BOOK I Arse End of the World

Once there was a High Quest to Northern Lands, a Bright Fellowship led out in Sunlit Glory by three Heroes from the Great War, companied with the Finest Warriors and Wise Men of Empire, and guided by an Angel fallen from On High…

The Grand Chronicle of Yhelteth

Court bard edition

CHAPTER 1

“Well, that’s that, I suppose.”

Ringil Eskiath weighed the desiccated human jawbone glumly in the palm of his hand. He crouched on the edge of the opened grave, fighting off a vague urge to jump down into it.

Looks cozy down there. Out of the wind, dark and warm

He rubbed at his unshaven chin instead. Three days of stubble, rasping on calloused fingers, itching on hollow cheeks. His cloak, puddled about him where he crouched, was soiled at the border and soaking up water from the rain-drenched grass. The shoulder of his sword arm nagged from the unrelenting damp.

He shut out the ache and brooded on what lay below him in the grave.

They’d come a long way for this.

There wasn’t much—shards of wood that might once have formed a casket, a few long strips of leather, cured stiff and crumbling. A mess of small bone fragments, like the leavings of some overenthusiastic soothsayer on the scry…

Gil sighed and levered himself back to his feet. Tossed the jawbone back in with the rest.

“Fucking waste of five months.”

“My lord?”

Shahn, the marine sergeant, who’d climbed back out of the grave and now waited close by the mounds of earth his men had dug out. Behind him, the work party stood around, soil- and sweat-streaked, entrenching tools in hand, scowling against the weather. Whoever dug this plot all those centuries ago, they’d chosen a spot close to the cliffs, and right now there was a blustery wind coming in off the ocean, laced with fistfuls of sleet and the promise of another storm. The three Hironish guides they’d hired back in Ornley already had their hoods up—they stood farther from the grave, watching the sky and conversing in low tones.

Ringil brushed the traces of dirt off his hands.

“We’re all done here,” he announced loudly. “If this is the Illwrack Changeling, the worms sorted him out for us awhile back. Stow tools, let’s get back to the boats.”

A tremor of hesitation—hands working at tool handles, feet shifting. The sergeant cleared his throat. Gestured halfheartedly at the soft-mounded earth beside the grave.

“Sire, should we not…?”

“Fill that in?” Ringil grinned harshly. “Listen, if those bones stand up and follow us down to the beach, I’ll be very surprised. But you know what—if they do, I’ll deal with it.”

His words carved out their own patch of quiet in the rising wind. Among the men, a touching of talismans. Some muttering.

Ringil cut them a surreptitious glance, counting faces without seeming to. A couple of those he saw had been around when he took down the kraken, but most were on the other ships at the time; or they were aboard Dragon’s Demise but in their bunks. It had been a filthy night anyway—rain and howling wind, bandlight muffled up in thick, scudding cloud, and the encounter was over almost as soon as it began. All but a handful missed the action.

They had reports from their comrades, of course, but Ringil couldn’t blame them for doubting it. Killing a kraken, at the height and heart of an ocean storm by night—yeah, right. It was a stock scene out of myth, a lantern-light story to frighten the cabin boy with. It was a fucking tale.

It was five weeks now, and no one was calling him Krakenbane that he’d noticed.

He supposed it was for the best. He’d held enough commands in the past to know how it went. Best not to disabuse your men of their tight-held notions, whatever those might be. That went in equal measure for those who doubted him and those who told tales of his prowess. The actual truth would probably scare both parties out of their wits, and that, right here and now, was going to be counterproductive.

They were twitchy enough as it was.

He faced them. Put one booted foot on the forlorn, shin-high chunk of mossed-over granite that served the grave as marker. He pitched his voice for them all to hear—pearls of dark wisdom from the swordsman sorcerer in your midst.

“All right, people, listen up. Anyone wants to sprinkle salt, go right ahead, get it done. But if we stay here to fill this hole in, we’re going to get drenched.”

He nodded westward, out to sea. It was not long past noon, but the sour afternoon light was already closing down. Clouds raced in from the north, boiling up like ink poured in a glass of water. Overhead, the sky was turning the black of a hanged man’s face.

Yeah—be calling that an omen before you know it.


HIS MOOD DIDN’T IMPROVE MUCH ON THE WAY BACK TO THE BOATS. HE took point on the meandering sheep track that brought them down off the cliffs. Set a punishing pace over the yielding, peaty ground. No one made the mistake of trying to stay abreast or talk to him.

By way of contrast, there was raucous good cheer at his back. The marines had loosened up with the permission to lay wards. Now they tramped boisterously along behind him, good-natured bickering and jeering in the ranks. It was as if they’d poured out their misgivings with the salt from their tooled leather bags, left it all behind them in the tiny white traceries they’d made.

Which, Ringil supposed, they had, and wasn’t that the whole point of religion anyway?

But he was honest enough to recognize his own released tension as well. Because, despite all the other pointless, empty graves, despite his own increasingly solid conviction that they were wasting their time, he, too, had gone up to those cliffs expecting a fight.

Wanting a fight.

Little vestiges of the feeling still quivered at the nape of his neck and in his hands. Enough to know it had been there, even if he hadn’t spotted it at the time.

Last resting place of the Illwrack Changeling.

Again.

This being the ninth last resting place to date. The ninth grave of the legendary Dark King they’d dug up, only to find the detritus of common mortality beneath.

Has to be an easier way to do this shit.

Really, though, there wasn’t, and he knew it. They were all strangers here, himself included. Oh, he’d read about the Hironish isles in his father’s library as a boy, learned the arid almanac facts from his tutors. And growing up in Trelayne he’d known a handful of people who’d spent time there in exile. But this was not knowledge with practical application, and anyway it was decades out of date. Fluent Naomic aside, he had no useful advantage over his fellow expedition members.

Meanwhile, Anasharal the Helmsman, full of ancient unhuman knowing when they planned the expedition back in Yhelteth last year, was now proving remarkably cagey about specifics. The Kiriath demon was either unwilling or unable to point them with any clarity to the Changeling’s grave, and instead suggested—somewhat haughtily—that they do the legwork themselves and inquire of the locals. I fell from on high for your benefit, went the habitual gist of the lecture. Is it my fault that I no longer have the vision I gave up in order to bring my message to you? I have steered you to journey’s end. Let human tongues do the rest.

But the Hironish islanders were a notoriously closed-mouth bunch—even Gil’s dull-as-dishwater tutors had mentioned that. Historically, they’d been know to harbor popular pirates and tax evaders despite anything the League’s heavy-handed customs officers could do about it. To lie with impassive calm in the face of threats, to spit with contempt at drawn steel, and to die under torture rather than give up a fellow islander.

So they certainly weren’t about to spill the secrets of settled generations to some bunch of poncey imperials who showed up from the alien south and started asking oh, hey, we hear there’s this dark lord out of legend buried around here somewhere. Any chance you could take us to him?

Not just like that, anyway.

It took a week of careful diplomacy in and out of the taverns in Ornley and then out to the hamlets and crofts beyond, just to find a handful of locals who would talk to them. It took soft words and coin and endless rounds of drinks. And even then, what these men had to say was sparse and contradictory:

—the Illwrack Changeling, hmm, yes, that’d be the one from the dwenda legend. But he was never buried up here, the dwenda took him away in a shining longship, to where the band meets the ocean

—crucified him on Sirk beach for a betrayer, was what I heard, facing the setting sun as he died. His followers took him down three days later and buried him. It’s that grave up behind the old whaler’s temple.

—the Illwrack Betrayer was brought to the Last Isle, to the Chain’s Last Link, just as the legends say. But the isle only manifests to mortal eyes at spring solstice, and even then, only with much purifying prayer. To land there would require an act of great piety. You should ask at the monastery on Glin cliffs, perhaps they can make offerings for you when you return next year.

Yeah, that’s right—jeers from further down the tavern bar—you should ask his brother out at Glin. Never known him turn down a request for intercession if it came weighted with enough coin

You know, I’ve had about enough out of you whelps. My brother’s a righteous man, not like some worthless bastard sons I could—

They’d had to break that one up with fists. Start all over again.

the grave you seek is on a promontory of the Gray Gull peninsula, no more than a day’s march north of here. On approach, Gray Gull may seem a separate island, but do not be deceived. Certain currents cause the inlets to fill enough at certain times to make it so—but you can always cross, at worst you might have to wade waist deep. And most of the time, you won’t even get your boots wet.

Hagh!—a graybeard fishing skipper hawks and spits something unpleasantly yellow onto the tavern’s sawdust floor, rather close to Ringil’s boot—not going to find that grave this side of hell! That’s where the Aldrain demons took that one—screaming to hell!

No, no, my lords, forgive him, this is just fisherfolk superstition. The last human son of Illwrack is buried at the compass crossroads, on a rise just south of here. Some say the hill itself is the Changeling’s barrow.

—the truth, my lords, is that the dwenda hero was laid to rest in the stone circle at Selkin, where his retainers

So forth.

It was a lot of digging.

But in the absence of the imperial expedition’s other main prize—the legendary floating city of An-Kirilnar, which they also couldn’t seem to find right now—there really wasn’t much else to do but tramp out to site after site and dig until disappointed.


DISAPPOINTMENT IS A SLOW POISON.

Initially, and for some of the closer sites, practically every figure of note on the expedition tagged along. There was still a palpable air of journey’s end hanging over them all at that point—a sense that after all that planning, all those sea miles covered, this was it. And whatever it was, no one wanted to miss it.

True above all for Mahmal Shanta—he went out of sheer academic curiosity and at the cost of some substantial personal discomfort. Really too old for a voyage into such cold climes anyway, Shanta was still getting over flu and had to be carried on a covered litter by six servants, which was awkward over rough ground and slowed everybody else down. Gil rolled his eyes at Archeth, but in the end what were you going to do? The naval engineer was a primary sponsor of the expedition; his family’s shipyards had built two of the three vessels they sailed in and reconditioned the third, and even in illness he held onto stubborn and canny command of the flagship Pride of Yhelteth.

If anyone had earned the right, it was Shanta.

Archeth’s reasons for riding along were twofold, and a little more pragmatic. She went because she was overall expedition leader and it was expected of her. But more than that, she badly needed something to take her mind off the lack of any Kiriath architecture standing above the waves offshore. Not finding An-Kirilnar had hit her hard.

Marine commander Senger Hald went ostensibly to supervise those of his men detailed to the search, but really to put an unquestionable marine boot on the proceedings. And Noyal Rakan went beside him, to show the Throne Eternal flag and remind everyone who was supposed to be in charge. The two men were coolly amicable, but the interservice rivalry was never far beneath the surface, in them or in the men they commanded.

Lal Nyanar, captain of the Dragon’s Demise mostly on account of Shab Nyanar’s substantial investment in the expedition, went along even when the prospecting was done overland, apparently out of some belief that he was representing his absent father’s interests in the quest. Gil didn’t really begrudge him; Nyanar wasn’t much of a sea captain—the sinecure commands his father had secured for him back in Yhelteth were largely ceremonial or involved river vessels—but he did at least know how to follow orders. Out of sight of his ship, he deferred to the expedition leaders and kept his head down.

The same could not be said of the others.

Of the expedition’s other investors who’d actually made the trip north, Klarn Shendanak stuck close to the action because he didn’t trust Empire men any further than you could throw one, and that included Archeth Indamaninarmal, jet-skinned half-human imperial cypher that she was. Menith Tand followed suit and stuck close to Shendanak because he harbored a standard Empire nobleman’s distaste for the Majak’s rough-and-ready immigrant manners and would not be one-upped. And Yilmar Kaptal went along because he mistrusted both Shendanak and Tand in about equal measure. The three of them didn’t quite spit at each other outright, but having them at your back was like leading a procession of alley cats. Shendanak never went anywhere without an eight-strong honor guard of thuggish-looking second cousins fresh down from the steppes, which in turn meant that Tand brought along a handful of his own mercenary crew to balance the equation, and Kaptal flat-out demanded that Rakan muster a squad of Throne Eternal just in case…

Egar usually tagged along at Gil’s shoulder just to see if there’d be any kind of fight.


ONE GRAY MORNING, ON THE WAY TO A TALISMAN-WARDED GRAVE THAT would prove to contain nothing but the skeleton of a badly deformed sheep, Ringil stopped and looked back from the top of a low rise, squinting against the rain. The whole bedraggled entourage spilled up the trail behind him like the survivors of a shipwreck. He reckoned sourly that he hadn’t seen such a mess since he led the expeditionary retreat back to Gallows Gap eleven years ago.

Bit harsh, was Egar’s considered opinion. On the expeditionary, I mean. That was an army we had. You imagine trying to lead this lot into a battle and out the other side? We’ll be lucky if they’re not all at each other’s throats before noon.

Don’t, Ringil told him wearily. Just—don’t.

They went. They dug. Found nothing and came back, mostly in the rain.

But—to the Dragonbane’s evident disappointment—there never was a fight.

Instead, Gil’s train of gawkers and minders slowly began to whittle away in the face of repeated letdown and the godawful weather. Each found other, more compelling matters to occupy them. Archeth withdrew into brooding isolation aboard Sea Eagle’s Daughter, and could occasionally be heard right across the harbor, yelling abuse at Anasharal in the High Kir tongue. Nyanar went back to residence aboard Dragon’s Demise, where he instructed and supervised an endless series of small deck repairs and wrote self-importantly about it in the captain’s log. On the shore side of things, Yilmar Kaptal took to his rooms at the inn on Gull’s Flight wynd and asked Rakan for a brace of Throne Eternal to guard his door. Shendanak and Tand stomped about the streets of Ornley, shadowed by their men, glaring at the locals and each other whenever they crossed paths. Desperate to bring the temperature down, Hald and Rakan both habitually stayed in town with the bulk of their respective commands, put their men through punishing work schedules, held exhaustive training sessions, and did anything they could to head off the simmering sense of boredom and frustration.

Egar found himself some local whores.

And Mahmal Shanta sat with a racking cough in his stateroom aboard the flagship Pride of Yhelteth, spitting up phlegm, drinking hot herbal infusions, and poring over charts, all the while trying to pretend he was not planning their empty-handed return home.

The search went on, pared back to Ringil and a marine detachment under Hald’s occasional command to do the digging. The unspoken understanding—Gil was the sharp end. He had the spells and the alien iron blade; if the Illwrack Changeling popped up out of the next grave in fighting temper, Ringil was the man to put him down. As they exhausted the more promising fragments of legend and hearsay closer to town, Nyanar and Dragon’s Demise were detailed to carry them whenever a site was—or was reputed to be—sailing distance away. Which was all the time these days.

It was starting to feel like clutching at straws. Like going through the motions. Gil’s patience, never his strong suit, was frayed down to shreds. The itch to kill something stalked him day and night. What he wouldn’t give for the Illwrack Changeling to erupt from the damp earth and grass right in front of him right now, sword in hand, undead eyes aflame.

He’d cut the fucker down like barley.

The sheep track wound its unhurried way across the shoulder of the hill, dropping by hairpin increments into the valley below. A couple of ruined crofts showed hearth ends and tumbled dry stone walls rising out of the heather like longboats drowned in shallow water. Bedraggled-looking sheep dotted the slope, stood at a distance, chewing patiently and watching them pass. One or two of the nearer ones beat an ungainly, lumbering retreat from the path, as if warned in advance of Gil’s state of mind.

I’m going to put that fucking Helmsman over the rail when we get back. I’m going to sink it in Ornley sound without a cable and leave it there to rot.

If Archeth doesn’t beat me to it.

I’m going to—

He jerked to a halt, awareness of the thing that blocked his path coming late through his seething mood. He teetered back a couple of inches.

Behind him, he heard the marines’ banter dry up.

The ram stood its ground on the path. It was big, bulking nearly twice the size of the sheep they’d seen, and it was old, fist-thick horns coiling twice around and then out to wicked downward-jabbing spikes. Its fleece was a filthy yellowish white, matted across a back as broad as a mule’s. It stood well over waist height on Ringil, and it stared him down out of pupils that were slotted black openings into emptiness. Its chin was raised toward him, and it seemed to be smiling at some private joke.

Ringil took a sharp step forward. Jerked arms upward and wide—not unlike, it suddenly dawned on him, one of the charlatan witches you saw pissing about at magic in Strov square.

The ram stayed where it was.

“I’m in no mood for you,” Gil barked. “Go on, fuck off.”

Silence. A couple of nervous guffaws from the marines.

The moment stretched and broke. The ram took a step sideways, tossed its head in a gesture as if to say look up there, and ambled off toward one of the ruined crofts.

Ringil looked, a flinching glance, back up the rain-soaked hillside and—

Black flap of cloak, glimmer of faint blue fire in motion.

A dark figure, moving on the ridgeline, head down as if watching him—

He blinked. Stood there, locked still, trying to be sure. The flicker of movement, out of the corner of his eye.

There and gone.

Oh, come off it.

He came back around, spotted the ram standing at the wall of the ruin. It still seemed to be watching him.

“Sir?”

Shahn was at his side, face carefully expressionless. Ringil looked past him at the men, who were mostly squaring away twitchy grins, squinting up at the sky and trying to seem serious. He couldn’t really blame them; he was about to shrug off the whole thing himself, when he noticed the Hironish guides. They stood apart, off the path, and hastily averted their eyes as soon as he looked their way. He stared at them for a couple of moments, and they steadfastly refused to meet his gaze. But he caught the glance one of them could not help casting toward the ruin and the ram.

Ringil followed the man’s gaze. He felt his pulse pick up.

The ikinri ‘ska, pricking awake in him like some dozy hound by the fireside at the sound of the latch.

“Sergeant,” he said with distant calm. “Get everybody down to the boats, would you?”

“Sir.”

“Wait for me there. Tell Commander Hald and the captain I won’t be long.”

“Yes, sir.”

Ringil was already moving toward the ruin. He barely heard the man’s response, was barely aware of the marines as they mustered behind Shahn’s snapped order and tramped off at a brisk march. He was off the path now, knee-deep in the rain-soaked heather, and he had to force his legs through it to make headway. Ahead of him, the ram, apparently satisfied, tossed its head again and trotted through a gap in the tumbled wall of the croft that might once have been a doorway.

The sky had darkened overhead with the gathering cloud. The wind seemed to be picking up.

He reached the ruin and looked in over a wall that barely came up to his waist. The ram was nowhere to be seen. Ringil prowled the wall, swept a speculative glance up and down the interior, making sure. Knee-high growth of grass across the floor, shaped stones from the tumbled walls scattered here and there, the splintered, rotted-wood remnants of what might have been furniture a long time ago. At one end wall, the stonework was blackened where hearth and chimney had once stood.

Something was gathered there, crouched by the hearth-space, waiting for him.

He couldn’t quite see what it was.

At the ruined doorway, gusts from the rising wind agitated the long grass, bowed it back as if offering him passage inside.

Ringil nodded to himself. “All right, then.”

He stepped in over the threshold.

CHAPTER 2

He’d paid the whores for the whole afternoon, but in the end couldn’t summon much enthusiasm for a third go-around. Usually, two women at once solved that kind of problem for him, but not today. Maybe it was the smell of damp wool that still clung to their bodies even after they’d peeled naked for him, maybe the fact he caught the mask of fake arousal falling off the face of the younger one a couple too many times in the act. That kind of thing stabbed at him, took him out of the moment. He knew he was paying, but he didn’t like to be reminded of the fact, and back in Yhelteth he wouldn’t have been.

What’s the matter, Dragonbane? You never fucking happy? Up on the steppe, you craved all that southern sophistication you’d left behind. Put you back in the imperial city and you wish you could have the simple life again. Now here you are with simple whores in a simple little town, and that’s not right for you, either.

Ye Gods, he missed Imrana.

Wasn’t talking to the bitch currently, but missed her still.

So when the young one knelt before him on the floor and slipped his flaccid cock into her mouth, while her older companion sat on a stool in the corner, legs apart, lifting one pendulous tit at a time and tonguing the nipple with leering glances in his direction, he just grunted and shook his head. Hoisted the girl bodily from her knees—his cock slipped back out of her mouth, still pretty much flaccid—and set her aside. The older whore eyed him warily as he got up off the disheveled bed. He read her thoughts as if they were tattooed across her face. No telling what any paying customer might do when they couldn’t get it up, and this one here was big and battle-scarred, and a foreigner to boot. Harsh alien accent and hair all tangled up with talismans in iron. Lurid tales of the Majak had percolated right across the continent in the last couple of centuries—they’d doubtless got as far as the Hironish isles long ago. Bloody steppe savages, disembowel a girl and cook her on a spit soon as look at her most likely if they got out of bed the wrong side one morning

He forced a reassuring grimace and went to stare out of the window. Heard them move behind him with alacrity, start gathering up their clothes and the coin he’d left on the table. Light-footed, they left in what seemed like seconds and the door of his room clunked shut. He felt the relief it brought go through his whole frame. He slumped against the window, rested his head on cool glass. Outside, a light rain was falling into the street, clogging up daylight that was already past its best. A couple of children went past, splashing deliberately in the puddles and yattering some rhyme he could barely make out. He’d learned the League tongue, more or less, while on campaign in the north during the war, but the Hironish accent was hard work.

Yeah, like their fucking awful food and their fucking awful weather and their fucking awful whores. Five weeks in this shit-hole already, and still no—

Commotion downstairs. A woman shrieked. Furniture went over.

He frowned. Cocked his head at the sound.

Another shriek. Coarse laughter, and men calling to each other. The words were indistinct, but the rhythms were Majak.

Uh-oh.

He grabbed his breeches off the bed, trod hurriedly into them on his way to the door. Shirt off the table as he passed, out into the corridor still bare chested. Shouldered into the garment as he went down the stairs. No time for boots or other refinement, because—

He arrived on the ground floor of the inn, barefoot and undone. Surveyed the scene before him.

There were three of them. Shendanak’s men, just in from the street by the look of it, felt coats still buttoned up and damp across the shoulders from the rain. One had the younger of Egar’s whores grasped firmly by the crotch and one tit, was nuzzling and licking at her neck. The other two seemed engaged in facing down the innkeeper.

“Oi!” Egar barked, in Majak. “Fuck do you think you’re doing?”

The one holding the whore looked up. “Dragonbane!” he bawled. “Brother! We were just looking for you! Get your drinking boots on! ’S time to light this shit-hole town right the fuck up—Majak style!”

Egar nodded slowly. “I see. Whose idea was that, then?”

“Old Klarn, mate! The man himself.” The whore bucked and twisted in the speaker’s grip. She sank teeth into his forearm. He winced and grinned, let go of her crotch, used the free hand to squeeze her jaws open and force her head back, clear of his flesh. Looked like she’d left a pretty distinct bite there in the thick muscle behind the wrist, welling blood and everything, but the Majak’s voice barely wavered from its previous slurring good cheer. Egar estimated he’d been drinking awhile. “Fucking bitch. Yeah, Klarn says how we’ve been soft-soaping around these fish-fuckers for long enough. Time to get steppe-handed on their arses. In’t that right, boys?”

Growls of approval from the other two. By now they had the innkeeper bent back over his own bar with the flat of a knife blade tapping under his chin and his legs dangling a couple of inches off the sawdusted floor. They flashed cheery, inclusive grins at the Dragonbane.

Egar jerked his chin at the girl. “That’s my whore you’ve got there. Let her go.”

Your whore?” The other Majak’s face was suddenly a lot less friendly. “Who says she’s yours? She’s down here waggling her tits and arse in grown men’s faces, she—”

“She’s paid until sunset.” Egar shifted his stance a little, squaring up. He nodded at the older whore. “They both are. They’re down here getting me a drink and a platter. So let her go. And you two—let him up as well. How’s the poor cunt supposed to pull me a pint if you have him pinned?”

The two Majak at the bar were happy enough to obey. Maybe they’d been drinking less, maybe they were just more intelligent men. They nodded amiably, backed off the innkeeper, and let him scramble loose. The one with the knife put his weapon away with a sheepish grin. But the guy with his arm round the whore was going to be a harder push. As Egar watched, he tightened his grip.

“My coin’s as good as anybody’s,” he growled.

Egar took a casual step forward. Measured the room without seeming to. “Then get in the queue with it. Or find yourself another whore. You’re not having mine.”

The other Majak’s hand strayed down toward his belt and the big-hilted killing knife sheathed there. He barely seemed aware of the motion.

“You’ve got till sunset,” he said gruffly, almost reasonably, as if trying to put the case to some court in his own head. “I’ll not need long.”

“I’m not going to tell you again. Let her go.

Egar saw the other man make his decision, saw it in his eyes even before he went for the knife. His hand clamped down on the hilt, but the Dragonbane was already in motion. Across the scant space between them, bottle snatched up off the table to his right, sweeping in, and a braining stroke across the Majak’s head. He gave it all he had, was actually a bit surprised when the bottle didn’t break first time. As the other man reeled from the blow, Egar stepped in after him, swung again, backhanded, and this time—yes!—the glass came apart in a bright burst of shards and cheap wine. The Majak went down, bleeding from multiple gouges in his forehead. The whore got loose and scurried behind her colleague; the injured man crawled dizzily about on the floor, blood running into his eyes. Egar curled one foot back, mindful of his naked toes, and kicked the Majak hard in the face before he could get up. He brandished the business end of the shattered bottle admonishingly at the other two.

“You boys plan to paint the town, you aren’t going to start in here. Got it?”

Quiet. Wine dripped wetly off the jagged angles of the bottle stump.

The two remaining Majak looked at their companion, curled up on the floor and twitching, then back to the wet gleam of Egar’s makeshift weapon. Rage and confusion struggled on their faces, but that was as far as it went. He saw they were both pretty young, reckoned he might be able to brazen this one out. He waited. Watched one of them rake a hand perplexedly back through his hair and make an angry gesture.

“Look, Dragonbane, we thought—”

“Then you thought wrong.” He had his reputation and his age—things that would have counted for something among Majak back on the steppe, and might play here, if these two hadn’t been away from home too long.

If not, well…

If not, he had bare feet and a broken bottle. And glass shards on the floor.

Nice going, Dragonbane.

Better make this good.

He put on his best Clanmaster voice. “I am guesting here, you herd-end fuckwits. My bond with these people compels me, under the eyes of the Dwellers, to defend them. Or don’t the shamans teach you that shit anymore when you’re coming up?”

The two young men looked at each other. It was a dodgy interpretation of Majak practice at best—outside of some small ritual gifts, you didn’t pay for guesting out on the steppe. And lodging at a tavern or a rooming house, say, in Ishlin-ichan, wasn’t considered the same thing at all. But Egar was Skaranak and these two were border Ishlinak, and they might not know enough about their northerly cousins to be sure, and in the end, hey, this old guy killed a fucking dragon back in the day, so…

The one on the floor groaned and tried groggily to prop himself up.

Time running out.

Egar pointed downward with the bottle. Played out his high cards. “And what do your clan elders have to say about this shit? Stealing another man’s whore out from under his nose? That okay, is it?”

“He didn’t kn—”

“Pulling a knife on a brother? That okay with you, is it?”

“But you—”

“I’m done fucking talking about this!” Egar let the bottle hang at his side, like he had no need of it at all. He stabbed a finger at them instead, played the irascible clan elder to the hilt. “Now you get him up, and you get him the fuck out of my sight. Get him out of here while I’m still in a good mood.”

They dithered. He barked. “Go on! Take your fucking party somewhere else!”

Something gave in their faces. Their companion stirred on the floor again and they hurried to him. Egar gave them the space, relieved. Bottle still ready at his side. They propped the injured man up between them, got his arms over their shoulders, and turned for the door. One of them found some small piece of face-saving bravado on the way out. He twisted awkwardly about with his half of the burden. The anger still hadn’t won out on his face, but it was hardening that way.

“You know, Klarn isn’t going to wear this.”

Egar jutted his chin again. “Try him. Klarn Shendanak is steppe to the bone. He’s going to see this exactly the way it is—a lack of fucking respect where it’s due. Now get out.

They went, out into the rain, left the door swinging wide in their wake. The Dragonbane found himself alone in a room full of staring locals.

Presently, someone got up from a table and shut the door. Still, no one spoke, still they went on staring at him. He realized the whole exchange had been in Majak, would have been incomprehensible to everybody there.

He was still holding the jag-ended bottle stump.

He laid it down on the table he’d swiped the bottle from in the first place. Its owner flinched back in his chair. Egar sighed. Looked over at the innkeeper.

“You’d better keep that door barred for the time being,” he said in Naomic. Too the room more generally, he added: “Anyone has family home alone right now, you might want to drink up and get on back to them.”

There was some shuffling among the men, some muttering back and forth, but no one actually got up or moved for the door. They were all still intent on him, the barefoot old thug with iron in his hair and his shirt hanging open on a pelt going gray.

They were all still trying to understand what had just happened.

He sympathized. He’d sort of hoped—

Fucking Shendanak.

He picked his way carefully through the shards of broken glass on the floor, past the stares, and went upstairs to get properly dressed.

He wanted his boots on for the next round.


HE FOUND SHENDANAK HOLDING COURT OUTSIDE THE BIG INN ON LEAGUE street where he’d taken rooms. The Majak-turned-imperial-merchant had ordered a rough wooden table brought out into the middle of the street, and he was sat there in the filtering rain, a flagon of something at his elbow, watching three of his men beat up a Hironish islander. He saw Egar approaching and raised the flagon in his direction.

“Dragonbane.”

“Klarn.” Egar stepped around the roughing up, fended his way past an overthrown punch that skidded inexpertly off the islander’s skull. He shoved the tangle of men impatiently aside. “You want to tell me what the fuck’s going on?”

Shendanak surfaced from the flagon and wiped his whiskers. “Not my idea, brother. Tand’s getting his tackle in a knot, shouting about how these fish-fuckers know something they’re not telling us. Starts in on how I’m too soft to do what it takes to find out what we need to know. Come on, what am I supposed to do? Can’t take that lying down, can I? Not from Tand.”

“So instead, you’re going to take orders from him?”

“Nah, it’s not like that. It’s a competition, isn’t it, boys?” The Majak warriors stopped what they were doing to the islander for a moment. Looked up like dogs called off. Shendanak waved them back to the task. “Tand sets his mercenaries to interrogating. I do the same with the brothers. See who finds out where that grave and that treasure is first. Thousand elemental payoff and a public obeisance for the winner.”

“Right.” Egar sat on the edge of the table and watched as two of the Majak held the islander up while a third planted heavy punches into his stomach and ribs. “Menith Tand’s a piece-of-shit slave trader with a hard-on for hurting people, and he’s bored. What’s your excuse?”

Shendanak squinted at him thoughtfully.

“Heard about your little run-in with Nabak. You really bottle him over some fishwife whore you wouldn’t share? Doesn’t sound like you.”

“I bottled him because he pulled a knife on me. You need to keep a tighter grip on your cousins, Klarn.”

“Oh, indeed.”

It was hard to read what was in Shendanak’s voice. Abruptly, his eyes widened and he grabbed the flagon again, lifted it off the tabletop as the islander staggered back into the table and clung there, panting. The man was bleeding from the mouth and nose, his lips were split and torn where they’d been smashed repeatedly into his teeth. Both his eyes were blackening closed and his right hand looked to have been badly stomped. Still, he pushed himself up off the table with a snarl. The Majak bracketed him, dragged him—

“You know what?” said Shendanak brightly. He gestured with the flagon “I really don’t think this one knows anything. Why don’t you let him go? Just leave him there. Go on and have a drink before we start on the next one. It’s thirsty work, this.”

The Majak looked surprised, but they shrugged and did as they were told. One of them gave the beaten man a savage kick behind the knee and then spat on him as he collapsed in the street. Laughter, barked and bitten off. The three of them went back into the inn, shaking out their scraped knuckles and talking up the blows they’d dealt. Shendanak watched them through the door, waited for it to close before he looked back at Egar.

“My cousins are getting restless, Dragonbane. They were promised an adventure in a floating alien city and a battle to the death against a black shaman warrior king. So far, both those things have been conspicuous by their absence.”

“And you think beating the shit out of the local populace is going to help?”

“No, of course not.” Shendanak leaned up and peered over the table at where the islander lay collapsed on the greasy cobbles. He settled back in his seat. “But it will let the men work out some of their frustration. It will exercise them. And anyway, like I said, I really can’t lose face to a sack of shit like Menith Tand.”

“I’m going to talk to Tand,” growled Egar. “Right now.”

Shendanak shrugged. “Do that. But I think you’ll find he doesn’t believe these interrogations are going to help any more than I do. That’s not what this is about. Tand’s men are better trained than mine, but in the end they’re soldiers just the same. And you and I both know what soldiers are like. They need the violence. They crave it, and if you starve them of it for long enough, you’re going to have trouble.”

“Trouble.” Egar spoke the word as if he were weighing it up. “So let me get this straight—you and Tand are doing this because you want to avoid trouble?”

“In essence, yes.”

“In essence, is it?” Fucking court-crawling wannabe excuse for a… He held it down. Measured his tone. “Let me tell you a little war story, Klarn. You know, the war you managed to sit out, back in the capital with your horse farms and your investments?”

“Oh, here we fucking go.”

“Yeah, well. You talk about soldiers like you were one, so I thought I’d better set you straight. Back in the war, when we came down out of the mountains at Gallows Gap, I had this little half-pint guy marching at my side. League volunteer, never knew his name. But we talked some, the way you do. He told me he came from the Hironish isles, cursed the day he ever left. You want to know why?”

Shendanak sighed. “I guess you’re going to tell me.”

“He left the islands, married a League woman, and made a home in Rajal. When the Scaled Folk came, he saw his wife and kids roasted and eaten. Only made it out himself because the roasting pit collapsed in on itself that night and he got buried in the ash. You want to try and imagine that for a moment? Lying there choking in hot ash, in silence, surrounded by the picked bones of your family, until the lizards fuck off to dig another pit? He burned his bonds off in the embers—I saw the scarring on his arms—then he crawled a quarter of a mile along Rajal beach through the battle dead to get away. Are you listening to me, you brigand fuckwit?”

Shendanak’s gaze kindled, but he never moved from the chair. Horse thief, bandit, and cutthroat in his youth, he’d likely still be handy in a scrap, despite his advancing years and the prodigious belly he’d grown. But they both knew how it’d come out if he and the Dragonbane clashed. He made a pained face, sat back, and folded his arms.

“Yes, Dragonbane, I’m listening to you.”

“At Gallows Gap, that same little guy saved my life. He took down a pair of reptile peons that got the jump on me. Lost his ax to the first one; he split its skull and while it was thrashing about dying, it tore the haft right out of his grip. So he took the other one down with his bare hands. He died with his arm stuffed down its throat to block the bite. Tore out its tongue before he bled out. Am I getting through to you at all?”

“He was from here. Tough little motherfucker. Yeah, I get it.”

“Yeah. If you or Tand stir these people up, you’re going to have a local peasant uprising on your hands. We won’t cope with that; we’re not an army of occupation. In fact”—Egar’s lip curled—“we’re not an army of any kind. And we are a long way from home.”

“We have the marines, and the Throne Eternal.”

“Oh, don’t be a fucking idiot. Even with Tand’s mercenaries and your thug cousins, we have a fighting muster under two hundred men. That’s not even garrison strength for a town this size. These people know the countryside, they know the in-shore waters. They’ll melt out of Ornley and the hamlets, they’ll disappear, and then start picking us off at their leisure. We’ll be forced back to the ships—if some fisher crew doesn’t manage to sneak in and burn those to the waterline as well—and we haven’t even provisioned for the trip back yet. It’s better than three weeks south to Gergis, and I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to do it on skewered rat and rainwater.”

“Well, now.” Shendanak made a show of examining his nails—it was pure court performance, something he must have picked up on the long climb to wealth and power back in Yhelteth. It made Egar want to crush his skull. “Getting a bit precious about our campaigning in our old age, aren’t we? Tell me, did you really kill that dragon back in the war? I mean, it’s just—you don’t talk much like a spit-blood-and-die dragon-slayer.”

Egar bared his teeth in a rictus grin. “You want a spanking, Klarn, right in front of your men? I’ll be happy to oblige. Just keep riding me.”

Again, the glint of suppressed rage in Shendanak’s eye. His jaw set, his voice came out soft and silky.

“Don’t get carried away here, Dragonbane. You’re not your faggot friend, you know. And he’s not here to back you up, either.”

Egar swore later, if it hadn’t been for that last comment, he would have let it slide.

CHAPTER 3

“You are not being reasonable, daughter of Flaradnam.”

Archeth grunted, gritted her teeth, and hauled on the rope again. Below her, the Helmsman Anasharal spindled about and bumped up a couple more of the companionway steps. Its weighty iron carapace clanked dully on the wood, its underfolded limbs twitched feebly about. As ever, it looked and moved like a crippled giant crab.

And talked like an exasperated schoolmaster.

“Krinzanz has clouded your judgment.”

“Uh-huh.”

She took a turn of rope about her forearm, set her boot against the hatch frame, and leaned her weight steadily backward. She’d run the rope over the top strut of the companionway rail and then under the rail itself to create a makeshift pulley. Now the cabled hemp came slithering round the polished wood rail at really a quite promising speed. She staggered backward, semicontrolled. Anasharal came up again, a solid yard this time. Whatever krinzanz was or was not doing to her judgment, it ran in her muscles like liquid rage.

“You are going to regret this.”

“Doubt it.” Words bitten off, she was panting hard from the exertion. “This is… the best fucking idea… I’ve had in months.

Another savage tug backward on the last word and she made three more steps across the deck, away from the hatch at a tight angle that kept the rope pulleyed around that strut. Damp gray daylight, and the cold wrap of drizzle across her face. Summer in the Hironish. If the sun was up there somewhere, you’d never have known it. The rail was beginning to warp visibly with Anasharal’s weight, but there was a krinzanz certainty in her head that said it would hold, if she could just…

Knees bent almost to sitting, Archeth dropped her weight near the deck to stop her feet slipping on the rain-greased timbers. She heaved backward, felt the throb of a krin-elevated pulse in her neck as she strained. The companionway was built amidships and equidistant from either bulwark. Sea Eagle’s Daughter was a decent-sized ship, starboard was a good fifteen feet away, but once Anasharal was up on deck, dragging it across the wet planking would be child’s play. She wasn’t quite sure how she’d get the Helmsman up and over the bulwark—work something out once she got that far. Truth was, she hadn’t been much in the mood for careful planning when she went below with the rope.

“Daughter of Flaradnam. You cannot believe any of this is my fault.

“No?” Haul-l-l—and suddenly the Helmsman’s carapace cleared the top of the companionway. Anasharal hung and swung there like some big, misshapen ship’s bell. A couple of its legs reached halfheartedly for purchase on the rail, but as always, the effort of motion alone seemed to defeat them. Archeth felt a vicious surge of satisfaction jolt through her at the sight. “So who dragged us the fuck up here in the first place? Whose idea was this fucking quest? Who told us we’d find a Kiriath city in the ocean up here?”

“I had no reason not to believe—”

“Or wait—what about a phantom island that comes and goes like the weather? Ring any mother-fucking bells, does it?”

“I understand that you may be disappointed, Archeth.”

“Oh, you do?” Leaning back into the tension on the rope, getting some breath back. “That’s good, then.”

She began to track an arc sideways across the deck, opening the angle on the taut rope and hauling herself back in closer, leaning steeply backward the whole way. Another couple of steps and the rope should snap free of the rail end, yanking the Helmsman over the edge of the companionway hatch and out onto the deck…

“But what exactly do you think this will achieve?” She thought there might be the faintest trace of panic in the Helmsman’s voice now. “Do you expect me to confess some secret I’ve been keeping from you?”

“Nope.” Shortening rope, hand over hand. “I expect you to sink.”

“Daughter of Flaradnam, you cannot—”

“Just watch me.”

Footfalls on wood. Off to her left, where the ship’s gangplank lay lowered, a figure came hurriedly aboard. She spared a glance, saw one of Rakan’s Throne Eternal approaching. Nodded breathless acknowledgment at him and went back to hauling on the rope.

“My lady, I am sent to—”

“Not!” Through gritted teeth. “Now!”

The rope twanged free of its wrap on the rail. Anasharal tumbled to the decking, tipped over on its back with the momentum, legs flailing. Slack leapt through the rope, and Archeth went over on her arse. The Throne Eternal sprang forward.

“My lady—”

“I’m fine,” she snarled, and the sheer force of it drove him back a step. She scrambled to her feet, gathered the rope in burning palms. Anasharal looked pretty helpless upended like that but she wouldn’t have put it past the Helmsman to somehow right itself, drag itself back to the edge of the hatch, and fall to the relative safety at the bottom of the companionway; safe because—and she suspected that Anasharal would somehow know this—she was pretty sure she wouldn’t have the focal strength to do all this a second time today, krinzanz or no krinzanz. She was in fact, already starting to feel that maybe—

“Help me,” she snapped at the confused soldier. “Don’t just stand there with your prick in your hand! Grab the rope!”

“My lady?”

But he was Throne Eternal, and she, here in this godforsaken miserable place, was the throne, or its closest representative at least. He was charged with obeying her to the death if need be. He did as he was told. He took up station behind her, and she felt the easing on her own scorched-palm grip as he added his strength to hers. They hauled in unison, and the upended Helmsman skated a couple of feet across the greasy timbers, rocking gently. The Throne Eternal tried again, panting somewhat now. “My lady. What is. Your intention?”

“Intention?” She twisted her head to look back at him, treated him to a gritted krinzanz grin. “Dump this fucker in the harbor, why?”

She caught the look of dismay on his face. Turned herself back to face front.

“Just pull,” she told him.

“That would be ill-advised, Selak Chan, as I’m sure you already realize. The lady Archeth has ingested—”

“You shut up!” she screamed jaggedly. “You shut the fuck up!”

And abruptly, as if the scream had punctured some inner chamber in the workings of her anger, she was done. She felt the precious load of her fury leaking away, turning into tears. Suddenly, her muscles were no longer on fire, they only ached. Her palms stung, her mouth tasted sour and dry; every one of her 209 years fell on her like stones.

She dropped the rope and stood there in the rain, head down.

“Shut the fuck up,” she murmured to herself.

“My lady? Are you hale, my lady?”

Archeth shook herself like a wet dog. She turned to face the man properly for the first time since he’d come aboard.

“What do you want?”

“It’s the Dragonbane, my lady. And Shendanak’s men. Well, and my lord Tand as well. There’s been fighting. At the inn on League street. Commander Rakan requests your presence.”

“Wait, fighting? Who’s fighting, who—” She drew a breath deep enough to shake her whole body. “All right, never mind. Go back, tell them I’m on my way.”

“Yes, my lady.” Relief flooded the young face. He saluted, fist to heart, turned and hurried away. She watched him cross the gangplank and head off into the drizzle. She wiped some of the rain off her face.

Fighting.

Just what we needed.

Better get strapped, then.

“Not one fucking word,” she told the Helmsman as she passed its upended carapace on her way to her cabin and her knives.

For once, Anasharal was silent.


THEY HAD SHENDANAK LAID OUT ON THE BED IN HIS ROOMS. GRIM-FACED Majak cousins lined the narrow corridor outside and took up space on the stairs, bulky and damp-smelling in their felt coats and boots. Shouldering her way up past them, Archeth caught impassive stares and muttered snatches of conversation in the steppe tongue. Covert warding gestures forked in her direction, hands touched to talisman purses. Here and there, she saw the glint of a knife being used—for now—to pick at nails or teeth.

There was an ugly, purposeful quiet to it all, and it kicked her straight back to the war. Armed men, waiting for violence to ensue.

At the top of the stairs, one of the cousins rocked to his feet and got in her face, berating her loudly until two of his companions forced him to sit back down. She couldn’t decipher any of what he said; her understanding of the various Majak dialects was limited to a handful of Skaranak phrases Egar had taught her over the years. But she didn’t really need a translator.

She masked her misgivings, kept her hands well away from the hilts of her own knives, and rapped sharply at the door. Rakan opened for her.

“Got your message,” she said.

“I would not have disturbed you, my lady, but—”

“Skip it.” She slid through the meager gap he’d opened, let him close up again after her. Saw two brace of Throne Eternal at his back with hands on sword hilts. “That really necessary?”

Rakan’s young face was grim. “We had to break a couple of heads just to calm things down. I think if Tand’s crew hadn’t shown up when they did, it might actually have been worse. It might have come down to steel.”

“Wait a minute.” Archeth frowned. “If this wasn’t Tand and Shendanak going at it, who the fuck started the fight?”

“I did.” Egar, in from the next room, pressing a wet cloth to the right side of his head. His face was a mess, one eye bruising up, a fresh gouge on the cheek. He grinned at her. “Afternoon, Archidi.”

“Yeah.” She was in no mood. “What happened to you?”

The Dragonbane lowered the cloth and peered into its bloodstained folds. “Bit my ear,” he said apologetically. “Still bleeding a bit, look. I kind of lost it when he did that. Wouldn’t have hurt him nearly as bad otherwise.”

You were fighting with Shendanak? What the fuck for?”

“Basically?” Egar shrugged. “Because he’s a fat imperial fuck who’s forgotten where he’s from, and he needed a good spanking to help him remember.”

The Throne Eternal bristled. Archeth closed her eyes. “Great. Where is he?”

“In here.”

Shendanak lay on the big four-poster bed, belly up, unconscious. He’d been stripped down to a loincloth and Archeth thought the impression was rather like a butchered whale she’d once seen landed at the docks in Trelayne. One arm was splinted, the head was bandaged with windings through which blood had already soaked. The face was a torn-up mess—broken nose, both eyes blackened, the jaw looked lopsided with bruising, might be dislocated…

She gave up trying to assess. Salbak Barla, ship’s doctor from The Pride of Yhelteth, was bent over Shendanak with a poultice. He nodded absently at her.

“My lady.”

“How is he, Doctor?”

Barla sucked in air through his teeth. “Well, he’ll live. Your barbarian friend here was restrained enough for that. But it may be awhile before he walks anywhere unaided. He’s taken a lot of heavy blows to the skull. One knee is badly bruised, the joint may be cracked. Severe bruising to the groin as well. Ribs broken in numerous places. The arm”—a gesture—“as you see.”

“Yeah, that was when he did the ear.” Egar, behind her, voice still apologetic. “Like I said, I just lost it.”

“You certainly did,” agreed Barla.

Archeth held down the edges of a krinzanz rage. She turned to face the Dragonbane, who’d gone to stand at the window.

“So what was the plan, Eg?” she asked mildly. “I mean, I assume you had one.”

He would not look at her. Stared out at the rain instead. “I already told you, I lost my temper. But that fat fuck and Tand have both got their men out there beating up the locals for information they don’t have. Something you’d know about, if you got off the boat occasionally.”

“Don’t you fucking try to make this my fault.”

He spun from the window. “Archeth, they are betting on who gouges some information out of these poor bastards first. Someone had to put a stop to it.”

“Yeah—that’s what Rakan and Hald are here for.”

“Hald went with Gil. And anyway, I didn’t need any help.”

Breathe, Archidi. Keep it together.

“And what’s going to happen now, Eg? Who’s going to keep Shendanak’s steppe cousins in line now he’s not awake to do it?”

“I will.”

You will?” Disbelieving. “Eg, the mood they’re in on the stairs, I’m surprised they haven’t broken in here and lynched you already.”

He gave her a grim smile. “Not the way it works, Archidi. Those kids are pure steppe. I can handle them just fine.”

“The two down in the stable were handled well enough,” said Barla, without turning from his work with the poultice.

“The two in the stable?” Archeth asked with dangerous calm.

Egar nodded. “Yeah, couple of Shendanak’s guys came out in the street while I was stomping him. That was before Tand showed up. I had to take them down as well. No big deal.”

“No big deal, I see. Doctor?”

“Superficial injuries,” Barla confirmed. “I’ve given both men a grain of flandrijn to keep them happy. They should sleep it off and be fine by the morning.”

“I see. Egar—let’s get this straight. Exactly how many men have you… damaged today?”

“Just the three. The others backed right off.” The Dragonbane paused. “Well, and there was the one in the tavern earlier, the other tavern, where I’m billeted. I bottled him because he was groping my whore, wouldn’t give it up.”

Archeth shook her head. “I’m sorry? You bottled him because what?”

“Yeah, it’s how I knew this shit was going down in the first place. The way they came in, throwing their weight around. Two he was with probably would have let it go, but—”

“Wait, wait.” She held up her hands, palm out. “Stop. Eg, suppose you act like I don’t know what the fuck is going on for a moment, and tell me what the fuck is going on. From the start. What happened? How did we end up like this?”


HOW DID WE END UP LIKE THIS?

It would have been a reasonable question for anyone on the expedition to ask.

Five months back, it was all bright spring sunlight and cheering, as the freshly minted flotilla sailed downriver through Yhelteth and out to sea. Fair winds and a high quest, the Emperor’s blessing and the city turned out in force to see them off. Jhiral, in a shrewdly calculated crowd-pleasing gesture, had made the day of their departure a public holiday, and the banks of the river were thronged on both sides. Every ship in the harbor flew sky-blue and silver pennants for luck. Even the Citadel—or at least the more collaboration-minded among its mastery—had been prevailed upon to offer up prayers for the expedition’s success and safe homecoming. Incense billowed from blessing braziers along the river, smoked out over the water, mingled with the crisscrossed traceries of a thousand fireworks set off.

Pretty noisy for a secret mission, Ringil reckoned as they left the estuary, shadowed on all sides by a mob of smaller craft filled with waving, bellowing well-wishers. But you could see even he was enjoying himself.

That’s “voyage of scientific discovery” to you, son, Mahmal Shanta told him, grinning.

And the wind stropped at the unfurled canvas overhead, the sun glistened on the foaming churn of their bow-wave, and Archeth, who was already starting to miss Ishgrim, found a quiet smile despite herself.

Now two out of three vessels sat storm-battered and damp, huddled into Ornley harbor like whipped dogs in a kitchen corner. Dragon’s Demise was off up the coast, chasing another pointless lead, and it seemed the rain would never stop.

And for lack of other enemies, we’re tearing each other apart.

She heard Egar out with weary patience—the brawl over whores, Tand and Shendanak’s bet, the fight with Shendanak in the street, the stand-off with his angry cousins over his beaten body, the arrival of Tand and his men…

“Didn’t really need them,” sniffed the Dragonbane. “But it got things wrapped up a lot faster, you know.”

No surprise there—Tand’s mercenaries were a cold-eyed, scary bunch, a couple of hundred years’ brutal enforcement experience between them and all the scars to show for it. You’d have to be either pretty sure of yourself or pretty far gone to get into it with them. Shendanak’s cousins were tough enough in their unseasoned steppe-grown fashion, they were mostly younger men, and there were more of them. But in the end, methodical battle-trained competence was always going to tell. It was the axiomatic truth they’d all learned in the war.

“Where is Tand?” she asked.

Egar shrugged. “He got them to call Rakan, then he fucked off. Went back to his rooms, I reckon. You know how much he hates the rain.”

“Right. I’m going to talk to him.”

“I’ll come with you.”

“No. You won’t.” Archeth jerked a thumb in the direction of the door and the men gathered on the stairs beyond it. “You say you can handle Shendanak’s crew? Then you stay here with Rakan in case we need you to do exactly that. You let me worry about Tand.”


IT WAS BRAVADO SHE DIDN’T MUCH FEEL. THE KRIN HAD PEAKED ON HER back aboard Sea Eagle’s Daughter, and now it was starting to wane. All she really felt was tired. But she lacquered on a thin shell of pretense as she went up through the streets to Tand’s inn, forced the ghost of strength down into her legs with each step, and reminded herself that she was the Emperor’s Named Envoy for the expedition, the Authority of the Burnished Throne made Flesh.

And an immortal black-skinned witch with dark magic from the veins of the Earth at her command.

Let’s not forget that one, Archidi.

She found Menith Tand sat at a table in one corner of the otherwise empty tavern bar, flanked by two of his mercenary crew and playing out a deck of cards in some version of solitaire she didn’t know. If he was concerned about the path of recent events, it didn’t show. Lamps had been lit for him against the late afternoon gloom, and in the light they cast, his narrow features were composed to the point of boredom. She saw he’d recently had a shave, and his ostentatiously undyed gray hair was gathered back on either side of his head with twinned clips the color of ivory—carved, so the rumor went, from the bones of an escaped slave. He met Archeth’s eye as she came through the tavern door and nodded, then leaned back in his chair to speak with one of his men. As she approached the table, the man stepped forward and for a moment her pulse ratcheted up. But the mercenary just made a clumsy bow and set out the chair opposite Tand for her to sit down.

“Greetings, my lady.” The slave magnate placed a new card, frowning at the pattern for a moment before he looked up. “Won’t you sit down?”

Archeth ignored the snub. She rested her hands on the back of the chair. “I hear you’ve taken some kind of bet with Klarn Shendanak.”

“Yes.” Tand went back to brooding on his cards. “What of it?”

“Are you entirely fucking stupid, Tand?”

The slaver turned over a card, did not look up. “Not entirely, my lady, no. Why, what seems to be the problem?”

“You really think going to war with the locals for a bet is a smart thing to do? You think we can afford that right now?” Quick, dark pulse of krinzanz rage. “I’m talking to you, Tand! Did your krin-whore mother drop you on your fucking head when you were a baby?”

The mercenary who’d put out the chair stiffened, laid hand to sword-hilt. Archeth peeled him her best lethal-black-witch look and watched with satisfaction as the hand slid away again. Tand, meanwhile—

The slaver had paused, theatrically, midway through playing out a card. Momentary stillness, and it was hard to tell if she’d got to him or if it was for show, but—yes, there. A vein pulsed in one temple. Archeth cheered inwardly at the sight. Then Tand completed his play, laid aside the slim sheaf of cards in his hand, and sat back in his chair.

“My mother was a noblewoman of Baldaran stock, my lady.” The pale, cold eyes swiveled up to meet her own, and for just a moment she saw the fury chained there, she saw how dangerous he was. But the slave magnate’s voice, when it came, was cool and even. “And as for krinzanz, I think it’s likely she saw less of it in the course of her whole life than is currently coursing through your half-blood veins. So. Perhaps we can dispense with the cheap insults now and behave a little more as befits our station, yes?”

She leaned on the back of the chair. “I’m all in favor of that, Tand. Let’s start by knocking off the occupation tactics. You were there at Lanatray, you signed the accord like everybody else. We are diplomatic guests of the Trelayne League, permitted access to the Hironish isles on that basis. Let’s act as such.”

“They made us their guests because they didn’t have a choice. The peace is fragile, my lady. They’d hardly deny us passage and risk the Emperor’s displeasure.”

“I think you overestimate imperial influence. By the best route home, we’re nearly three thousand miles from Yhelteth.”

Tand made a dismissive gesture. “We’re the best part of a thousand miles from Trelayne as well. By the time word of what we do here reaches anyone who matters, we’ll be long gone. That’s if anyone cares in the first place, which—if my knowledge of Trelayne Chancellery affairs is anything to go by—they won’t.”

He probably had a point. Ringil had told her exactly how remote from League affairs the Hironish isles were. Some of the dignitaries they met with in Lanatray had even been a little vague on where exactly the islands were to be found, how far north or west they would have to sail to reach them. And Tand, in his capacity as major player in the slave markets, had spent enough time back and forth between League and Empire in the last few years to be accurately informed. Still—

“The peace is fragile on both sides, Tand. What you’re doing here could be just the tinder it needs. You throw your weight around like this under the auspices of an imperial expedition and you’re creating a perfect pretext for war.”

“Frankly, I doubt that. But in any case, what we’ve done so far is considerably more controlled and less destructive than what will probably happen if the men are left much longer without some outlet for their frustrations. You have dragged us to the ends of the Earth, my lady, and now we’re here, you give us nothing to do. That’s not an ideal situation for fighting men.”

“So you don’t believe there’s anything to learn from these interrogations? The whole thing’s a sham, just to keep the men exercised?”

The slave magnate nodded sagely. “No call to let Klarn Shendanak know that, of course, but—yes, more or less.”

“I doubt I’ll be telling Shendanak anything in the near future. The Dragonbane put him in a coma.”

“Did he now?” There might have been admiration in Tand’s voice.

“You didn’t know that? You were there, weren’t you?”

“Yes, I thought the old tub of guts looked rather mauled when we arrived. But you know what these Majak are like—up on the steppe, they’re beating the shit out of each other the minute they drop out of the womb. They breed for thick skulls.”

“Well, Shendanak not so much, it seems.”

“No.” Tand looked genuinely thoughtful for the first time since she’d walked in. “That does put a different complexion on things. We’d better—”

The door of the tavern banged back. Twitchy with the crashing krin, Archeth jumped at the noise it made.

“Sire!” It was one of Tand’s men, grinning triumphantly in the doorway. “Sire, we’ve got it!”

He advanced into the room, campaign cap off for respect, shaven head gleaming with sweat in the low light. He seemed to have been running, he was panting hard. Took a moment to get his breath under control.

“We’ve got it,” he said again.

“I’m sure you have, Nalmur,” said Tand patiently. “But perhaps you could tell the lady Archeth and myself what exactly it is that you’ve got?”

Nalmur glanced at Archeth, apparently noticing her for the first time in the gloom. His expression grew a little more wary, but his face was still suffused with delight.

“The thousand elementals, my lord. The bet. We know what happened to the Illwrack Changeling!”

CHAPTER 4

He felt the change as soon as he stepped over the threshold of the croft. It came on like icy water, sprinkling across the nape of his neck.

He tilted his head a little to send the feeling away, traced a warding glyph in the air, like taking down a volume from a library shelf. Around him, the croft walls grew back to an enclosing height they likely hadn’t seen in decades. The boiling gray sky blacked out, replaced with damp-smelling thatch overhead. A dull, reddish glow reached out to him from the hearth. Peat smoke stung his throat. He heard the slow creak of wood.

A worn oak rocking chair, angled at the fireside, tilting gently back and forth. From where he stood, Ringil could not tell what was seated there, only that it was wrapped in a dark cloak and cowl.

The ward he’d chosen was burning down around him like some torched peasant’s hut. He felt the fresh exposure shiver through him. Reached for something stronger, cracked finger-bones etching it into the air.

“Yes—becoming quite adept at that, aren’t we?” It was a voice that creaked like the chair. Wheeze and rustle of seeming age, or maybe just the breathlessness at the end of laughing too hard at something. “Quite the master of the ikinri ‘ska these days.”

His fresh ward shattered apart, no better than the first—the chill of the Presence rushed in on him. The rocking chair jerked violently around, from no agency he could see. The thing it held was a corpse.

The shrunken mounds it made within the wrap of the cloak were unmistakable, the way it skewed awkwardly in the seat, as if blown there by the wind. The cowl was tipped forward like the muzzle of some huge dark worm, shrouding the face. One ivory-pallid hand gripped an armrest, flesh shrunk back from long, curving nails. The other hand was lost in the folds of the cloak, and seemed to be holding something.

His hand leaped up, across, closed on the hilt of the Ravensfriend where it jutted over his left shoulder.

“Oh, please,” creaked the voice. “Put that away, why don’t you. If I can break your wards like sticks for kindling, how hard do you think it’s going to be for me to break that dinky little sword of yours as well? You know, for an up-and-coming sorcerer, you show remarkably little breadth of response.”

Ringil let go the Ravensfriend, felt the pommel slip through his hands as the Kiriath-engineered scabbard sucked the handbreadth of exposed blade back into itself. He eyed the slumped form before him and held down the repeated urge to shiver.

“And you are?”

“And still he does not know me.”

Abruptly, the corpse loomed to its feet, out of the chair as if tugged there by puppet’s strings. Ringil found himself face-to-face with the worm’s head cowl and the blank darkness it framed. He made himself stare back, but if there was a face in there, dead or alive, he could not make it out. The whispering voice seemed to come from everywhere at once—down from the eaves of the thatch, up amid the crackle of the hearth, out of the air just behind his ear.

“You did not know me at Trelayne’s Eastern Gate, when your destiny was first laid out in terms you could understand. You did not know me at the river, when the first of the Cold gathered to you, and your passage to the Dark Gate began. And I sent a whole shipload of corpses for you when you were finally ready to come back. So tell me, Ringil Eskiath—how many times must I look out at you through the eyes of the dead before I am given my due?”

It fell in on him like the thatched roof coming down. The cloak and cowl, the stylized placement of hands, one raised to the arm of the chair, the other gathered in the lap, holding—

“Fifirdar?”

“Oh, well done.” The corpse turned and shuffled away from him, back toward the hearth. “Took you long enough, didn’t it? Wouldn’t have thought it’d be so hard to recognize the Queen of the Dark Court when she comes calling. We are your ancestral gods, are we not?”

“Not by my choice,” he said starkly.

But through his head it went, all the same—the call-and-response prayer to the Mistress of Dice and Death:

Firfirdar sits

Upon her molten iron throne

And is not touched

By fire

Is kernel heart of darkness to the blaze

It was ingrained—a decade of foot-dragging attendance at the Eskiath family temple, every week like clockwork until, finally, at fifteen years of age, he found the words to face his father down and refuse the charade.

By then, though, the cant was worked into his brain like tanner’s dung.

Firfirdar smiles

In shadows lit by liquid fire

And holds the dice

Of days

Holds dice for all, and all that is to come

Firfirdar lifts

The dice of days in one cold hand

And rolls them free

In fire

Calls luck like sparks from out the forge of fate

“Yes, well.” The corpse bent stiffly into the shadows beside the fire-glow and the pallid, long-nailed hand reached a poker from its resting place against the stonework. Firfirdar prodded at the fire, and a log fell loose, cascading embers. “Fortunately, we’re not all dependent on your choices in such matters.”

“Then why am I here?”

“Oh.” The poker stabbed into the hearth a couple more times. Sparks billowed up the chimney. The voice rustled about in the flicker-lit, haunted spaces of the croft. “You were passing. It seemed as good a time as any.”

“You know, for a goddess of death and destiny, you show remarkably little sense of divine grandeur.”

The corpse leaned over the hearth, cowl pressed to the low stone mantelpiece as if tired by its exertions. The echo of Ringil’s words seemed to hang in the silence. For a long, cold-sweat moment, he wondered if the dark queen would take offense.

His fingers flexed and formed a brief fist—

Look, I won’t lie to you, Gil. No ikinri ‘ska ward is going to actually back down a member of the Dark Court. Hjel the Dispossessed, almost apologetic when Ringil asks him. It’s his magic, after all, his heritage he’s teaching. But if you throw enough of them around, well—a faint shrug—you might buy yourself some time, I suppose.

Time to do what?

But to that, he gets no answer beyond the dispossessed prince’s customary slipshod grin. Hjel is not what you’d call a consistent guide.

What he is, exactly, Ringil has yet to work out.

—and so…

He loosened the fist, forced his fingers to hang slack. Waited for the dark queen’s response.

“Funny.” The corpse had not moved, was still bent there over the hearth. It was as if Fifirdar was talking to the flames. “Yes. They did say that. That you think you’re funny.

A thick silence poured into the croft behind the snap in that final word. All the hairs on Ringil’s forearms and the back of his neck leaped erect. He mastered the shudder, thrust it down, and stared at the hunched black form. The ikinri ‘ska, swirling like water just below his fingertips…

The corpse straightened up. Set the poker aside in the shadows by the wall.

“We’re wasting time,” said Firfirdar sibilantly. “I am not your enemy. You would not still be standing there if I were.”

“Perhaps not.” Behind the mask he kept, a cool relief went pummeling through his veins. He let the ikinri ‘ska subside. “But please don’t claim the Dark Court has my best interests at heart, either. I’ve read a few too many hero legends to believe that.”

“Legends are written down by mortals, floundering in the details of their world, seeking significance for their acts where usually there is none.” The corpse hobbled back to its seat by the fire. “You would do well not to set too much store by such tales.”

“Is it inaccurate, then, my lady, to say that heroes in the service of the gods rarely end well?”

“Men who carry steel upon their backs and live by it rarely end well. It would be a little unjust to blame the gods for that, don’t you think?”

Ringil grimaced. “The Mistress of Dice and Death complains to me of injustice? Have you not being paying attention, my lady? Injustice is the fashion—for the last several thousand years, as near as I can determine, and more than likely before that, too. I think it unlikely the Dark Court has not had a hand in any of it.”

“Well, our attention has been known to wander.” It was hard to be sure with that whispering, rustling voice, but the dark queen seemed amused. “But we are focused on you now, which is what counts. Rejoice, Ringil Eskiath—we are here to help.”

“Really? The lady Kwelgrish gave me to understand that mortal affairs are a game you play at. It’s hard to rejoice in being treated as a piece on the board.”

Quiet. The corpse lolled back in the rocking chair’s embrace. The nails of its left hand tapped at the wooden armrest, like the click of dice in a cupped palm.

“Kwelgrish is… forthright, by the standards of the Court.”

“You mean she shouldn’t have told me?”

The soft crackle of the fire in the hearth. Gil thought, uneasily, that the leaping shadows painted on the wall behind Firfirdar were a little too high and animated to fit the modest flames in the hearth that supposedly threw them. A little too shaped as well, a little too suggestive of upward tilted jaws and teeth, as if some invisible, inaudible dog pack surged and clamored there in the gloom behind the dark queen’s chair, only waiting to be unleashed…

Very slowly, the corpse lifted both hands to the edges of the cowl it wore. Lifted the dark cloth back and up, away from the visage it covered.

The breath stopped in Ringil’s throat.

With an effort of will, he looked back into Firfirdar’s eyes.

It was not that the corpse she had chosen was hideous with decay—far from it. Apart from a telltale pallor and a sunken look around the eyes, it was a face that might still have belonged with the living.

But it was beautiful.

It was the face of some fine-featured, consumptive youth you’d readily kiss and risk infection for. A face you might lose yourself in one haunted back-alley night, then wake without the next day and spend fruitless months searching the stew of streets for again. It was a face that gathered you in, that beckoned you away, that rendered all thought of safety and common sense futile. A face you’d go to gladly, when the time came; no regrets and nothing left behind but a faint and fading smile, printed on your cooling lips.

“Do you see me, Ringil Eskiath?” asked the hissing, whispering voice.

It was like flandrijn fumes through his head, like stumbling on a step that suddenly wasn’t there. He reeled and swayed from the force of it, and the corpse’s mouth did not move at all and the voice seemed to come from everywhere at once.

“Do you see me now?”

Out of the seething, chilling confusion of his own consciousness, Ringil mustered the will to stay on his feet. He drew in breath, hard.

“Yes,” he said. “I see you.”

“Then let us understand each other. It isn’t easy being a god, but some of us are better at it than others. Kwelgrish has her intricate games and her irony, Dakovash his constant rage and disappointment with mortals, and Hoiran just likes to watch. But I am none of these. You would be ill-advised to judge me as if I were. Is that clear?”

Ringil swallowed, dry-throated. Nodded.

“That’s good.” The corpse raised pallid hands once more and lifted the cowl back in place. Something went out of the space around them, as if someone had opened a window somewhere to let in fresh air. “Now—to the business at hand. Walk with me, Ringil Eskiath. Convince me that my fellow gods have not been overly optimistic in their assessment of your worth.”

“Walk with you whe—”

The fire billowed upward in the hearth, blinded him where he stood. Soundless detonation that deafens his gaze. The croft walls and thatch ripped back, no more substantial than a Majak yurt torn away by cyclone winds. He thought he caught a glimpse of them borne away at some angle it hurts his eyes to look at. Gone, all gone. He blinked—shakes his head—is standing suddenly before a roaring bonfire, on a deserted beach, under an eerily luminescent sky.

Walk with me here, says Firfirdar quietly.

She’s unhooded again, it’s the same achingly beautiful dying youth’s face, but here it seems not to have the power it had back in the croft. Or maybe it’s him—maybe he has a power here the real world will not permit him. Either way there’s no punch-to-the-guts menace, no fracturing of his will and sense of self. Instead, he thinks, the Mistress of Dice and Death looks overwhelmingly saddened by something, and maybe a little lost.

There is not much time, she murmurs. The dwenda have found a way back—though back is a relative term, as they’ll discover soon enough—and with them comes every dark thing men have ever feared.

Ringil shivers. There’s a hard wind coming off the sea, stoking the bonfire, whipping up the flames and leaching the heat away.

Then stop them, why don’t you?

A gossamer smile touches Firfirdar’s mouth at the corners, but it’s etched with that same sadness. Her eyes tilt to the sky.

That was tried, she says quietly. Once. And your sky still bears the scars.

He follows her gaze upward. The source of the eerie radiance slips from behind the clouds—the dying, pockmarked little sun he’s heard the dwenda call muhn. He shrugs.

So try again.

It will not be permitted again. Even if we could find some way to press upon the sky as hard and deeply as before, such powers must remain leashed. That was the pact, the gift of mending the Book-Keepers gave. We are bound by the codes they wrote.

Ringil stares into the orange-red heart of the bonfire, as if he could pull some of its heat out and cup it to himself. So much for the gods. Maybe I should just talk to one of these book-keepers instead.

You already have, Ringil Eskiath. How else would you have returned through the Dark Gate except with its blessing? How else would you have come back from the crossroads?

Memory stabs at him on that last word. The Creature at the Crossroads, the book it held in its multiple arms. The razor talons it touched him with.

I should hate to tear you asunder. You show a lot of promise.

The branches buried in the heart of the fire suddenly look a lot like bones in a pyre. He turns away. He stares away along the shoreline, where the wind is piling up waves and dumping them out incessantly on the sand. Over the sound it makes, he grows aware that Firfirdar is watching him.

That was the book-keeper? he asks reluctantly.

One of them, yes.

He locks down another shiver. Sets his jaw. I was under the impression that I owed my passage through this Dark Gate of yours to Kwelgrish and Dakovash.

In a manner of speaking, yes, you do. But—come. Firfirdar gestures, away along the ghost-lit beach and into the gloom. Walk with me. Let us talk it through. All will become clear.

Yeah? Ringil grimaces. That’d be a first.

But he walks with her anyway, away from the useless glare of the bonfire, the heat it apparently cannot give him. He lets her link her arm through his—he can feel the chill it gives off through his clothing and hers—and she leads him away, under the dwenda muhn.

In the ghost light it casts, he notices, looking back, that her feet leave no trace on the sand at all.

After a while, nor do his.

CHAPTER 5

When the doctor was done with Shendanak, Egar went out onto the stairs and called in a couple of the cousins for witness. He picked two faces he knew, men he’d shared grog and grumbling with on the long voyage north. Both had been down off the steppe for a good few years, both had survived in Yhelteth in a number of more or less thuggish capacities before they went to work for Shendanak. They had a flexible city manner about them as a result, and ought to understand the situation beyond any initial dumb-as-fuck tribal loyalties they still might own.

He hoped.

He led them to Shendanak’s bedside and let them look.

“See,” he told them breezily. “Cleaned up and sleeping like a baby.”

“Yeah?” Durhan, the younger of the two, glowered across to where Salbak Barla was packing up his doctor’s satchel. “So when’s he going to wake up?”

Egar shot Barla a warning look.

“Sleep is a great healer,” the doctor said smoothly. “It unmounts the rider of consciousness so that the horse—the body—may rest from its exertions and recover from any wounds it has sustained. The wise rider does not attempt to mount an ill-used horse too soon.”

Durhan was not appeased. “Don’t fucking talk to me about horses, you city-dwelling twat. I asked you when he’s going to wake up.”

“Couple of days,” Egar improvised rapidly. “Right, Doc?”

Barla nodded. “Yes, I was going to say. Given the nature of his wounds, a few days should suffice.”

Durhan’s companion—a blunt, taciturn Ishlinak by the name of Gart—nodded slowly and fixed Egar with a speculative look.

“You sure about that, Dragonbane?” he rumbled. “Couple of days? That’s the word you want put out?”

Egar feigned lack of concern. “You heard the bone man.”

“Yeah. But I wouldn’t want to be you or your pet bone man here, three days hence, if Klarn still hasn’t made it back. That happens, the brothers are going to take it hard.”

“That happens,” Durhan echoed, “the brothers are going to want blood.”

Egar grinned fiercely, no need to fake it this time. “Anyone wants blood, that can be arranged. You just tell them to come see the Dragonbane.”

Alarm on Salbak Barla’s face, but the two Majak just grunted acknowledgment. It was steppe custom, close enough. It would wash.

“Couple of days it is,” said Gart.

“Yeah.” Durhan nodded at the doctor. “You keep him well, bone man, you hear? If you know what’s good for you.”

“Right, good.” Egar, shepherding them out of the bedchamber. “Now get everybody off the stairs and about their business. I want a sickbed honor vigil out there at most—five men or less, cool heads. You pick them. And no more shaking down the locals in the meantime. We need that shit like a pony needs skates.”

Durhan balked. “Tand’s men—”

“The lady Archeth has gone to deal with Tand. That’s her end, this is ours. You get the brothers straightened out for me, we’ll talk about the rest later.”

He got them to the door, ejected them into the hall, and nodded to Rakan’s men to close up again. Through the wooden panels of the door, he heard Gart’s voice raised against a growing storm of questions in Majak. He closed his eyes, allowed himself the brief moment.

Here we go again.

Back in Yhelteth, he’d sworn he was done giving other men orders. He wanted no rank, he wanted no responsibility. He’d tagged along on the expedition for a whole tangle of reasons that he now had trouble teasing apart, but longing for command was not one of them. There was gratitude to Ringil, some vague sense of obligation to Archeth—he was, after all, supposed to be her bodyguard these days—and the common-sense discretion attached to getting out of town after his clash with clan Ashant. And underlying, he knew, was a generous helping of nostalgia for the camaraderie of the war years. The quest had felt like the war again, at least the preparatory part. But he’d reasoned that while there might indeed be some fighting along the way—pirates, unruly locals, maybe finally the minions of this long undead warlord they couldn’t seem to find—still, he’d thought he could take his place in the line without having to worry about what other men thought or feared or needed.

Yeah, some fucking chance.

He went back through to the bedchamber, found Barla fastening up his satchel and looking distinctly queasy. He manufactured an easy grin.

“Don’t worry, Doc. I’ll walk you out.”

“Is that, uh…” The doctor swallowed. “Really necessary?”

“No, probably not,” Egar lied. “But it’s best not to take any chances, tempers the way they are right now.”

Also best not to mention that for most of Shendanak’s crew, the ones who hadn’t been off the steppe longer than a couple of years, a doctor was just a shaman without the Sky Dwellers to call upon. And fail to deliver the magical goods without the gods at your back, you could end up in a ditch with a slit throat—he’d seen it happen more than once to itinerant doctors from the south in Ishlin-ichan.

“Yes, well, uhm.” Barla put both hands on the closed satchel and looked down at it, as if considering a rapid change of profession. “Thank you. But could not captain Rakan and his men, uh…?”

“Better if it’s me.” Egar’s smile was starting to feel like smeared jam on his face. “Come on, let’s get you back aboard the Pride. Shanta could probably use another one of those stinking herbal infusions you make, and he won’t drink it if you’re not there to force it down.”

In the other chamber, Rakan heard the plan and nodded agreement with barely a word. He was a pretty shrewd lad for his age; he saw the sense in this. But as his men got the door, he beckoned Egar aside for a moment and the Dragonbane saw how his youth leaked through the façade of soldierly calm.

“When do you think my lord Ringil will return?” he asked quietly.

Egar shook his head. “Your guess is as good as mine, Captain. A day there by boat, they said. A day back. That’s two, plus a day to do the digging and rest…”

“It’s been four days already. What if something’s wrong?”

“Well, they might have a hard time finding the grave marker, sure. Or, if the weather’s against them—”

“No.” Rakan’s voice grew tighter, lower. “Not that. What if this time he found the Illwrack Changeling?”

Near the opened door, Salbak Barla cleared his throat. Egar shot a glance that way, saw Rakan’s men hanging off their captain’s every word. He pitched his own voice loud and brisk.

“If that has happened, Captain, then pity the Changeling. Because Gil’s going to be bringing us his head on a spike and his balls wrapped around the haft.”

It raised weak grins among the men, which he counted a victory of sorts. He wagged a finger in salute at Rakan, led Barla out the door.

To his relief, both corridor and stairs outside were cleared of men. Durhan and Gart appeared to have followed their instructions to the letter. Downstairs in the tavern’s main bar, four Majak sat at a table, burning a blessing taper and playing halfheartedly at dice. Serving staff and a couple of local patrons aside, they were the bar’s only occupants. They grew quieter as the doctor and the Dragonbane came down the stairs, but they all lowered their eyes with appropriate respect. Egar paused at the table and sketched obeisance at the taper, nodded acknowledgment at the man he judged the eldest. Then he ushered Salbak Barla past, one proprietary hand on the doctor’s shoulder for all to see.

He felt their stares at his back, all the way to tavern’s front door.

Out in the street, it was still raining and the daylight had all but given up. A damp gray gloom hung over everything. Ornley had no formal street lighting, even here on League street, one of the town’s main thoroughfares. There was a local ordinance commanding residents to burn candles in their windows during the hours of darkness, but around here this kind of murk apparently didn’t count as dark, so—no candles yet. Egar and the doctor picked their way with care over rain-slick cobbles they could barely make out, and presently the street began to slope downward toward the harbor.

“What will you do if Shendanak does not waken in three days?” Barla asked him when they’d negotiated a hairpin curve that took them out of sight of the tavern.

“I’ll think of something.”

“That’s very reassuring.”

Egar shrugged. “Look on the bright side. Maybe he’ll be up and about day after tomorrow. I didn’t hit him that hard in the head.”

“No, but you did it repeatedly. Which makes it far more like…”

Volume soaking out of Barla’s voice like piss into sand. Then silence. Egar glanced over at him curiously.

Saw where the doctor was staring and followed his gaze, down League street to the next bend, over the low roofs of houses to the harbor waters beyond.

And the big, lean League man-of-war anchored there.


HE SPRINTED THE REST OF THE SLOPE DOWNWARD, LEAVING BARLA PUFFing in his wake. Skidded on greasy cobbles, stayed upright with the long habit of battlefield charges in his past. Around the final curve on League street, where it splayed wide to meet the wharf, down the broad cobbled mound it made, and so out onto the waterfront proper. He let his pace bleed down to a slow jog and came to a halt at the edge of the wharf, staring out at the new arrival.

Trying to calculate exactly how much bad news this might be.

The League ship was a little smaller than Pride of Yhelteth, but with that sole exception, she dominated the harbor. Her bulk dwarfed the few local fishing boats tied up along the southern quay, her lines rebuked the sturdy merchantman build of Pride and Sea Eagle’s Daughter, and she somehow gave the impression of having shunted the moored imperial vessels aside to make room for herself in the center of the little bay. Shielded archer’s platforms armored her railings fore and aft. The cumbersome snout of a war-fire tube poked over her bows like some huge sleeping serpent’s head.

She was anchored squarely across the harbor exit.

Her colors flapped wetly at stern and mainmast—he’d recognized them from that first glimpse up on the hill, had seen plenty like them on the ships in Lanatray harbor a few weeks back, while the expedition restocked provisions and waited on the diplomatic niceties. The eleven-star-and-band combination of the League topped the mainmast, above a bigger flag denoting city of origin—in this case some piece of nonsense involving a gate, a river, sacks of silver, and a couple of large buzzards; Trelayne itself, he recalled. The League flag was repeated at the stern, and dark reddish pennants flew off both secondary masts. He’d seen those before, too; couldn’t remember where. Couldn’t remember what they meant.

Footfalls behind him—he glanced round, saw Barla crossing the deserted wharf at a limping trot, lugging his bag from one hand to the other as he came.

“Sacred Mother of Revelation,” he panted. “What’s that doing here?”

Egar shook his head. “I’d love to believe it’s a standard patrol. But from what we heard in Lanatray, I don’t think they bother with that sort of thing up here. Fits with what Gil told me, too—no one in the League gives a shit about these islands.”

“Apparently they do now.”

“Yeah.”

Movement on Pride of Yhelteth’s main deck. Egar squinted in the failing light, made it for Mahmal Shanta, up out of his cabin for the first time in days, huddled in a heavy blanket and trailed by solicitous slaves. He stood at the starboard rail with a spyglass at his eye, scoping the League vessel. Egar saw him turn to one of his retinue and issue commands. The man bowed and went below again.

“All right, come on.” Egar jogged along the wharf to Pride’s gangplank, waited for Barla to catch him up, and then went aboard. The watchmen waved them through, clearly distracted. Which, Egar reflected grimly, wasn’t good to see in men supposedly trained to marine standard.

We’re all getting way too slack. This place is sapping us. We’re in no shape to

To what?

He joined Mahmal Shanta at the starboard rail.

“Dragonbane.” The old naval engineer did not take the spyglass from his eye. His voice was hoarse with long bouts of coughing. “You’ve seen our new friends, I take it?”

Egar grunted. “Hard to miss.”

“Indeed. Hard to take as coincidence, too. One doubts such savage beauty graces Ornley harbor on a regular basis.”

“Beauty?”

“Beauty.” Reedy emphasis on the word. Shanta lowered the spyglass and looked at the Dragonbane. He’d grown gaunt with his illness, but his eyes still gleamed. “I don’t expect anyone from a horse tribe to appreciate it, but that’s a poem in timber floating out there, a veritable ode to maritime speed and maneuverability. There’s a reason the Empire always comes off worse in naval engagements with the League, and you’re looking at it. Superior design, borne of constant competition between city-states warring for an edge.”

“Right.” Egar gestured. “You know what those red pennants mean?”

“Indeed I do—”

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.”

CHAPTER 6

The 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.”

Archeth drew Quarterless from the sheath in the small of her back. The knife blade glimmered in the low light.

“Where is the sword now?”

“Taken back, my lady.” His eyes were fixed dully on the blade. For one chilly moment, Archeth thought she saw a longing in that gaze that made no distinction between Quarterless cutting his bonds or his throat. “Back to Trelayne. There will be a ceremony. The lodge elder says rejoice, the Aldrain are returning.”

She shivered, not sure if it was his words or the look in his eyes that caused it. She shook it off. Knelt at his side and sliced through the cords binding his legs to the chair. He began to weep, like a small child. The stench from where he’d pissed and shat himself was stronger this close in. She cut the cords off his chest and arms, ripped them loose with unneeded violence. She swallowed hard.

“Go to your family,” she said. “You will not be harmed further. You have my word.”

Critlin staggered upright, clutching at one arm. He limped away into the other room. Archeth stared after him, locked up in a paroxysm of something she could not name.

Menith Tand cleared his throat. “Perhaps, my lady—”

“Give me your purse,” she said distantly.

“I beg your pardon?”

She stirred as if awakening. Turned on him, Quarterless still in her hand. Words like hammered nails into wood. “Give me your motherfucking purse!”

Tand’s lips tightened almost imperceptibly. The same chained rage she’d seen in his eyes at the inn was there again. But he reached carefully beneath his cloak and fished out an amply swollen soft black leather purse. Weighed it gently in the palm of his hand.

“I do not care for your tone, my lady.”

“Yeah?” She reached back and put Quarterless away in its sheath. Safer there, the way she felt right now. “Then take it up with the Emperor when we get back. I’m sure you’ll be able to buy yourself an audience.”

“Yes, no doubt. Using the same funds that have made me a significant sponsor of this expedition—”

She chopped him down. “Of which I am nominated imperial commander. Are you going to give me that purse, or am I going to take it from you?”

Brief stillness between them. The faint reek of shit from the stained torture chair she stood beside. Horseplay commotion from Tand’s men out in the street. Raised voices—they seemed to be squabbling about something. In the next room, the keening went on as if Critlin had never been released.

Tand tossed the purse at her, hard. Two centuries of drilled reflex took it out of the air with knife-fighter aplomb.

“Thank you.”

The slave magnate turned away and headed for the door. He paused, hand on the latch, and looked back at her. The fire was out in his eyes now, and he looked merely—thoughtful.

“You know, my lady—you would be ill-advised to make an enemy of me.”

She should have left it alone, but the krin still sputtered and smoked in her like a pissed-out campfire. The words were out of her mouth before she knew it.

“I think you have that backward, Tand. I’ve seen better than you strapped to an execution board in the Chamber of Confidences.”

He held her gaze for a sober moment, then shrugged.

“Understood,” he said tonelessly. “Thank you for your candor.”

He turned the latch and went outside to his men. Archeth watched the door close on him, then cast about in the dampish, shit-smelling room as if she’d dropped something of value somewhere on the earthen floor. She closed her eyes briefly, too briefly, then forced herself to the door into the next room and the source of the keening. She leaned there in the doorway, curiously unwilling to actually step over the threshold.

On the big sagging bed that constituted the room’s only real furniture, like huddled shipwreck survivors on some fortuitous raft, a young woman sat and hugged two young boys to her. All three had had their clothing torn or sliced apart and now only the woman’s tight embrace held the remnants against their pallid flesh. The eldest boy looked to be about ten or eleven, the younger more like six or seven. Both their faces and bodies were marked, beginning to bruise. The woman’s eyes were closed tight, one swollen cheek was gouged where someone had struck her, most likely with a belt-end or maybe just the back of a heavily ringed hand. Her lips were moving in some voiceless litany, but it was her throat the keening came from, the only sound she made, and she rocked in time with it, back and forth, back and forth, a rigid couple of inches either way.

Critlin was slumped on the ground near the doorway in a way that suggested he’d simply leaned there and slid down the stonework until the floor stopped him. He was less than four feet from his family and staring at them as if they’d just sailed from some harbor quay without him. His left hand reached helplessly out for them, rested on one of his own up-jutting knees, hung there limp and lifeless.

Archeth swallowed and stepped into the room. Crouched at Critlin’s side, tried to fold his nerveless fingers around the purse. “Here. Take this.”

He barely looked at her.

“Take—look, here—just fucking take it, will you?”

The purse hung in his hand a scant second. Then it tugged loose with its own weight, fell from his slackened grip and into the dirt he sat on.

Muffled clink of imperial silver within.

Greetings from the Emperor of All Lands.

She got up and backed out.

Went back through the room they’d tortured Critlin in, as if pushed by a gathering wind. Yanked open the door and stepped out into the murky evening street.

Found a sword tip at her throat.

CHAPTER 7

He woke to the crash of waves and the cold coarse press of damp sand against his cheek. Harsh gray light insisted at his eyelids until he opened them. He blinked, lifted his head, and saw eyes on stalks, watching him from less than a foot away.

Shudder and shiver with the chill.

He pushed himself more or less upright and the crab scuttled away. Seen clearly, it wasn’t much bigger than the palm of his hand. It found a burrow in the sand some distance off and stood half in, half out, still watching him. Ringil sat and stared back for a while, trying to put his head back together.

Along the curve of the beach, away from bonfire glow, she told him the Truth behind Everything, and then he forgot it.


OR MORE PRECISELY, HE DROPS IT, CANNOT HOLD ON TO IT WITH SUFFICIENT strength—the Truth, it turns out, is a delicate, ineffable thing. It will not fit in his head any more than the wind will fit in a helmet. It tumbles and falls away instead. Bruises on impact, like fruit lost off some heavily overladen market barrow, while Ringil Eskiath, sorcerer warlord apparent, runs around grabbing and groping for the scattering, rolling pieces.


HE RUBBED FEROCIOUSLY AT HIS FACE AND FOREHEAD WITH BOTH HANDS, but it was gone, scrubbed away, leaving only a truth-shaped stain on his memory and a loose, sandy feeling in his head.

The rest came back presently, in tawdry chunks—sparse fragments of recall, like soiled pieces of crockery from some lavish feast he’d attended and then been ejected from for lack of sufficiently noble blood.


THEY STEERED YOU AS BEST THEY COULD, SHE TELLS HIM. DAKOVASH AND Kwelgrish, juggling the myriad factors between them, with a little side help now and then from Hoiran and myself. They made the introductions, so to speak. Borrowed scrapings of steppe nomad myth, crafted them into a U-turn just beyond the shadow of death. Your tithe for the Dark Gate, paid. But in the end, we of the Dark Court can only request such passage. Permission is for the Book-Keepers to give or withhold. And even that permission may be qualified, truncated, subject to change.

Ringil’s lip curls. You’ll forgive me if I say this all sounds rather clerkish. The gods of the Dark Court stooping to abject negotiation.

Well, now—most human prayer is exactly that, is it not? He thinks he can hear pique in the dark queen’s voice, and the waves seem to crash a little harder on the sand. Abject negotiation with higher powers for aid, for intercession, for benefits not otherwise obtainable?

Yes, but that’s humans. We’re a conniving, carping bunch.

As above, so below, she says tartly. And since the results have saved your life on more than one occasion, perhaps you should be a little less snide.


HE GOT TO HIS FEET, SWAYING.

The Ravensfriend lay in the sand beside him—evidently at some point he’d taken it off, but he didn’t remember that, either.

He bent, clumsy-limbed with the cold. Gathered the sword to him like the body of some dead and broken lover.


THEY STAND TOGETHER ON A PROMONTORY OVERLOOKING THE OCEAN. They must have climbed there from the beach below, though his memory on this is vague. The sky has darkened, but there’s a loose, buttery glow from the muhn, seeping through the torn-up cloud like a weaker version of band-light, dusting the sea with soft gold. Around them, the wind cuts through the long coarse grass, bending it in circles so it seems to be making obeisance to the dark queen.

You are seeking the Ghost Isle, the Chain’s Last Link. There’s no question in her voice.

Among other things, yes.

You found it a week ago. You have been deceived.

Ringil makes a restless gesture. An island that comes and goes from existence with the wind and weather? With respect, my lady, I’m fairly certain we would have noticed such a thing if we’d stumbled on it.

Would you now? Firfirdar’s eyes glitter in the sparse light. And how exactly would you do that? How would you recognize such an island, unless you had seen it materialize? How, in its manifest form, would it be any different from any other island? Would you expect it to glow with witch fire as the chronicles claim?

No, I’d expect the locals to know about it and be able to point it out to me.

They do. And they did.

You are mistaken, my lady. Outside of myth and old wives tales, the locals made no mention of any island at all. The closest they came was—

And realization dawns. He hears the rough Hironish-accented voice again, one among the many many they’d listened to in and out of Ornley’s taverns until they all began to blur into a single incoherent stream. On approach, Grey Gull may seem a separate island, but do not be deceived. Certain currents cause the inlets to fill enough at certain times to make it so—but you can always cross, at worst you might have to wade waist deep. And most of the time, you won’t even get your boots wet.

He closes his eyes. Oh, for Hoiran’s fucking sake.

Just so. As I said, you have been deceived. More specifically, you have been tricked into thinking that a legend distorted over millennia of telling and retelling can still be taken literally.

It comes and goes with the weather, Ringil said heavily, laying it out like some theological proof. There’s an island there, then it’s gone—because there’s a peninsula in its place. I’m going to fucking drown that Helmsman.

The Helmsmen have agendas of their own. It would be a mistake to believe they are your friends.

He snorts. Yeah, they told me the same thing about you.


HE SLUNG THE RAVENSFRIEND ACROSS HIS BACK BY ITS HARNESS AND FELT immediately somewhat better. The ache the truth had left in him receded, became more or less manageable. He’d had worse hangovers.

He cast about, trying to get his bearings. The beach wasn’t one he recognized, either from his time in the Grey Places or anywhere he’d been in more prosaic realms. But the landscape behind was a close match for what he’d seen of the Hironish isles so far—windswept and low-lying, not much in the way of trees, some low rock outcroppings and what looked like cliffs out at one distant headland. He wondered for a brief moment if Firfirdar had sent him back to Grey Gull peninsula with his newly minted understanding, to finally face the Illwrack Changeling. He dismissed the idea after a moment’s groggy thought.

We dug that grave up. It had a sheep in it.

For a moment, it seemed he recalled the dark queen advising him that looking for the Illwrack Changeling’s corpse was in itself a mistake, a waste of time. But he couldn’t be sure. There was too much missing around the ragged wound in his memory where the gift tore loose.

Yeah, yeah. You had the truth, and then you dropped it, and it broke. Poets weep, the sky falls down. Get a fucking grip, Gil.

He shook his head to clear it. Found a high point on the spine of the land behind him and started walking toward it.

The churned-up memories scampered after him.


YES, YOU MAY ASK.

What? She’s fallen behind so he turns to look back at her. Ask what?

She grins, not fooled. The question that echoes through your thoughts so clearly. All those adolescent evenings at temple back in Glades House Eskiath—you remember the cant. Now you’re wondering how much truth lies in it. You’re wondering—does the dark queen really grant favors to those bold enough to face her and ask?

They face each other across a half dozen steps in the sand. The wind buffets noisily between them. It’s a tense little moment.

Well? Ringil gestures impatiently. Does she?

It has been known. What would you ask for, supplicant?

He grimaces at the epithet. Hesitates, then plunges in. Grashgal the Wanderer told me once that the Ravensfriend will hang behind museum glass in a city where there is no war.

That is one possible end for it, yes. I ask again—what do you want?

He swaps the grimace for a weary smile, and turns away. His words trail back over his shoulder like a scarf caught up in the wind. Well, if you can really catch the echo of my thoughts, Mistress of Dice and Death, then you already know that.

Ah, grim and gritty little Ringil Eskiath. Yes, walk away, why don’t you? And then, abruptly, she’s close at his side again, voice intimate, a caressing whisper at his ear. The fractured heavens forbid that Gil Eskiath should ever beg a favor of anybody, even of the gods themselves. That he should ever show weakness or need. How unbecoming that would be in the scarred bearer of the dread blade Ravensfriend. Oh yes, I can see why they both like you so much.

He kept his eyes straight ahead, kept walking. Voice just about steady. Like I said, if you can catch the echo of my thoughts—

You want to go there. It’s out in a rush, and then Firfirdar is abruptly silent. She seems, in some indefinable way, to have surprised herself. For just a moment, her tone grows almost wondering. They’re right, you do it every fucking time. Alright, Ringil Eskiath, you want to play the game that way, let’s lay down those pathetic cards you’re holding. What do you want? What is your heart’s desire? You want to go there, to that city without war. You want to live out the rest of your days in the peace it offers. Standard twilight-of-a-warrior happy ending shit. Your basic profession-of-violence retirement dream. There. Satisfied? Did the goddess read your mind? Or did she read your mind?

It’s his turn to be silent, oddly embarrassed to hear his own barely conscious longing laid out so brutally naked in words. He clears his throat to chase the quiet away.

Grashgal told me there was no way to reach it. He said the quick paths are too twisted for a mortal to take, and the straight path is too long.

True as far as it goes, yes.

He glances sideways at her. But?

But it misses the larger point. Grashgal’s vision was incomplete. Like so many of his Kiriath kin, he never fully recovered from the passage through the veins of the Earth and the gifts it inflicted. He had the sight, but not the critical instinct to interpret it well. In the case of the Ravensfriend, he saw the resting place, but not how it came to be. He did not appreciate the irony of that sword in that museum.

For what it’s worth, nor do I. You want to explain in words a mere mortal can understand?

Well, irony really does better unelaborated, but if you insist. The dark queen’s voice drifts, as if reciting some empty cant. The city you speak of will be built—will stand in all its undeserved serenity—on the bones of a billion unjust, unremembered deaths. Its foundation stones are mortared with the blood of ten thousand suffering generations that no one there recalls or cares about. Its citizens live out their safe, butterfly lives in covered gardens and brilliant halls without the slightest idea or interest in how they came to have it all. She comes abruptly back to the here and now. Turns and flashes him a hard little smile. Do you really think that you could stand to live among such people?

Ringil shrugs. I lived among my own people nine years after the war. Most couldn’t forget the past fast enough. The fortunate among them spend their lives now forgetting the misery their good fortune squats upon. If I have to live amid ignorance, I’ll take a people who’ve forgotten what suffering is any day over a society that eats, sleeps, and breathes it daily and still turns a blind eye to the pain.

Very well. She walks ahead of him now, raising her voice a little. Then ask yourself another question, hero. Do you think they could stand to have you in their midst—a bloody-handed monster, a living, breathing reminder of all they do not appreciate or understand?

I’m used to that, too, he says curtly.

They’ve reached the end of the beach’s sweep. A darkened tumble of rock looms ahead of them, fringed along its edges with the luminous shatter of waves. Windblown spray from the breakers dampens the air, puts a faint sheen on everything. The dark queen picks her way up onto the outcrop without apparent effort, turns and beckons him after her.

Disappears.

He follows awkwardly, places each booted step with care on the wet, unyielding tilt of the rocks. A couple of times, he slips and curses, nearly goes over—the long habit of battlefield poise keeps him up. Further along, with some relief, he finds small pale expanses of barnacles he can gain some crunching purchase on. His steps firm up.

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.


FROM 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.


LET 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.


HE 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.


RISGILLEN OF ILLWRACK TOLD ME SHE NEGOTIATED WITH THE DARK COURT 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.

She looks at him like a doting mother. No, you aren’t. You are not made that way.

All blades have a breaking point. It’s a line from his treatise on modern warfare, the one no one in Trelayne would touch with a publishing barge pole. All men, too.

Firfirdar inclines her head. You are all made to run yourselves against the grindstone, true enough. But some take longer to wear down than others, and some give out brighter sparks. You shower incandescence at every unyielding turn, Ringil.

I won’t do it, he says quickly.

You won’t do what?

Whatever it is you want. I won’t take up your fucking tools and be your cat’s paw. Not anymore.

She breaks out into soft, throaty laughter. It’s as if he told a very sophisticated joke, and the punch line has only just dawned on her.

Oh Ringil, she says fondly. That’s not how it works. You should know that by now. I do not send you back to the world with instructions. I offer only guidance, I tell you only what you might anyway wish to know.

Which is what?

Another regal shrug. That Ornley is fallen in your absence, that your friends are now captive and your enemies lie in wait. That war is declared and battle soon to be joined. That the Aldrain are bringing the Talons of the Sun to light the skies once more with the glare from a myriad undeserved deaths—unless you can stop the machine in time. She gestures cheerfully. Things like that.

You think you’ll hook me again? He manages a shaky laugh. He clears his throat, clears out the hoarseness in his voice. You’ve had your fun, you and the court both. I broke Risgillen for you. But that’s the end of it. Show’s over, time to go home. I am done playing this game.

But the dark queen only shakes her head.

No, she tells him gently. You’re only just beginning.


PROPPED UP TO PEER CAUTIOUSLY OVER THE RIDGE ONCE MORE, HE watched himself poke about in the long grass along the ruined wall of the croft. Watched himself step over the threshold of a doorway that barely existed. Watched the uncertain storm-light gather there nonetheless, and wrap itself in some indefinable way around his black-cloaked form.

Watched it fold him somehow away.

When he was sure the scar-faced sorcerer assassin had really gone, he got himself upright and scuttled down the grassy bank to the path. He stood there, eyes fixed on the croft doorway, until his vision blotched with the imagined lines and angles of its shape, and his head was wiped clean of everything but the white, rinsed-out whisper of the wind.

He wondered dizzily—the thought went fleeting half unformed, through his head like a cold-sweat twinge of pain—what if he followed himself through that doorway? What would he find on the other side, what would he have to face?

He turned hastily away.

Blinked to clear his vision, and hurried down the path after the marines.

CHAPTER 8

Archeth had a one brief, blind moment in which to curse Menith Tand for a traitorous piece of shit. Then she saw him on the other side of the narrow street, pinioned by armed men in unfamiliar garb, and she woke up to what was really happening.

The sword at her throat belonged to a grim-faced stranger.

“Easy there,” she told him, lifting hands wide and well away from her knives. “Let’s not get off on the wrong foot.”

The flat of the blade chucked her roughly under the chin. She had to rise on tiptoe to avoid getting cut.

“Shut your fucking face, sorceress.”

He spoke Naomic, and she realized she had done, too—some reflexive carryover from her words with Critlin before she walked out into the street. But even without the exchange, she’d have made this one for a northerner right off. Pale faced and craggy featured, none too clean smelling. The blade at her throat was a League navy cutlass, shorter and chunkier than anything you’d get out of an Empire smithy, and the man’s clothing was cut from drab shades of gray and green no self-respecting imperial would have been seen dead in. There was a woolen seaman’s cap crammed onto his head, a cheap metal badge in the shape of a cross pinned into the cloth.

Up on tiptoe, Archeth was unable to focus on the design of the badge, but she didn’t need to. She already knew what it depicted—a rolled and sealed scroll crossed with a cutlass not unlike the one now nestling under her chin. Letter of marque and a blade.

Privateers.

“I think you’re making a mistake,” she said conversationally. “We are a licensed and authorized—”

“Sogren, get over here.” Her captor didn’t turn to speak to his comrade. The eyes behind the cutlass blade stayed narrow on her the whole time. “Come and take this fucking witch’s knives off her before she starts getting any ideas. Check her over good.”

Sogren was bigger than his companion, a capless, long-haired giant with a face that looked oddly cheery despite the various scars it bore. He carried no blades, had only a long sealing club slung at his belt, but he didn’t look like he’d need much else in a fight. He collected her weapons with the brusque efficiency of long custom—unbuckled the harness that held the knives sheathed about her waist and at her breast, lifted it away in one hand entire, then bent and took Falling Angel out of her boot. He handed everything off to someone else she couldn’t see clearly, then went over her body with blunt-fingered care, pressing and prodding for hidden blades, inevitably taking the opportunity to grope her between the legs and squeeze approvingly at her breasts. Swell of chuckling as his companions saw it. She bit her tongue, stared straight ahead, submitted, because, realistically, what else was she going to do right now? Sogren finished up his fun, checked through her stiffly braided hair with his fingertips, stepped back, and nodded.

“We’re good. Nothing on her.”

The cutlass under her chin dropped a grudging couple of inches. She was able to look around and take in the full extent of the shit they were in.

The street was thronged with the drab privateer uniforms. She counted two dozen in her first sweep, possibly there were more. She saw crossbows, cocked and leveled, a variety of unsheathed steel. Tand’s men must have been overwhelmed on the instant, no chance to stand and fight or even run. Then the privateers had simply waited on Tand to come out, and then her. It showed an admirable level of patience and tactical smarts she didn’t generally associate with the League’s licensed pirates, whose depredations up and down Yhelteth’s coasts in earlier years had been legendary for senseless bloodletting and terror.

She heard the clop of horse’s hooves, coming steadily up the darkened street. Saw how the men stiffened around her at the sound. She turned gingerly to face the new arrival, mindful of the blade still hovering at her chest.

An explanation of sorts offered itself.

The rider wore the martial colors of Trelayne—rich cream cloak bordered in sunset red, the tunic in blue slashed across with the same tones of red and cream. There was a lightweight open helm on his head and the spike of a broadsword pommel over his left shoulder. A second, shorter sword was sheathed at his hip. And he was flanked by six men in skirmish ranger attire—Trelayne’s nearest equivalent to the Throne Eternal.

Privateers or not, the newcomers looked to be under formal military command.

She met Menith Tand’s gaze across the street. The slaver raised one eyebrow, nodded down to where his captors’ hands still had him firmly pinned. He shrugged apologetically.

And you, in any case, are expedition leader, Archidi

She made eye contact with the man behind the cutlass, pitched her voice for calm and command. “I’ll speak with your commander now. You may stand down.”

The man bared his teeth at her, made a noise in his throat like a wary hound. But he voiced no actual objection, and when she lifted—slowly, slowly—one loosely curled hand and gently pushed his blade aside, he let it happen. She stepped out into the center of the street, just as the Trelayne knight reined in. She made a brief dip of obeisance, just enough to meet etiquette, then drew herself up.

“My lord, I am kir-Archeth Indamaninarmal, imperial envoy of his majesty Jhiral Khimran the Second of Yhelteth, and leader of an accredited expedition in good faith to the Hironish isles, as licensed by the city council of Lanatray in certain letters of—”

“Yeah, good.” The rider waved it away with one gauntleted hand. He leaned forward on the pommel of his saddle, seemingly fascinated by what he saw. “Been looking for you, my lady. Glad we found you so easily, in fact. I’d not want an officer of the southern court to come to any unwarranted harm, even in these times.”

These times?

“You have not given us your name, sire.” Menith Tand, apparently also let free by his captors and now standing haughtily at Archeth’s side. “Which is, at a minimum, our diplomatic due. Perhaps you would care to remedy your lack of manners?”

The mounted man scratched under his helm at the back. Grinned. “You’d be Tand, right? The slaver? Yeah, they said you was a scrawny, arrogant fuck.”

Tand grew very still.

“Klithren of Hinerion.” The helm came off, doffed as if it were some peasant’s cloth cap. The head beneath was recently shaven, showing less growth than the man’s stubbly beard. One ear was chopped and notched from some past near miss. “Knight supplemental in the united land armies of the Trelayne League. I’m not much for protocol, I’m afraid. But I have a feeling that’s why they sent me.”

“This is an outrage,” said Tand coldly. “I have good friends in the Trelayne Chancellery, Captain Klithren. I’m not entirely sure how you managed to attain your present commission, but I assure you, your lack of respect will not be allowed to stand. I will see you whipped for this.”

Klithren sighed.

“Sogren.” He raised an arm, snapped his fingers, and beckoned. “Explain the situation to my lord Tand, would you? Without breaking anything.”

Archeth turned just in time to see the giant who’d searched her earlier come up behind Tand with a grin. He grabbed the slaver by the hair, yanked him about, and punched him solidly in the belly. Tand grunted with shock, sagged, and would have fallen to the floor if Sogren hadn’t still been holding him up by his immaculately groomed gray locks. The giant landed another punch and Tand threw up, hung there by Sogren’s grip on his hair with vomit spilling down over his chin and onto his clothes. Sogren clubbed him solidly back and forth across the face three times, let him drop to the cobbles, and then put the boot in with judicious, repeated force until Tand stopped trying to get up.

Klithren of Hinerion fitted his helm carefully back on his head.

“We are at war, my lady. My lord. Empire forces took my home city by storm nine weeks ago yesterday. The League has responded with a formal declaration of unity in the face of imperial aggression. Armed levy to be raised in every city, an army of liberation to march on Hinerion before season’s end. All imperial citizens found within the borders of the League to be detained pending exchange or ransom.” A wintry smile. “Or trial and execution for spying.”

Archeth gaped up at him. “You what?”

“As you heard, my lady. You are now my prisoners under terms of war.” Klithren nodded to Sogren, and the giant hauled Menith Tand upright with no more effort than you’d use picking up a saddlebag. Klithren looked the slave magnate over. “As my prisoners, you can expect to be treated with the courtesy that befits your station. Provided, of course, that you observe that same courtesy yourselves. Got that, my lord Tand?”

Tand’s lips moved but nothing audible came out. He made a jerked coughing sound and tried to collapse again. Sogren grinned and held him up.

“I’ll take that as a yes.” Klithren glanced at Archeth. “Yes, my lady, you have a question?”

“I, yes, I—for what cause?” Her head still whirling, krinzanz fogged. “The assault on Hinerion—what cause was given?”

Klithren sniffed and rubbed at his stubbled chin. “Well, not that it much matters—we all know you lot been spoiling for another fight ever since Vanbyr—but the charge given was murder of an imperial legate and impeding the actions of imperial authority in bringing the culprits to justice. Which I think your ladyship would agree is pretty fucking thin as an excuse to tear up a whole city.”

She stopped herself nodding, just. Her thoughts skittered about like panicked rats, seeking logical bolt-holes from the madness.

What the fuck are you playing at down there, Jhiral?

Who’s been pouring poison into your ears while I’m gone? Which buggered excuse for an imperial counselor thought this shit was a good idea?

Citadel pressure?

Impossible. Following the death of Pashla Menkarak and the collapse of the Afa’marag temple cabal, the Citadel Mastery had been meek as a gaggle of fresh-bought harem initiates. Jhiral had them eating out of his hand when she left.

Shield-beating at the Empire’s edge, then?

But garrison command on the marches was chosen with exactly that kind of risk in mind. The commanders were shrewd and sanguine to a man, the cream of Yhelteth’s officer class even in these pinched times. None of them would be so stupid.

Did something else force your hand?

Is there something new in play, something I missed?

Not for the first time since they arrived in the Hironish isles, Archeth had the dizzying-urgent sense that she was in the wrong place. That somewhere, a serious miscalculation had been made, and now they were all going to pay.

“And so.” Klithren leaned forward on his saddle once more, eyes fixed directly on Archeth’s face, holding her gaze. “To our next point of business. I’d be grateful if you’d confirm for me the continued presence on this expedition of the Trelayne renegade and declared outlaw Ringil Eskiath.”


“YOU DID NOT KNOW OF THIS, MY LADY?”

In the low yellow light from the tavern lamps, Klithren watched her shrewdly for reaction. She made her face stone. Shrugged.

“I knew he wasn’t getting on well with his family.”

“That’s putting it mildly.” He leaned forward on the table, poured wine for them both. Around them, his men bustled about the business of setting up billets with the landlord and getting drinks of their own. “His family have disowned him before the Chancellery. Gingren Eskiath has declared him outlaw and forsworn blood vengeance on anyone who brings in his son’s head. Cheers. Your very good health.”

Archeth left her brimming goblet where it was, though she, too, was forced to huddle into the table somewhat. It was a small tavern, basically someone’s converted kitchen in a farmhouse on the outer corner of the drover’s road where it came into town. There wasn’t a lot of space with Klithren’s men milling around.

“Curious,” she said. “At Lanatray his mother was quite civil. Helpful even. We were guests at her residence for a week and she said nothing of this. In fact, I’m told it was her word in council that expedited our license to come here.”

“Well—mothers with their sons.” Klithren made her a tight little smile as he sipped his wine alone. “Never had a mother myself, but I’ve known a few. Women often lack the mettle to do what is needful. They don’t deal well with the harsher realities of life.”

“Is that a fact?”

“And, frankly, Lanatray’s pretty much a one-horse town. Been the lady Ishil’s summer residence for a couple of decades now. I hear she dominates the place like Firfirdar on the throne. Of course, the outlaw proclamation is Trelayne’s alone, so Lanatray is no more obliged to recognize it than any other League city. But still, it was smart of Ringil, putting in there. Took a couple of weeks before the news leaked back to Trelayne.”

“Lanatray was five hundred miles closer along the coast.” She tried to keep the annoyance out of her voice, because, whore’s breath and fuck it, Gil should have told her this shit ahead of time—not left her to find it out secondhand from some hacked-about over-the-hill League captain with a bounty gleam in his eye. “Since we were told any incorporated city may issue license of passage for the whole League territory, there was no need for us to cover the extra distance.”

A sober nod. “Yeah. And, but for the war, that license would have been a fine pair of balls to wave in Gingren’s face. Nice trick, really. Show up on your dad’s doorstep an accredited imperial officer and dare him to do something about it.”

“Do you see everything in such childish personal terms?”

“In my experience, my lady, the whole stinking dung cart of history is hauled along on such childish personal terms.” Klithren grimaced, as if surprised by his own sudden reach into gravitas. He shrugged. “In any case, I think it’s safe to say your comrade is some significant distance past getting on badly with his family. House Eskiath has cast him out utterly. They have named him outlaw. Seen the declaration of amnesty from blood vengeance myself, and Gingren Eskiath’s seal is on it. Ringil’s own father wants him dead.”

“And so do you.” Challenging him with her eyes.

Klithren made a throwaway gesture. “I am charged with bringing him to Trelayne in chains. If he sees fit to surrender, that’s what I’ll do.” His voice hardened. “But if he wants a fight, he can have that instead, and I’ll settle for his head in a bounty bag. Now where is he?”

She touched the goblet’s base with a finger. Grinned down at the scarred wooden table it stood on. Prodded circular ripples awake in the wine.

“Something amuses you, my lady?”

“Yes, my lord Klithren. You amuse me, if you think you’re going to take Ringil back to Trelayne in a bounty bag.”

“Are you refusing to tell me where he is?”

“Not at all. I’m warning you what to expect when you find him.”

Klithren rubbed at his mutilated ear. “I do this for a living, my lady. I fought at Hinerion and Baldaran during the war, and since then I’ve been gainfully employed hunting outlaws for both the League and you imperials at Tlanmar. In fifty-nine I brought in five of the Silverleaf Brotherhood single-handed.”

“I’m afraid I have no idea what that implies,” Archeth said politely. “Were they dangerous men?”

“The Tlanmar garrison commander thought so. Dangerous enough to pay three hundred elementals a head. And one of them claimed to be a black mage, just like your friend.” Another shrug. “Didn’t help him much, when the steel came out.”

“I’ve never heard Ringil Eskiath claim to be a black mage.” Still she toyed with the goblet, still she did not pick it up. “But I have seen him stand and kill things that would turn most men’s bowels to jelly.”

“Yeah—the Hero of Gallows Gap, the Scourge of the Scaled Folk, Last Man Standing on the Walls of Trelayne. Heard it all before, my lady, out of a thousand flapping mouths, most of whom were never actually there. But you know what? When I last encountered this war hero he was skulking behind an assumed name and denial of his origins, and the only way he could best me was to strike me down from behind, under cover of false camaraderie.”

A jagged pause. Klithren had not quite been shouting when he stopped, but the quiet that followed was tight with the rise in his voice. At the other tables in the tavern, his men paused in their drinking and chatter and glanced toward their leader. Archeth nodded.

“I see. So it would be fair to say, my lord, that your interest here is personal.”

“I am here on assignment from the Trelayne Chancellery,” said Klithren stiffly. “To secure the Hironish isles against invading forces, to dispatch or detain all enemies of the League discovered therein. Speaking of which, I think it’s time we cut the courtier pleasantries and I get on with my job. So I’ll ask you once more, politely, and hope you’ll give me a straight answer this time, because I’d not want to put a noble captive to the question quite this early in the game—now where is Ringil Eskiath?”

She picked up the wine, examined it intently. “Along the coast somewhere. Searching for a grave that probably isn’t there. Your good health, sir.”

Klithren watched her drink, nodding. Waited until she set the goblet down.

“Do you think you could you be a little more fucking vague, my lady?” Leaning in with a sudden, fierce grin. “Only—I have a few hundred men at my disposal and I worry that along the coast somewhere may not quite soak up all their efforts.”

She tucked away the little nugget of information he’d let slip. She shrugged. “I believe Dragon’s Demise sailed north from here.”

Klithren hung there, still leaned in over the table toward her. Something old and unkind glittered in his eyes.

“You are not taking me seriously, my lady.”

“My lord Klithren, I assure you I am. I was otherwise occupied the day Ringil Eskiath departed, I did not see him sail.” True enough—otherwise occupied shivering and hugging yourself in your bunk, waiting out a krinzanz crash that made it feel like your eyeballs might fall out of your skull if you moved your head too suddenly. “Others did, however, and I shall instruct them to answer your questions openly. I believe they’ll tell you that Dragon’s Demise took sail northward along the coast, but I cannot personally vouch for that fact.”

“You show so little interest, then, in your officers’ comings and goings?”

She built him a weary smile. “We are not a military expedition, my lord. Lanatray would hardly have permitted us passage if we were. We are explorers and scientists.”

“Yes. And latterly torturers, it seems.”

She left that where it was. “If Ringil Eskiath has deceived the imperial court as to his status in the League, then he has done my command a grave disservice, and I have no interest in protecting him from his enemies. As I said, I believe you will find him to the north.”

Klithren held her gaze pinned for a moment. Not many men could look her in the eye so long and hard. Then he sat back in his chair.

“All right. How many men are with him?”

She gestured apologetically. “Again, my lord. I cannot be precise. But let’s see; full crew for Dragon’s Demise; a substantial detachment of imperial marines. Say about eighty in all? Maybe a hundred?”

She saw how he worked to hide his disquiet. “A lot of men to dig up a grave, my lady. What were you expecting to find—a barrow full of guardian undead?”

She shrugged again. “These are unfamiliar climes for us. We try not to take unnecessary chances.”

“Hmm. And these imperial marines of yours—are they amenable to reason? Will they stand down if challenged under League authority?”

Archeth drank again, deeply—harsh metallic taste to the cheap wine as it went down. But she’d had time now to fumble through the new hand they’d all been dealt, and she saw only one useful way it could be played. She emptied the goblet and put it down.

“They will if I tell them to,” she said.

CHAPTER 9

“You fucking what?”

Egar, bristling, still had eyes to see Archeth flinch at the hissed fury in his voice. But she rallied pretty quick.

“You need to calm down,” she told him. “If we’re going to turn this thing around, we have to be smart. We need to think things through.”

Well, maybe. But right now, he was in no fucking mood for strategy. He’d just spent an unpalatable half hour talking the Majak down from a suicidal last stand around the sleeping body of Klarn Shendanak. Now he stood downstairs in the inn on League street, face knotted up with mingled shame and rage, watching his countrymen hand over their killing iron to Klithren’s skirmish ranger elite without a fight.

Like you had some other choice.

The privateer incursion had been meticulously planned and now it yielded near enough a perfect victory. Aside from a couple of messy skirmishes with some die-hard Throne Eternal—whose bodies now lay heaped together, pin-cushioned through with arrows and crossbow bolts, on the cobbled street outside—this Klithren fuck had rolled up the imperial forces almost without incident.

“I am thinking things through,” he snapped at Archeth. “We’re fucked in the arse and you’ve just sold Gil out like a barrel of gone-over ale.”

“Keep your voice down.”

She took his arm. He shook her off angrily.

“We should have seen this coming, we should have fucking seen it coming!”

“How?” She came around to face him, voice low and urgent. “War declared out of nowhere, and a flotilla sent chasing up here after us before the declaration ink is even dry. Tell me how we could have seen that coming, Eg.”

Egar drew a deep breath and held it in. Let go his anger with a growl. It got a couple of wary looks from among the League men, but they soon looked away again, when they saw he presented no threat. Went back to their drinking or their card games or simply watching with fascinated gaze this bloodless humbling of the dread barbarians from the Majak steppe.

“You don’t want to worry too much about being overhead,” he muttered. “Pirate scum like this, they won’t speak Tethanne worth a shaman’s fuck.”

“Yeah? Klithren, for your information, almost certainly has fluent Tethanne. He’s been careful enough not to show it to me, but he let slip that he grew up in Hinerion, and apparently he’s worked both sides of the border as a bounty hunter. There’s no way you get by in that world without Naomic and Tethanne both. And chances are he’s brought a few other schooled borderlanders up here with him, too. So keep your fucking voice down.

“All right.” Muttering tightly now. “But I still don’t see how selling Gil out is supposed to help.”

Dull crumping clunk like emphasis, as the next Majak in the line dumped his ax and knives onto the table in front of Klithren’s armorer. The skirmish ranger ran a rapid professional hand over the tangle of sheaths and belts and steel, calling it to the man seated at his side with pen and parchment. Ax—machete—couple of knives, and—what’s this—oh, right, blade-edged bolas. Nice. He indicated where the Majak should ink his thumb and make mark on the parchment, then nodded him aside. Next.

The Majak turned away, fixed Egar with a baleful, blaming stare, and spat in the sawdust on the floor. But he went quietly enough, out the door under guard to whatever makeshift lockup Klithren’s men had cobbled together for the defeated rank and file.

Great. Just fucking great.

“I haven’t sold Gil out,” Archeth said patiently. “All I’ve done is give Klithren information he could have had from the locals in about five minutes anyway. The whole town saw Dragon’s Demise set sail north. The whole town knows what we’re doing here. But you want to know the interesting thing?”

He puffed out a disinterested breath. “Sure. Tell me the interesting thing.”

“Klithren already knew.”

“Knew what?

“Knew we were busy digging up graves. I told him Gil was up the coast looking for a grave that might not be there. He never blinked. He already knew.”

Egar shrugged. “So he had advance scouts, and they already talked to the locals.”

“No, I don’t think so. It doesn’t fit. Look, Eg, I can see a man like Klithren working a grudge, hearing about the expedition from someone in Lanatray and coming up here after Gil on his own hook. I can even see someone—Gil’s father, some slave merchant or other with an ax to grind—paying him to do it. Outfitting him for the trip. But a fucking flotilla? Hundreds of men? Diverted a thousand miles north of Trelayne, when the fight’s shaping up nearly five hundred miles south? That takes major resources. Connections. Yeah, maybe Klithren blagged himself the command, but someone in Trelayne made this happen, someone with a lot of rank and influence. And you know what that means, right?”

Egar nodded. “There was something here to find all along.”

“Yeah. And they were afraid we’d find it.”

“Oi, dragonfucker!”

It was one of the privateers by the table, a youngish-looking thug, built in the chest and arms, possessed of a raucous Naomic drawl that carried. Conversation elsewhere in the tavern petered out at the sound. Egar gave him a measured look.

“You talking to me?”

“Yeah—what you so busy boiling up with that midnight bitch? Cooking up your fucking escape, are you? Pack that in if you are, you’re both of you fucking done.”

Egar grimaced at Archeth, left her in the corner, and advanced deliberately toward the table. He heard a couple of low whoops from the spectators, anticipatory glee for the fight that looked to be brewing. And every Majak eye in the room was on him—the queue of those still to be disarmed rustled and muttered, the armed men around them tensed. Egar nailed the privateer who’d spoken with a hard stare, tapped fingers on the broad red-silk ribbon tied around his upper right arm.

“See this?” he asked the man coldly. “Me and that midnight bitch, we’re both prisoners-in-honor to your commanding officer. So you want to watch your step, son. Else I reckon he’ll kick your ignorant bilge-rat arse all the way down to the harbor and in.”

The privateer leered. “Oh yeah?”

“Yeah.” Aping the leer, mocking it. “And something else. That midnight bitch? Been my comrade-in-arms since you were a pissing, shitting bundle at your mother’s tit. You got the balls to take off your steel, I’ll give you a spanking for lack of respect, right here and now.”

It played well—approving laughter sounded loud across the room, much of it from the same men who’d whooped low before. The privateer’s face mottled and he clamped a hand on his sword hilt. But one of Klithren’s skirmish rangers stepped in. He locked the other man’s hand down and shoved him back, eye to eye, voice a corrosive low-toned hiss. Egar didn’t hear exactly what was said, but the wind went out of the younger man like wine from a slashed skin. The ranger twisted his hand off the sword hilt, let him go with another contemptuous shove. Looked back to Egar and made an apologetic gesture.

“He’s young, Dragonbane, what are you going to do? Let’s just try to keep things civilized, shall we?”

“Suits me,” Egar lied.

He rejoined Archeth in the shadowy corner of the room. Kept his voice to a murmur that didn’t suit the words he uttered or the low pounding in his blood.

“All right, so what was there to find that has them scurrying up here after us? Tell me that much, please, because it sure as shit isn’t anything we’ve managed to dig up so far. The graves have all been empty of anything worth having. Your Kiriath city in the ocean isn’t here. And this dwenda Vanishing Isle is living up to its fucking name. So what else is there?”

“There’s a sword,” she began.

“A sword?” Voice tight with disbelief. “You’re telling me we came all this way for a fucking sword?”

“Just listen, Eg.”


HE LISTENED.

They got a table, off in an alcove, ordered drinks for show, and watched the tail end of the Majak queue get stripped of their weapons. Egar slumped moodily in his chair, not entirely for show. The wine tasted bitter and iron on his tongue. He barely sipped at it, felt nonetheless as if he’d downed the whole bottle. He was dizzy with the implications of the last four hours, and nothing Archeth was saying made much useful sense.

“Look.” Hands down on the tabletop in an attempt to stop the spinning. “If they’ve already got this sword—already got away with it—then why send this lot up here afterward?”

“I don’t know,” Archeth admitted. “Maybe it’s bad communication. Ringil told me there’s a cabal at the heart of things in Trelayne, and he thinks they’re the ones who had dealings with the dwenda. Said he thinks the Trelayne Chancellery didn’t necessarily know about it. Maybe the cabal sent for the sword, but they haven’t let the Chancellery know it’s in the bag.”

Egar scowled. “That’s pretty fucking thin. Why would they do something like that?”

“All right, then maybe the ship with the sword never made it back. Maybe they got wrecked on the way home and the sword’s at the bottom of the ocean. Or washed up somewhere on the Wastes coast. It doesn’t much matter, does it? The point is they’re here and they want Gil—”

“Yeah, and you’ve told them where to find him.”

“What I’ve done is buy us a little time, and a fighting chance. We’ve got prisoner-in-honor status, flexibility to come and go within reason. And tomorrow at first light, Klithren is going to rig up and sail north after Gil. He’s going to split his forces to do it, and he’s going to take me with him.”

He shot her a skeptical look. “He told you that?”

“He didn’t have to. He’s got a hard-on for Gil like a fucking tent pole.”

“Ought to make the man happy,” Egar said sourly. “But if Klithren’s spoiling for that much of a fight, I don’t see him taking you along to talk the marines down.”

“You didn’t see his face when I gave him the numbers.” Archeth cut him a grim little smile. “Eg, this isn’t some meathead bounty hunter we’re dealing with. This guy’s built himself a knight’s commission and a naval command on a war only nine weeks old. That makes him pretty fucking smart.”

“Yeah. Smart enough to take us all up the arse before we saw it coming.”

She lost her smile. “Agreed. And we were slack, and we were stupid, and we deserved to get fucked over the way we did. Now can we stop wailing and beating our breasts about it, and for fuck’s sake concentrate on getting out of this mess instead?”

A flicker of old admiration woke in him. Archeth Indamaninarmal sat there across from him in all her battered glory. The woman who’d pulled him out of a jail cell, out from under certain death back in Yhelteth last year. The woman who’d rallied the engineers at Demlarashan when the dragon came. The krinzanz crash was there in all the jerky gestures she made, in the dark smears under her eyes and the hollow stare—but something else coiled there, too, at the core of it all, and he would have trusted that something at his back in a fight on foot with steppe ghouls.

He cleared his throat. Nodded.

“I’m still listening.”

“Good to know.” Maybe she’d seen the change in him. She leaned in a little closer. “Klithren grew up in the borders, so he knows a little something about imperial marines. And he probably saw them in action during the war as well. End result, he won’t want to get in a fight with them if he can avoid it. So he’ll take me with him, but he’ll take a fair few of his pirate pals as well, just in case. He’ll leave a rump force here because he figures this battle is won. At which point—it’s up to you and Rakan to prove him wrong.”

She sat back. He went on looking at her.

“You put all this together off one conversation with this Klithren? On the fly, while you were still talking to him?”

“More or less, yeah.” She rubbed at one eye with a knuckle. Sniffed. “Why?”

“Nothing, it’s, uh…”

“Oh, right. You think that’s fancy footwork?” She gave him a weary smile. “Try a hundred and fifty years at the imperial court.”

He scooted a surreptitious glance around the room. Now the disarmament of the Majak was done, they were getting more attention from the victorious privateers in the tavern lounge. But none of it amounted to more than muttering and speculative looks, and both died away as soon as he glanced in their direction. No one was listening in, nor realistically could have been, as near as he could judge.

“All right, so young Noyal and I turn the tables here. What then?”

“You get the fuck out of Ornley. Take back Pride and Sea Eagle’s Daughter, burn anything else in the harbor to the waterline. Tell Shanta he’s to run south under full sail. Skip Lanatray, skip anything bigger than a village you can scare. Reprovision fast, and then swing out wide around the Gergis cape. If there’s a League cordon, it’ll be sticking close to the coast; you should slip by them easily enough.”

“And you?”

“Don’t worry about me.”

“I’m supposed to be your fucking bodyguard, Archidi.”

It drew a smile from her, and for a moment she bowed her head in homage to something he couldn’t quite work out. Then she looked up, and her face was set.

“Look, Eg,” she said quietly. “Maybe this business about the sword is so much superstitious horseshit, just like the Illwrack Changeling, just like the Vanishing Isle. But if it isn’t—if the sword really is some talisman for bringing back the dwenda, then the Empire needs to know what’s coming. And that means you have to get home, with or without me.”

Egar shook his head. “The Empire’s on a war footing already. And if Jhiral’s not expecting dwenda to the feast, then he’s even more of a useless wanker than I thought. Not like he hasn’t had enough warning the last couple of years.”

“That isn’t—”

He chopped across it. “We all need to go home, Archidi. That includes you. The Empire I could give a stiff shit about; it’s a decade since I took their coin. But I took an oath to keep you in one piece, and that’s still in force. You don’t really get a say in it.”

“I saved your life last year,” she reminded him.

“Yeah—which is really going to encourage me to leave you up here on the wrong side of a war while the rest of us run south. Forget it, I’m not—”

The tavern door unlatched, slammed back on a gust of wind. Cold air scooped the room. Klithren of Hinerion loomed in the doorway, bodyguards at his back. No helm or mail, but he bore a long sword over one shoulder and another sheathed in leather at his belt.

“Here we go,” murmured Archeth.

The League commander pretty clearly spotted them, but there was no sense of acknowledgment in the way his gaze swept the room. He headed over to speak to his skirmish rangers instead. For a while, the men prodded at the piled Majak weaponry and swapped comments that were apparently funny.

“Easy, Eg.”

“Yeah, yeah.” He made an effort, wiped his face of all expression. Took a measured sip from his wine and settled lower in his chair. “All under control.”

Presently, Klithren found time for them.

He came to their table alone, bodyguards dismissed to their own devices over by the bar. Arms spread wide with avuncular good humor, a cheerful grin on his face. Ease of victory had evidently put him in an expansive mood.

“So you’d be the Dragonbane,” he said loudly. “Sitting right there in the fucking flesh! Couldn’t believe it when they told me. Can’t be too many like you left aboveground, eh?”

Egar grunted into his goblet.

Klithren seemed to take it for an invitation. He hooked out a stool from under the unoccupied portion of the table. Sat down with the satisfied sigh of a craftsman at the end of a long day’s work. He looked amiably from Egar to Archeth and back again.

“Fought the reptiles myself, of course, back in the day. Hinerion, Baldaran, like that. We had some Majak lads billeted in Hinerion back in fifty-one.”

“Not me.”

“Right, no, I guess not.” Klithren helped himself to the wine bottle, swigged deep, set it down. Wiped his mouth with evident relish. “Anyway—an honor to meet you, Dragonbane. Only sorry about the circumstances. And I want to thank you for talking down your brethren earlier. That was a smart move, saved a lot of bloodshed all around.”

Egar stared into the middle distance. “Think nothing of it.”

“Yeah, ’cause otherwise we would have rolled over you like a twenty-stone whore. No one wants that, eh?”

“Don’t know, “the Dragonbane said, teeth still not quite clenched. “Never had a twenty-stone whore. I guess it’d be an interesting challenge.”

“We’re all keen to avoid bloodshed,” said Archeth hurriedly. “We are not, as I’ve already said, a military expedition. Can I ask what provision you’ve made for the internment of our men?”

Klithren switched his attention to the woman across the table from him. There was a small smile playing about his mouth that Egar didn’t like at all.

“Those who have surrendered will be treated well, my lady. But it seems a handful of your Throne Eternal have taken weapons and a small boat with their captain, and escaped along the shoreline. They will, of course, be executed if captured alive. I can allow no mercy there.”

“Of course.” She made it come out it pretty smoothly, Egar thought.

Count young Noyal out of any schemes we have for now, then. Crafty fucker, wish I’d had the same idea first.

“Of Menith Tand’s mercenaries,” Klithren went on, “quite a few have offered to change sides if the purse is right. But that’s a matter for my masters back in Trelayne to decide. For now, imprisonment will be according to rank and station.”

Archeth nodded. “Yes, that’s fair. Thank you.”

“For yourselves, I would like you both to report to the harbor at dawn tomorrow. Lord of the Salt Wind is now at dock and reprovisioning, so she’ll be ready to sail at first light.”

“Both of us?” Caution edging her tone now.

“Yes, it’s my intention to have you conveyed back to Trelayne with all due speed along with the other prisoners. Matters of ransom and interrogation can be decided by the proper authorities once you arrive. I’m afraid I shall not be accompanying you myself.”

Trelayne? But…”

Egar saw how she clamped down hard on her dismay. How she came back smooth-voiced and court-mannered once more. “My lord Klithren, I understood you required my help in negotiating a surrender from the marine force accompanying Ringil Eskiath up the coast.”

“Did you now?” Klithren grinned. He knows, he fucking knows. “My apologies, my lady, for that little misunderstanding. I have no intention of sailing out in search of the outlaw Eskiath—that would, after all, entail splitting my forces with an enemy still at large. Tactically unwise, given that I am now weighed down with captives, most of whom are canny professional soldiers. Wouldn’t you say, Dragonbane?”

Egar took the bottle and concentrated minutely on pouring his goblet full. “I’d say you worry overly about men whose weapons you have already taken away.”

“Well, we differ, then.” The League commander sniffed, but showed no sign of losing his good humor. “In any case, I have it on pretty good authority from some of the locals that Ringil Eskiath will be back very shortly. The grave he went to rob, it seems, is not all that far from here. A little something you neglected to mention there, my lady.”

“Specifics, my lord.” Archeth, working at elaborate unconcern. “As I told you—”

“Yes, yes, I recall. You are not a military expedition, you do not concern yourself with details, Ringil Eskiath went, uhm, let’s see… north.” Klithren’s grin sharpened a little. “But it seems he didn’t go very far north, so I think an ambush here in Ornley will serve me better than hunting him along the coast. And clearly it’s better that such honored prisoners as yourselves should not be caught up in the action.”

“My lord, without my presence…” Archeth cleared her throat. “Well, I’m not sure the marines can be relied upon to surrender, even under ambush.”

“Well, then they’ll die.” Sudden, graveled drop in Klithren’s tone, and the grin was gone. “My men will hold the high ground and the cover, and I’ll close up the harbor from the outside once Eskiath’s ship is in. Surrender will be offered—once. If a detachment of imperial marines can’t see the writing on that particular wall, then I’ve no sympathy for them. We are, after all, at war.”

They all sat there while that sank in.

And across the silence, Klithren’s long arm reaching, as he helped himself to the wine bottle once again.

CHAPTER 10

They waited a full day and night for Ringil Eskiath to show.

Everyone was briefed, everyone knew their place. The League warship Mayne’s Moor Blooded sat quietly at quay as decoy, while Star of Gergis and Hoiran’s Grin took picket station at points north and south along the nearby coast. The privateers held ambush positions down at the harbor and all along the edges of the bay. Lookouts took the high ground at either end, and the watchtower at Dako’s Point. Certain among the imperial marine prisoners were held in cellars not far from the docks, ready to be hauled out and used for bargaining or simply as shields. Klithren sat at a table in the Inn on League street, played dice against himself, and waited for word.

The locals hid in their homes. Ornley held its breath.

The privateers were sanguine—they knew how to sit tight. It was part of their trade to wait, sifting the haze at the horizon for signs of enemy shipping or a change in the weather. You waited sometimes for days on end, and nothing to break the monotony but the soft rocking of your vessel on the swell. You learned patience out there, you had to. No percentage in getting all riled up ahead of time. The fight, the storm—these things would be upon you soon enough. Take the quiet empty hours and breathe them in like pipe-house smoke—they’d be yours for a meager enough span in the end.

The townspeople were less sanguine. Maybe if you were a soldier boy you could sit scratching your arse like this all day long, but gouging a living out of the Hironish took work. You were up with the dawn or before, out to sea and casting your nets, or into the surrounding hills to tend your livestock. There were dry-stone walls to be maintained, crops to be checked for blight, crows and gulls to be kept at bay, eventually the harvest; thatches to be renewed or repaired after storms, peat to be dug and cut and stacked for drying. Nets to be mended, hulls to be ripped of barnacles, scrubbed, and pitched; there was gutting and cleaning, salting, packing, the smokehouse to tend. Did these bloody blade artists ever stop to think how food ends up on their plates and fire in the grate to keep out the chill? Thank the dark queen we never got that garrison they promised us after the war, if this is all they’re good for…

The hours limped by like aging mules, overladen with expectation, one slow step at a time. Late into the afternoon, some representation was made to Klithren, that they could not sit like this indefinitely and when did he expect to be done? Because the goats out on Whaler’s Rise wouldn’t milk themselves, you know, and there were—

At which point, Klithren looked up at the little knot of spokesmen, and gave them a thin smile that dried the words in their throats. He waited a couple of beats and then, when no more complaints looked to be forthcoming, he nodded. Two privateers stepped in from the corners of the room, and the spokesmen were ushered away, to recriminate bitterly with each other out in the street.

Klithren, for his part, stared after them until the tavern door slammed, then he went back to his dice. Cup and roll, out onto the scarred wooden tabletop with a bony rattle. Scrutinize the faces the worn cubes offered.

Scoop and cup, and roll again.

“He’ll come, Venj,” some later claimed they heard him murmur. “You’ve not long to wait now, mate.”

But whomever he was talking to seemed destined to disappointment. Afternoon turned into evening, and what miserable gray light there’d been all day went down into dark without any sign of the outlaw or his ship. The customary lamps were lit along the harbor wall and the wharf-front, the waiting privateers stretched cramped limbs, and cursed, and settled in to wait some more.

“Going to be a long fucking night,” someone grumbled out on the harbor wall, and the men down the line all laughed.

“Figure it’ll be worth your while,” someone else called back. “I was at Rajal beach in the war, I saw Ringil Eskiath fight. Never seen anything like that, before or since. He was a fucking maniac. We take him down tonight, you’re going to have a tale to get you laid the rest of your natural life.”

More laughter, punctuated this time with lewd commentary.

“Yeah, or you’ll be dog meat,” sneered a grizzled and corpulent privateer sprawled spread-legged with his back to the wall a couple of yards down from the original speaker. “And your soul sent screaming to hell.”

And he prodded morosely with the tip of his killing knife at the crack between two of the harbor wall flagstones he sat on. Around him, the laughter damped down a bit. Stares fell on him. A few of the men shifted out from the wall so they could see him more clearly.

“Say what?”

The grizzled privateer glanced up, saw he had an audience.

“Yeah, that’s right,” he said. “I don’t know nothing about Rajal beach, but before I got this gig, I worked muscle for Slab Findrich back in Trelayne—”

“That slaver piece of shit?” A younger privateer hawked and spat.

“Too fucking right, that slaver piece of shit. Findrich pays double the going rate for good men in Etterkal.”

“What’d he pay you, then?”

Jeers. Farther down the line, a sergeant bellowed for quiet.

“Yeah, laugh it up.” The corpulent privateer glowered and dug harder with his dagger. The blade tip made a tiny scraping that put your teeth on edge. “I was in Etterkal when Ringil Eskiath came calling last year, when Findrich put the bounty out on him. I saw what was left of the Sileta brothers when they finally found them.”

The jeers dried up with the mention of the name. Everyone knew that story, some version or other. Tavern tale spinners in Trelayne had been drinking off it ever since the news broke. Mothers down in harbor end used it these days to quieten their unruly infant sons—behave, or Ringil Eskiath’ll come for you in the night, do you up like the Sileta brothers.

The privateer looked around with a bleak smile, nodding.

“Slab Findrich threw up when he saw what was left,” he said. “I was there at his side. And I’ll tell you this much for free. Nothing human could have done that.”

“Ah, come off it,” somebody scoffed. “What is this Eskiath, a fucking demon now? You think there aren’t half a hundred whores and losers in harbor end who’d have cut the Siletas up the exact same way if they got the chance?”

“But they weren’t cut up.” Scrape, scrape went the knife point, along the crack and the listeners’ nerves. “It wasn’t a blade that did it, it wasn’t that kind of damage.”

Silence. Lamplight dappled out in thin lines across the black harbor waters. Out to sea, a barely heard sound that might have been gathering thunder.

Someone cleared their throat. “Look—”

“He’s just a man,” snapped the privateer who claimed to have been at Rajal beach. “Fast with a blade and not afraid to die is all. Seen it before plenty of times.”

The corpulent storyteller scowled. “That’s what you think. Maybe he was still a man back at Rajal, but no man could have—”

“You!” The sergeant, grown tired of the raised voices, had stirred himself and come stalking down the line. “Yeah, you—fatty. Shut the fuck up, before I kick your larded arse down in the cellar with the prisoners.”

The rest of the privateers broke up—ripples of snorting laughter along the harbor wall. The sergeant rounded on them.

“That goes for anyone else around here who thinks this is all one big fucking joke. You stow that shit, right now. Call yourselves men of war? You’re on watch, all of you—not down the tavern with your pox-ridden sisters on your arm.”

The laughter died abruptly. The sergeant glared up and down the line, spaced his words for impact.

“When this outlaw faggot piece of shit comes creeping into harbor tonight, I want men on this wall, not a gaggle of fucking fishwives. Do I make myself clear?”

It seemed, from the ensuing quiet, that he did.

Still, he stood awhile longer, daring anyone to catch his eye. When no one looked like taking up the challenge, he evidently judged his point made and headed back to his post. Muttering snaked in his wake, but it was muted, and there was no more conversation along the harbor wall for quite a while.

The privateers settled once more to waiting.

But the only thing that came creeping into harbor as the night wore on was a thick, low-lying sea fog that blanketed vision, muffled sound, and chilled them all to the bone.


“I KNOW YOU CAN’T SEE TO STEER IN IT,” SAID RINGIL PATIENTLY. “YOU don’t need to steer in it. The ship will steer itself.”

Not really accurate, but about as close to the truth as he wanted to get. If he’d told captain and crew what was really going to steer Dragon’s Demise through the fog, Gil suspected he’d have an all-out mutiny on his hands.

This swordsman-sorcerer gig was turning out harder to balance than you’d expect.

Lal Nyanar, for instance. There he stood on the helm deck now, fine aristo features pinched up in a frown, shaking his head. Torches bracketed at the rail gave a flickering yellow light, enough to make out the salients. Below them on the main deck, the mist roiled and crept like something alive. Above and ahead of them it wrapped tendril fingers through the rigging and around the masts.

“But this…” Nyanar gestured weakly. “This is no natural fog.”

Ringil held on to his temper. “Of course it’s not natural—you saw me summon it, didn’t you? Now can we please get under way while it lasts?”

“You put all our souls in danger with this northern witchery, Eskiath.”

“Oh, please.

“I think,” said Senger Hald dryly, “that my lord Ringil is most concerned at the moment with our temporal well-being. To which I must concur. There will be time enough to worry about the salvation of our immortal souls once we’ve saved our mortal skins.”

Ringil masked his surprise. “Thank you, Commander. I do believe you’ve stated the case admirably there. Captain?”

Nyanar looked betrayed. Hald was probably the closest thing to a soul mate he had on the expedition. Both men had washed up in the company through sheer chance. Both had been witness to the arrival of the Helmsman Anasharal while they were about entirely routine duties, and so in the interests of keeping the secrets of the quest between as few as possible, both had been promptly seconded to the command.

But more than that, they were both of a kind. Both were Yhelteth born and bred, both came of noble stock—Hald might lack the staggering wealth of the Nyanar clan in his own family backdrop, but like most homegrown military commanders in the Empire, his lineage would be impeccable—and both had contented themselves with moderate careers in soldiering that kept them close to home. Neither man had seen more than superficial deployment during the war. Neither man had previously been outside the Empire’s borders.

Now here they were, up on the mist-ridden outer rim of the world, the sun-baked certainties of Yhelteth three thousand miles astern, and suddenly Hald was breaking ranks. Buying into this infidel sorcery and the dark northern powers it called on. Casting off the sober tenets of the Revelation and trusting to an unholy alien faith. Worse still, they had no Citadel-assigned invigilator along to weigh in—Jhiral moved swiftly enough to crush that custom as soon as events at Afa’marag gave him the upper hand. The palace, he declared, could not possibly trouble the Mastery for valued officers of the faith when they must surely be needed here at home to help with the purges; the northern expedition must perforce rely on the individual piety and moral strength of its members without recourse to clerical support; as, in fact, must all naval and military commands, for the time being at least, until this deeply shocking crisis has passed. No, really, such an outpouring of pastoral concern is touching, but his Imperial Radiance insists.

No invigilators, no clear moral compass, no working chain of command. And the only viable father figure around wears a scar on his face, fucks men from preference, and has unnamed demons at his back.

You had to feel sorry for Nyanar, caught up in it all through no fault of his own and no easy way home.

No, you have to kick his arse and get him moving.

“Captain? Are we agreed?”

Nyanar looked from Ringil to Hald and back, mouth pursed tight as if he’d just been served a platter of peasant gruel. He turned his back and stared out into the fog.

“Very well,” he snapped. “Sanat, raise anchor, make sail. Inshore rig.”

“Aye, sir.” Sanat sent a practiced first mate’s call rolling down the length of the ship. “Raise anchor! Make sail!”

The call picked up, was echoed across the decks. Men moved in the rigging, vaguely seen, and canvas came tumbling down. Inshore rig, taken as read. Grunted cadences from the prow and the repeated graunch of wet rope on wood as the anchor came up.

Dragon’s Demise shifted and slid on the swell. Began to move with purpose.

Ringil felt himself relax a little with the motion. He thought it had been touch and go for a while back there. Not for the first time, he wondered if the powers he was acquiring under Hjel’s tutelage were really worth the trouble spent getting them.

What point, after all, in racking yourself to produce a handy sorcerous mist if the men you led wouldn’t follow you into it?


THEY’D ALL WATCHED HIM RAISE HANDS TO THE SKY AND CONTORT HIS face, like some barking mad market square prophet of doom. A knot of sailors not otherwise occupied gathered on the main deck below to stare. They’d heard the muttering sounds he made deep in his throat, seen the splay-fingered traceries he cast across the air. He supposed they must have done some muttering themselves, some more clutching at their precious talismans, but he’d been too lost in it by then to notice. Too busy pouring his entire focus into the glyphs he made, because in the end that was the only way it would work.

You must write upon the air like a scribe, Hjel tells him on a cold stony beach somewhere at the margins of the Grey Places. The air itself is parchment, read continually by powers waiting for command. But such powers can only read what is written clearly, can only answer commands clearly expressed. Cast poorly and you are no better than a clumsy scribe, blotching or scrawling your script. Cast poorly or in error, and there will be no answer.

Now try again.

It takes days.

It takes morning after bleak early morning, going down to the shore again and again from the cold, coarse-grassed dunes where Hjel’s gypsy band are camped; it takes day after day of standing there facing the ocean like an enemy, clawing at the air, grating the learned strings of polysyllables until his throat is raw. It takes days, and not even Hjel’s caresses under canvas at night can take away the impatient frustration it stirs in him.

But finally, one morning, he goes down to the shore in an odd, emptied-out mood. He goes alone—Hjel turns over under the blankets when he rises, mumbles something, does not open his eyes—and he stands there on the beach, and he casts, and this time he does it right.

The mist rolls in from the sea, blots out everything around him, wraps him in its damp gray embrace.

Now, aboard Dragon’s Demise, it came as second nature. His throat had long since accustomed itself to the harsh sounds he needed to make, his fingers had grown supple with practice. And whatever elemental powers lurked in the coves and straits of the Hironish, now they leapt to do his bidding. He sensed them—rising off the darkened ocean’s surface like cold steam, pouring down out of gullies and caves in the ancient cliffs along this coast, circling the anchored vessel in fitful band-light like curious wolves, darting in now and then to stalk the decks unseen by human eyes, to ruffle the flames of a torch, or brush past crew members with wild, unhuman hilarity, leaving the brief touch of chilly tendril fingers and shivers on the spine.

He felt them gather on the helm deck at his back.

He felt them breathing down his neck.

He gathered their cold breath to him like a cloak, he breathed it in. He smiled as the ikinri ‘ska came on like some icy battlefield drug.

He heard, as if in a dream, the lookout overhead, calling out the fog as it rolled in and wrapped them.

The ikinri ‘ska syllables died away in his throat, scuttling back down under cover, their work done. The muscles in his cheeks and jaw eased, his arms sagged to his sides. His aching fingers hung loose, his eyes—he wasn’t aware he’d closed them—snapped suddenly open, and he found himself staring into Senger Hald’s face.

The marine commander shuddered visibly in the torchlight.

Turned away.


DRAGON’S DEMISE MADE CURIOUSLY GOOD TIME DOWN THE COAST, AS IF the same elemental forces that had brought the fog now clung to the masts and filled the cautiously rigged canvas with their breath. As if they were anxious to see the ship arrive. Once or twice, the steersman remarked that it felt as if something was dragging on the hull. But they were a prudent distance out from the shore in five fathoms or more of water, and when Nyanar glanced askance at Ringil, Gil just shrugged.

Now and then, off the port bow, they heard the rumbling prowl of a storm. But it was faint and distant to the east, and showed no signs of coming after them.

These are not trivial sorceries, Hjel warns him, when he has the magic down. The elementals are capricious, and their range is wide. Unleash them, and their mischief will be general. Try not to worry about it too much, it’s a price you have no choice but to pay. That they do your will in your immediate vicinity is the trick. What havoc they wreak elsewhere need not be your concern.

Ringil shrugs. Sounds no worse than most men I’ve had under command.

He stood alert though, throughout the night, listening intently to the storm and ready to pull down the ikinri ‘ska on the elementals’ heads if they showed signs of getting cute.

The fog held. The storm stayed away. He heard it fading, chasing away southeast; some other vessel’s problem now.

They made Ornley harbor with the cold pale seep of dawn.

CHAPTER 11

“Archeth? Archeth?”

There was a numb, pulsing heaviness in her head that she took to be krinzanz crash. She groaned and twitched, thankful it still seemed to be dark outside. Or at least—some hints of light filtered in and prodded at her eyelids, but not enough to force them open. Ishgrim’s arm was heavy across her chest, did not shift as Archeth moved. No surprises there—the northern girl habitually dosed herself with wine or flandrijn as night came on, or simply with Archeth’s repeated attentions—again, mistress, do me again hissed frantically up from the pillows she lay crushed back into, mouth smeared slack and smiling with spent passion, driving a sleepy Archeth back into fresh arousal she hadn’t known she owned—until sleep came and took Ishgrim down like prey. Thereafter, she either thrashed with nightmares or slept like the dead, a coin-toss guess as to which it would be any given night. But by morning…

“Archeth!”

Sounded like the Dragonbane’s voice—be banging through the door and into her bedchamber any moment, by the tone of it. Yeah, any excuse to leer and peer at Ishgrim’s curves. Archeth felt the twitch of a smug, possessive smile at her lips. Reached up to grasp the girl’s fingers in her own. Trying now to remember what the hell they’d been playing at last night because she had aches in places that—

Memory crashed in on her, like shutters blown back in a—

—storm—

She found the fingers at the end of the heavy arm. Yelped in shocked revulsion and let them go in a hurry. They were corpse-cold, thick and blunt—

The storm.

Waking to its violence, hurled casually from her bunk as the deck tilted up and the cabin door slammed open, tearing out its feeble lock.

Stumbling out, thankful she’d slumped on the bunk without the will to undress or even pull off her boots. Slapped in the face with driving rain and spray, heels skidding on a deck awash with water—men stampeding back and forth yelling—and then a sound overhead like the sky tearing open. The savage pitch and roll of the ship, the heaving ocean lit by fitful lightning flash, like some vast angry beast hunching and flexing awake

She opened her eyes.

She was flat on her back on unyielding rock, arms trailing up past her head and curiously weighted down. Pallid light filtered up from somewhere between her feet.

Screams from the lookouts—Lord of the Salt Wind wallowing like a pig in mud, the veil of rain and spray torn suddenly aside as they washed sideways—the shore coming at them like a cavalry charge—some kind of bay, a jagged lower jaw of rocks like fangs, the sky-high burst of surf like geysers, the roar of it all in her ears

Wrenching, groaning impact.

Her grip on a companionway rail torn loose, her whole body flung into the rain-filled, thunderous air.

And flight—like magic from a tale.

She was upside down.

Dreams of Ishgrim, memory of the storm—it all flew apart in fragments as she woke up for real. The heaviness in her head was not from krinzanz or its lack, it was gathered blood, clogging there as she hung upside down in some damp and narrow, salt-smelling space with the echoing drip-drip of water around her and a dead man heavy on her chest. The light between her feet wasn’t shining upward, it was spilling down from above.

“Archeth?”

“Here!” But it came out a strangled squawk, barely louder than the drip of the water and the thud of blood in her ears. She arched up as far as the dead man would let her, coughed and spat sideways, cleared her throat out for a decent attempt at a yell. “Eg! Down here!

The corpse on her chest pressed her back down. Her head and shoulders hung in empty space, but it seemed the rest of her body lay on solid stone, albeit at an atrocious backward angle. She heaved an arm up and out to the side, touched slick, wet rock—forget it, no chance of purchase on that, even without the dead man’s insistent weight to contend with. And back up at the other end of her body, her feet were caught up, tightly wrapped by something and numb inside her boots from the shins down. She and the corpse seemed to have tumbled headfirst down a steep incline in some kind of cleft and in each others’ arms, and whatever had caught them by the feet had apparently stopped them going over the lip of the incline and into the lightless space beneath.

“Archeth?”

“Eg!” Voice stronger now. “Yeah, I’m down here! I’m caught up! Must be wreckage or someth—”

Something moved, stealthily, in the space below her hanging head.

Fuck!

She flinched violently, tried to lift herself bodily up, and this time the strength of her fear let her shift the corpse off her chest and aside. She twisted about, flailed in vain for handholds anywhere, anywhere in the smooth stone she lay on. She craned up at the faint light beyond her boots and yelled again.

“Eg! Egar!

Movement, definitely, and noises like a beggar sucking on midden-heap bones.

She hinged up, hard, elbowed the dangling dead man aside. His slack, lugubrious features wobbled away from her in the gloom, as if offended by the blow.

“Eg!”

“Archeth!” The light blotted out, his voice boomed down into the cleft. “Right here. You’re caught up in the bowsprit lines. We’re going to have to clear—”

“Never mind that shit, Eg!” Some real panic in her tone now. Briefly, an image flared in her mind—Jhiral’s Hanliagh octopods, tearing the condemned apart in the pool in the Chamber of Confidences. She heaved violently up again, felt muscles in her stomach tearing with the force of it. “Pull me the fuck up! There’s something down here!”

The sucking sound built, rose closer to her ears.

Yelling from overhead, more than one voice. A repeated cracking and suddenly she was whisked a foot up the incline. The corpse came up with her; she could hear grunting effort from above.

“He’s dead,” she shouted frantically. “The other guy, he’s dead. Cut him loose!”

Egar gritted something she couldn’t hear. They hauled her another couple of feet upward; the corpse came spindling and cuddling at her. A door opened somewhere in her head and abruptly she remembered him in life—some young sailor, not one of the privateer force, running at her yelling, gesturing, some communication she had no hope of making out in the chaos of the storm, mouth distorted wide around his shouted words and—

Gone.

Washed away as they hit and her grip was ripped from the railing and she flew—

The thing that was making the sucking noises came up over the lip of the incline.

Vision upside down, dizzied by the tugging and swaying as she was dragged upward, Archeth fixed on it and could make no sense. There were tendrils, she saw that much, a thick, muddy fringe of them like the made-up eyelashes on some gargantuan whore’s eye, and they seethed about in search of prey, tasting the surface of the rock as they came, but the body, there was no body, there was only…

Icy clutch around her heart as she understood.

The creature filled the cleft like water. It flowed and swelled, was a single amorphous thing rising in the confines of the space it owned. Patterning like giant eyes or plague rings swilled around on the surface of its flesh like oil in a hot pan—

“Get me the fuck out of here!” she screamed.

Another yard. She felt hands on her boot, heaved desperately from the waist again and stuck up an arm, somewhere close to her own feet. A calloused hand grabbed her around the wrist, she felt one of the creature’s tendrils brush stickily into her hair at the same instant. Pure revulsion wrung the shriek out of her—it dinned in her ears, involuntary, her right hand curled for the grip of a knife that wasn’t fucking there—

Then she was in the air.

Burst of light and space, the thin roar of the ocean.

She had time for one backward glimpse of the creature rising behind her, cramming up into the cleft like vomit in a throat. Then the Dragonbane swung her up bodily by one hand and boot, tilted, and dumped her way off to the side on cold flat rock. Her breath exploded out of her with the impact. Shocked yells rose around her; she twisted about on the rock and saw men staggering back. The creature burst into the open among them like a pan of milk boiling over. Her corpse companion from the cleft was gone, swallowed down somewhere in that heaving mass. Tendrils lashed back and forth, one of the men toppled and was caught by the leg, another seemed to stumble face first into the creature’s fronds.

The Dragonbane whirled about. He had something like a huge broken lance or harpoon held aloft in both hands—later she would realize it was Lord of the Salt Wind’s snapped and splintered bowsprit, still trailing lines and fragments of netting. His eyes were wide with berserk fury, and there was a rising, grinding roar from his mouth. Like some statue of a warrior god, he lurched forward and over on the yell, buried the length of splintered wood deep into the heart of the seething, tendriled mass.

Twisted and leaned in. Roared again, dug deeper still.

The tendrils spasmed, some pale fluid leapt across the air, spattered down on the rocks. The rising mass of the creature seemed to deflate. It was, she noted numbly, quite beautiful in the light—all patterned purples and pale violets flowing in and out of each other in the vaguely circular patterns she’d taken for eyes…

“Get on this,” bellowed Egar. “Gouge this fucker with me!”

Two men threw themselves on the leaning bowsprit, hung off it, swinging with all their weight. More splattering leakage, a low gurgling, hissing sound, and it was done. The two men dropped off the end of Egar’s improvised harpoon, someone dragged the ones who’d been grabbed by the creature’s tendrils out of harm’s way. The thing sank back down into the cleft as swiftly as it had risen, taking the bowsprit with it. Egar let go of the shaft with a kiss-off gesture. Spat into the hole after his retreating adversary.

He turned about to check on her—by then she was back on her feet, a little shaky, but otherwise holding up. He grinned at her, still panting.

“Hey, Archidi.” Pause for a mustered breath. A sweeping gesture with one arm “Welcome to the Kiriath Wastes.”


IN TWO HUNDRED YEARS, SHE’D BEEN THERE JUST ONCE, AND THEN ONLY TO the southern fringes, on what amounted to a glorified child’s dare.

When she was younger, Grashgal and her father continually talked up the possibility of expeditions north to see what had become of the land. It had been thousands of years, they argued, nature would have absorbed and repaired most of the damage done; it had to be safe by now. And who knew what they might find that had been lost to memory and record all those centuries? She remembered those conversations, the earliest of them barely comprehensible to her infant ears as she sat in Flaradnam’s lap or played on the rug while the adults talked. On later occasions, she perched on the arm of her father’s chair and joined in the speculating as best she could. She’d always assumed she’d be going with them.

Her mother put paid to that notion pretty sharply one summer evening. The Cursed Lands? Are you insane, girl? Do you know what’s waiting up there?

No, Mum. She would have been about eleven at the time; the answer was meant innocently enough. Do you?

Don’t you smart mouth me, young lady.

Mum, I’m not. Dad says no one knows what’s up there.

Yes, and that’s precisely why you’re not going.

In the end, it didn’t matter. Like so many of the Kiriath’s latter-day schemes, nothing came of it. The years of talk guttered and went out, focus wavered and was gone. Grashgal and Flaradnam went back to their hobby of tinkering with the Empire’s political framework instead.

Forty-odd years slipped by.

Archeth was never sure if it was just the nature of her father’s people and their subtly damaged mental state that killed the expedition, or if, as her mother feared, there really were things up in the Waste better left undisturbed. Or if those two factors were linked, and Grashgal and her father abandoned their plans because they came to fear that an expedition would somehow—guilt? ghosts? strange infectious airs?—further corrode their ability to live in this adopted world as if it were their home.

Then her mother died, as humans were wont to do, and Archeth got the chance to see the Wastes for herself firsthand.

Taken north one year by Grashgal as part of an extensive diplomatic mission to the recently formed League, she found herself wintering in Trelayne. Nantara’s death was barely a couple of years past and Archeth was still raw, ripe for mischief. Part of Grashgal’s intent had in fact been to get her away from An-Monal and her perennially grief-stricken father for a while, in the hope that it would maybe calm her down, get her back on an even keel—all of which pretty much showed how poorly he understood the half-blood girl he’d helped raise. Fuck her mother’s ghost, fuck her father in his endless self-absorbed gloom, now she was going to get even with both of them. While Grashgal and the imperial legate busied themselves with sounding out their new northern neighbors, putting out cautious feelers, getting useful ink on documents of trade and peaceful coexistence, Archeth and a couple of Kiriath lads near to her own age talked each other into mounting an expedition across the northern sound and into the Wastes.

It took them almost the whole winter to put the scheme together. To find a suitable vessel along the ramshackle riverside moorings that passed for Trelayne’s harbor in those days, to identify a captain and crew willing not only to make the trip but to have any truck with these jet-skinned demon folk from the south in the first place. And then, with a price agreed for passage and provisions, they had to slowly siphon off the necessary cash from embassy funds without anyone in the mission noticing. It was all painfully gradual, with frequent disappointments and setbacks. But if an immortal life span was good for anything, it was the learning of methodical patience and planning. Two days into spring, and a month before the mission was due to go home, they cast off from a quay in Trelayne harbor aboard a grubby-looking longship, and they headed upriver to the estuary and the sea.

By the time Grashgal realized they were gone—and set about tearing the city apart to find them—Archeth and her pals had raised the Wastes coast, made landfall, established an initial camp, and pretty soon had a major fight on their hands trying to stop the longship captain sailing straight back home again. The sky above the Wastes shoreline burned as often as not with luminescent greenish fire. Strange cracking and whistling sounds could be heard from farther off into the interior. The strand they’d anchored off was replete with all sorts of exciting stuff—outlandish mobile vegetation that seemed as happy in the water as it did on the sand and was given to tangling affectionately around your limbs if you walked or swam near it; clumps of shredded alloy wreckage that looked and mostly was inert, but would occasionally shudder and talk to them beseechingly in High Kir; creatures that might once have been crabs, but were now, well, quite a lot bigger for one thing, more lopsided, uglier all around, and made an unpleasant hissing sound if approached…

The captain lasted three days at anchor, nailed in place initially by some apparent sense of contractual integrity, then, as tensions built, by improvised threats of Black Folk sorcery if he broke his signatory oath. But when Archeth insisted they proceed into the interior and would need porters, the crew delivered a quiet ultimatum of their own, and the three young Kiriath woke the next morning to find the longship gone.

They had their provisions—the captain had been decent enough at least to off-load these—and a decision to make. Stay on the beach and wait for rescue, or head southeast along the coast with what they could carry and try to walk out. Archeth was all for walking out, but got voted down by her two rather more chastened male companions. Lucky as it happened—a Trelayne navy picket boat carrying an incandescently angry Grashgal showed up off-shore two days later. He came ashore tight-lipped and icily controlled, unwilling to loose his rage on them in front of the humans, but you could see in his face that they were going to catch it as soon as he got them alone. He wouldn’t even let them take specimens home, despite Archeth’s muted protests. She managed to sneak a cutting of the friendly mobile vegetation aboard in a bottle nonetheless, but she had no idea how to care for it and it died not long after they got back to Trelayne.

They went home to An-Monal in deep disgrace, not least on account of the diplomatic strain caused by Grashgal’s rampage through the city in search of them. He thought they’d been taken by slavers, or some weird religious sect or other, and had got pretty heavy-handed with representatives of both constituencies before the Trelayne Chancellery stepped in, posted a reward, and turned up the shamefaced longship captain a day or so later. But by then quite a lot of damage had been done. It didn’t quite set relations back between League and Empire the hundred years Grashgal ranted at them that it had—the League had in any case only been around in its current form for a couple of decades, as Archeth tried to point out before she was bellowed into silence—but it certainly hadn’t been any kind of diplomatic triumph, either.

For Archeth, the disgrace lasted a year or so after she got back, though her father, still deep in mourning for Nantara, was halfhearted in his disapproval. He didn’t much care how many fucking humans she’d offended in the north—protests that she wasn’t the one who’d done the offending washed right over his head—he was just glad to see her home in one piece. There were some harsh words between Flaradnam and Grashgal on the subject, though nothing that Grashgal couldn’t later forgive as the grief talking, and the millennia-old friendship was never at any real risk. But for well over a century after, they all avoided anything but casual mention of the Kiriath Wastes.

Then the Scaled Folk came, and avoidance was no longer an option.

Year of fifty-two. The great floating purplish-black migration weed rafts, spotted drifting northward on strong coastal currents, up past the Gergis peninsula and onward. Some premature celebration at the realization that this fresh wave would not wash ashore in either Empire or League.

And then the Helmsmen, doing the math, talking with iron certainty of what would happen if the rafts hatched out on the shores of the Wastes, of what would come sweeping south in the autumn after.

Archeth was with the Kiriath delegation that went to Trelayne behind Akal the Great and laid it out for the League. She still remembered her father, pacing back and forth in the Chancellery hall, giving a flesh-and-blood face to the Helmsmen’s unhuman wisdom. Seamed ebony features intent as he walked the northerners through the need for yet more sacrifice, yet more blood, yet more men drawn from the war-weary ranks for an expeditionary force into the Wastes.

The lizards can endure some cold, slower though it makes them. But they are drawn to warmth. We estimate there may be enough residual heat among the ruins of the Wastes to keep them happy through the summer months. But with autumn and the chill, they will inevitably turn south. At best, they will be a force as powerful as anything we have yet seen or fought against; at worst, the sorceries at work in the Wastes may have twisted them into new and more dangerous forms.

In either case, the war will begin anew on your northern flank before it is even ended in the south. All we have achieved here in brotherhood will be for nothing.

This time, Archeth was certain she’d get to go.

But Flaradnam would not hear of it. Your mother was right, he told her. And I was foolish beside her wisdom. Enough that we devastated the land back then and poisoned it for centuries to come. Enough that we must now drag more human lives back into that hell. I will not risk my own flesh and blood there, too.

But you’re going, she said bitterly.

I am going because somebody has to. The humans cannot operate our engineering without help, they will need Kiriath leadership to see it through. Naranash is no longer with us; Grashgal is needed in the south. That leaves me.

I’ll be more use at your side than I will in the south. The fighting’s all but done, it’s just politics down there now. Grashgal doesn’t need me for that.

No—but I need you to go. And as fresh protests rose to her lips. Please, Archeth, don’t make this harder for me than it already is. I made your mother a promise on her deathbed. Don’t ask me to break it.

It was a rarely used appeal, but it was one that in all the years since her mother died Archeth had never learned to resist.

So she went back to Yhelteth with Grashgal and the others.

And she never saw her father again.

CHAPTER 12

“You hear that?”

“Hear what?” The second privateer stifled a yawn. “Only thing I can hear is Kentrin snoring. Kick him for me, willya?”

“Let the kid sleep. I mean, did you hear water dripping just n—”

“Let him sleep? He’s on fucking watch!”

“We’re all on watch—all three of us. Doesn’t take six eyes to peer through this murk and see nothing all night. Leave him alone.”

“Leave him a—? What’s the matter with you, Lhesh? You after a portion of pert buttock pie or something? We’re on fucking watch.

“Yeah, like you never dozed off when you were his age?”

“Yeah, I did. And the first mate put stripes on my back for it. You give him a kick in that pretty arse of his and bawl him out, he’s getting off lightl—”

Ringil came over the watchtower rampart like a grinning black shadow.

He was chilled and drenched through from his brief swim to the tower’s base, his teeth were locked tight to stop them chattering, and his fingers and unshod toes ached from the thirty-foot climb. He landed right at the feet of the grumbling privateer. Hit the stone flags on haunches and one braced palm, exploded up out of the crouch, dragon-fang dagger already reversed in his right hand, while the man just gaped down at him in disbelief. He struck upward for the soft underside of the jaw, up through tongue, mouth, soft palate, and on into the brain.

He lifted the privateer backward on the force of the blow.

Yanked the knife free.

The man crumpled, eyes rolled up to the whites. Ringil was already turning away.

The other privateer, Lhesh, was a scant five yards off across the flagstone roof of the tower. He turned as his comrade stopped speaking, curious more than alert, and the difference killed him. He had time to glimpse motion, the collapse of a body to the stones, dull red splatter across the fogged palette of the dawn, and a twisted black shape, spinning about…

The dragon-tooth blade was useless for throwing; it didn’t have the balance or the elegance of form. Ringil dropped it. Raked a glyph into the chilly morning air instead, uttered harsh whispered syllables, and Jhesh choked on the cry in his throat. He gaped, staggered, made hoarse sounds and pawing gestures. Ringil crossed the five-yard gap in what seemed like a single leap. He reached in, left hand swept across the man’s eyes like the gesture of a servant wiping a window, right palm slapped in against the upper ribs. He hissed out the two-syllable command.

Stopped the man’s heart in his chest.

Jhesh’s eyes bulged for a brief moment—shock, terror, and the struggle to understand. Then he sagged and went bonelessly to the flagstone floor. Ringil held on to the dead man’s chest like a lover, softened the drop, lowered the body down.

Soft snores from one gloomy corner of the tower wall.

Ringil looked around, slightly incredulous. Kentrin, it seemed, had managed to sleep through the whole thing. He was still there, legs pulled up for warmth, leaned slightly into the corner, face slack with sleep. Gil approached, cat-footed, momentarily unsure what to do. He glanced back at the dragon fang blade, sticky with blood where he’d left it, too far to easily fetch. And now, almost as if Kentrin sensed the danger looming over him, he stirred. Muttered something, eyes sliding halfway open, still glazed with sleep…

Drop to one knee, press the killing palm into the boy’s chest. Ringil made the window-wiping gesture again, again the two grating irrevocable words from the ikinri ‘ska. Kentrin’s eyes jerked wider open at the sound, his mouth fluttered, the beginnings of panic surfacing on his face. Gil put fingers to the boy’s lips and pressed. Made his voice soft as warm wool.

“Hsss. Sleep, go back to sleep, it’s fine.”

“N-n-no, but—” Body twitching sideways, legs shoving for support—in a moment he’d struggle to his feet against the hollow wrongness in his chest. “You’re—”

“A bad dream. That’s all I am. Shsssh.” Singsong soothing, wiping the fear away. Watching the boy’s features soften again as death took him back down. “You’re having a bad dream, go back to sleep. Rest now, rest…”

The boy’s head lolled sideways in the angle of the wall. His legs slid down under their own weight, straightening slowly out. He looked almost as peaceful in death as he had asleep.

His comrades lay less cozily, but still like sleeping men, flat out on the gray stone flooring, curled just fractionally into themselves as if against the cold. Blood pooling around the first man’s head told a different tale, but in this uncertain light even that was easy to miss.

And Ringil was gone.


HE MET SENGER HALD AT THE BASE OF THE TOWER.

He’d stopped to kill two more men on the way down, but in the twisting spiral confines of the tower’s only staircase, it was easier work than he’d had on the roof. Each sleepy privateer heard unhurried motion on the stone steps overhead, glanced up in expectation of a comrade coming down with something to report, saw instead a looming, unfamiliar figure, jagged knife in hand. Ringil stepped down, stepped in close, and it was done.

He used the dragon fang dagger both times—stopping the hearts of the two on the roof had tired him for magic, and anyway, trying to cast glyphs under the low stone roofing of the staircase was asking for trouble and barked knuckles besides.

The ikinri ‘ska works better in open areas, Hjel tells him apologetically. Best of all under open skies. The powers are not always attentive in tight or hidden places.

Great. Some fucking sorcery you’re teaching me here.

The dispossessed prince smiles. Did you think it would be easy?

Not to learn, no—but I thought it might be a bit handier than this once I had it down.

Your mistake, then.

Yeah.

He edged out of the watchtower doorway, squinted around the curve of the wall to his right. From the raised promontory of Dako’s Point, a broad, stepped causeway descended southward over a chaotic tumble of boulders and chunks of collapsed cliff façade each the size of a modest galleon. Beyond, dimly through the fog and the strengthening glimmer of dawn, the lights of Ornley harbor beckoned.

Footfalls to his left. He whipped around and saw Hald emerge from the gloom, sword in hand. Black marine combat rig and cloak, soot-smeared features—Ringil was expecting him, but it was still a little like meeting an unquiet ghost.

“All right?”

The marine commander gestured over his shoulder. “They’re coming up now. Had to brace our way up a chimney from that inlet. Higher than we thought.”

“Yeah, well, the good news is it looks like we guessed right about these guys. I don’t see anyone on the causeway.”

Hald grunted and took his own peek round the curve of the tower.

“It is sense,” he allowed. “If I held the town, and could assume a good watch in the tower, I would not waste men, either, by stringing them out this far from the harbor.”

More black-clad figures, out of the gloom at his back as he spoke—the marines gathering, two and three at a time, blades out, sooted faces grim. Hald snapped his fingers, gestured for positions. They formed up in a small phalanx. Someone brought up helm and shield for Ringil, the Ravensfriend in its scabbard, a marine-issue cloak and his boots—he put it all on, hefted the shield a couple of times to settle it on his arm, then he faced the men and drew the Ravensfriend from his back. Most of them hadn’t seen that trick before, how fast the Kiriath sheath would deliver up the blade. It sent a brief murmur through the ranks. Gil showed them the slice of a smile.

“I’m afraid I don’t know how many of these motherfuckers we’re dealing with down in the harbor,” he began. “But I can tell you this much for nothing—the ones in the tower died pretty easily. These are League privateers we’re dealing with, not soldiers. They’re pirate freebooters, out for easy coin. No match for imperial marines, and they do not know we’re coming.”

Carnivorous grins on some of the faces now, and the murmuring in the ranks grew. Hald tried to look aloof from it, but he couldn’t keep the gleam of anticipation off his face, either. Ringil kept his smile, wore it like a mask. He was underselling the privateers, he knew; they were generally a pretty hard-bitten lot, the League’s hard-nosed mercantile version, in fact, of the Empire’s marine soldiery. Back before the war, privateer crews under men like Critlin Blacksail and Sharkmaster Wyr had shown themselves pretty effective in routing imperial forces both aboard ship and on land. They were maybe not as intensively trained nor regimentally committed as the marines, but most among them would be similarly seasoned in the acts of piracy and coastal assault that passed for naval warfare on the western seaboard. They’d be as savage, as hungry for the slaughter.

Truth was, barring terminology and the ink on a few contractual documents signed by men who could barely read what they’d put their names to, there really wasn’t a lot to choose between the two sides here.

But now was not the time for that truth. Some of these men would be dead before the hour was out, and collectively they knew it. So keep up the incentive beat, Gil. Let’s give them that at least.

“You have the element of surprise,” he said. “And you have your training. Follow my lead, keep my pace. We start slow, but we’ll be taking the harbor wall at a charge. They’re never going to know what hit them. We clean them out, kill anything that gets in our way. And—this is important—if any of them go into the water in the fight, forget them, they’re done. They won’t be getting back out again, that’s a promise.”

“Yeah, and what if we fall in?” called someone at the back, a grin in the voice.

“Don’t,” he told them, and the grins all evaporated at the chill in his tone. “I won’t be able to help you, there won’t be time. Now enough of this advisory shit—who wants to open some pirate throats?”

Growling assent. It wasn’t dissimilar to the elemental thunder he’d set prowling the sky the night before.

He let it in, he let it carry him forward. Raised an arm. Let it fall.

Down the broad stepped flow of the causeway, skulking at first, some caution in the pace. Shields carried low, eyes and ears sharp for any straggling resupply coming up for the watchtower guard. Soft, hurried trample of booted feet behind him, no sign of anyone in their path. And now, sketched in fog below, the blunt outlines of the harbor wall looming closer. Nothing to indicate they’d yet been seen. Caution crumbling, flaking away before the heated fact of what they were about to do. Pace already picked up way past any chance of braking—they were sprinting now, they were falling forward, pouring down the steps unstoppable, the heads of men becoming vaguely visible here and there above the line of the harbor wall, there’d be bowmen among them, keep it tight and silent, keep that shrill, hooting cry fenced back behind your teeth. Lips peeling back, grinning hard from the sprint, breath beginning to cost something now each time it’s drawn—

“’ware raiders!”

It rang out, high and panicky, from somewhere on the wall.

Way too late.


GIL LEAPT THE LAST TWO STEPS TO THE WALL, LANDED AMONG MEN NODding at the edges of sleep. They had perhaps a glimpse of him—a darkened form unfolding, the terrible hiss and glide of the Ravensfriend in the gloom, then it was all blood and screaming as the Kiriath steel found flesh and laid it open. He barely saw the men he killed—pale, blurred faces in the whirl of first contact, shocked, gaping mouths—he knew only that he took the throat out of one—chopped open the neck on a second—took down a third with a slice to the thigh, batted him into the harbor waters with a blow from his shield, the man screamed once, was pulled down, was gone—gutted a fourth on his way past. None among them had managed to even clear their weapons. None among them got out any kind of articulate word before they died.

Ringil hooked back his head as the howl inside him came loose. The fog eddied, seemed to tear apart around him with the sound.

And back came cries from along the wall, as if in answer.

“’ware raiders! This is it, lads!

A sneer painted itself on his lips like a lover’s smeared kiss. He piled forward, full tilt into the eddies of fog and vaguely seen forms ahead.

If the harbor wall was for defense against seaborne enemies and the elements, the causeway behind was made with blunt haulage and commerce in mind. It was wide enough to take an ox cart—or a dozen armed and armored men abreast. Ringil led the imperials in an iron wedge, short swords out to hack and stab. They tore into the disarrayed ranks of the privateers, rolled up a dozen yards of the wall before anyone could grasp what was going on.

Then, somewhere down the line, a voice of gruff command.

“They’re coming off the fucking stair!”

Something dark snapped and snarled inside Gil, something reached out smokily for whoever that fucking loudmouth was. But he lacked the tools to equip it, to send it on its way, and anyway, whatever the dark thing was, it could not find the speaker in the fog, nor break his tongue in time—

“They’ve taken the tower! Brace up the north end!

The cry was taken up. It was the sound of order in the chaos, the sound of their advantage burning down. Ringil reached inside himself. Dredged up a warped, grating roar. Threw back his head again.

“Whore sons of Trelayne!” He barely understood it as his own voice, it was like something from the Grey Places speaking through him. “Whore sons of Trelayne—come meet your unmaker!

And on down the red-running causeway path, bringing the killing steel as he came.


IT WAS LESS THAN A HUNDRED YARDS TO THE END OF THE WALL, BUT BY halfway, he was running into harder pellets of resistance and losing men. That rallying, command voice had done something, built something here that wouldn’t give.

At his left shoulder, the first casualty—some privateer with a cutlass proving more than equal to imperial marine training. The marine went down with a groan. But the wedge held—his replacement stepped right over his body and avenged his death in five savage cut-and-thrust blows. Further on, another imperial grappled with a privateer on Gil’s right, lost the white-knuckled struggle for grip and took a knife blade in the guts, staggered backward with a howl. But he clung on and took his killer with him, over the edge of the causeway into the harbor below. Boiling thrash of water, vaguely seen through the fog, then both men were gone.

The next imperial slotted right into the gap. The wedge rolled on.

Salt on the marsh. Mother says

It was the boy, Gerin, the cold voice in his ear. Always the same rote words, the icy urchin touch at the nape of his neck that he’d learned better than to ignore in moments like these. Tugging him downward to a crouch…

Arrow fire came slicing out of the fog.

“Shields!” he bellowed. His own was already up—the shafts split and feathered it like magic, took down three less wary imperials in an eye blink. They cursed and groaned and tumbled, twisted and fell atop the bodies of men they’d just killed.

“That’s it, lads! Hold the line!”

That fucking voice again.

Yelling from across the harbor at the docks, lanterns coming on. Any element of surprise they’d once had was fast transmuting into the dross of a messy pitched battle. If he didn’t get this nailed down pretty fast…

He summoned force, summoned voice.

“Men of Trelayne!” Grateful for once that his own men would mostly not be able to follow the Naomic well enough for it to affect them. “Men of Trelayne, look to the water! The kraken wakes!

And leapt forward behind his shield, into the fog and the figures that bulked there.

He heard the oaths and yelps of shock. A shrill, terrified cry went up from somewhere, a volley of arrows scattered wide and harmless. Briefly, he glimpsed the terror that he’d set loose in their minds, the towering, tentacled bulk, rearing over the harbor wall like some vast, uprooted, upended oak tree, studded with unblinking obsidian eyes. Gray flicker glimpse, there and gone. It didn’t look a lot like the real article he’d faced a few weeks back—way too big, for one thing—but these men were seafarers and they’d come up on a dripping, woven mass of tales about this beast, each more outlandish and distended than the last. Some few might be smart or awake enough to shake off the glamour for what it was, but not many. For the others, their deepest nightmares and fears would do the rest.

A young privateer ran screaming along the causeway at him, eyes blind with fear. Ringil blocked a wild cutlass slash, stepped aside, tripped the man, and shoved him into the water on the harbor side. Something sinuous and muscular coiled up and around him as he flailed, Gil caught a glimpse of the man’s screaming face being engulfed and really wished he hadn’t…

“Rally!” The command voice, higher pitched now with desperation. “Rally, you fools! It’s a trick! There’s nothing there!”

“No, no—there’s something in the water, there is!

“The kraken!

“It took Perit!”

“Stand, you fools!”

Right.

Time to finish this.

He cut down two more privateers on his way to the commander. It wasn’t hard to do, the state they were in. Block and slice, hack out the leg from under one, pommel into the face of the other, then the short chop to the throat as he staggered back. He shouldered them out of the way, cleared space for himself with the Ravensfriend and now—the fog was finally clearing, burning off as the day got under way—he spotted the rallying point. The commander stood there on a crate, bellowing at the panicking muddle of men around him.

“You!” He stalked forward, sword point raised at the man. “Yeah, you! Want to come down off there and give me a fight?”

The moment seemed to lock up. Men froze in midmotion, weapons half raised, staring. Tendrils of fog, curling back, blown away on a new breeze.

“It’s him,” someone yelled. “It’s Eskiath, I told you he’s not fucking hu—”

The commander—by his jacket badges a mere sergeant—came leaping off the crate, blade in his right hand, short ax in his left.

“With me, lads! Throw this filth back into the sea!”

Ringil met him in a whirl, shield up to block the ax, Ravensfriend swooping low. Forced the other man to parry clumsily downward with his sword. The ax hit and bounced off the Kiriath blade—evil, twanging pain up through Gil’s elbow and shoulder with the impact. He rode it, jerked the shield edge in, looking for a chop into face or head. But the privateer sergeant was too canny a fighter—he’d already backed up, two looping rearward steps, weaving a figure-of-eight blur with his two weapons to cover.

“Get in behind this fuck,” he yelled. “Chop him down.”

But the imperial wedge was already rolling up behind Gil, and the other privateers had opponents of their own to worry about now. Battle was joined, tangled up and snarling across the corpse-littered causeway flagstones. They stared at each other through waxing morning light and an odd moment of calm. Ringil lifted shield and sword, querying.

“Need a rest?”

The sergeant brandished his weapons and roared. “Outlaw faggot scum!

“Oh, please.

He judged the man’s rush, broke it on the instant with his own leaping attack. Led with the Ravensfriend, let the sergeant beat it back with a wild, looping parry and swung in hard with his shield. Got the other man in the chest. Got ground. The ax whistled down and he flung the shield higher, whipped the pommel of the Ravensfriend into the sergeant’s face. Hooked the ax head on the shield edge, ripped the privateer forward off balance, and chopped in under his ribs. The man screamed, swung wildly with his sword arm, but the ax was still snagged and Ringil just leapt back, hauling the clinch. The sergeant tripped or slipped on blood, fell headlong forward at Gil’s feet, still dragged on ax and shield. Ringil flipped the Ravensfriend over from horizontal guard to downward jag, stabbed down hard between the man’s back ribs, shoulder turn and full weight behind the blow. There was mail over the man’s jerkin, but lightweight and cheap, links most likely rusted with time at sea; the Kiriath steel went through it like an arrow at full draw. The sergeant spasmed and groaned, let go his ax haft, and Gil’s shield came free.

He withdrew the Ravensfriend, judged the man done, looked about for fresh targets.

But the fight was all but finished. The imperials were still rolling forward, and any discipline the privateers had once had was broken. Strictly mopping up from here on in. Gil stalked about anyway, hamstrung a man here, belted another in the head with his shield, just to speed things up. The imperials fell on his victims and finished them.

Unexpected glint off the Ravensfriend’s edge—he peered upward through the clearing fog.

Looked like the sun was going to come out after all.

CHAPTER 13

They came down off the flat rock in single file behind the Dragonbane, giving clefts and blowholes a suitably wide berth. There was more debris from the wreck along the way—crates here and there, like lost dice from some abandoned game among giants; spars and tangled rigging, some of it up-jutting out of gaps in the rock where wind and waves had driven it or perhaps—she shivered slightly at the thought—where it had later been dragged. Here, the smashed ribs and soggy white spill of a shattered flour barrel. There, a scattering of galley pans. And just once, like so much knotted-up wet laundry flung down, a privateer corpse, sprawled bonelessly on the rock.

A couple of the men made sketched gestures of blessing over the dead man as they went past, some business with open palm and a couple of fingers kissed. Hand to chest, briefly bowed head. It dawned on a groggy Archeth, as she watched the ritual, that at least half her rescue party were also privateers.

The others she made for Tand’s men, with the exception of a single young Majak and a pair of marines. But they all followed the Dragonbane as one.

She went up the line, caught him up.

“Got these guys eating out of your hand, don’t you?” she said in Tethanne. “How’d you swing that one?”

Egar shrugged. “Someone’s got to be in charge.”

“Okay. But… a prisoner of war?”

“Look around you, Archidi. Things have changed.”

She let that go, looked out in silence to the rinsed gray horizon and the unquiet sea. The curve of a shingle beach just ahead of them, the rise of jagged uplands beyond. It was a pretty bleak shore they’d wrecked on.

“You recognize anything?” she asked, more quietly.

“Not here, no. We’ve got to be a long way farther north than the expeditionary ever made it.” He pointed ahead. “Follow this coast far enough south, there’s a big river delta with Kiriath ruins on the northern shore. It’s where we burned the lizard rafts with your father’s machines. We need to find that river. Then I’ll know where we are. Then I can get us home.”

They reached the limits of the flat rock, jumped down into the crunch of the shingle. More flotsam strewn along the strand ahead of them, some of it still washing around in the shallows. She stopped, shaded her eyes, and looked farther out, saw a bobbing carpet of the stuff there as well. No sign of any intact portion of the ship itself.

Further along the beach, someone had built a driftwood fire. Pale flames, barely visible in the harsh gray daylight. Men huddled around, jostling for warmth.

Archeth nodded at them. “How many we got?”

“Thirty-four, all told. I sent another party to scout the rocks southward, see if we find anybody else.”

She glanced back at her rescue party. “What’s the split?”

Another shrug. “What you see there—some League, some of Tand’s freebooters, a few marines mixed in. There’s a few Eternals, too, but I left them in charge of the other party and the fire.”

“Any more Majak?”

“A couple.” Egar grimaced. “Not a lot of use for swimming up on the steppe, most of them never learn.”

“Did you find… Kaptal?” She’d been going to ask after Shendanak, or his sodden corpse anyway, then thought better of it. “Or Tand?”

The Dragonbane shook his head. “Kaptal, no. No sign. And Tand went on the other ship—Flight of thegoing west or whatever it was. With Shendanak and Shanta, remember?”

She did now. “Gull—Flight of the Westward Gull. Yeah, but…”

“But what?”

“Well.” She gestured helplessly. “There’s a lot of wreckage.”

“All from the one ship.” The Dragonbane jerked a thumb back at one of the accompanying privateers. “According to that guy, anyway, and he was second watch steersman on Lord of the Salt Wind. Figure he ought to know what he’s talking about. Seems pretty certain the other ship didn’t wreck, nor the Pride. Or at least—they didn’t wreck around here.”

They reached the fire. One of the Throne Eternal, she didn’t know him by name, came to meet her and bowed his head. He was bedraggled and damp, but there was still a drilled poise in the way he stood that made her abruptly long for Yhelteth and home.

“Alwar Nash, my lady. At your service. It brings me joy to find you hale. Will you come closer to the fire?”

The solicitude melted some tiny chunk of something inside her, and for the first time she realized that her clothes were damp, that her head and body both ached from bruises she’d collected in the wreck, that she was in fact pretty fucking cold—

She locked down a shiver, nodded weary thanks. Nash turned and brusquely ushered the crouched or kneeling men aside to make a path nearer the fire. There were some resentful glances, but between Archeth’s alien looks and Nash’s take-no-shit Throne Eternal demeanor, no one seemed to want to make an issue of it. She stood at the wall of heat like a supplicant, holding out her hands to it, trying not to shudder with pleasure as the warmth seeped into her chilled and battered body.

There was some muttering among the privateers by the fire, the usual thing, and she would have paid it little attention, except that she saw the second steersman stride in among them, point back at her, and murmur something urgent. At which point the muttering dried up faster than a desert martyr’s blood. She wasn’t sure, but she thought she saw a couple of the men make some gesture of… What’s that? Obeisance?

“What’s going on?” she asked Egar as he joined her in the warmth. “I get that they don’t like the burned-black witch. But this is new.”

The Dragonbane glanced over at the privateer huddle. “Yeah, forgot to mention. Reason we found you so fast? You were caught up on the bowsprit lines and the snapped top half of the figurehead, too. The whole lot was jammed in there, sticking back up into the sky like a big fucking arrow pointing us to where you were.”

“Yeah, so?”

Egar hesitated. “Thing is, when we got there, it looked like the figurehead had hold of you by one ankle. Ship’s called Lord of the Salt Wind, remember? That’s Takavach—Dakovash of the Dark Court for these guys—and the figurehead was his likeness. Looks like the Salt Lord grabbed you by the leg in the storm, hung on, and saved your life.”

She shot him a sidelong look. “You’re not serious?”

“Hey, you’re looking at the man Takavach showed up in person to save from a brother slaying back up on the steppe. What do I know? And another thing? Privateers and marines both are all muttering that was no natural storm hit us last night. Certainly came on pretty fucking fast.”

“But—”

“Look, it doesn’t matter, Archidi. Believe what you want. But if these men think you’re some kind of favorite with their Dark Court, it’s going to be handy for keeping order. So don’t knock it down.”

“No problem.” She rubbed her hands together thankfully in the warmth from the flames. “Been the bad smell in the room around here for quite long enough. Adulation’s going to make a nice change.”


A LITTLE LATER, SHE FELT WELL ENOUGH TO REALIZE SHE WAS HUNGRY AND asked Egar quietly about supplies. He shook his head.

“We’re pretty low. Couple of oil jars with the seals still on, found them floating in the breakers. And there’s a salted ham we might be able to salvage some of. Got an intact crate over there with some ship’s biscuit in. Seawater got to some of it, but to be honest you need to soak that shit in brine before you can eat it anyway.” He looked at the backs of his battle-scarred hands. “It’ll do for now. Water’s the bigger problem.”

She brooded on the chains of jagged rising rock that formed the hinterland view. “There’s got to be some up there somewhere though, right?”

“Somewhere, yeah. But it could be a long way, and when we find it, it may not be safe to drink. Couple of times on the expeditionary, your father told us not to drink the water we found. Said it was likely poisoned.”

“Great. So do we scout or—”

A cry from someone on the other side of the fire. Egar and Archeth stepped wide of the billowing heat haze the flames gave off. Saw returning figures dotted along the shingle to the south. Moving slowly by the look of it—for some reason Archeth thought of men walking into the teeth of a roaring gale.

“My eyes aren’t what they used to be,” the Dragonbane muttered. “Is that… are they carrying someone back there? The last ones in the file?’

“Or something.” Archeth squinted. “Hard to tell. I count eleven men walking, anyway. That right?”

Egar grunted. “Four more than I sent out.”

They watched and waited as the party straggled in. Archeth recognized the Throne Eternal who led them—Selak Chan, the man who’d come aboard Pride of Yhelteth and found her trying to sink Anasharal in the harbor. His young face seemed to have aged ten years since she saw it last, but as with Alwar Nash, there was a trained spine of determination to his stance that gave her a little hope. He bowed deeply as he reached her.

“My lady. Such fortune we could not have hoped for. My life at your command. And with the news I bring—”

“You found survivors?” Egar broke in pragmatically.

Chan nodded, gestured back. “Two League, a Majak kid and one of Tand’s. All in pretty good shape—one of the League guys has a couple of broken fingers, but we splinted them up. Tand’s dog is limping, says he did something to his knee. But he can walk.”

“So who are you… carrying…” Voice fading out as she saw.

The last two men in the party were both League sailors. They’d slung a couple of lengths of three-inch rope across their shoulders and to form a nifty makeshift carry cable between. Hanging from the rope, like some giant crab caught up on netting, was a Kiriath machine.

Anasharal…?

It took her measurable moments to realize it was not—could not be—the Helmsman.

First of all, no mention of Anasharal had been made by her captors at any point, and she had to assume that it was still skulking aboard Sea Eagle’s Daughter somewhere, silently imitating some inanimate object.

Yeah, or dazzling Klithren and his men with some sorcerous shit or other, and securing passage south.

In any case, the thing the men carried was no Helmsman. It was smaller than Anasharal, for one thing, and more skeletal in frame. The central mass was dwarfed by powerful limbs, whose articulations would have risen well above the body itself when the thing walked, and by two of which it now hung suspended from the rope sling. It was like some nightmare version of a Helmsman, some predatory fantasy Anasharal might once have dreamed of itself.

“What the fuck is that?” Egar, asking it for all of them.

“Dunno,” grunted one of the men carrying the sling. “But it’s very fucking heavy.”

He nodded to his companion and the two of them shucked the rope sling in a single neat motion. The crablike thing clanked and rattled loudly on the shingle as it landed. It lay there on its back, legs splayed and draped outward, while the men from the fire crowded around to stare.

“Is it dead?” someone asked wonderingly.

“Looks that way,” said the sailor who’d complained about the weight. “Looks like they burned it up or something.”

It was true—now she looked at it carefully, Archeth saw that the thing was blackened and charred all over. Parts of it even seemed to have melted, something she found hard to credit despite the evidence of her own eyes. Her people built habitually out of materials that would withstand great heat. Outside of dragon venom, which ate pretty much anything it touched, the only time she’d seen substantial damage to Kiriath alloys was—

Khangset.

She still remembered her first view from the rise above the town—Khangset’s seaward ramparts torn and melted through when the dwenda came calling, the damage done as if by gigantic white-hot claws.

The Talons of the Sun, Ringil told her they called it. He wasn’t sure what exactly it was, had himself never seen it in action. From what he did know, it seemed the dwenda used it like volleys of flaming arrows to open passage, to sew chaos and terror ahead of an assault or simply to obliterate everything in their path.

Later, she’d found fleeting reference to it in the war chronicles her people left behind. But the language was ornate and unhelpful—usually a sure sign of the writer covering for their own lack of knowledge or reliable memory. She’d talked to the Helmsmen and not gotten much further. They’d been around for the war, four thousand years back, but they couldn’t tell her much more than she’d already gleaned elsewhere. They’d seen what the Talons did, had perfect recall of smoldering ruins and whole armies charred to ash, but the strike had always come from a place they could not see. They had some largely incomprehensible explanation of how this might work, one that lost Archeth at the first bend.

“Where did you find this?” she asked Chan.

The Throne Eternal nodded back over his shoulder. “At the bottom of a gully, my lady, on the other side of the headland. There were quite a few like it, all piled up there. I believe they must have come from the fortress.”

“Fortress?” Hunger, cold, the bruising she’d taken. For the first time, she felt genuinely dizzy. “You found a… fortress? A Kiriath fortress?”

“Yes, my lady. I was about to tell you.” Chan shot a reproachful glance at the Dragonbane. “We saw it from the headland, out to sea at least a mile. It stands in the ocean exactly as the Helmsman described it.”

CHAPTER 14

There were three fishing skiffs tied up along the causeway quay. The imperials found a couple of younger privateers cowering among the nets aboard the first, smacked them about a bit and threw them overboard. Splash and roil of waters as they were snatched down screaming—one or two of the marines looked a little queasy as they caught glimpses, but the rest seemed to be getting used to it.

Ringil cobbled together a rough-and-ready kindling spell Hjel had taught him early on and conjured fire from the damp timbers in the prow of the boat. It took a couple of attempts, the first one more smoke and smolder than flame. But second time around, the spell took. The damp wood snapped and crackled alight like desert scrub kindling. Ringil stepped back, splayed hands toward the flames, as if at once restraining them and warming his hands.

“Get out of the boat,” he suggested to the curious imperials rubbernecking at his back. “And somebody get that mooring cut.”

He clambered out after them. Watched somberly as the little improvised fireship drifted away from the causeway, spun about like a floated needle seeking north, then settled into an eerily rapid and accurate course across the harbor. The imperials clustered about him on the quay’s edge, but none got too close.

“There’s no current pulling that way,” somebody muttered at his back.

“Yeah, no shit,” came a low response. “What, did you just get here or something? You didn’t see those guys go into the water?”

Ringil turned about as if he hadn’t heard. Made for the second skiff. The rhythms for the kindling spell were thrumming in his head now, he had it down. Pretty sure he’d only need the one shot at it this time. More than enough spare attention to track the murmured conversation among the men who followed him.

“This is evil work,” he heard. “The Revelation is clear. It’s forbidden to have dealings with powers like these. Scarface there is going to—”

Keep your fucking voice down! Man’s a sorcerer, isn’t he?”

Twitch of a grin at the corners of Ringil’s mouth. A fresh voice joined in.

“Yeah, Krag, we’re all real upset about how it’s turning out. We just kicked these pirates’ arses into the harbor thanks to Scarface there. I’ll take that over a barrel of invigilator’s indulgences any day of the week.”

“Yeah, you ever see an invigilator fight like that?”

Guffaws.

“Ever see an invigilator fight at all?”

“That’s blasphemy, Shahn! The Revelation’s our guide to salvation of the soul. The invigilators cannot mire themselves in worldly matters.”

“Yeah? Seen a couple of them mire themselves pretty deep in the girls at Salyana’s Yard last year.”

“What I hear, most of them prefer boys.”

“Man, now that’s just fucking obscene—”

“Oh, what—you really going to pull that face, Mahmal? After the way you snuggled up to little rosy cheeks from the galley aboard Lizardlash last year?”

“That’s different, man. That’s at sea. But when you’ve got the fucking choice… ”

They reached the second skiff. Showing off a little, Gil made the cast from the causeway this time, into the piled up nets in the bottom of the boat. Smoke and smolder, and for a moment he thought he’d fucked it up again. Then the flames broke out, pale and crackling in the bright morning air. He rested one boot on the side of the skiff, gave the fire a moment to really take, then nodded at the marine nearest the mooring iron. The man hacked a knife blade up through the rope and Ringil gave the boat a heavy, booted shove away from the causeway’s edge.

“My lord!” A marine, hurrying along the quay from the stairway end. “My lord Ringil!”

Gil turned to face him. The imperial bore the marks of the engagement just gone—he was limping somewhat, he’d been bandaged crudely about the head. Blood had trickled down from the binding and was starting to dry on his face. Still, he seemed pretty cheerful.

“My lord, Commander Hald sends word—he is ready to move on the town. Fresh men are coming up at the tower to support the push.”

“Excellent.” Ringil nodded at the last remaining skiff. “Everybody in the boat, then. Tell Commander Hald we’ll see him on the other side.”

He watched with some amusement as the men around him looked at each other in alarm. Then he strode to the third skiff, threw in his borrowed shield and jumped down after it. Looked back expectantly at the marines.

“Gentlemen, if you please.”

They came without much enthusiasm, nine men in all, lowered themselves in with wary care. They sat gingerly away from the sides, while he took station at the prow and waited for the bandaged marine to cut them loose. Out ahead in the harbor waters, the other two skiffs were well ablaze and heading steadily for the League man-of-war tied up at the main dock. In the brightening light of the morning, the fireships looked harmless and toylike, but he could already hear voices raised in alarm along the dock.

Good enough.

They made good time across the harbor—stood at the prow, Ringil glanced down and saw the lead akyia just below the surface of the water, swimming effortlessly on its side, long, fronded limbs rippling. One claw-tipped hand trailed back to caress the keel, as if guiding the vessel by touch alone. The creature’s head was tilted up, one fist-sized eye seeming to watch him through the water, huge lampreylike mouth irising open and shut in the boneless lower face.

They’re talking about you.

Seethlaw’s words, the first time they saw the akyia, watching them both from shallow waters, just offshore in the Grey Places. At the time, he’d dismissed the dwenda’s words as a joke. But he was pretty sure there’d been an akyia in the river when he came out of the crumbling temple at Afa’marag. He was pretty sure it had left him his dragon-tooth dagger, pegged in the mud on the riverbank. And somewhere in the twisted morass of nightmare and memory he carried from that time, was a flicker-lit recollection of taking the Ravensfriend out of a webbed and clawed hand that offered it like a gift from the water.

I see what the akyia saw, Gil. I see what you could become if you’d only let yourself.

He wasn’t sure what he was becoming, but he knew they’d shadowed him northward. He’d seen them cavorting in the surf one night at Lanatray when he went out to prowl the battlements of his mother’s summer retreat. He’d seen them at play in the bandlight-dappled wake of Dragon’s Demise on more than one occasion, though no one else up on deck those nights seemed to share his vision. And when the kraken came calling, hauling itself up meatily on deck one questing tentacle at a time in search of prey, it was the akyia who swarmed it, tearing at its bulk with claws and mouths, dragging it finally back down into the ocean before Ringil had the chance to do more than hack at it a half dozen times.

They featured in Naomic myth, more often called the merroigai, though the focus in those tales was usually on their sleek, womanlike bodies and seductive ways with mariners. Not so much mention of the nightmarish bone structure and feeding apparatus of the face, or the rather intimidating claws. But for all that, they were seen as creatures of power. There were legends that made them minor gods, close relatives of the Dark Court nobility. In other myth, they were linked specifically with the Salt Lord Dakovash. In some versions they were his eyes and ears across the ocean, in others his handmaidens.

Seethlaw had been reticent, told him nothing meaningful or useful, but one thing had come across very clearly. The dwenda lord and his sister Risgillen were both obviously wary of offending the akyia, if not actually scared of them. And anything that worried the dwenda, well, that had to be worth something.

We’ll take what allies we can get, Akal the Great told his court bluntly, when news of the alliance with Trelayne against the lizards was proclaimed. And we’ll not question our good fortune in finding them.

Ringil had never much liked the man, but he couldn’t fault the thinking.

They were coming up on the shingle beach now, at the end of the quay. No sign of a reception committee. In the wake of the fireships and Hald’s encroachment along the far side of the harbor, no one had had time to notice them arrive. The lead akyia let go the boat’s keel, executed a slick dive-and-turn that would have broken the back on any human swimmer, and was gone, back into deeper waters. Through his own grip on the prow and his boots, Gil thought he felt the release of multiple claws from the underside of the skiff and a faint slackening of the boat’s momentum.

“Ready it, lads.” Shahn, the ranking imperial present, gruff voice raised. “I want a nice tight deployment behind my lord Ringil, soon as we hit. Blades out after you jump.”

They ran in to the shelving shingle with a sustained, grinding crunch. The boat jammed to a halt and tilted to one side along the keel. Gil leapt out, shield slung, splashing heavily through ankle shallows and up onto dry land. He stood and drew the Ravensfriend, sheer leadership bravado, there was nothing here to kill with it. But he heard the multiple scrape as the men at his back followed suit.

“Shields!”

They stalked up the beach as one. The soft breeze plucked aside his cloak, put a moment’s chill back in his damp clothing. He shivered, but it felt exultant.

Dad, if you could only see me now. Leading a pack of imperials in assault on a chartered League town.

Outlaw faggot scum, is it?

Fair enough.

They made the street to the quay unnoticed, traded shingle for cobbles with some relief. A couple of hundred yards off to the right, one of the makeshift fireships had lodged at the waterline of the League warship, flames licking upward at the rail and rigging there. Men swarmed the ship with buckets, trying to get the fire out.

Yeah, good luck with that. Hjel had taught him well; nothing would quench invoked fire until the thing you’d set aflame was ash.

Meantime…

The plan was pretty straightforward, a lopsided pincer to clear out the wharf of any hostile forces, then advance up into the town with general slaughter. But as they reached the quay, he heard yelling and the clatter of boots on cobbles, carried down from the street above in the still morning air. Reinforcements, coming down.

He whipped around to face the imperials, whirl of decision and hurried speech.

“Four men, with me, now. We’re going up there and block the next wave. Shahn, you take the others and hack your way through to Hald.”

Six of the eight imperials stepped forward on the instant. Assume the remaining two had to be the pious Krag and a like-minded pal. Ringil grinned and pointed at random with his shield.

“You, you, you and you. Thank you, gentlemen.” Briefly, turning to Shahn. “Tell Hald we’ll hold the slope as long as we can, but some backup would be nice. Okay, go. Get it done. The rest of you, with me. Let’s fucking chase them back up that hill, shall we?”

Grim laughter. They knew what they were being asked to do, they knew the odds. Five blades to stop up the street against who knew how many privateers, and the gradient against them, too.

He raised the Ravensfriend like a steel standard.

“For your comrades, gentlemen—for the Empire! Make it count!”

For the Empire, Gil? Where’d that one come from?

Hey, whatever works.

They rushed the corner, got there at about the same time as the privateer force hurrying down the street—to that extent, it was an ambush and quite effective as such. The descending soldiers literally stumbled over Ringil’s squad. Gil battered the lead privateer with his shield, knocked him down, kicked him in the head, and left him for someone else to finish. He cut low on the next man, chopped the legs out from under him almost before the privateer realized he was there. Then slip aside as the maimed and screaming soldier tumbled past, plant your feet, meet the third man with hew and block and slice, all the time looking for that opening. Watch those cobbles underfoot—the night’s fog and the morning dew had left them slick and treacherous.

The privateer he faced found out the same thing on too much downward momentum—he staggered on a parry, came around too far—the Ravensfriend scythed down, took off his arm just below the elbow. Gout of blood across the air, and the man bellowed like a slaughterhouse ox as he saw it happen. Ringil grabbed him roughly by the jerkin, shoved him aside. Caught some of the blood, warm and wet, across the side of his face as the man fell screaming.

The imperials had opened out around him like the petals on some malign black rose. Slam of shields and hack and stab—they scooped the surprised privateers in, set them stumbling about on the incline, had slaughtered a half dozen before anyone managed to back up and mount a decent defense. For long moments, panic and confusion swept the League ranks—they couldn’t see exactly what kind of force had got in their way, how strong it was, or how well armed. And this outlaw they’d come to take down, wasn’t he a black mage or something, was this some kind of sorcery…?

Of course, it couldn’t last.

“For Hoiran’s fucking sake, there’s only five of them! Form up!”

Like a dog shaking itself, the privateer troop rallied. Shields came down off shoulders, a ragged line formed up, backed away for breathing space. The imperials grabbed the chance, drew breath of their own, stood panting. The privateer who’d shouted pushed his way through to the front, grinning savagely beneath an ornate helm that hid his upper face. There was a sergeant’s badge emblem painted crudely across his cuirass, an ax held low in his right hand and—Gil’s heart sank—a skirmish ranger’s coat beneath the armor.

“Right,” he snapped, and pointed with his ax. “Now cut these perfumed southern ponces down, will you.”

Here we go, Gil. Now or never.

Sword arm thrown up, as if blocking a punch, fist reversed, Ravensfriend held vertical, blade pointing down. He took three fingers off the grip, held on to the sword with circled index finger and thumb. He made the glyph. Hoped Hjel’s much vaunted Powers were paying close attention, out here in this, come on now, pretty fucking open space.

The skirmish ranger snorted. “Fuck’s that supposed to mean? You want to surrender now, outcast? That all you got?”

“Your helmet is red hot,” Ringil told him.

And watched as the man screamed, dropped his ax and grabbed his helm with both hands, screamed again as his fingers touched the metal and melted from the heat, went to his knees still screaming. The skirmish ranger spasmed to the cobbles and thrashed and rolled and arched in agony, scream on scream on scream, until it was done, and finally lay there twitching, eyes poached white in their sockets.

Faint steam curled out of the wrenched gape of his mouth, like a soul departing.

The cost of it all came and took Gil like a kick in the guts. It was a major effort not to flinch, not to sag in the wake of the forces that had passed through him, not to sit down right there on the cobbled street. He lifted the Ravensfriend instead, trembling fingers clenched once more around the grip. He pointed with the blade at the staring privateers. The voice that grated up out of him seemed to belong to another creature entirely.

“Who’s next?” it asked them.

They broke and ran.

Luckily.


HE LED THE IMPERIALS UP THE STREET AFTER THE ROUT. HALD COULD PLAY catch-up when he finally broke through along the wharf. He was a smart lad, he’d work it out.

We certainly left enough bodies for him.

They made no real attempt to catch the fleeing privateers—better to let them sow panic in all they met along the way, then deal with any die-hard hero types who didn’t buy the tale and decided to make a stand. They took the slope at no more than a brisk walk. Slow enough to let Gil get some breath back and try to master the trembling in his guts. He’d pushed it too far, he knew—just as Hjel had warned him not to—and here came the price. One thing to put imagined terrors and doubts into the minds of ignorant, ill-educated opponents. That came at a light enough toll, was almost, according to Hjel, not sorcery at all. But this trick—pulling furnace heat out of the air’s very pores, pulling it down on an elite trained opponent’s head in the midst of combat and the blink of an eye…

That, you paid for in heavy coin.

The ikinri ‘ska snaked about within him, like something wanting to be fed. It coiled and snapped in his chest and guts, watered his eyes, shoved jagged spikes down the nerves in his arms and legs. He had no way to get a grip on it.

“Upper window!” Crisp, controlled alert from one of the imperials. “Left side.”

He swung to look. Saw only a boy of about ten or twelve gaping down at them, pointing finger raised, turning back into the room behind, lips moving.

And grabbed away by a burly, parental form.

“Nothing—” He cleared his throat, gathered some command back into it. “Nothing to worry about. Keep the pace.”

Farther up, where the sloping thoroughfare took a hairpin turn, they found blood trickling down between the cobbles and tracked it to a stricken privateer. The man was trying to crawl out of the street and into the sanctuary of a narrow gap between neighboring houses. He’d either staggered this far and then collapsed, or been carried by comrades who’d thought better of the gesture and shed their burden in favor of a speedier retreat. He heard their boots coming and scrabbled over onto his back, propped himself up on one elbow, and groped desperately at his belt for a knife that wasn’t there. There were smeared puddles of blood on the cobbles where he’d crawled, and a ragged ax gash in his jerkin just above the hip, marking the wound beneath. He looked up at them as they approached, defiant eyes in a sweat-beaded face contorted with pain.

Grim chuckles among the imperials. Their blood was up with the unexpected victory they’d just enjoyed. One of them crouched at the man’s side.

“That looks like your handiwork there, Mahmal.” He prodded at the wound and the privateer convulsed with a weak scream. “Half-arsed butcher’s chop like that.”

“Fuck off. He’s down, isn’t he?”

The crouched imperial cleared a mercy blade from his belt left-handed. “Yeah, but you gotta learn to—”

“Hold up.” Ringil, stepping between them. “Let me talk to him.”

The imperial shrugged and moved aside. Ringil took his place and squatted by the injured man’s side. He looked down into the sweating countenance. Saw under the blood and grime a face not much out of boyhood. He switched to Naomic.

“You know who I am, son?”

A shaky nod. The man shrank from him as best he could.

“Not the demon blade…” he husked.

It took Ringil a moment to understand that what he was hearing was a plea. He reversed his grip on the Ravensfriend, hefted it by the pommel, up where the man could see it.

“This?”

“No! Don’t kill me with that. Please, I—I beg. Not—that blade. Don’t take my soul.”

“Hm.” Don’t waste this, Gil. Run with it. “You want to save your soul, son, you’d better talk to me. I want some answers. And, ehm, have a care—the demon that sleeps in this blade will know if you lie.”

“Yes.” Voice faint and tight with the pain. “All right, yes. Ask me.”

“Right, first off—what the fuck are you people doing up here? There’s nothing worth having in the Hironish, it’s the arse end of the League. Any coast-hugger captain knows that much. What’s this about?”

“Came for you—Eskiath, outcast.” It was barely a whisper. “Capture for judgment—or kill.”

“This many men? Come off it.” Gil hefted the Ravensfriend again. “I said tell the truth.”

“No—wait, wait. It is truth.” The injured man, panting with panic as well as pain now, gulped a breath. “Word came—from Lanatray. The outlaw Eskiath, in company of Empire nobles, of men at arms. A voyage north. And now, with the war—”

Ringil blinked. “War?”

“—you are all proscribed… in League territory. We are ordered—detain all—all imperials…”

“What fucking war?”

The man flinched. “The imperials—they began it. They took Hinerion—with fire and force. They claimed offence—justification. The—old story.”

Ringil closed his eyes. Jhiral—you twisted, arrogant little fuckwit, what have you done? What murderous, pimp-strutting piece of idiocy have you loosed on us all now?

Aware that he was probably looking less than wholly dark and sorcerous, more just sick and tired, he opened his eyes again.

“How long ago was this?”

“Don’t know—couple… months… Maybe more—by the time word came.”

War is declared and battle soon to be joined. The dark queen’s words floated back through his head. It had never occurred to him that she might be speaking literally.

“How many men?” And then, on a sudden, grim suspicion. “How many ships?”

“Five—five vessels—but two are now gone—took the prisoners. I—crew for Star of Gergis. Her muster is… eighty-six—”

And the man-of-war in the harbor looked good to carry twice that. Plus three more hulls at anybody’s guess of tonnage and crew. It beggared belief.

Five fucking ships. Father, you have really outdone yourself this time.

Come off it, Gil. Let’s not let our family rancor run away with us. Gingren doesn’t swing the weight to accomplish this.

The cabal, then?

An open question. He still had little real sense of the cabal’s reach, the extent to which they might or might not govern behind the scenes in Trelayne or even the League in general. He’d met their agents on occasion, but had scant opportunity to interrogate them—the scuffles were always too brutal, the blades too unforgiving, his own unleashed rage too raw. Seethlaw had been using the cabal to consolidate power and influence in the northern cities, this much he did know. But he had no idea whether the cabal itself was a created tool of the dwenda’s hand, or simply an existing power structure Seethlaw had seen fit to subvert. He didn’t know if it had shriveled when Seethlaw went away and Ringil returned to the city to wreak vengeful havoc among those who’d abducted his cousin, or if Findrich and the others had merely hunkered down and waited out Gil’s poorly planned and clumsily executed revenge. Gil had warned off Risgillen’s incursion in Yhelteth last year in no uncertain term—

I stand watch here! There is no way to this city except through me!—his own screams, shredding at his ears as the temple hall at Afamarag came collapsing about him, and Risgillen looked on appalled—The next time I see a dwenda, I cut its heart out and eat it still beating!

—but he’d never had much doubt Seethlaw’s sister would continue to work whatever levers of power she could find in the north.

The Aldrain are bringing the Talons of the Sun, Firfirdar’s whispering voice in his head like feathers falling, to light the skies once more with the glare from a myriad undeserved deaths

Never mind the cabal, what would the League itself do for a weapon like that? He’d heard Risgillen’s boasts, he’d listened to Archeth’s account of what she found at Khangset. He didn’t understand what exactly the Talons of the Sun was, but what it could do did not seem much in question. A weapon to set the city of Yhelteth aflame like felled and rotted timber. A weapon to bring the whole Empire to its knees.

What would they not offer up to Risgillen for that?

Five ships and a few hundred men to capture or kill your brother’s murderer, my otherworldly lady, bringer of victory fire? It’d barely count as a good faith down payment.

He forced his attention back to the wounded privateer.

“Who commands you in this?”

The man quailed. “Klithren—Klithren of Hinerion. Lately knight—knight commander under the war muster.”

Ringil’s lip curled. “Oh, really?”

He knew the sort. Scrambling for cheap title and advancement in the frantic, ill-discerning chaos of mobilization. The war against the Scaled Folk had seen a flood of noble younger sons into posts they were not remotely equipped to fill—not least one hot-eyed young Ringil Eskiath, come to think of it—and he supposed this time around would be no different.

The injured man gulped air again. “They—they say Klithren—bears you ill will. Personal, they say. He—speaks your name with hate—to his pillow at night.”

“How very romantic.” Ringil got to his feet. Saw how the privateer’s eyes darted desperately left and right among the towering figures of the enemies that surrounded him. Terror and quailing hope fighting for the upper hand on his tormented face. “All right, son. Rest easy, we’re done. Your soul is safe.”

He made a show of putting aside the Ravensfriend. Saw the flood of relief on the young man’s face. He nodded at the imperial with the mercy blade.

“Make it quick.”

The imperial knelt, humming a distracted little tune to himself, and slit the man’s throat ear to ear. The privateer’s lips moved, gusting prayer. Blood welled up and filled the gash, spilled down onto the man’s chest and soaked down his jerkin to join the spreading stain from the wound at his hip. Hard to tell if the relief stayed on his face as he died—the imperial was good at his job and the young features went sullen and slack with blood loss, almost the moment the cut was made. His eyes fluttered closed, like doves settling to a perch, and then he was gone.

Klithren.

Gil brooded. The name meant nothing to him, but then these blood feud names rarely did. Kill enough men, you built a whole clan’s worth of bereaved brothers, fathers, sons, and comrades and they’d all rip out your entrails if they ever got the chance. The upside was that contrary to popular tales and legend, that chance almost never came. Few outside the nobility had the luxury of the spare time to track you down, let alone the fighting skills to do the deed, or the purse to hire it done. Oh, you might get called out to the odd inconvenient duel, or hear vague word of sneak assassins set on you, who anyway as often as not pocketed the purse and disappeared rather than take the trouble to fulfill their contract…

But mostly, you got to sleep at night untroubled.

And your murderous deeds were washed away downstream, leached more or less clean of the blood, lost in the slaughterhouse flow of it all. The world forgot and so, in time, did you.

“Anything useful, sir?” Shahn asked him.

Ringil nodded. “Seems His Imperial Radiance has, in His infinite wisdom, taken us to war in our absence. Hinerion has already fallen.”

“All hail,” said Shahn reflexively, either missing the irony in Gil’s words or perhaps just choosing to. He looked significantly at his comrades, and a muted smattering of All Hails trickled out among them.

“That puts us a thousand miles the wrong side of the line,” someone muttered.

“Then we fight through it,” snapped Shahn. “And join our comrades at the front in glory, with blood already on our blades.”

“Indeed,” said Ringil, deadpan. “But first things first, eh? According to our friend here, there’s some asshole with a personal grudge against me leading this lot. If I can find him, we might be able to wrap this up faster than I thought.”

Shahn frowned. “Single combat, my lord?”

“If he’ll take it, yes.”

“Do we know their strength?” asked one of the others.

“Five vessels. But two are already gone south with prisoners.”

Five! Five fucking—”

Silence! My lord Ringil is speaking.”

“I reckon about two fifty, maybe three hundred men,” he went on evenly. “Most of them ashore. Skeleton crews for the picket ship we passed in the fog, and its sister to the south.”

“And us with less than eighty men.” The same imperial who’d worried over the thousand miles to the front. “Come on—who’d take single combat over those odds?”

“Eskiath!”

It was a raw bellow from up the slope and beyond the turn in the street ahead. A voice bright with rage in the crisp morning air, thick with unreleased longing. Ringil spun toward it with a look on his face the imperials would later describe to their comrades as close to joy.

“Answer your question for you?” he asked absently, scanning the rise.

“Coward! Outcast!” The roared challenges rolled down on top of each other, echoing between the houses like the fall of heavy stones. “Come meet your rightful doom!”

“Be right there,” Ringil murmured.

And stalked up the street, as if to something calling him home.

CHAPTER 15

Even for Kiriath architecture, An-Kirilnar was pretty fucking impressive.

Sure, anyone who’d ever lived in Yhelteth knew what the Kiriath could build when the mood took them. Sooner or later, you went out and rubbernecked at the Black Folk Span where it leapt across the river, or the Bracing Twins on the imperial palace’s distressed northern flank. At one time or another, you’d have seen the estuary defense walls and the eternally dancing prism of green and violet light atop the lighthouse tower where they ended. You’d maybe have passed the cordoned end of the imperial shipyards, where the last remaining fireship in the city rested on its dry dock props like some huge pupating iron grub. Or you’d have gone one day to peer into the gaping pit at Kaldan Cross and the eldritch scaffolding there that seemed to lead the eye on downward forever…

But still.

Pretty fucking impressive.

Egar muttered the words under his breath as the party walked the ocean-drenched causeway into the shadow of the city, tilting their heads back to take in the silent overhead loom of the place. An-Kirilnar stood about a hundred feet above the waves, on five thick supporting columns that would each have dwarfed the estuary lighthouse back in Yhelteth in girth if not in height. From the shore, it had looked distant and unreal—blank walls the dirty white of old river ice, wrapped tight around a central cluster of spires that glistened now and then as some wandering shaft of sunlight made it down through the cloud. It was like seeing a frost-giant fortress out of some Voronak hunter’s tale—something glimpsed through veils of blizzard snow up north along the edges of the Big Ice. Like some tiny chunk of another world dropped into this one. Like something out of myth.

But up close like this, myth melted into something else. The underside of the city, now they were beneath it, looked derelict and used—a vast, dark expanse of stained and variegated alloy surfacing, scarred here and there with patchwork riveting and ugly metal seams that looked to Egar like repairs carried out in haste. He’d seen similar during the war, when the dragons came and the Kiriath engineering corps had to make good the damage to their defenses before the next battle. And still, at intervals across this surface, there were broad gaps, some regular enough to be intended aspects of the structure, others looking ragged and wound-like. The wind swept in and hooted eerily among them, brought with it occasional gusts scented with some indefinable chemical reek. Here and there, cabling drooled down out of a gap, like spittle from the mouth of some drunk collapsed asleep over the edge of a table.

They walked beneath as if afraid of waking something up.

“Think this place is haunted?” he heard at his back in Naomic.

Another privateer hawked and spat. “Nah. Those burned-blacks are fucking immortal, in’t they? How you going to get ghosts if no one ever dies?”

“Yeah, but they could still die in, like, battles and shit. Like at Rajal beach.”

“Fucking looks like someone died around here.”

Egar rolled a look back over one shoulder. “Shut up.”

The men fell silent.

Just as well, really. Not exactly the time or place for knocking heads together, this. A causeway of interlocking five-sided alloy plates each the size of a small shield, but making a path barely a yard and a half across in total, washed a couple of inches deep each time the ocean swell swept across it, and slippery as fuck if you didn’t watch your step. Any punch-ups here and all parties would likely end up in the drink. And having seen what could come crawling up out of cracks in the rock on dry land in these parts, Egar wasn’t all that keen to try his luck in deep water a couple of miles from shore.

You worry like a boy at a brothel door, Dragonbane. These men aren’t going to break ranks on you now and you know it.

It was herdsman’s wisdom first and foremost, gleaned up on the steppe from boyhood on. The buffalo herds followed the big bulls—get the bulls to behave, you had the herd, too. But head south and enlist, and you found that what held for steppe buffalo wasn’t far out for men, either. The pack followed its leaders pretty much the same way.

Yeah, and you broke the big bull back on the beach this morning. Picked him out of the huddled early survivors at a glance, recognized him from among his and Archeth’s captors when they were brought aboard Lord of the Salt Wind the day before—

Only yesterday? Urann’s balls, time flies when you’re having fun.

—beckoned him forward.

You with the hair. What do they call you?

What’s it to you, Majak? Stirring, rising to a disconcerting two yards plus of muscled height. Fighting scars on the face, and—

And never mind.

Put on a brief grin, Dragonbane, take it off as fast. What’s it to me? Take a look around, why don’t you. Voice abruptly raised. Go on—the rest of you, too. You realize where we’ve washed up?

It’s the Wastes coast, someone said.

Yeah, it is. Anyone been here before?

Silence.

Well, I have. I was here with the joint expeditionary under Flaradnam Indamaninarmal back in fifty-two. And I was at Gallows Gap on the way back.

A stir of murmurs at the name. If a single battle had caught the imagination of the League populace, it was the stand at Gallows Gap. For the first time, the giant in front of him looked uncertain. Egar locked gazes. Dropped his voice to a more personal level again.

You want to get out of here? A tight nod toward the huddle around the fire You want to get these people home in one piece? I’m your man.

Yeah? Last time I checked, you were a fucking prisoner of war.

Egar let his hands hang loose at his sides, put everything into his eyes. Check again.

Long pause.

The giant shifted. Sogren, he said. They call me Cablehand.

Egar. They call me the Dragonbane.

The causeway ended. More precisely, it opened into what appeared to be an encircling ring shadowing the curve on the central supporting column, a dozen yards out from the structure itself. Ahead of Egar, Archeth had been setting the pace, as hurriedly as the treacherous surface they walked on would allow. Now she came to an abrupt halt and Egar was so busy casting glances upward that he walked into her back. She teetered forward, he grabbed her by the shoulders, just avoided sending them both into the water.

They stood very still.

“Sorry,” he muttered.

“That’s just fucking great.” There was a dull, bitten-off anger in her tone, but it wasn’t for him. She gestured outward. “How the fuck are we supposed to…”

Let her arm fall.

They stood staring across at the support column. The surface of the sea heaved and slopped in the gap between—in the shadow of the city, the water was a murky, impenetrable gray. The face of the column rose featureless from it, dirty white alloy, bloomed here and there with patches of green or purplish brown, as if the metal had somehow bruised. If there was a way in anywhere, it didn’t show.

The men were piling up behind them. The muttering started again. Better give them something to do, Eg.

He snapped his fingers for attention—his old imperial training, woken to the occasion and rising ready for use. He stayed in Tethanne, looked to one of Tand’s men to translate quietly into Naomic for the privateers.

“Right, listen up, all of you. I want fifteen men to make a circuit that way, another fifteen this way. Sogren, you take the first party, pick ’em out now. Alwar Nash, you pick fifteen more and go the other way. Go carefully. You’re looking for a doorway, a bridge, a crack—anything that lets us in. Meet at the midpoint, pass each other, and keep on going—what one man’s eyes miss, another’s may find. The rest of you, back up and check overhead. I don’t see how, but maybe we missed something important up there.”

Hesitation, glances exchanged. They were cold, tired, hungry, and bruised from surviving the storm and the wreck. Caught up in a place they knew only from nightmare tales and legend, armed with nothing beyond a sparse selection of knives, a few salvaged lengths of chain, and one or two shattered ship’s timbers with enough heft to make a halfway decent club. They were kitted out for a tavern brawl at best, and they were facing monsters out of myth.

Egar spread his arms. “Come on, people. Let’s get to it.”

He let his own two-foot piece of chain dangle from the loop he’d made of it around his right hand. He had no intention of using it—could not afford to start maiming or killing men out of a party not fifty strong over some minor issue of discipline. But the chain was a reminder. It still carried the bolts at either end that had anchored it to the chunk of driftwood he’d found it in. And they’d all watched him tear out those bolts one at a time by sheer brute force.

“Yeah, come on.” Sogren gestured impatiently. “You heard the man. You. You. You…”

The tension drained away. Alwar Nash mustered some limited Naomic to make his own selection—though he chose mainly from among the various imperial contingents anyway—and the two search parties formed up. Egar watched them head off, then waved the remaining men back along the main causeway. He turned back to Archeth, who’d sunk into a crouch on the inner rim edge of the ring.

“Any ideas?” he asked her quietly.

“You got any grip on what your ancestors were doing four thousand years ago? No, I don’t have any fucking ideas.”

“I thought Grashgal… your father…”

“Yeah, they were around back then. They didn’t talk about it. I don’t think they even remembered it all that well.”

He crouched at her side. “Well, what about that place you found at Shaktur—that was a city standing in the lake, wasn’t it?”

“An-Naranash, yeah.” She shook her head. “Not like this. It was smaller, and they left the doors open when they abandoned it. Anyway, we had a boat back then.”

Egar studied the blank, color-bruised surface of the support column. Green and reddish-brown blooms like fungus, but no sign of any crack or opening, or even a purchase point for climbing out of the ocean.

“I’d swim across there,” he offered. “But—”

“No, you fucking won’t.” She looked sideways at him and he saw the apology in her face. “You think I’m going to let you put yourself in that water? Let that fuck Sogren do it, see what happens to him.”

Egar blinked. “Sogren’s kind of handy to have around at the moment. He do something to upset you?”

She shook her head wearily. “Forget it. Anyway, what’s the fucking point? There’s no way in, even if he did survive the swim.”

“Okay, Archidi, but we got to come up with something. It’s cold, and it’s going to get colder with the dark. Either we get inside this thing pretty sharpish, or we have to head back to the beach and get a fresh fire built.”

“You think I don’t know that?”

He fixed his gaze on the support column and its bruises. Greenish blue and crimson, purplish black. He sighed.

“I think,” he said carefully, “that you’re cold and tired and pissed off that this isn’t turning out the way you hoped. And you’d probably sit here until you freeze rather than—”

Wait a minute

“Archidi…” Long hesitation because he wanted to be sure. “Look.”

“Skip it, Eg. I don’t want to talk about it.”

“No, look.” He leapt upright, pointed. “Look at it, look at the colors. They’re changing, they’re… shifting or something…”

They both stared over the water at the blooms on the dirty white alloy support. The greenish-blue patch lost its last few tinges of green as they watched. The crimson began to darken, tipping toward the color of old meat. The purplish-black mark paled, crept into violet.

“No,” Archeth, climbing slowly to her feet. “Fucking. Way.”

“You want to bet?” For some reason there was a grin on his face. “They’re moving around, too. Look.”

It was like watching the passage of slow clouds across the sky. Some force inched the patches of color along, squeezing them thinner, puffing them out, sculpting fresh lines and curves along their edges, all so gradually that if you looked away too soon—or, say, if you stood around with a bunch of tired and worn shipwrecked men looking for a doorway that wasn’t there—you’d miss it.

“You know what that is?” Archeth asked him with sudden energy.

“I was hoping you’d tell me.”

“It’s a—” She stopped, lips moving silently as she mustered, he guessed, a translation from High Kir. “A species portcullis. Built for the dwenda wars. It locks out anyone who isn’t Kiriath. Can’t believe I didn’t recognize it—the Indirath M’nal talks about them all the time. All I have to do is name the colors out loud.”

“Well…” Egar frowned. “So anyone who speaks High Kir could get in, really.”

“No. Human eyes don’t work the same way as Kiriath—it’s a subtle difference, but it’s there.” A wan smile. “Why my mother and I could never agree on clothes. Even if you knew the words in High Kir, you wouldn’t have the vision to identify them. I guess that must have been true for the dwenda, too.”

She stepped back and narrowed her eyes at the crawling blotches of color. Cleared her throat, raised her chin, and uttered a paced string of syllables.

Waited. A good few seconds.

They exchanged a glance.

“Are you sure you and your mother didn’t just—”

The ocean rose up before them, roaring.

CHAPTER 16

Klithren of Hinerion, newly minted League knight commander, was not quite the fop Gil had been hoping for.

He stood at the top of the rise, backed by a knot of men in skirmish ranger gear, and in his stance alone, Ringil read trouble. There was nothing affected about it, no trace of show for the men at his back or bravado for his approaching enemy. In fact, for a man bearing a blood grudge, Klithren looked uncommonly relaxed. He stood with a sword held low in each hand, no more tense than a craftsman with his tools contemplating the start of the day’s work. He was no youngster, probably had a good few years on Gil himself, but he wore it well—taut midriff showing left and right of his cuirass’s lower curves, muscular, dancer’s legs, and probably a nice tight arse at the top of them. Big in the shoulders, long in the arms, the cabled muscles easy to read under the mail that covered them.

“How now, Eskiath?” he called as Ringil got within easy hailing distance. “Remember me?”

“Not really, no.”

In fact, there was something familiar about the face, but that could just have been the combination of weathered features and warrior calm. He’d rubbed shoulders with men of this temper countless times in the war, faced down a few when his command was called into question, fought and killed a few more in the snapping, snarling mess that followed, when the Scaled Folk were defeated and League and Empire went back to their habitual dogfight scrabbling over territory and the souls of men…

This could have been any one of them.

“You lie, faggot!” Gil’s answer seemed to have shaken Klithren’s poise a little. The calm on his face broke up in a scowl. His top lip lifted off his teeth.

Ringil lifted sword and shield in a fractional shrug. “I hear you’re upset about something I did, but I’m afraid you’re going to have to refresh my memory.”

Klithren twitched forward, and now his voice shook. “Perhaps, fucker, you don’t remember my face because when you struck me down in Hinerion, it was from behind, just like the faggot coward you are. Perhaps instead you’ll remember Venj, whose guts you spilled across the street like night soil, like I’m going to fucking do to yours!

Ah.

Through veils of dimly remembered fever and frailty, now he placed the face. The voice.

Some fucking retirement, eh pal? Hunting bandits in a foreign land for fifty florins a pop.

The candled gloom of the bounty office in Hinerion. Grim shared hilarity, and men of violence waiting on the call. His incipient feverish trembling, banished by an effort of will as he clung to his assumed disguise and a thin semblance of good health, and joined in the brutal camaraderie as best he could.

I pride myself on being a judge of men with steel. And you’re like me, you’ve held a command. Got the rank, the experience. Man like that, be glad to have you ride with us.

The tavern after, Klithren’s bizarre enthusiasm for alliance, and that bullying little turd Venj in his train—the instinctive clash, the looks the axman shot Gil as he left. And later, on the sloping cobbled street, that same crowing, bullying sneer.

Well, well, well. Thought that was a dodgy fucking Yhelteth accent if ever I heard one. Thought I knew the face from somewhere.

And then the dance of shadows out of nowhere and the fine patter of blood like rain on his face as he watched the slaughter like something that had nothing to do with him at all.

He stood on the sloping cobbled street—this other sloping cobbled street—and was dizzied for a moment by the swinging hinge of past over present time. The way his existence seemed to convulse about him like some crumpled parchment tossed onto the fire.

Are we all like that, he had an instant to wonder. Parchment lives written out in lines and held rigid in time until, one by one, we all crumple and twist and flare away to nothing in Firfirdar’s flames?

“So now you know me, Eskiath.” The march of memory must have shown on his face. There was no real question in the other man’s voice, only a certitude of hate. Gil remembered the final moment—Klithren bent over Venj’s slaughtered form, back turned to Ringil in the confidence of comradeship or maybe just the emotion of the moment.

He was an arrogant little fuck sometimes. But you couldn’t ask for a better man at your back in a scrap. Saved my life a couple of times for sure.

And the nape of Klithren’s neck, offered…

“Now you remember, coward!”

Ringil took hold, pulled himself back through the storm of time and into the now. Like hauling in canvas on a trimmed sail. He looked into Klithren’s newly familiar face.

“Yeah, I remember I spared your life last time around. Want me to remedy that?”

Klithren’s hands clenched around each sword hilt. He bared his teeth.

“Let’s see you try, faggot.”

But he didn’t quite hurl himself forward on the challenge. The imperials had come up on Ringil’s flanks and stood there like so many silent shadows. Only four men, but somehow the balance in the street shifted with their arrival, and a new moment unfolded.

Grab it, Gil.

“All right, darling—you can have me.” He smooched a brief kiss at Klithren. “But if this is personal, it stays that way. Got it?”

Pause. The mercenary sneered.

“Single combat? Are you fucking dreaming?”

“Ah—not quite so personal after all, then.”

A quiet arose between the faced-off parties, so intense that Ringil caught the soft moan of sea breezes down the rising hairpin streets and alleys of the town around them. Shifting among the skirmish rangers at Klithren’s back. Murmuring.

Klithren gestured. “Why would I, outcast? The bulk of your force is already defeated and sent south to Trelayne, your nobles included. I hold this town in the palm of my hand. My men outnumber yours three to one.”

One of the imperials, who apparently had some Naomic, coughed out laughter. “Yeah? Funny how we just chase them up street a minute gone.”

The skirmish rangers bristled. At Ringil’s shoulder, another Empire man spat on the cobbled street and mustered his own rough take on the northern tongue.

“Go down to harbor, look for self, pirate scum,” he snapped. “You’re against imperial marine this time. You’re fucking done.”

“And that isn’t even the point,” said Ringil softly. He held Klithren’s eye. “Is it?”

The moment leaned over them all, like the shade of a passing summer cloud. Klithren twitched. Nodded. He turned his head aside, toward the nearest of the skirmish rangers.

“Captain. If I fall here, you will grant safe passage to the imperials out of Ornley and south. You will not—”

“My lord! We—”

“Shut up and recall your fucking oath, Captain!”

The skirmish ranger subsided, just barely. Klithren waited a couple of beats. Laid out his words like measured paces.

“You will not pursue them, you will let them walk. You will let them sail away. Is that understood? On your soul before the Dark Court, I want your word you’ll see it done.”

Brief, stiff silence, while they all waited.

“On my soul before the Dark Court,” gritted the ranger captain. “I will see it done as you command. But they—”

“Yes, quite.” The mercenary jerked his chin at Ringil. “Your turn. You lose, your men lay down their arms and submit. I want to hear your marine pals say it. And I warn you, my Tethanne’s pretty good—you try and fuck me here, I’m going to hear it.”

Gil nodded. He switched to Tethanne, raised his voice for the imperials so they could all hear. “Have you understood the terms?” he asked.

“It isn’t complicated,” said one of the men who’d spoken in Naomic before.

“Yeah,” agreed another. “You kick this piece of shit’s arse, they surrender. You lose, we do the same. Not going to lose, are you, my lord?”

Ringil held back a smile. “No, I’m not going to lose. But this is my word, and yours, that we stand on. Under the Lady kir-Archeth, I command this expedition, and she is now a prisoner. That leaves me. If I fall, you see to it that Commander Hald honors my terms.”

“It will be done,” said the man who’d slit the injured privateer’s throat, and with about as much emotion. “If this pirate rabble can keep faith, will an imperial marine not?”

“Good enough?” Gil asked Klithren, in Naomic again. He gestured with his shield at the ground between them. “Shall we?”

The duel space opened around them like some quiet clockwork trick, like the iris of an eye in thickening light. The men at their backs gave instinctive ground, the duelists moved crabwise and cautious, reading each other’s movements for error or slack. Gil circled up slope to the right, Klithren let him come, gave ground down and left. Soft scuff of boot leather on the cobbles underfoot. The early morning sun threw slant shadows off the roofs of houses and down on the street. Made broad bars of warmth and chill for the two men to move in. A gull carped shrilly at them from its overlooking rooftop perch. A hollow brightness held the air

Best weather we’ve had since I got here.

Klithren rushed in.

Conventional enough—the longer of the two swords chopping down, the shorter stabbing in from the side—but very fast. Gil got his shield up in the way of the bigger blade, took the impact of a blow only partly committed, heard the muted clank it made in the morning air. He fended off the short sword with the Ravensfriend reversed downward—harsh scrape of steel on steel as the weapons crossed. He stabbed slantwise down on the same move, and Klithren had to leap backward to avoid getting skewered through the foot. Gil made a hard feint after him with the shield, watched over the rim to see what the mercenary’s instinctive guard looked like—answer; it looked pretty good—then let him go.

Testing, testing…

Ringil reached inside himself where the magic was, found the ikinri ‘ska still too slippery and restless to get a hold on. Even the brief effort he made kicked a pit of nausea open in his throat, put tiny sparks across his vision. No chance, no chance at all.

Guess we’ll just have to do this the hard way.

He drifted unhurriedly toward Klithren, waited for the other man’s reaction. Klithren let him come. He had the slope, a shallow slanting angle on it anyway, and Gil’s attack would have to be made uphill, with all the cost that implied. The mercenary’s lips were parted as he watched, his sword blades held open as if in invitation, as if to embrace. Ringil grinned and nodded amiably as if something had just been agreed—put an abrupt spurt of speed on his approach, drove hard with one foot, raised his shield in a repeat of the feint he’d made before. Klithren read it, wasn’t buying that or Ringil’s distracting smile, kept his eyes full on the sweep of the Ravensfriend—and Gil, driving hard from the same foot, rammed the shield all the way home.

Klithren staggered, swung to block, both blades at once. The Ravensfriend leapt into the gap it left, faster than human steel could have moved. Sliced one mailed arm at the shoulder, bit through the metal links with no more effort than if they’d been leather weave. Klithren roared and struck back with his broadsword, in at thigh height. Gil chopped his shield down, killed the blow, snapped his own blade up across the other man’s face. Klithren recoiled—but the Ravensfriend kissed a pair of sparks off the cheek-guard of his helm before he got clear.

Something subtly wrong with the pattern of it all…

Ringil pressed the attack, gave himself no time to think. Get this done. The Ravensfriend went for Klithren’s throat like an enraged wolfhound, seemed to drag Gil along more for company than because he was striking the blow. The mercenary blocked with the short blade, swung his other sword in from the side. Gil took it on the shield, was moving aside anyway, dropped his wrist and stabbed low. The Ravensfriend snagged Klithren’s mail above the hip, below the curve of his cuirass. Chewed through again—bright spill of blood and wisp of smoke in the shining air. Gil pivoted and withdrew, gouging back hard with the blade’s edge, along the wound he’d made. Klithren screamed and—

Smoke?

—the short blade, out of nowhere, glinting down. It screeched on Gil’s cuirass, bounced off, punched him back. Fleetingly, he saw Klithren had reversed his grip on the weapon, must have let go, rolled the hilt off his thumb on the blade’s own weight in midair, grabbed it up inverted and stabbed down, all in the same split second and riding the pain of the wound in his side. There was just time for Gil to appreciate the grit and speed it would take to do all that, the momentary unsettling in his guts at the realization he was fighting an equal here after all. Then his shield was back in the way, yanked in on instinct to take another blow from Klithren’s broadsword that he never actually saw coming.

Fucking smoke?

He backed up. Klithren snarled a grin across the space it opened between them.

“Ready to die now, faggot?”

Klithren, who should have been leaking blood copiously, down his left leg from the torn up mess of the wound above his hip. Gil could almost see the way it ought to look, as if it were somehow there, in alternate moments, laid over the wound the mercenary actually bore, which looked barely knife-nick deep and didn’t seem to trouble him at all. And let’s not forget the shoulder, Gil—another solid chop that ought to have sliced and levered open the knit of the muscle there, ought to have made any major motion of that arm a screaming agony thereafter.

Instead, as Ringil watched, Klithren flipped the reversed short sword in the air with that hand, caught it upright again, barely grimaced as he did it.

Made it look easy.

“Well?” he jeered. “That all you fucking got?”

“Why don’t you ask your friend Venj?” Gil shut out his misgivings, gathered himself. “You’ll be seeing him soon enough.”

He hurled himself forward on the last word. Ravensfriend upflung, inviting the block, then snatched down in the instant that Klithren took the bait. He drove for the other man’s leg. Somehow, the mercenary got there first, slammed a block on the Ravensfriend with his broadsword that drove the Kiriath weapon down into the cobbles and locked it there.

The short sword came leaping, in at head height.

Gil felt it more than saw it. Could only drop his chin and hope.

The blade caught him a savage blow across the top of the helm, jarred it almost off his head, then skidded off the metal curve and sent him stumbling, head ringing with the impact, shield wrong-sided and useless, sword hand barely clinging to the Ravensfriend’s hilt.

It was all he could do to keep his feet.

Whoop of triumph from Klithren, and abruptly he felt a chilly urchin hand on his arm, tugging him to one side. He went with it, heard the other man’s broadsword slice the air apart where he’d been. Reeling, he thought he’d found his feet for a moment, but then there was another urchin tug and this time it took him to the ground. He hit the cobbles hard, full length, banged his head. Felt his helm come loose with the impact, heard it roll clinking away, and realized at the same moment that Gerin’s ghostly grip was on the Ravensfriend, dragging it out of his grasp…

He rolled soggily onto his back, shield an impossible weight pinning down his left arm at his side, sword hand empty. Saw Klithren walk up to him and block out the sky like some towering, bad-tempered god he’d managed to upset. He felt the point of the mercenary’s broadsword jab in under his chin, press down for a long moment, then snick loose again. Blood welled and trickled where it had been.

He guessed his throat had been slit, and marveled at how little it hurt.

Klithren crouched down, tucked the fingers of his left hand in where the sword point had gone, then brought them back up into view, smeared wet and red with Ringil’s blood. He looked at the blood quizzically for a moment, then got to his feet again.

Spat in Ringil’s face.

“Some fucking hero,” he said flatly. “The Silverleaf crew were a harder take than you.”

Ringil, still belatedly working out that his throat had probably not been cut after all, could make no sense of the words. All he knew was that Gerin’s ghost hand was cold on his brow and other hands, bigger but equal chilling, tugged at his arm as if to hurry him away at some impossible angle to the rest of the world

Klithren turned away, then seemed to think better of it. He stepped wide, came back, and swung one colossal god-sized boot, hard into the side of Ringil’s head.

The sky went out, like candles snuffed.

CHAPTER 17

At times, he feels no more than a tapestry stitching of a man.

He moves, he acts, as ever, but it’s as if every action has an echo in his own head, as if he can stand there and watch himself perform it without really being involved. He did this consciously a few times on the voyage north—let his hands go on with a task without him. Stared down at them as if they belong to another man entirely, as if he could get up and wander away from his own body, and trust it to complete whatever duty had been assigned.

It sits ill with him, this detachment hovering constantly in the corner of his eye. He’s a soldier after all, and what’s a soldier if not a man of forthright action. Leave maundering down the well of deep thoughts to the inkspurt clerks and graybeards they pay so handsomely to do that stuff. Last time he held a quill was when they asked him to make his mark on the articles of enlistment. His right hand has had other employment since, and ink is not a stain it’s familiar with. He is no clerk. His chosen tools are sword and ax and shield, mute iron witnesses to the life he’s carved out for himself, and the lives of others he’s spilled out in bloody ruin along the way. He has memories of slaughter in a half dozen different places across the Empire, though he doesn’t revisit them much. What would be the point? He has the decorations and scars to prove he was there. He has the body, the heart, and the brain of a soldier, and all he wants is the simple peace of mind that should go with it.

Is that so much to ask?


NOT LIKE HE’D DONE BADLY FOR HIMSELF UNTIL RECENTLY, EITHER—assignment in honor to the Emperor’s own personal adviser, the last remaining Kiriath in the world. He remembers how he swelled inside with rich satisfaction when he woke the morning after that news, and remembered the posting was his. Service aboard a river frigate—not generally something a marine would shout about, Yhelteth doesn’t do much of its fighting on rivers; they’re strategically important to be sure, and sometimes need policing like any other aspect of Empire, but no one ever launched a real threat to the Burnished Throne from a river. This river frigate, though, appointed specifically to carry the lady Archeth Indamaninarmal to and from her ancestral home at An-Monal, this was something special. He’s not sure why, exactly, but from the beginning it felt right. Destined. The lady Archeth felt important, still does in some indefinable way that nothing in his blunt soldier’s pragmatism can pin down. All he knows is that he needs to be by her side.

He was not in the least surprised when the news broke that she would be leading a quest into the north. But he remembers the crushing anxiety he felt that he might not be among those finally selected to escort her, the relief and joy when the orders came down that he would. He traded vessel assignment with another comrade, even though it meant a lesser post, so that he could serve aboard Sea Eagle’s Daughter and stay closer to the lady Archeth’s side. He kept an eye on her cabin whenever he took night watches and whenever she went ashore during the voyage around the cape, he did his utmost to get assignment in her guard. He did these things instinctively, rarely if ever questioning the impulses that drove him. Thinking that way, questioning his basic assumptions, didn’t feel good. It distanced him from the comfort that soldiering brought, and at times it seemed to bring on that same cursed sense of detachment once more.

The Kiriath built the Empire, their magic and their learning sustained it even now. There. Service to the last of their kind could only be service of the highest sort to the Empire itself and all its peoples.

Something like that, anyway.

And now it’s all up in flames, it’s a fucking mess, and not one cursed thing he can do about it. Ornley fallen to League privateer scum, the lady Archeth taken as prisoner and spirited away by ship, most likely south to Trelayne. Lord Ringil defeated, despite his dark arts and lethal steel prowess. Brought low by a common freebooter just when victory seemed within his grasp. And the imperial forces scattered, some already taken in chains with the lady Archeth, the rest awaiting a similar fate. Locked in the town jail or, like him, thrust in small groups into the dark, damp stinking confines of individual cellars all across Ornley.

He snarls and thumps his fist impotently into the rough stone wall at his side, rakes it sideways so the skin over his knuckles breaks and oozes thick, slow droplets of blood. The others startle for a moment in the gloom, stare at him, see what he’s done. The pain burns briefly, but it’s distant, no contender anyway for the other scrapes and bumps and minor gashes he collected in the day’s fight. He grits his teeth, hisses through them like something cornered. His companions look away, staring wordless into the glow from the candle stubs guttering on the cellar’s earthen floor. He can hardly blame them. They have their own demons to contend with—ignominious defeat, forced surrender, most likely torture to look forward to once the League forces get organized, digest their victory and decide it’s time to do some questioning.

He turns his clenched fist in the flicker of the candles, looks incuriously at the torn knuckles. In the scant, uncertain light, his blood is black.

Should never have done it.

Should never have accepted assignment to the search parties and Dragon’s Demise.

Should never have trusted that the lady Archeth would be safe out of his sight, even in this dull-as-dishwater fish-reeking northern shit-hole.

Should never have bought into the logic that said the real threat now was the undead sorcerer lord whose grave they sought, that being there to take that fucker down quick and hard was the best service he could render both Empire and the lady Archeth too.

Would not have trusted, either, not any of it, were it not for the soft, murmured persuasion of that fucking Helmsman.

CHAPTER 18

He wakes on a bedroll beside a softly crackling fire. Red sparks escaping skyward over his head to mingle with the cold white scatter of stars. He props himself up and stares through the waver of flames to where Hjel the Dispossessed sits with mandolin in lap and broad-brimmed hat slanted forward over his eyes.

How’d you find me? he asks.

Hjel nods across the fire. They brought you.

Three figures sit cross-legged around the fire to his right, heads bowed as if in prayer. They don’t speak or look at him, they give no sign they know Ringil and Hjel are there with them at all. They don’t even breathe. Aside from the occasional pluck of the night breeze at their ragged garments, they might be statues, carved there in obsidian to mark some auspicious campfire meeting from whatever chronicled histories this place might own.

But they aren’t.

They are his dead. His own personal cold command—though actually commanding them in anything is something he still has no inkling how to do. He knows only that they’ve been with him in one way or another since Hinerion and the slave caravan. That every so often, when his own death looms inescapably close, they will step out of whatever shadows they normally keep to and add a chilly thumb to the scales of chance to steer him safe and clear.

He supposes he should be grateful for the mechanism, whatever it is. But all he feels when he looks at them is an awful, plummeting grief.

The rangy one with the mutilated head and face, gazing down at a gore-streaked sword he holds balanced on his thighs and cupped lightly in both hands at pommel and point.

The big, blunt one with the scarred hands and the blacksmith’s hammer in his lap.

The boy Gerin…

Half-starved urchin face intent, thin hands empty—the only one he actually saw die, but somehow the link that pins the three of them together and cements them all to Gil.

He’s not even sure if they know they’re dead.

Come to that…

He looks at one hand, turns it in the firelight. Am I…?

No. Hjel smiles into the flames. Very far from it. In fact, from what I can see, you are barely here at all. Whatever your shade guard brought here is the thinnest of essences. More’s the pity. That hard warrior’s body of yours is still back in whichever real world owns it.

Some fucking warrior. Memory crashes in on him. I lost. I got my arse handed to me by some low-rent border thug with a grudge.

Hjel’s smile melts into a frown. That seems unlikely.

Hey, you weren’t fucking there.

Did you want to lose?

Oh, yeah. Just tired of life, me.

The dispossessed sorcerer prince lifts his head and nails him with a glitter-eyed stare. You shouldn’t joke about that. I see a weariness and a self-hatred in you that might burn down half the world if you unleashed it, if you finally gave up caring and let go. Now answer me—did you want to lose?

Ringil sits fully up. Stares down the cold blade of his memories for a while.

No, he says finally. It was single combat. The lives and freedom of my men if I won.

The impotent fury of it sits in his belly like the ache of an old wound.

Hjel shrugs. Then you misjudged your opponent. He is clearly notsome low-rent border thug after all.

He fucking is.

Then he had help. Hjel lifts his hands from the strings of his mandolin, gestures open-palmed. How else would he best you? Think about it. See it again. What went wrong?

Gil peers back into the last solid moments of the duel. He sees again the damage he dealt, the way Klithren weathered it, shrugged it off as if it didn’t matter. He sees again the wisps of blue smoke that join the other man’s blood as it spills, the way the wounds didn’t—

No, not smoke.

Suddenly, he’s certain. He sees it again in his mind’s eye, the wisp and flicker of fragmented blue fire like lightning

He missed it for what it was in the bright morning air, missed the connection, and in absence of that link, his eyes had made what sense of it they could on their own. He saw smoke. Now, he looks up at Hjel in dawning shock.

Oh, shit.

The dispossessed prince nods. Tell me.

I think the dwenda just chose a human champion.

I thought they chose you.

Yeah, well, look how that worked out. Something approaching pique creeping into his tone now. Looks like they’re trying the low end of the market this time.

That the great ancient elder race out of legend could be satisfied with someone as, well, as basic as Klithren.

You work with the tools at hand, Dakovash told him once of the Dark Court’s policies. No reason, he supposed, that the dwenda should be any less pragmatic.

But still, somehow…

I’ve got to go back.

You’ve got to go back, agrees Hjel, and strums a gently chiming chord out of his mandolin. In fact—


HE WOKE WITH A START, ON A LOW WOODEN COT IN THE SOFT LIGHT OF A lantern set on the floor at his side. Splutter and splash of water somewhere faint, blank boards and beams of a cabin roof overhead. Way less clearance than the imperial shipwrights habitually built for, and the woodwork was worn and split with age—he was aboard one of Klithren’s League vessels, then. Sickly heavy reek like temple incense in his parched throat, a deep ache in his jaws and a banging head. Sluggishness through his veins, and the pain was distant—it felt as though they’d drugged him with something. He tried to sit up and failed—found his hands crossed over his chest like the wings of a bird, roped together at wrists and thumbs, multiple coils of thinner cord wound tightly round his palms and fingers.

Thicker ropes were secured tightly right around the frame of the cot, pinning him in place. He tried to shift his legs, found similar bindings there.

Someone wasn’t taking any chances.

And the ache in his jaw—the same someone had jammed his mouth open on a rough wooden wedge, then gagged him with silk strips soaked in some anointing oil and knotted savagely tight at the nape of his neck. Pain from the pressure flowed steadily up and around to join the throb in his head, where a broad contusion gripped hotly at one temple and the side of his brow.

No fucking guesses as to how that got there.

A grunt that wasn’t his. He twisted his head awkwardly and glared across the glow of the lantern to where Klithren of Hinerion sat on a low stool, watching him from the other side of the cabin.

“Comfortable?” the mercenary asked him.

Ringil let his gaze turn back up to the wooden ceiling. Judging by the gentle tilt in the cabin space around him, they were at sea. Bound for Trelayne, he assumed.

“If Venj could see you now, eh?”

He flickered Klithren a sideways glance. Rolled his eyes.

Flurry of motion and the other man leaned over him, close enough to smell coffee and lemon on his breath. A mercy blade glinted in one raised hand. Gil felt it snick in behind his ear and lift the cartilage a hairbreadth away from his skull.

“If I were you, faggot,” said Klithren, soft and very intent, “I’d keep what manners you can about you on this voyage. I am charged with delivering you to Trelayne as intact as possible, but there’s none to say what harm I might need to inflict on you to staunch your black mage sorceries.”

Gil held the other man’s stare with his own. Poured every ounce of contempt he could muster into his look. He wondered briefly if Risgillen was fucking this one to keep him in thrall.

What, the way Seethlaw was fucking you, you mean? To keep you in thrall?

The thought must have kindled some extra measure of hate in his eyes. Klithren broke gaze. Snorted and put his knife away.

“Don’t know why I bother. I’m pretty sure what they’ll do to you in Trelayne is going to make anything I can put you through here look like tickling.”

He got up and turned away, stood with his back to Ringil a moment or two. Turned back, face still dark with anger. He gestured at the way Gil was trussed.

“You know, my men wanted a more permanent solution than this. They wanted your fingers and thumbs hacked off. Your tongue sliced out at the root. Took some convincing out of it, too. You’re alone on this vessel, Eskiath. I left your men under guard back in Ornley, pending pickup from my other ships.”

Yeah, you’ll be lucky. He’d sent the akyia after the other two vessels.

“So it’s just you, me, and a boatload of privateers who hate your black mage guts. These men are plain sailor stock; they’re way past superstitious at the best of times, and let me tell you, right now is not the best of times.”

The mercenary prowled the cabin in the low light from the lantern. He seemed distracted, and a lot less happy than you’d expect under the circumstances. If he was pleased with his victory over Ringil, there was precious little sign of it.

“They’re nervous, you see. They’re full of fears about kraken and merroigai and unholy consuming fire, and they’ve got a fully declared war for an excuse. I don’t honestly think it’d take much for them to roll right over me. Break in here to get you and then sacrifice you to the Salt Lord in the old way. And while I have a contract with some very important men in Trelayne, I’m just as well served seeing you strung up from the rigging and torn apart with boathooks, and then telling my employers that dead was the best I could do.”

No Risgillen, then. Or at least not bluntly front and center the way Seethlaw had been. Maybe Klithren was into the cabal and not the Chancellery for his commission and his new command, but he didn’t seem to be aware of the other gifts he’d been given.

Not yet, anyway.

Well, nor were you at the time, Gil. Nor were you.

“Think it over,” the mercenary told him. “Think about behaving. When I come back, maybe I’ll bring you some water.”

He got up, took the lantern, and went to the cabin door, passed out of Ringil’s field of vision as he did so. Banged the door on his way out with what sounded like unnecessary force.

Without the lantern, the cabin was sunk in a darkness relieved only by the faint gleam of bandlight through a single porthole in the far wall. Ringil waited in the gloom awhile to make sure Klithren really had gone, then set about exploring his bonds at greater length, carefully testing each coil and knot for some measure of play. He found none. Sailor stock, sure enough.

He couldn’t get loose, and he certainly couldn’t use the ikinri ‘ska.

If it would even work in here.

He spent awhile reflecting on the irony of getting sacrificed to the Salt Lord, when Dakovash and his fellow dark courtiers had apparently spent the last couple of years moving heaven and earth and a few other places besides to shape him into their champion.

Dakovash—yeah, where’s that slippery fucker when you need him? Or Firfirdar, Hoiran, and the rest, for that matter.

The Court has always had faith in your ability to find your own way. It is what draws us to you.

Ask yourself—what use does any god have for worshippers who tug constantly at her sleeve like so many overmothered children?

Yes, well.

He drifted for a while after that, trying not to focus on the raw pain in his mouth, his dust-dry throat, and his stiffened muscles. He wondered if there was some way to get through to the Grey Places that didn’t involve actual sorcerous effort. He’d woken there on occasion in the midst of fevers or while drunk, with no clear recollection of how it had happened. He didn’t know, looking back, if he owed some dark courtier or other for the passage, or if he’d somehow done it himself and then forgotten. Or if, on those occasions, he’d just been dreaming and never really gone in the first place

Come to that, even if he could push through right now, wouldn’t he wake there still bound and roped to this fucking cot?

As you step through from your own world, so exactly you will arrive in the Margins.

Hjel, explaining to Gil as his father once explained it to him. Wisdom handed down the line of dispossessed princes from the Creature at the Crossroads. It was, Hjel tells him, something to do with conservation, though what was conserved and in what kind of vessels, he admits he doesn’t know. Those mysterious black glass long-jars they sometimes stumble on in rusting waist-high racks or discarded in piles at certain points on their travels, perhaps…


THE FIRST TIME HJEL SHOWS HIM THE JARS, HE TRIES TO PICK ONE UP FROM the top of its rack and is mildly shocked at the weight. They’re slim and gently tapered, about the length of a modest broadsword and the girth of a fortification fence pole at the thick end, but they’re heavier than the biggest campaign pack he’s ever had to lift. The closed ones are faintly warm to the touch and capped off at the tapered end with bluntly rounded stoppers that remind him, frankly, of nothing so much as the end of a gigantic straining cock. There’s no sign of handles or even wrapping bolts to knot a carry cord, so he manhandles the thing with open hands, gathers it back in his arms like a big bonfire log, into the crook of his elbows and up against his chest with a rolling impact that makes him grunt. There’s space for another one stacked against the first, but he doubts he could hold them both up. He doubts he could carry this one more than fifty feet without setting it down to rest.

What’s in here? he pants at Hjel.

The sorcerer prince shrugs. You’re asking the wrong man. You can’t get them open, and they will not break. Many have tried.

Ringil lets go with a gasp, leaps back to save his toes, and proves Hjel’s point as the released canister crashes down against one rusted corner of the rack, then tumbles to the floor apparently none the worse for the impact. He crouches and rolls it carefully over on the ground a couple of times but can find no damage, not even a scratch.

He does, however, in the course of his search come up with a single imperfection in the jar’s surface—about a third of the way down from the cap, minute lines of script are etched lengthwise into the smooth black glass curve, in an alphabet he cannot read. Next to them is set an equally tiny etched image—a human skull apparently fracturing apart under the influence of what might have been the sun’s rays, except that they fall not from a sun but from a curious symbol like a double looped knot or maybe a pair of empty oval eyes just touching in the middle and staring outward.

He can’t read it, can’t decipher it at all. But if that’s not a warding, a binding spell of some sort, then he doesn’t know what is.

Hjel shifts impatiently behind him. If we spend so long poring over every lost thing the Margins offer up, we’ll never reach the glyph cliffs at all.

Are they all marked like this?

The sorcerer prince sighs. Yes. Every one I’ve ever looked at is marked like that. And no, I have no clue what it says. Hang around in the Margins long enough, you get used to that sort of thing. Now come on, let’s get out of here.

Ringil brushes his fingertips across the minutely carved glyphs, feels their tiny tracks through the callouses a lifetime of swordsmanship has left on his skin. Then he looks away across the marsh plain around them, the empty gray sky these things have lain abandoned under for who knows how many thousands of years, and a shiver comes to walk up his spine.

Can’t read it, can’t decipher the spell. And suddenly he doesn’t want to.

Later on in the journey—what feels like days later, but in the Grey Places who can tell—Hjel relents a little and takes them off the paved track they’re following to show Ringil a place between standing stones where the ground is scattered with more of the same jars, all of them opened. Gil goes to pick one up and finds it almost weightless. It’s a comical moment, he staggers upright with the surplus force he’s unleashed to lift the thing, nearly goes over on his arse as a result. He recovers, catches Hjel smirking.

Very fucking funny.

Yeah, thought you’d like it.

Gil tips the canister cautiously back and forth on his open palms, mindful of nesting marsh spiders or worse, but nothing falls out. At the narrower end, the glans-shaped stopper is gone entirely, nowhere to be seen on the surrounding ground. The jar’s surface is cool to the touch, almost cold, and the black glass has turned a pale, smudged gray, marked out now that he looks closer in tightly whorled patterns continuous along its length. When he upends the jar to peer inside, there’s nothing to see but a slim empty space and the same whorl pattern filtering the light that gets through the glass so it dapples the interior in the weirdly restful shades of a charcoal sketch.

You’d think something would nest in these, he says, hefting the vessel in both hands.

Hjel nods. Yes, but nothing ever does. Smell.

Suspecting another joke at his expense, Gil lifts the open jar end closer to his face and sniffs. Catches a scent like thunder recently departed—must sniff again to be sure he hasn’t imagined it—catches it again, clearer and closer this time—the same thick odor the air carries after lightning strikes close by, but pared down to a wavering remnant of itself, as if you could somehow pick up the trailing reek of some storm that passed this way a thousand years ago…

He looks up, disbelieving.

Right. Hjel has lost any trace of a grin he might have had. Now listen to it.

Past any fear of pranks, Gil lowers one ear to the open end of the jar, and this time his senses are sharpened enough to be sure first time.

Right down at the limits of hearing, he picks it up—a constant seething, chittering, like specks of oil on a heated pan in another room. Or the hisses and clicks of the million invisibly tiny snakes and beetles Grashgal had once told him—thanks, pal, really needed the extra nightmares—existed on every patch of his and every other human being’s skin no matter how often they washed. Or—his mind groping about ever more feebly for comparison to cling to—like a constant succession of newly tempered swords plunged into a cooling trough down at the end of some unlikely palace hallway a thousand twisted, echoing yards in length.

He lifts his head again, cannot prevent the impulse to peer down into the dappled gray light at the bottom of the canister as if, despite Hjel’s words and his own previous check, there’s something insectile living down there after all.

Hear that?

Ringil nods numbly. Something about the noise has unnerved him out of all proportion to its volume or provenance. The hairs on the nape of his neck are erect in the cool air. He wonders if this is what dogs feel when there’s a storm closing in.

Makes you a young man, then. The sorcerer prince’s expression is somber, his smile doesn’t quite make it through. My father told me there’s an age you get to, you just can’t hear it anymore. Not too old, either; he was only in his thirties.

Gil shakes his head. Wouldn’t bother me if I never heard that again. He looks warily around at the scattered canisters. Are they—

Yeah. All like that. Try another one if you like.

Thanks, I’ll pass.

And later, as they put the stone circle behind them and head back to the paved path, he asks Hjel quietly what he thinks the long jars were for, whether he’s ever heard anything that might explain them.

Hjel walks in silence at his side for a while before he speaks.

There’s nothing in what I’ve mastered of the ikinri ‘ska about them, he says finally. Nothing in the tales my people tell, either. I think they’re too old for that.

More quiet, the soft squelch of their boots across the boggy ground. They regain the paved path and pick up their pace.

That looked like some kind of spell written on them, Gil ventures. Some kind of ward.

Maybe. Hjel stops and looks back to where the standing stones still puncture a skyline growing dark with some faded simulacrum of evening. He sighs. Look, I’m just a cheap trick mage, a scavenger along the cliffs of the ikinri ‘ska. I’ve got nothing but some vague, eroded hints and my own feelings to go on. I’m just guessing here. But I think something bad happened in the Margins, a very long time ago, so long ago maybe even the gods don’t remember it very well. I think men—or beings like men anyway, you saw that death’s head—were in it somehow, and I think they brought those vessels here as tools to play whatever part they had. Tools, or maybe weapons.

He faces Ringil in the gathering gloom on the road.

Whatever it was those men came to do, I think they failed. I think they were, I don’t know—a helpless gesture—swept away somehow, and their tools were the only thing left behind. But whatever it was they did, I think it caused harm that’s still not fully healed today, maybe harm that can’t ever completely heal.

He draws a deep breath and looks up and down the faintly luminous dirty white paving of the path they’re on.

And I think that’s what you can hear. The echo in time of the harm those canisters did when they were opened.


THE RASP OF THE CABIN DOOR LATCH WOKE HIM FROM REVERIE THAT HAD somewhere slipped into a fitful doze. No real sense of how much time had passed. He looked down the length of his roped-up, immobilized body in the gloom and saw no useful change—dreams, it seemed, would not get you into the Grey Places unaided after all.

The door creaked open, somewhat less violently than Klithren had banged it on his way out. Maybe he’d calmed down a bit, taken a few turns around the decks and let the fact of his victory sink in. Maybe there’d be some water after all. Ringil’s throat clutched and worked with craving at the thought. He fought the urge, the eagerness to twist his head and look. Give him nothing, Gil. No weakness to work with, no satisfaction, no submission that isn’t torn out of you by the fucking roots

Low, swaying glimmer of the lantern carried into the cabin, the shadows it set dancing on the ceiling and walls. He heard it set down.

A calloused swordsman’s hand fell on his cheek. He had a moment to wonder if, under all of Klithren’s rough sellsword camaraderie in Hinerion, there had lurked something less rough and manly after all. Some twinge of attraction, maybe, that.…

The swordsman’s fingers stroked up against his stubble. Touched the jut of his cheekbone below the eye. He recognized a sly, torturer’s mockery in the caress, prelude to some brutal abuse or other.

So it’s going to be like that.

He shut down hope of water, hope of anything at all.

The caressing hand fell away.

CHAPTER 19

It took Archeth a numb couple of seconds to understand.

The sudden, violent upwelling of the ocean in front of her gave rapid way to structure beneath. A broad array of nestled five-sided platforms, rumbling up out of the water, filling the gap inside the ring and rising higher still, in stepped succession, toward the support column at the center. Churned gallons of seawater, roaring and streaming down off the jagged alloy terraces like some vast, mounded waterfall, as the platforms built themselves into an even conical ziggurat reaching up in easy steps to touch the support column at about half its full height.

Where, abruptly, there was an opening.

“Have you been tortured, child?”

Water was still pouring down off the sudden structure. Archeth, entranced by the risen spectacle before her, barely registered the voice at all, let alone the language it used or the words it spoke. She glanced at Egar, who stood equally spellbound at her side.

“What?”

“Hm?” The Dragonbane, evidently unable to tear his eyes away from the newly formed ziggurat, either. “What’d you say?”

“I didn’t say anything, I asked you what you said.”

“Didn’t say anything,” Egar murmured. “You realize—”

I spoke to you, child!” There was a note of sharp reproach in the voice this time, enough to sting her out of her trance. “I asked if you had been tortured.

High Kir—only now did she register the stark, marching syllables for what they were, only now did she understand, seeing Egar’s utter lack of reaction, that the voice spoke only for her. And a scant moment after that, realization crashed in on her; that tight, wavering edge on the avuncular tones, like a scream held back—she was listening to a Helmsman.

“I, uhm…” She mustered command of her people’s tongue. Looked upward at the ravaged underside of the city for want of any other direction to address herself. “Why would you think I’d been tortured?”

Out of the corner of her eye, she caught Egar gaping at her. Raised one rigid flat palm—give me a minute here.

“Others have been,” said the voice matter-of-factly. “Many prisoners were brutalized to gain entry past the species portcullis. And your state corresponds with theirs to some extent—you have not fed well or drunk sufficiently for several days, your body carries substantial bruising, and your mind shows signs of torment. But you need have no more fear, child—I can withdraw the structure you stand upon to the level of the seabed just as easily as I have raised this entry. You will be rescued with precision and your tormenters will be drowned the same way. You have my promise.”

“No!” She made an effort at calm. “No, that won’t be necessary. These men are my… uhm… friends.”

“Are you sure, child? You seem to be lying to me. There really is no need to lie on these creatures’ behalf. There is not the least risk that they can harm you further, and to accomplish their deaths is a small matter for me.”

She thought she detected a hint of leashed eagerness in the voice, a touch more of the withheld shriek behind the avuncular. Over her head, An-Kirilnar seemed abruptly to squat lower on its supports, to loom that much more menacingly. The roar of the water pouring off the ziggurat of steps in front of them had muted to the tick and trickle of some mountain brook, and an ominous quiet was building in the space it left. Egar mouthed at her.

Who the fuck are you talking to?

Unsure of the answer herself, she shook her head.

“Look, there’s no further about it,” she said rapidly. “These men haven’t harmed me at all. In fact, some of them saved my life earlier today. My privations are not the fault of anyone here. Well, that is, some of them did, uhm… Look, I bear them no ill will now, that’s the thing.”

“You lie again, child. A small lie, but—”

“Yes, yes, all right. I know.”

She fought off a panic-stricken vision of Egar and the others, yelling knee-deep in the ocean as the causeway pentagons sank away under their feet. Knee-deep, waist deep, and then just floundering to stay afloat, thrust back into the nightmare of shipwreck once again, and this time a couple of miles offshore.

She was beginning to guess at what the An-Kirilnar Helmsman was. She formulated her words with care.

“There is one, yes. He put his hands on me when I was his captive, the one with—”

“I am aware of him, child.”

“But that’s done, it’s over. The uhm, the circumstances have changed, the uh… Look, it’s complicated, all right? Just take my word for it, we’re all friends now.”

“I am not ill-equipped for complexity.” The hint of reproach was back. “But little can be taken on trust in these troubled lands. The Aldrain have grown cunning of late.”

“Maybe so, but… What did you say?

“I said I am not ill-equipped for—”

“No—about the dwenda. The Aldrain. You said they’re getting more cunning of late?”

“That is correct.”

“Of late?” Her nerves prickled. “You’re saying that there’ve been dwenda around here recently? And—and my people, too, the Kiriath? Recently?

“Most certainly. The last local clashes were considerably less than five thousand years ago. And inconclusive, despite some opinion to the contrary.”

Her shoulders sagged. All the privations the Helmsman had so neatly listed seemed to fall on her again, harder. She was cold, she was hungry and thirsty, she ached from head to foot. The krinzanz need was beginning to bite.

“Five… thousand years?” she asked drably.

“Less, my child, far less.”

But that’s not fucking recent! she felt like wailing. Not even my father on one of his bad days would have called that recent.

Get a grip, Archidi

“I am kir-Archeth,” she said evenly. “Daughter of kir-Flaradnam of the clan Indamaninarmal. Current overall mission commander of the Kiriath Project, based out of An-Monal. To whom am I speaking?”

There was a long pause. Through the quiet, she heard the wind hoot in the gaps and crannies of the massive structure overhead.

“I am the Warhelm Tharalanangharst, chief among the Seven Summoned from the Void. Please excuse my lack of manners. I have not had visitors for a while.”

“That’s, uhm… fine.” She nodded, suspicions confirmed. “I take it we are permitted to enter here, then?”

“But of course.” She couldn’t be sure if surprise etched the Warhelm’s tones or she just read it there herself. “The species lock is open, you are of the People. And these others are your allies, however variegated their allegiance may be. I have opened portals at three points around the entry tower now. Some of your men are already mounting the steps.”

She shot an alarmed glance at Egar, remembered he could not hear half of the conversation, and the half he heard was gibberish to him anyway. He looked back at her expectantly.

“Explain later,” she told him. “We’d better get in there.”


LED BY OUTSIDE APPEARANCES, AND BY HER SOUR MEMORIES OF AN-Naranash, she expected dilapidation and decay within.

Instead, the space inside An-Kirilnar’s central support column was neatly kept and spotlessly clean. Illumination sprang up as they entered, struck a sheen from burnished dark alloy surfaces in a dozen different colors that all flowed into each other. It was subtly done, it took her awhile to work out where exactly the lights were ensconced and even then, her eye was led back to where their radiance fell instead—on walls and pentagon-patterned floor, the first turn of steps and then the climbing underside of a huge spiral staircase where it swept upward around the curve of the column, and the gold and steel thicket of concertina metal fencing on a massive cage set in the center.

The men stood and gaped about them. The Dragonbane, who’d seen the inside of An-Monal a couple of times, worked visibly at not being impressed. Archeth went to the cage and worked the mechanism that opened it. There was a smooth clicking, snipping, the sound of a hundred brisk tailor’s scissors at work, and the concertina fencing folded up on itself to the side.

The men looked dubiously at the opening.

“It’s an elevator,” she told them. “It’ll carry us to the top.”

“Yes, just a moment.” From the way they all looked fearfully upward and around, it seemed Tharalanangharst had given up speaking in her ear alone. “There are one or two matters to be gone through before we proceed. First of all, allow me to welcome you formally to the Overwatch Platform An-Kirilnar. I am the Warhelm Tharalanangharst, I govern here. Please forgive the somewhat archaic use of your various native tongues; this will improve as I converse with you further. In the meantime, here are some basic ground rules.”

On three sides, the doors they’d come through dropped shut with a rapid triple clang. Out of nowhere, something spiderlike and gleaming leapt down onto one man’s shoulders—she realized who it was, felt the pit of her stomach fall out—and bore him to the floor. There was a moment of thrashing, a scream, and the crimson glint of blood, then the man lay still. His panicked panting came to her across the air.

“This man,” the Warhelm told them in the same genial tones, “laid unwanted hands on the lady kir-Archeth Indamaninarmal when she was powerless to repel such attention.”

She stared fascinated at the thing that had Sogren pinned. It was a machine like the charred crab remnant the men had carried back from the south side of the bay, but poised and menacing and alive. It glimmered and gleamed in the lighting, crouched atop Sogren’s head and shoulders for all the world like some arcane helm and shoulder piece he’d somehow fallen over wearing. Or, she thought queasily, some beautifully crafted instrument of torture from the imperial dungeons. Sogren had tried to rise, to cast the thing off, but a narrow, bladed appendage was out near the creature’s head—it had drilled the privateer neatly through the right hand, sprouted multiple holding pincers and twisted his arm out and over, locked the elbow joint out. It held him flat to the floor like a wrestler’s trick.

One of the other privateers darted forward to help. Soft scuttling sounds came from the walls as he moved.

“I really wouldn’t if I were you,” the Warhelm advised.

The man froze where he was.

“Needless to say,” Tharalanangharst went on, into the general, horror-struck stillness, “such violation of the body of one of the People is also a violation of the alliance terms between the Kiriath and those noble humans who wish to throw off the yoke of dwenda oppression. It is therefore punishable by death. Sogren Cablehand, do you have anything to say?”

Appendages like long, extending jaws clamped on Sogren’s head at either side, dragged his face up from the floor. He snarled and thrashed, spat out his rage.

“Nothing of consequence, then,” the Warhelm decided, and the clamping appendages hauled sharply up and to the right. Sogren’s eyes bulged with the sudden pain, he made a desperate choking sound, like some giant startled hen, and then his neck snapped with an audible crunch. His contorted features slackened on the instant, but his neck went on making tiny crunching noises as the crab twisted his head around until it faced neatly backward on his shoulders.

Among the men, she heard shocked oaths, Naomic and Tethanne alike.

The executioner unseated itself from Sogren’s neck, prodded once or twice at the newly made corpse, as if to make absolutely sure the job was done. Then it stalked spider-legged away into the shadow beneath the first turn of the staircase, found a small hole in the wall there that Archeth hadn’t noticed before, and was gone.

“The body of kir-Archeth Indamaninarmal is sacred,” said the Warhelm Tharalanangharst mildly. “Other acts of violence here, though lesser in degree, will not be looked well upon, either. You would do well to remember this while you are guests in An-Kirilnar. With that proviso, you are, as I have already said, most welcome.

“The elevator will take you to more adequate accommodation.”


“IT’S A WARHELM, EG. WHAT CAN I TELL YOU? THEY’RE NOT LIKE OTHER Helmsmen.”

“Yeah, no shit!” The Dragonbane stalked back to her across the sumptuous black carpet in her rooms, voice savage. “Think I noticed that about the time it was snapping the head off one of my men!”

Your men? And anyway—don’t exaggerate. It broke his neck.”

“And then turned his face around to look backward on his shoulders! Let’s not forget that little detail, shall we? Because it’s fixed pretty fucking clearly in my head, and I doubt any of Sogren’s privateer pals are going to have trouble remembering it, either. I have to lead this rabble, Archeth. Sogren Cablehand was a key part of that.”

“Well, he isn’t anymore.” She hadn’t enjoyed watching Sogren die any more than anyone else, but she was fucked if she was going to tax herself with summoning sympathy or any species of regret. “So you’d better start getting used to the idea.”

“Yeah, easy for you to—” Egar made a noise in his throat and turned away, whatever else he had to say bitten off and swallowed.

“Easy how?” she demanded.

“Forget it.”

“No! How is this any fucking easier for me than it is for you?”

The Dragonbane gestured around them. “You’re home, aren’t you? Apartments fit for a Kiriath queen. The Empress of all you survey.”

She followed the motion. Tharalanangharst’s hospitality was lavish, true enough. She had rooms of palatial expanse, windowed for a view out over the ocean and the coastal headland to the south. The bedchamber was furnished with a bed big enough to sleep a whole family in comfort, there was a bathing annex with a bath seemingly built with the same family in mind, and the lounge she sat in provided ample scope for the Dragonbane’s pacing. The roof space was high, the alloy flooring was polished to a gloss that made it look like well-cared-for wood, and strewn with multiple carpets in jagged Kiriath designs. Beyond a discreet archway to one side, there was a dining chamber containing a table set for ten and near enough space to ride a horse around the outside.

If the decor was somber, metallic, and rather thin on adornment of any sort, well, she was used to that from An-Monal.

“That’s a bitchy crack, Eg. I’m as far from home as you are, and you know it.”

The Dragonbane sighed. Came to the couch she was seated on, dropped onto it beside her. Pinched finger and thumb to his eyes.

“I know. I’m sorry.” He dropped his hand from his face. “But Sogren was herd bull for the privateers. Now he’s gone, I’m likely going to have to do the whole dominance thing all over again, just to keep them in step.”

“You think they’ll try to leave?”

“Not right away, no.” Egar nodded at the stupendous bowl of fruit that stood on an ornamental table beside the couch. A brace of Tharalananghast’s smaller creatures spidered about in it, restocking and removing the sucked-clean stones and pips Archeth had left when she fell on the fruit earlier. “I mean, look at that little lot. They’re not stupid; they’ll fill their bellies while they have the chance. They’ll want to get warm and dry, get some rest. But after that…”

He scowled.

“You really think they’d mutiny?”

“I think they’ll be fed and rested, they’ll have had time to think and talk, and they won’t be any less pissed off about Sogren. I don’t know about outright mutiny, but it’ll make them slippery to handle once we set out south. And it’s certainly going to put a dent in their liking for you.”

“I thought I was chosen of the Dark Court since Dakovash grabbed my ankle.”

“Yeah, and now you’re friend to a demonic power that’s butchered one of their own right before their eyes.”

“And is feeding and sheltering the rest of them in the lap of luxury,” she snapped. “If I were a privateer, I’d be counting my fucking blessings.”

“Maybe they are, right now. But that kind of gratitude fades pretty fast. What they’re going to remember when we head south is that Sogren was killed while we all watched, and none of them did a fucking thing about it. That’s going to rankle and rot inside them, and sooner or later, they’re going to want to cleanse the wound.” He shook his head. “It’s not a showdown I’m looking forward to having.”

“They’re not a majority.” She’d been too tired and beaten down and krin-deprived to do the count properly at any point—made her eyes ache just to try. “Are they?”

“Not outright, no. But they outnumber each of the other factions well enough, and there’s no telling where Tand’s freebooters are going to stand if it comes to a fight.” Egar sighed again, leaned back on the couch, and stared at the iron-beamed ceiling four yards over their heads. “All right, look, forget it—for now anyway. I guess we’re cozy enough here for the moment. Give me another one of those plums.”

She scooped it off the pile, black and ripe, handed it to him. He bit into the flesh, spilled juice down his chin, chewed with his eyes still on the ceiling.

“Ate a ton of these in my room earlier,” he said, a bit indistinctly. “Still can’t believe how good they taste. How long you reckon this place has been here?”

She shrugged. “My people chased the dwenda out anything between four and five thousand years ago, depending on which sources you want to believe. Tharalanangharst seems to have had a hand in that, so you’re looking at that long at least. Why?”

“Just wondering where all the food came from.” He looked at the remainder of his plum. “This is fresh off the tree.”

“It’s out of store, apparently. They say this part of the world was a garden paradise before the Kiriath came. The Wastes are what was left here after we went to war with the dwenda. They must have harvested for a siege, laid down the stores, and then never used them.”

“Stores that last five thousand years?” There wasn’t any real incredulity in the Dragonbane’s voice; he was mildly surprised at most. He bit into the plum again. “Neat trick if you can pull it off. So you think any of this stuff can exist outside of the fortress? Or will it turn to dust if we try to take it away?”

“No, why would it?”

“Well, you know.” he gestured. “Spells and such. They say up on the steppe you can find the finest silver where a falling star hits the Earth, but you have to get to it before the sun comes up or it turns to dross.”

“That’s just superstition, Eg. Just tales. My people were engineers, not magicians.”

“There’s a difference?”

Since she sometimes had a hard time seeing the difference herself, she let it go. “So how are your rooms?”

“Good.” Egar spat the plum stone into his palm. Looked around in vain for somewhere to dump it. “Not as big as these. Got a view out to sea. You think there’s any chance of meat in this place? I’d kill for some decent meat.”

“I’d be surprised if there isn’t. An-Monal was always pretty well stocked.”

He nodded at the ceiling. “Think it’s listening to us?”

“I have no idea. Like I said, it’s a Warhelm. I never met one before, I’ve only read about them.” She heard how her voice took on the cadences of her father’s lectures, the same words and phrases borrowed wholesale, some of them still only partially understood. “But they reckon the exigencies made for some pretty weird behavior. Thing is, when you summon something as powerful as a Helmsman from the void, you usually want it leashed pretty tight, kept pretty attentive to your needs. Otherwise, who knows what it’ll go off and do that’s more interesting than looking after you. So you lay down protocols, you cement a complex dependency. You make what you’ve summoned need you as much as you need it. But the Warhelms aren’t like that, they couldn’t be. There wasn’t time. They are raw power and purpose, and they were called to the world in a hurry, purely to defeat the dwenda. There were no other considerations, and no other purpose for them once the war was done.”

The Dragonbane frowned. “You think they’d be any use in a war against someone else? Someone not the dwenda, I mean?”

She shrugged again. “You saw what happened to Sogren.”

“Yeah. You know, Archidi, I got to wonder if this is what your father was really doing up here on the expeditionary. I mean, I know we went to burn the Scaled Folk’s rafts before they could hatch out, but what if after that, Flaradnam was planning to come looking for this place, looking to enlist its help.”

“That,” said the voice of the Warhelm suddenly from the air, “is not likely.”

It spoke Tethanne this time, perhaps intending to be inclusive. She exchanged a look with Egar. “You’ve been listening to us?”

“No, but I am listening to you now.”

“Seems a bit convenient,” said the Dragonbane, studiously casual. He dumped his plum stone surreptitiously down by the side of the couch. “Why now particularly?”

“You mentioned kir-Archeth’s father by name. I knew kir-Flaradnam Indamaninarmal well. He was instrumental in my summoning from the void, and we fought side by side to end the Aldrain presence.”

“Well, then.” Archeth spread her hands. “He probably was on his way to see you back in fifty-two. It would make sense, wouldn’t it?”

“It would not. Your father and I were not on good terms by the time the Aldrain were driven out, and we certainly never reconciled.” Hard to tell if something shifted now in the tight-strung amiability of Tharalanangharst’s tone, but she thought she heard a chill there. “It was, after all, kir-Flaradnam who crippled and blinded me at the end.”

CHAPTER 20

Ringil tensed for the inevitable blow.

Saw a cloth-muffled face lean over him, familiar eyes above the mask, creased in boyish concern…

No fucking way!

He jerked in his bonds. Grunted against the gag.

Noyal Rakan pulled the masking cloth down off his firm young mouth and chin, put fingers slantwise across his lips for quiet.

“Have you loose in just a moment, my lord,” he whispered. “Don’t move.”

Yeah, like I got a fucking choice about that, you stupid fucking gorgeous idiot beautiful wait till I get loose of these

Rakan already had fingers at the back of Ringil’s neck, exploring the gag. He conjured a knife in his left hand, pressed Gil’s head gently over to one side, and sliced deftly through the knotted silk. Ringil shoved at the wedge in his mouth with a tongue that felt like a chopped-off piece of two-inch rope. He coughed the chunk of wood loose as the Throne Eternal captain lifted away the severed silk bonds of the gag. He spat it out onto his chest with a relief that watered his eyes.

“What are you doing here?” he croaked.

“Skulked aboard last night while they were loading.” Rakan worked rapidly on Gil’s bonds with the knife as he talked. “Been hiding in the grain store since we made sail. Took me awhile to work out where they were keeping you. Can you walk?”

“I doubt it.” Ringil flexed his hands as Rakan sliced the cords away, grimacing at the numbness. “Anyway, we’re not leaving. I want to be right here when Klithren comes back.”

The Throne Eternal looked baffled. “You want to stay put? My lord, I—this lantern is from the bracket outside the cabin, someone’s going to notice it’s gone. We need to get you out of here fast.”

“And go where? We’re at sea, Noy. What are we going to do, jump over the side? Swim back to Ornley?”

“No, but—”

Ringil flexed his mouth in an ugly, down-curved smile. His parched lips split, thin splinters of pain somehow driving the grin.

“We’re going to fucking take this ship, Noy. You and me, with a little help from our friend Klithren. Now get my feet and help me up. I’m going to cramp like fuck, but that’s fine. Need to work it off.”

Rakan sliced the ropes binding Gil’s legs in place, got an arm around his shoulders, helped him into a sitting position on the edge of the cot. Sure enough, cramp sank its fangs into his calf the moment he tried to put pressure on that foot. He grunted, stiffened—felt Rakan’s arm tighten around his shoulder. He turned sideways to look at the Throne Eternal in the low light.

“How the… I thought you were gone, Noy. Captured, sent south for ransom or dead or worse, I—” He swallowed painfully, reached down to massage his calf as best he could with numb fingers and palm. “I mean, what the fuck happened while I was gone?”

The Throne Eternal looked away, something like shame in his face.

“We were unprepared,” he said quietly. “They landed men down the coast and stormed the town from the top, while one of their vessels stopped up the harbor below. When I saw the ship, I took five men and went looking for the lady Archeth. She was supposed to be at Menith Tand’s lodgings, but when I got there both were gone, no way to know where. We cut back to the harbor, but by then this pirate scum were in the streets, along the wharf, everywhere. We fought, but…”

He looked back at Ringil.

“I knew you’d be coming back. I took my men, only three left by then and one of them wounded. We cut loose a small-boat at the beach, got it past the League ship, out of the harbor and along the shoreline. I hoped to find you, warn you before you sailed back into the trap.”

He stared miserably at the cabin floor.

“I abandoned the lady Archeth. The Emperor’s anointed agent in the flesh. I failed my sworn charge. I told myself it was for the best, that saving you would save the others in the end. But that’s not—that’s not why I, I…”

Ringil took the hand he was using to work at his cramped leg, pressed it hard against Rakan’s averted face. Hints of pain beginning to spike through the numb flesh now as circulation returned, he couldn’t feel much else. But he pulled the young Throne Eternal around fully to face him. Placed the other hand on his other cheek and pulled him close. Kissed him hard on the mouth, for all that it cracked his dried up lips again and hurt the scorched rag of his tongue. He pushed back and held the other man’s face only inches from his own.

“I’m very glad you did,” he said distinctly. “I’m in your debt, Noy. Really. I’m… honored by this.”

Rakan licked his lips. “But—”

“And we will get Archeth and the others back, no matter what it takes. Count on it. Your oath is not broken, you have done nothing wrong.”

“We tried to find you.” The Throne Eternal’s voice was urgent, pleading. He pulled away from Ringil’s grip, stared at the floor again. “We tried, but night came on. None of us are accomplished seamen, we’re not marines. Akal was sinking into a fever, losing blood. In the end we had to beach and build a fire for him. We sat with him, we…”

Rakan swallowed. Tears bright in his eyes. Not for the first time, Gil was forcibly reminded how young this tight-muscled warrior lover he’d taken still was.

“When the morning came, he was stiff and cold,” Rakan whispered. “We buried him as best we could without tools. Offered prayer, scattered salt. There was a peak behind the beach; we climbed it and scanned the horizon northward for your sail. We stayed there all day. But then, with evening, the fog came, the storm blew up out to sea. We couldn’t manage the boat in weather like that.”

“No.” Probably would have got eaten by the akyia into the bargain.

“We walked inland. We thought to raid some croft, feed ourselves at least and keep our strength up. But we’d walked almost back to Ornley before we saw any signs of life. We made out lights in the mist, but when we got closer, when we realized where we were…”

Ringil grunted. “Yeah, fog’ll get you all turned around like that. Lose your sense of distance, direction, everything. Done it myself a few times.”

He forced himself to his feet and hobbled across the cabin to its single porthole. His other leg cramped up in the thigh on the way, but it wasn’t as bad as the calf had been. His fingers were starting to really hurt now as blood forced its way back into them. He braced on the cabin wall with both hands, bowed his head to look through the porthole. Saw a narrow slice of band-lit ocean, the dark crumpled rise of a shoreline beyond. Standard night voyage precautions—they were shadowing the Hironish coast, but far enough out to stay safe. Looked like the privateers had put to sea pretty much as soon as they could tidy up the aftermath in Ornley and get Ringil loaded aboard. Klithren must be in a real hurry to get his bounty home.

“We heard the fighting on the breeze as we approached.” Rakan evidently still felt the need to explain. “But by the time the mist cleared and we could make any sense, it was over. All we could do was skulk and wait for nightfall. Learn what we could, plan from that. Nalak and Jan took the upper town, I went to the harbor. We were supposed to meet back up on the cliff road. But when I saw them carrying you aboard…”

“Yeah.” Enough talk, Gil. And enough bloody brooding—what is this, one of Skimil Shend’s poetry soirees? He turned away from the porthole. “Listen, Noy, you’d better get that lantern back outside on its bracket.”

He limped back toward the cot, gauging the strength in his legs. Still not great, but getting better by the minute. Across from him, Rakan was already on his feet, like it was parade call. He swept up the lantern and slipped out the door, plunged the cabin back into gloom.

Ringil lowered himself to the cot, swung his legs back up and lay flat. The pain of returning circulation was spiking right through his hands now, but along with the pain there was functional feeling as well.

Yeah, might even be able to hold a sword sometime later this month.

“All right, listen,” he told Rakan, as soon as the Throne Eternal was back in the darkened room with the door closed. “Get back by the hinges. You’re going to jump Klithren soon as he comes in here. Hurt him, put him on the floor, but whatever you do, don’t stab him. We need him alive.”

Rakan nodded, barely seen in the gloom, and sank into a comfortable crouch in the space where the door would hinge back. As if on cue, the hurrying multitude stomp of feet on wood came from somewhere overhead.

But it faded again and no one came.

“Think it’s another ship,” murmured Rakan. “Heard the crow’s nest call out something just before I came down here. I mean, I don’t speak Naomic or anything, but if there’s one word I have picked up in the last couple of months, it’s ship. Gave me my best chance to move, too. Must have had every man on deck over at the rail to look.”

“You couldn’t work out anything else they said?”

Rakan’s dimly seen form shook its head. “Nothing. They sounded pretty pissed off, though.”

An Empire warship this far north was a flat-out impossibility. And Ringil couldn’t see any reason why sighting random League traffic of any sort would upset the privateers.

Which left only one explanation, really.

“Get ready,” he told the Throne Eternal cheerfully. “If this is what I think it is, we’re about to have some very angry company.”

A solid, jolting impact nearly tipped Noyal Rakan out of his crouch. Then another, less violent, and then a couple more gentle bumps. Shouts of satisfaction from above. Gil recognized the pattern from the time they’d been boarded by a customs frigate on the run-in to Lanatray. Whatever ship Klithren’s lookout had sighted, they’d come up on it now and were engaged. Grappling irons and boathooks would lock the two vessels together until they could be properly lashed. Meantime, the privateers were amply competent to swing or leap aboard, take stock, and then…

They waited.

They didn’t have to wait long. A shocked cry came in the porthole, then others, high pitched with fear and disgust. A wider chaos of yelling above as men still on board this ship tried to get sense out of those who had boarded the other.

Now he wondered if they shouldn’t have tried to sneak out of the cabin after all. There’d be enough confusion on deck to maybe let them find some other place to hide. Leave an empty cot and the loose coils of rope, a vanishing trick from the terrifying black mage they’d so foolishly taken captive…

Yeah, and then what, Gil?

Over the side and swim? We’d drown before we got halfway to the coast.

Stow away on a boat full of privateers out for blood who know her stem to stern? How long’s that going to last?

And even if we could, even if you could somehow buy time to use the ikinri ‘ska and kill them all off—who’s going to sail us back to Ornley? Elementals again? The akyia? It was hard enough last time, with a fully competent crew to keep Dragon’s Demise trimmed. We’re two men, and neither of us knows any sea-craft worth a back-alley fuck.

You need to own this ship, Gil. Ship and crew, stem to stern. There is no other way.

There is nothing wrong with a defensive strategy, he’d written in his treatise on warfare, back when he still thought it might see the published light of day, save that it hands over the initiative to the enemy. So you’d better hope you’re strong enough, fortified enough in defense, to withstand whatever that enemy decides, in the luxury of time and choice you’ve given them, to start throwing at you.

And if you are not that strong—then offense and a colossal bluff may be the better option.

He heard boots stamping down on companionway steps close by.

“Show time,” he hissed at Rakan.

The latch. The door flung back. Klithren stormed into the cabin amid a spill of light from outside. He hadn’t bothered to take the lantern down from its bracket.

“What the fuck have you done, Eskiath? What the fu—”

Rakan hit him from the side like something demonic. Chopping blows into neck and temple, a savage stomp into the back of one knee to fold and take him down, and a vicious kidney punch as the Throne Eternal rode his victim to the floor. Klithren convulsed and groaned, tried to get up, and found an arm across his throat, a dagger point at his eye.

“I’d lie still if I were you.” Ringil told him, up off the cot at a speed he felt quite pleased with, all things considered. “That’s a Throne Eternal blade in your face.”

He limped rapidly to the cabin door, hooked the lantern on his arm and brought it in, shut the door solidly, and turned back to his new captive. He set the lantern down, well away from Klithren and Rakan’s clinch on the floor. He grinned down at the floored mercenary.

“Change of dealer,” he said. “But the game remains much the same.”

“They’re going to fucking kill you now, Eskiath.” The words choked out of Klithren. “Nothing I can do, nothing anyone can do. You think one imperial sneak assassin at your back is going to change that?”

Ringil nodded up at the cabin ceiling. “That one of your flotilla up there, is it? Drifting with the wind?”

“What did you do to that ship? What filthy piece of sorcery did you work on those men?”

“Me? Nothing. We sneaked past your picket in the fog, close enough to hear their hour call on the breeze.”

Klithren glared up at him. “You lie. There are… fucking pieces of dead men all over her deck. Blood everywhere. They’ve been… chewed on, you piece of shit.”

Ringil knew. He’d seen the Sileta brothers after the merroigai got through with them.

“Let’s just say I’ve got some friends you’d prefer not to meet,” he said. “And if you don’t want your crew meeting them, either, I suggest you do exactly what I tell you.

He crouched over Klithren.

“Now where’s my fucking sword?”


A RAPID SEARCH OF KLITHREN FOR WEAPONS YIELDED A COUPLE OF NASTY little knuckle blades tucked up in interesting places, as well as the big killing knife on his hip and a slimmer, nicely balanced piece of cutlery in his right boot.

It wasn’t the Ravensfriend, but it was a start. They shared out the blades and took Klithren up on deck.

The companionway was the trickiest part. Gil had Rakan lead; he at least knew the ship’s layout a little, would have some sense of what they were climbing up into. The Throne Eternal went up, lifted the companionway hatch by inches to check for close bystanders, then flagged an all clear to them and clambered up and out. Klithren went next, far enough behind not to grab at the Throne Eternal’s ankles, and Gil brought up the rear, the slim, balanced blade pressed close against the artery in the mercenary’s inner thigh as he climbed. The moment the mercenary’s head cleared the top of the companionway, Rakan’s dagger snicked in under his chin, and the Throne Eternal drew him painstakingly up and out like some big, vicious fish he’d just hooked. Gil came swiftly up behind and settled the slim blade in Klithren’s back.

“Easy there,” he murmured.

They crouched in a corner of the raised foredeck, shadowed by the rail and the foremast rigging in band-lit bars and squares.

By now, the hubbub down on the main deck was total. The other vessel was roped in tight to the port rail and a mob of men crowded there, yelling and brandishing weapons. Others clung to the mainmast rigging for a ladder and stared down onto the other ship’s deck. Even the steersman and his boy had left the wheel and were crowding the poop deck rail in an attempt to see what was going on.

You’re not going to get a better chance than this, Gil.

He took the slim balanced knife out of Klithren’s back and weighed it loosely on his palm. Knew, with a sudden conviction, that the weapon was worth less to him now than his two empty, unbound hands.

“Don’t you fucking move,” he warned the mercenary. “Noy, you take this blade, keep it right-handed, ready for a throw. Dagger in your left and hard up against our pal here’s kidneys. Soon as I give you the nod, get him up against the rail to my left. And get your mask back up. Try to look, uhm, shadowy. Hunched.”

He ignored the look the Throne Eternal shot him, flexed his fingers, wishing they weren’t still quite so stiff, and drew in one deep, hard breath. Then he nodded at Rakan and went to stand upright at the rail.

“Men of Trelayne!” Voice pitched to roll sonorously out across the main deck below. “Look upon my work, and repent! I hold your souls in the balance!”

The men in the rigging heard him first, swung from their points of purchase to stare. So far so good—no one climbs rigging with a primed crossbow, and the range was too great for accurate throwing of knives or clubs.

Down on the deck, though—that was going to be a different matter…

“Noy, this is going to be your moment.” He figured the muttered Tethanne was safe enough, was likely going to sound to the rattled northerners below like some kind of spell or incantation, if they heard it at all. “They’ll all have their eyes on me. Reckon you can throw down there accurately, take out the first man that gets too close?”

The Throne Eternal hefted the slim knife below the level of the rail without change of expression or stance.

“What, and still looked hunched and shadowy?” he muttered back, deadpan.

“Good lad.” Gil raised his hands, switched back to sonorous Naomic. “Look upon what I have done! Know the power you face!”

Curses now, panicked and raging in about equal measure. The crammed pack of men at the ship’s rail loosened, unknotting itself, spreading back out across the ship’s waist as the privateers turned and saw the dark figure up on the foredeck.

A new chaos of voices boiled up among them.

“He’s loose!” one of them yelled. “He’s out!”

“How the f—”

“Look, Klithren—he’s sold us out!” A panicking bellow. “He’s traded our fucking souls!”

“No, no, use your eyes—the mage’s familiar has him!”

“Black mage, black mage! Hoiran ward us!”

“Shit, it’s true, like that fat git Hort said, he’s—”

“Black mage! In Hoiran and Firfirdar’s name, ward us!”

So forth.

Out of the mess, Ringil tracked the dangerous men—snaking their way through the press, largely silent, eyes fixed balefully on the foredeck rail and the dark lord stood there who’d apparently butchered their comrades. Perhaps predictably, at least half of them wore Skirmish Ranger rig. He let them come on, tried to stave off the rising itch of unarmed exposure it set loose in his guts. Trusting to Rakan’s eye and arm rather a lot here, actually. If the ikinri ‘ska had spells for taking thrown weapons safely out of the air or deflecting them away—and he supposed it probably did—Hjel hadn’t gotten around to teaching them to him just yet. And the men down on deck were going to cut loose as soon as they thought they were in safe range, which might or might not be inside a distance Throne Eternal training allowed for, so if even one of them looked like…

That one for example, Ranger rig, out now ahead of the pack, spiked killing club in hand, still moving fleet-footed forward but settling into this sliding crouch that presaged—

Fuck this shit.

He threw up his arm and pointed. Shouted in Tethanne, words spaced in his best attempt at sounding like a spell. “That one there, Noy!”

The privateer got his throwing arm up, almost back—went choking, stumbling backward instead with Rakan’s knife in his throat. The tipped weight in his stance took him over in a tumble, no time to see if he landed with the knife clearly visible or not, if anyone was interested in checking such details with the black mage calling at them from the rail…

“Will you harm me with your petty blades and clubs?” he roared at them. “Will you stand against me? Will I bring the kraken’s doom upon you all? Don’t touch him!”

This last to a privateer pacing up to the newly made corpse. There was nothing of magic in the shout, just the years of desperate command from the war, but the man froze as if turned to stone. Gil, balanced on the hard edge of the seconds it bought him, saw what had to be done next to keep control—

Did it.

Leapt without thinking.

Up and over the rail, gut-swoop moment of the fall and his cloak flapping out behind him like tattered black wings—with luck they’d see that and believe he flew. He hit the main deck in a solid crouch, dared not roll to absorb the impact—it was only going to wreck the hard-bought dark lord poise of it all—took it in the knees and spine instead, jagged tug and flare through the bone, then straighten up out of the crouch, as if the pain were not there.

You jumped out of raided warehouse windows twice that high, back in the day, back in Trelayne.

Yeah, you were half the age as well.

Flickering stab of nostalgia for the youth and long withered innocence of those years—it hurt almost as much as the fall. He shook off both, stalked into the scattered ranks of the privateers with hands rising in finger-splayed claws at his sides.

“Who wants to die next then?”

Now it was time for the ikinri ‘ska, and he welcomed it in—the liquid stir it made through him, the trembling potential in his fingertips. Yeah and half a hundred more subjects than you can put away with it here, Gil. Let’s not get cocky. He still had the positions of the men he’d marked from the rail, the dangerous ones. He saw a raised hand ax out of the corner of his eye, swung on the man who wielded it. Carved a glyph from the air and pointed.

“You. You’re on your knees.”

And the privateer dropped there, like a puppet with strings abruptly cut.

“That’s not an ax, it’s a snake.”

The man let go his weapon with a yell of revulsion. Exultation surged through Ringil. He saw a wave of reaction run through the other privateers, steps stumbling backward in most, away from the black-cloaked thing walking into their midst. He picked another man who’d still not given ground. A glyph like tearing open, another pointing finger—

“You, you’re choking.”

And watched him go down, clutching at his throat. Another Skirmish Ranger off to his left—

“Corpsemite! It’s on your back!”

The victim, screaming and staggering, thrashing fit to snap his own spine backward…

“You—where are your weapons? What’s that on your thumbs?”

And the privateer rearing back, hands held up in horror. The exhilaration of the ikinri ‘ska washed through Ringil now like flandrijn, washed around him like the summery blue and white slop of waves on the beach at Lanatray in his youth. Something had changed, something had shifted inside him. Somehow, the overreach he’d forced through on the sloping street in Ornley had pulled something along with it. Like a knot threaded back through itself and then hauled on so hard it pops out of existence and leaves the cable running clean. Like a muscle, torn up with too much strain, knitting harder and tougher again…

A man in Ranger rig came at him howling, cutlass raised for the chop. He locked gazes, spoke the simple word No, not even very loud. Saw the waver of the upflung blade, the sudden stammer in the Skirmish Ranger’s step. He stepped in, blocked the cutlass blow with an imperial empty-hand technique, hooked and hauled the arm down, smashed an open palm into the man’s chest, put him on the deck on his back—

“Lie still—you are in your grave!”

The Skirmish Ranger convulsed on the planking, as if pinned there by an iron spike. He flailed with hands in front of his face, weeping. Ringil turned away, on to the next…

He should be weakening, this should be tiring him by now.

“Marsh spider—there in your shirt!”

But all he feels is the appetite for more. He strides unarmed into the midst of his enemies, and it’s as if he’s wearing tailored plate; as if the Ravensfriend is there in his hand. The privateers are backing away now, scrambling to get clear of him, clear of the clawing, raking, stabbing gestures from raised hands he barely seems to own anymore…

“Oh, you think you’re going to shoot me with that? It’s not strung, you twat. And your eyes are bleeding!”

The arbalest, tumbling to the deck, landing—reach in there and flip—upside down, muffled twank and the bolt discharged, spent into the deck planking. The man who’d held it clapped hands to his face and bawled something incomprehensible…

Enough.

He bent and gathered up the crossbow, held it briefly aloft in one hand.

“You think this is going to save you?”

And threw it to the deck at his feet. Raised his voice for them all.

“There are two kinds of men aboard this ship! Those who oppose me—and those who will live to see the dawn!” He snapped out the blade of one hand, gestured at a trembling privateer on his left. Stared into the man’s face. “Which are you?”

Frozen pause.

Then the man’s head bowed and he dropped on one knee to the deck. He threw his club away.

Ringil turned his head, and it was like a wave sweeping through the privateers wherever his gaze fell. They began to kneel. By ones and twos at first—then more—then most—and finally the very few stiff-backed resilient ones, broken by his stare as it swept over the bowed heads of their comrades and found them, put the same silent question to them that the others had already faced and answered for themselves.

Soft clatter and thump of discarded weaponry across the deck.

And the slow leak inside of a feeling Ringil couldn’t place at first. He thought it might only be the sinking away of the ikinri ‘ska as it faded into the background again, and he looked around at the men he would not now need to fight and kill…

Then he had it. Saw the sensation for what it really was.

Disappointment.

CHAPTER 21

It seemed like a very long time they stood in silence, while the Warhelm’s accusation soaked away into the quiet. Archeth might have been a statue, rooted to the polished alloy floor where she’d leapt to her feet.

“You said what?” Staring balefully up at the iron-beamed ceiling now. “You’d better back that shit up, Warhelm. You’d better fucking explain to me why my father would cripple and blind one of his most powerful allies in the fight against the dwenda. Are you accusing him of treachery? Why would he commit such an act of violence against you?”

“It was not treachery, no. But we differed over how to end the Aldrain threat.” Near as Egar could tell, the screech-edged amiability in the demon’s voice hadn’t changed. If it had ever been pissed off about what ’Nam had supposedly done to it, the passing of a few thousand years certainly seemed to have taken the edge off. “More precisely, kir-Flaradnam believed that the threat was ended, and I did not. He did not like my plans for further action, and he knew I would not obey him when he told me to stand down.”

“But it was ended,” Archeth blurted. “You drove out the dwenda. The Aldrain. It was over, the Indirath M’nal says so. You ended the threat.”

Egar sniffed. “Till now, anyway.”

“Ah, so it begins.”

“Begins?” The Dragonbane looked suspiciously around. “What begins?”

“The Aldrain reconquest, I imagine. I did wonder about the seismics. I have wondered every time, in fact. They fit so well into the model, each time it was hard to believe that the Aldrain would not see their opportunity and seize it. Though apparently not until now.” Tharalanangharst had seemed for a moment to be drifting away. Now, its voice came back tighter. “A pity your father is not here to see this, kir-Archeth—he was adamant that it would not occur. Could not occur, in fact. He was a tower of rhetorical passion on the subject. It was the kind of conviction one only sees in a man when he knows beyond any doubt, beneath all speech and emotion, that he is utterly wrong.”

“What seismics?” Archeth asked the ceiling rigidly.

“Yeah, what is a size-mix anyway?” He liked to think his Tethanne was pretty good, but it wasn’t a word he’d heard before.

“I have detected vibrations from the south, consistent with a significant earthquake event. My these days somewhat limited senses tell me its origin is in the Hanliagh fault.”

“Fucking earthquake?” Egar blinked. “What, wait a minute—you talking about the Drowned Daughters?”

One tavern night in Yhelteth, not long arrived in the city, he’d felt the floor lift and sway beneath his feet and thought it was just the drink—until a serving maid shrieked at his elbow, and things started toppling off shelves and tables around him. He rode the shaking with a—drunken—horse breaker’s calm, watching faintly bemused as his hardened mercenary colleagues grabbed at the talismans they wore or made forking wards in the air. It was a solid few minutes before everything calmed down and he could grab someone, with bruising, inebriated force, and ask what the fuck just happened here, brother?

The Drowned Daughters twist and yearn in their sleep. They dream of waking and rising from their ocean bed in memory of their great father.

There’d been other tremors on and off in the years that followed, mostly of lesser force, nothing you didn’t get used to with time. They were far from the weirdest thing a Majak lad might experience, living in the imperial city But some of the local tales on the subject were pretty dark. They told of a cataclysmic ruin visited upon Yhelteth in earlier times, and the tellers could point you easily enough to cracked and slumped buildings amid the older architecture to vouch for the truth of the account. It was said that out to sea, the ocean had boiled, and the Drowned Daughters of Hanliagh had risen from it vomiting fire to scorch the sky.

“Well?” Archeth, looking slightly sick now. “Is he right? Have the Daughters risen?”

“The nature and intensity of the tremors suggests not, at least not yet. But if these vibrations are only a precursor, then it is not impossible that the submarine caldera at the heart of the Hanliagh scatter could vent again.”

Archeth twitched about, then just as abruptly seemed not to know what to do with her sudden will to motion. She stood irresolute on the stark black carpet, glaring through the Dragonbane at something he had no way to see.

“If there are earthquakes in Yhelteth,” she said tightly, “then those assholes up at the Citadel are going to be touting it for evidence that God’s angry with the Empire, and that means angry with the Emperor, too. This is going to be their wet-dream comeback moment, Eg. They can march right up to the palace gates at the head of a mob ten thousand strong, demand audience, and ask for pretty much anything they like. Prophet’s prick! No wonder Jhiral’s taken us to war.”

Egar nodded. “Looks like he’s taking a leaf out of Daddy’s campaign manual.”

“Yeah—a new holy war, against the infidel north. Except when Akal did it, he was expanding the Empire for real. Jhiral’s going to do it just so he can hang on to the throne.”

“Still—not going too shabbily, if he’s taken Hinerion like Klithren said.”

Archeth pulled a sour face. “He can lose it again just as fast. That border’s been back and forth like a wanker’s hand as long as I’ve been alive.”

“Yeah, seen some action there myself, back when I was starting out.” The Dragonbane brooded for a while. “You reckon Anasharal saw this coming, Archidi?”

“What?”

“Well, look at it this way—Helmsman gets us all fired up for a three-thousand-mile quest north after things that aren’t there—”

“An-Kirilnar’s there. Here, I mean.”

“Archidi, come on. You’re reaching. There’s no Illwrack Changeling, there’s no fucking Ghost Isle. And this place is nowhere near where we were told it was going to be.”

Archeth looked thoughtful. “Anasharal said south and east of the Ghost Isle. You know, that’s not technically a lie. This coast is east of the Hironish, and the storm did blow us a long way south before we wrecked.”

“Yeah, whatever. Point is, we were sold a nag and told it was a unicorn. So I’m thinking maybe Anasharal just wanted you out of the city before all this earthquake and war shit broke loose. Maybe this whole thing was just one big fucking excuse to protect you.”

He watched her digest the idea. Stare at the carpet underfoot, then shake her head. “No. Can’t be, Eg. It’s too elaborate. Helmsmen falling out of the sky? Portents and legends come to life? A quarter million elemental venture, complete with imperial charter, drawing in half the uncrowned heads of Yhelteth commerce? All that to coddle one washed-up, krin-soaked half-breed?”

He heard the old, tangled damage, the pain and self-loathing in her voice.

“Well,” he said, very gently. “Got to depend on how much the washed-up, krin-soaked half-breed in question matters to you, I guess. Didn’t you tell me Angfal’s sworn to the single purpose of your protection? Manathan, too, right?”

“Manathan is sworn to the Kiriath mission, not me. Anyway, that’s not the fucking point. If this is all about protecting me, why didn’t Angfal just tell me to head out to Dhashara for the duration? Or sit things out in the imperial embassy at Shaktur?”

“Dunno, because you wouldn’t have gone, maybe?” Egar grinned. “I’ve been your bodyguard less than two years, Archidi, and I already know you’re a pain in the arse to keep out of harm’s way. I don’t envy Angfal. You do what’s good for you about as often as a shaman gets a shag.”

He thought she smiled, just barely. “Thanks.”

“Just pointing out some obvious truths here. Anasharal sold you the one pony that would get you a thousand miles out of Yhelteth without blinking. And he sold Jhiral a matching saddle to get you there in style.”

“No.” She shook her head again, emphatically. “I’m not buying this, Eg. You set out a good stall, but there’s too much else that doesn’t fit. There’s the dwenda. Anasharal didn’t make them up. There’s Klithren, and the fact that somebody in Trelayne thought it was worth sending him and a whole fucking flotilla of privateers up to the Hironish isles to detain us. There’s the fact somebody in Ornley was told to dig up that sword and take it back to Trelayne before we arrived. That can’t all be—”

“What sword?”

A hard edge on the Warhelm’s voice, unmistakable even to Egar. And he saw how Archeth shot a surprised look at the ceiling.

“What do you care?” she asked curtly.

Into the abused air evolved a twist of light that rapidly became a writhing calligraphic stroke, then some kind of long tool, then—recognition sidling quickly in—a broadsword.

“If,” said the Warhelm distinctly, “it is this sword, then I care a great deal, and you had better tell me all about it right away.”

Egar stared at the image floating in the air before him. He’d been a lot of different places in his time under the imperial standard, slaughtered a lot of different peoples, and seen the—usually inferior—weapons they defended themselves with.

He’d never seen anything like this.

The blade glinted blue along its edges and did not taper, was the same slim width from guard to jagged tip. He’d seen similar in the hands of the dwenda when they came to Ennishmin two years ago, right enough, and again in the musty stone depths of the temple at Afa’marag last year. But at the guard end of the weapon, any further familiarity died. This sword was equipped there with a heavy slope-sided cross-piece, studded on the underside with hooked little teeth that gave it the appearance of iron jaws wrenched open to vomit out grip and pommel. And grip and pommel, well… Egar caught himself shaking his head as he tried to make sense of what was there. No defined place for hands to grip, no pommel counterweight, just a long, snakelike coil of metal that also gleamed blue in the low light and terminated in a sharp, inward-angled spike.

The whole lower section of the weapon looked more like an instrument of torture than the handling end of a broadsword.

“Is this the sword?” A hint of impatience in the demon’s voice now.

“We haven’t seen the fucking sword,” Archeth snapped. “It was taken from a grave in the Hironish isles before we arrived there. How are we supposed to know what it looks like? You want to tell us what this… thing is?”

“This is Betrayal Becomes You,” said the Warhelm crisply. It is the Illwrack Changeling’s Doom. A synthesis—a Kiriath reverse-engineered simulacrum of the Aldrain weapon Out of Twilight Leaping, which was gifted by the Illwrack clan to their human champion Cormorion Ilusilin Mayne, called Cormorion the Radiant, on his appointment as battle marshal supreme in the until right now, it seems final dwenda war.”

Archeth prowled around the floating image of the sword, fascinated. “Betrayal Becomes You? Reverse-engineered why? What for?”

“As its name I would have imagined tends to suggest, the Illwrack Changeling’s Doom was designed to murder Cormorion when he drew it in battle.”

“Murder him how?” Archeth was still peering at the sword, either oblivious in her absorption to the Warhelm’s sour point-scoring, or just ignoring it.

“The Illwrack Changeling’s Doom was reverse-engineered to cut the Changeling’s connection with undefined existence and the opportunities for sorcerous strength that it provides, instead of feeding and channeling them as the original weapon was forged to do. It was to then mirror and store Cormorion’s selfhood, oppose that copy to his existing self in his own mind, and let them obliterate each other.”

Egar frowned. “You what?”

“To steal his soul,” said the demon more slowly. “All right?”

“No, it’s not all right,” Archeth interjected. “I’ve read the Indirath M’nal. That’s not science the Kiriath have ever had. There are speculations about the possibility of stealing or mirroring a, whatever you want to call it, a soul. But that’s all they ever were. Speculations.”

“I did not say, kir-Archeth, that the forces at the heart of the sword’s design were Kiriath. I said only that the Kiriath did the engineering work.”

“On whose instigation?”

Another pause. “We knew them as the Ahn Foi—or the Immortal Watch. Humans on both sides of the conflict called them by a variety of names. Judging by the curses and prayers that I have overheard some of your followers utter in the last several hours, it seems they are currently known as the Dark Court.”

“The fucking Sky Dwellers?” A disbelieving grin on the Dragonbane’s face.

“That, too.”

“They’ve been in this fight for that long?” He looked at Archeth, still grinning. “On your side, against the dwenda from the start? Man, they must be pretty fucking pissed off ‘Nam and Grashgal opted for the Revelation.”

She shrugged, a bit defensively. “We had our reasons. Monotheism’s handy if you want a rational development of… Oh, never mind.” Her voice pitched up again. “So. This assassination plot. Presumably, it worked?”

“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.”

CHAPTER 22

“You 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.


FINDING OUT ABOUT THE MARINES WAS SHEER LUCK. IT 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.


WHICH 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.”

A tight silence. The marines twitched, yearning etched into their young faces.

You’re going to have to do it, Gil. Let’s just get on with it, shall we?

He sighed. “You know the real problem here, bounty hunter?”

Klithren showed him the street dog snarl again, but Gil thought he saw a tremor at the edge of it this time. Hard as nails or not, and contrary to Ringil’s earlier insult, the mercenary wasn’t stupid. He would have picked up on the new calm in his captor, would understand how it presaged the endgame.

He offered Klithren a thin smile.

“The real problem is that you took my friends. And I want them back.”

“Yeah?” The mercenary spread his fingers, studied his hands in their cuffs with affected boredom. His voice missed steady by an inch. “Well, I want to fuck a Yhelteth virgin princess. Let’s see who gets lucky first, shall we?”

Ringil laughed politely. “No, you haven’t understood,” he said.

And launched himself forward.

Grabbed Klithren’s fingers between his own and snapped his fists closed. The mercenary reared back in shock, then tried to mend his failed nerve by leaping straight back in with a full force head-butt. Ringil jerked his own head clear by fractions and Klithren’s forehead went all the way down. Hit the table and the iron manacle rail with a solid clank.

The marines leapt forward on either side, curses and drawn blades—

“No!” Gil kept his hold on Klithren’s fingers, shut the imperials down on voice alone. “It’s okay, we’re fine here. We’re fine.”

The marines eased back, one muscle at a time. Gil saw them shoot each other glances about equal parts bemusement and anger. A fair bet they’d never attended an interrogation session quite like this one before.

You know you’re going to have to—

He lowered his head carefully beside Klithren’s. “Just fighting men, shooting the breeze. Right Hinerion?”

The mercenary groaned. Lashed sideways with his head, but Ringil was too close for him to make it into a blow of any consequence. Gil pressed back, skull to skull, feeling Klithren’s stubble rasp against his own cheek. Both their faces dipped to within inches of the torture table’s ravaged wooden surface. He let go Klithren’s right hand with his left, slammed his palm up hard against the other side of the mercenary’s skull to keep the clinch.

“I said you haven’t understood,” he hissed low. “I am going to have my friends back. If I have to burn the whole—”

Klithren bucked against his grip. Ringil clinched harder with head and hand, dug his nails into the mercenary’s face.

“—the whole fucking city of Trelayne into the marsh to bring them home, then I will do exactly that. Those fucks in the cabal, the Chancellery, my own fucking father—if they think I caused trouble last time I was in town, they have seen and understood nothing. Are you beginning to get which way the wind blows here, Klithren of Hinerion?”

Grunt of muffled rage, another attempt to butt sideways. He felt Klithren’s feet thrashing about for purchase beneath the table.

You know you’re going to—

He reached down, reached inward. Spoke in rasping tones, hauled hard, as if pulling some massive root crop fruit up through the dry-baked earth of a pitiless summer. Felt in the pit of his stomach how the power built with each glyph, how it washed about seeking an exit, any exit other than the one he now demanded. Let the rumbling, answering snarl come up his throat and out through his gritted teeth, the sequenced cant, the savage warning to whatever he was struggling against here, living thing or insensate matter or something somewhere in between, to get the fuck out of his way. He kept his grip on Klithren, kept his weight locked in, kept on pulling at the stubborn edges of the rip he’d made, the damage he’d done to whatever fabric this was…

And through.

Like a fist punched into mud, and out an unexpected other side.

Into weeping quiet.

Ringil shudders and lets go. They’re here.

He hears it for sure now—the low keening, like the wind in tall grass, but he knows that’s not what it is. He grips Klithren’s head for a moment like a drowning man clinging to some smoothly rounded rock. He turns his face and drags a hard, smearing kiss up over the other man’s cheek to his ear. Lets go and stands shakily back. Jerks his chin at Klithren’s huddled form where it’s slumped over the torture table.

He gets his breathing mostly back under control.

Now let’s stop fucking about, he says unsteadily.

The Grey Places spread out around them, marsh flats to the horizon in every direction and a vast pale sky above.


SOME THINGS SHIFT IN SUBSTANCE OR FORM WHEN THEY COME THROUGH to the Margins, some things melt completely away. Hjel tells him he suspects it depends on how likely or unlikely the item in question is to exist across a whole range of different times and places.

The torture table hasn’t changed very much at all.

The wood is a little more worn and cracked, perhaps, and whitened in the cracks with some lichen or mildew he doesn’t recognize. He thinks the scarring on the tabletop looks different, too—suddenly unfamiliar patterns among the scatter of dents and gouges, changed outlines to the blotched and faded stains, a whole new map of atrocity to get used to. The manacle rail is rusted, the manacles themselves are no longer iron; they look to be made of some cured bluish gray hide.

The keening around him is growing louder now, or maybe just imprinting itself more clearly on his scrambled senses. Ringil casts a glance around him, knowing already what he’ll see, still hoping somehow that he won’t.

Klithren twitches on the table and mumbles something. Gil turns back and leans over him, glad of the focus. He’s not sure how conscious the other man is. Coming through has left him feeling like a morning after too much cheap rum and krin, and he’s more or less used to the transition. No telling how the passage must have felt to the mercenary.

Nonetheless…

He digs out his dragon-tooth dagger, cuts the blue-gray hide bindings. It’s harder work than you’d expect from the frayed and faded look of them. He hooks Klithren under the shoulder with one arm, heaves and drags him up off the table, dumps him onto the marshy ground beside it. Stares down at him for a moment.

Black mage lizardshit, is it? He kicks the mercenary solidly in the ribs. Stands over him, breathing harder than his exertions merit. Why don’t you take a look around, Klithren of Hinerion? See what you think.

Another kick. Klithren rouses with a groan. He rolls over on the waterlogged, spongy turf, comes up with a bump against what looks at a glance like some ancient, rotted mooring post, driven here untold centuries ago to mark the edge of a river long since dried up or diverted. The mercenary blinks, rubs the back of his hand across his eyes, and then reaches up to steady himself on the protrusion. He props himself blurrily to his knees, glances at the post—

Screams—recoils—falls back over on his arse again.

No, but, no, no, that’s, no, no… dribbles from his lips as he stares at the thing he’s just rested his hand on.

It’s a human head. And it’s alive.

They took them, Miri, they shone like stars, I tried, I tried, but they took them, please believe me, I couldn’t stop them, please forgive me, they shone like stars, they took them

It’s the head of an old man, sparsely bearded with white whiskers and mostly bald, mumbling and weeping, endless tears that ribbon down through the grime on his cheeks and into the deep-cut lines that mark his sunken face. His neck has been severed a handbreadth below his chin and then somehow cemented to a tree stump that matches its circumference perfectly. If his faded blue staring eyes see them at all, he shows no sign.

—took them, please, I couldn’t, they shone, shone like stars—

Klithren has seen enough—he’s scrabbling backward on the heels of his hands, still staring, as far away as he can get. Until he bumps solidly into something behind him, jerks his head around to look at what he’s hit, and screams again—

It’s a young woman this time, disheveled long hair half obscuring her face, trailing down to brush at the humped and twisted roots of the stump she’s mounted on. Her voice whispers out, as if jolted into speech by Klithren’s clumsy shoulder.

left me, he said he’d come, trust him he said, he’d come for me, it aches, it hurts, please don’t, I’m tired, he’d come he said, he swore, I trusted, I’m tired, where is he, oh, it hurts, it hurts, he left me, he

Klithren staggers to his feet. Backs away, tearing his gaze from the babbling woman’s face, looking for escape.

He’s wasting his time.

The severed heads stretch away in all directions, studding the marsh in endless random succession as far as the eye can distinguish them from the tufted marsh grass. They number in the thousands, maybe the tens of thousands, and all of them are weeping, some low, some high, some screaming their pain, some mumbling, but not a single one at any kind of lasting rest…

Ringil can almost see the moment that Klithren makes the connection, understands the low susurrus of moaning on the wind for what it really is.

No, that can’t be, that, no… he’s shaking his head, muttering to himself with a kind of hollow confidence. No, that, no, no

Oh, yes, yes, fucking yes. Ringil stands at his shoulder, feeling an unwelcome stab of empathy for the other man. Grinding it back down into anger. And no, in case you wondered, you are not fucking dreaming. Each one of these is a living soul, kept alive as long as the tree roots draw water from the soil. Look out there and try to count. Some of them will be children.

The mercenary hangs there for a moment, and then a deep shudder runs through him. He swings on Ringil, sharp enough that Gil’s reflexes put up a blocking arm between them, a hand pressed to the other man’s shoulder ready to trip him back onto the marshy ground. They’re close enough that he can smell Klithren’s soured breath. Their eyes lock.

What…? The mercenary shakes his head numbly. What is this?

This? Ringil presses firmly back a couple of inches to make the point, then drops his arm. He looks around at the harvest of human misery they stand amid. This is what’s coming—if I can’t stop it in time.

Klithren makes a noise, not even a word. Ringil steps away from him and gestures with the dragon-tooth dagger.

You wanted to see some black mage lizardshit? You’re looking at it. This is what happens when the original black mages cut loose. This what the dwenda leave in their wake.

Fucking dwenda? Klithren’s still numb by the sound of it, still dislocated and stumbling. Youtalking about the Aldrain?

More steps away—then Gil turns to face the other man. Call them what you like. They’re the power behind Findrich and the rest, just like the cabal is the power behind the Chancellery. You do a deal with Findrich and the cabal, you’re doing a deal with the creatures that did this—that do this habitually when they’re pissed off.

So like I asked you once before, Klithren of Hinerion—proud of your employers, are you?

Klithren shakes himself like a wet dog. Breathes in hard. Gil watches. Knows what the other man’s doing because—there’s that fucking empathy again, Gil, going to get you killed one of these days—he’s done it himself enough times. Close down focus, shut out what you can’t stand or can’t do anything about, stare down the blade of what needs to be done.

And then do it.

How do you know all this? Klithren asks him.

Ringil smiles bleakly. The dwenda and I are old friends.

That’s not an answer.

It’s the only one you’re getting on that subject. Ask me something else.

Why did you bring me here? Klithren talking deliberately louder now, to drown out the keening around them. But there’s a wavering crack in his voice. Why are you showing me this?

I told you—because I need your help. Ringil looks away to the horizon. One part of him registers with a tiny shock how used he’s grown to this horror, how little it touches him anymore. See, I think I can probably take back Ornley without you. I’ve got your crew terrified into submission, I’ve got the ship, and for a little bonus I’ve got a handful of my own men to season the mix. I could torture some details out of you—

You could fucking try!

I could fucking succeed. He says it matter-of-factly, doesn’t even look around. You’re from the borders, you know about imperial marines. Well, there are marines back on that ship trained specifically in inquisition, and they’re leaping at the leash for a shot at you. I let them loose, you’d spill, you know you would. You’d give up everything I need to know before you died. And the noises you make doing it are just going to hammer home my grip on your crew.

Silence at his back that he takes for assent. Ringil waits regardless. The lost-soul moaning rises to fill the gap. He lets it chew at Klithren for a while before he goes on.

So like I said, I could get the detail. Find out where the prisoners are being held, what defensive setup you’ve left in place. Now he turns back to the other man. Sees that Klithren has started, faintly but perceptibly, to tremble. But here’s the thing—it’s still going to cost too much. It’s another fucking sneak attack, another battle uphill, and I’m going to lose men I can’t afford. Some bright spark on shore is likely going to run off to wherever they’ve stashed the prisoners and start cutting throats—it’s what I’d do, anyway. And there’ll be reprisals when we’re done. We’ll probably end up burning the town.

He sees it in his mind’s eye.

In other words, it’ll be a bloody fucking mess for all concerned. And when that’s done, I’ve still got to sail to Trelayne, get my friends back somehow, slaughter Findrich and his pals, and find some way to stop the dwenda.

That’s a lot of work with no intelligence to go on.

Whereas—you give me your allegiance here and now, I can go back to Ornley without drawing a blade. I collect my men in good order, imprison yours. Get my ships back, provision them, set sail. Nobody gets hurt. Then you tell me what I need to know about the cabal. You come back to Trelayne with me, and help me gain entry. Then, when we’re done, I’ll give you what you want.

Klithren makes an effort to master his trembling. Which is what?

Your much-vaunted revenge. The chance to kill me blade to blade, and no need to hand me over to anyone else. Gil considers for a moment. And no lizardshit black mage protection for either one of us. You can find out for real what the gods want done about this.

The mercenary stares at him. You’ll do that?

Gil sighs. Yeah, I’ll do that. Like I already told you, I didn’t kill your friend. But the truth is, I would have cut him apart given half a chance; it would have made my day. And the thing that did cut him apart—well, that was a power sent to protect me, so… A careless shrug. You want payback? You want a piece of me? I’ll give you your shot.

What p-power? There’s no masking the tremors now—Klithren is breaking down. The desolate unhuman chill of the Grey Places is eating into him like fever. But he clings to the last vestiges of his hate. The thing thatwhat, what are you talking about? What thing?

Do you really want to know? Ringil crushes out another inconvenient flicker of sympathy for the mercenary. Opens a palm to the marsh plain around them and what it contains. Have you really not seen enough?

It feels almost cheap this time, the little it takes to break down the other man’s gaze and have him look away. Klithren shudders.

And—what, what if I—refuse this? Turn you down?

Oh, that’s easy, Ringil tells him. I’ll just leave you here.

CHAPTER 23

You didn’t see the Dragonbane at a loss very often.

Archeth was one of the few who had, and she couldn’t remember the last time she’d seen that expression on his face. She’d forgotten how suddenly young it could make him look. For just those few moments, she was watching the features of a Majak buffalo herdsman not yet out of his teens.

“But—forty-seven… million?” he murmured. “You could really have killed forty-seven million people?”

“Oh, yes. Sadly no longer, though. Her father saw to that.”

“But.” Egar shook his head. “Why did you let him? You said you wouldn’t obey his orders, why’d you sit still for him to… to mutilate you?”

“I was summoned from the void to protect the People, at any and all cost to anything else including myself. That was the pact, those were the terms of my containment. I could not act directly against kir-Flaradnam Indamaninarmal, or against any Kiriath, even in self-defense. It was not in my intrinsic nature. I could no more do it than you, Dragonbane, could breathe beneath the waves. And since I could not act against kir-Flaradnam, he was free to commit such surgery on me as he chose.” A longish pause, an unmistakable note of sour satisfaction creeping into Tharalanangharst’s voice. “I only hope his daughter does not live to regret the fact too much, now that our concerns about humanity have proven accurate.”

“The Kiriath mission,” snapped Archeth, “is to nurture humanity, to bring the human race eventually to the same levels of civilization as the Kiriath themselves enjoy.”

“Yes, it is now. Didn’t use to be. Good luck with that, by the way, when the Aldrain finally wake up to the benefits of volcanic eruption at Hanliagh and give it a little helping hand with their weapon of last resort.”

“You’re talking about the Talons of the Sun?”

“Well, well, you are better read than I expected. Yes, kir-Archeth, I am referring to the Aldrain’s chief engine of destruction. Which can in all likelihood pour enough destructive force into the volcanic vents at Hanliagh to burst the caldera like a rotten egg.”

“In all likelihood?” She let scorn edge her tone. “You don’t know?”

“No.” If the Warhelm noticed or cared about her affected lack of esteem, it didn’t show. It lectured methodically on, as if to a none-too-bright student. “The rather melodramatically named Talons of the Sun remain, I’m afraid, a largely unknown quantity. The Aldrain used them several times against us during the war, to obliterate cities and armies or to create obstacles in the landscape. Once they evaporated the ocean at Inatharam harbor and so created an incoming wave of colossal force. But for all this, the weapon itself never manifested in the real world. It was deployed from, and seems resident in, an undefined plane to which we did not have access.”

“And now? Do you have access now?”

“I have access to very little these days, daughter of kir-Flaradnam. I thought I’d made that clear.” The Warhelm paused again, presumably to let the poetic justice sink in. “So, no, in answer to your rather obtuse question, I am no more able to locate and quantify the Talons of the Sun now than I ever was.”

Archeth went, as if called by something, to stare out of the run of broad windows in the chamber’s south-facing wall. There was an ornamental rail below the glass expanse and she placed her hands on it with a conscious effort at calm. The krinzanz crash itched through her grip, made her fingers twitch. She watched evening crowd the thin sunlight westward and out to sea.

“If the dwenda use the Talons of the Sun to force an eruption at Hanliagh,” she said evenly, “then it’s going to affect the whole fault system. Will An-Monal erupt as well?”

“It did not happen the last time the caldera blew. The pressure walls at An-Monal are among the most powerful defensive engineering ever conceived by Kiriath science. The heat exchangers and diversion channeling were all built with exactly such a contingency in mind. And the Helmsman Manathan was called from the void primarily to hold the volcanic forces there in safe equilibrium.”

“But last time was not a dwenda incursion.”

“No.”

Her hands tightened on the rail. “Then it could happen. Manathan could be overwhelmed.”

“Possibly, yes. But I think you have missed the rather more important consequence of an eruption at Hanliagh, both for Manathan and for everybody else.”

“Which is what?”

“Which is that the ash cloud thrown up when the caldera detonates will darken the skies over Yhelteth for days, veil the sun’s force for even longer, and so render the region positively hospitable for any invading Aldrain force. After that, whether Manathan is overwhelmed by lava at An-Monal or by Aldrain sorcery is really academic. The Kiriath mission, such as it is, will have failed.”

Archeth leaned in hard against her own grip. Stared out at the darkening ocean and coast, as if she could somehow will herself southward and back to Yhelteth along the line of her own gaze. She was in the wrong place, she was in the wrong fucking place. She felt the bitter flood of vindication—could briefly appreciate how Tharalanangharst must feel—and the impotent rage that it brought. She’d known. From the moment their disappointments began at Ornley, she’d fucking known.

Hold it down, Archidi. Someone’s got to deal with this, and it looks like it’s you.

Again.

My father would not have left the job of liberating this world half done. She would have laughed if she hadn’t felt so near to weeping. They’d left everything half done or worse, Grashgal and her father; it was practically their defining characteristic. The Empire—the brutal and bloodthirsty men they’d somehow let hold sway over it, let warp its envisaged purposes into the same dreary mash of conquest and slaughter, tribute and oppression, as ever was. The plan to reclaim the Wastes, the plan to cross the western ocean—both abandoned on the drawing board. The search for the Estranged Clans—wherever they’d wandered off to over the slow millennia—abandoned. Redecorating An-Monal. Her own fucking education. All left half done or badly handled. About the only thing her father had followed through on in the end was getting himself killed. And then Grashgal and the rest had left her, one badly trained half-breed caretaker novice, fumbling to hold up the towering, badly stacked, awkward-to-balance weight of their ridiculous fucking mission to civilize—

All right, Archidi. Old wounds, leave them alone.

“You are powerless to prevent any of this?” she asked tonelessly.

“In direct terms, yes.”

“Are there other Warhelms still in existence?”

“Oh, yes. The Aldrain were only able to bring down three of us in the end. Valdanakrakharn in the east—”

“I don’t need the names of the dead. Who’s left?”

“In the far south, Anakhanaladras. Up in endless circuit between the world and the band, Ingharnanasharal. And on the shores across the western ocean Gohlahaidranagawr. But I’m afraid they are each as crippled and reduced as I am. They had all reached the same conclusions as I, you see. And your father was most thorough in his determination not to allow the housecleaning we wished to embark on.”

“Housecleaning,” she said grimly. “Right. Did you at least—any of you—manage to gather any useful intelligence about the Talons of the Sun?”

“Useful? No.”

“Well, I don’t see how that can be.” She worked at keeping the tinge of desperation out of her voice. “Even ordinary fucking Helmsmen can make assumptions, projections based on evidence. And you were summoned specifically to fight the dwenda. It was your whole purpose.”

Tharalanangharst’s tone turned acidic. “Be that as it may, daughter of kir-Flaradnam, we were only ever able to determine two basic truths about the Talons of the Sun, busy as we were fulfilling our purpose and ensuring that the Aldrain did not obliterate the People. First, despite the name, the weapon does not appear to have anything to do with the sun, or at least not the sun that this world orbits around. And second, the uses to which the dwenda put their device appeared neither to tax it very much nor suit its capacities particularly well. It was a weapon immeasurably more powerful than anything the People had access to, but equally, it seemed hopelessly out of place in the Aldrain armory. It was, if you like, a broadsword used by schoolchildren to cut twine.” Another of the Warhelm’s characteristic blank pauses. “So, then. Do you wish me to make an assumption based on this evidence, kir-Archeth?”

“Yeah, why don’t you do that.”

“Then assume this: we are talking about a weapon held over from the cataclysm visited upon this world tens of thousands of years before the Kiriath arrived here through the veins of the earth. A battle relic of what some of your more well-read human protégés five thousand years ago liked to hark back to as the Time of Dark and Angry Ancient Gods.”

Archeth watched the sky through the window. Early stars glimmered in the gaps between soft mounded cloud, the band leaned in from the horizon at a drunken angle. She glanced upward at the roof, expectant. Got nothing in return. It took her a couple of moments to understand that Tharalanangharst had stopped talking for good. Had chosen to absent itself in the wake of its last, charged words, and leave her swimming for herself in the implications.

An odd quiet made itself felt, dropping into place like shutters across her view, forcing her back to the room, a half-turn to look at the Dragonbane still sitting there on the couch. He met her gaze and shrugged.

“Dark and Angry Ancient Gods, eh? Doesn’t sound too clever.”

She felt the chilly, dead breath in the phrase, tickling the short hairs at the back of her neck. She shook it off, impatient.

“We have to get out of here,” she said. “We have to get home. Jhiral isn’t going to be able to handle any of this alone.”

Jhiral isn’t going to be able to handle any of this at all. But that doesn’t put us one foot farther south than we already are. And I don’t see how we can get back to Yhelteth in time to make a difference.”

“You said you could walk us out of the Wastes.”

“Yeah.” Egar nodded at the fruit bowl beside him. “Given enough of this five-thousand-year-old grub, some packs to carry it in, something resembling decent weapons, we might make it to Gallows Gap, sure. Might.”

“This morning you were talking about doing it on a few mouthfuls of ham and oil, and some sea-soaked biscuits. You seemed pretty comfortable with the idea then.”

“What can I tell you? Didn’t want to spoil anyone’s mood.” The Dragonbane stooped forward on the couch, leaned elbows on his knees, and looked down into his own cupped and empty hands. “Archidi, if we hadn’t found this place, chances are we would all have died in the Wastes. I doubt we’d have made a hundred miles south. But you don’t ever say things like that to the people you have at your back. I mean, they know it as well as you do, but that doesn’t mean they want to fucking hear it. What they want is for you to take charge. Distract them from it, give them some hope, some reason to keep putting one foot in front of the other.”

“Even if it’s a crock of lizardshit?”

Especially if it’s a crock of lizardshit.” He looked up at her, gave her a bleak smile. “We’re all bound for the Sky Road, sooner or later. How we walk it depends on how we walked in the world beneath. So you don’t sit on your arse whining and waiting for your death to come find you. You go looking for it. Track the fucker down, force the issue. You walk, Archidi, you find the strength to walk, and you keep walking till you drop. Now some men don’t have that strength, so you have to lend it to them.”

She gestured. “So we get walking.”

“Not saying we don’t. But I still don’t see us riding to the rescue in Yhelteth. We’ve got the Wastes to cross, and if we do make it as far as Gallows Gap, we’re still deep in League territory, four or five hundred miles north of a border that’s on fire. And half our company is men who see the League as their side in the fight. Remember what I said about Sogren, how they’re going to feel? Not going to help the balance any, is it?”

“So what do you want to do?”

“I don’t know.” He got up from the couch, yawned and stretched like a man crucified. “Get some sleep might be a start. Then, tomorrow, we take stock. Feed up the men, lay some plans. And yes, try to get home. But you got to stop worrying about how fast we can get back to Yhelteth. Let that wanker Jhiral fight his own fucking battles.”

“I promised—” She chopped off the retort, but not before the Dragonbane spotted where it was going.

“I know, I know. The Great Kiriath Mission. But they fucking dumped it on you, Archidi. They cut and ran, and they left you holding the pieces. So give yourself a break, why don’t you? Let’s just worry about what’s possible here and now. Not get hung up on some cobbled-together dream your father had a few thousand years ago when his demons couldn’t persuade him to wipe us all out.”

She made a noise that felt like collapsing. The Dragonbane heard it and crossed the room to her. She could see he wanted to embrace her, would have liked it herself, but could not rid herself of some stubborn, refusing fiber at her core. She held up a single arm instead. He slapped her hand, palm to palm, and they made the clasp, two hands, then four, tight. He hauled her close over the grip anyway, put his forehead to hers.

“Go to bed, Archidi,” he said gruffly. “Get some rest. And for Urann’s sake, stop feeling fucking guilty about everything for a change.”


GET SOME REST.

Ha.

She lay in the huge bed, staring across the darkened expanse of the bedchamber at the windows and the clouded night sky beyond. Bandlight filtered in, but there wasn’t much of it. Krinzanz need pounded in her veins like the ocean. Her mind churned the events of the day—near death hanging upside down, hunger and cold and a meager fire on a beach, fresh hope rising with the news, An-Kirilnar growing closer along the causeway, the species portcullis, the death of Sogren. Now the Warhelm’s guided tour of the ancient past, the sword and Cormorion Ilusilin Mayne, the truth about the Illwrack Changeling, the shattering revelations about her father and the mission.

Or had it been lying about that bit…?

You know the truth when you hear it, Archidi.

Really? We came north because you thought you’d heard the truth, and look what happened there. Look where we could have been otherwise.

Oh, give it a fucking rest. You heard the Dragonbane.

Yeah, the wisdom of buffalo herders turned mercenary captains. Precious beyond the price of pearls. Maybe he can recommend you some whores as well.

She tried masturbating to thoughts of Ishgrim, her pale honey limbs and curves, her hooded eyes and undone mouth, but despite her best efforts, climax was as out of reach as the girl herself. She gave it up, flopped back hot and irritable in the covers.

What would Ishgrim do when the sky turned black?

What was she doing now, come to that, with tremors shaking the city, and the tramp of hot-eyed religious morons through the streets, fired up by fear and Citadel cant, on their way to glorious martyrdom somewhere in the north, but happy, more than happy, to start trouble right here, right now, at the faintest hint of anything they could take righteous offense at, above all if it was committed by a woman…

You have to get back. You have to stop this from happening.

You have to get some rest.

She felt as if someone had hammered her into very small pieces that somehow still retained all their links with each other. The enormity of what her father had done to the Warhelms towered in her head, the enormity of the crime they’d planned to commit if Flaradnam had left them empowered. The enormity of the power they’d had.

What she wouldn’t give for that power now.

For a fraction of that power.

To have just one intact Warhelm at her back. Never mind the luxury half dozen that her father’s generation had apparently summoned from the void to fight the dwenda the last time—she’d settle for a single one and count herself well-armed.

Would that have been so fucking much to ask? That just one of those colossally empowered creatures could have come up with a better fix for the problem than extermination, that it could have come to some kind of agreement with Flaradnam and preserved its strength for later days. Anakhanaladras in the south or Ingharnana—

Wait a minute

She snapped bolt upright in the bed.

Ingharnanasharal?

What kind of coincidence would that have to—

She leaned back on her elbows, dug back through the messy whirl of her thoughts, sifting for Tharalanangharst’s words. Up in endless circuit between the world and the band

That’s no fucking coincidence, Archidi.

She sat up again, got herself cross-legged under the covers. Noticed absently that her ruined clothes were gone from where she’d stepped out of them beside the bed.

“Warhelm?”

“I hear you, daughter of kir-Flaradnam. What is your will?”

CHAPTER 24

When Dragon’s Demise stood about half a league out of Ornley for what looked to be—thank Firfirdar’s flaming cunt for that—the very last time, he went up on deck to watch the sun set and have a quiet word with Nyanar. The noble captain was still somewhat shaken by his captivity at the hands of the privateers—all thirty-odd hours of it—and wasn’t much in the mood for conversation. He was also, Ringil discovered, nursing a deep resentment that Klithren had chosen to leave him imprisoned in Ornley and take Senger Hald back to Trelayne instead. It reflected badly on the Nyanar clan that he hadn’t been considered worthy of immediate ransom and the marine commander had. Didn’t this League pirate scum know who he was?

“Klithren of Hinerion is a commoner,” Ringil consoled him. “Recently and rapidly promoted with the war. He’s a pragmatic man, knows nothing of nobility. Doubtless, he saw only commander Hald’s military value for interrogation. And the risk of leaving him behind with his men. Ornley jail is not what one would call secure holding for soldiers of marine temper.”

“That’s as may be,” snapped Nyanar. “But it is a gross breach of wartime etiquette to privilege such crass pragmatism above recognition of rank. And bad form to assign a knight’s command to a commoner in the first place. This is not the same League that my father went to war with in the twenties. That was a war between gentlemen.”

“Indeed,” said Ringil absently, watching the dun cluster of sails on Sea Eagle’s Daughter and the League vessel Mayne’s Moor Blooded off to stern and starboard. Beyond them, the sun declined into torn cloud the color of bruises, stained the sky bloody enough for omens to please the most exacting of black mages. He gazed west into it all, soaking up the rich and violent colors while he could.

Where he was going next, there’d be none of this.

“Do you know, I was not permitted water to wash in for the entire day? And they only fed me from the tavern’s leavings at nightfall?”

Well, at least they didn’t roast and eat you.

“Can you manage with this crew?” Gil asked him bluntly. He thought if Nyanar whined on much longer about his ordeal, he might end up putting him over the side.

“In this weather? Oh, yes.” The captain pulled a sour face. “But if we have to deal with storms such as we met coming north…”

“There’ll be no storms.” Ringil was not honestly sure he could deliver on that just yet, but he handed out the cheap reassurance anyway, for what it was worth. Hoped the Dark Court would take the hint.

Nyanar sniffed. “Well, let’s hope you’re right. With this few reliable hands to count on, we’re spread very thin.”

He had a point. It had been a tricky balancing act—how many of Klithren’s men to leave behind in Ornley, how many to co-opt for the voyage south. In the end, Ringil decided to take both remaining Empire vessels home, mainly because he couldn’t be bothered moving Anasharal from Sea Eagle’s Daughter to Dragon’s Demise, but also because he might need to split his forces once they reached the Gergis coast. And then, for appearances, they needed at least one League warship to play the role of conquering escort. Mayne’s Moor Blooded was there for the taking—rather than adrift somewhere up the coast, decks soaked with blood and littered with the akyia-butchered remnants of crew—so that was that. Three vessels to crew with the sailing complement of one, plus the sparse crop of imperial marines, sailors, and Throne Eternal they’d liberated from holding in Ornley. Even as supervisors of co-opted privateer manpower, that left them stretched.

Ringil longed silently for Mahmal Shanta’s supremely competent hand on the tiller, but, well, nothing to be done about that for the time being. Nyanar was what he had.

He glanced sternward, where Ornley and the whole Hironish coastline were shrinking and sinking into the early evening gloom. If the Illwrack Changeling was still back there somewhere, still buried someplace long twisted out of memory by the elaborations of lazy chroniclers or epic storytellers chasing something more dramatic and sonorous than true—well, then, his bones could rest in peace. Gil was done digging holes. He’d told Archeth back in Yhelteth that the whole quest was likely a waste of time, a wild ride after phantom fancies, and now he had Firfirdar’s word for it that he’d been right all along.

“I’m going to my cabin,” he told Nyanar. “I’m locking the door and taking out the key. I may be some time. You or any of the men hear anything scratching at that door and asking to be let out, even it sounds like me, you don’t listen and you don’t open. Got that?”

The captain looked queasy. Like everyone else, by now he’d have heard the story the marines told about Klithren’s interrogation—how Ringil, a recalcitrant Klithren and the torture table itself had all disappeared for the solid count of sixty, left nothing behind but wisps of smoke and flickers of blue light and a scorch mark on the deck where they’d stood. And how they’d come back—Klithren uncuffed from the table and apparently unharmed, but cringing like a dog in a thunderstorm, the iron cuffs on the manacle rail sliced open and bent back as if they were nothing more than stiff leather, a faint scent of burning in the air. And how the air around that burn mark on the deck had seemed to emanate faintly heard moans and wailing right through until dawn…

“But… will you be gone long?” Nyanar’s voice was almost plaintive.

“Quite possibly.” He thought about it. They had a good few weeks at sea ahead of them for sure. “Look—at worst, I’ll be back by the time you raise the Gergis coast or I’ll be dead and not coming back at all. In which case, you run west for the cape and head home under full sail. And don’t let Klithren of Hinerion across onto this ship at any point—I don’t think he’s going to be any trouble; we’ve struck a gentlemen’s agreement and he seems to be holding to it, but—”

A mannered snort, presumably at the epithet gentleman attached to someone like Klithren. Gil ignored it, pressed on.

“—but I have been wrong once or twice in my illustrious career, so best not to take any unnecessary chances. He stays aboard Mayne’s Moor Blooded, where Hald can keep an eye on him.” Scratching around, hoping he’d thought of everything that could… “Oh yeah, and if you’ve raised Gergis, I haven’t shown, and there’s something else in that cabin, scratching to get out, then you get everyone across to Sea Eagle’s Daughter and you scuttle this fucking ship. That clear?”

Nyanar swallowed. “And if… if something… untoward… occurs before that, during the voyage? If we need you? What then?”

Gil clapped him cheerfully on the shoulder. “Then I’ll know, and I’ll be back,” he lied. “But I’ll come back through the door myself; I won’t need any help. Tell the men that, make sure it’s clear. Can’t answer for your safety if you don’t.”

He was probably laying it on a bit thick, but better that than leave this pampered noble idiot any latitude for error. Better to cover all the angles as best he could, and hope the ramshackle makeshift command structure he was leaving would hold.

Time to go.

Down in his cabin, he locked the door as promised, took the reclaimed Kiriath steel carpenter’s bradawl he’d blagged from Shanta back in the shipyards at Yhelteth, and scratched wards into lock plate, door hinges, and jamb. He made himself go slow, make sure of each stroke. He’d nearly burned down a waterfront tavern in the upriver districts of the city last year, pissing about with fire wards for practice and getting the cross strokes out of true.

Faint flicker of blue, etching the door’s dimensions, fading out.

Done.

He took the key out of the lock, etched glyphs down its shaft, and put it under the pillow in his bunk. He put on his cloak, took the Ravensfriend, scabbard, and harness, lay back on the bunk with his sword hand draped over the side to the floor, boots up on the foot bar and crossed at the ankles. He put his free hand behind his head and stared up at the ceiling.

Began to recite the slow, unwinding cadences Hjel taught him. Described the glyphs to the ceiling with the fingers of his left hand.

Anticipation prickled through him.

He wasn’t sure if it was the slow seep of blood into his prick at thoughts of Hjel, the siren song of the white ikinri ‘ska cliffs, waiting in endless glyphed mystery, or simply the thought of what he and the Ravensfriend would need to do once he reached Trelayne.

Then, as the trance state Hjel had taught him came steadily on, he saw that, really, there might not be much difference or distance between any of those three things.


The cabin ceiling grew less significant overhead, the bunk seemed to drift like an unmoored boat. He felt himself slipping toward the Grey Places. Compared to the raw force it had taken to punch himself and Klithren through last time, this was almost languid. Lesson one, grim scar-faced swordsman sorcerer—some places in the Margins are easier to reach than others. Hjel smiles as he says it, pillowed only inches away, and traces the scar on Gil’s cheek with one gentle fingertip. The reason so few aspiring witches and warlocks make it through is because they’re so bloody single-minded. They aim for the heart of the ikinri ‘ska every time—which is a bit like trying to swim up a waterfall in spring spate. Trick is, look for kinder waters. If you’ve got any natural aptitude, the Margins want you here anyway. Use that. Loosen up, float and swim wide. Relax and let the currents bring you. You can always walk the rest of the way in, once you’re here.

He opens his eyes.

Red sparks escaping skyward over his head to mingle with the cold white pinprick scatter of stars. He’s on hard-packed earth beside a roaring fire.

A boot comes down, right next to his head. Someone yelps in shock, he hears liquid spilled into the fire with a billowing hiss. Gets a confused impression of a figure towering over him, pinwheeling its arms to stay upright. His grip on the Ravensfriend tightens. The figure sits down with a hard bump, narrowly misses landing on Gil’s legs.

Fuck, man! Where’d he come from?

Uproarious laughter, a burst of it, but dying off fast into queries of concern. The man who went over on his arse waves it away. Bounces to his feet and winks at Gil in the firelight. His Naomic has an outlandish lilt and phrasing to it, but Ringil’s been here enough times now for it to seem comfortingly familiar.

Nice entrance, mate. You were nearly wearing my soup for a waistcoat there.

Ringil mumbles an apology, props himself up and looks around. Sees faces beyond the leaping flames, easy grins. Behind that, the cold white rise of ruins into the dark; slumped walls and truncated white pillars, holding the night air up.

A handsome, middle-aged woman comes forward, bends, and offers her hand to help him up. Dark hair bound back, shot through with a lightning bolt streak of white from one temple—he knows her vaguely, has seen her around camp a few times on previous visits. He lets go his sword and makes the grasp. Her hand is warm and calloused. She smiles at him.

Hjel’s apprentice, she says. Welcome back. You’re getting pretty good at this, you come in closer every visit. Try not to land in the fire next time.

More laughter. She pulls, strong and firm, lands him on his feet. He nods acknowledement, gathers up the Ravensfriend, scabbard, and harness from where it’s lying in the dust. Feels a little self-conscious clutching it—outside of the usual knives and bows for hunting, the odd ax for chopping wood, these people aren’t much for weapons.

Thanks, uh—

Daelfi. She sketches a casual reverence, hand to breast and brow, head briefly inclined. The motions have a dancer’s easy grace. Acting skipper, while Hjel’s away.

Daelfi, yeah. I’m Ringil.

Oh, I know. She grins crookedly, gestures around. You might not think it from all these cackling idiots, but you’re a bit of a favored guest these days. The way Hjel mopes about between visits, we’re all pretty glad when you finally show up and put a smile back on his face.

Yeah, someone calls out. Poke the fire, get it going. So to speak.

The laughter again. He’s forgotten how much he misses that sound, the rounded, open ring of ribald amusement with no sour edge, no hidden blade of hate or distancing mockery in it. He feels it tug a soft unwilling smirk onto his lips.

He’s not around, then? Hjel?

Headed out into the deep range this morning. To look for you, actually. For the first time, a frown chases the good humor off Daelfi’s face. We had a visit from your wraith guard yesterday, back at the beach camp. Flickering about on the edge of the fire like candles in a gale. Poor, cursed creatures. They were frantic about something. Hjel figures it has to be you, you’re in some kind of trouble, so he has us up stakes and move into the Margins. Told us to camp out here at the ruins and wait for him. So here we are, waiting. And—a sharp clap of those warm, calloused hands—pashatazam! You show up here instead. Magic, eh—what are you going to do?

Her grin is back, irrepressible. He does his best to match it—anything else would feel rude.

Can you get me to him, Daelfi?

Oh, you can do that yourself. You were well on your way, showing up here. But events don’t echo the same way in the Margins as they do in the real world. Him heading out probably doesn’t feel like it’s happened yet. Feels like he’s still here, I expect. She pauses. Do you want some soup before you go?


SHE KEEPS HIM COMPANY WHILE HE EATS.

Perhaps sensing his awkwardness in Hjel’s absence, she leads him away from the main gathering. Seats him on a tumbled column close to where the soup cauldron hangs over a smaller, neatly banked cooking fire. She serves him a generous, steaming bowl and a torn chunk of bread. Takes a smaller chunk of the bread for herself and perches beside him on the column, nibbling daintily. It knocks years off her apparent age, makes her seem almost girlish. She watches him devour the soup—he’s ravenous, it only dawns on him as he takes the first well-seasoned mouthful; back in the real world, he’s not exactly been keeping up with regular meals. She refills his bowl when he’s done, keeps him supplied with bread.

I have a question, if you don’t mind, she says. The girlishness is gone, evaporated like the steam from his bowl. Is there much talk of heroes and destinies in the lands where you’re from?

He wipes the bottom of his second bowl with the bread. Nothing but. Everybody loves that shit. Everybody wants to believe in heroes.

And you?

He shoots her a sideways glance as he chews. Swallows.

Will it offend you if I say no?

I am not easily offended, it’s not our way. What others believe is not my concern, unless they attempt to force it on me.

You wouldn’t like it much where I’m from.

This much, I had already divined. Daelfi opens one beckoning hand at him. But you have not answered my question.

He finishes the last of his bread, sets his empty bowl down at his feet. Sighs. I have seen too many soothsayer’s heads on spikes to believe they see much further into the future than the rest of us. The marsh dweller women at Strov market scrape a living from prophecy—I suspect that’s about all it’s good for. Why do you ask?

Daelfi studies her hands, turning them as if they might do something unexpected at any moment. He supposes that to be Hjel’s second in camp, she must have some talent with the ikinri ‘ska herself.

They say that Hjel nearly died at birth, she says quietly. That he was stillborn in fact. I am more or less of an age with him, so I’m too young to remember if there’s truth in this. But they say a living god came into camp and gave him back his life for a great purpose.

A god, or a good doctor?

She smiles gently. They say it was a god. They say it was Akoyavash, with his storm-coat and slouch hat and a salt wind at his back.

Ringil tries to ignore the quickening twinge along his nerves. Hjel has never shared this with him. A great purpose, eh?

Yes, it’s a commonplace, I know. A line from every second campfire tale. But why should that be, I wonder?

He manufactures a casual shrug. We look back and see a path we have taken through life. It’s tempting to imagine that the path was always there, laid out with purpose and waiting only for us to walk it. And I suppose it’s comforting to think that those who lead us are walking such an allocated path, laid out by the gods for the greater good.

Daelfi shakes her head. We are not much for such fancies here. And most of us take the Ahn-foi to be self-interested powers. Occasional allies at best, rarely safe to trust. But a story like that, one that dogs you from the cradle onward. Well, it can be hard to shake. You live in its shadow, I think. There are other reasons why Hjel helps you, I know. But I do wonder.

Don’t think I’m pretty enough to swing it alone, eh?

A broad grin. No, if I were Hjel, I’d fuck your brains out as soon as look at you. In fact, if you were otherwise inclined, I might try it myself. The grin fades out. But I’m not sure I would be teaching you the ikinri ‘ska. We’re not meant to pass it on lightly.

You think he’s making a mistake?

Honestly, I don’t know. I hope not. She stares away, back toward the bonfire and the main gathering. But something is troubling him these days. I’ve known him all my life, I see it when the others mostly don’t.

And you think it’s me?

I think it began not long after you came. Not at first—at first, he was happy, happier than I’d seen him in years, certainly happier than he’d been since Loqui left. They’re right about that much, you really lit him up. But later… Daelfi shakes herself out of her brooding. I’m sorry, I should not have started this. It’s not my business, it’s not our way. I have no right to burden you with any of this uninvited.

Bit late now.

Yes. She looks steadily at him. Her face is a restless mask of shadow and ruddy light from the dance of the cook fire’s flames. Are you angry with me?

You’re worried about him, Gil says with an attempt at good grace. It’s understandable.

I am worried about him, she agrees. But I would not be honest if I let you believe it is only that. You worry me, Ringil. We are guardians of the ikinri ‘ska, it’s said, and I worry we have not understood what opening it to you might mean.

Perhaps you worry too much. He can feel himself getting impatient with this woman, and he doesn’t want to be. She’s just fed him, she clearly cares about Hjel, her worries are selfless and well-intentioned. He tries to curb his tone. Perhaps you’re mistaken about your guardianship. Perhaps your ancestors stumbled on the ikinri ‘ska by mistake and just happened to get a good grip on it. Who’s to say it’s really yours to worry about in the first place? Who laid that duty down? Or worse—perhaps your mastery was handed down by evil forces, by creatures whose interests are actually inimical to the good of humankind. Ever wonder about that?

She grimaces. Frequently. And many similar things besides.

Then, as I said before—perhaps you worry too much.

She bows her head for a while, frowns into her flexed and interlaced hands. Please understand—like you, I don’t believe in paths already drawn. But I do seepatterns, all around us. Day and night, the turn of the sky and the seasons, the migrations of certain birds, the age stations of a life. Enough for a rudimentary sort of prophecy, in fact. And back before the Southern Scourge fell on us and razed our kingdoms, wise men and women among our ancestors went further than this. They detected certain useful mathematical truths about the universe and handed them down to us. These, too, are a form of pattern, I think. So I wonder if there might not be other patterns written into the world, patterns that remain invisible to us, but that a god might perceive and use for tools.

He laughs, not very kindly. I have met beings that call themselves gods, my lady. They don’t seem to have a much better grip on things than we do.

No, but they might see things coming that we do not. And—he sees that she’s running just ahead of the unraveling thread of her own thoughts, eyes alight with the speculation—what if their relationship with time is not as rigid as ours? In the Margins, I have seen time slow down, speed up, dance around itself like a drunk courtesan. Some say it’s broken. Damaged somehow, and not yet healed. Others say that it’s been rebuilt, but by poor craftsmen who have not properly understood its nature. What if the gods avail themselves of that for their own purposes? In a limited way, but enough to bluff us, to make it seem as if they attend to the working out of a great destiny, when in fact they merely conjure and improvise at a level we cannot encompass?

You think this is what Hjel believes?

Daelfi draws a breath as if to speak, then visibly reins herself in.

I have intruded enough as it is, she says quietly. I won’t attempt to guess Hjel’s thoughts for you. You must ask him yourself when you reach him. But this much I do know—time was out of joint when you first came to us.

Out of joint?

Yes, dislocated as if by some brutal force, some violent intrusion into things. You came to us a stranger, but one who already knew us. And then, many months later, you came again and did not know us when we already knew you. In a lifetime of living in and out of the Margins, none of us have ever seen a twisting as savage before, nor is there any record or tale of it among our people. None of us want to guess what it might portend. She gives him a sad, regretful smile. Or what you will do when the time of that portent arrives.


RELAX AND LET THE CURRENTS BRING YOU. AGAIN.

He opens his eyes.

Red sparks escaping skyward over his head to mingle with the cold white pinprick scatter of stars. He’s on a bedroll beside a softly crackling fire.

He props himself up and stares through the waver of flames to where Hjel the Dispossessed sits with mandolin in lap and broad-brimmed hat slanted forward over his eyes.

That was quick.

Gil grunts and heaves himself fully into a sitting position. He’s still full of soup. Not from my end it wasn’t.

He looks for the three figures that brought him last time, the wraith guard Daelfi talked about, but he and Hjel are alone.

Hjel sees the glance.

They faded as you did. Just a few moments gone. The dispossessed prince sets his mandolin aside and unfolds a little, reaches for a stick to poke the fire. They know well enough I don’t readily welcome their kind at my hearth.

Bit harsh.

Maybe so. Hjel jabbed at the fire, a little more vigorously than it appeared to need. But my path through the ikinri ‘ska is not yours, and I have no desire to make it so. I don’t do that black mage shit. I don’t like dealing with the enslaved dead.

You think I do? The Dark Court dumped them on me, what am I supposed to do?

The dispossessed prince shrugs. I really wouldn’t know. Use them, I suppose. Exploit them. Isn’t that what a black mage should do?

How the fuck should I know? Daelfi has warned him to expect a troubled dispossessed prince, but this is way beyond anything he expected. Introduce me to a black mage, I’ll ask him. How many do you know?

Just the one, and I’m looking at him now.

Oh, fuck off.

They sit in silence for a while. The fire hisses and snaps between them.

So what do you want? Hjel asks him eventually.

There’s an obvious answer to that, but by now Ringil is in no mood to give it to him. This isn’t working out anything like he’d planned, and it’s Hjel’s fucking fault. He looks with unfriendly eyes across the fire, then away. He lowers himself back to the bedroll and stares up at the stars.

What do you think I want? The words are ashy on his tongue. You think I’m here for the company? I need to go back to the cliffs.

We were there not long ago. You told me you’d drunk your fill, you were sick of it.

That was then. This is now.

You are learning as fast as anyone I ever saw. Faster. I am already letting you push to the limits.

It’s not enough.

It’s more than you can readily handle at the moment. It would take the lifetime of a god to absorb the totality of the ikinri ‘ska. No human can do more than scratch the surface, borrow in depth here and there maybe. Even if I—

Well, then you’re not teaching me the right fucking pieces, are you?

Ringil flings himself up into a sitting position again, glaring. The splintered snap of his rage, there in the firelight and gone, soaking away into the quiet gloom around them.

Hjel bows his head.

Perhaps I am not. Have I been a poor teacher, then? Perhaps you should write the lessons from now on.

Oh, don’t fucking sulk at me! Gil means to yell across the fire, but somehow it comes out tighter, almost pleading. Hoiran’s throbbing prick, Hjel—I’ve got my balls to the wall here! Don’t you get that? Something’s coming, and I’m not ready for it. I am not ready!

And you think any of us ever are? Now there’s a snap in Hjel’s voice as well. What, have you swallowed some idiot tale of warrior youths and wizards in training for their great task, their moment of destiny?

I don’t know, have you?

Hjel blinks. What the fuck is that supposed to mean?

It means I had a word with Daelfi on my way here. And the way she paints it, you think there’s some great purpose afoot and we’re both snuggled up together in it.

Daelfi had no business—

Oh, shut up. Gil gestures in disgust. Didn’t fucking tell me you had a visit from Dakovash when you were born, did you? You don’t like my wraith guard, my enslaved dead—take it up with your fucking patron, he’s the one who gifted them to me.

Akoyavash is not my patron—

No? Seems you’d be dead without him, though.

That is a tale.

Yeah, a tale you chose not to tell me. I wonder why.

Well, maybe because it was none of your fucking business, my lord black mage.

Oh, give it a rest. You know what? You think you made the wrong choice with me, fine. Go home. I’ll walk to the glyph cliffs myself, get what I need without you.

I’d like to see you try.

Gil lowers his voice to a gritted snarl. Then stick around. Because I am not going to waste any more time with your lizardshit petty sorceries. I need to be ready for the cabal and their dwenda pals, and I am not waiting around while you decide if I’ve maybe drunk too much of the ikinri ‘ska to merit further instruction, or if maybe I’m not a safe pair of hands. I need to be ready, and I will be fucking ready.

Is that right? The dispossessed prince is breathing hard. Ready? Hmm? You think any of us get that luxury?

I think you’d better—

Hjel tramples him down, voice trembling with rage. You think I was ready when my father died and leadership of the band fell on me? You think I was ready to go and face the Creature at the Crossroads then? I went because someone had to. I took what half-made rags of proper dress for the occasion I so far owned, and I put them on, because that’s what you do. Why do you think you’re any different? What’s so fucking special about you?

The quiet darkness curtains in behind his shout.

Ringil studies the flames for a while.

Well, he says mildly, at least your father’s dead. He’s not running around somewhere trying to have you killed.

He looks up. Hjel meets his eye and sighs. Ahh, Gil, look—

No, it’s fine. Skip it. Roughly now. I’d be dead if it weren’t for what you’ve done for me already. Worse than dead. I tend to forget that sometimes.

You needed to forget. The sorcerer prince’s voice is soft and urgent. You told me the tale, but those memories come from a place I have not yet been, a time that has yet to pass for me. It makes sense that such premonition would fade. That kind of forgetting is how we deal with the Margins.

That’s not what I meant.

No. I know.

I meant I can be a selfish, graceless fucker sometimes.

Well. Hjel looks away. I, uh—that wasn’t the warmest welcome I could have given you, either, was it?

Had warmer. Gil risks the crooked corner of a smile. So Daelfi was right. This Destiny of the Gods shit is chewing you up.

Hjel gives him back his half smile, but there’s pain in the corners. Look, it doesn’t matter right now. Why don’t you just come over here, Gil?

No, you’re all right. Best if we just get some rest and talk about it over breakfast.

There’ve been times in the past, and other men, where he would have bounced back from the quarrel. Used the slosh of raised emotions to fuel the arousal for a grudge fuck or maybe just the hot, hugging collapse into mutual remorse. But he doesn’t want to grudge fuck Hjel, and he feels no remorse. And Daelfi’s right on the money—something is very clearly eating away at the dispossessed prince, despite his protestations to the contrary.

Hjel watches him rearrange himself on the bedroll.

I am sorry, he says. What do you think is coming, that you’re so unready for? Did you somehow unleash this Illwrack creature you went looking for?

Over breakfast, like I said. Gil smiles to rob his firmness of offense, lies flat, turns his face to the sky. We’ll talk about it then.

But as he lies there, he’s well aware that Hjel is not following suit, that he sits instead, unmoving on the other side of the fire, and after a while, the pressure to talk to him is just too great. Gil wonders briefly if it’s some minor glamour that the dispossessed prince knows how to cast, is casting even now. Then he gives up caring one way or the other—there’s too much pressing up inside him that he wants to share, to lay out in words, if only so he can consider how it all sounds when it’s said out loud.

You’re right about one thing, he says, without moving or looking away from the stars overhead. We’re none of us ready. No, we didn’t unleash the Illwrack Changeling, we didn’t even find him. We didn’t find the floating city of An-Kirilnar, either. Meanwhile, there’s a war started down south behind my back, we’re three thousand miles the wrong side of the battle lines, and my friends are captives of the enemy. And just to really spice things up, I’ve had a friendly visit from the Queen of the Dark Court and it looks like the dwenda are bringing the Talons of the Sun to the party.

Silence, and he thinks for a moment that he’s wrong, Hjel has fallen asleep sitting there after all, and he’s talking to himself. Then the dispossessed prince speaks, and there’s a guarded tension in his voice that Gil makes for disbelief, or maybe even faint envy.

You summoned Vividara the Dark?

Ringil watches the stars. Yawns. No, I think it’d be fairer to say she summoned me.

Hjel’s pantheon, he knows, isn’t really the same as the one honored in the temples of the League, or even the rough analogue worshipped out on the steppes by Egar’s people. But some of the names the Ahn-foi bear are close, and there are enough similarities to detect a common underlying pattern. An assembly of enigmatic absentee overlords, demanding absolute obedience at all times but rarely showing up to collect it; a rough hierarchy, blurred and shuffled by an inconsistent mythos that suggested the relationships were a little less formal, a little more complicated than temple officiators liked to admit. Hoiran and Firfirdar on their wedded thrones, a close circle of courtiers—mostly—at their beck and call.

But then there were tales of insurrection, resentment, infidelity, squabbling…

At times, Gil can understand the longing for simple order that drives the southerners’ arid faith. How comfortable it must feel to know that there’s just the one overlord, just the one set of edicts he’s handed selflessly down for your personal benefit, and that everything from the depths of the ocean to the starry sky is safely in hand.

Yeah, Egar snorted one campfire night out on the steppe. And if you believe that, I’ve got a string of unicorns out back I want to sell you cheap.

Ringil feels a grin touch the corners of his mouth at the memory. He shifts a little on the bedroll, seems to sink fractionally deeper into it. His fed belly gurgles a little; there’s a spreading warmth right through him now, and a letting go. It’s as if unburdening himself to the dispossessed prince has cut some cable deep inside, let him finally drift loose on the swells of a weariness whose extent he only now starts to grasp.

Vividara manifest portends destruction, Hjel says quietly. Death and flames about her, the confusion of human hopes and fears where she passes, and the creep of chaos in her train.

Yeah, Gil mumbles. Same where I’m from, more or less.

How did she appear to you?

Uhm—regal. A bit chilly with it. He yawns again, cavernously. Reminded me of my mother, actually.

The other gods you’ve told me about were circumspect in their approach. Hjel’s voice seems to be coming from farther away than before. They played games. Disguised themselves or walked in your dreams.

Mhmm.

That Vividara came to you so directly cannot be good. It suggests that the game they play is building to its climax. That fire and destruction are coming, and that most likely you will be the Dark Queens’s agent in bringing them on.

Ringil is vaguely aware of turning on the bedroll, putting Hjel’s voice and the heat of the fire at his back, turning his face away into the dark.

Certainly fucking will if I can get into Etterkal and find Findrich, he says drowsily.

And sinks away.

CHAPTER 25

Egar prowled seemingly endless corridors and companionways of iron, or some dark alloy that looked a lot like it. In places the metal glowed to life to light his way—soft, red light on the surfaces, as if they were heated from within, painting the close surroundings with a dull furnace glow. But when he put the back of a cautious hand close to the source, there was no heat at all. The alloy felt the same wherever he touched it, cool and smooth, and the glow faded not long after he passed—he looked back once and saw it inking out, closing up the corridor behind him with slightly unnerving dark.

He was, he supposed, lost.

He’d been wandering for the best part of an hour now, not much caring where his feet took him, though tending only to take stairs or ladders where they led upward. He assumed he was safe under the Warhelm’s watchful eye—and if he wasn’t safe from the demon itself, then it didn’t much matter where in An-Kirilnar he wound up—but he’d carried the length of chain along anyway, wound twice around his fist and clinking reassuringly at his side as he walked.

Part of him longed for the chance to use it.

Some of those crab-legged spider things, maybe, run somehow out of the Warhelm’s control. Or some species of giant rat that lived in the walls…

You don’t need a fight, Dragonbane. What you really need is sleep.

He’d thought he was exhausted—he was exhausted, he ached from it—but sleep would not take him, no matter how long he rolled and flopped in the half-acre bed. His limbs itched and tingled when he tried to lie still, his belly ached from all the plums he’d eaten. In the end, he got up but that was no better. The apartments would not hold him, they stank of mannered confinement. Like the cell the imperials had held him in back in Yhelteth, there was a surface comfort that felt like some stilted apology for the truth—that he was trapped in the belly of a beast the size of a city, and it would not let him go. He felt the craving for open air and access to the horizon like some nagging hangover he couldn’t shake off.

Fucking tent-dweller.

It hit him then, abruptly, how much he missed the steppe—the big open skies, the endless flat expanse of land with no visible limit on how far you could ride. In the last three years, he’d been in swamps and on ships, in pipe houses, whorehouses and taverns, in slums and palaces and jails, up and down the tangled warren streets of the imperial city herself, out to Rajal, Lanatray, Ornley for more of the same. Now he felt suddenly as if none of it had ever been more than a distraction, a series of cheap whore’s tricks he’d bought to keep him from missing the peace you felt sitting at a campfire out on the endless plain, band and stars close enough to reach up and touch, buffalo grazing close…

Yeah—take you back there, Dragonbane, and you’d be screaming for Imrana’s perfumed arms and the streets of Yhelteth inside three fucking days.

Youaretired.

He prowled about. Stared at his own rumpled bed like a beast he had to somehow kill. Oh, for Urann’s sake. He dressed, grabbed up the chain from where he’d left it beside the bed, hurried out of the apartments in search of… something.

Hadn’t found it yet, whatever it was.

He did find, finally, a set of laddered steps that led somewhere other than into a new corridor. Climbing them, he felt a cool breeze on his face and thought he might have made it up to whatever skyline An-Kirilnar might offer. But instead, the top of the companionway gave out into a vast, gusty cargo space, where crane hooks hung in immobile and silent silhouette, and looming, tangled piles of scrap littered the floor. Fitful traces of bandlight crept in through a row of huge windows set high up in one wall. From equally massive openings in the floor came the distant sound of the ocean below.

Egar stood for a moment, taking it all in.

He wasn’t overly impressed by the size or the gear; he’d seen similar spaces at An-Monal. But back then the Kiriath had still been around, the cranes had been in motion, hauling loads up through the hatches and shuttling them back and forth. There’d been noise and light. Hammering, shouting, the brilliant cascade of sparks from the Black Folks’ metalwork tools.

This just felt like a mausoleum.

He moved cautiously up to the nearest of the enormous hatches, thankful for what thin light there was. Peered down to the faintly luminous roil and surge of waves, a hundred feet below. He wasn’t sure quite how he’d managed to end up in the lowest levels of An Kirilnar despite all his choices of upward stairs and ladders, but this was, he supposed, as good a place as any to rein himself in and stop wandering aimlessly about.

He stood there in the near dark for a while, looking down, listening to the ocean and the sound of his own breathing.

“The fall would in all probability kill you,” said the demon in his ear. “I would advise against it.”

“Do I look like I’m going to fucking jump?” he snapped, because the sudden voice had, in fact, made him jump quite severely.

“It is hard to tell with humans. But many of the others did.”

“The others?”

“Yes. The others who were harbored here. After the victory at Inatharam, most of this coast was rendered uninhabitable for both Kiriath and humans. The land died and so did most who lived in it.”

The Dragonbane grunted. “Doesn’t sound much like a victory to me.”

“The region was rendered uninhabitable for the Aldrain as well, which was the purpose of fighting in the first place. Their cities were obliterated, their populations exterminated or driven out. I use the term victory in this sense. In the aftermath, however, some small bands of survivors from the Kiriath side made their way here in the hope of refuge. Where their allegiance could be proven, they were taken in. They waited here, with the existing garrison, for rescue from the south.”

“You’re talking about human survivors?”

“Human and Kiriath both.” A delicate pause. “The Kiriath weathered the waiting better than the humans.”

Egar thought about the architecture he’d wandered through and imagined having to live with it on a siege basis. “I bet. So how long was it before a rescue showed up?”

“Six hundred and eighty seven years from the date of the victory at Inatharam. External conditions would not permit an approach any sooner.”

“Six hundred… ” His voice died away, his gaze tipped down through the hatch to the ocean below. He nodded bleakly, imagining the choices made by men and women thousands of years ago on the edge of this drop. “I wouldn’t worry. I don’t think I’ll be staying that long.”

“Quite. In fact, this is something we should discuss.”

“What is?”

“Your departure. Your exit from the Wastes.”

As if unleashed by the words, one of the massive iron cranes overhead jolted into sudden motion. For the second time in as many minutes, the Dragonbane startled back. He shot a sour, accusatory look at the ceiling, then watched the crane, fascinated as it juddered and screeched and showered sparks along the long unused track it ran on. The noise was deafening.

“What’s this for?” he yelled over the din.

“I have spoken with kir-Archeth Indamaninarmal regarding the Warhelm Ingharnanasharal’s recent sacrifice, and have formulated a model of the campaign vector it seems to intend.” The demon’s voice was still an intimate, unnerving presence at his ear, somehow managing to come through the racket the crane was making without apparent effort. “If I have understood the strategy well from the evidence, it remains a bold stroke for all its shortcomings, and deserves to succeed. Certainly, it is the only faint hope I see in light of the Aldrain’s impending return. But to have any hope of success now, it will require some significant adjustments. Your return to the steppes is one such requirement. Retrieval of certain necessary implements and aids is another.”

“The steppes?” Egar bellowed, and the crane jolted to a halt over a hatch, left him bawling into abrupt quiet. “Who said anything about… the steppes?”

“Have patience. All will become clear.”

“Yeah? So who’s this Warhelm Ingharn—”

Lights sprang up everywhere, bright rose and orange variations on the dull red he’d followed through the corridors, glaring from bulkheads, ceiling, and floors like the multiple, puddled reflections of a fiercely setting sun. The shadows fled out, and somewhere behind him, a door clanked open.

He pivoted about, chain length swishing low. Saw Archeth standing on an iron gallery about head height above him on the nearest wall. She was, he noticed, dressed in completely fresh garments, cut and colors he’d never seen before, still visibly Kiriath but nothing as grim and minimal as he was used to her wearing. And she was the one gaping down at him.

“What are you doing down here, Eg?”

“Might ask you the same thing.”

“He was led,” said the Warhelm blithely. “Subtly, through lighting cues and… other measures. My powers, albeit severely truncated, are good for that much at least.”

“Motherfucker.

“Eg, listen, never mind, it’s—” She grabbed the rail in her fists, leaned over at him. Her voice echoed in the iron space. “There’s a way we can do this. There’s a way we can get home and make a difference. But it means—”

“Yeah, going back to the steppes. I just heard.”

Behind him, the crane began to unwind its huge hook and cable, downward through the hatch. It made a noisy whining, like some giant hound out of myth wanting to be fed, but nothing to compare with the shriek and clash before. You could talk over it without having to shout. Egar gestured helplessly at the machinery.

“Archidi, you want to catch me up here?” He held out his arms, palms upward. “I mean, all I did was go out for a fucking walk.”


THEY SAT TOGETHER ON A CONVENIENT PILE OF SCRAP AND WATCHED THE cable spool down through the hatch. It seemed to be going down a long way.

“Anasharal’s a… a fragment, I guess.” Archeth set her hands half a yard apart in front of her, framing empty space with them as if trying to trap the concepts there. “It’s a piece of the Warhelm Ingharnanasharal, cut loose and dropped out of the sky. It’s like, I don’t know—remember those big armored lizards that used to smash the barricades in with their skulls and then just die in the breach?”

Egar nodded. “Blunderers.”

“Yeah, well you remember how the tail end didn’t use to die for hours afterward? How it’d still be thrashing around, grabbing at things, trying to spike them, and the front end’s dead and leaking brains? That’s Anasharal, the tail end.”

“So that makes Inghawhatsit, the one still up in the sky, what, dead? Dying?”

“I don’t know.” She jerked a thumb at the ceiling. “Tharalanangharst says it’s talked to the other Warhelms, and none of them can get Ingharnanasharal to answer. They don’t talk to each other very often, so there’s no way to know how long Ingharnanasharal has been silent. Might be recent, might have been as much as a couple of centuries. Anyway, Tharalanangharst says there’s no precedent for a Helmsman falling to Earth, didn’t even know such a thing was possible. Ingharnanasharal would have had to tear itself apart to make Anasharal, and there’s no telling what’s left up there or what state it’s in.”

The whining stopped. They glanced up and saw the cable hung motionless down through the hatch. The Dragonbane gestured at it.

“Your got any idea what it’s bringing up for us?”

She shook her head. “Just that it’s something we’re going to need.”

“Never tell the troops anything they don’t absolutely need to know, huh?” He pulled a glum face. “Had a squad commander like that once.”

Archeth hunched her shoulders, as if against cold. The new jerkin she’d acquired moved loosely on her. “I don’t think the Warhelms know that much more than we do. It’s all guesswork they’re doing. I described what Anasharal looks like, and Tharalanangharst says you couldn’t contain a Helmsman in something that size. It reckons that whatever’s left of Ingharnanasharal, whatever it did to itself, there’s probably not too much to Anasharal, either—just a bunch of basic conversational tricks wrapped around a core purpose and a plan, and then dumped into a containment vessel.”

For Egar, the words might as well have been in another language for all the sense they made. Demons that weren’t really demons, demons that had a plan, demons that could help you, demons that couldn’t or wouldn’t. At least up on the steppe you had it clear—steppe ghouls, flapping wraiths, possessed wolves. You either killed them or they killed you, and that was all you had to worry about.

Beside him, the dark woman went on framing boxes in the empty air.

“See, that’s why Anasharal was vague so much of the time, why it couldn’t help us once we got up to the Hironish. It’s not really a Helmsman at all, it’s a, a pretense of one. It never actually had much knowledge, just enough of a sketch to drive its purpose. It’s like that talking map in the stableboy story or something, like a…”

She dropped her hands. “I’m not explaining this very well, am I?”

“Didn’t want to say anything.”

She drew a deep breath. “Okay, look. Imagine the Empire wants to send a legate up to Ishlin-ichan, but there’s no one available. It’s important they impress the Ishlinak, get some treaties inked, but they can’t spare anybody for the job. So they decide to send an actor instead—”

“Yeah, wouldn’t surprise me. They think we’re all fucking savages up there, who’s going to tell the difference?” Egar scrubbed both hands down his face, suddenly conscious again of how tired he was. He put his chin on his fists. “Actually, if the same bunch of clowns are running Ishlin-ichan as when I was last there, they really wouldn’t know how to tell the difference. You could send in a trained pig and they probably wouldn’t notice, as long as it was wrapped in silk and walked on its hind legs most of the time.”

“Uh—yeah. Anyway.” Archeth cleared her throat. “So that’s it, that what the court does. They get an actor, they tell him exactly what documents they want signed. Exactly what he can and can’t agree to, and they make him memorize it. Then they teach him a bit of court etiquette, a couple of good stories to entertain the Ishlinak worthies, half a dozen reasons why the treaties are a good idea. But that’s it. In the end, he may look like a legate, he may even act like a legate some of the time. But he isn’t. He’s just an actor who’s memorized a few things in order to get something done.”

“Right. So what was Anasharal trying to get done? Not find the Illwrack Changeling, that’s for fucking certain. So—what?”

“I don’t know.”

“Did you ask?”

“She did ask,” the Warhelm’s voice, all just-this-side-of-sane amiability, dropping unannounced into the conversation like a ton weight of pallet-loaded stone through the roof. “And she was told as much as she needs to know.”

They looked at each other. Archeth shrugged.

Egar cast a murderous glance at the ceiling. “Bit like the lighting around here, huh? Just enough illumination in just the right places to get us where you want us to go.”

“Your analogy is sound as far as it stretches, Dragonbane, yes. Though the guidance in this rather more important matter has been Ingharnanasharal’s, not mine. I merely attempt to extend and modify the model, so nearly as I am able to estimate its intended outcome.”

Hard, echoing clank—they both twitched at the sound. The crane cable jerked, cranked upward and stopped, jerked again, then began to rise smoothly through the hatch.

“Yeah, well.” Somewhat mollified—the Warhelm’s words had rinsed right out of Egar’s head while he was distracted by the cable, leaving only a vague comprehension that the demon seemed to have agreed with him. He struggled to retain some previous anger. “Like I said, had a commander like that once. And that fucker nearly got me killed. I’m not looking for a repeat performance.”

“That is unfortunate. But I’m afraid Ingharnanasharal’s sacrifice appears to have been built on a mathematics of oblique chaining and cascade outcomes. Which is to say that if either of you knew what end was intended from your actions, your knowledge would damage the equilibrium of the model, in all probability to an extent that would prevent said end from ever being achieved. It is quite possible that Anasharal itself does not know the true purpose behind its actions, or at least has not been allowed to consciously know, for the same reasons that I cannot allow either of you to know now.”

“Is that supposed to make us feel better?” snapped Archeth

“It is the closest to an explanation that I can offer you. And you should be aware, kir-Archeth, that all my actions, now as before, are taken in your best interests. I hope that this will be enough, because I will not tell you more.”

The Dragonbane brooded on the rising cable. The tone of the crane engine’s whine was notably deeper than it had been on the downward journey. Something heavy was coming up. Something that weighed hard at the machinery’s limits…

He snapped his fingers. “Wait a minute! I thought you had to obey the Kiriath no matter what. You let ’Nam cripple and blind you because you had no choice, you said. And now his daughter can’t make you answer a simple question? How’s she any different?”

There was a long pause, a quiet broken only by the burdened whining of the crane. At his side, Archeth looked away, into the tangled scrap at her feet. Her new boots gleamed softly in the low light.

Kir-Archeth Indamaninarmal,” said the Warhelm very gently. “Is half human. This… gives me some leeway.”

They sat in silence after that, all three of them, while the cable ran and ran, and whatever it was bringing them climbed inexorably up out of the ocean’s depths below.

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