shamans were right and you really could read the future in the stars, then tonight was a shit night to be trying it.

“You think he’s all right?” she asked finally.

He thought about it. “I think he’s alive, definitely. Gil was a tough-to-kill motherfucker even before he started in on all this black shaman stuff. Now, I can’t see anything short of the Sky Dwellers stopping him.”

“Or the dwenda?”

He snorted. “Yeah, a whole fucking legion of them, maybe. Which that shit-head Klithren didn’t look to me like he had.”

She didn’t say anything for a few moments, maybe because they could both feel the shape of what was coming next.

“You didn’t answer my question, Eg.”

He grimaced up at the hidden stars. “No?”

“No. You said you were sure he was alive, but I didn’t ask you that. I asked if you thought he was all right.”

Egar sighed, caught. Said nothing, because, well … 

“Well?” she prodded.

“Well.” He gave up trying to see anything in the sky above. Turned on his side, away from her so he wouldn’t have to meet her eyes. “All depends on your definition of all right, doesn’t it?”

Menith Tand

Klarn Shendanak

Yilmar Kaptal

Mahmal Shanta

e wrote the names out in his cabin back aboard
Dragon’s Demise
. Sat and stared at them as the ink dried. He’d lived cheek by jowl with these men for nearly five months now, the ones who’d chosen to come along. He’d grown used to them, got to know them somewhat. Had built what amounted to a friendship with Shanta, a wary mutual respect with Tand, and a gradual appreciation that Shendanak was not quite the thick-skulled swaggering Majak thug he generally liked to appear before his men.

Kaptal was an obnoxious tub of guts, but there you go, can’t have everything.

And before that, back in Yhelteth, there’d been meetings, endless fucking meetings, with the whole expeditionary board of sponsors, those four and the others.

He wrote the others out, too.

Andal Karsh

Nethena Gral

Shab Nyanar

Jhesh Oreni

Watched the fresh ink soak into the parchment and dry to an even color with the previous names. Outside, indistinct shouts between men in the rigging as they got the sails dressed, worked at keeping
Dragon’s Demise
tight with the other two ships. The noon sun put bright, high-angled beams of light through the cabin windows around him and caught the swirl of dust motes in the air. It spilled pools of radiance across the writing desk he sat at, touched one corner of the parchment he’d written on, lit it to blazing like a sly hint.

He picked up the list and stared at it some more. Thought about it, about what he knew firsthand, what he’d gleaned from Archeth and the others over the previous year of hustling and prepping for the expedition. The gossip, the rumors, the moments of unguarded candor and drunken admission.

He read the names over again.

Saw, with slow-dawning comprehension, the gathered tinder they represented.

Shanta
—landed, titled, and colossally well-heeled coastal clan patriarch, the foremost naval engineering authority in the Empire and a presiding member of the Yhelteth shipwright’s guild. Which body already served, if Archeth was to be believed, as chief cauldron for a bubbling centuries-old coastlander resentment of the Khimran dynasty’s overlordship, and might now be coming to something of a boil. And if it did, Shanta would likely be more than happy to give the pot a stir—he’d seen a few too many friends and acquaintances lost to Jhiral’s purges in the years since the accession, and with each loss the memory of his close friendship with Akal Khimran the Great was further tarnished, his traces of nominal allegiance to the dynasty further scrubbed away. On his own admission, age was the knife edge Shanta balanced on now, lacking on the one hand the indignant impulse of a younger man to leap in and act with violence against a ruler he had come to hate, on the other hand not having anything much to lose in terms of future years if he did act and it turned out badly. He’d once joked rather grimly with Ringil that whatever unpleasant, long-drawn-out fate the inventive young Emperor might someday decree for him, his aged heart would give out at the first infliction of even moderate sustained pain. And he’d long ago seen his children grow up and navigate into safe harbors within the imperial hierarchy where it would, frankly, be impossible to do them much harm without fatally destabilizing the whole edifice of rule.

S
HANTA HAD LIVED HIS LIFE FOR WHAT IT WAS WORTH; HE WAS LOOKING
now only for a good and significant death. And if the quest didn’t provide it for him via chest infection or drowning, Ringil thought he might well go looking for that death in a defiant rising against Jhiral.

Nyanar and Gral
—coastal clan worthies of note, perhaps not quite in Shanta’s class, but not far behind, and both harboring the same basic sense of superiority over the Khimrans’ horse-tribe bandit origins. The Nyanars were generationally wealthy and wielded substantial political influence in the ranks of both the imperial navy and the marine levies—a dozen or more scions of the house held command posts in one service or the other, some of them apparently earned on actual merit. A nominal loyalty to the palace came along with that, of course, service oaths of allegiance and so forth, but what it really amounted to was a loyalty to the sea-faring heritage of the coastal clans and a preexisting naval warrior tradition that the Khimran dynasty had co-opted whole, once it got through with defeating them.

No one had really forgotten that defeat.

House Gral’s reach apparently leaned more to the civil and legislative, and the wealth was more recent, but weighty nonetheless. Reigning daughter of a former shipbuilding family that had come back from prior ruin via judicious, cutthroat speculation in property and law, Nethena Gral had learned at her father’s knee that
a court sword on your hip’s worth nothing much compared to the weight of a magistrate in your pocket.
That was word for word—she’d told Ringil the tale herself in an unguarded and slightly drunken moment one celebratory spring evening as
Pride of Yhelteth
launched. Perhaps she’d felt some gush of aristo empathy with Gil, scion of an exiled-into-ruin Yhelteth noble line, as Shanta was currently parading him, or perhaps she’d simply wanted—thirty-something summers now and a determined spinster—to get laid. Which was a service that Gil rendered her later in one of
Pride
’s newly outfitted sawdust and lacquer scented cabins. He was philosophical about the task, quite pleased with his powers of concentration and fakery during the act, wrote the whole thing off as part of his duties as combined midwife and shepherd to the quest, and listened absently to her post-coital ramblings once they were done.

Gral’s father, it seemed, had salvaged the family fortunes by the simple expedient of converting once-disused shipyards and slipways into desirable waterfront residences for a rising merchant class that craved imitative proximity to the palace. Twenty years later, he stepped up his wealth again through the equally simple process of turning said residences back into shipyard space under handily finessed compulsory purchase legislation with the outbreak of the war, and then selling imperial sublicenses on the family’s hereditary right to construct warships for the crown. And
maybe,
a sweat-dewed Nethena mused amid throaty laughter as she straddled his face in the lacquer-reeking cabin bunk, just
maybe
she’d see about reversing the whole trend again in a couple more years, once the postwar economy staggered back to its feet and imitation of the bloody horse emperor’s every belch and gesture came back into fashion. Lot of money to be made that way, a
lot
of
money,
yes, like
that,
yes,
yes
!

But anyway, she allowed later, toweling herself down with his shirt, dressing with rapid care while he lay like a used rag on the bunk and smoked a krin twig with eyes on the ceiling, there was always good money to be made in Yhelteth, always, if you just kept your weather eye to the changing times, paid well for good information, and kept your pocket dignitaries sweet. House Gral, Ringil gathered, was aggressive, dynamic, proudly ahead of the pack, and saw the Khimran ascendancy as just one more feature of a landscape it had to navigate. Detect a coming shift in that landscape, a volcanic demolition, say, of the Khimran peak, and Nethena Gral would respond with no more reluctance than the next hungry shark in bloodied waters.

And speaking of sharks …

Tand
—broad slave trade interests both north and south of the border, like some far-reaching commercial echo of his mixed-blood heritage. Liberalization had made him, but he was already into the trade before the war, already a significant player with underworld connections in Baldaran, Parashal, and Trelayne, balancing risks against big profits, smuggling the pale, voluptuous flesh of carefully selected and kidnapped northern girls out through the Hinerion borderlands to where it could be legally sold in the Empire to high demand. In the postwar slump, with debt slavery made suddenly legal again throughout League territory, Tand had all the right friends and trade experience to go from significant player to one of the five richest slave magnates in the Empire He’d taken imperial citizenship by blood-right—father a minor noble from Shenshenath—but it was mainly for convenience. On the voyage north, he talked, often with surprising nostalgia, about Baldaran and the Gergis hinterland where he’d grown up, and Ringil got the impression he might settle back there one day. Menith Tand, it was frequently said, had quite as many friends in the League Chancellery as he had at court in Yhelteth—where he was, in any case, held severely lacking by the horse tribe nobles for his mixed blood. He had nothing to gain from a holy war in the north, and quite a lot to lose. He’d be a handy sea anchor for any negotiations that might close out the war, and if that meant a dynastic shake-up into the bargain, well, maybe that haughty horse tribe element had it coming …

Shendanak
—like most Majak, he had an easygoing contempt for what these once fearsome southern horse clans had become in their luxurious city by the sea. But it didn’t stop him from getting rich off the Empire’s insatiable craving for good horseflesh, nor adopting the trappings of said coastal luxury himself when it suited him. He was an imperial citizen in good standing, and had learned how to read and write, for all he didn’t like to talk about it much. He wore silk about town, he kept a modest harem. He even sent his sons to school. Owned homes of palatial extent in Shenshenath and the capital, not to mention ranches, stables, and stringer staging posts throughout the vast hinterland sprawl between the imperial city and the pass into Majak lands at Dhashara. It was said that every fifth horse in the Empire bore the Shendanak brand, and that once introduced, Akal the Great had refused to ride stallions of any other provenance. Legacy of that relationship, Shendanak now had royal charter to provide mounts for the entire imperial cavalry corps.

Seen from that angle, he didn’t look much like rebel material.

But this, none of this, was the real man. Shendanak hadn’t inherited his imperial citizenship like Tand, he’d bought it—one of the many points of mutual dislike between the two men—but the same basic motivation lay behind both men’s adoption of the privilege, as it did behind Shendanak’s late-in-life decision to get lettered. To rise in Yhelteth, you had to be able to read and you had to belong. The Majak horse-trader-made-good was just putting on the colors, doing what it took to succeed.

Ringil had a strong suspicion that the same shrewd herdsman’s measure of benefits had featured in Shendanak’s reputed friendship with Akal. Shendanak shed his silks when he rode, preferred traditional Majak garb to court robes, could live without his palatial accommodation and harem of perfumed beauties for months at a time when he rode north to Dhashara. He prided himself on this, had rambled on more than once about the preferable charms of the hard-riding, lean-muscled women you found up on the steppe, the simple pleasures of a real horseman’s life. And that old, stored contempt for the softened southern clans flashed like a pulled knife in his sneer as he talked.

Rumor had it that relations with Jhiral were at best strained since Akal’s death—perhaps the young Emperor had spotted the mercenary nature of Shendanak’s engagement with his father, perhaps Shendanak, once a steppe raider and bandit himself and used to dealing with an old-school horse clan warrior like Akal, just found it hard to stomach Jhiral’s languid city-boy sophistication. Whatever the truth of it, there was no love lost, it seemed, and Gil reckoned any residual loyalty to the Khimran name could be dropped at the clink of a bit and bridle, if Shendanak thought the coastal clans might make him a better offer.

Meanwhile, his ranches and stables and staging posts were staffed largely by Majak—hard young men in their hundreds, down from the steppe for the hell of it and owing clan allegiance directly to Shendanak alone. Handy manpower to wield in a time of crisis. And, sidling in alongside that, Gil had heard it said that no small number of officers among the imperial cavalry corps could be overheard professing an open admiration for Shendanak, not just for the prime steppe horseflesh he brought them but for his
origins,
for how close he lived to a horseman tradition upon which it was widely felt Yhelteth was losing its rightful grip.

If Jhiral Khimran were suddenly to be seen publicly as a decadent city-dwelling betrayer of his horse clan heritage, Shendanak would make a fine gathering point for all those disgruntled by the fact.

Kaptal
—easy to write the man off with his portly bulk and double chin and constant carping about personal safety, but both Mahmal Shanta and Archeth had warned Gil not to be taken in, and with time he came to see the wisdom in what they said. Kaptal was a thoroughly disagreeable self-made man, had gone from the gutters and wharfs of Yhelteth all the way to a well-feathered nest in the palace district and a place at court, apparently without unlearning any of his obnoxious street demeanor along the way. But when you looked in his eyes you saw that wasn’t the only thing he’d failed to leave behind. There was something cold and calculating in there, like the eyes of a Hanliagh octopus watching you swim over its spot on the reef—something that tracked back through the procurement for depraved appetites and judicious following blackmail with which Kaptal had gained his foothold at court; the brothels he’d worked in, run, and finally come to own before that; the territory and strings of urchin street whores he’d clawed from rival pimps and gang leaders when he was starting out. For all his bulk, he moved with the ghost of a street fighter’s grace, and the worries about safety looked to be an affectation or a tic, once you considered Kaptal could very easily have sat out the quest back home in Yhelteth along with the other no-shows. His investment in the expedition in the first place, his determination to come along, these things both suggested a man who did not mind risk anywhere near as much as he pretended.