The Dark Defiles (6 page)

Shanta stopped abruptly, caught and then creased over with a spasm of coughing. One of his retinue came forward to hold him up, but the engineer waved him violently away. He braced himself on the rail with one age-knobbed hand, got himself upright again by wheezing stages. Slaves fussed about, rearranging the blanket on Shanta’s trembling shoulders. The man Egar had seen Shanta order below returned with a steaming mug of something that reeked of mint and other less palatable herbs. The engineer tucked the spyglass under his arm and cupped the mug with both hands. He drank gingerly. Grimaced but forced the liquid down.

“My lord, this is madness.” Salbak Barla knew his patient well and was not crowding him, but his tone was urgent. “You should not be out in this weather. We must get you below, we must get you warm.”

“Yes, yes, all in good time. Here.” Shanta handed the mug to the doctor and took hold of his spyglass again. “It is unfortunate, but I am the expert here, and I am not done perusing. I must fix detail in my head, Doctor, and thus save myself the necessity of further sojourns on deck.”

“The pennants,” Egar persisted.

“Yes, the pennants.” Shanta pointed with the spyglass, schoolmasterish. “Heart’s blood red, snake’s tongue trim, at foremast and aft. Northern League naval convention. It signifies that the vessel is flagship to a flotilla.”

“A fucking
flotilla
?”

Shanta stifled another, weaker cough with his fist. “Three to five vessels, if my memory serves me correctly. More and the pennants would not be split tongued. Or they would have gold trim. Or is it both?”

The rain seemed abruptly to be falling that little bit harder. The gloom beyond the harbor exit grew that much more menacing. Egar scowled.

“So where are the rest of them?”

“There’d hardly be room for more vessels in the harbor anyway,” Barla offered. “Perhaps they anchored farther out.”

Egar tried to stave off a creeping sense of doom.

“How long have they been there?” he asked Shanta.

“Oh, not long. The watchmen called me as soon as they sighted the colors. It’s taken me some time to get up and dressed, and then I waited below to see if they’d come to us. When they didn’t, I came up on deck and I’ve been here awhile. Say half an hour since they anchored? A little longer?”

“And no landing party.” Egar squinted against the rain. “They’ve not even started lowering a boat.”

“No.”

“But … what would they be waiting for?” wondered Barla.

Shanta and the Dragonbane traded glances. Shanta nodded. Egar felt a sickly weight settling in his guts.

“Should I tell him?” wheezed the naval engineer. “Or will you?”

The doctor blinked in the rain. “What?”

“Encirclement,” said Egar grimly. “They’re not here to send anyone ashore, they’re here to plug up the harbor. Stop us getting out. While the rest of the flotilla lands an assault force somewhere up the coast, and they come overland to fence us in.”

“Then—but, then …” Salbak Barla gaped back and forth at the two of them. “Well, we have to warn captain Rakan. And the marines. We have to … to …”

“Forget it.” Egar gripped the rail in front of him, tightened his hands on it with crushing force as the anger swept through him. “Way too late now.”

Can’t believe we’ve been this fucking stupid.

But who would have looked for it, Eg? Here, at the damp arsehole end of the world? Why would they fucking bother?

“What do you mean too late?” The doctor’s voice, plaintive now, like a child tugging at his sleeve. It seemed to be coming from a long way off.

“He means,” explained Mahmal Shanta patiently, “that if they’ve chosen to show themselves in the harbor now, it’s because the land forces are already in place.”

Egar made an effort, reeled himself back in. He scanned the rise of the town where it backed up the hill above the bay, the briefly seen winding of streets and alleys between the dark stone houses, the crappy little watchtower on the ridge to the north. All harsh and alien now, and just to really crown it, a thick fog had settled in on the upper reaches of the hill. Half the fucking town was gone into it already.

Steep ground, hostile forces closing from all sides, and a local population we’ve just succeeded in pissing off.

“Gentlemen,” he said flatly, “we are royally fucked.”

he house Tand’s men took her to was on the upper fringes of the town, just before Ornley thinned out into a scattering of isolated crofts. It was high ground, and there would have been a great view back down the slope of the bay to the harbor, if the air below hadn’t been quite so clogged with drifts of murky, low-lying cloud.

At least we’re out of the rain.

It was something Tand appeared to take comfort from as well. As they walked the last couple of turns in the street, he put back the hood on his cloak and nodded approvingly up at the sky. He was doing his best not to look smug.

“Seems to be clearing,” he said.

She tried not to sound too bad-tempered. “You really think we can trust this confession, Tand?”

“Oh, most certainly. Nalmur’s a good man, one of my best. He knows his work.”

Nalmur was leading the group. He glanced back at the mention of his name.

“I’d stake my life on it, my lady. We got at least three other squealers leading us to this bloke by name, and when he talked, well—you know it when a man cracks, you can almost hear it happen. Like a rotten tree branch going, it is.”

She masked a desire to bury one of her knives in his throat. “Right. And have you left this cracked man in any fit state to talk to us?”

“Oh, yes, my lady. Didn’t need to rough him up much past the usual.” An opened palm, explanatory. “He’s a family man, see. Good lady wife, a pair of strapping young sons. Plenty to work with.”

Smirks edged the expressions of the other men in the group.

“Yes, thank you Nalmur.” Perhaps Tand saw something in her face. “You can spare us the details, I think.”

“Just as you like, my lord. My lady. But that confession is rock solid. You could build a castle on it, sir.”

Tand tipped her a told-you-so look. She worked at not grinding her teeth.

They took the final turn in the street, found themselves facing a short row of cottages, dwellings more hunched and huddled than the buildings lower down the hill. A brace of Tand’s men were loitering outside an opened door about halfway along the row. They were guffawing about something, but when they saw the approaching party, they stiffened into quiet and an approximation of drilled military attention.

A curtain twitched in her peripheral vision. She didn’t bother to look around. You could feel the eyes on you all the way along the street. Gathered at the edges of the darkened windows and in the gap of doors cracked a bare inch open, waiting to slam. Watching, hating as the booted feet tramped by.

It was the postwar occupations all over again.

Greetings from the Emperor of All Lands—we come to you in peace and the universal brotherhood of the Holy Revelation.

But if you don’t want those things, then we’re going to fuck you up.

Tand had taken the lead. He nodded at his saluting men and stepped between them, ducking in under the low lintel. Archeth followed, into the soft glow of a banked fire in the grate, and candles lit against the day’s end gloom. There was a pervasive smell of damp from the earthen floor and the whiff of voided bowels to go with it. A sustained, hopeless keening leaked in from the next room. Three more of Tand’s mercenaries stood guard over a man stripped to the waist and strapped to an upright chair.

Nalmur and the rest of the squad crowded in after her.

“Well then,” said Tand. “Nalmur, will you do the honors?”

Nalmur took a theatrical turn around the chair and its occupant. As Archeth’s eyes adjusted to the light, she made out bruising on the man’s face, crusted blood from the broken nose, a series of livid burn marks across chest and upper arms. His breeches were soaked through at the crotch. Nalmur dropped a friendly arm around his shoulders, and the man flinched violently against his bonds.

“My lord, my lady—meet Critlin Tilgeth, first warden of the Aldrain flame, Hironish chapter. Master Critlin here likes to get together with his pals a couple of times a year in stone circles and invoke the spirits of the Vanishing Folk. Which they do, apparently, by dancing around naked and fucking each other’s wives senseless. I guess you got to find something to fill your evenings with up here.”

Belly laughs from the men around her.

“Get on with it,” she said harshly.

“Yes, my lady.” Nalmur slapped the tied man amiably on one cheek. Straightened up. He switched to accented but serviceable Naomic. “Tell us about the grave again, Critlin. Tell us what you did.”

“Yes. Yes, we dug—” Critlin swallowed hard. His voice sounded as broken as his face. Low and shaky, a pleading in it, like raindrops trembling on the underside of a roof’s edge. His eyes kept darting to the doorway into the other room, the source of the endless weeping. “We dug it up. We—we went at night. The day before Quickening Eve, when the waters are low.”

Archeth frowned. “What waters?”

“He means the gap at Grey Gull peninsula, my lady.” Nalmur, for all the world like a tutor helping out a feeble student under examination. “Says the currents bring more water in at certain times, make it harder to cross.”

“But—” She shook her head irritably. “There was a dead sheep in that grave, that’s all we found. We didn’t …”

They’d been using Tethanne, while Critlin gaped uncomprehendingly back and forth between this evil-eyed black woman and his tormentor-in-chief. Archeth made an effort, shunted the constant keening to the back of her mind, summoned her own creaky Naomic.

“You, uh—you took the Illwrack Changeling out—and put a, uhm—deformed? Yeah—a deformed sheep in his place? What—position?—no, wait, what
condition
—what condition was the body in?”

Critlin hesitated. He seemed puzzled by the question, maybe confused by her fumbling, error-strewn speech. Nalmur fetched him a massive clout across the side of the head.

“The lady Archeth asks you a question! Answer, and be quick about it! Or perhaps you think little Eril’s jealous of the caresses his big brother’s had from my men. Perhaps he’d like some of the same?”

The wailing from the next room redoubled. Critlin moaned deep in his chest and strained against his bonds. Nalmur grinned and raised his hand again.

“That’s enough!” Archeth snapped.

The hand came down. A small, angry smile played around the corners of Nalmur’s mouth for a moment, but he bowed his head. Archeth leaned in closer to Critlin. He shrank from her, as far as the chair-back would allow. The stench of shit wafted as he moved. She raised her hands, palms outward, and backed away again.

“Just tell me,” she said quietly. “Was the body intact? Had it decayed at all?”

“Intact,” blurted Critlin. “It was intact! The sheep was but recently slaughtered. We took it from Gelher’s flock and—”

“All right, that’s it you little goat-fucker!” Nalmur, stepping in with fist clenched and swinging. Archeth swung up and round, put a knife-fighter’s block in the way.

“I
said
that’s enough.”

Nalmur recoiled from touching her, whether out of respect for rank or superstitious dread, it was hard to tell. But there was a tight anger in his face.

“My lady, he is taking the piss. He’s—”

“He is
broken
!” Her yell froze the room. One of Nalmur’s men, already on his zealous way to the other chamber, stopped dead his tracks. Archeth swung on him, pointed. “You! You step through that door, I will fucking kill you.”

Tand stirred. “My lady, the man shows a distinct lack of respect, given his station. Joking at our expense should hardly go unpunished.”

“I
will
kill you.” Still eyeballing Nalmur’s man. “Don’t test me, human.”

And abruptly it was there in her head, like some unfolding map of a battle campaign she’d only heard rumors of until now. How it could be done, how it would go. The rest of Tand’s men, their positions in the room, the gnarled hilt of each knife she carried, how to reach them, in what sequence, how many bloody seconds it would take to
fucking kill them all
… 

These fucking humans, Archidi.
Grashgal’s voice, almost toneless, empty of anything but the distant trickle of despair, as the Kiriath laid their plans to leave.
They’re going turn us into something we never used to be.

Hadn’t he called it right?

Didn’t she feel it herself, day in, day out, the corrosive rub of human brutality, human cruelty, human
stupidity
against the weave of her soul? The slow erosion of her own moral certainties, the ground she gave up with every political compromise, every carefully balanced step in the Great Kiriath Mission, every lie she told herself about necessary sacrifice in the name of building something better … 

Through the doorway, the constant keening. Her hands itched for the hilts of her knives.

Maybe it was just fucking
time.

Menith Tand was watching her, fascinated. She felt his gaze like shadow in the corner of one eye, and something about it pulled her back from the brink.

“You want to live, you stand down,” she told the mercenary by the door. Voice flat now, as flat and emptied out as Grashgal’s had ever been. “Nalmur, get your men out of here.”

Nalmur looked at Tand, outraged. The slave magnate nodded soberly.

“But my lord, this man is—”

“Broken. Remember?” Archeth fixed her eyes on Critlin as she spoke, didn’t look at Nalmur at all. She didn’t trust herself to. “You heard him break, you said. Like a rotten tree branch. Couldn’t miss it. Your work here is done, sellsword. Now get out, and take your thugs with you.”

It took less than a minute to clear the house. Give Nalmur his due, he ran a tight enough crew. A sharp whistle brought a couple of younger mercenaries out of the room the keening was coming from. A gruff command and everybody trooped out, leaving Archeth and Tand alone with Critlin. Nalmur was last man out, slamming the door ungraciously shut.

The room seemed suddenly larger, less oppressive. Even the weeping next door seemed to ebb a little.

Archeth crouched in front of Critlin’s chair, made herself as unthreatening as she knew how. The Naomic came a little easier this time around. Just getting Tand’s men out of the house felt like a headache lifting.

“Listen to me, Critlin. Just listen. No one’s going to hurt you anymore. You have my word. No one’s going to hurt your family, no one’s going to hurt you. Just tell me again about the body.”

“The … the sheep?”

She breathed deep. “No, not the sheep. The body in the grave. What state was the body in?”

“But …” Critlin stared. His voice quavered. “There
was
no body in the grave.”

Archeth shot a glance at Tand.

“Look,” the slave magnate began angrily. “You told my men—”

Critlin cringed as if Nalmur had just come back through the door.

“There was bone,” he gabbled. “Just bone, just fragments of it, tiny, nothing left but that. The rest was just … rotted …”

His voice petered out. He was staring at them both as if they were insane. Archeth groped for some context.

“Well—were you surprised by that?”

He looked back at her numbly.

“Surprised?”

“That the Illwrack Changeling’s body had rotted? Did that surprise you?”

“N-no, my lady. He has been dead these four thousand years.”

“Yeah, but—”

She shut her mouth with a snap. Recognizing suddenly which side of reasonable they’d all somehow ended up.

Because if these last weeks have been anything at all, Archidi, it’s a lesson in how badly myth and legend butt up against the real world.
And yet here she still was, wanting to know why a body put in the ground four millennia ago wouldn’t be in decent condition when you dug it up.

This place is driving us all insane.

“All right, so there was no body.” Tand seemed to have moved past his previous anger—there was a deadly metronome patience in his voice now. “Or at least nothing much left of one. And you expected that. So why bother digging up the grave in the first place?”

“The lodge elder ordered it, my lord.” Critlin’s head sagged forward. He seemed to be giving up some final thing. “To take the sword.”

Archeth gave Tand another significant look. “There’s a sword now?”

The slave magnate shrugged. “He was a warrior, was he not, this Illwrack Changeling? Makes sense that they’d bury him with his weapons.”

“All right, so you took the sword.” Archeth rubbed at her closed eyes with finger and thumb. “But, look—why bury a fucking sheep in its place? Why would you do that?”

“The lodge elder ordered that, too, my lady.” The words were falling out of Critlin’s mouth now, stumbling to get out. He was done, he was over some kind of hill, and his eyes flickered more and more to the door into the other room. “Gelher’s flock have the run of Gray Gull—several were born last season with deformities—the lodge-master said it was a sign, that the soul of the Changeling had awakened—most died at birth, but two or three survived until this year. So the elder said we must sacrifice one such in thanks—lay it in place of the sword. We did only as he ordered us, as our oath demanded.”