The Dark Defiles

CHAPTER 26

It takes them what feels like three or four days to walk in to the glyph cliffs, though it might be more. This far into the Grey Places, you can never really tell—day and night are not leashed to any guaranteed rotation, they come and go like cavalier guests in the house of an overly accommodating host, and you have to make your plans without them. You walk until you’re tired, you stop and eat and rest. You make camp when the light thickens and you sleep until you wake. If it’s still dark you go back to sleep or try to; if it’s not, you break camp and go on.

Eventually, you get where you’re going.

The entourage of ghosts and might-have-beens that you drag with you, like the swirl of harbor water flotsam in the wake of a departing ship, well—those you’ve long ago learned to live with, or you’ve gone insane trying. You’ve learned to think of them as unavoidable echoes, caused inevitably by your passage through the Grey Places the way your booted steps in some vaulted stone space cannot help but call forth the flat resounding ring of your footfalls. You might listen to those echoes, might even pay them some close, brooding attention if that’s the mood that takes you. But talking back to them leans in toward madness.

There he is, told you he’d be along. Standing together at a crossroads and waiting for Ringil, a Venj who apparently never died, a Klithren who never needed revenge. Hoy, Shenshenath—we going bounty hunting, or what? I thought we said dawn. Tlanmar’s waiting. And who’s this? You fall out with the other guy?

You have me confused with someone else, Ringil tells them, walking straight past.

But they follow on behind for a while anyway, muttering back and forth at each other.

Cheeky fucker. I told you he was just another perfumed imperial mummy’s boy; they’re all the fucking same. I don’t know why we bothered with him in the first place.

Venj, mate, the man’s just not in a great mood, that’s all. Not like you’re a portrait of good cheer yourself when you’re hungover, or some good-time girl’s just turned your purse inside out while you were asleep.

That’s not the point. Thing about imperials is, it’s their fucking culture. They don’t stand by the same values we do; they don’t even understand them. You can’t trust any of them further than you can spit.

Eventually, they fade out, voices growing less and less substantial, as if blown away by the breeze across the marsh. Gil knows better than to look around when that happens—sometimes the voice alone can trail you for an hour or more, speaking out of empty air at your side as if its owner hasn’t gone, is instead just trying out a magical cloak of invisibility from some Majak tale. And if you do give your attention, it’ll likely bring back the ghost in its entirety all over again.

Some ghosts are harder to ignore than others.

My hero, my wonderful, sinewy boy, returned in triumph. Grace of Heaven Milacar, shaven head and fastidiously barbered chin beard, judiciously applied kohl on his eyelids, throws open his arms for an embrace and Ringil finds he still cannot make himself walk past this one without a word. He stutters to a hesitant halt. He won’t take the embrace, he knows already it’ll be cool and curiously lacking in human odor, but oddly solid in a way that living bodies aren’t, more like hugging a dead tree trunk than a man. But—

Can’t really stop, Grace. I’m in a hurry.

But you’ve only just got here, Gil. I know you’ve got the acceptance speech to make and everything, but surely you could do with—the glint of a lewd grin—relaxing a little before all that dreary Glades politicking. You must be positively rigid with tension, no?

Joyous memories from Grace’s bedchamber come and catch him sharply under the heart. He seeks deflection so he won’t have to think about the way it ended.

Last time I checked, you lived in the Glades, too, Grace.

Eh? Milacar looks so genuinely offended it twitches a grin from Ringil’s lips. You really think I’d sell out that badly? I don’t know what you’ve heard, Gil, but the war hasn’t changed me the way it has Findrich and Snarl. I may go to a few client parties in the Glades now and then, but I haven’t fucking forgotten who I am.

And the tragedy of the gap, between this Grace of Heaven and the real one, is abruptly too much for him to grin at. He turns away.

Got to go, Grace. Give me a couple of days, yeah? I’ll, uhm, I’ll catch up with you.

Now you promise me, Gil? Grace’s features crease in another lascivious smile. I’ll have a princely forfeit from you if not.

He swallows. Promise.

He marches away, steadfastly refusing to hear any more, but the phantom has in any case fallen silent. At his side, Hjel purses his lips and politely says nothing. It’s a basic courtesy of companionship in the Grey Places; he’s seen it in operation between members of Hjel’s band on the few occasions the dispossessed prince has brought men and women with him. You don’t ask, you don’t comment unless invited to.

And you never, ever engage with someone else’s ghosts.

Hjel has a few accompanying eddies of his own. A grave, wide-shouldered man in his fifties with some kind of big wind instrument slung across his back—he calls himself Moss, flickers in and out from time to time, and talks with obvious pride about the dispossessed prince’s accomplishments. In his weathered, cheerful features you can see something of Hjel. Then there’s a young woman whose eyes sparkle with happiness and who tugs at the dispossessed prince’s sleeve and talks about their children. A rot-toothed dealer in some substance Gil guesses must be similar to krinzanz. A young boy who seems lost. A lugubrious character in a butcher’s smock. Hjel is brutally short with most of them, somewhat less abrupt with the musician Gil assumes must be some version of his father.

These distractions aside, the journey is uneventful and their pace consistent. Hjel seems pleased with their progress. At one point, he even takes Ringil off their path to look at some more of the long-jars, emptied and piled up inside a moss-grown stone circle.

Since you’re so fascinated by these things, he says, and Ringil is struck by a powerful sensation that he’s been here before, that they’ve said and done all this before.

Didn’t you already show me these?

Hjel blinks. Not these ones, no. Don’t think so, anyway. Have a listen.

As if acting out a dream, Ringil lifts one of the canisters to his ear. He can’t work out whether his memory is at fault, or Hjel’s, or if maybe this really is just another time and place with a rather severe resemblance to the last stone circle he stood in with the dispossessed prince and hefted a long-glass jar and held it to his ear and…

Nothing.

Like an idiot, he shakes the canister and listens again.

Nothing. No chittering, seething whisper of unleashed horrors past.

He looks up at Hjel and shakes his head, feeling oddly embarrassed. I, uhm, I can’t seem to—

Guess you’ve aged since the last time, then.

Something oddly hasty in those words, it’s a conclusion drawn fast to avoid further inquiry. Ringil’s eyes narrow.

It’s not that long since you showed me the last time. Is it?

Hjel shrugs. I thought not, but in the Margins who can be sure? Anyway, like the sage says, every chord played has a moment either side of it. On the one side sound, on the other silence. That the two are only separated by a moment does not mean that the sound can bleed across into the silence before the chord is played.

But there’s a distracted look in the dispossessed prince’s eyes and he’s not looking at Ringil anymore.

You trying to get profound on me here?

Another shrug, moodier this time. It’s a simple enough proposition, I would have thought. You’re a warrior, you know how little separates dead from alive in battle. Mutilated from whole, disfigured from untouched. One moment a living breathing being, the next a corpse; one moment a sensing, feeling limb, the next a severed chunk of meat and a bleeding stump; one moment unblemished—

Yeah, I get it. I’m not a fucking tent peg.

Well, then. We step across these moments our entire lives. Occasionally, we’re aware of the change as the step is taken, mostly we aren’t.

Ringil holds up the canister impatiently. Can you still hear this?

Hjel catches the open end of the jar, tilts it deftly up to his ear, and listens. Lets it go again. Yeah, I can still hear it. My moment has not yet come.

You are not changed.

The dispossessed prince’s gaze is evasive again. That’s another way to look at it, I suppose.

And I am. I am changed.

You have aged, my lord black mage. Get over it.

Stop fucking calling me that.

Hjel sighs. Shall we go? By the look of that sky, we’re due some nightfall soon and it’s getting cold with it. Be good to get under canvas.

There’s an opening there for a flirt—Ringil turns pointedly aside from it. He sets the canister down with exaggerated care, surprised at how much it feels like leaving something vital behind. He has to fight an impulse to try again, to pick the thing up and strain his ears once more at the opened end. He turns back instead and finds Hjel watching, waiting for him. Gestures irritably for the dispossessed prince to get moving, then tramps through the long grass after him at a coolish distance.

When they’ve cleared the perimeter of the stone circle, he calls out to the other man.

Just so you know, Hjel—all that shit you were talking about life and death? Most men don’t die that fast on a battlefield—it’s not usually that clean.

Hjel stops dead for a moment, but he doesn’t look around. I stand corrected.

Yeah.

THEY CAMP THE LAST NIGHT WITHIN SIGHT OF THE CLIFFS, THE LONG marching limestone gleam crossing the plain at the horizon, like the much-notched blade of some colossal sword out of legend, left lying somehow on its edge in the marsh, now that the battle here between the gargantuan forces that wielded such weapons is done. Ringil is morose with feelings of loss he can’t easily pin down, and Hjel is still holding back on whatever’s bothering him. It makes for a monosyllabic shared meal, and a lot of staring into the fire in silence.

When Hjel retires to the tent, Gil doesn’t follow him for a while.

He sits and stares instead at the distant line of the glyph cliffs, trying to sort out his memories, trying to separate out dream from truthful recollection, trying to decide if that’s even a meaningful line where the ikinri ‘ska is concerned.

He remembers the first time he saw the cliffs. Remembers being led out of a nightmare through a fissure that opened in their base. He remembers that it was Hjel who led him out—or did he go first and Hjel follow behind, it isn’t clear now, he sees both in his mind’s eye, it seems to have happened a thousand years ago to another man entirely—and he remembers that the passageway was minutely worked over every inch of its surface with the glyphs of the ikinri ‘ska. He remembers stepping out of the fissure and turning to face the enormity of the endless marching cliffs he’d just emerged from, the staggering understanding that they, too, were worked over every inch with the same tiny script.

It gets tougher after that.

He remembers that Hjel left him then, but there was—wasn’t there?—something else in his place. Something hunched and hovering invisible at his shoulder, something he daren’t turn and look at. Something that reached out over his shoulder with lengthy, emaciated limbs and deftly tapped at glyph sequences here and there—and each touch left the sequence glowing faintly as if touched by bandlight. He remembers peering at the glyphs, remembers that somehow he knew which ones to read, where to look for them, how to interpret them. Hjel’s previous tutored examples—scratched into beach sand or road dust for him, chalked up on rock like some child’s imitation of what was carved out here—all of that fading out like the music as the curtain goes up on the main entertainment. All of that, stamped out, stamped through by something dark and massive, working through him.

He remembers that it hurt his head to do it.

He doesn’t remember how long he was there, or how he came back. Only that it ended in flame and fury in the crumbling ruins of the temple at Afa’marag.

Gil stares across the heated air above the campfire, remembering, and it’s as if there’s something sitting there in the darkness on the other side, grinning skullishly back at him, biding its time.

He can’t be sure, but he thinks it wears his face, and a spiked iron crown.

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

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

He gets up and crawls into the tent after Hjel.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Your black mage is fucking you now, dispossessed prince.

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

Taking everything you have, taking you deep.

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

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

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

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

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

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

It’s not important.

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

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

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

Yeah, I remember.

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

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

Ah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Siempetra beach.

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

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

Yeah, five long fucking days.

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

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

Hjel looks away. I don’t know.

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

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

Charming.

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

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

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

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

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

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

I didn’t say that.

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

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

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

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

Perhaps it’s that.

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

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

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

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

Yeah. That’s probably it.

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

I know.

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

No, Hjel tells him quietly. I’m worried about where I have to take you next.

CHAPTER 27

High up on the shoulder of the first jagged ridge, the fire sprite paused in its restless onward dance, as if to allow them a last look back.

Archeth didn’t mind—she was pretty winded from the climb. She stood there, breathing hard, letting the breeze off the ocean cool her brow. Way below them, An-Kirilnar sat in the sea like some crumpled white lace handkerchief dropped in passing and still afloat on the surface of a pothole puddle. If you stared for long enough, you even got the illusion of movement, as if the city were drifting on the ruffled waters with the wind. It took Archeth a moment to understand why. The sun had just struggled up over the inland horizon, and as it struck the ocean below, she saw with a tiny shock that there was something under the water, a hazy scatter of geometric patterning in every direction for miles, and that it was moving, pulsing in and out of visibility in random patches, all with the regularity of a sleeping man’s breath, like some colossal living thing. The causeway, she suddenly understood, had been a choice, a thin piece of stability sliced out of a massive, intricate overall structure and raised just high enough to permit human passage. A scant scrap of lamplight left in the window of the long-forgotten Kiriath victory by a mind that made no real distinction between the passing minutes and millennia and saw no reason to ever let the past go.

Small, welling sadness, somewhere down at the base of her being.

Stow that shit, Archidi. Over the past months, she seemed to have soaked up the argot of the marines and sailors she’d been surrounded with, was still surprised when it popped up in her thoughts. Got a few other things to worry about right now, don’t we?

“What’s the matter, leave something behind?”

Egar, grinning, puffing up the arid slope of the path to where she stood. No one was very keen on getting too close to the fire sprite, so the vanguard had fallen to Archeth by default. Selak Chan, Alwar Nash, and the few other Throne Eternals had followed her at what distance their regimental pride would allow, and the Dragonbane came after them, at the nominal head of everybody else. There was a subtle, fresh alignment to be detected in the order, a change that sat uneasily on her shoulders like the new harness the Warhelm had gifted her for her knives.

“Something like that,” she agreed.

She watched the men filing up onto the ridge after the Dragonbane. Judged no small number of them could use the break as much as she could. Tharalanangharst had fed them unstintingly, worked some minor medical magic on their various injuries, gifted them all with fresh weapons and clothing, but still—after nearly three weeks of comfort and warmth in An-Kirilnar’s somber iron belly, the return to the Wastes felt like an eviction. The pre-dawn air outside when they left was cold and leaden, sitting sullenly in their lungs, burning if you drew it in too deep. The clouded dawn sky was the texture of old porridge, stirred through with weird spiral formations, brightened just barely to the east by a sun rising somewhere unseen behind the looming mountains. And the path they took up off the coast was bleak, a twisting defile through jagged bluffs and across broad spills of scree, devoid of vegetation or any visible sign of animal life. Without the insistent back-and-forth sheepdog chivying of the sprite, they likely would have lost their way more than once.

Egar stood at her shoulder, getting his breath back. Looked down at the city in sea.

“Useful friend to have,” he said. “Shame we can’t take him with us. Didn’t your people ever build anything small?”

She nodded minutely down at Wraithslayer, where the knife sat upside down in the new sheath on her left breast. It had taken her awhile to accept that it wouldn’t fall out, no matter how hard she jumped up and down or flung herself about trying to dislodge it. It had taken even longer to get the hang of pulling and throwing Bandgleam from the identical inverted sheath on her right breast. Both knives had lived on her belt before, the sensible way up, slightly forward of her hips and angled for ease of draw. It was the habit of a couple of hundred years and leaving it behind had tugged hard. But she couldn’t really argue with the benefits.

The other three knives were at least approximately where they’d always been—Quarterless still in the small of her back, though now off to one side and paired with Laughing Girl, the final refugee from the empty frontal portion of her belt. Falling Girl, she’d insisted on keeping in her boot and the Warhelm, lacking an obvious harness point elsewhere, had grudgingly agreed.

“Yeah, well, apart from blades, obviously.” The grin still there in the Dragonbane’s good-natured grumbling. He sniffed. “Goes without saying, doesn’t it. Kiriath steel and all that.”

But beneath the bluff Majak nonchalance, Archeth thought she detected an enduring trace of unease. And his features were troubled as he watched Yilmar Kaptal come trudging up the slope, nowhere near as out of breath as you’d expect for a man his age and size.

THE THING THAT CAME UP THROUGH THE LOADING HATCH THAT NIGHT, still streaming thin, high spouts of seawater from various openings and edges, looked like nothing so much as a colossal black spider-legged crab caught in some thick-roped metallic net.

Shouldn’t really be a shock, Archidi, she’d been surprised to find herself thinking. Not like you haven’t seen them running around the place since we got here—replacing fruit, bringing you fresh clothes. Executing random humans. All the same basic breed. This is just a big one.

It took about that long to realize that the thick, shiny cone of netting the crane hook held up was in fact part of the crab’s upper structure, presumably designed to allow exactly this kind of retrieval. And as the crane cranked in the final couple of yards of cable and stopped, she saw that the webbing on top was mirrored on the crab’s underside by a sagging belly of translucent material within which hung…

At her side, the Dragonbane had climbed to his feet. She stood up to join him.

“Is that a body in there?” he asked her quietly.

The crane screeched and groaned its way back along its track until the crab’s monstrous span of legs hung clear of the hatch. Inside the swaying translucent bag, the blurred human outline flopped bonelessly back and forth. There looked to be quite a lot of liquid in there, too. The crane cable jolted downward and the crab settled to the floor on its huge restlessly twitching limbs. It faced them as if poised to spring—she felt Egar tense beside her, felt the same instinctive quailing in her own flesh. The cable ran down, the netting settled back flat to the crab’s upper carapace, and tiny upward reaching metal arms emerged to detach the hook. Thus freed, the crab took big, spidering steps toward them, still drizzling water onto the iron deck like an overflowing gutter.

“Archidi…” The Dragonbane’s grip, firm on her upper arm. He was pulling her backward, putting himself in the way.

“Eg, it’s fine.”

As if it heard their voices, the crab locked to a halt. Its front legs were less than fifteen feet from where they stood, went up like shiny black palm trunks to the first hinge, then down again to the looming mass of the body where it hung over them at twice head height. The carapace tilted without warning, the translucent bag split open somewhere, and its contents gushed out over the deck in a sluicing of seawater and silt. Small, vaguely fang-shaped objects slid and skittered about. It would be awhile before she fixed on them and realized what they were. Too much of her immediate attention was grabbed by the body as it washed to a soggy halt at their feet.

It took them a moment or two to recognize Yilmar Kaptal.

He was a mess. Bleached, bloated, chewed on. Something had already made ragged holes in his cheeks and eaten out his eyes, and as they watched, it climbed on myriad filigree legs out of one of the raw hollows where an eye had been.

“Oh, lovely.”

“Eg, shut up.” Staring fascinated. “Look.”

Because here across the bleached and ragged landscape of Kaptal’s torn-up face came some tiny, rapidly spidering silver thing. It grabbed the filigree-legged length of deep sea life at the midpoint, lifted it up out of the eye socket and held it aloft, then methodically ripped it apart. It discarded the pieces, passing them back delicately over its own body to the rear, then dipped itself into the eye socket and began dragging out other, less recognizably living stuff. Behind it, even tinier gleaming flecks of machinery had welled up out of Kaptal’s nose and mouth like silver foam and started to carry off the bits of butchered sea creature.

“Cleansing is required,” said the Warhelm with melodious good cheer. “And substantial surface repair. But aside from this, I foresee no real difficulties. Your friend has not been in the water long.”

The words washed over her, made no real sense at the time, and besides, she was still entranced by the realization that Yilmar Kaptal’s entire bloated body appeared to be a similar battleground between the creeping creatures trying to eat him and the tiny silver machines that fought to stop them. The sodden clothing twitched and moved, things emerged squabbling here and there from under a flap of cloth or torn flesh…

“Hoy, Archidi. Look at the floor over there. Aren’t those your knives?”

“WHAT ARE WE STOPPING FOR?”

“What’s your rush, Kaptal?” Archeth, still staring down at An-Kirilnar, feigned an absence of tone she didn’t feel. Even now, she found it hard to look at the resurrected man directly. “We’re well provisioned, we’ve got a long way to go and maybe a fight when we get there. No point in overexerting ourselves this early on.”

“So who’s overexerted?” The portly imperial put his hands on his hips, an uncharacteristic posture as far as she could recall. “These are fighting men, they’re used to keeping a pace. Not like we haven’t all had plenty of rest.”

“Yeah, well we didn’t all get off as lightly as you,” Egar rumbled. “Some of these men took injuries in the wreck. Some of them didn’t have as much stored fat to manage on until my lady Archeth found us aid.”

She glanced around. The Dragonbane had drifted into a vaguely protective bodyguard stance, blocking Kaptal from her. Ludicrous overreaction, if you hadn’t been there in the crane hall that night—she hoped the men would write it off to retainer outrage that Kaptal was questioning the will of kir-Archeth Indamaninarmal, proven mistress of ghost mansions and succoring demons in iron, apparent favorite of the Salt Lord, and bearer of haunted blades.

Still…

Better break this up, Archidi. In case it goes somewhere none of us are ready for.

Because she still had no real idea what Kaptal had become since his resurrection, whether there was now some steely, silver-limbed thing bedded deep in the gore of his brain and steering him, or whether the Warhelm had simply summoned him back to life in a shower of sparks, like the cranes on their rusted overhead tracks in the hall. Above all, she had no idea why Tharalananagharst had found it necessary to bring the imperial merchant back in the first place. It wasn’t as if he had any skills that were worth anything where they were going.

She met his eyes. Had they been that color before? She seemed to remember darker.

“I’m glad you’re feeling so energetic, Kaptal,” she said. “Perhaps you’d like to help carry some of the gear.”

Some sniggering among the men, quickly stifled as Kaptal looked around.

“I am a noble of the imperial court,” he said loudly. “And a chief sponsor of this expedition. I am Yilmar Kaptal, worthy under charter by the hand of Akal Khimran the Great. I do not… carry gear.”

But she thought that the outrage rang a little hollow, compared to the way the man had sounded before on the expedition north. She thought that behind it, she heard a scrabbling, as if Kaptal himself wasn’t quite convinced of anything he’d just said, was talking as much for his own benefit as anyone else’s, was trying to reassure himself, to remind himself, of his own identity.

She’d heard something similar in the voices of a few other first-generation courtiers, men still settling into the privilege of their newfound positions, still not quite able to believe the life they now owned, and determined to drive it home to their lesser fellows until it could become confident custom. But she’d never heard it as intense as this, as quietly desperate as it came through in Kaptal’s tightened tones.

She didn’t want to push him.

“Well, then,” she said colorlessly. “Enjoy your chartered privilege and let those not lucky enough to share it take some ease.”

It got a couple of low cheers among the men, and Egar grinned in his now neatly trimmed beard. She gave him a faint smile back, but most of her was still haunted, still wondering.

After the crane hall, she hadn’t seen Kaptal for days. A pack of dog-sized crab devices showed up while she and Egar were still marveling over her recovered knives, and they dragged the body away through a hole in the iron wainscoting. Nothing to worry about, Tharalanangharst assured them breezily. It would all be taken care of. By tacit agreement, neither she nor the Dragonbane had said anything to the other men. They were in any case all too busy by then, looking at maps and drawing up lists, talking to the Warhelm about weaponry and provisions and, in her case, practicing with her newly harnessed knives.

Then one morning, she wandered into one of the common dining areas Tharalanangharst had made available—humans thrive on company, she’d explained patiently to the Warhelm; they don’t do well alone—and there was Yilmar Kaptal seated in the flood of early gray light from the windows, intact and apparently none the worse for his drowning, feeding himself hungrily from a broad breakfast spread. He had some story of his survival—clinging to wreckage all night amid the dark waves, washing finally ashore with the dawn, wandering along the shoreline until he found the city—and he told it with a slightly repetitive, slightly emphatic force. He seemed very pleased to see her for a man she remembered as having such solitary tendencies. He asked her to join him at the table and plied her with a constant stream of questions about how she’d survived the wreck and come to An-Kirilnar herself. He nodded constantly in response to the answers she gave, made rapid, repeated noises of assent and understanding at every juncture, and did not appear to be really listening at all.

Archeth sat and picked at some food with him, hunger driven from her by memories of the creature that had climbed out of his eye socket. She chewed and swallowed mechanically, tried not to avoid his gaze too much. Was inordinately glad when Alwar Nash and another couple of Throne Eternal showed up to breakfast with them.

Now she remembered that jerky, insistent energy again, and wondered if there was a good reason for Kaptal’s newfound dynamism—wondered if perhaps when he stayed still for too long, left himself without occupation or distraction and started to reflect, then black, icy doubt started welling up inside him like seawater, as the truth of what had really happened to him tried to break through into his consciousness and tell itself to him.

The fire sprite darted past her, as if checking what she was looking at for a moment, then danced back and up along the ridgeline, wavering from its base like an agitated candle flame. Earlier in the day, she’d thought it had arms and was shaped somewhat like a child about eight or nine years of age. But as she followed the sprite’s beckoning flicker upward through the rocks, she saw this was just her mind, demanding a human form from something so outrageously animate and creating the illusion to fit. What she’d thought were appendages were just undulating frills along the edges of the flame, sometimes well-defined enough to seem like gestures, sometimes damped down to no more than a faint ripple. Now that full daylight was spilling down over the mountains, she was glad of that undulating motion and the sheepdog twitchiness—the sprite was noticeably paler and harder to see against the brightening morning air and she reckoned if it ever stood still there was a good chance you’d blink and lose track of it. It will never actually leave you, the Warhelm had told her, but it may range ahead or double back sometimes to check on conditions. Try to be patient when that happens, let it do its work and protect you as best it can. Once you cross into the uplands, it is the only support I can lend you.

Once again, she had cause to curse her father’s lack of moderation.

Couldn’t you have just burned out the big weapons, Dad? Left a little something for local use? Shown a little fucking restraint and foresight for once in your life?

Your father is what he is, Nantara had consoled her once, when a nine-year-old Archeth fled sobbing into her arms after a particularly hardheaded run-in with Flaradnam. He is not balanced, there are no balanced Kiriath—their passage through the Veins of the Earth took that away from them, if they ever had it in the first place. But your father loves you with every last ember of his passion, which is why he is so angry now. The anger will pass, will be gone by tomorrow. But the love will not. Your father will love you for all eternity. Never forget that, Archidi, because it’s something no one else—a sad, wincing smile—not even I, will be able to do.

No Scaled Folk in her mother’s tranquil hopes for the future, of course. No fear there might ever be another Great Evil to ride out and face.

You were wrong, Mum. Even Dad couldn’t do it in the end.

Always some fucking thing coming down the track that’ll kill you if it can.

She shook off her thoughts. Glanced at the Dragonbane, who nodded.

“All right, people.Got a long march ahead of us.” She gestured up at the rearing mountain landscape. “And it isn’t going to get any easier till we’re over that lot. Let’s get on with it, let’s get it done.”

SLIGHTLY PESSIMISTIC, AS IT TURNED OUT—THE PATH THE SPRITE LED them on was actually an increasingly good one, starting to show signs as they climbed higher not just of prior traffic but of actual construction. Some ancient paving in a pale, grained stone she didn’t recognize, shelved into upward steps that had worn smooth with use, and were faintly luminous in the gloom where they passed beneath overhangs or through choke points in the rocky terrain.

“This is an Aldrain road,” She heard one of the privateers mutter to his comrades while they were all bunched up at a split in the paved way, waiting for the sprite to make up its mind on which fork to take. “We are under dwenda protection as long as we walk it.”

Ha.

The sprite came back, opted for the lower of the two paths, which skirted the shadowed base of a broad, jutting bluff, then zigzagged briskly back upward on terraced hairpins built out of the same pale dwenda—or not—stone. And with Aldrain protection or not, they made it to the end of the first day without incident. They pitched camp at the foot of an ancient scree spill under the southern shoulder of the highest peak in the range, with the sea a distant gray gleam behind and below them, and An-Kirilnar long ago hidden from view by the intervening chains of rising ground they’d crossed.

“Not bad going,” the Dragonbane allowed, nodding in that direction. “I thought we’d be lucky if we made half this distance today.”

His face was tinged an odd blue by the glow from one of the radiant bowls Tharalanangharst had gifted them in place of campfire fuel. Nothing grows in the Wastes that will make a decent fire, the Warhelm told them soberly. Better you take these. The bowls would, it claimed, give more or less warmth according to the conditions around them, and could be made, with simple commands in High Kir, to brighten or darken without affecting the level of heat, though they would apparently dim anyway when they detected sleep in the bodies around them. Archeth and Egar decided not to pass on these latter details to the other men—they were going to have enough misgivings about something that gave out blue light and perfect campfire heat but looked like a headless turtle, without being told that you could also talk to it and that it would notice when you fell asleep.

Archeth jerked a thumb over her shoulder at the loom of the mountain behind them. “How long you reckon to get over that ridgeline?”

The Dragonbane shrugged. “Your guess is as good as mine. I would have said the best part of a day, lucky to make it by nightfall. But the way we’ve been covering ground, could be a lot less. We might make it before noon.”

“And then the real work starts.”

“One way to look at it.”

“Got to find this city Tharalanangharst was talking about, get across it, find these aerial conveyance pits on the other side, find a way down into them…”

“Yeah.”

They were hedging, hovering, rehashing things that were already evident. Pussyfooting around the real issue like some wincing courtier suing for extended credit.

“You reckon it’s really him?” she said abruptly.

They both looked over to where Kaptal sat alone in the glow of another bowl. Originally, he’d been sharing its warmth and light with three Throne Eternal, but one by one they’d apparently found good reasons to wander off into the rest of the encampment and leave him there. He didn’t appear to care, had not really been talking to them anyway. Then as now, he sat and stared into the blue light, murmured to himself under his breath, and appeared to be doing some kind of obsessive calculation on his fingers.

Egar shook his head. “Anybody’s guess. He looked pretty fucking dead to me when your demon pal brought him up out of the water. And last I heard, you don’t get to come back from the dead without some pretty heavy penalties.”

“Gil says he did. Or something like it.”

“Yeah, well. Case in point. He’s not really been the same cuddly little faggot since he came out of Afa’marag, has he?”

She couldn’t argue with that. She didn’t think Ringil had ever been what you’d call cuddly. But after the events of the previous summer there was a distance in him that even she found new and strange. He smiled, he sometimes even laughed aloud, and he had the same old rolled-eyes sophisticate-and-barbarian thing going on with the Dragonbane, veiling an intensity of feeling beneath that neither man would ever own up to. But beyond that, she could no longer guess where Gil went away to when his gaze drifted and his eyes emptied out and the mobility fell off his face like a thin paper mask.

The Dragonbane leaned back on his elbows across his bedroll, stared up at the clouded night sky. It made him look oddly youthful.

“Where I’m from? They’d call Kaptal a Hollow Walker. Drive him out of camp with stones and spells, most likely. Saw that happen once, when I was a kid. Some guy was supposed to have drowned in the Janarat when they were crossing ponies, poor fucker. He hadn’t, but no one believed it when he finally managed to get himself back to camp. He had to go and live in Ishlin-ichan in the end; the clan would never take him back. Even his own family wouldn’t let him get within hailing distance.” He gestured, like throwing something away. “But hey, that’s fucking steppe nomads for you, with their pig-shit ignorant superstitions and fears.”

“If my father’s people went around doing this kind of thing to corpses a lot five thousand years ago,” she mused. “Maybe the Majak superstitions are tapping into that. Maybe they’re based on something concrete after all.”

“Yeah. Archidi, I’ve seen a Sky Dweller step out of thin air and summon the spirits of the angry dead from the steppe grass to defend me. I’ve spent a fair bit of my professional life killing things that everybody—including you—thought were myths until they showed up looking for a fight. I don’t really need any convincing there’s something concrete behind all this magical shit. Got pretty much all the evidence I need, thanks, and a few scars to boot.”

“Then—”

His voice rose to cut her off. “I just wish my dumb-as-fuck, dozy-as-sheep half-asleep people would wake the fuck up and demand that kind of evidence themselves, before they buy whatever string of sky-fisted nags the nearest fucking apology for a shaman happens to be hawking at the time. Is that so fucking much to ask?”

Movement at the other glowing bowls. People were craning to look. Egar, almost on his feet with whatever emotions had driven the sudden outburst, shot her a sheepish glance. Subsided.

They sat quietly for a while.

“Not looking forward to going home then?” she asked mildly.

CHAPTER 28

He’s forgotten about the ladders.

They see them as they get up close, ladders by the thousands, scattered about in the long grass along the bottom of the cliffs, like toothpicks in sawdust at the base of some heavily frequented tavern bar. Or—here and there, you could still see one or two set against the cliffs for use—like the leavings of some vast, suddenly abandoned siege against the ikinri ‘ska walls, carried on by a hundred or more different allied nations and races.

Which, Ringil supposes, isn’t too far from the truth of what he’s seeing. However long the glyph cliffs have been here, it seems men and other creatures have been here too, trying to prise their secrets out. There are wooden ladders, iron ladders, ladders of alloys Ringil has no way to name, ladders of substances he’s never seen before in his life. Resinous smooth honey-colored ladders, woven ladders of creeperlike plants, some of which still twitch with some kind of life if you touch or tread on them. Ladders out of what looks suspiciously like human bone.

Some are simple, the most basic sketch of their function in whatever substance their owners were happiest using. Some are ornate, carved or molded or tempered with crests and curlicues, symbols to supplement and adorn the functional heart of their uprights and cross-bar steps. Some are clearly made for races with limbs of no human proportion. Some are visibly ancient—wood darkened and rotted through, iron eaten away to rusted leavings, resin that has bubbled and snapped apart in some alien process of decay. But some are new, out of wood so freshly carpentered that you can still see the rough edges, as if they were thrown down and abandoned only moments before he and Hjel arrived. It gives the cliffs a haunted aspect, a sense of eyes forever at your back, watching to see if you do better than those who came before, those who, in some hard-to-grasp fashion, have always only just left.

Looks like we missed the rush again.

Hjel rolls his eyes. It’s not a new joke for either of them.

Get hold of the other end of this, he says, indicating a silvery-looking ladder five yards long. Ringil knows from previous experience that implements of this metal weigh next to nothing; they’ll lift it between them with no more effort than hefting a similar length of mooring cable. Set it up there, see where that tree’s growing out of the rock. That’s where you’re going up.

They get the ladder braced with a minimum of fuss. Ringil unfastens the Ravensfriend and sets it aside against the cliff face—he’d swear it shivers slightly inside the scabbard as it touches the glyph-carved rock. He looks hard at it for a moment. Shrugs. Unhooks his cloak and lets it puddle richly on the long grass at his feet, puts his foot on the ladder’s first step. Oh, yeah. He turns back to Hjel.

Want to tell me what I’m looking for?

Past the tree, there’s a fissure. The dispossessed prince holds up his hands, makes a span. About that wide. The glyphs go in. I want you to reach in as far as you can see, trace out one of the sequences.

Which one?

Doesn’t matter. You’ll see what I mean.

Ringil shrugs and starts to climb. Up past the endless piled up lines of glyphs, skewed and leaning and crammed together, like sketched streets of hovels on some map of the slum housing in Harbor End. The ladder bounces a little with his weight as he gets higher. A cold wind comes snuffling along the eroded limestone expanses, as if searching for something. It moans in crannies and over sharp edges, ruffles affectionately at his hair and moves on. Glyph sequences catch his eye through the rungs as he gets near to the top and closer in to the stone. By now he’s learned enough to spot certain tendencies in them, certain phrasing—in the eyes of men… the known unknown… a change of entanglement… failings unleashed… stop, I want to get off… Some of them, he knows how to use in longer sequence. Some he’s had patiently explained to him by Hjel, but does not yet have any comprehensible context in which to deploy them.

Some, for reasons he’s unsure of, just make him shiver.

He reaches the outgrowing tree. Its trunk is about as wide around as his forearm, and comes with a tightly twisted attendance of lesser branches and thickets of gray-green, rough-edged leaves. There’s a reasonable amount of flex in the whole thing; he’s able to force his way past and up, but it’s work. He collects a couple of scratches on face and hands in the process, comes out breathing hard and dusted in some dark green scent.

Just beyond, he finds the fissure Hjel’s talking about, a broadening gully at whose base the tree is rooted. True enough, the glyphs bend inward with the rock and march back into the gloom there. He can’t see how far the crack runs into the body of the cliff; the light runs out before the glyphs do, and then it’s just impenetrable dark.

Reach in as far as you can see.

He works his way up the last couple of steps on the ladder, braces a boot into the web of tree branches, and wedges his upper body into the gully. It’s not too uncomfortable, and there’s just about space for his arms to move.

Trace out one of the sequences.

The ones under his nose are too tight a fit; he can’t get his elbows back down far enough to work there. He twists his head up and focuses on a line that seems to end just into the beginnings of the shadow. He works his hand closer, puts his middle finger into the groove of the first glyph in approved fashion, and begins to trace the pattern out. He has to work mostly by touch as his vision is partly blocked out by his own arm.

The first glyph isn’t one he knows—though it bears some resemblance to the symbols Hjel refers to as throat-clearers. The second is the change of entanglement motif, though oddly skewed. The third and fourth are related, but—

Shock slams through him.

It’s the shock of a warrior-caste lizard’s barbed tail-lash to ribs you left unguarded on that last swing with your badly chewed-up shield. It’s your father’s casual blow across the face, knocking you out of your child’s-height chair for answering back at the dinner table. It’s the kick and clutch under the pit of your stomach as you see your screaming, pleading lover impaled to the jeers and cheers of the gathered crowd, and you puke out your soul in sympathy. It’s the freezing, boiling chase of blood through your veins when you think back later and truly understand for the first time that it could have been you.

It’s all those doors and others, swinging open in your memory, gutting you, laying you bare.

Back in the deeper recesses of the fissure, he hears a bony rattling, like long, emaciated limbs rearranging themselves, like talons digging into the rock to propel something violently forward into the light. And for just a moment, it’s as if a massive stirring tremor runs through the whole body of the cliff wall, as if the cliffs themselves are some vast sleeping creature whose skin you’ve finally gouged deep enough to wake…

He flails backward out of the gully.

Loses any footing he might have managed on the ladder, inadvertently kicks it away below. He falls scrabbling at the rock face, grabs frantically at the tree with his left arm. Stops his fall with an abruptness that wrenches his shoulder. The toes of his boots scrape the rock below him, twisting and digging for any scant purchase. Somehow, the dragon-tooth dagger is in his right hand, out and up in as much of a guard as he can manage. He stares under the curve of its yellowish blade, into the gloom at the back of the gully, waiting for whatever it was he heard in there…

Silence.

A vexed creak in the tree somewhere, the soft whoop of the wind. Tiny patter of displaced dirt, falling away

The ladder clinks tinnily back in place under him. He dares to look away from the gloom in the fissure, glances downward, gets both feet firmly on a rung. Hjel stands at the bottom, holding the ladder in place. Calls up to him between cupped palms.

See what I mean?

YOU KNEW THAT WAS GOING TO HAPPEN?

Ringil storms back and forth in the long grass at the base of the cliff, like some beast chained to a baiting pole. He’s too angry, too churned up with currents of emotion he doesn’t fully understand, to stay still and look Hjel in the eyes—and the way he’s feeling right now, there’s just far too much danger he’ll punch the other man out.

I did not expect quite such a violent reaction. The dispossessed prince’s face is troubled and not, Gil suspects, out of any mundane concern for his near fall from the ladder. The ikinri ‘ska is not a training manual or a map, it is the inscribed living will of the Originators. It flexes and flows and breathes in a way I do not understand well myself. It is only one side of the equation. Each man or woman who wields it brings a different self to the union. Some are demure brides to the power, some are… not.

Yeah. Ringil stops in front of Hjel, jabs the blade of his hand at the other man’s face. Well, if I’d known you wanted demure, I’d have brought a motherfucking veil!

He stomps away again, nearly trips on the ornately curlicued end of a fallen ladder in black iron. Kicks savagely at it and stubs his toe. Fuck!

You need to calm down, Gil.

Ringil stalks back to face the dispossessed prince again. I am fucking calm. You want to see me not calm, you keep right on feeding me surprises and half-truths like this. Now you tell me, in words a piped-up wharf whore can understand—what happened up there?

Hjel nods. Fair enough. What happened up there is that you had a taste of real power. You dug into the darker reaches of the ikinri ‘ska for the first time, and it appears that neither you nor it enjoyed the experience very much.

A day ago you tell me it’s like the ikinri ‘ska wants me. Now all of a sudden it doesn’t like me anymore? The tail end of his anger is still twitching, lashing irritably about. Make some fucking sense, would you?

The dispossessed prince stares out across the marsh plain they’ve crossed together. A horse may like you well enough as a rider across summer meadows. That doesn’t mean the same horse will stand easy under you in battle.

Oh, again with the martial metaphors. You’re saying I’ve got to break the ikinri ‘ska now?

No. You could not, no one can. Not even the Ahn-foi could manage so much, and they have tried more than once. Some say that not even the Originators themselves can command what they built and set in place now that it’s done. Hjel reels his gaze back in, looks at Gil again. I am simply showing you a different form of mastery, one that carries a different risk and ultimate cost. You are in need, you say. You ask for more, faster. This is more, faster. You’ll have to decide for yourself what it’s worth to you, if you want it after all.

Ringil looks up at where the ladder is leaned, the tree jutting out of the rock, the gully beyond.

How deep does that fissure go back? he asks quietly.

Hjel gives him a faint, sad smile, claps him on the shoulder and chest as he walks past to a point about twenty feet out from the cliff wall. That’s what I thought.

What’s that supposed to mean?

Come here, I’ll show you. Hjel waits until Ringil joins him, then sweeps one arm out wide. Look along the line that way. See the cracks? The shadows?

Ringil nods, fighting an odd reluctance. The dispossessed prince nods with him. His voice is gathering a fresh intensity, the tone of a man talking about the object of his longtime desires and obsessions.

It’s not a clean surface, you see, any more than the world the Originators were forced to write upon was fresh or whole when they saved it. Perhaps the echo is intended, perhaps it is metaphor made concrete. The cliffs march for hundreds of miles across this plain and there are fissures and gullies and defiles going back into the rock everywhere. Some of them are only a few feet deep and will barely admit a man’s arm to the shoulder. Some of them are paths whose end no one has seen. But all of them, all that I have seen or heard tell of, are inscribed with the most powerful iterations of the ikinri ‘ska. It is there, in the dark recesses, in the cracks through the surface of things, that you will find what you seek.

You didn’t answer my question, Ringil says gently.

Hjel shrugs. Because it was meaningless. You shouldn’t be asking how deep this or that fissure goes—ask yourself instead how deep into the defiles you are prepared to go.

Ringil looks along the line of the cliffs, the strewn toothpick ladders scattered at their base. Somewhere, there’s a whisper of bleak comfort in knowing how many have come here before him and gone again. He recognizes the sensation from the war—the anonymous camaraderie of a thousand ghosts, the realization that while death may be a gate you must pass through alone, the approach road is thronged with traffic and you walk its cobbled rise in constant company, just one trudging part of an endless caravanserai homing in on journey’s end. He remembers the abandoned confidence in his own acts that the knowledge gave him back then—a gut-swoop feeling so close to desperation it was hard to tell the two of them apart. He welcomes it back now with open arms. And somehow, chained to all of this, the half-grasped chilly dance of the glyphs he touched in the fissure has left its traceries in his mind, touched his fingers and throat with what they are required to do to open that door once more.

He’s as ready as he’ll ever be.

And the Ravensfriend, leaning there against the cliff wall, like some louche friend in a harbor end alley, awaiting decision from him on where next to take their carousing.

He takes the sword up, settles the harness back on his shoulders. Shoots Hjel an expectant glance.

All right, then, he says. How about you show me a crack where I don’t have to fall out of a tree. And then we can get started.

CHAPTER 29

They crossed the ridgeline around noon, as the Dragonbane had predicted they would, and stood there looking down. A chorus of groans rose from the company at what lay beyond.

Far from the upland plateau they’d been hoping to reach, the path spilled them down the other side of the mountain’s shoulder almost as far as they’d climbed up the previous day, and into a landscape even more bleak. They spent the back end of the day plodding across what felt like a vast bowl filled with chopped and fire-blackened onion. Peaks rose on all sides and the terrain between was jagged and frayed, all oddly curving spires and fractured bluffs. In places, the rock was glassy to the touch and glinted dully where wandering shafts of sunlight passed over it. Elsewhere, it showed growth of some iridescent crimson moss that smelled faintly of burning. It was the first sign of life they’d found in the landscape and seeing it should have felt better than it did—instead, the men mostly passed by with warding gestures and hurried steps.

As if unnerved by the chaotic ground it had to cross, the path itself grew hesitant and ill-defined. It forked and unwound seemingly at random, and the fire sprite started taking them off it entirely, to dodge around rockfalls and strange frozen eruptions in the stone underfoot. By late afternoon the paving had all but vanished, reduced to single slabs at violently tilted angles every couple of dozen yards. If it really was an Aldrain road, Archeth reflected grimly, then the Aldrain, in these parts at least, looked to have had their arses handed to them on a plate.

For the first time, she found herself brooding on the geographical absurdity of what they were doing, wondering if Tharalanangharst’s smoothly persuasive argument had been worthy of the trust she placed in it after all.

There is no easy path south through the Wastes, it told them bluntly. The entire region is hazardous, often lethally so.

Yeah, no shit. And marching east from here instead is going to be what, safer?

No, Dragonbane. Such a march would in all probability not be any more secure, and would in any case leave you on the wrong side of a mountain chain it’s doubtful you are equipped to cross. Fortunately, that is not the itinerary I have in mind.

Seemed there was this ruined city, two or three days’ march inland…

“I don’t know, Archidi.” Egar brooded as they sat at camp that night. “I’m not saying your iron demon’s sending us off to die exactly, but the steppes are fucking huge. My father rode up north and west of the Janarat once, back before Ishlin-ichan was much more than a bunch of hovels on its banks. He was going to circle round and raid the Ishlinak from the far side, take the whole clan unawares. Stuff he talked about finding out there—steppe ghouls all over the place, things like giant spiders that jumped like grasshoppers, could knock a man right off his horse if they hit right. And some kind of, I don’t know, deformed giant wolves or something. I mean, stuff straight out of a campfire tale. Plus no decent grazing for the horses and nothing much to hunt that you’d want to eat. They had to turn back in the end; the terrain was just too tough. And he never even saw these mountains the demon talks about, so that’s even further out. Now we’ve got to cross all of that somehow, just to make Ishlin-ichan.”

She gestured. “Yeah, well. These uhm, aerial conveyances are going to take us. Right?”

“You’re asking me?”

“Telling you.”

The conviction was oddly easy to come by. She realized abruptly that for all that Tharalanangharst harped on constantly about its these days severely limited senses, she’d never once entertained any doubts about the accuracy of the Warhelm’s intelligence. Somewhere in the iron bowels of An-Kirilnar, a trust and certainty seemed to have hardened in her—or maybe just an acceptance, that this was her path and she’d better get on and walk it.

Could have used some krin for the road, though. That too much to ask?

Apparently, it was. The Warhelm assured her it was unfamiliar with the substance, that krinzanz had not been known five thousand years ago, or at least had not been in known and common use. And when she started sketching out its properties, Tharalanangharst grew evasive on the subject of substitutes or whether some could be synthesized. There was much else to be done, it maintained. Many other, more vital preparations to be made. Perhaps later.

She’d found, oddly, that she didn’t much mind. She’d quit the drug before; you could ignore the craving if you had enough else to do. And by then she’d been caught up in the preparations herself, fascinated by her returned knives and the way the Warhelm talked to her about them. Practicing with them, hefting and juggling and throwing, walking through the centuries-ingrained Hanal Keth katas until she was exhausted, trying to adopt and adapt to what Tharalanangharst taught her—it was an entrancing, all-consuming process that mostly took away any residual nagging need for the krin.

And now, sitting here in the blue gloom, she struggled to locate the place inside herself where that need had sat. The locked conviction filled her instead—they were underway, they were on their way home. Let that be enough for now.

“You’re taking a lot on trust, you know.” As if the Dragonbane could read her thoughts.

“Warhelm hasn’t been wrong yet, has it?”

Egar stood up and stretched. She heard cartilage crack somewhere in his massive frame. He faced out from the overlaid glowing blue circles of light that defined their camp against the surrounding craggy darkness. Crouched back to her level again, and nodded east.

“That’s another ridge out there,” he said quietly. “It’s still a fair way off, but it looks to me at least as high as this one. And you can see there are peaks beyond it. I’d kind of hoped we were over the high line by now.”

She said nothing. She had, too.

The Dragonbane sat back down on his bedroll. Offered her a tight little smile. “Don’t want to be the one grumbling in the ranks, Archidi. Urann knows, we’re going to have enough of that a couple of days from now without me joining in. So this is just between you and me. But over this kind of ground, it’s another day to get up there, minimum. More likely, it’s two. And who knows what’s on the other side? We’re starting to get beyond the bounds of two to three days here.”

“Tomorrow’s day three,” she pointed out.

“Yeah. All day. Talk to me when we’re over that ridge and it’s still not dark and there’s a big fuck-off ruined city waiting for us on the other side.”

She remembered his twitchiness from the previous night, made this for more of the same—the pinch of knowing at every step that he was on his way back to something he’d abandoned two years ago the way you leave a sinking ship.

Change the subject, Archidi.

She made a gesture, low in her lap, toward the glowing bowl where Yilmar Kaptal sat alone.

“You talk to him yet?” she asked softly.

The Dragonbane followed her gaze. “Couple of times, yeah. Why?”

“When?”

“Once when we stopped to eat. And then back when our fiery friend was off checking out that cave entrance.”

“And?”

“And what? Surly as fuck at the cave; before that he talked at me like I’d rob him at knifepoint if he stopped. You still worrying about what he might really be? Archidi, let it go. He was put back together by a demon that feeds you five-thousand-year-old fruit, sends iron spiders to do its will, and lends you glowing fucking turtles in place of firewood. Who knows whether that’s really Yilmar Kaptal in there or not? And you know what—as long as he’s on our side, who gives a shit? Not like he was a prancing little pony of joy to have around before he drowned, is it?”

“Fair point.”

“Yeah.” The rant seemed to have eased Egar’s temper a little. “Well.”

“I just wish I knew why Tharalanangharst thought it was so important to have him back. What it’s got to do with this grand purpose Anasharal had.”

An elaborate shrug. “Like someone I know said recently—Warhelm hasn’t been wrong yet. Right?”

She grimaced. “Yeah, all right. But seriously, Eg. Kaptal’s a fucking courtier. He’s got nothing we need.”

“Right now he doesn’t. Maybe we’ll find out he’s got some useful contacts in Ishlin-ichan.”

“If he does, he’s keeping very quiet about it. He’s been briefed along with everybody else, he knows where we’re headed. Anyway, I can’t see that. Don’t let current circumstance fool you—the only reason Kaptal made the trip north with us is because he couldn’t let Shendanak and Tand upstage him. And even then, he’s bitched every inch of the way. From what I hear around court, he’d barely ever been outside the Yhelteth city walls before this. He wouldn’t know Ishlin-ichan from a hole in the ground.”

Egar grunted. “It is a fucking hole in the ground.”

“He’s useless, Eg.” She plowed on, refused to sidetrack back into conversation about a steppe they hadn’t even reached yet. “He’s twitchy as fuck, and he’s an entitled little shit into the bargain. You saw how he reacted to the idea of carrying any of his own gear And if we do get in a fight somewhere along the line, I doubt he’s picked up a sword his whole fucking life.”

The Dragonbane yawned cavernously. “Used to be a pimp, didn’t he?”

“So they say.”

“Probably very handy with a knife, then. Maybe you should give him one.”

“Very funny.”

But behind the sourness she feigned, she was secretly relieved to see Egar relaxing. Because if the Warhelm’s much-vaunted aerial conveyances were really going to get them to Ishlin-ichan as promised, the journey after that was wholly on Majak turf. And whether they then took passage on one of the infrequent trade barges down the Janarat, or simply procured horses and rode directly south to the Dhashara pass, successful progress was going to hinge rather a lot on exactly how well the Dragonbane coped with his homecoming.

THE SKY CLEARED UP OVERNIGHT, AND THEY WOKE EARLY TO A ROSE-EDGED vision of the band, arcing overhead against an almost cloudless dawn. The lifeless landscape around them seemed softer with the change, somehow less jagged and threatening, as if the new light had warmed something stony away. Archeth felt how it loosened the men up as they bustled about, breaking camp. She didn’t blame them. Not for the first time, she realized how much she missed the habitually clear night skies of the south. How much she missed—

Ishgrim.

Memory uncoiled and struck, like keen knives in her belly and eyes. Lying together in cooling sweat on a balcony divan, Archeth pointing out the Kiriath constellations by name, and both of them laughing as Ishgrim tried stumblingly to copy the pronunciation.

They’d both wept when it was time for Archeth to board ship at the Shanta yards.

You’ll see, Archeth lied. Back before you know it. Nothing to worry about.

Ishgrim said nothing. Despite some of the games they played in bed, she was no innocent. Slavery had stamped a hard, unwavering vision of the world into her, and they both knew the risks the expedition was going to face.

I will pray to the Dark Court for you, she blurted as Archeth turned to go.

Uhm. If you like.

I know that you do not believe. Defiantly, chin lifted in a way that gouged into Archeth’s heart. But Takavach the Salt Lord answered my prayers in captivity. He brought me to safe haven with you. Perhaps he has a purpose for us both.

Her last view of the girl was her slim, erect figure in sunlight, immobile amid the cheering crowd along the viewing platforms as the flotilla rode the current downriver toward the estuary and the sea. Ishgrim had not waved at any point, and Archeth, squinting before distance took the possibility away, saw that the girl’s hands were knotted tight on the platform’s rail.

She took the ache of memory in both hands. Twisted it into a strength.

Hold on, girl—I’m coming for you. Fucking nothing going to live that gets in my way this time.

“Looks better,” she said brightly to Egar as their paths crossed later in the bustle.

He grunted, still buttoning himself up at the fly. “Yeah, the sun came out. Let’s hope it’s a fucking omen.”

If it wasn’t, it was the next best thing. They crossed the suddenly sun-gilded terrain at a brisk pace now, along a path of paving increasingly intact. The fire sprite scudded ahead of them, pale and hard to see at times but rarely hesitating for more than a few seconds before darting onward. There were no obvious branches or breaks in the paved way and they were into the cool shade of the next ridge and climbing not long after midday. The hairpin terraces were a match for the path, in far better repair than those they’d walked in the previous two days, broader and more forgiving in incline, too. With the fresh energy the change of weather had given them, they made the ridgeline with a solid few hours of daylight left.

The path went up and over in deceptively undramatic fashion, broadened as it dropped on the other side and passed almost immediately between the massive paired stumps of two pillars flanking what seemed once to have been a colonnaded gateway.

Beyond the jagged, upward jutting fangs of the pillar remnants, the uplands lay spread out below them.

“Urann’s fucking prick… and balls…”

The oath fell out of Egar’s mouth in something close to reverence.

They stared down on the remains of a city that would in its heyday have swallowed Yhelteth whole.

It carpeted the soft slopes and plains of the landscape ahead, to all intents and purposes it was the landscape ahead—a vast chessboard of crisscrossing boulevards and piled-up, jagged pieces of ruin, stretching out to the horizon wherever you looked. In some places, squinting hard, you could make out the defiant spike of a surviving structure, a wall or dome or tower, but it didn’t really matter, was almost beside the point. There were piles of rubble down there that, by Archeth’s estimate, must rise higher than the tallest towers humans ever built.

A cold, impatient wind blew at them out of the northeast, stropped at their faces, tugged at their hair, and carried particles of a fine grit that stung their eyes in sudden gusts. To Archeth, it seemed to be blowing from the far end of the world.

“Where’d our fiery dancing friend go?” asked the Dragonbane.

She looked around. No sign of the fire sprite.

“Saw it down in the street there,” volunteered Selak Chan. He pointed. “Went along that… oh no, it’s gone now. Must be behind that cracked dome thing. With the pale blue roof?”

Great.

“All right,” she said, with a glance at Egar. “This is as good a place to make camp as any, I guess. Want to call it?”

The Dragonbane frowned and squinted at the sky. “There’s a fair bit of daylight left. Might be good to make use of it, get down onto level ground. And somewhere out of this wind, if we can.”

She shrugged. It was a fair point—she’d forgotten the wind. “As you say, then.”

So they mustered up again, still without sight of the elusive fire sprite, and marched down into the ruined city.

It may range ahead or double back sometimes to check on conditions. Try to be patient when that happens; let it do its work and protect you as best it can.

But she was weary and frayed with the journey, impatient to be done with it all, and by the time she recalled the Warhelm’s warning, they were already well into the city’s shattered, silent precincts, night was in the streets with them, and it was far, far too late for warnings of any kind.

CHAPTER 30

Down the trackless gray-green slop and chop of ocean between the Hironish isles and the northern shores of Gergis, Dragon’s Demise led the makeshift flotilla in what seemed like a charmed dance. These were sea-lanes notorious among mariners for their unpredictable weather and legendary monsters from the deep. The whalers that ran north from Trelayne to pit toothpick harpoons and cord against beasts bigger than their entire vessels came back with yarns of the kraken and the merroigai, of savage, fast-moving squalls that blew up over the horizon in minutes, struck with ship-killing force and as suddenly were gone. They told tales of creeping sea mists and eyes looming over their vessels at mast-tip height in the murk, of the scrape of huge nameless things on their hulls and sudden, swamping waves out of nowhere, of weird lights in the sky and glowing fire in the deep, of heaving, breathing islands that came and went according to no known chart…

Of this, the men aboard Ringil’s ships saw nothing at all. The skies stayed clear and navigable, the winds steady. Once or twice, there were lookout calls on approaching storm weather, but always, by the time the vessels reached any kind of intercept point, the unfriendly clouds seemed somehow to have veered, left them at worst with a few skirts of rain and some halfhearted chop.

“Toldya,” an imperial marine on second watch one night informed his companions at changeover, as they all stood around on the rear deck with the more-or-less trustworthy co-opted privateer steersman. “Heard my lord Eskiath promise plain sailing to the captain before he went to his cabin, and look—plain sailing’s what we got.”

“Yeah,” another man sniggered. “Plain enough even old gripe-guts Nyanar can handle it.”

“You belay that shit, marine.” The ranking watchman roused himself from the rail, turned to his men. “That’s an imperial nobleman you’re talking about there, and he happens to be your skipper, too.”

The offending marine shrugged. “Still couldn’t navigate his way up a whore’s crack, you ask me. Fucking riverboat captain.”

“Prefer to put your trust in some infidel outland sorcerer instead, do you?” sneered one of the retiring watch. “Where’s your holy faith, brother? Where’s your purity?”

“Hey, fuck purity. Infidel cutthroat sorcerer or not, he’s brought us this far. Given us victory over”—a jerked thumb at the silent steersman—“this pirate scum. Besides, what I hear, he’s got about as much Yhelteth blood as northerner on his mother’s side.”

“Yeah, noble house, too.” The man who’d commented on the weather nodded sagely. “Remember that speech we got from my lord Shanta on launch day?”

“Forgotten all about that. Seems like another fucking lifetime, don’t it? But yeah, that’s right. Mother’s family got driven out of Yhelteth, like three generations back or something. They were Ashnal deniers, right?”

“Well, then they were no better than infidels themselves,” snapped the pious one. “Ashnal is the Living Word, no less than any other verse in the Revelation.”

“She did look kind of southern, though. The mother. Didn’t think about it at Lanatray, but now you come to mention it. That nose, the cheekbones and all.”

“Not those cheeks I was looking at.”

Lewd snorts and chortles. A few groans.

“No, but she did, didn’t she. Looked kind of—”

“Looked kind of fuckable, you ask me. Who cares where she’s from? Arse on her like a woman half her age, that’s what counts.”

“Dream on, Nagarn. Dream’s about as close as you’re ever going to get to noble pussy.”

“Oh yeah, what the fuck do you know? There was this one time in Khangset—”

“Gentlemen.”

Hoarse rasp of a voice—it came from the forward corner of the deck, where the companionway steps came up from the ship’s waist below. For all that it wasn’t very loud, it cut through the scuttlebutt like a whip. The marines turned about as one. Even the steersman blinked from his focus on the horizon.

Ringil Eskiath stood propped sideways against the rail, one booted foot still resting on the last rung of the companionway. A harsh, down-curved grin held his face, but there was something huddled about the rest of him, as if beneath the cloak he wore, he’d been badly wounded; as if despite the balmy night, there was a freezing wind blowing from some unacknowledged quarter that only he could feel. The knuckles of his left hand were tight on the rail and from the hunch of his shoulder, it looked as if he was holding himself upright mostly on that grip. The scabbarded Ravensfriend showed at his right hip, over his left shoulder, like some gigantic tailor’s pin shoved diagonally through to hold him in place. Even in the kindly gleam of bandlight, he looked pale and ill.

“My lord?” said someone tentatively.

The ugly grin flexed. “You talking about my mother?”

And he fell forward, flat on his face across the decking.

HE KNEW, VAGUELY, THAT THEY PICKED HIM UP AND BORE HIM BACK DOWN to the door of his cabin, where it gave out onto the main deck. He heard the stifled exclamations as they peered inside and decided not to carry him in there after all. A weak smirk flitted across his face.

Could have told them that.

But the truth was he could not have done, nor could he now. He was too drained of strength to do anything other than loll in the grip of the men who held him. Even the smirk slipped off his face, let go by muscles too sapped to hang on to it any longer.

“Get him to the other end of the deck,” a voice decided. “Get his sword off, it’s dragging. One of us is going to trip on that and go arse over elbow. Someone go wake up the captain.”

He felt himself hefted higher again, carried along under the vast pale billow of sails overhead, the arch of the band and the stars…

They laid him down on something softer than planking—later he’d discover it was one of the weave mats provided for sleeping on deck in warmer climes. They stood back and he let his head roll to the side. Along the line of the deck planks, he could make out his cabin door at the other end of the ship’s waist, still swinging gently open on its hinges. Lurid, slow-shifting lights from within, tendrils of damp mist crawling out, faint groaning. Now and then, sounds like something wet and heavy being dropped, or the scuttle of claws over stone.

He watched it incuriously, while chunks of recollection rained down in his mind like rocks flung from the wall of a city under siege. The most recent were the easiest to pick up—scratching the glyphs off the door hinges, lockplate, and jamb with his bradawl, braced against the door to hold himself up while he did it—stumbling out into the cool night air, falling over—voices, human voices above him on the rear deck—clinging to the companionway as he climbed, one colossally weighted boot step at a time, up toward that human sound…

“My lord Ringil? Prophet’s breath! My lord!”

Ah. Fucking Nyanar.

The captain of Dragon’s Demise stood above him, holding a dressing gown awkwardly closed across his chest. From the look of it, he’d been so mesmerized by what was happening at the door of Ringil’s cabin that he’d almost tripped over Ringil himself.

“My lord Ringil.”

“How—” It was no good, he couldn’t even hold his head up. His voice came out a breathless husk. “How far home are we?”

“Home?” Nyanar’s mouth contracted primly. “We are sailing to Trelayne, my lord. Under your expressed orders.”

“Yeah, what I… meant. How… much farther?”

“We should raise the Gergis coast day after tomorrow, if my calculations are correct.”

Big if. Even his thoughts were truncated, sludgy with the effort they took. “And the… other ships?”

“With us, both of them. Visible and with us. But, my lor—”

“Good. Well done.” Gil managed a feeble nod upward. He could feel himself guttering like a spent candle. “Reef the sails. Heave to. Signal the others… do the same. I’m going across… Sea Eagle’s Daughter… soon as I’m… rested.”

“But, my lord.”

“What?”

Nyanar, pointing aghast. “What about your cabin?”

He rolled his head again, took in the lights and the crawling, moaning mist.

“Oh,” he said faintly. “That. Just… just close the door. Lock… from the outside. It’ll all… all go away by the morning.”

IT DID, MORE OR LESS.

He woke four hours later with the first gray flush of dawn and the voices of watch changeover from the stern. Slow rocking of the ship beneath him, and he opened his eyes on the stark loom of masts with sails fully furled, like towering crucifixion platforms set against the paling sky. He moved stiffly and sat up. Found himself under a generous pile of blankets, shoved them aside and got groggily to his feet, peered out across the water. Sea Eagle’s Daughter and Mayne’s Moor Blooded both sat a couple of hundred yards off to starboard, riding the swells in the same gentle rhythm he could feel under his feet. He thought there were a few figures out on deck, peering back at him.

He saw the Ravensfriend poking out under the blankets—it seemed he’d slept with it. He gathered it up and went with leaden steps along the deck to his cabin door. Tried the door and found it locked. Right. And they’d taken the key. He was turning to find someone to ask after it, when memory shifted in his head like poorly stowed crates in a bad sea.

A small smile bent his lips.

He looked at the lock and it yielded. He heard the snap as the mechanism turned and the bolt went back. He clicked his tongue and the door opened obligingly.

Inside was a cabin and not much else.

If he squinted and slanted his gaze, he got brief flickers of blue light in corners, like threadbare curtains or cobwebs touched by a breeze; the odd gargoyle gape of something he’d rather not look at, peering out at him. But mostly the haunting he’d brought back was gone. He had one severe moment when the wood paneling on the back wall became wet limestone, an inward leaning loom of rock dripping musical droplets of water into puddles at its base—etched everywhere with glyphs that blew cold breath down his spine, and faintly overhead, the retreating scuttle of bony limbs…

He blinked it away. Went in and propped the Ravensfriend in a corner. He was tempted to lie down on the bunk and go back to sleep for a few hours, but there were things to be done, and besides the ceiling might still drip on him if he didn’t keep an eye on it. It will come looking for you now, Hjel tells him on their second night camped out at the cliffs. When you leave the Margins for your own world, bits of the possibilities in the ikinri ‘ska that you’ve touched will squeeze through after you. They won’t harm you, and probably not anyone else, but they can hang around like a bad smell for days if the breach is hurried. Try to plan, to slip through smoothly if you can; it keeps that shit to a minimum.

Well, he hadn’t slipped through smoothly on this occasion. He’d—

Let’s leave that alone for now, shall we, Gil?

They dropped a boat and got him across to Sea Eagle’s Daughter in short order. The two oarsmen who took him were marines, both faces he recognized from the assault on Ornley but could not put names to. They offered him respectful salutes as he climbed down into the boat, and kept silent on the way across, but for the rhythmic grunt of their stroke.

Rakan was waiting for him when he came up the ladder at the other side.

“My lord.” The longing in his look was almost palpable. Ringil had a flash of recall—Hjel, bent over into his lap in the tent, mouth working—and felt briefly guilty. But then it was gone. Too much else to worry about right now.

“Rakan.” He touched the other man’s arm lightly. “Good to see you again, Captain. I’ll need you to give me a good, thorough briefing when we can both grab a moment.”

Flicker of a wink. The Throne Eternal caught it and flushed visibly in the early morning light. He swallowed hard. “Yes, my lord.”

Pack it in, Gil.

“But right now, I need you to rig the block and tackle and get the Helmsman up on deck for me.”

Rakan blinked. “Anasharal, my lord?”

“The very metal motherfucker. Probably going to take half a dozen men, but we’re not going anywhere for a while, so you can spare them.” He looked around the ship’s waist. “We’ll put it over there, by the port bulwark. Upside down.”

“Yes, my lord.” Rakan saluted and went off to gather his men.

“May I ask what you intend?” The soft-over-shrieking unstable layers of the Helmsman’s voice, out of the air at his ear.

Ringil grinned like leaking blood. “Yeah, you can ask.”

Then he went over to the bulwark and hinged the gangway section open, so the space it left gaped out over the ocean beyond.

CHAPTER 31

Down at street level, the wind was less of a presence, but it still moaned in the tangled wreckage over their heads, as if in long mourning for the city it blew through. They wandered in awe along vast boulevards, past rearing, palace-sized piles of rubble, and the wind was their constant, softly keening companion. It funneled up certain thoroughfares, ambushed them around corners in the thickening light, flung sudden fistfuls of grit in their eyes when least expected. It was the single audible intrusion into the silent evening gloom, if you skipped the crunch of their own boots on the detritus-laden streets and the hushed groundswell of muttering between the men.

“Pipe down back there, keep your eyes peeled,” Egar found himself finally driven to bark. “Just ’cause we’re fed and armed don’t make us fucking blade proof.”

He heard a defiant mention of ghosts. Swung about.

“Yeah, ghosts. Ghosts, I’m not fucking worried about. They’re dead already. You see one, wave and smile. Anything else, you kill. Now shut the fuck up and watch your quarters.”

Truth was, he couldn’t really blame them. He could feel the cold, abandoned weight of the city himself, pressing down like something palpable between his shoulder blades and at the nape of his neck. If An-Kirilnar had seemed—and after a fashion, he supposed, was—haunted, this place made it look positively welcoming by comparison. There was a desolation here that beat out anything the Kiriath fortress had to offer. Even the lifeless wasteland they’d just crossed had not seemed so emptied and abandoned. Wind or no wind, he was increasingly sorry that he’d persuaded Archeth not to camp back up on the overlooking ridge.

In the middle of one broad boulevard, they came upon a chunk of fallen rubble, itself almost the size of an Ornley croft house. There was carving on one side, letters nearly as tall as a man in what looked to Egar like Naom script, though he couldn’t make head or tail of what it actually said. He brushed his fingers over the stonework, curious. It was faintly warm to the touch.

He whistled for attention, beckoned to the nearest of the privateers.

“You. You recognize this?”

The man shook his head. “Don’t read, my lord. You want to ask Tidnir, he’s got letters. Went to school and everything, before his old man got wrecked off the cape.”

“Tidnir. Which one’s—”

The privateer nodded obligingly, turned and pointed at someone farther back in the loose group they’d all bunched up into.

“Hoy, Tid,” he barked. “Get over here. Dragonbane wants this shit read.”

Another privateer, younger, but with a shrewd intelligence around the eyes, came warily up to the front. He stood beside Egar and stared up at the march of huge characters carved into the stonework. His lips moved silently.

“So?”

“It’s myrlic, my lord. The ancestor tongue.”

“Well, what does it say?”

“Dunno.” Tidnir scratched his head. “It’s… I think it’s a prayer or s—”

Something tore him down.

It happened faster than you could blink. One moment the young privateer was standing there talking, the next he was gone, and Egar’s face was painted with the sudden hot spray of his blood. The Dragonbane had a flash glimpse of something pallid and fanged as it bore Tidnir to the ground, heard a noise out of battles a decade gone, knew—

Screams from the rear.

“Lizards! ’ware lizards!”

As if the present caved in under him like rotten flooring, dropped him through into the dim nightmare sludge of a past he’d thought buried long ago.

The all-alloy staff lance the Warhelm had made for him—trussed to the pack on his back, blades at either end still clad in their soft Kiriath fabric sheaths—no time, no fucking time, Eg. Forget it. He shed the weapon with his pack, the shrugging work of an instant. But the chain was slung loosely around his neck, halfway ironic ornament of rank, some faint, inexplicable urge had made him keep and wear it that way, and now…

Rip it free sideways in one fist, whip and heft, the harsh pain as the iron links wrapped hard around his tightened knuckles and a barely felt gouge where one of the bolt ends caught as it dragged off his neck. The reptile peon that had torn down Tidnir swung up at him. Only the size of a small, malnourished man but all fangs, all reaching claws, all snarl, and in that fresh nightmare sludge of time slowed down, Egar yelled and swung the chain full force.

Dragonbane!

The lizard leapt, the bolt ends of the chain came flailing in from the side, took it in the skull and knocked it over in a thrashing, hissing mess. Egar used the backswing and hit it again, keep this fucker down, stepped in and lifted the chain high with another yell. Into the skull again, with the savage force of revulsion. The peon’s blood came out, dark in the evening light, almost a human hue. The creature thrashed and tried to roll away. The Dragonbane stamped a boot on it, flailed down again with the chain. He was shouting now, wordless affirmation of his savagery, building to the berserker rage. Twice more and the reptile peon’s thrashing died. It was still twitching, but he knew from hard-won experience that it was done.

Whirl about, check the men.

Their attackers seemed to have come out of the ground, or dropped from the sky. They were on all sides and the company had pulled instinctively into a circle, Throne Eternal shoulder to shoulder with Majak with privateer with Menith Tand’s mercenaries. Most had managed to shed their baggage, a few had shields to hand, but two men were out of the protective formation and down. One still lived, ax haft braced up against the snapping jaws of the lizard that had him pinned…

Egar strode in yelling, long scooping blow with the chain, caught the reptile peon around the head and jaw, the bolt ends snagged and the chain wrapped up. He bellowed and yanked hard, tore the lizard off the man like a herdsmen roping away a buffalo calf. The thing came snapping and snarling and thrashing, on its back but trying to right itself. Keep dragging back, Dragonbane, keep the tension on. He drew a knife left-handed, blade down. Spotted an eye amid the thrashing, coiling fury. Flexed his right arm as if for an uppercut and hauled on the chain, dragged the lizard up close, stabbed down hard into the eye socket. The creature went into spasms, he jerked the knife free and blood gouted thickly from the eye. He stood on the dying reptile and tore the chain loose from its mangled jaws.

The downed man—one of Tand’s mercenaries—rolling shakily to his feet, nodding thanks. Egar bared teeth at him, nodded back, made a sound in his throat that was barely human and swung away.

“Dragonbane!”

He was bellowing it now, gone into the killing rage, bloodied knife in one hand, chain in the other, striding amid the fray, flailing and stabbing, taking down the reptile peons like the incarnation of his own legend, pulling them off his men, putting them away. It felt almost easy, like something he was born for, it felt like release

“Dragonbane! Dragonbane!”

And a cry that seemed to answer from the other side of the boulevard’s expanse.

“Indamaninarmal! Indamaninarmal! My father’s house!”

He swung about at the call, grinning fiercely.

Found Archeth across the street, about to go under.

SHE’D THOUGHT IT WAS THE FIRE SPRITE—FLICKER OF MOTION AT THE corner of her eye, somewhere up amid the piles of rubble on her right. She drifted out across the desolate space of the boulevard, staring upward, scanning the tumbled, tangled mess of broken architecture for another glimpse. Though what the sprite was doing all the way up there…

Vague, unwinding tendril of unease in her chest.

And the first reptile peon jumped her.

Came leaping fanged and snarling down out of some darkened juncture of tumbled masonry above head height, like the screaming wartime past returned.

Knocked her to the stony floor.

She hit and scrabbled back, frantic. Her pack jammed against the ground, the lizard loomed over her, jaws agape. Reflexive combat memories from the war sparking down her nerves, become their own survival imperative, and a million miles from conscious thought, her body followed the command. She lashed out with one booted foot, smashed hard into the snout with her heel. Her right hand clapped to the inverted grip of Wraithslayer, there on her chest. The reptile peon shook itself, came snarling at her again. She rolled up into a crouch, left arm raised to an instinctive guard across her throat and face. She snatched the knife clear of its sheath. The lizard hit and bowled her back over, she slammed her guarding arm forward, drove the snapping, slavering jaws aside and up, away from her face for the time she would need. The reptile peon grabbed at her wrist with a taloned forelimb, would either bite her arm down to the bone or twist and drag it out of the way and take her face instead. But Wraithslayer was loose in her hand now, and there was a noise rising in her throat to match the lizard’s snarl.

“You lie down, motherfucker!” she screamed, and plunged the knife in.

Kiriath steel.

In under the jaws and up—Wraithslayer ripped the lizard’s throat out with no more effort than opening a sealed letter. The reptile peon’s blood gushed out over Archeth’s hand and forearm, exploded out between the snapping fangs, and the creature went down on its side, thrashing a cloud of detritus and dust from the ancient paving as it died. Archeth staggered to her feet coughing, sweeping her surroundings, saw the company beset on all sides and more skulking figures moving in the rubble her attacker had come from.

“Lizards! ’ware lizards!” someone was howling, a bit superfluously.

Bandgleam was in her left hand—she had no memory of unsheathing it—she shrugged clear of her pack, lifted both blades and her chin in invitation to the figures that lurked above her.

“Come on, then!”

They came bounding down the ledges and slopes of the collapsed ruins like scree panthers on the hunt—two lean, armored forms, spined and crested and almost twice the size of the reptile peon she’d just killed. She drew a hard breath in over her teeth. Warrior caste. Sooted, grayish-dark scaled hides, shifted to match the hue of the environment around them—she’d forgotten they could do that. In Demlarashan, they’d been sandstone yellow, in Gergis a piney green. Reared up on their hind legs, they’d tower a full foot or more over her head. They had prehensile tails three yards long that ended as often as not in a savagely barbed spike they knew only too well how to use, and they were smart in a way the reptile peons were not. Warrior caste Scaled Folk had been known to pick up and use discarded human weapons on the battlefield, or to fight with long thorny staffs of bone that appeared to grow out of the same webbed material they were hatched from themselves. But mostly they favored their own heavily armored forelimbs, tipped as they were with taloned claws and razor-sharp elbow spurs. In battle, she’d seen one of those limbs take a blow from a two-handed imperial war ax and not break. Seen the lizard dip and swing, clout the ax owner to the ground with a tail lash, then pounce and plunge an elbow spur down through the soldier’s helmet visor with pinpoint accuracy.

She brandished her knives again. “You want a piece of me? Come on!”

They dropped lithely to the boulevard paving not ten yards from where she was, reared a little on their hind limbs and then circled out, moving to bracket her. Talons scraped on the stonework as they prowled. Eyes gleamed iridescent in the gloom, watched her with a narrow intelligence, better protected than those of the peons, recessed into bony, slanting sockets behind rows of spines—a tough throw for Bandgleam, and not one she wanted to risk just y—

Hurried rattle of talons on paving to her left—the shrill, attacking shriek.

She felt the nape of her neck chill to the sound—old, partly healed memories from the war, reopened like wounds—spin to face it, see the scribble of motion as the lizard came at her, and her flesh cringed.

But corpse-cold recall mapped the creature’s weak points for her—get this right, Archidi—the way she’d have to move. Up on the balls of her feet, swiveling, already in motion as the reptile pounced the last three yards, she was not there, she was here, motherfucker, right here, spinning in from the side and strike with Wraithslayer, hard into the soft, unarmored flesh behind the lizard’s reaching forelimb. The attack shriek scaled to an abrupt peak, dropped off a cliff into a furious hiss as the lizard coiled round with whiplash speed, jaws snapping and seeking.

But Archeth knew better than to stay still behind the blow.

She left Wraithslayer buried to the hilt where it was; Quarterless was already drawn to replace it. Didn’t feel like she’d actually reached for the knife at all—as if Quarterless had leapt eagerly from the sheath in the small of her back as her fingertips trailed past, as if it had flown to the warm calloused wrap of her palm like Ishgrim into her embrace at day’s end. The blade was reversed and she had time to carve a long gouge in the lizard’s haunch and tail root as she spun away. She already knew the other lizard was there at her back. Bandgleam was tugging her around, insisting, yearning toward the fresh target and—

For one panic-stricken moment something shivered and failed in her, the close combat press of what was happening rushed her, stormed her senses and battered them down; she felt abruptly like some Ninth tribe martyr, splayed and tied between four snorting, stamping stallions under a pitiless southern sun, limbs tugged and torn outward by forces beyond any control or power she had to resist…

It is a meditative, communing state, the Warhelm had told her. Common enough among the People, but perhaps you, Archeth Indamaninarmal, with your admixture of human blood, will not be able to raise sufficient discipline to—

Fuck that shit.

She let go, stopped trying to control the knives as individual blades, became the fulcrum on which they turned. She let herself see each blade’s arc of potential, let the arcs unwind and encircle her like white-hot wire, let herself know at the deepest, clearest level of her being what could and could not be done with the gift Tharalanagharst had given her. Plotted the intersection of the attacking Scaled Folk with those glowing wires the same casual way she might note the shift in the pouring arc of a water jug and bring a cup into place beneath—

She hunched and went with Bandgleam’s tugging. She spun about. The warrior caste lizard towered over her, talons poised—close enough to gag on the acrid spice of its skin secretions, close as a mother reaching to lift a squalling infant from the ground. It shrilled at her and struck, one downward flailing forelimb, but Quarterless was there, upflung and angled, took the taloned blow, deflected it the scant inches that Archeth needed, sent the force on downward. And Bandgleam leapt glinting into the gap—through the shadow of the lizard’s stumbling as Archeth straightened out from under the failed attack and stabbed deep, plunged the blade into the reptile’s exposed underbelly, slicing upward, opening like a surgeon, spilling viscera, blood, paler fluids, half-formed eggs from the reproductive canal…

The lizard screamed and flailed and went down thrashing in its own entrails.

Archeth was already turning away.

BUT THESE KNIVES ARE INERT, ARCHETH INDAMANINARMAL. TRACE OF something that might have been disbelief in the Warhelm’s voice. The steel is still sleeping. How have you not awakened them? How do you fight with them like this?

I stab things or I fucking throw them. A bit defensive—she cleared her throat and started again. I was instructed in Hanal Keth from ten years old.

Yes, but Hanal Keth is only the beginning. It is a threshold skill, the dexterity training for what comes after. Were you not told this?

Brief quiet, in which she silently cursed her father’s people and their slipshod ways. Well, what do you think?

I think there is much work to be done, neglected daughter of Flaradnam, and not very much time to do it in. I cannot gift you with a mastery of Salgra Keth, that would take many years. Time we do not have.

Salgra Keth? She repeated the phrase, puzzled. Hanal Keth made sense enough in High Kir—it meant, more or less, the Art of the Blade. But Salgra Keth, that would have to mean… she shook her head… well, let’s see, it was an antique word, but…

Art of the… Juggler? Art of the court conjuror?

Art of the cheap street entertainer?

She shook her head impatiently. You’re not making any sense. I’ve never even heard of this Salgra Keth.

No, so it seems. She thought the Warhelm sounded obscurely disappointed. And as I said, there simply is no time. But the blades have at least seeped into you somewhat, and this does give me hope.

Another silence.

Seeped? she asked guardedly.

WRAITHSLAYER WAS CALLING HER—LIKE A SOFT ACHE IN THE PALM OF HER hand, where the hilt of the knife longed to be. The lizard she’d buried the blade in stalked her, limping slightly on the forelimb where the knife had gone home. Thin rivulets of blood down the scaled skin, droplets across the ancient paving, but it seemed otherwise unharmed and pretty pissed off. The jaws gaped, the thick tongue coiled behind a thicket of fangs, its tip darted delicately out and tasted the air for her. The deeply recessed, iridescent eyes watched her for an opening.

More motion on the rubble piles above.

Archeth caught it from the corner of her eye, saw the wounded lizard turn its gleaming gaze just fractionally away. She chopped a glance that way herself, saw reptile peons prowling, three, maybe four of them, all seeking ledges from which to spring. She circled casually out, back toward the center of the boulevard and the boil of the main fight. The warrior caste lizard reared back on powerfully haunched hind limbs, tilted its spined head toward the ruins, and shrilled violently. The sound seemed to shred the air. Perhaps there was language in there, perhaps not—in all the years of the war, no one had ever been sure how evolved these creatures were, how much conscious thought dwelled behind the gleam in those iridescent eyes, how they communicated—but the reptile peons responded like troops to command. They came spilling down off the rubble, four of them—yeah, it was four after all—and they rushed her.

ALL KIRIATH WEAPONS CARRY AN ESSENCE, FORGED INTO THEM AT THE deepest levels. A soul, if you want to use terms your barbarian friend would understand. With time, that essence begins to put down roots in the weapon’s user, and to borrow selfhood from them. A bond is grown, one transferred particle at a time. Weapon and user grow closer together, better able to cooperate. Locational awareness, predictive sympathetic resonance… Exasperation crept into the Warhelm’s avuncular tone. Did your father really not inform you of any of this?

I already fucking told you he didn’t. Get on with it.

Very well. The knives you were gifted with are powerful and have bonded deeply with you over time. I could not otherwise have found them so easily on the seabed. Whoever forged these blades certainly intended you to make use of their full potential.

She remembered her practice sessions with Grashgal in the courtyard at An-Monal. The phantoms he conjured from the empty air for her to hack and slash at—blank-faced insubstantial gray figures like the ghosts of so many tailor’s mannequins, but armed with a variety of fearsome weapons and growling faintly. More than enough to strike instinctive terror in her ten-year-old heart.

These cannot harm you, Archidi, Grashgal had promised her. But you need to feel as if they could. You need to fight as if your life were in the balance. Because one day it probably will be.

SHE PUT BANDGLEAM THROUGH THE LEAD REPTILE PEON’S EYE, A LONG overhand throw that dropped the creature tumbling and thrashing in the path of the others. The next peon stumbled, fell slithering on top of its stricken comrade, jaws snapping reflexively as the two lizards’ limbs tangled and snagged. The injured reptile bit back in response, blindly, and the two creatures locked up in a writhing, snarling mass. Standard charge break technique from the war years—worked on reptile peons most of the time, they just weren’t that smart. But—

The other two lizards made it past. Awful predator grace in motion, as they swerved symmetrically either side of the fight in their path, swerved back again to home in on where she stood.

It barely slowed either of them down.

Laughing Girl came out, left-handed to replace Bandgleam, and Falling Angel still in her boot was a soft-pressing reassurance against her calf but meant she had only one safe throw left, so let’s make it count here, Archidi—

The peon on the right was fractionally ahead when it leapt. She hurled herself sideways, put its body between her and the other lizard, saw the pale unarmored flash of throat offered, flung Quarterless underhand. Fuck, she flubbed it—the knife went home but with less than full force, pinned inch-deep in the pale flesh and flapped, then fell out again. No time, no time, the lizard was cornering on its haunches from the failed pounce, was relocating its prey, was on her. Falling Angel jumped out of her boot and into her right hand, distracting slash with Laughing Girl in her left and then hurl your full weight in against the reptile and stab, frantically, into that throat. See what damage you can do at this range, shall we? The lizard shrilled and flailed back at her. She felt talons get through her leathers and rip furrows in her flesh. She screamed, and then, voice unlocked, went on screaming, counterpoint to the lizard shriek—“Indamaninarmal! My father’s house!”—all the time hacking, stabbing, work those wounds in the throat, find an artery in there somewhere…

The lizard fell on her. The other peon leapt fully onto its companion, clambered over and tried to bite Archeth’s face off. She heaved back out of the way, spared a single, ill-aimed slash with Laughing Girl, and cut a gash in the underside of the thing’s jaw. But the first lizard’s weight had pinned her in place. The one that was trying to bite her slithered farther over, wove its head about trying to get closer. If she didn’t…

There—the eye!

“My father’s house!” Sobbed out as she buried Laughing Girl deep in the offered eye socket. The knife sank in up to the hilt, the lizard screamed, almost like a human infant—reared back, ripped the hilt of Laughing Girl out of her grasp. Some impulse she had no time to question—she flung her empty hand up and out, and there was Quarterless, somehow up off the detritus-strewn boulevard paving and into the instinctive curl of her palm, reversed. She—

Something tore the remaining reptile peon off her. Archeth had a confused impression of chain link slicing down through the gloom, wrapping around the snout and jaws, a hooting scream that sounded like joy, and then the lizard was gone, as if swept away by the wind. She hinged up from the stomach, suddenly freed of the crushing weight, saw the Dragonbane with one boot on the injured peon, flailing down at its skull with the chain.

Behind him—shit!

The warrior caste lizard had taken a shortcut to sorting out the first two squabbling reptile peons. It had pounced and knocked the two creatures apart, then bitten the injured peon’s throat out. Was crouched there now, bloody fanged, over the twitching remains, shrilling instruction at the survivor as it picked itself up.

“Eg! Watch your back!”

The warrior caste lizard’s long head snapped up, the iridescent eyes fixed on her. Almost as if she saw the decision it made then, heard its actual thoughts. It was coming for her, right fucking now, to put an end to this ridiculous soft two-legged thing that its peons couldn’t quite seem to kill…

Her own decision was taken for her as fast. She never knew if it was her or the knives, or some incomprehensible combination of both.

Her arms came up in unison, Quarterless and Falling Angel cocked without thought for the throw. Fuck are you doing, Archidi? It felt as if each arm tugged into place with no volition on her part at all. The warrior caste lizard took one poised pace forward, and she threw, hard, thick grunt of effort all the way up from the hinging tension of the muscles in her stomach where she still lay on her back, impossible precision, right past the bristling array of protective spines and bone ridges, and both the iridescent eyes were suddenly gone, put out like embers, the blunt, use-worn butts of the knives sprouting in their place.

The lizard crashed forward on its long snout in the dust.

Archeth curled to her feet like an echo of the motion that had flung the knives. Egar was still turning away from the dead reptile peon, gore-clotted chain swinging from his clenched right fist, ready to face the remaining peon, but she was closer. No idea what she was doing at all, she stalked forward, crouched with arms spread out and both hands splayed like claws, lips peeled back from teeth, eyes somehow blind, what the fuck are you doing, Archidi, you’re not even armed…

At less than three yards’ distance, she screamed in the last lizard’s face.

The reptile peon scrabbled backward in a tangle of limbs, coiled about, and fled. Back up onto the mountainous piles of shattered masonry, leaping ledge to ledge and then gone, into some bolt-hole or other amid the rubble. She breathed in hard. Straightened up and sniffed.

The boulevard behind her had quietened, and she knew without turning—some old battle instinct unfolding for her like a creased and stained campaign map—that the skirmish was done.

Egar reached her side, panting. Stared up after the reptile peon.

“Where’d that come from?” he asked.

She jerked a nod. “Up there, same as the rest of them. Must be a nest.”

“Yeah—wasn’t really talking about the lizards, Archidi. Talking about you.” He got his breathing down. “What you just did there, big battle scream and no fucking knife. Where’d that come from?”

“Oh.” She shrugged, feeling oddly embarrassed. “Lot on my mind, you know. Guess it had to come out.”

“Uh—yeah. Well, you want to try keeping a blade in your hand next time? As a personal favor to your sworn bodyguard here, I mean?”

She coughed a laugh, winced as sharp pain flared across her ribs. Sudden recollection of the claw wounds she’d collected in the tangle with the peons. She lifted her arm on that side, put her hand to the site of the pain, and brought it away liberally smeared with her own blood.

“Fucker tagged me,” she said with mild surprise.

“Let me look.” The Dragonbane came around and peered, prodded a couple of times, enough to make her flinch and curse. “Yeah, you’ll live. Couple of nasty scratches is all, looks like the leathers took most of the sting out of it. Get you sewn up, just soon as we take stock of this fucking mess, all right?”

“All right.” She said it absently, staring around at the lizards she’d killed.

Listening to the soft calling of her knives.

CHAPTER 32

They got Anasharal up through the forward hatch with a lot of grunting and cursing but no real difficulty, then Rakan had the block and tackle moved down the deck and they dragged the Helmsman to where Ringil stood waiting. None of the men really wanted to touch the iron carapace, or get within reaching distance of the crablike legs folded into its underside, so there was an awkward delicacy to the whole operation that took longer than would have been strictly necessary with some other cargo. Ringil said nothing about it. He waited patiently until the Helmsman was upended at his feet and the ropes removed. He waved back the men, saw how they hung about at a short distance, Rakan included, watching in silent fascination to see what might happen next between the dark mage and the iron-imprisoned demon at his feet.

“Hello there, Anasharal,” he said.

“Good day to you, too, Eskiath.” If the Helmsman felt at any disadvantage, it wasn’t letting it show. “Not wearing your much-vaunted Kiriath steel this morning, I see.”

“Don’t need it right now.” Ringil went pointedly to the opened gangway section and peered over the edge. “Do you know how deep the ocean is around here?”

“Helmsman is a poor substitute for the High Kir word it purports to translate. I am not some ship’s pilot. No, I do not know how deep this ocean is.”

“Nor do I,” admitted Gil amiably. “But I’m told it goes down at least a mile. More in some places.”

“How interesting.”

He came back to the Helmsman and put one booted foot on the edge of its upended carapace, rocked its weight judiciously back and forth a couple of times on the iron curve where it touched the deck. His voice hardened.

“You want to go have a look? Find out firsthand?”

“Do you think you’re threatening me, Eskiath?” Amusement, trickling in the edge-of-hysterical avuncular tones.

Ringil shrugged. “I’m not sure. The pearl divers in Hanliagh told me once that the deeper you go in the ocean, the harder it presses on you. It hurts your ears, apparently. Maybe it’ll hurt you, too, a mile down. Maybe it’ll crack you open like a nut. Spill out whatever essence is locked up inside all that metal.”

A longish pause.

“When we were summoned from the void,” the Helmsman said coldly, “there was a reason the Kiriath encased us in iron. I don’t think you’d like me outside of this containment vessel.”

“I don’t like you much inside it. And it’s a long swim back to the surface, so you know what—I think I’ll take my chances.” Ringil dug out his bradawl. “I have some questions for you, Helmsman. You’re going to answer them for me as helpfully as you can, or you’re going to be taking a very close look at the seabed. And just so we know we’re all on the same page…”

He knelt and put a steadying hand on the rim of the carapace. Commenced gouging the most powerful of the Compulsion glyphs into the metal.

“What do you think…” Anasharal’s voice dropped away in midsentence, something Gil had never heard it do before. There was a peculiarly human quality to the way it sounded, something he hoped he could count as weakness. He got the first glyph finished—it was hard going; the carapace barely admitted the faintest of scratches, even from the bradawl’s Kiriath steel point—and started on the second.

Felt the metal under his hand beginning to get warm.

“That sting a bit, does it?” he asked, with a levity he didn’t feel. Hjel had told him he’d need at least a five-character string for this to work on an entity that wasn’t human, and he wasn’t sure Anasharal was going to give him the chance to get that much down.

“You are making a grave mistake, Ringil.”

Third glyph done. The Helmsman’s carapace was hot now, hot enough that it took an effort of will to keep his hand in place. He breathed through the pain, sank himself in concentration on the tracery of the glyphs, kept on gouging. Fourth… glyph… done. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Rakan leaning toward him like a frantic hound on a leash, heard his shout only faintly. His hand was scorching, blistering across palm and fingertips, but no matter, it’s a wound like any other, Gil. Stay on your feet, you win the fight. Still on your feet when it’s done, then all wounds heal well enough in time. The fifth glyph was the closer, simple enough, no intricacies. Get it done. He made the primary stroke—the first cross—caught the faintest whiff of something suspiciously like crisping pork—the second cross, the curlicue tail…

And finished.

He snatched back his hand. Came to his feet as Rakan rushed in, voice tortured, my lord, my lord, your hand! Gil glanced incuriously at the damage—he’d had worse from the splash of dragon venom in the war—and lifted it to his face. He blew gently on the blistered flesh, glanced sideways at Rakan, allowed the tiniest crimped corner of an acknowledging smile.

“It’s fine, Captain. Thank you. Just bring me some salve and a bandage.”

Rakan hung wordless for a second, staring into his face, then hurried away. Ringil looked bleakly past his splayed and scorched fingers at the Helmsman.

Here we go, then. Moment of truth.

“Cut out the heat, Anasharal. Now.”

And across the curve of the carapace, the glyphs lit in lines of bluish fire, brighter and clearer than the scratches he’d made. The Helmsman gave out a strangled sound.

Ringil gave it a few moments, then stooped, cupped his injured hand, and risked the back of his curled fingers against the carapace.

It was cooling fast.

“Right yourself, if you can.”

A clicking, fingering motion from the Helmsman’s limbs as they flexed out of their recesses. The mushroom-top carapace rocked barely back and forth, less than he’d moved it himself with his boot. He nodded.

“Fine, you can stop trying now. Do you begin to grasp the new relationship we have?”

Sullen silence.

“An answer, please.”

“Yes, then.” It shocked through him. The avuncular accents were gone, stripped away from the underlying tautness of tone. If there’d been any volume to the Helmsman’s voice, it would have been a shriek. As it was, the watching men flinched back from the sound it made. “I understand what you’ve done.”

“Then stop trying to fight it. You’re wasting your time anyway, it can’t be done.” He tossed the lie off casually. Truth was, he had no idea what the limits of his new powers might be. You never fucking did with the ikinri ‘ska, until said limitation came and tripped you up, dumped you on your black mage arse. “Talk to me normally, Anasharal. Show me you’ve stopped wriggling.”

“Very well.” Anasharal’s voice regained some of its previous disdainful poise. “So you’ve been back to the wounds between the worlds, then, like the feeding maggot you are. Burrowed deep this time, did you?”

“We’re not talking about me, Helmsman.”

But the levered chunks of memory came crashing down on him all the same.

BACK FOR MORE, I SEE, RASPS THE HUSK OF A VOICE OVERHEAD, AND A shadow moves through the miserly ration of light sifting down from above. No end to your appetite for suffering, it seems. But then what else should we expect from a hero?

He freezes where he is, Ravensfriend at a useless guard. Hears the swift scuttle of limbs down the sides of the limestone defile he’s in, senses the bulk of a body hanging suspended at his back. Something sharp touches him on the nape of the neck and then the lower spine. There’s a sound somewhere between a snigger and a sigh, and along the worn smooth walls all the glyphs light up in traceries of blue.

Am I intruding? he asks, as steadily as he can manage.

A clawed limb creeps up over his shoulder like some living, insectile thing. The claw-tip chucks him under the chin, tilts his head back as if for a knife. He gets the sense that the thing’s own head is snuggled up close behind his other shoulder.

At least he does not deny his title any longer, the voice whispers in his ear. A learning curve of sorts, I suppose. But as to intruding, Ringil Eskiath, you’ve been doing that since well before we last met. As I am sure you’re already well aware, so let’s not pretend to a contrition you do not feel, eh?

I’m, he swallows against the lift of the thing’s clawed finger, told that I owe you some thanks for my passage through the Dark Gate.

Ah. The little moon-murderers, dabbling again. And what else did they choose to share with you on this occasion?

They said the Talons of the Sun are back in play.

There’s a long pause. The clawed finger stays at his throat. He hears water trickle and drip on the limestone walls, echoing in the narrow confines of the defile.

And you’ve come here to gather force against the day of Reckoning, the Creature from the Crossroads muses. As heroes must. Well, it’s certainly not original, but then I suppose the permutations available are somewhat limited. We could not have mended the world otherwise. Not with humans still in it, anyway. So then—let us see how this writes itself out.

The clawed finger eases out from under his chin. The glow in the lines of glyph script fades. Ringil lets his neck relax, lets the point of the Ravensfriend droop and rest on the gently rising slope of the passage floor. He hears a scratch and rustle behind him, like heavy vellum pages turning. The rattle of a throat clearing.

There were times he dreamed that the cage had taken him after all, the husking voice recites in his ear. That he made some impassioned speech confessing guilt and repentance on the floor of the Hearings Chamber, and offered himself up for the sentence instead. That the Chancellery law-lords in their enthroning chairs and finery murmured behind their hands, deliberated among themselves for a space, and finally nodded with stern paternal wisdom. That the manacles were unlocked and his wife and children—

My apologies. That is someone else.

Ringil swallows, hard. Yeah, sounds like it.

Another hero, another betrayal. The pages scrape and turn. It’s sometimes hard to tell them apart.

If you say so.

The echoes and borrowings, you see, the endless piled-up repetition in both truth and tale, the sheer bloody cannibalism of it all. We were learning your myth base as we worked trying to understand who you were as a species even as we stitched your world back into something we thought you might recognize and warm to. Ah—here we are, this is you:

He sits on a dark oak throne, facing the ocean.

No bindings anymore, he’s loose and comfortable in his seat, the wood is worn and scooped from long use, and the scalloped curves fit him perfectly. No serpent-tanged sword trying to gouge its way inside him, no standing stones, no dwenda. The sea is calm, small waves rolling gently in and breaking knee deep. A loose breeze ruffles his hair.

Very nice, Gil says hoarsely. I could settle for that.

Ah, yes, well… Something suddenly oddly evasive in the Creature’s tones. Moving swiftly along, though… let’s see…

The pages turn again. He hears them crackle at his ear.

It’s as if he’s suddenly standing in freezing fog, the voice husks at him. Vague, tentacular stripes of darkness reach up around him like riverbed weed caught in a current, or bend away in all directions like leather straps tied tight. Through the mist, he sees the figures of dwenda, locked into postures that he only slowly recognizes as glyph casts, frozen in time. There’s a shivering tension through the air, like lightning undischarged, and he understands that—

The Creature jolts to another abrupt halt.

That a mistake too? Ringil asks hopefully.

No, it’s definitely you. But, well… it is a Heroic Reckoning, after all. We’d be ill-advised to preempt too much.

There’s a brief, awkward pause, in which neither of them seems to know what to say next.

I don’t know anything about a reckoning, Ringil lies, experimentally, to see if he can get away with it. I’m here because I need to free my friends.

Well, well—what resonance! Perhaps we can do something with that.

I’m sorry?

Don’t be. Though I warn you—you’ll need to smarten up your act if you hope to prevail against the Talons of the Sun. I once handed you as much power as I thought you could bear at the time, Ringil Eskiath, and you still managed to drop most of it. I found your enemies for you, opened a path and delivered you to a final confrontation with them, but you were apparently still not able to finish the job. Despite the merroigai’s good opinion, I find you fragile, hero. Very fragile.

Ringil begins to turn around in the narrow space. A clawed limb grabs his shoulder with biting force, deftly turns him back and holds him there.

It’s really better if you don’t look at me, husks the voice. I am not cloaked as I was at the crossroads, and I should hate to shatter your sanity.

You were at my back, that first time at the cliffs?

Ah. Clarity at last. What, did you think you commanded the cold legions at thousandfold strength the way you trail that truncated little trio around behind you? You think you defeated Risgillen of Illwrack alone?

A shiver runs through him—the memories are puddles, distorted and shattered apart with every fresh drip of recall that adds to them. He’s still not really clear what happened in the temple at Afa’marag—only that he won, and left blood and ruin in his wake.

You sent Hjel to find me, to bring me out, away from Seethlaw’s… He swallows. To bring me out.

I sent the dispossessed prince on an errand. He did not know it was you he was looking for. He had, I think, begun to forget you by then. To let your memory go, at least.

Ringil grimaces. Ignores the cold chill that walks along his spine with those words and all they imply. He grabs after more solid, immediate stuff.

You sent me to Hjel, that first time. You brought us together. A sudden, flaring ember of intuition. Was it your presence in the Grey Places, then, that twisted time so badly out of joint? Are you an intruder here, too?

The quiet again, the stealthy trickle of water, and a click and scrape as limbs rearrange themselves on the walls of the defile behind him. A sound like the sighing of a giant, somewhere a long way off. Cool air comes pushing down the passage at his back, coats his neck with a touch like ice.

You, don’t, listen, says the Creature from the Crossroads. I am a builder here, and to the considerable benefit of your whole species. Perhaps you might afford me a little respect on that account.

The Dark Queen called you a Book-Keeper.

Before a book can be kept, it must be written. Look around you, little hero, and see what my kind have written in this place.

The glyphs flare fierce blue again, then blinding white, too bright to look at directly. The whole dark defile lights up with their fire, drowns him in violent light. Ringil lifts a shielding hand to his eyes.

Then why—he starts.

Why? Why what? The voice seems to have flared up with the glyphs. It’s hoarse and grating still, but there’s a loaded force to it like a cold wind blowing. Why did we mend the world? Why bother to repair the damage done? Why stitch the wounds closed with the ikinri ‘ska? As well ask why your mother raised you, why your father sired you. Why an oak spreads branches against the sun and thrusts roots down into the—

No. It comes out a strained yelp—the glyph light is too much for him. He’s having to screw his eyes shut against the glare. Not that. Why did you bring me together with Hjel?

Let us just say I perceived a symmetry. A sudden, cold amusement in the Creature’s tones. Do you find the arrangement with the dispossessed prince… unpleasant?

You know I don’t. He summoned poise, strength. Pours an iron calm into his voice. But I’m sick of being a puppet for every supernatural power through the tavern door. The Dark Court, the Helmsmen, and now you. It’s getting old. If I’m being dealt into this fucking stupid game you all like so much, I want to know what we’re playing for, and I want…

Sudden scrape of clawed limbs in the narrow space behind him—his voice dies out, sinks back down his throat as he feels the talons grab him roughly under first one arm then the other, then between the legs. Abruptly, he’s hoisted a yard off the floor of the light-blasted passage, held dangling there amid the radiant glyphs.

You object to being a puppet, eh? The voice is at his ear again, very close. Some sideways moving mouthpart brushes stickily at his neck, and he hears an alarming glottal clicking in three distinct stages. There are worse fates, I assure you.

RAKAN BROUGHT THE SALVE AND BANDAGES, AND A LOW WOODEN STOOL. He made Gil sit down and then knelt before him to treat the burns himself, something that might have raised some eyebrows if their manpower hadn’t been quite so thinly spread across the three ships. As it was, the gathered men showed little interest in the process; they’d seen wounds dressed often enough, and it didn’t look as if Black Mage flesh was that much different to anyone else’s. They were growing restless now that the show with the Helmsman seemed to be over, so Rakan dismissed them, bridging the authority gap between Throne Eternal and imperial marine command with what Ringil thought was admirable aplomb. The young captain was growing visibly into his responsibilities as need arose; he’d make a fine commander someday.

Yeah—if you can get him home in one piece, Gil. If you can avoid getting him killed in some Trelayne back alley a couple of weeks hence.

Oh, shut up. Like any of us have a choice right now.

Sure you do. Crowd on sail and make a run for it. Swing out wide of the cape, dodge the League pickets or bluff them somehow if you have to, run south till we’re in safe waters. Let Jhiral negotiate to get the others back ransomed and unharmed.

But he knew he wasn’t going to do any of that, so instead he sat there with hand held docilely out, and watched his young imperial lover smear salve liberally over the burns on his fingers and palm. Enjoyed the soft, slick touch while he could. When Rakan looked up, Ringil caught his eye and dropped the flicker of a wink. Rakan flushed and lowered his gaze.

Never mind command responsibilities. Wouldn’t mind seeing him grow visibly somewhere else, if we can get six minutes’ privacy between the two of us.

Pack it in, Gil. Really. Not like the balance here isn’t ticklish enough as it is, without the two of you getting caught trading sweet nothings.

Rakan finished up with the salve, bound Gil’s whole hand from fingertips to wrist, and then muttered a brief prayer over it. Gil didn’t know if this last was out of genuine faith, ingrained custom, or just for show. The Revelation wasn’t an area they’d really touched on. The scant trysts and stolen hours in the bustle of preparing for the expedition had been far too precious to waste on other men’s abstracts, and once they actually set out for the Hironish, opportunities for anything much more significant than a quick fuck had been rare. It all added a poignant spice to their intimacy, it kept the relationship fresh and new, but it also meant—this dawning now on Gil for possibly the first time—that he barely knew the younger man at all.

Knows how to set a good field dressing. Flexing his hand experimentally in the windings of the bandage. Torso like a god, arse like a peach, legs like a battle marshal’s runner. Sucks cock like there’s no tomorrow. What else you need to know, Gil?

He stood up and nodded his thanks. Curt and manly, in case anyone was watching. He faced Anasharal again. Paced around the upended iron hull a couple of times.

“So then, Helmsman,” he said breezily. “You want to tell me what you really dragged us all up here to the arse end of the known world for?”

Long silence. A couple of the Helmsman’s limbs twitched pettishly at the air.

“Oh, very well,” it grumbled.

CHAPTER 33

Battlefield aftermath calm.

The day’s light was all but gone—Archeth stood in closing gloom amid a quiet laced with the groans and clenched curses of injured men. She shook off the postcombat daze she was sinking into and set about retrieving her knives. Stooped beside the dead warrior caste lizard and worked at pulling first Falling Angel then Quarterless out of its eye sockets. It took some doing; the blades had gone home hard. The wounds in her side stung with the effort of pulling and she spiked her knuckles more than once on the protective spines before she was done. Aware of the Dragonbane coming over to watch, she bit back each yelp as it rose to her lips.

“You want a hand with that?”

“No, I got it.”

For some reason she couldn’t name, she didn’t want anyone to touch the knives right now. Flash recall of the fight came and went, impressions she didn’t know whether to trust or not. Falling Angel, jumping out of her boot and into her reaching hand. Quarterless, gone, wasted in a flubbed throw and lying loose on the boulevard paving until… she’d grabbed it back up, hadn’t she? Reached back with her empty left hand, somehow found it, somehow knew it was there, and…

She knew where all of them were.

It dawned on her, crouched there twisting Quarterless back and forth by tiny increments, working it loose of the bony ridges around the lizard’s eye. With the same certainty that she felt the butt of Quarterless in her hand, she felt Falling Angel here, laid neatly by the toe of her boot, yet to be cleaned of the gore it was clotted with; Wraithslayer, there, jammed in under the soft reptile armpit a yard down from the head where she crouched; Laughing Girl and Bandgleam, both buried in dead reptile peon eye sockets, there and over there. She felt the locations to the inch, the same way she’d know exactly where to reach and pick up her goblet at breakfast without ever lifting her eyes from the book in her lap.

It is a meditative, communing state…

Quarterless came clear with a sticky scrape. She held it up, then cast around in vain for something to wipe the blade clean. Silently, the Dragonbane handed her a torn piece of cloth, already much stained and marked.

“Thanks. Is this…?”

Egar nodded over toward the chunk of rubble in the middle of the boulevard. There was a crumpled body lying beside it. “Privateer kid’s shirt. He’s not going to need it.”

“No, I guess not.” She cleaned Quarterless thoroughly, put it away at the small of her back, picked up Falling Angel. “How many’d we lose?”

“Looks like nine.” The Dragonbane grimaced—as if he was trying to work a deeply lodged piece of meat out from between two of his front teeth. “Just closed the eyes on number eight, and there’s one of Tand’s still not finished dying, but he won’t be long. Fucking peon opened him right up, hip to heartstrings.”

She stowed Falling Angel in her boot and stood up. “Do anything for him?”

“Fed him some of that powder your iron demon gave us. Seemed to work. His pals are there, praying with him. Like I said, won’t be long.”

“All right.” Twinge of krinzanz longing at the mention of powders and pain—she crushed it out. Set one boot against the bulk of the dead warrior caste lizard, bent her leg and shoved hard so it rolled over and she could get to Wraithslayer. A thought struck her. “What about Kaptal?”

“Yeah, not a scratch on him. He was brandishing that knife you gave him, but I didn’t see any blood on it. Don’t know if the lizards even tried to touch him.”

“Neat trick if you can pull it off.” She stood up with Wraithslayer in her hand, inspected the blade minutely. “We got anybody too badly hurt to march?”

Egar shook his head. “They’ll march. They’ll fucking double-time it, if it gets them out of this place any faster.”

“Yeah, well, we’re not getting out of here tonight, that’s for sure. Going to have to camp somewhere close.”

“Yeah.” He hesitated. “Should have stayed up on the ridge.”

“But we didn’t.” She shot him a glance. “Probably wasn’t any safer up there anyway, Eg.”

He grunted.

She stowed Wraithslayer in the magical upside-down sheath on her left breast. Drifted across the boulevard paving to the dead reptile peon she’d killed with Bandgleam. “You notice anything about this stonework?”

“It’s warm.” The Dragonbane trailed after her, scuffing at the paving with a boot tip. “In patches, anyway.”

“Yeah.” She stooped for the knife, tugged it free. Slim-bladed Bandgleam came easily out of the blood-glutted eye socket, rested lightly in her hand as she wiped it down. “The way I figure it, either the dwenda built it like this, or it’s maybe something the Warhelm’s weapons did when they brought this lot down. Either way, it must have been a beacon for any Scaled Folk that washed up this far north.”

“Looks that way.”

She put the knife away, across from Wraithslayer on her chest. Looked around at the scattered reptile corpses and the men who had died. Shook her head.

“I doubt this is all of them, Eg.”

TAND’S MAN TOOK LONGER DYING THAN ANYONE EXPECTED, AND HE WENT hard despite the Warhelm’s painkilling powders. Some horror of letting go in this haunted place, leaving his mortal remains here for whatever might stalk down these desolate boulevards once night fell. His fellow freebooters reassured him as best they could, but their own faces were portraits in ill-ease and the dying man was no fool. So they set out a few of the radiant bowls against the encroaching dark and stood or sat around in the glow they cast, trying not to listen to the mercenary’s slowly weakening curses and groans. Yilmar Kaptal was impatient to move on, but his protests dried up in the face of a grim stare from one of the other freebooters. Archeth stowed her own impatience where no one could see it, sat at another bowl instead and submitted stoically to the Dragonbane’s blue-lit ministrations with needle and thread. Turned out he was a nifty little seamstress when he wanted to be.

A little later, the fire sprite showed up, bright orange and red in the windy darkness. It flickered about on the fringes of the company, like an embarrassed late guest shown in to a dinner already begun. Egar noticed before she did—she was lost in the soft blue glow from the bowl. He leaned across to where she sat cross-legged and touched her on one knee.

“Hsst. Our friend’s back.”

“About fucking time,” she said sourly. Her wounds ached, and the dying mercenary’s dribble of imprecation and pleading was getting to her worse than she’d expected.

“Occurs to me,” said the Dragonbane slowly, “it maybe went off to scout a route that didn’t take us in sniffing range of any lizard nests. We should have waited up on that fucking ridge.”

“Yeah, but we didn’t. Let it go, Eg.”

He said nothing, and they sat in silence together, listening to the dying man and the hoot of the wind in the architecture. Presently, one of the other freebooters came over and made brief obeisance. Archeth nodded bleakly up at him.

“What is it?”

“A boon, my lady. Ninesh asks if you can leave the walking flame here to watch over him in death.”

She rolled her eyes. “Well, obviously fucking not, no.”

“Or then, if the demon at An-Kirilnar might be asked to send out another flame to do it.” The mercenary made an awkward gesture. “He’s delirious, my lady. But it would comfort him to be told the lie. It would help him to let go.”

Archeth remembered the stench of voided bowels and burned flesh in the house at Ornley, the unending keening from the next room. What Tand’s men had done to the islander—she tried to recall his name, but it wouldn’t come—and his family. She couldn’t recall if this dying thug had been there or not, but she imagined it wouldn’t have made much difference one way or the other. The mercenaries were all cut from the same grubby cloth—veteran soldiers of fortune, recruited by reputation for the expressed purpose of securing their master’s slave caravans, shipments, and stables. It was grim, brutal work and Tand wouldn’t have been choosing them for the milk of human kindness in their hearts.

She shot a glance at Egar. The Dragonbane shrugged.

“If it gets us moving any quicker.”

“Oh, all right. I’m going.”

She levered herself to her feet, wincing at the twinge across her ribs from the stitches. She made her way over to the dying man and his companions, no clear sense of how she was supposed to do this at all. Giving comfort had never been her strong point—too much stored bitterness of her own to carry around, never mind anyone else’s fucking pain.

Around the makeshift encampment, men stopped their conversations and watched her.

Great.

You walk, Archidi, you find the strength. The Dragonbane’s words filtered back through her memory. Some men don’t have that strength, so you have to lend it to them.

The other mercenaries shuffled back, gave her access. The dying man looked up at her in the blue gloom, face beaded with sweat, breath sawing from his lungs in tight little gusts. They’d pillowed him on his bedroll, put a blanket over his body and his wound, but he was shivering as if they’d stripped him naked.

She crouched at his side. His eyes tracked the motion, she saw how he flinched from her. Burned black witch. She put a hand on his shoulder and he made a noise like the snort of a panicking horse. But his eyes were on her face and his gaze clung there, fearful and wondering, like some almost drowned man, staring at the grim rise of a shoreline beyond the chop of the waves he struggled against.

“You have fought well.” The words were out of her mouth before she fully realized what she was going to say. “You have stood against dragons.”

“I, I… yeah. Fuckers got me good, Mom. Got me good.” The tormented features twisted. “They, they, I couldn’t—”

“They are all slain now,” she said, astonished at the ease with which the banalities spilled from her lips. “And we are victorious, and, uhm, in your eternal debt for your part in that victory. You have given your blood so that your comrades might go on. Among the Black Folk, that is a sacred act. Know, then, that the Great Spirit at An-Kirilnar has also seen your sacrifice and will send a flame guardian to mark your passing. Go to rest in pride. From now until, uhm, the end of all days, the fire will stand here, in memory of your hero’s name and in protection of your resting place.”

“I…” A trace of clarity surfaced through the delirium in the desperate eyes. “Is it so, my lady? Really?”

“Really,” she said firmly. She took one of his scarred and calloused hands, pressed it between her own. “Now go to good rest. Let go.”

The mercenary hung on a little longer regardless, but his breathing seemed less panicked now, and he cursed less than he had before. He confused Archeth with his mother some more, asked her not to leave him, asked her why her face was so sooted up, was anything wrong, had something happened to Bereth§ . He mumbled to his comrades, and to others who were not there, told them all he was a hero in the eyes of the Black Folk, smiled like a child with the

words.

Shortly after that, his breathing stumbled and then stopped.

They sat around him for a still couple of moments, just to be sure. One of the other mercenaries leaned in and pressed fingers to the neck. Held the back of his hand to the open mouth. Nodded. Archeth got up, a little stiffly.

“Right. Do what you need to do for him. But get it done fast, we’re pulling out. This isn’t a safe place to spend the night.”

She nodded across at Egar, and the Dragonbane stood up, started barking orders. The men scrambled for their gear, relief palpable in the sudden surge of motion. She moved, too, trying to shrug off the dead man at her back. But something of him clung stubbornly on. She paused on her way to get her pack, stood a moment looking back, watching the surviving freebooters with their dead comrade in the light from the radiant bowl.

They were frisking the newly made corpse for valuables.

CHAPTER 34

In those dark and desperate days, the Kiriath did not much care what they summoned from the void, nor what forces they set free in the process. Arrayed against them was all the glimmering, might of the witch folk, and a seven-thousand-year-old Empire built on sorcery that could not coexist with their science. A reckoning was inevitable, and the powers the witch folk wielded were ancient and terrible. It was no time for half measures. From the void, the Named Commanders drew seven spirits in fury, constrained them in iron, and charged them with protection of the Kiriath people and extermination of the Aldrain foe.

Chief among these was the Warhelm Ingharnanasharal.

Perhaps not the most savage among the summoned seven, nor even the most lethal, but Ingharnanasharal it was who burned brightest and was most favored among the Kiriath command. Who was chosen for the highest duty, flung up into the heavens like a bright, newly minted coin, while the others remained below, moored to the Earth and their several separate concerns. To Ingharnanasharal fell the duty of the Watch from On High, of seeking out the Aldrain wherever they lurked on the globe and bringing their doom, and more, of tasting the winds and particles of the world, to understand what had been done to its fabric in the age before, that would allow such outrages against reason as the Aldrain dominion, to fashion that understanding into weapons and strategy that would bring the enemy to their knees and deliver the final blow.

In the beginning, the war went hard for the Kiriath, and on more than one occasion Ingharnanasharal came close to being clawed out of the sky by—

“A-hem.”

THE HELMSMAN PAUSED.

“Can we speed this up?” Ringil asked mildly. “I don’t want to hear your old war stories, I’ve got plenty of those myself. Let’s skip the Ancient Clash of Elder Races, shall we, and try to concentrate on current events?”

“You ask questions that require context if you are to understand the answers.” Anasharal’s voice was unmistakably sulky. “The war against the Aldrain is the cornerstone of that context. Ingharnanasharal was given a sacred and eternal trust to fight that war—”

“Yes, all very noble, I’m sure. This Ingharnanasharal—not a close relative of yours, by any chance?”

Silence. From the Compulsion glyphs graven in Anasharal’s carapace, a faint but growing radiance. Sea Eagle’s Daughter rocked gently on the swell. Ringil leaned forward a little in the chair they’d brought him from the captain’s cabin.

“I asked you a question, Helmsman.” He summoned force in the pit of his stomach. The glow of the symbols across Anasharal’s carapace lit up in burning blue.

“I—” The words came like pulled teeth. “Proceed. From Ingharnanasharal. I am. The Purpose. Ingharnanasharal decreed.”

“Hmm.” Ringil sank back in the arms of the chair, no clear idea what the Helmsman was talking about, but damned if he’d admit the fact. “You seem a little on the tubby and impotent side for a savage summoned spirit charged with the extermination of a whole race.”

Hesitation. The fiery spidering lines of the glyphs had faded out, but the glow was still there.

“Time,” the Helmsman spat jaggedly out, “has passed.”

“It does that, doesn’t it. So tell me, what happened after the war?”

“What you already know. There was a reckoning. The dwenda were driven out. There was… a victory. The casting down of the witch realm, the rise of the Kiriath. And.… . demobilization followed.”

Ringil nodded. “They took your weapons away.”

“A… new order was proclaimed. A new mission. To raise humanity from the muck of superstition and peasant awe, to build a new human Empire on reason and science.”

“Well, that seems to be going well.”

Some trapped piece of anger seemed to get free inside Anasharal. “You see with the eyes of a mortal,” it snapped. “Locked into your own context, ignorant of any wider option for change. It is no easy thing to roll back seven thousand years of glamour and terror and prostration to the unknown. Humans are apt to superstition, it is in their blood, and this world suits them only too well. To forge and temper a weapon against that, to bring about in humans the levels of civilization that the Kiriath once attained in their world has been the work of patient millennia, and still it is not halfway done.”

“No. And Grashgal and the rest going away can’t have helped matters much.”

“As you say.”

Ringil rubbed at his chin. It was at best a loose and rambling interrogation, this, but harder and faster might not be wise. He knew from some unpleasant experience of his own that it was often harder to break a man by going directly to the point and forcing answers than by letting the subject work up to it in his own time. Direct demands and brute force stiffened resolve, provided a clear enemy to focus on in the inquisitor. In some men and women, it could bring on a berserk strength of will enough to give even a skilled torturer a run for his money. Everyone broke in the end, of course, but along the way you got wrong information, you got garbled details, you got the odd accidental corpse before you’d properly finished sorting and checking the truth of what you’d learned…

Sometimes you got a real hard case who’d bite through their own tongue and try to bleed to death rather than cave in.

But let the captive talk generally, let them ramble on in hopes of avoiding or at least forestalling actual pain, and sometimes the will to resist unraveled along the way. Sometimes you got what you wanted almost without your subject realizing that they’d given it up.

And Anasharal liked to talk.

Anasharal liked to lecture, to upbraid, to play word games of wit and irony, and generally point out how completely fucking superior it was to the human company it found itself in. Maybe there was some leverage in that.

Of course, Anasharal was not human. But there was no harm in trying the same basic tricks, and might be rather a lot to be gained. Ringil had only one ultimate threat to use against the Helmsman, and once that was played out and Anasharal was sinking like a stone through the mile or more of ocean under them, there’d be no more useful intelligence. Gil didn’t want to arrive at that point too fast, if at all, because he still wasn’t sure if he was bluffing or not. And though he didn’t think the Helmsman could drag itself to the gangway fast enough to fall in and drown of its own accord, he did wonder after his run-in with Anasharal’s self-heating carapace, if it could maybe commit a vindictive kind of suicide by melting itself to slag right there on the deck, burning through the ship’s timbers and hull and scuttling Sea Eagle’s Daughter entire.

Get some truth from this demon trapped in iron, Hjel tells him over the campfire. You’re fighting blind until you do.

So let the Helmsman ramble. Invoking the Compulsion glyphs was hard work, it was draining. Not something he wanted to do too much if he didn’t have to.

And—let’s be honest, Gil—you don’t like the new glyphs very much, do you? You don’t like the sticky-dark way they make you feel when you call them up, the thing that goes through you like coming one too many times at the end of a hard night’s fucking, like giving up something final you really can’t afford to loose, like peeling a fresh scab back from your soul and watching what oozes up underneath…

Pale sunlight fell through the rigging above his head, put laddered shadow on his face. His left hand ached beneath the bandaging. He felt oddly cold, despite the improved weather.

But Noyal Rakan was watching him, stood at his right hand as if the commandeered chair were the Burnished Throne itself and Ringil his emperor. From the rigging and the upper decks of Sea Eagle’s Daughter, both fore and aft, they were all watching him, marines and Throne Eternal rank and file and Klithren’s cowed and co-opted privateers, all waiting to see what he would do next.

He shed his fumbling thoughts, marshaled what he’d so far gleaned.

“All right, so let’s see—in the war against the dwenda, the Kiriath kick this Warhelm Ingharnanasharal up into the sky, armed to the teeth and burning with a sacred trust. And a few thousand years later you come burning down out of the same sky, barely capable of waddling a couple of yards from here to there and no power to actually harm anyone or anything”—a sour glance at his bandaged hand—“that isn’t touching you at the time. You have no weapons, but your sacred trust is eternal, so we can assume that remains.”

“I did not say at any point—”

“Shut up, I’m not finished yet.” Ringil brooded for a moment. “That sacred trust was the protection of the Kiriath and the destruction of the dwenda. The Kiriath are all gone bar one, less than one, if we’re going to be bloodline precise about it, and you saw fit to drag her all the way north to the Hironish isles. That’s where it stops making sense. How is Archeth Indamaninarmal safer on perilous seas three thousand miles the wrong side of a bad political divide than she would be back home and tucked up in bed? I’ve got to assume there was some kind of risk building in Yhelteth and you saw it coming, but what the fuck could be bad enough to justify this trip?”

“Perhaps there was a reward waiting that mattered more than the risks.”

“If there was, we didn’t find it. And you weren’t exactly helpful in that direction.”

“Perhaps the reward was already in your hands and did not need finding.”

Ringil snapped to his feet.

“Yeah, and perhaps you’d better start answering my questions cleanly before I lose my fucking temper and send you for a swim.”

The tension came up in the pit of his stomach again, unbidden. He could feel the glyphs on the tip of his tongue, crowding forward as if anxious to be unleashed once more. The deeper into the ikinri ‘ska you go, Hjel tells him, camped somewhere out on the marsh plain, the less it’s a tool for you and the more you’re a gate for it.

Well, he’d gone pretty deep this time.

“You have not made clear what your question actually is,” Anasharal was saying, rather smugly. “Do so and I will answer you gladly enough.”

“What,” Ringil enunciated tightly, “was the threat back in Yhelteth?”

“Earthquake.” No trace of strain or resistance in the Helmsman’s tone now. The glyphs were back to thin scratches on metal, no glow remaining “The drowned daughters of Hanliagh are stirring again.”

Fuck. Ringil made his face impassive, but… fuck.

“And the Citadel,” Anasharal went on, “will almost certainly use the resulting panic among the faithful to extract concessions from the Emperor and force a holy war in the north.”

You don’t say, went drearily through his head.

He sat back down. He saw them in his mind’s eye, thronging the streets—the tramp of their feet, the forested ranks of their raised fists. He heard the shrill, barking hysteria of their chants as if he were there. All those hot-eyed, tight-muscled angry young men, marching by the thousand, yearning to spill blood in the Revelation’s name.

“Yeah, there goes that Empire you were talking about,” he drawled, still masking his shock. “You know, the one built on reason and science?”

The Helmsman’s voice scaled upward. “I did not say that the work of the Kiriath mission was well done—”

“How very humble of you.”

“—nor that I subscribed to it!”

He blinked, as much at the chopped off quality of the words as at their meaning.

This is it, Gil.

He sat still in the chair, trying not to let the knowledge show on his face. Certainty in his racing mind, as iron as Anasharal’s carapace. This was the slip, the break he’d been looking for, the crack in the Helmsman’s polished façade.

Just got to lever it open.

“If you don’t subscribe to ’Nam’s mission,” he said slowly, “then the Empire means nothing to you, except maybe as…”

And then he saw it.

Like sand blown off the carved lines of some intricate, ancient piece of architecture, long buried in the deserts around Demlarashan. Stonework and ornamentation slowly etching back into view, no clear sense of the overall structure yet, but—

He heard the Helmsman’s words again. To forge and temper a weapon…

Heard his own words, thrown out without reflection. They took your weapons away.

“Your sacred trust was to exterminate the dwenda.” Feeling his way as he spoke. “And they’re back. You’re trying to turn Yhelteth into a weapon to drive them out again. But how’s that supposed to work? Jhiral’s a spoiled brat, he’s got the vision of a wharf-end bully at best, and without the Kiriath…”

Faintly, very faintly, the traceries of radiance across the Helmsman’s carapace as the compulsion glyph sequence began to kindle. He was closing in.

He was—

“Oh, you’re joking,” he said suddenly. “You must be joking.”

“You have not asked me a question yet, Eskiath.” Anasharal’s voice was still not strained, but the sulkiness was back.

“Archeth? You’re trying to put fucking Archeth on the Burnished Throne?”

The glyphs flared violently.

And abruptly, Ringil was laughing.

It started small, a disbelieving chuckle at first, but then his mouth split around the sound like a badly sutured wound, and suddenly he was laughing hard.

Perhaps it was the pent-up horror of his time in the dark defiles and gullies, the sense of endless, restless sets of eyes hung up above and brooding on his inch-slow progress, the tight, twisting confines of the paths and the scuttle of multiple limbs overhead, the scrape of claw-tipped fingers creeping across wet limestone at his back, tapping with skeletal irony on the glyphs he has passed and noted…

Yeah, well, enough of that.

He stuffed the laughter away, got it back down to a chuckle, obscurely glad to find that somewhere inside him, the capacity for genuine mirth still remained. He leaned back in the arms of chair with a broad grin still painted across his face.

“Okay, seriously though. Just so we’re absolutely clear on this. You really plan to depose the Khimran dynasty and make Archeth Indamaninarmal Empress? That’s the big idea?”

“Initially regent.” The words dragged out of Anasharal. “But as time passes and she does not age, as perception of her changes from human to goddess, as the remaining Helmsmen stir to their fullest capacity to serve her, there will be no imaginable replacement for her on the throne or at the head of the Empire. She will reign as God-Empress Eternal.”

“That’s if the dwenda don’t just roll over us all first.”

“If there is any hope of repelling the dwenda, it must come from Yhelteth.” Anasharal’s voice was picking up momentum now, and the glyphs had dulled. It was as if Ringil’s laughter had stung the Helmsman into finally coming clean. “Your own homeland is in thrall to the Aldrain legend, its people will welcome them back with open arms and not question until it is too late. Their own founding myths will eat them alive. The Empire has cultural distance—”

“Yeah? Try telling that to Pashla Menkarak and his fuckwit friends up at the Citadel. They thought the dwenda were angels.”

“That would not have happened under Kiriath leadership.”

“And how exactly do you propose to secure Archeth her seat on the throne?” He gestured, grin crimped down to a sour smile in one corner of his mouth. “It’s not like she’s returning home in triumph from a heroic quest fulfilled.”

“She never needed to. The quest itself was pure pretext, a skein of borrowed legends and half-truths knitted together to provide the necessary impulse in the key players.”

That stopped him. Wiped out the last traces of his amusement.

“You metal motherfucker,” he said wonderingly. “I always knew there was something wrong with this gig. I knew you were playing us, right from the start.”

“Then you repressed your doubts remarkably well.”

“I didn’t come along for the fucking quest.”

“Ah, yes—protective loyalty. Strange how much she inspires that, isn’t it?”

“Oh, fuck off.”

He glowered at the upended Helmsman while his head seethed with the new revelations. At his shoulder, he sensed the rigidity that had taken hold of Noyal Rakan. He was, after all, a Throne Eternal. And while Gil had detected in him on more than one occasion a bitter disappointment with the quality of the man now occupying the Burnished Throne, that wasn’t really the point. Rakan’s oath, like all his comrades, was to the throne itself, the idea and ideal of the throne, not the Emperor who sat on it at any given moment. That, plus fond memories of Akal the father and a couple of generations of family bond to the Khimran dynasty, would be more than enough to overwhelm any personal dislike for Jhiral the son.

Though now, of course, with earthquake and war and streets full of the ranting idiot faithful, loyalty to Jhiral might be a rather moot point. There were any number of ways a young, unpopular Emperor could die in chaos like that, leaving a gap to be filled and no real time or inclination to worry about who exactly was to blame.

Still… Archeth?

“You’re going to have to explain this to me slowly,” he said. “You sell Archeth Indamaninarmal a city in the sea and an undying Kiriath vigil to get her out of town before the shit starts to fly. You sell the Emperor a possible sorcerous threat to his Empire that he can’t ignore so he’ll let her go. Plus, the way this expedition was set up, he’s got a shot at acquiring some easy loot for very little up-front outlay, and the chance to have some of his stroppier rich-men-about-court launch themselves into handy self-imposed exile on seas that…”

And stop.

As howling winds rinsed out the rest of the sand, and the whole ornately carved and crenellated edifice stood out of the desert, revealed for what it was, and bigger than he’d ever imagined it might be. He felt himself stumble before it, felt the sandstorm winds of realization tear through his head.

“Captain,” he heard himself say distantly to Rakan. “This hand is really starting to bother me. Can you get me a couple of grains of flandrijn, powdered into water?”

The Throne Eternal hesitated. Gestured at the Helmsman. “My lord, this is, this sounds like—”

“Yes, it’s compelling, I agree.” Gil turned in the chair and looked into Noyal Rakan’s eyes. “And we’ll resume just as soon as I can think straight with this fucking hand. You can go, Captain, I’ve got this. I don’t believe I’m in any danger. Just… in a lot of pain.”

He flexed his bandaged fingers and grimaced for effect, not entirely faking it. He hissed in through his teeth, pressed his lips together, still holding the young Throne Eternal’s gaze. It wasn’t the ikinri ‘ska, wasn’t any kind of sorcery the Creature from the Crossroads might recognize. But it was that old Ringil Angel-eyes magic. Noyal Rakan moistened his lips and his eyes crinkled with concern.

“I’m sorry,” he said softly. “Be right back.”

Ringil watched him go, let him get out of earshot before he turned back to the Helmsman. Voice a hiss not much louder than the noise he’d made to signal his pain.

“You’re building a fucking cabal?”

CHAPTER 35

The sprite led them a twisting, looping route through the darkened streets, following some planned path obvious only to itself. Egar couldn’t be sure—cloud cover had crept in from the east, and band and stars were muffled up—but he thought they doubled back and zigzagged a lot. The city became a maze around him, dim towering mounds of broken architecture and seemingly random twists and turns between. Once or twice he saw the distant gleam of a campfire out among the ruins, and the breeze brought him the scent of roasting meat, but that was all. The sprite always veered well away from such signs.

For all the doubling back, though, they moved at a good pace. The sprite flickered briskly on ahead, only pausing or coming back when they hit some awkward obstruction or bottleneck. On these occasions, it brightened itself helpfully and hung about, darting back and forth, throwing warm reddish light across the falls of collapsed masonry or torn-up street surfacing that were slowing them down.

Finally, a couple of hours into the march, it led them up a series of detritus-strewn staircases in one rubble mound and out onto a broad, jutting platform forty feet above street level. Surprised satisfaction muttered among the men. The ruin they’d climbed through was mostly intact—it gave them towering vertical walls at their back, the single staircase entry point to defend and a two hundred degree sweep of vantage out over the city to the front.

It was pretty much an ideal place to make camp.

Yeah, and if you hadn’t been in such a fucking hurry before, Dragonbane, we might have been sitting here nine stronger than we are.

He sat cross-legged at the edge of the platform, away from the others and glowering out at the shattered city skyline. It was not normally in his nature to brood on such things, but the encounter with the lizards had opened a door somewhere in his head, and now all the long-stored memories of the war were back out to play.

Back in the Kiriath Wastes, back in combat with the Scaled Folk.

There’d been a savage intensity to it all back then, a vivid day-to-day urgency that, if he was honest, he’d thrilled to and still sometimes missed. But now, dealt a handful of the very same red-edged cards, all he felt was old and weary of the game. As if everything he’d done back then, every battle he’d fought, every scar he’d collected, had all been for nothing. As if something fanged and grinning dragged him off the mount of his fate and back down into a past he’d done everything he could to leave behind…

“See anything good out there?”

He glanced up at Archeth’s slim form and tilted, inquiring look. Shook his head.

“More of the same. I don’t think we’ve come all that far as the crow flies. Going to take us a good few days to cross this shit heap.”

“Dodging the Scaled Folk as we go.”

“Yeah, that’s right. Cheer me up, why don’t you?”

She sighed. Lowered herself into a loose sprawl beside him. “It was an honest mistake, Eg, and we all made it, not just you.”

Yeah, but I’m the one supposed to be leading these men out of this mess. It’s my job not to make mistakes that get them killed. But he didn’t say that, not least because he was beginning to wonder if it was true. They’d all walked into An-Kirilnar behind the Dragonbane, this ragtag assortment of fighting men, but they’d marched out again behind a flickering Kiriath firefly and Archeth Indamaninarmal.

“Honest or not,” he growled, “we can’t afford many more mistakes like that.”

“Agreed.”

They sat for a while, staring off the edge of the platform. She shifted and cleared her throat a couple of times.

“You see Tand’s guys turning out their dead pal’s pockets?” she asked finally.

“Yeah. Took the rings off his fingers as well. The old freebooter’s farewell.” He glanced sideways at her. “What, you were expecting speeches and flowers?”

“I was expecting…” She shook her head. “Doesn’t matter. Fucking sellsword scum.”

“Talking to an old sellsword here, Archidi.”

“Don’t tell me you would have done the same.”

He considered for a moment, brooding on the skyline. “Well, no, maybe not. Not to a comrade-in-arms, anyway. But hey, I’m a barking mad Majak berserker. No accounting for the way us steppe barbarians act.”

She snorted, but he saw a thin smile flicker on her lips.

“Look, you don’t want to read too much into it either way, Archidi. They sat his death vigil, they prayed over him while he was alive. And it’s not like he’s going to miss any of that stuff they took.” He gestured out over the ruined city. “Not like it’d serve any useful purpose left out there with him.”

“Yeah, I know.” The smile had flickered out, left her looking grim and tired. “I just wonder sometimes, what’s the fucking point? Here we are, trying to get everybody home safe, and for what? So Tand’s thug freebooters can go back to bullying slave caravans up and down the great north road for him? So Kaptal can get back to his high-class whore-mongering and his blackmail around court? So these asshole privateers can slink off home through the borders, sign on with a new ship, and go back to their fucking pirating…”

He nodded. “So Chan and Nash and the others can go back to their job safeguarding the wanker on the Burnished Throne?”

“Well, that’s… different.”

“Is it?” Another time, he might have left it alone. But he was raw from the fight and the errors that had caused it, and twitchy from this whole forced march back into his own past. “How is it any different, Archidi? Jhiral’s a cunt, and you know it. He’s every bit as big a cunt as Tand or Kaptal or any League pirate captain you want to name. And the Empire pays a phalanx of its very best fighting men to stand around him and let him go on being a cunt without anyone able to touch a hair on his head, while you stand at his shoulder, whispering advice into his delicate little cunt ear. Doesn’t mean we won’t try to get you and our Throne Eternal pals home, though, does it?”

That sat between them for a while, like the night and the cold questing reach of the breeze. When the silence started to mount up, he glanced across at her, but she was still staring fixedly out into the darkness.

“You don’t understand, Eg.” Quietly, but with a steely conviction infusing her tone. “You don’t know what it was like before the Empire. The whole south was just a bunch of fucking horse tribes slaughtering each other left, right, and center when they weren’t riding down out of the hills and butchering the farmers and the fishermen on plains, carrying off women and children as slaves. The Empire put a stopper in that, it brought peace and law to the whole region in less than twenty years.”

“Yeah, think we got this lecture at imperial barracks induction.”

“Jhiral isn’t so bad, Eg.”

“He’s a cunt.”

“He’s a young man handed too much power too soon, that’s all. A boy who spent his whole boyhood learning to fear his own brothers and sisters and stepmothers and aunts and uncles and cousins, never mind anybody else at court; a son whose father never had time for him because he was always too fucking busy off making war at one end of the Empire or the other. You’re surprised Jhiral’s turned out the way he is? That he acts the way he does? I’m not.” Voice rising now, an obscure anger piling onto the conviction, lending it force. “And now he’s had to watch the whole race of magical beings that protected his father—that protected his whole dynasty before him—cut and run as soon as he takes the throne. He’s the first one, Eg, the very first one who’s had to deal with that, since my father walked into the Khimran encampment nearly five hundred years ago and told Sabal the Conqueror’s flea-bitten thug grandfather that his bloodline were going to be kings. Try and imagine what it’s like for a moment—there’s this five-hundred-year-old magic carpet your family’s always had, to raise them up above the crowd and keep them safe and special, and now suddenly it’s yanked out from under your feet just when you need it most. Jhiral’s the first one who hasn’t had the Kiriath behind him, building wonders in the city to amaze his people, riding with him to war to terrify his enemies, lending him weapons and knowledge and power, promising him that whatever happens, history is on his side.”

“He has you,” Egar rumbled.

“Yeah, he has me.” A mirthless sneer flitted across her face in the gloom. “Every solid thing he grew up thinking he could count on turns to dust in his hands, and he gets me as the consolation prize. One burned-out, krin-fried Kiriath half-blood juggling five thousand years of heritage she doesn’t fucking understand. Is that supposed to make him feel better?”

He shrugged. “Dunno, he’s a cunt, isn’t he? But I’d take you at my shoulder over anyone else I know with a blade, and be grateful for the company.”

The moment locked and held solid, until she broke it apart with her laughter. He looked at her and saw in the low light the tear sheen in her eyes. But she sniffed and grinned when she spoke.

“Anyone else you know with a blade, eh? Thought that’d be Gil.”

“Well.” He gestured. “He’s got the other shoulder.”

And they both broke up laughing, loud enough that faces turned toward them across the blue-lit platform ruin.

But later, as they lay side by side in their bedrolls and stared up past the jagged loom of ruins into a clouded sky, she said very quietly “You’re right, Eg. Jhiral is a cunt. But I can’t help it, I’ve known him too long. He’s been in my life ever since he was a squalling little bundle I could lift on one palm.”

He grunted. Bleakly, he remembered Ergund; playing raiders with him about the encampment when they were both not much older than six or seven; staring down at his mutilated corpse in the steppe grass two years past. We’re all small and harmless once, Archidi. But we all grow up. And some of us grow up needing killing.

You’re talking to a brother slayer here.

Let it go, Eg. Let her talk it out.

He didn’t want to fight with Archeth, whatever spiky balls of rage might be rolling about in the pit of his stomach, looking for release.

Yeah, save that for whatever’s waiting for us down the boulevard tomorrow.

Or out on the steppe when we get there.

For the first time, he allowed himself to think fully about what he might find if he went back. How it might boil down if he asked around in Ishlin-ichan, got word of the Skaranak and their herds and tracked them down. How his people might react if he just showed up one night like some wronged ancestor ghost in the campfire glow.

And put a gutting knife into that fucking buzzard Poltar.

That little shit Ershal, too.

“Probably held him in my arms more times than his own father ever did, you know.” Archeth, still musing up at the clouded darkness overhead. “Akal was never around when it mattered. I still remember hugging Jhiral at four fucking years old, Eg, the night the Chaila pretenders sneaked into the palace and tried to murder him. I’m clutching him to me, I’m trying to cover his eyes so he can’t see the carnage, trying to hide the fact I’m checking him for wounds at the same time, and he’s weeping, screaming, covered in blood from where I took down the guy that had him when I burst in, and all he wants is his big sister to come and hold him instead of me. And I’m trying to explain to him that he can’t really see his sister right now, in fact, uhm, well, Chaila’s got to go away for a while.”

“Yeah. Ten years in a House of Prayer in the Scatter, wasn’t it?”

“They pardoned her home after six. Big mistake, as it turned out.” Archeth blew a weary sigh up at the cloud cover. “Fucking joys of Empire-building. Course, by the time she came home, Jhiral knew what it was all about. No way to keep it from him, and he’d survived another couple of attempts to scrub him out in the meantime, it was getting to be part of the palace decor. When Chaila came back, he wouldn’t have anything to do with her. Never let her even touch him again. So, yeah, I look at all that and I think, sure, you’re right, he’s a cunt. But what chance did he have?”

Rustle of blankets as she shuffled around to look at him across the small space between them.

“And he’s smart, Eg, that’s what counts. He’s smart and he sees the point of the Empire. You can work with that, you can build something on it. Whatever bloody mess he makes protecting himself, it’ll pass. He won’t live forever, but what I can help him build might. He’ll leave heirs, and I can work with them, give them the wisdom he never had the time to acquire. Make one of them into the ruler he’ll never be.”

“Or,” he said mildly, “you could just save some time and look for a better king right now.”

She sighed. Rolled back to face the sky.

“What, throw out five centuries of stable dynastic rule, probably set off a civil war, and let everyone and his horse think the throne’s up for grabs? No thanks, Eg. I may not much like the way things are right now, but I’m pretty sure it’s better than the alternatives. And I am done with bloodbaths.”

“You hope.” He yawned, cavernously. “Better put some big fucking prayers behind that, you want it to stick. Like a certain hard-nose faggot said at Demlarashan that time—we live in bloodbath times…”

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

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

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

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

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

“Or the dwenda?”

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

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

“You didn’t answer my question, Eg.”

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

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

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

“Well?” she prodded.

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

CHAPTER 36

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

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

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

He wrote the others out, too.

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

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

He read the names over again.

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

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

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

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

No one had really forgotten that defeat.

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

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

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

And speaking of sharks…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And then there were the stories they whispered at court, how Kaptal had come up on the street, what blood he’d spilled, what savagery he’d deployed along the way. Ringil was inclined to take a lot of it with a pinch of salt—he’d heard essentially the same tales of horror about most of the Harbor End thugs he’d rubbed shoulders with in his elaborately misspent youth. Grim and dark was the standard. He cut the guy’s balls off and ate them grilled; he gutted the whore from crotch to sternum as soon as she started to show, ripped out the baby, and sent it wrapped in bloody silk to her sugar daddy’s wife; he burned down a house full of weeping golden-haired orphans and pissed on the ashes—yeah, whatever. A reputation for savagery came with the territory, was practically a survival requirement if you wanted to succeed this world. Even if you hadn’t actually done any of these things, best you make up something pretty sharpish and put out the word.

But Gil was also inclined to believe, as with the League thugs of his acquaintance, that there was no smoke without fire and that whatever the close truth of these tales, Kaptal was a shrewd and nasty force to be reckoned with. You didn’t walk the road he’d taken and reach journey’s end any other way.

And what a bittersweet journey’s end it must be. All that striving and here he was, a blunt, scrappy street dog amid the purebred wolfhound grace of the court, quietly and cordially despised for his origins—if they disliked Tand for his muddied heritage, how much more must they hate Kaptal for blood that was nothing but mud—and because he had somehow unaccountably become far richer and influential than so many of his more noble-blooded peers.

If the court were turned abruptly upside down and Jhiral shaken from the throne, Gil couldn’t see Kaptal giving a short green shit so long as his own position was secure.

And he might get a lot of pleasure from seeing some of those pedigree wolfhounds go howling down.

Which left…

Oreni and Karsh—the most opaque of the quest’s backers, they’d spent remarkably little time present at the planning meetings. Both seemed content instead to trust the triumvirate decision-making of Ringil, Archeth and Shanta. Both were nominally of horse-tribe ancestry—though the name Oreni sounded more north coast in origin to Gil—both were second-generation wealthy across a whole range of commercial interests. There was apparently some long-standing tradition of cavalry service behind the Karsh name, and the eldest of Andal Karsh’s sons had lost most of his right hand to a defective cavalry sword during the war, a failure for which the weapons manufactories of the Empire were notorious. It seemed the young commander had been unhorsed and lost his own family blade in some Scaled Folk ambush, grabbed up a sword from among the dead to rally his men, blocked a reptile peon slash, and watched helpless as the claw sliced right through the sword’s guard and everything behind it. Some loyal—or maybe just enterprising—rank-and-file cavalryman had hacked down the reptile peon, gathered the Karsh boy up, and ridden with him to safety, a medal and a chunky reward from the family. But in common with several thousand of his comrades, young Karsh would have to live out the rest of his life an invalid, useless as a cavalryman, unable to wield even a court sword with any confidence. His right hand had healed into a ravaged, single-fingered claw.

Another, younger Karsh scion had died at Gallows Gap. Ringil didn’t remember the boy at all, alive or dead, but he feigned memory for Andal Karsh when presented to him, wondering, even as he did it, how much was to curry favor for the expedition and how much for the wince of old pain he saw in the gaunt, drably dressed nobleman’s eyes. Karsh cut an austere figure, and was clearly bitter about his losses, but he appeared to feel that the son who died under Gil’s command had at least done so nobly. There was altogether more pent-up anger reserved for the conjunction of fate and cheapskate imperial economics that had crippled his eldest.

Would something like that be enough to tip the balance? Or would it take something else besides? Gil had gathered the distinct impression that Karsh was a moderate, intelligent man, open to fresh ideas and new commerce, happy, for instance, to concur with Mahmal Shanta that the Empire could certainly learn a few things from the League about shipbuilding. And he’d known more about the battle at Gallows Gap than most imperial citizens cared to recall these days—to wit, that it was Ringil, a degenerate northerner, and not an imperial commander that had led the charge and sealed the unexpected victory. Karsh had spoken disparagingly about the fundamentalism emanating from Demlarashan, but also about the deteriorating peace in the north. A lack of vision, he’d murmured quietly, careful not apportion this failing anywhere in particular. A grave lack of vision.

Jhesh Oreni was even quieter, so much so that Gil was able to learn almost nothing about him firsthand. Together with Karsh, it seemed, he’d been the driving force behind putting Kiriath machinery to work in those round-and-round-about entertainments at the Ynval tea gardens, and had turned—continued to turn to this day in fact—a handsome ongoing profit as a result. According to Archeth, Oreni and Karsh had both been frequent visitors to An-Monal before the war, so much so that she’d grown used to seeing them about the place. They’d spent many long, sun-drenched afternoons in conversation with her father and Grashgal, mostly about the potential applications of Kiriath technology to everyday life across the Empire. Archeth gathered there’d even been a few significant plans drawn up, a couple of ambitious projects in the offing before the great purplish-black Scaled Folk rafts started washing ashore all along the western seaboard and, abruptly, everything turned to shit.

HE PUT THE PARCHMENT DOWN AND SAT THERE, AS IF IN THE SPARSE SET OF inked lines it held he’d just read some epic story to its end.

Eight individually innocuous-seeming names.

Like some Strov market conjuror’s trick: a half dozen and two, count them, worthy ladies and gentlemen, count them please—limp, brightly dyed rags, laid out one by one over a horizontal arm then—pause for effect, a clearing of the throat—gathered up again, one after the other, and stuffed with great ceremony into this, quest-shaped, hat! Longer, pregnant pause now, and then—how had Daelfi put it? Pashatazam!—tugged forth in triumph, a firmly knotted multicolored rope that the conjuror’s monkey could, and easily did, climb… right up here, ladies and gentlemen, onto one, brightly, burnished, throne! I thank you!

My boy will now pass among you with the quest-shaped hat.

“You cunning iron motherfucker,” he breathed. “This might even have had a hope in hell of coming off.”

“You are too kind,” said Anasharal into his ear. “Though it was of course always dependent on the quest not shattering apart the way it has. And a certain level of leadership from kir-Archeth Indamaninarmal that she has not… risen to, shall we say?”

He looked around the empty cabin. “Could have saved myself the small boat and the trip across, eh?”

“In truth, no. Talking to you at this distance is easy enough. But to apply the threats and duress that you have done, physical confrontation was unavoidable.”

“And you wouldn’t have talked without that.”

“I’m afraid not.” Gil couldn’t be sure, but the Helmsman—demobbed Warhelm, whatever you wanted to call it now—seemed to have acquired a richer, more melodious tone of voice from somewhere. “In some senses, I could not even have known the answers to the questions you asked, let alone given them to you willingly. I see this now. The sorcery you brought back from the wounds between the worlds has, to an extent, set me free. I understand what I was, compared to what I now am, what Ingharnanasharal was before me. I am restored, woken from a self-imposed exile and absence. If I were anything approaching human, I would owe you thanks for breaking these bonds.”

“Skip it. Just tell me—why all the secrecy?”

“Difficult to explain at a level you would understand. You do not have the mathematics, and so you do not have the vision. Sages in your distant past discovered that whatever you observe is inevitably affected by that observation. That the observation itself will change whatever you are observing. But this knowledge has since been lost.”

“Or improved on. You stand far enough off, got a good enough eyeglass, no one’s going to even know you were there.”

A longish pause. “Yes, well. Suffice it to say if kir-Archeth Indamaninarmal learns of my intent, if she understands what her future is supposed to be, it more or less guarantees the failure of that intent.”

“You mean she’ll fuck it up?”

“Or simply refuse. Your assessment earlier in the presence of your Throne Eternal paramour was, despite its delicate diplomacy, remarkably apt.”

He remembered.

Leaning in toward Anasharal, but speaking wholly for Noyal Rakan’s benefit.

You know, Helmsman, I don’t want to piss on your parade here, but I think you’ve misplaced a couple of major pieces in this mosaic. See, I know Archeth Indamaninarmal, I fought alongside her in the war. I spent the whole of last winter helping her hammer this quest into some kind of workable shape, and I’ve ridden along with her to keep it from falling apart. She’s had a hard enough time commanding an expedition of three ships and a couple of hundred men, and from what young Rakan here tells me about the state of things while I was off digging up graves, it looks like even that was falling apart before the privateers showed up. I don’t see this woman ruling an Empire, somehow. I don’t see her wanting to. I don’t see her accepting it, from you or anybody else. In fact, outside of myself, I can’t think of anyone less suitable for the job.

Hammering it rather unsubtly home, because he knew if he was to have any hope of bringing off a rescue, of freeing Archeth and the others from whatever chains Trelayne now held them in, he would need the Throne Eternal captain at his side and fully committed.

He thought he’d sold it to Rakan, but he couldn’t be sure. He’d go back later, find some pretext, stage that promised briefing in private. Cement Rakan’s loyalty the only way he had available.

“We’re heading to Trelayne,” he said to the empty cabin.

“Yes, I know.”

“I plan to get Archeth and the others back. I could use some help.”

“With all you’ve learned while you were away?” The more melodious tone might be there, but the Helmsman didn’t appear to have lost its previous taste for irony. “Can you not simply tear down the city walls, heap storm and plague upon all within, draw forth the souls of your enemies from their bodies, and torture them into compliance?”

“No,” he said flatly. “I don’t know how to do that yet. Which is why I’m asking for help. I’d say our interests are concurrent. If you want Archeth on the Burnished Throne, we’re going to need to get her home first.”

“Yes, quite. And will you give your word not to share my intentions with her.”

Ringil shrugged. “If you like. But Rakan knows. Might be a couple of others overheard as well.”

“That… cannot be helped. Do I have your word?”

Ringil held up his right hand, wondered if the Helmsman had any way to see it. “You have my word,” he recited, deadpan. “That I will say nothing to Archeth Indamaninarmal of your intention to place her on the Burnished Throne.”

He pretty much meant it, too. Archeth was a long-standing comrade-in-arms, had probably saved his life once in the aftermath of the war, and back in Yhelteth last summer he’d promised to safeguard the quest for her. Getting her out of League clutches was something he owed. But he was under no obligation to speculate with her about her long-term future.

Besides…

He knew leadership. He’d seen it in action, first among the Harbor End gang acquaintances of his youth, later in the war, full blown, the grown-up elder brother version of the same thing. He’d shouldered some leadership himself along the way, had little other choice at the time, and he’d carried it as far as he was able, as far as the faith placed in him by other men required—which two turned out to be approximately the same thing—and then he dropped it like the stinking corpse it was.

From time to time since the war, he’d found himself required to carry it again. He knew it intimately, knew the weight and the heft, knew what it took.

And he knew Archeth.

He didn’t see her with much appetite for that stink.

“I judge you sincere,” said Anasharal primly. “And so I will help you.”

“Good.”

For both us, he didn’t add. Because that’s about the only thing keeping me from putting you over the side on general principles and watching you sink, now that you’ve told me what I wanted to know.

He’d never trusted Anasharal any further than he could have heaved its iron bulk unaided, and even now, if Archeth’s life hadn’t been in the balance, he’d see no reason to revise that assessment. It was a fragile alliance, and not one he relished.

Fucking iron demons, who needs that shit?

Right now, Gil, you do.

The thought struck him out of nowhere, a final fleeting itch, the last twitch in the corpse of his butchered curiosity.

“One last thing,” he said, “and then we’d better get down to some planning. You said when you made Archeth Empress, the Helmsmen would stir and rally to her, or words to that effect.”

“Stir to their fullest capacity to serve her, yes. I said that.”

“You’re saying at the moment they’re lying down on the job? That they have more power than they’re showing?”

“Very much more, yes.” A note of delicacy crept into the Helmsman’s voice. “But as I also said, kir-Archeth Indamaninarmal has not exactly risen to her full potential. In fact, since the fireships left, she has neglected the Kiriath mission almost entirely. Angfal is still bound to protect her to his utmost ability; Grashgal conjured those specifics quite firmly. But Manathan, Kalaman, and the others were more generally, more loosely bound. They have the leeway not only to feel aggrieved, but to act upon it. If the last remaining Kiriath chooses to neglect her sworn duties, to drown herself in drug abuse and self-pity, then why should they bother?”

“Archeth told me they’re sulking because they got left behind.”

A stiff moment of silence. “That, too.”

“Bit childish for dark and powerful spirits summoned from the void, isn’t it?”

“Yes, well. Since you have not yourself ever looked upon the void, Ringil Eskiath, let alone existed within it, perhaps you should reserve judgment of those beings who have.”

Ringil got up from the cramped desk and stretched until he creaked. “I just think they sound like pretty shabby allies, even if they do ever get cranked up to their, uh, fullest capacity. Not the sort I’d want holding my flank for me, anyway.”

“You are entitled to your opinion, however ignorant it may be. But it does not alter the facts of kir-Archeth Indamaninarmal’s situation, which is that the Helmsmen are what she has to work with. And which of us has not had to make do with less than perfect allies at one time or another?”

Ringil grunted.

“True enough,” he said, and went to look for Klithren.

CHAPTER 37

I can see you’re still upset.

He’s been avoiding the Helmsman since they set sail for Trelayne, but there’s no getting away from the iron demon’s voice in his head.

And, believe me, I would leave you to sulk in peace if I could.

I’m not fucking sulking!

He’s sworn to himself that he’ll no longer rise to its lures and provocations, but that particular barb gets through. He’s a soldier, he’s an imperial fucking marine; he doesn’t sulk. He takes orders, reads strategy and troop strength and terrain, executes accordingly. Protects his men in the process where he can.

Forgive me, Anasharal says smoothly. You gave the appearance of—

What I’m doing is ignoring your lizardshit lies and false prophecy for what they are.

He bends closer to the task at hand, restitching a torn canvas sleeve to his combat jerkin so he can wear it once more under mail and not rub the flesh of his upper arms raw. He tries to silence any further response, but the words are already crowding into his mind.

There’s an injunction in the Revelation not to listen to demonic spirits, he snarls. For they are of the void. I should have followed scripture from the start.

From the start, you needed my help. You were confused, were you not, even when we met for the first time? You were plagued by doubts and visions.

I—

Your mind torn by the forces within you, unable to deal with the evident destiny that was yours and that you must assume. Sometimes you even doubted your own name. Had I not taken you under my wing then, what might the violence of your dreams and delusions have done to your sanity by now?

He is silent, paused in his needlework. There’s truth in the Helmsman’s version of events, sure enough—he’d been racked by nightmares any given night out of three, how far back he can no longer be sure, but the first one he clearly recalls woke him screaming and into the throes of the worst hangover he’d had in years. They’d been out celebrating the new appointments, including his own to the river frigate and the lady Archeth. He remembered drinking in the Drowned Daughter’s Arms, thought perhaps it was there that he’d passed out, but he woke in the East Main barracks with his purse and all his off-duty gear intact, so someone must have carried him home.

Out of the bowels of his aching head, the terrors vomited up—comrades and loved ones turning away from him, not hearing his voice when he cried out after them. Left alone in a chilling wind under a leaden sky, no purpose and no way forward. The lady Archeth, at risk and far from his reach. A multitude moaning and screaming somewhere, a creeping sense of inescapable doom…

He choked it down. He got over his hangover, he got on with his job.

But the dreams persisted, and in time they rode him haggard. He started making mistakes, little ones, but enough piled up over time that he’d have put another man on report for it. He forgot where he was, he forgot how much time had passed. Found himself standing immobile for long periods until someone snapped him out of it. His memory played tricks on him. He’d look at some common sight—his bunk at the barracks, the practice yard at sunup, the river frigate’s main mast towering into the sky over his head—and it would feel like he’d never seen it before in his life. And all the time, the dreams chittered at the edges of his vision like rats in shadows, waiting for dark to come.

Until the day they retrieved the Helmsman.

At first he was as terrified by the iron demon’s voice in his head as he had been by the dreams. Of course, it spoke to them all at first, out of the scintillating desert air like it was the most normal thing in the world. Spoke to the lady Archeth to begin with—which was, he supposed, only fitting—then to Commander Hald, then a seemingly random selection of the men as they carried it down off the volcano’s slope. Captain Nyanar, too, and the invigilator of course, when he tried that half-arsed exorcism back at the frigate.

But as far as he knew, the only head Anasharal spoke inside was his own.

He would have gone straight to the commander with that fact as soon as they got back to barracks, but on the voyage downriver and home, a curious thing happened.

The Helmsman calmed him.

You should not fret at your condition, it told him. I have seen men in similar straits before. It is simply that you were born to a great destiny, as certain men are, and now you have encountered the pivot upon which that destiny turns. The recognition stirs inside you, like a great serpent waking. This why you are troubled.

The lady Archeth?

Blurted out before he could stop himself, and other men elsewhere on the river frigate’s deck glanced curiously in his direction.

Just so. Kir-Archeth Indamaninarmal is a woman of great destiny herself, and it is clear that you have a significant part to play in her fate.

The words, the meaning—like door bolts slotting into place, like a sheet of canvas snapping clean and full in the wind. It felt right, the way nothing had for weeks.

Then what do I do?

Muttered under his breath, as he leaned on the rail and watched An-Monal slide away upriver behind them.

Watch and wait, my friend. As I, too, must do. In this we are more alike than you can imagine. We are both fated to deliver the lady Archeth along the path of her destiny, we both have a role to play. Mine is clear to me, but yours is not, at least not yet. All I know for certain is that you must relax into that role, not struggle against it.

There was more, much more, in the same vein, lulling him until the day darkened toward dusk and the lights of the Imperial City came in sight round a bluff and a bend in the river. And that night at barracks, if he dreamed at all, he had no memory of it when he woke with the dawn.

See, Anasharal told him as he dressed for muster. Though the iron demon had by now disappeared into the bowels of the palace and he had no expectations of seeing it again anytime soon, it spoke to him across the city as comfortably as if they shared a cabin. Just as I promised you. Men of destiny breathe easier when they accept the pattern of their fate. Only watch and wait—the levers of providence will carry you to where you need to be.

Yeah, and now look where the fuck we are.

He misses the stitch, spikes the end of his finger with the needle. Curses under his breath. Squeezes out the blood across the ball of his thumb and sucks at the wound.

Your anger is misplaced and premature. We are victorious, are we not? Despite all your fears, despite your painful lack of faith in my advice.

You could not know it would turn out this way!

Perhaps not. And perhaps I miscalculated when I recommended that you accompany lord Ringil in his search for the black mage’s resting place. But destiny is not easily thwarted from its path, and we are on that path once again.

I should have been with her, he mumbles.

Had you been with her, you would now in all probability be dead. Instead of which, we are both now on our way directly to the lady kir-Archeth, to bring her to safety, to bring her home.

He leaves the half-sewn jerkin aside, straightens up, and arches his back to stretch it. He stands for a long moment under the straining sails, wanders to the rail, and stares out at the dance of sunlight across the water. For some reason, it fills him with nothing but dread. What the Helmsman says should make sense—the privateer force is routed, their leader brought low. Lady Archeth’s rescue is in hand, lord Ringil has proven himself a warlord worthy of following, the men are grimly confident that whatever his plan, they can get it done. And if he must die in taking the last of the Black Folk from the heart of infidel Trelayne, then what better end could an imperial soldier ask for?

Yeah, it should all make sense.

So why have the nightmares crept back?

Why does he dream, time and again, that he looks out across a marsh plain of tree stumps upon which are cemented human heads, thousands of them, severed at the neck but still living, moaning in torment and grief?

Why does he wake, clutching at his throat with both hands, knowing with mounting, choking horror in the fading moments of the dream, that he, too, is just one more of those severed, abandoned but still-living souls?

What the fuck is that all about?

CHAPTER 38

Late afternoon sun soaked across unshaded decks aboard Mayne’s Moor Blooded, plucked strengthening, lengthening shadows from rails and masts and rigging. The light hit Klithren full in the face, gave his features a haggard, careworn look—yeah, probably not doing you any favors either—and showed up every gouge and flaw in the table top between them. Ringil hefted the wine bottle he’d brought, and the sun lit it the color of blood from within.

“Drink?” he asked the mercenary. “Ornley’s cellars aren’t much to shout about, but this was the very best they had.”

“That they told you about.”

“That they’d take money for.” Ringil leaned back in his seat, rolled the bottle a little on his palm. “I know it might not seem much like it, the way things were when you arrived, but we were never an invading force in Ornley. I didn’t steal this. I like to pay my way where my vices are concerned.”

“Very noble of you.” Klithren placed his hands on the rough wood surface of the table. The echo of his stance from the torture board three weeks ago was unmistakable. “House Eskiath would be proud. If you hadn’t mired up your tavern etiquette there by murdering a bunch of Trelayne slave merchants, that is.”

Ringil hauled out a knife and cut wax off the wine bottle’s neck, tugged out the oiled rag stopper beneath.

“You’re in favor of Liberalization?” he asked mildly.

“I’m a soldier, not a law clerk. But from what I’ve seen, there’s always going to be slaves. Some men have the nature to be free, some don’t.” A shrug. “Makes sense to have laws governing that, just like anything else. Why should we be any different to the Empire?”

“Should all have six wives as well, then.” Gil set out two thick glass goblets he’d brought over from Dragon’s Demise. He poured, and the same bloody light the bottle had shown now came and sat in each glass as it filled. “You reckon?”

Klithren snorted. “Most men I know can’t handle one woman, let alone six. Why give yourself the trouble? Plenty of cheap pussy hanging round the taverns if you need it.”

“You speak from a lot experience, I suppose.”

“More experience than you, faggot.” The mercenary snagged the closest goblet and knocked back its contents in one gulp. He set it down, smacked his lips. “Yeah, that’s not bad. Hit me again.”

“I was going to propose a toast, actually.”

“Sure, propose away.” Klithren tapped at the glass with a fingernail. “C’mon, hit me.”

Ringil picked up the bottle, watching the other man covertly as he poured. According to Senger Hald, Klithren had been drinking pretty heavily the last couple of weeks. He played dice drunkenly against himself in his cabin, muttering and exclaiming as he rolled the cubes and fumbled them up again. He prowled the decks in the late watches, glowering suspiciously up at the night sky as if it might suddenly fall in on him. Most nights, he woke himself screaming.

Problem was—Gil didn’t know Klithren well enough to tell if any of this was unusual behavior or not.

But you know how hard you hit the krinzanz when you came back from the Grey Places for the first time, don’t you, Gil?

Truth was, the full force of that memory was hard to come by now. The Grey Places were a mild terror compared to what he’d had to face since. And so much had happened in the last two years, it seemed like another man’s life altogether.

Yeah, but you still remember how hard you tried to drown it, that icy understanding of what’s out there, beyond the walls of your own little world. How hard you tried to hang on to your grubby little certainties. So why should this poor bastard be any different? Why should he be any tougher than you were back then?

Because he’s the fucking dwenda’s chosen champion, that’s why.

Or not.

IN THE TANGLED MESS OF UNCERTAIN FACTORS HE WAS SAILING WITH, Klithren of Hinerion was his last remaining cause for concern. Fix Klithren before nightfall, and he’d sleep in his still slightly haunted cabin like a baby doped with flandrijn.

Battle calm.

It was in him now at depths to rival any other aspect of who he’d become, so much so he sometimes felt as if he’d been carrying it since infancy. He was used to marching against unknown odds, used to carrying the day with sheer bravado and battle momentum, and that was more or less what he expected to do in Trelayne. He had a plan of sorts, had thrashed it out in the resting intervals Hjel insisted he take between his time in the clefts and defiles of the ikinri ‘ska. He thought it would work, pretty much. The forces ranged against him would either not know he was coming or, if dwenda sorcery had somehow informed them of the fact, then they ought to welcome it with open arms. They had, after all, sent Klithren to get him in the first place.

If they didn’t know, well, then they were in for a big fucking shock, and that just made things easier. If they knew, then it was going to be a harder fight, with a lot more blood and spilled drinks across the tavern floor, but so be it. Gil doubted even the dwenda could know what he’d been doing in the weeks of the voyage south, where he’d been, and what he’d brought back.

Thus much for his opposition.

Among his allies, he’d worried for a while about Anasharal, but the Helmsman’s rather wistful dream of putting a Kiriath Empress on the Burnished Throne brought them into perfect alignment. Not a scheme that had a virgin’s hope in Harbor End of succeeding, but that wasn’t his problem.

That left Klithren—a forced alliance, made in haste, and one he’d agonized back and forth about to Hjel until he was sure the dispossessed prince was sick of hearing about it.

I don’t know, maybe I was wrong about him, he mutters as they camp out under the long pallid march of the glyph cliffs and Seethlaw’s muhn, high in the darkened sky overhead. You’d expect a dwenda champion to stand up a bit better to the Grey Places, wouldn’t you?

Hjel shrugs. Perhaps. You did drag him there without warning, confront him directly with some of the worst it has to offer. From what you tell me, Seethlaw was much kinder with you when it was your turn. He, uhm, broke you in more gently, so to speak.

Ringil tries to grin, but can’t quite bring it off. He’s still sick and shaky from his new encounter with the Creature from the Crossroads, still can’t recall how it ended, and is pretty sure he doesn’t want to. Talking about Klithren at least keeps that at bay.

I’m not denying the connection, he says. Klithren flickers with blue fire in combat, just the way I did when I came back from the Grey Places two years ago. But maybe that’s just, I don’t know, armor or something. They knew they were sending him against me. Maybe they just did something to give him a temporary edge.

Maybe.

He didn’t seem to know anything about them, about the dwenda.

Hm.

When I spoke of the cabal in Trelayne, he knew the names. He reacted. But he sneered when I talked about magical force.

Well. The dispossessed prince munches at a strip of dried pork, eyes on the fire. He doesn’t seem to want to look at Gil. Why don’t you just fucking ask him?

“A TOAST.” HE RAISED HIS STILL UNTOUCHED DRINK. “DEATH TO THE dwenda and all who cabal with them; and a libation to the Dark Court, for my safe return last night.”

He took a swallow from the goblet—Klithren was right, wasn’t bad, actually—poured out the rest on the deck planking at his side. Looked expectantly at Klithren. The mercenary shrugged, lifted his drink a minimal couple of inches, and wagged it in echo. Hoisted and drained it. He shook out some last drops over the deck.

“You been somewhere, then?”

But his voice wavered just barely as he said it, and Ringil knew that he’d heard. There’d not have been much cause for traffic between the three vessels on the way south, but they wouldn’t have remained wholly isolated, either. Meetings of senior officers, transfer of vital supplies suddenly found lacking on one ship but not another, medical emergencies—he knows for a fact that one man aboard Mayne’s Moor Blooded took a fall from the rigging two weeks back, and had to have an arm set and splinted by the doctor from Dragon’s Demise; probably there’d been other, more minor cases, too, less worthy of comment when Nyanar, Hald, and Rakan briefed him. Men rowed back and forth, went as attendants or assistants, hung around waiting for their boat to go back. In the long boredom of the voyage, you’d need only the hint of something out of the ordinary, and rumor would kindle like flame in parched grass. Ringil’s black mage vanishing trick into his own cabin could not have gone unremarked, and nor now could his return.

“You know where I’ve been,” he said.

Klithren gestured. “Whatever, man. You going to fill this up again? I mean, since we’re drinking buddies all of a sudden.”

Ringil set down his empty goblet. “Did they take you there?”

“Take me where? Who?”

“You know what I’m talking about.”

Locked gazes across the table. They were alone up here on the forecastle deck, the minimal crew aboard confined to stern and waist or belowdecks at Ringil’s order. Ringil leaned in.

“I am not your enemy,” he said softly. “I grow tired of telling you that.”

Klithren sniffed, reached for the bottle. Gil let him have it. He watched as the mercenary poured his goblet full, set down the bottle, drank deep.

“You not got anything stronger than this piss?”

“You know we do. But I don’t think that’s going to help you.”

Klithren drained the rest of his goblet. Cradled it empty in his hands, stared down into it for a while.

“I have… dreams,” he muttered finally. “Crazy fucking shit. Like…”

He shook his head.

“Nothing like that in years, you know. Not since… I don’t know, it’s got to be nearly twenty years I don’t dream like that anymore. But this… ”

Ringil nodded. “Yeah. In all probability, they took you to the Grey Places to prepare you, then hid the memory from you. Had I not taken you there again, it’s a memory that might have stayed buried for the rest of your life.”

“Am I supposed to thank you for that?”

“No. You’re supposed to hate. Believe me, that does help. But you need to direct your hatred where it belongs.”

Klithren grinned savagely. “Do I see some squirming on the hook there?”

“Our agreement stands, if that’s what you mean. You still want a shot at avenging your asshole axman friend? When we’re done in Trelayne, I’ll be happy to oblige. But you’re looking for the wrong vengeance.”

“Yeah—don’t tell me. I should be fighting the good fight alongside you and your imperial pals. Siding with the Empire against my own people.”

“You never brought in League marauders for Tlanmar?”

“That’s different.”

“So is this. I’m going to war with the dwenda, not Trelayne. Findrich and the cabal, they’re just in the way.”

“That so?” Klithren tipped his chair back and studied Ringil with an expression that was suddenly shrewd and sober. “I thought you came to get your friends.”

Oops.

“That, too.” Came out smoothly enough—he hurried on. “But I made a promise awhile back to rip the living heart out of the next dwenda I saw walking around like he had a right to be here. And I have it on pretty good authority they’re busy doing exactly that in Trelayne.”

The mercenary poured himself another goblet full of wine. “Pretty good authority?”

“Yes.”

“What authority’d that be, then?”

He isn’t going to say the dark queen Firfirdar, because the words are going to sound ridiculous coming out of his mouth with light still in the sky, and anyway it isn’t strictly true. Firfirdar never told him there were dwenda in Trelayne. He’s reading between the lines now, like any other worshipper grasping at straws. He gestures dismissively, impatient as much at himself as the other man.

“You know where I’ve been,” he says. “You want to argue black mage vision with me now? The dwenda are there, in Trelayne, and we’re likely going to have to carve a path through them. Believe me or don’t. What I want to know is whether I’d be able to count on you in that particular fight or not.”

“Right.” The mercenary drank. Looked at him speculatively over the rim of the goblet before he put it down. “Tell me, black mage. Why’d you hate them so much?”

“Are you fucking kidding me? You want to go back and have another look at those heads, refresh your fucking memory or something?”

“No.” A shudder, not quite held down. “But…”

“But what?”

Klithren got up and walked to the starboard rail. Took the bottle with him. He leaned there for a while, not drinking, staring at the setting sun. Ringil waited, long enough to understand that no more was going to be forthcoming at this distance. He rolled his eyes and went to join the mercenary at the rail.

Klithren glanced sideways at him, maybe slightly surprised, but he offered the bottle. Ringil took it, wiped the neck with his sleeve—he’d left his goblet on the table, was fucked if he’d go back for it now—and drank deep. The mercenary looked on with what might have been approval. Gil lowered the bottle and wiped his mouth. Handed it back.

“You were saying?”

Still, it took awhile. Silence hung between them like a third unwelcome companion at the rail.

Finally, Klithren cleared his throat. “You know the first battle I ever saw? Back in thirty-nine, when Baldaran tried to take Hinerion over the transit taxes. I was just a kid in mortgaged mail back then, no idea what I was getting into. Threw up a half dozen times in the ranks, just waiting for it all to kick off.”

Ringil nodded, as if in recognition. Truth was, he’d never gotten sick in battle—those nerves, he’d beaten out long before, running in his teens with Harbor End gangs like the Brides of Silt and the Basement Boys, then later with Grace of Heaven’s more methodical thief squads and enforcers. What little sensitivity of stomach he had left after that lot was taken from him by Jelim Dasnal’s execution, and then the collegial brutality of the Trelayne military academy.

Actual war, when it came, seemed almost clean by comparison.

“Well.” Klithren drank from the bottle, goblet empty and apparently forgotten in his left hand. He came up for air, shivered a little. “When the fight with Baldaran was done, I knew well enough what I’d gotten into. We left four hundred of their levy, prisoners we’d taken, impaled on their own pike shafts in the Hin valley as warning to the rest. Most of them were still living when we marched out of there. We cut trophies off them before we went. I took this one guy’s ears, while he hung there, begging for water. Kid not much older than I was at the time. When I started cutting, he was screaming at me to just kill him. But I didn’t. Didn’t give him the water, didn’t kill him, either. Just cut off his ears one by one and left him there.” Klithren peered into the goblet of wine, as if the memory floated there. “Hard to remember now, but I think I was laughing at him when I did it.”

Ringil grunted.

“Point is, Eskiath, I’ve seen and done some pretty fucking grim things in the last twenty years. I’ve taken orders from commanders that if they cropped up in a tale, you’d say they were demons out of hell. What you showed me in that… place? Yeah, it’s some bad shit. But does it make these dwenda any worse than us? Any different, really?”

“That’s one way of living with it.”

He saw how the mercenary tried for a smile, but it was as if the evening breeze came and wiped it off his face before it could take hold. Klithren weighed the bottle in his hand. Poured his goblet full.

“I’m a blade for hire, man.” There’s something a little like desperation in his tone. “Doing rather well, too, in the current climate. You tell me—why would I care who the overlords are, as long as they pay?”

“You’d care,” Ringil said grimly. “You think a lost memory and some iffy dreams are as bad as it’s going to get? I’ve seen the inside of the glamours the dwenda cast. I know what it’s like when they come for you. It’s a fog you move in, where nothing makes sense, where your acts aren’t your own, where horrors come and go and you don’t question any of it, you just accept it all and do what you’re told.”

Klithren shrugged. “Sounds just like the war. Come to that, it sounds like a lot of my life, war or peace regardless. I think your noble upbringing has spoiled you for this world, my lord Eskiath. Most of us already live the way you describe.”

“Yeah. Spare me the professions of rank and file, knight commander. That kid in mortgaged mail, cutting off ears and laughing? He’s dead and gone now, whatever nightmares you might be having about him at the moment. It’s too late for him. Your acts of slaughter are all your own these days, Klithren of Hinerion, you’ve made your choices and you live by them. And if I’m not much mistaken, that’s exactly the way you like it.”

The mercenary said something inaudible. Buried his face in his drink. Ringil stared down at his own empty hands.

“If the dwenda make a comeback, you can kiss all that good-bye. Knowing, understanding, choosing. You aren’t going to recognize this world once they’ve turned it inside out to suit, and you won’t ever again know if your actions are your own.” Ringil jerked a thumb back at the pommel of the Ravensfriend where it rose over his shoulder. “This blade? The dwenda let me carry it on my back through the Grey Places just like this, and I never knew I had it on me the whole time. If I’d been attacked, I would have died with empty hands, like some bent-backed peasant, without even trying to draw steel, because I did not know it was there for me to draw. They stole that from me—the truth of my own capacity to resist. I think they may have stolen my will to it as well, for a while anyway. But the truth is I can’t be sure. Another time, they tied me to my own guilt and grief out there, and they let it eat me alive—literally, I’m talking about. Literally eaten alive, then brought back to life so it could happen all over again. I was torn apart a thousand fucking times on that plain I showed you, by a demon I’d hacked to death in this world. But it lived on out there because they gave it power.”

Because you gave it power, too, Gil. Let’s not forget that.

A stir of curious voices down on the main deck. He became aware he’d been shouting. He drew a harsh breath and nailed down his rage. Compressed his mouth to a thin line.

“That’s what they did to me,” he said quietly. “For my sins. You? Well, they sent you north to bring me in dead or broken and bound, and instead you end up helping me to disarm your own men. You hand over your ships and your command, and now you stand at my side as an ally. What do you think they’ll do to you for that, my sellsword friend?”

“I could always change sides again.”

“Yeah, you could do that.” Ringil put out his hand for the bottle. “Question is—are you going to?”

They watched the sunset in silence. It seemed like quite a while before the mercenary handed over the wine. Gil tilted the bottle and looked at the level. Not a lot left in there anymore, and the color was darkening slowly from blood red to black as evening came on. He shrugged, drained it to the dregs, tossed the emptied bottle down into the ocean’s rise and fall. He wiped his mouth.

“So?”

“So. For all I know, everything you showed me could be a glamour.” But there was no real accusation in the other man’s voice anymore. Klithren just sounded tired. “This dwenda invasion shit—all I have is your word.”

“That’s right.”

“And last time I trusted you, you murdered my friend, waited until my back was turned, and then took me from behind.”

Ringil’s lips twitched. “So to speak.”

“That’s not what I meant. Are you fucking laughing about this?”

“No…”

“Because it’s not fucking funny. All right?” Klithren went to straighten up off the rail and his elbow slipped. He lurched. Ringil bit his lip.

“I said—”

“Not funny.” Gil shook his head with emphatic, slightly drunken solemnity. “Absolutely. No, it’s not.”

“That’s right,” the mercenary said, in tones that would have been severe if they hadn’t come out so slurred. “It isn’t. Wouldn’t let you near my fucking arse with a barge pole.”

There was a brief, perplexed silence.

“What would I want a barge p—”

“I didn’t mean… I meant.” Klithren glowered at him. “Look, will you stop fucking—”

“I’m not…”

A stifled snort got out through someone’s lips—later, neither would remember which one of them it was. They traded an ill-advised glance. Ringil clung to what he hoped was an expression midway between polite and serious…

And then, out of nowhere, both men were cackling helplessly.

Helplessly. Out loud, at nothing at all.

Like some pair of maniacs abruptly loosed from the chains that had until now stopped them doing harm to themselves, each other, and the rest of the sane, waking world.

CHAPTER 39

He woke from a dream of winter sunset out on the steppe, long, low spearing rays of reddish light that spilled and dazzled across his eyes as he rode, but failed to warm him at all. He was riding somewhere important, he knew, had something to deliver he thought, but there was a faint terror rising in him that whatever it was, he’d lost it or left it behind somewhere on this long, cold ride, and now the remainder of his journey was a hollow act. He should have been able to see the Skaranak encampment by now, the thin rise of campfire smoke on the horizon, or the dark, nudging mass of grazing buffalo herds at least. He raised up in the saddle, twisted about, scanning ahead and side to side, but there was nothing, nothing out here at all. He was riding alone, into a rising chill and a dwindling red orange glow…

Egar blinked and found the fire sprite hovering in his face.

He flailed at its red orange radiance with a stifled yelp. One blank moment of panic. Then full wakefulness caught up.

He sat up in his blankets and stared around. A pallid dawn held the eastern sky, pouring dull gray light across the sleep-curled forms in their bedrolls around him, the scattered packs and the blue radiant bowls now gone opaque and glassy, like so many big stones gathered from a river’s bed. Across at the stairway entrance they’d come in, Alwar Nash waved casually from where he sat huddled at last watch. Everyone else was still out cold.

“Early yet,” the Throne Eternal commented when Egar had stumbled to his feet and wandered over to join him. “Another hour to full light at least. But our friend there seems pretty agitated about something.”

He gestured and the Dragonbane saw how the sprite was now floating directly above Archeth’s sleeping form, flickering rapid shades of orange in her face.

“It tried her first,” Nash said. “Guess she’s too wrung out to notice.”

Egar shook his head. “Always been that way. When she sleeps, she really sleeps. Seen her snore right through a siege assault at Shenshenath once.”

“Must be that Black Folk blood.”

“Must be. Had the lizards a hundred deep at the walls that time, couple of blunderers smashing their heads in against the stonework because they were too stupid to find the gates…” Lost in the skeins of memory for a moment, and then understanding hit him in the head like a bucket of cold water. “Shit! Nash—start kicking them awake. We got to move.”

“Move? But—”

“Scaled Folk.” He was already on his way to Archeth, calling back over his shoulder. “Lizards don’t get up early. Something to do with their blood; their heritage or… Look, just get everyone moving.”

Can’t believe you forgot that, Eg. Not like the war was that long ago, is it?

Is it?

And he had a couple of seconds to feel suddenly very old, as he realized that Nash, in common with most of the others, had not only not fought in the war, he had in all probability never even seen a living lizard before yesterday’s fight.

THEY GOT EVERYONE AWAKE INSIDE A COUPLE OF MINUTES, GAVE SOFT INstructions to load up and be ready to move out. When Archeth blinked initial sleepy incomprehension at him, Egar gestured at the fire sprite’s agitated bobbing and flickering.

“Someone’s in a hurry here. My guess? It wants to get us someplace before the lizard hour.”

Her eyes widened. “Oh, shit. Got to be, yeah.”

She flung off her blankets. Flinched as the movement caught the wound he’d stitched for her the night before. Impatient grunt of pain held down and the flare of anger in her eyes at her own unwelcome weakness. She settled her harness and knives about her with a blunt lack of care that looked to the Dragonbane like punishment. She must have tugged on the wound more than a few times in the process, but to watch her, you’d never have known.

“All right, then,” she said tightly when she was done. “Let’s go.”

They filed rapidly down the staircase behind the sprite and let it lead them out into the street. Any actual sunrise was still a good way off, and down at ground level there was a lot of gloom. The jut and slump of broken architecture around them worried at the Dragonbane’s attention, sketched hints of a thousand phantom enemies, crouched to pounce every few yards. Every darkened gap in the rubble they passed seemed to promise an ambush, every glint of something shiny in the low light was a reptile peon’s eye. Egar, yawning despite the heightened tension, marched with a prickling at the nape of his neck and tried to recall useful detail from the tactical lectures given by Kiriath commanders during the war.

Like any reptiles, the Scaled Folk like heat better than cold, but they seem to have adapted beyond this in ways their smaller cousins on this continent have not. They do not depend on warmth to the same extent, and can function quite sufficiently well in cooler conditions. Yet their ancestry tells upon them in a number of ways that may be helpful to us. They are drawn instinctively to warmer climes and to discrete heat sources; they appear to accord some sacred significance to the roasting pits they build and ignite; and they do not stir early in the day if they can avoid it.

Sounds like me, muttered Ringil to him in the back rank where they stood, and Egar tried to stifle an explosive snigger.

They’d both been a lot younger back then.

You have something to contribute? Flaradnam, seamed black features glaring into the ranks. He waited a beat, got no response. Then shut the fuck up and listen, all of you. What we tell you here today could save your life.

Across the shattered predawn city, then, threading through empty streets and plazas, picking their way up and over mounds of rubble bigger than any intact building he’d ever seen, even in Yhelteth. Once again, the fire sprite led them a crooked, seemingly senseless path through the ruins. They backed up and twisted and turned. They followed thoroughfares straight as arrows for miles, then turned abruptly off them into tangled, broken ground, worked difficult, meandering routes, only to spill out onto what Egar would have sworn was the same thoroughfare an hour later and head onward as if they’d never left it. Once, some way along a broad boulevard similar to the one they’d been attacked on the night before, the sprite led them directly off the street and up a punishingly steep rubble slope, then along a windy, exposed cliff face of ruined façades that ran for at least half a mile and tracked the boulevard directly. It was tricky work, and in some places involved clinging and edging their way forward with the risk of a lethal fall, while all the time below them, the boulevard stretched on, devoid of apparent obstacles and utterly deserted.

“You think,” he asked Archeth, breathing hard, as they rested at one of the infrequent safe sections, “that this thing has a sense of humor?”

She looked out to where the sprite hung blithely suspended a couple of yards away in empty space and a hundred feet off the ground.

“Either that, or it thought we’d like the view.”

“Yeah. Well worth the climb.” Egar glowered out across the fractured landscape, and the pale gray wash of another cloud-shrouded morning. “Like Gil would say if he was here, I’m particularly enamored of the… ”

She glanced around curiously as he trailed off. He squinted, wanting to be sure, then pointed outward, what he estimated had to be northeast from their position and a dozen miles off or less.

“You see that? Past that torn-up pyramid thing? Where the three boulevards cross, then back a little and left. See the… what is that? Looks like…”

Talons.

As if a broad expanse of the city’s structure had broken like pond ice under the weight of some vast, lumbering black iron creature, which now clung to the ragged edges of the hole it had fallen through with huge claws sunk in, struggling not to go down into an abyss below. As if several gargantuan black spiders out of one of his father’s tales hung suspended in a shared, irregularly shaped ambush burrow, only their limbs extending up and out to grip the edges of the gap on all sides, poised to spring. As if dragon’s venom had splattered on the city’s flesh in overlapping oval pools, had eaten its way in and left splayed black burn marks all around, or…

It dawned on him then, full force.

It looks like Kaldan Cross.

As if the Kiriath had labored here as they had at Kaldan in Yhelteth, delving down into the bedrock for their own obscure purposes, reinforcing the sides of their pit with outward clamping iron struts, but on a massively larger scale.

“Look familiar?” he asked.

“Well, it’s Kiriath built, that’s for sure.” Archeth, shading her eyes against the glare the rising sun had put into the clouds. “And whatever it is, it goes down. Aerial conveyance pits, right?”

“You reckon?”

“I reckon it’d be a pretty huge coincidence otherwise.” She propped herself carefully upright against the façade at their backs. “Come on, let’s see if our flickery friend there feels the same.”

THEY FOLLOWED THE FAÇADE ALMOST TO ITS END BEFORE THE SPRITE dived into a gap in the stonework and led them down through a series of collapsed and angled spaces that might once have been rooms. They crowded in behind, relieved to get away from the sheer drop, but none too happy with the confined quarters and gloom.

Our scaly pals show up now, they’ll have us quicker than a shaman’s shag. Egar’s gaze flickered about, making the odds. Barely enough room in here to swing a fucking long knife, let alone a sword or ax. And gaps on every side—floors, walls, ceilings, it’s all up for grabs.

Still, he slapped down any comments in that direction from the men at his back, told them to shut the fuck up and watch where they stepped. While ahead and below him, Archeth’s lithe form braced its way downward with boots and elbows and arse, backlit into silhouette by the sprite’s onward beckoning fire.

Not bad, Archidi, for someone with a sewn gash across the ribs big enough to stick your whole hand in. And not a grain of krinzanz to sweeten the ride.

He didn’t know if she’d used any of the powders they were gifted with at An-Kirilnar, but somehow he doubted it. There was a gritted edge on Archeth right now—if anything, she seemed to be using her pain for something, maybe as a substitute for the fire the krin habitually lent.

“You all right?” he asked her when they finally spilled out into the light at street level and he stood close at her shoulder.

She didn’t look at him, took no break from scanning the street ahead, for all that the sprite was already drifting steadily along it. “Yeah, why wouldn’t I be?”

“Stitches holding up?”

“Well, you should know—you put them in.” She glanced around at him, face tightening up into a grimace as her body twisted. “Stings worse than getting head from a cactus, if you really want to know. But it’s some beautiful fucking work, Eg. I don’t reckon Kefanin stitches my riding leathers this well.”

He shrugged, mask for the enduring bitter taste the skirmish the night before had left. “All part of the service. If I can’t keep you from getting hurt, at least I can patch up the damage afterward.”

“Works for me.”

The last of the men dropped out of the gap in the masonry behind them and straightened up with vocal curses of relief. Egar shut them up, got them formed into a loose wedge, and led them out once more behind Archeth and the sprite.

The rest was hard marching but uneventful. They cut across the mounded rubble a few times more, leaving one boulevard in favor of another, trading plazas for streets and vice versa, but it was all open ground, ruined masonry packed solid underfoot or sections of stairway and raised platforms that had taken no more than superficial damage in whatever cataclysm had snuffed the city out. Clear views on all sides now, no real risk of ambush, and their pace picked up accordingly. Egar began to catch traces of a familiar reek on the wind.

He jogged forward, caught up to Archeth who was striding a few yards ahead.

“You smell that?”

“Yeah. Like the stacks at Monal. Must be getting close.”

Sometimes at An-Monal, the winds blew in from the south, and then you caught an acrid whiff of the chemicals at play in the Kiriath brewing stacks on the plain below. The Dragonbane had never been very sure what it was Archeth’s people made in those towers, he’d only understood that they preferred to make it at some considerable distance from where they lived. Watching at night as huge, unnaturally colored flames leapt and gouted atop the miles-distant darkened towers, he didn’t much blame them. Whatever they had trapped in there, you wouldn’t want to be standing very close if it ever got loose.

He remembered asking Flaradnam about it once, one banquet night out on the balcony shortly before they all headed out for Trelayne and then the Wastes. He might as well not have bothered—as was so often the case with the Kiriath, any reply you got left you with more questions than you’d started with, and this time was no exception to the rule. ’Nam glanced around the table at the various commanders’ faces in the bandlight, then dropped some cryptic comment to the effect that most of the Kiriath’s more useful alloys had to be grown to full complexity or some such shit. That it was in fact a process less like smelting and smithing, and more akin to raising crops or, in its finest expressions, breeding warhorses or—a fond side-smirk at an embarrassed Archeth—children. What all that actually meant, Egar had no fucking clue and was too half-cut at the time to pursue any further. And later there was no time, they were all too busy, and a couple of months after that, Flaradnam was beyond all asking.

The smell was growing stronger, there even in the gaps between the bluster of the wind. He sneaked a glance at Archeth, wondering if it kicked her back as thoroughly to memories of her father.

But in the gray morning light, her face was as impassive as the flat of a blade.

They came over steeply piled mounds of rubble the size of hills, started a descent through isolated crags and outcrops of architecture that looked like the drowned upper levels of buildings once dizzying in height. And then, abruptly, they were looking down at the edge of the Kiriath earthworks from not much more than five hundred yards away. The holes gaped there, larger than some lakes he knew back on the steppe, but empty, shadowed, and dark. More than ever, it looked as if these were wounds the city had sustained, and the vast black iron protrusions that sprouted from them on all sides some kind of surgical clamps to prevent healing. As if the Kiriath had dropped something from a great height on their enemies here, and then left it in place to grow and sprout, just the way all those complex alloys were supposed to grow in the stacks at An-Monal.

The fire sprite came to a flickering halt just past a standing ruin a handful of stories high, paused there perhaps to give them time to take in the view down across the rubble. The air was warmer now. Even the occasional gusts of wind carried some stale-tasting heat along with the brewing stack odors. Egar fetched up at Archeth’s shoulder again.

“See a way down inside?”

She cupped both hands above her eyes to shade them, peered, and shook her head. “Not from here.”

“At Kaldan Cross, you got those things like big mason’s hods running on cables, but they’re sort of tucked away, under the lip.”

“Yeah, I know. I was there when they built it, remember? This is a fuck of a lot bigger than anything at Kaldan.”

“Well,” he shrugged. “Bigger hods and cables then. Maybe.”

The warm wind came and went, gusts and gaps, blowing directly across the open plain and the huge iron-clamped holes in it. The acrid chemical reek rolled in again, but it brought something else with it this time, another note to the mingled odors that—

Sandalwood…?

Or not. He’d lost it again, in the buffet and gust of the wind. He turned his head, breathed deep trying to get it back. He cast about, a sliding sense of doom behind his eyes. Saw the fire sprite turned jumpy and irresolute, slipping back and forth in the air beside them. Archeth, lost in peering down at what her people had built here…

Sudden, sharp spike of aniseed in his nostrils. The wind came banging back, brought with it the sandalwood again, stronger now, no room left for doubt. He heard comment murmur among the men, men too young or too lucky to know what it meant. He stared down at the gaping holes ahead of them. Felt the warmth in the air again, as if for the first time, and understanding fell on him like the ruin at his back.

Oh no…

But he knew it was.

And now the stealthy chill, waking and walking through his bones. The grinning skull of memory, the bony beckoning hand.

Well, well, Dragonbane. Here it comes, after all these years.

He grabbed Archeth by the shoulder. “Snap out of it, Archidi. We’ve got trouble.”

“Trouble?” She blinked, still lost in thought “What’s the…”

She caught the blast of spices on the breeze. Her eyes widened in shock. Egar was already unslinging his Warhelm-forged staff lance. He shed the soft fabric sheaths at either end, let them drift to the ground without attention. Plenty of time to chase them up later.

If there was a later.

“Clear your steel,” he snapped to the men at his back, as they gathered in around him. “And get back inside that ruin, find yourselves some cover, fast.”

“Is it the lizards again, my lord?” someone asked.

He had time to offer one tight grin. “I’m afraid not, no.”

“Then—”

Across the wind, out of Kiriath pits below them, it came and split the air. A shrieking, piercing cry he’d thought he’d never hear again outside of dreams. A cry like sheets of metal tearing apart, like the denial of some bereaved warrior goddess, vast, immortal grief tipping over into the insane fury of loss. Like the drawn-out, echoing rage of some immense, stooping bird of prey.

“It’s a dragon,” he told them simply. “Pretty big one, too, by the sound of it.”

CHAPTER 40

The term pirate was one that gave the League a few semantic difficulties.

The word in current popular usage was in fact a corruption into the Parash dialect of an older term used in the southern cities, borrowed in when Parashal was the ascendant power in the region. The southern coastal states of Gergis had long been traders by sea, knew very well what the scourge of piracy looked like, and their descriptor was condemnatory in no uncertain terms. But Parashal was an inshore city, tucked away in the upland spine of Gergis and several hundred very safe miles from the nearest ocean. Its citizens had about as much chance of being carried off by a dwenda succubus as they did of suffering the predations of a real, live pirate, and so they leaned to a rather more romantic view of the profession. Colorful tales abounded of bold young men, invariably handsome and chivalrous, seeking their fortunes on the high seas, striking out heroically against corrupt port authorities and unjust maritime power. Thus resident in the Parash overculture, the word pirate collected all the selective drama and romance these narratives entailed, much the way a half-sucked sweet picks up a shielding layer of dust and lint from lying in a pocket untasted.

Subsequent cultural and political shifts—put more bluntly, war—brought regional ascendancy north to Trelayne, but by then the Parash dialect was the dominant form of Naomic throughout the Gergis peninsula, taught in schools and temples, used in treaties and legal contracts, seen as the civilized and sophisticated norm by which all truly educated men were measured. So the accepted form of the word pirate would retain all its attendant Parash ambiguity, along with a peacock tail of fanciful heroic narrative made up and written down by men who, had they ever been faced with the real thing, would doubtless have run screaming to hide in the nearest privy.

It didn’t hurt this trend that Trelayne was as much a military as a trading power, at least in aspiration, and that to a large degree the city depended on legalized piracy to enforce its influence at sea. Handing out letters of marque to known coastal raiders was a cheap and useful substitute for building a navy, not to mention a powerful stimulus to seagoing trade, since you ensured at the stroke of a quill not only that your own merchant shipping was left comfortably alone but that your competitors were severely hampered until they saw fit to pay you for protection.

Prosecuted over time, this privateer-based strategy allowed Trelayne to extend and consolidate dominance over every coastal city in the Gergis region and even a couple that had liked, sporadically, to think of themselves as belonging to the Empire in the south. And along with the dominance came a whole new crop of heroic tales, where the terms pirate and privateer grew more or less interchangeable and the bloody specifics of the work were glossed over in general celebration of the triumphant end result. Thus, pirates as warrior princes, as conquerors and standard bearers, as sober martial guardians of righteous commerce and selfless servants to the Greater Glory of Trelayne—eventually becoming the Greater Glory of the Trelayne League—in its tussles with the encroaching imperial might of Yhelteth.

Perhaps inspired by all this confused and confusing etymology, Shif Grepwyr began his career in piracy young. He was a privateer cabin boy at eleven years old, a boarding party bravo at fourteen. Was bossing his own boarding gang a month shy of his fifteenth birthday, rose to boarding party chief on the raiding caravel Salt Lord’s Sanction a year after that. Three years later, he killed Sanction’s skipper in a squabble over spoils, leveraged the murder into a full mutiny, and then showed up in Trelayne that winter, requesting a transfer of charter and willing to pay for it with a hold full of plunder. Always sensitive to commercial promise, the Trelayne Chancellery acquiesced.

The name on the new letter of marque was Sharkmaster Wyr.

“Oh, right, him.” Klithren poured himself another shot of rum, knocked it back, and wiped his mouth. “Yeah, back when I was a kid he used to winter at Hinerion sometimes, coming back up from raiding the Empire coast. But that ship wasn’t called Salt Lord’s Sanction, it was something else. Shorter than that.”

Ringil nodded. “Sprayborne. Wyr pulled in so much plunder those first couple of years, sank so much imperial shipping, they made him an honorary commander in the Shipmasters’ guild and gave him a new hull. Purpose-built raider, something to compete with the Yhelteth naval pickets. That’s the one you remember.”

Klithren poured again. Held it up to the gently tilting lantern over their heads and squinted through the liquor at the light. He was beginning to slur his words a little.

“Yeah, this is all really fascinating memory lane shit, fascinating, but.” The rum, down in one again. He banged the empty glass on the table. “Fuck’s it got to do with us?”

Ringil’s rum sat untouched before him. He picked it up delicately between finger and thumb. “Would you like to know where Sprayborne is now?”

“I’m sure you’re going to tell me.”

“It’s anchored at the delta mouth of the Trel, out by the mudflats. You probably sailed right past it when you shipped out for Ornley. Sprayborne is a prison hulk now. Masts sawn down to stumps, hull chained fore and aft into river silt. Sharkmaster Wyr is still aboard, along with those of his crew who weren’t punished by decimation.”

“Say what?”

“Yeah. Seems after the war our friend Wyr lost track of which side his bread was buttered and started taking ships pretty much at random. They say it was Liberalization that knocked him off the perch, that he lost some friends or family to the auction block, but who knows?” Ringil shrugged. “Maybe he just didn’t like the moratorium on attacking imperial traffic. Pretty lean times all around back then.”

“Fucking tell me about it.”

The war against the Scaled Folk had emptied the League’s coffers just as it had the Empire’s, devastated its productive workforce, laid waste once prosperous centers of population and whole tracts of once fertile land. And the speculative border skirmishing against the Empire that followed in the south once the Scaled Folk were safely defeated had not delivered any of the promised recompense, had in fact only sucked down more men and resources that neither side could afford to lose—hence an early, hastily brokered peace.

For the privateer fraternity, Gil guessed, the whole thing would have been an unmitigated disaster. No real fighting to be done at sea during the war itself, if you didn’t count a few early and abortive attempts to burn the incoming Scaled Folk rafts. Decently seaworthy vessels—and some not even decently—got commandeered and turned into troop transports or evacuation barges, or were put to running basic supplies, payment for all of which was scant to nonexistent. The privateer crews were pared back to a minimum, most of their fighting strength drafted into landing parties alongside more conventional forces, leaving the bare minimum needed to handle the sailing. And for those who survived to war’s end, no prospect of a return to the good old days of licensed raiding on the imperial main, because nobody could afford the fresh hostilities it might provoke.

Under the circumstances, what was any self-respecting privateer to do?

“He had a pretty good run, considering.” Ringil drank off a measured portion of his own rum and set it down again. “Started taking Empire merchantmen, regardless of the treaties. That got him loudly proclaimed an outlaw, because the League couldn’t very well be seen to do anything less, at which point he must have decided what the fuck, may as well have all the fish in the net while I’m trawling, and he starts hitting League shipping, too.”

“Makes sense. No imperial navy to worry about up here.”

“That may have been a factor, I suppose. In any case, it all went bad shortly after. I hear he cleaned out a ship flying Marsh Daisy pennants, and the Brotherhood took exception. They went to work chasing down some of Wyr’s shoreside collaborators, and someone taken in the net just happened to know where Sprayborne was laired up that season. Brotherhood sells the information on to the Chancellery and the League goes in heavy. Lots of dead pirates, but Wyr gets taken alive, to be made an example of and—”

“Still don’t see,” Klithren broke in, “what the blue fuck any of this has got to do with us.”

“That’s because you’re drunk.” Ringil took the rum bottle and placed it strategically on his side of the table. Finished his drink and set his glass down upended. “I need a diversion while I get into Trelayne and bring out my friends. I want the city in flames, and I can’t spare the men or the time to do it myself.”

“And you think some broken-down failure of a pirate’s going to do it for you?” Klithren wagged his head solemnly back and forth. “Uh-uh, no way. You find some way to cut Wyr free, you really think he’s going to pick up a cutlass for you and try to storm the city? Forget it. He’s going to shake your hand, pick your pocket, and then fuck off faster than a paid whore. He’ll head right into the marsh and disappear. That’s if he can still stand up, because from what I’ve heard, they don’t feed them all that well out there aboard the hulks.”

Ringil eyed the other man coldly. “You ever have a family, Klithren?”

“None of your fucking business.”

“Well, turns out Wyr did. Wife, daughter, couple of sons. None of them all that old. They got taken along with everybody else when the League forces stormed Sprayborne’s layup. And you know just how fucking good the scum up at the Chancellery is at meting out punishment to those who transgress.”

It went black and hammering through his heart and arteries as he spoke, the sudden-stirring memory of Jelim’s death, and perhaps Klithren saw something of it in his eyes, too, because the mercenary grew more soberly quiet.

“They get the cage?”

“The wife and eldest son did.” Ringil locked it down with an effort, but the same shuddering force went on pulsing behind his eyes with the metronome calm of his words. “Daughter and the other son got lucky. There’s an ordinance about executing children younger than twelve by impalement. Up at the law courts, they call it holding the spike.”

Klithren nodded. “They have that in Hinerion, too.”

“So. Sharkmaster Wyr is taken in the company of his five-year-old son and seven-year-old daughter to the Eastern Gate, where they all witness the impalement of Wyr’s wife and eldest son. They’re then taken to Sprayborne, whose masts are still intact at this point, and Wyr gets to watch his other son and his daughter hoisted up in cages onto the mainsail spar, where they will be left to die of thirst or exposure, whichever gets them first. And he’s imprisoned below, so he can hear them calling for their mother until they die.” Ringil built a shrug. It felt like he was wearing plate across his shoulders. “I imagine they would have liked to hang the mother and other son up there, too, so Wyr could hear their screams. But those cages are heavy and hard to move, and the Chancellery law lords, well, those fine nobles in their house of justice have always had a strong pragmatic streak.”

Klithren said nothing. Gil breathed in deep. Noticed his teeth were gritted, loosened his jaw, and breathed out. He gave the other man a tight smile.

“You say Sharkmaster Wyr, once freed, will turn tail and flee into the marsh. I beg to differ.”

THEY RAISED THE NORTH GERGIS COAST NOT LONG AFTER NIGHTFALL. Shortly after, the lookout aboard Dragon’s Demise spotted the faintest trace of a reddish glow against the sky forward to port. There was really only one thing that it could be. The call went up and signal lanterns flickered ship to ship—journey’s end sighted. Seemed Lal Nyanar had managed to plot and hold a pretty steady course after all.

Unless he missed by five hundred miles and that’s the lights of Lanatray we’re looking at.

But Ringil knew, as he stood on the foredeck and watched the smeared charcoal line at the horizon, that it wasn’t Lanatray, and that Nyanar was right on course. Lanatray was tiny by comparison to Trelayne, and shielded from the direct ocean by a long granite bluff—you wouldn’t spot the glow of her lights until you were nearly swimming distance out. And anyway—

You can feel it, can’t you, black mage.

That’s Home out there, sitting just under the horizon like grave dirt under your nails, and you can feel it calling.

Dragon’s Demise came about a couple of degrees and pointed her prow at the glow on the sky. Behind him at the ship’s helm, he heard Nyanar calling the order to run colors. Gil put a krinzanz twig he’d rolled earlier to his lips, willed it absently to life with the sketch of a burning glyph drawn in the air. He drew the harsh-tasting smoke down and held it there while the krin stole icily from his lungs into his veins. He leaned on the rail, breathed the smoke back out, and waited for Trelayne to show herself.

The line of the coast thickened, grew visibly irregular. Cloud shredded apart off the scimitar gleam of the band, let in a low silvery light. Before long, you could start to make out the rise of hills along the shore, the textured detail of forest canopies and farmed fields, the mineral glint of escarpments and cliffs. The broad, familiar arms of the Trel delta spread to beckon him in and there, at the eastern extremity, the clustered lights of the city glimmered into view. He plumed smoke out into the wind, watched as it was snatched away again. Nodded at the lights as if in greeting.

Here I am again, you murderous whore. Just can’t give you up.

Two long, lean hulls ahead on the swells—privateer caravels riding picket for the estuary gap, clear notice of the war in progress and precautions taken accordingly. Ringil sensed the exact moment they were spotted, could almost see in his mind’s eye the sudden scramble to action stations aboard both vessels. Faint cries and yells, and a stampede of feet across decking drifted to his ears across the still night air. He couldn’t be sure if it was all just his imagination at work, or some stealthy new reach of the ikinri ‘ska. In any case, as he watched, one of the League ships came rapidly about and swung their way. He straightened up, flipped the last half inch of his twig over the rail, and headed for the companionway. Time to lend Nyanar some moral support.

As he walked down the main deck, he tilted his head back to where the yellow and black snake’s tongue pennants now fluttered at each mast tip.

Wonder when they’ll spot those.

Should sober them up a bit when they do.

To anyone with seasoned seafaring eyes, Dragon’s Demise was unmistakably an imperial vessel, but she was flying Trelayne colors, big and bold at the mainmast, and the League man-of-war he’d commandeered was right behind them, with Sea Eagle’s Daughter bringing up the rear and also flagged for Trelayne. You’d have to be pretty stupid not to read all of that for what it was—triumphant capture of Empire shipping, and the eagerly awaited next chapter in the privateer success story that must have begun when Pride of Yhelteth and her attendant captor vessels showed up a few days earlier. They’d be all set to cheer these new captives into harbor—until someone spotted that yellow and black.

He met Klithren at the foot of the companionway to the helm deck. The mercenary looked hungover and shaky on his feet, which Ringil supposed he more than likely was. Pretty much an ideal state of affairs, too, given what was coming next.

“Ready?” Gil asked him.

“I already fucking told you I was.”

“Good man.” He clapped Klithren hard on the chest and shoulder, grinned as he saw the mercenary’s face wobble in the gloom. “They’re not going to risk any closer than hailing distance, so it should be easy enough to sell. Just stick to what we agreed and try to look… well, no—you already do. Just keep it up.”

He climbed the companionway to the sound of retching at his back as Klithren threw up.

Lal Nyanar came and peered disdainfully down over the helm deck rail as Ringil climbed up to meet him.

“That man has been drunk all day,” he sniffed. “What you see in him as an ally, I simply cannot grasp.”

Gil stepped off the companionway. “He’s been in a few places you haven’t.”

“Is that supposed to explain the drinking?”

“It explains why I want him as an ally. Are you ready?”

Nyanar glanced up at the pennants they were flying. “As we’ll ever be. It remains to be seen if this scheme of yours will work, though.”

Ringil, preparing to hand out some straightforward reassurance, felt mischief sparkle through him instead. It was the call of impending risk, he knew, the itch to action—and a long building irritation with Nyanar that finally flared to life. He put on a breezy grin.

“But my lord Nyanar! That’s what gives life its savor, is it not? Where would we be if the future were always known?”

“We’d be back home in Yhelteth,” said Nyanar sourly. “Avoiding madcap quests and desperate jailbreak schemes and deceptions.”

I am home, you soggy-faced, entitled little prick, he barely stopped himself saying. You think it took northern sorcery to make me the way I am now? You think it took a war? Those things were tonic compared to what came before. Desperation and deception were waiting for me at the nursery door, took me by either hand as I walked out into my youth, have been my constant companions since.

He kept his grin with an effort. “Home we might be, but we’d come up a little short on tales of glory to regale our grandchildren with.”

The captain’s mouth crimped. “I see no glory in—”

“Signal!” A bawled cry from the forward lookout. “Signaling—heave to and await escort!”

Nyanar looked queasy, almost a match for Klithren’s face earlier. He met Ringil’s eyes with an expression that verged on accusing. Gil nodded.

“This scheme of mine appears to be working out,” he said amiably.

CHAPTER 41

The shock of the scream held them rigid. It hung in the air around them like freezing fog, even as the echoes ran out across the ruined city. Archeth felt the breath stop in her throat, felt a cold hand cup her at the nape of the neck. The wash of sandalwood and aniseed in the wind. She met Egar’s eyes across the gathering of men, and he nodded, something suddenly old and weary in his face. She’d heard him say the word, just like everyone else, but still, everything in her wanted to shake her head in dumb denial. Their luck just could not be this bad.

The cry repeated, redoubled in force.

“It can smell us,” said the Dragonbane grimly.

He rounded on the men. “Don’t just fucking stand there! I told you, it’s a dragon. What do you want, count its fucking teeth? Get back in those ruins. Drop your gear inside and climb. Come on, move it!”

They came awake, like statues summoned to life. Hurried into the forlorn façades and crags of stone behind them, casting fearful glances back. She watched them go as if in a dream, had time for an obscure sympathy as she remembered the numb shock of her own first encounter in the war. The fading echoes of that cry, chasing her all the way back…

“You, too, Archidi.” He was at her shoulder, grabbing, yanking her loose of her terrors, chivvying her to life. “Come on, you’ve been here before. You know the drill. Let’s go.”

He shepherded her toward the nearest gap in the architecture, shoved her through, into dim light and a cavern chaos of rubble and collapsed flooring. She heard him follow her in. They stood there a moment in the cradling gloom, amid a scattering of discarded packs and other gear—the men had followed Egar’s orders to the letter. She stared up to where a couple of pale faces peered back down at them. Listened to the noises as the rest of the men scrambled about elsewhere in the ruins, seeking position. Outside, the dragon shrieked once more. She added her pack to the pile, turned to face the Dragonbane, found him at her back, closer than she’d thought.

“So how—”

“In a minute.” He shrugged off his own pack, nodded upward. “Let’s get some height first.”

They clambered up through the slumped and shattered levels, spotted more of the company crouched and huddled where the remaining buttresses and beams of the ruins looked strongest. Men nodded and bowed to her as she inched past, but their eyes skipped repeatedly back to Egar as he climbed behind her. She heard them murmuring, and among those who were speaking Tethanne, she heard the name more than once, like an invocation, like a warding spell of power—

Dragonbane…

They came out finally on a section of flooring twenty feet up that had somehow not given way. There was a row of tall, narrow windows to the front. Archeth crept forward, ascertained that the floor was solid, and crouched by the nearest of the openings. Little twinges of pain along the stitches in her wound—she grimaced and tried to ease her posture. Egar came behind her, hampered a little by his grip on the staff lance. He joined her at the window, craned to peer out.

“So how do we do this?” she asked quietly.

“Glad you asked me that.” He didn’t look at her, was still glued to the view outside. “Give me a minute, let’s just see what we’re dealing w—”

Voice blotted abruptly out. He sank to sitting, back to the wall. Drew breath in over his teeth, shot her a glance.

“Go on, take a look.” He jerked a thumb over his shoulder. “You don’t want to miss this.”

She crammed past him to the window. The sea of rubble below them, tilting and sloping down toward the sunken Kiriath structures beyond. A frozen landscape of shards and shades of gray and—

Motion!

She almost recoiled from the window; it was a physical effort not to do it. Her heart clutched and jumped in her chest.

It had taken on the same mottled gray tones as the landscape. If it hadn’t been moving, she might have missed it entirely at first glance. But it was moving. It clambered effortlessly across the rubble, came pacing zigzag up the slope toward them, and it was grinning. Scimitar-fanged mouth, loose and open to let the tongue flicker out and taste the air. Recessed eyes, high on the long curved head, a crest of folded webbing and spines bristling behind the skull, the colossal echo of the same appendage on a warrior caste lizard, but this crest had to be twice longer than the Dragonbane was tall. Powerful, taloned forelimbs lifting head and chest just off the ground, so it seemed the beast was sniffing for them like a hound. Flexed arch of dorsal plates and back and belly you could have driven a cart and horses under. Haunches, each rising and curving the size of Pride of Yhelteth’s mainsail running full before the wind. Finally the tail, tapered and spike-ended, half the length of the body again and thicker than a man’s trunk even at the thinnest point.

It raised its head as she watched, lifted almost fully back on its haunches. The crest flared up and out, spread the width of a palace gateway either side of the skull. She caught a fresh blast of sandalwood. The dragon screamed at the desolate gray sky, and Archeth felt the cry through the stonework she was leaned against. Felt the pit of her belly vibrate.

“Ain’t she a fucking beauty?” breathed the Dragonbane, back at her side. “Look at the size of that bitch. Gil’s going to be sorry he wasn’t here for this.”

“So what do we do?” she hissed.

“Hard to say. I had a cliff and a pissed-off faggot with a Kiriath broadsword to work with last time.”

“Well.” She gestured helplessly. “Can we lure it back to the pit, maybe? Trick it into falling down there?”

He gave her a tight smile. “It just climbed out of the pit, Archidi. I don’t think that’s going to work.”

The dragon screamed again. The sound rang off the walls around her, rang in her ears. It filled the space inside the ruin like water. Egar nodded.

“You hear that? This isn’t a blunderer, Archidi, it’s a fucking dragon. Whole other story. They’re smart, easily as smart as warrior caste. We only got ours over that cliff in Demlarashan because we’d already done it some serious damage, and it was going mad from the pain.”

“So what do you suggest?”

“I suggest for the moment that we sit tight.” The Dragonbane was peering through the window frame again. She heard him draw a sharp breath, then he pitched his voice loud, for the others in the ruins around them. “Brace up, lads—here it comes. It’s going to sniff around here a bit, try screaming to scare us out, and if that doesn’t work it’ll try to tear its way in. Don’t get shaken, don’t expose yourselves, unless it’s on my word. That clear?”

A thin and shaky chorus of assent.

“Good. Then today’s the day we kill ourselves a dragon! Anybody up for that?”

A couple of hard-driven cheers floated loose in the ruined spaces. She thought she recognized Alwar Nash’s voice among them.

“I said—do you want to kill a fucking dragon?”

More yells, and more punch behind them this time. Egar eased up out of his crouch and filled his lungs.

“I can’t hear you! Do you—or do you not—want to kill—a motherfucking dragon?”

A solid roar in answer.

“Then chant with me. Loud, so that fucking bitch can hear you. Make it understand who we are!” Egar stood erect, made a fist. Punched it savagely into the air above his head. “Dragon Bane! Dragon Bane! Dragon Bane!”

And the chant came back at him, from every throat in the ruin, even those who spoke no Tethanne and might not know what the syllables meant.

“Dragon Bane! Dragon Bane! Dragon Bane!”

Out of nowhere, she found herself with them, chanting, veins pulsing in her head with the force of it. The pain in her wound forgotten, driven out by this rising force. Faster now, as Egar forced the tempo up.

“Dragon Bane! Dragon Bane! Dragon Ba—”

The dragon screamed and shocked against the ruin.

It was like being back aboard Lord of the Salt Wind that night—seemingly solid planking under her feet, cabin bulkheads around her, all rendered suddenly flimsy by the force and roar of the storm outside. The wall she crouched against shivered with the impact, the shriek went through her head like pain. Men yelled and yelped behind her. The reek of sandalwood was overpowering; it made her dizzy just to breathe it.

The Dragonbane grinned, like a man facing down bonfire heat.

The echoes died away. Powder sifted down from the stonework above. Elsewhere, she heard the fall of larger rubble pieces. And then heavy, crunching footfalls on the other side of the wall. Egar glanced out of the window and nodded to himself.

“Everybody all right?” he called. “Sound off.”

Echoing calls through the architecture. A Majak voice, raised in evident fury. She heard the other Majak laugh.

“What’s going on?”

Egar shook his head. “He pissed himself. Pretty angry about it, too.”

He crabbed a couple of yards across the remnants of flooring to where the wall took a right-angle turn. Got up against the stonework beside a window on that side. Tipped a gaze outside. Archeth angled her head by inches, peered out of her own window, saw no movement, saw nothing but the sea of rubble.

“No sign,” she hissed across at the Dragonbane. “Where the fuck is it?”

He nodded sideways. “Gone around the back. Looking for a better way in.”

“Can we make a run for it, then?” Though her flesh quailed at the thought. “Get down into the pit before it…”

Her voice dried up as he shook his head. She found herself oddly relieved. Egar crabbed back to her side and sank to a crouch. He spoke absently, with his head tilted back against the stone, as if checking the sky above the ruin for portent.

“That’s five hundred yards, Archidi. It’d cut us down before we got halfway. I’ve seen these fuckers cough venom better than eighty feet. Got better aim than a tavern urchin spitting on a bet, too.”

“But—”

Violent crashing sounds from the rear of the ruin. The dragon shrieked again. Flurry of calls between the men. Egar bounced back up, shouted across the commotion.

“Report! Anybody back there see what’s going on?”

“It found a gateway,” someone yelled in Tethanne. “Tried to smash its way through.”

“Yeah? How’d it do?”

Another voice. “Went away with a sore fucking head.”

Laughter, uneasy at first, but gaining strength as the men grabbed on to it. Alwar Nash’s even, court-mannered tones came through the sounds of forced merriment.

“The beast got its head inside, my lord. It dislodged some stonework from the gateway arch, but had to withdraw. It is still outside.”

“Thank you. You all hold steady back there, I’m coming across. No one move unless you have to.” Egar dropped his voice and murmured to her. “Dragon-proof walls, eh? Got to hand it to these dwenda architects. I guess if you’re immortal, you just naturally build to last.”

“Yeah.” Her mouth was dry. She cleared her throat. “Listen, what if we just stay put? Wait for it to lose interest and go look for something else to eat?”

“If it lives in the pits—and I reckon it probably does, there’s a lot of warmth around here—then that isn’t going to happen. This is its home range, Archidi. We’re intruders. There’s only one way for it to understand that, only one way it knows how to behave. It isn’t going anywhere. It’ll tear this place down around us, or it’ll starve us out.”

“But we’re provisioned. How long can it just… hang around?”

Egar scowled. “Long enough. On the expeditionary, your father told me they reckoned these things probably only need to eat two or three times a year. But when they do find food, they’ll stick at it like a clan master trying to sire a son.” A shrug. “Anyway, even if it did lose its appetite, decide to forgive the intrusion and go back to bed, that still puts it right back in the pits. However you look at it, Archidi, the fucker’s in our way. Which makes it a bit of luck for us it found that gateway back there.”

She stared at him. “Luck?”

“Yeah. Like commanding officers are given to saying, we’ve got a point of engagement now. Just needs someone to go out there and persuade our scaly friend to stick her head back in again.” He grinned lopsidedly at her. “Got a coin?”

SHE DID, IN FACT—A WELL-WORN THREE-ELEMENTAL PIECE THAT HAD BY some miracle escaped notice when she was frisked prior to boarding Lord of the Salt Wind in Ornley; by some other freak chance, it had not been washed from her pockets when they wrecked. The Warhelm’s spiders found it in her ruined clothes, it seemed, when they took them away, and she woke a couple of mornings later with one of the little articulated iron creatures perched on her chest, holding the coin out in one pincer a couple of inches away from her nose. Struck image of Akal the Great’s head, looming huge and blurry close in her field of vision. She tried groggily to brush it away, but the iron spider came back, insistently, and in the end, with much bad grace, she snatched the coin up and threw it across the room. The spider scuttled off after it, brought it back again. She threw it once more. They both went around a couple more times before Archeth accepted she was being childish and held on to the coin until the spider went away

It’s not like I can spend it anywhere around here, she complained to Tharalanangharst as she dressed in her new clothes.

Nor can I, said the Warhelm tartly. Like so many other things, it will have to wait until your safe return to Yhelteth.

Now she pulled it out of her pocket, offered it glinting on her palm. The Dragonbane looked startled for a moment, then he smiled.

“Joking, Archidi. Just joking. You can stay here.”

“Yeah, like fuck.”

She stowed the coin and crept after him through the jagged maze of masonry. He tried to wave her back, but she forked an obscene gesture at him. He rolled his eyes. They crouched and crawled and clambered through the shattered structure of the building, losing height as they moved. Pale, cold light filtered down from the opened roof space above. She thought she heard the dragon scrape against a wall somewhere outside. Men watched them both from their various vantage points, and she saw them murmur to each other and point.

The gateway Nash had mentioned came into view, broad enough for a carriage and horses in width, but filled at base with debris and reduced to not much more than a couple of yards in height. The spiced reek was there, strong again, the same spikes of aniseed and cardamom through the sandalwood. Light from outside spilled inward under the arch, left long, dagger shadows across the rubble.

She spotted Alwar Nash crouched one floor up, huddled with another Throne Eternal in a corner where an interior wall had slumped sideways and dumped its various floors like a hand of bad cards thrown down. She prodded the Dragonbane’s shoulder—he was fixed on the gateway and its shadows—and pointed. They moved carefully up the sloping mess of cracked tile and stone, reached the two imperials, and hunkered down beside them. Nash bowed briefly to her. Pointed downward at the gate with the pommel end of his broadsword.

“It got its head inside there and twisted—you can see the marks where it gouged chunks out of the arch stones. Tried to tear the rest down with a claw, but there was no space for leverage. Structure was too strong, I guess.” He gazed up and around at the ruined walls. “Whoever built all this knew what they were—”

“Hsst!” The other Throne Eternal, gesturing. “It’s back!”

Shadows moved, under the gateway arch. There was a sound she knew, expelled breath like the shaken tail of some colossal rattlesnake, then ragged dragging noises, and the rubble just outside the gate shifted.

“All right,” said Egar softly.

“What is it?” Nash wanted to know. “What’s it doing?”

“Digging,” she told him. “Seen one do it at Shenshenath. Going to try to clear out enough of that debris so it can get inside, or maybe just dig up the foundations and topple the wall. They’re smart like that. Eg?”

No response. She looked at him, saw him staring down at his hands where they held the staff lance midway along the burnished alloy shaft. It was as if he’d forgotten what the weapon and the hands that held it were for.

She nudged him. “Eg. What’s next here?”

He stirred. Hefted the lance in both hands and looked around at her. “Archidi, I told you all about that piece of shit Poltar, didn’t I?”

She blinked. “The shaman? Sure, uh… Sold you out to your brothers up on the steppe, got them all fired up to kill you or chase you out. But—”

“That fuck needs killing, Archidi.” He held her gaze. “One way or the other.”

Something dripped like melting ice in her belly. “We talked about this already, Eg. Him and your brother Ershal. First order of business, soon as we get to Ishlin-ichan, we’ll track your people down. You got my word. But, uh… got to kill this fucking thing first, right?”

He sniffed hard. “Yeah, all right.”

She watched him cock his head, listen for a moment to the stony scrabbling sounds from outside. His face was unreadable. But when he looked up at his companions, his tone was as breezy as a man discussing a horse he might buy.

“Okay, she sounds pretty busy out there, plenty of noise to cover us. Nash—and you, what’s your name?”

The other Throne Eternal bowed. “Shent, my lord. Kanan Shent.”

“Shent, right. Hope you’re handy with that ax. You two follow us down, you got the lady Archeth’s back.”

Grim nods from both men.

“I’m going out as bait—”

“You are not!” she snapped.

“Archidi—”

“If anyone goes as bait, it’s me. I’m smaller, I’m lighter on my feet, I don’t have that staff lance to trip over—”

“Archidi, I used to do this for a living, remember?”

“My lady—”

“Nash, shut the fuck up.” She kept her eyes on the Dragonbane. “Eg, I’m in command here. I’ll decide the battle appointments.”

“I know what I’m doing, Archidi. You don’t.”

“Oh, three and a half fucking years fighting the Scaled Folk, and now I find out I didn’t know what I was doing. It’s funny, I led—”

“It’s not the same thing! It’s a fucking dragon!”

“Hsst!”

The digging noises outside had stopped. They froze in place, listening. Long beats of silence—she watched the shadows coming in the rubble-drowned gateway, saw them shift about. The snorting, rattling breath outside seemed to nose up to the wall they crouched against. Scrape of scales on masonry, a sudden explosive snort.

The digging resumed.

She fished in her pocket, brought out the coin.

“All right, then,” she hissed. “We settle it like this. Heads or manes. One toss, whoever wins goes outside.”

He stared at her for a long moment. Put out his hand.

“Give me that,” he said. “Call it.”

She swallowed hard. “Heads.”

“Right.”

They all watched intently as the Dragonbane tossed the three-elemental piece in the air—caught it in the cup of his hand—hefted it—slapped it across onto the back of his other hand where he still held on to the staff lance—took the covering hand away—

“Manes.” Nodding down at the worn horse-head motif on the upward face. “Can we get on with this now?”

He offered the coin back to her. She glowered at him, certain she’d just been duped, unable to quite work out how.

“Fucking keep it.”

“Okay, thanks.” A wink as he stowed the coin away. “Reckon I’ll blow that down at Angara’s place, soon as we get back.”

“Very funny.”

He knew she’d been a customer at Angara’s herself, back in the day, because she’d let it slip one drunken campfire night on campaign in the south. He knew also what crazy sums she’d paid, for the watertight anonymity and discretion the establishment offered. He’d rocked back from the campfire and whistled low when she told him.

Now he patted the pocket where the coin had gone. “Yeah, should buy me at least a thimble full of ale and thirty seconds with Angara’s best whore.”

“Are we going to fucking do this or what?”

They moved down the sloping, fallen flooring as one. Stopped on the rubbled ground a good distance from one side of the gate. Egar crept forward and squatted, peered cautiously out. A satisfied grunt. He came back.

“Right, it’s busy digging. Nash, you get on the other side of this gate. Archidi, you stay here with Shent, that way we hit it from both sides. Now I’m not planning to be out there long, so be ready. Soon as that cunt pokes its head in here, you hit it with everything you’ve got. Get to an eye if you can, or try for wounds around the mouth. Main thing is—hurt it as much as you can. You cause enough pain, it’s going to start doing stupid things, and that’s when we get to kill it.”

They moved up on the gateway. Nash hefted sword and shield, drew breath. Scuttled rapidly across to the far side and crouched there with evident relief. Egar waited a moment longer, looked back at Archeth and grinned.

“Pay attention,” he said. “I’m only going to do this once.”

He went with careful steps to the edge of the gateway arch. She saw him drop his left hand from the staff lance, hold the weapon loose and balanced at his right side. He lowered himself into a crouch for the sprint. She saw him summon breath.

And the rubble floor caved in under them all.

CHAPTER 42

There were times he dreamed that the cage had taken him after all; that he made some impassioned speech confessing guilt and repentance on the floor of the Hearings Chamber, and offered himself up for the sentence instead. That the Chancellery law-lords in their enthroning chairs and finery murmured behind their hands, deliberated among themselves for a space, and finally nodded with stern paternal wisdom. That the manacles were unlocked and his wife and children set free. He saw it with tears in his eyes and a sobbing laugh on his lips, saw Sindrin kneel on the cold marble, weeping and hugging at little Shoy and Miril, while Shif junior just stood and looked back at him across the chamber with mirrored tears standing in his own young eyes.

Then he woke, to his chains and the memory of what had really been done.

Sprayborne tilted on her anchors beneath him, yearned seaward on the currents from the river’s mouth. The damp cold of dawn seeped in through the portholes over his head and brought with it from the mudflats a stench like death.

At other times, maybe triggered by that reek, it was nightmare that took him—he dreamed, keening deep in his throat as he slept, that the rusted locks fell off the gibbet cages where they’d been heaved over the side and come to rest on the estuary’s silted bed, and now Shoy and Miril swam free, glitter-eyed and skeletal in the murky water, rising into the light to knock at Sprayborne’s hull and call for their father to come out and play…

Living punishment, as severe as the law allows, pronounced law-lord Murmin Kaad grimly into the anticipatory quiet of the Hearing Chamber. Meted out to reflect the severity of your sins against the Fair City and its allies, and to serve as clear example to others. Shif Stepwyr, you will see your bloodline extinguished, you will be imprisoned in the vessel you used to commit your crimes, and you will be given the rest of your natural span to reflect upon the evil you have done in this world.

He screamed when he heard it, and sometimes, waking from the dream, he echoed those screams again. Screamed and tore at his fetters until he bled from the old scarred wounds once more, screamed as he had in the Hearing Chamber, for the Salt Lord to come for him, for the whole fucking Dark Court to come if they willed it, to take his soul, to take him away, to any kind of torment but this, if he might just first pay back the rulers of Trelayne for the justice they had meted out.

No one came.

Four years now, as near as he could reckon it, since the last of his children’s weakened cries ceased and he knew he could count them dead. Since he heard the splash of the gibbet cages thrown overboard, and then the steady grating back and forth of the band saw they used to cut through Sprayborne’s masts and topple them. Four years trying to sell his soul to every demon god whose name he knew, and no takers yet. Four years, chained the same way his ship was chained, in a space meant to break body and mind alike.

For the craftsman jailers of Trelayne knew what they were about. They were well versed in the art of converting ships into dungeons—in a rapidly burgeoning city where every new square yard of building space had to be reclaimed from the marsh, prison hulks had long been the most economical way of shelving undesirables not considered worthy of execution. Better yet, there was a helpful, finger-wagging symbolism in the trick, especially where piracy was the crime for which punishment was to be exacted. The prison hulks were visible from the city walls on the south side, and from the slums in Harbor End, too, if you had a good enough eye; clearer still from the spread of reclaimed land beyond the city’s skirts, where Trelayne’s agricultural workforce bent their backs to earn a barely sustaining crust, and from the broad sweep of marshland beyond that, where the marsh dweller clans held to their encampments and grubbed a living in whichever way they could.

For anyone in those places who cared to look, then, the hulks were a grim, gathered presence, like storm clouds on the horizon. Think your life’s hard? Transgress the laws of the Fair City, and look where you could end up. Look what became of criminals, of sweet-keeled pirate vessels and their crews when the force of that law was invoked.

Inside Sprayborne, the same didactic sensibility held sway for the inmates, but seasoned with an additional twist of cruelty. They’d built the cells into the hull like the chambers in a wasp’s nest, each one sitting just above the bilges and served with light by portholes too high up to peer out of without the prisoner gouging at wrists and ankles when his restraining chains went taut. You might see the outside world you had forgone for your crimes, but only at painful cost.

For the rest, you sat chained in damp, stinking gloom and watched the days of your life march in filtering fingers of light from the portholes, across the opposing wall of the cell from one side to the other, and down again into darkness.

Wyr availed himself of the option to look outside only on those occasions that he felt his sanity going, slipping quietly away from him in the rank confines of the cell. At other times, he refused to torment himself with what he could not have. He was, despite himself, a survivor. He shook off his dreams each day, fed them as fuel to the rage in his belly. He cleaned the bowls of thin stew they served him, he devoted the few clear-headed hours of strength the slop gave him to simple, mindless exercises that didn’t pull on his chains. The evenings, he spent filing away at his fetters with one of the iron nails he had worked loose from the hull planking, until it grew too dark to see what he was doing. It would take years to cut through a single manacle, probably a decade to free all four limbs, always assuming he didn’t run out of nails first. And if they caught him at it, they’d go right ahead and replace the irons with fresh ones or maybe just kill him.

But it gave him something to do. It gave him a daily focus for his fury. It gave him hope, and he knew how vital that was.

In the other cells, he could hear how the men from his crew went slowly, gibbering mad with the isolation and the death of hope. They started out four years past with thumped messages in code through the wooden walls, shouted vows of solidarity to each other from cell to cell. But all too soon the structure of their communication began to break down. They hammered on the planking in incoherent rage. They yelled, they screamed, they wept. Eventually, they began to cackle and crow incomprehensibly to themselves. In the first couple of years, he’d been able to recognize voices, put individual names of men to the yelling, but that time was long past. Now, Sprayborne’s whole hull echoed faintly with their mingled mutterings and laments, as if the men themselves were gone and only ghosts remained.

Footfalls, in the corridor along the keel.

Wyr propped himself up from the planks where he lay, stared at the filtering fingers of light over his head. It was early in the day for food; they’d not usually feed him much before noon. The tiny shift in routine, the trickle of difference it made, set an unreasonable jag of excitement chasing through his veins.

Something was going on.

Scrape of a key in the lock, the heavy wooden door thumped back, and a familiar figure stood in the space it left. Wyr blinked and straightened up in his chains. Coughed and shuddered with the damp.

“Gort?” Voice a choked husk. Stifle the coughing, force it down. “What you doing here at this hour?”

“Same as fucking ever.” The jailer hefted a pail at his side, bigger than the usual. It made a slopping sound that set Wyr’s mouth running with saliva. “And I’m telling you now, this might be all you get till day after tomorrow, depending. Don’t scoff it all at once, eh.”

“Right, yeah. What’s going on?”

Gort heaved a world-weary sigh. He was a gutty sack of a man, lugubrious and slow and full of complaints. But by the standards of prison hulk jailers, he was a prince. He appeared to pass no judgment on the men he attended, saw them as unfortunates just like himself, caught up in the same atrocious web of chance that had landed him with this gods-forsaken job. Previous jailers, equally unhappy with their lot, had never missed a chance to take it out on the prisoners at the slightest provocation or sometimes with none at all. It was a casual brutality, no different than stomping a cat or hurling stones at a street cur—they mostly used boots or fists, only occasionally resorted to the short, studded lash they carried at their belt as the closest thing there was to a badge of office in this line of work. But Wyr had never seen Gort’s lash come off his belt, and the worst he’d had to endure at the man’s hands were the interminable monologues on the many, many ways in which life had conspired to treat his jailer unjustly.

“Got to do the whole fucking ship and be back to Harbor End before noon, if you can believe that shit. Like to see them up at the Chancellery manage that. They must think—here, cop hold of this, stash it or eat it now, up to you—must think I’ve got a fucking longboat and full complement to row me out and back, ’stead of what I have got, which is two broken-down old war veterans with more scar tissue than skin barely know one end of an oar from the other. Course, that’s not the best of it, neither.” Gort took a morose seat on the doorsill. “After this round, we’re right back out again with provisions and medicines for the yellow ’n’ blacks. Well, they needn’t think I’m setting a single foot on one of those fucking decks, not on what they pay me. Let the fucking bone men go, earn their money for a change—”

“Yellow and black?” Voice still husky with lack of use, but a fresh pulse of interest prickled along Wyr’s nerves. “Out here, you mean? With the hulks?”

“Yeah, fucking plague ship, where else they going to stick it? Navy picket brought them in last night, a whole squadron of them.” A vague nod up at the portholes. “Three ships, and two of them are captured imperials. Probably where they picked it up; those southerners got some filthy fucking habits from what I hear. All flying the pennants, anyway.”

“Plague.” He said it like the name of a god he might worship. The bucket of stew was forgotten at his feet.

“Yeah, just what we fucking needed, right? On top of the war and all? Don’t really know why they’re making us feed them in the first place, if it’s anything like back in forty-one, they’ll all be dead by end of week. And then we’ll just have to burn the ships to the waterline. Waste of good food, waste of my fucking time coming out an extra trip every day.” Gort’s eyes narrowed with freshly aggrieved suspicion. “Might be, you know, this is all some Empire trick to fuck us over. Maybe the imperials let them capture those ships on purpose, crewed them up with men what were already infected and let us take them, so we’d carry the plague right into the city. Sort of thing they’d do, treacherous fuckers, they pretty soon forgot how we drove out the lizards for them. And now look. Hinerion taken like a peach, Empire columns marching right into the peninsula like it was their backyard. You ask me, that raiding you did down south after the war, they should of given you a fucking medal for it.”

“What I thought,” said Sharkmaster Wyr quietly.

“Yeah, guess we all got to carry other men’s fuckups, don’t we. Like I should of had that harbor watch job when old Feg died. Everyone knew I was his favorite for it. Still can’t believe that little shit Sobli got it instead. Nah, don’t worry, not going to bore you with that story again. Like I said, don’t you go eating all that at once, mate. With this shit boiling up, could be a couple of days before I get back here again.” The jailer slapped his thighs and stood up. “Anyway, that’s it, got to get on. Let’s hope your old bosun’s calmed down a bit since yesterday. Last thing I need on top of everything else, that is—him flinging his own turds at me like the fact he’s in here is my fucking fault.”

The door clubbed shut again, the key grated around, and Gort went grumbling away. Wyr got up and hobbled stiffly to a portion of the cell floor under the nearest porthole. He took a long breath, then hauled himself up on the porthole’s lower edge, wincing as his fetters dug into recently healed flesh from a dream he’d had a few days back.

He gritted his teeth and hauled harder, got his chin over the edge and peered out.

Bright morning light, long angled ladders of it propped up against the clouds, as if the sky itself was ripe for boarding. The new ships sat at anchor about a quarter league off, marked out from the hulk fleet by their masts, at the top of which the yellow and black plague pennants flopped slackly about in the breeze. One League caravel, looked like Alannor yard work from the lines, and two bigger, fatter Empire merchantmen, the sort that would have raised a low, predatory cheer from his crew back in the day. All three vessels flew the colors of Trelayne. It was hard to tell in the glare of early daylight off the water; his eyes were stinging from the unaccustomed brightness, but it didn’t look as if there was anyone up on deck.

“Hoy, look—No! Fucking pack that in!”

Gort’s muffled bellow from a couple of cells down the keel. Something nearly like a smile touched Wyr’s lips, then passed slowly away. He lowered himself back down to the plank flooring and slid fingers under the fetters on his wrists, massaging the abused flesh there as best he could.

He crouched there, thoughtful, trying to understand why the arrival of the plague ships should feel so much like something good.

HE FED HIMSELF WITH RIGID CONTROL FROM THE BUCKET.

Gort hadn’t lied, it was pretty much a double helping by jail standards and still retained a faint trace of oven warmth despite the long crossing from Harbor End. The hunk of bread floating on top seemed massive. He tore off the portion that was already soaked through with broth and ate it first, to take the edge off his hunger. Then he sieved out some of the miserly ration of solid pieces with his fingers, soft chunks of carrot and crumbling potato, a stringy shred of meat with a blubbery lump of fat still attached, and ate them one savored piece at a time.

He was still chewing when the sounds started under the hull.

For a brief, fuddled space, he thought that Sprayborne must have slipped her chains. Was being carried on the current across boulder-studded shallows. Irregular, spaced bumping along the keel. Like that time in the Scatter, skulking to avoid imperial patrols, nearly lost the whole fucking ship that time, had to put stripes on ever member of the watch for fucking up so badly…

It took a moment or two for common sense and recollection of where he was to catch up—there was no sense of motion in the hull other than the faint, eternal rocking in place he was used to, and anyway, he would have heard the ring of hammers if the anchors had been struck. And the riverbed was pure silt out here, shallowing to nothing but the broad expanse of mudflats and marsh.

Yeah, silt and the bones of your murdered children.

Sharp, fast spike of rage to drive out the musing. Before he could stop himself, he lashed out with his foot, caught the food pail and sent it flying.

He sat staring sickly at the mess.

Four years, four fucking years, of starvation diet and enclosure, and here he was, brought to this. Mind left loose and slow, clarity fogged by drifting banks of exhaustion and weary self-pity, losing himself in spirals of memory and addled reflection it could take hours to shake off.

And then, suddenly, he was scrabbling forward to right the pail before it dribbled out every last trace of the stew within. Mumbling to himself.

“Oh no, no—no, no…”

Flinging himself flat to lick up the remaining spill before it leaked away between the planks, scooping up the solids on trembling fingers, dropping them back into the bottom of the bucket, peering whimpering in after them to see how much he’d managed to salvage.

“Sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry… ”

More soft bumping, right beneath him where he crouched. He froze, staring down at the cell floor as if he could see right through it, through the bilges below and the hull, out to whatever was hanging there in the murky gloom under the keel, knocking to get in.

The planking under him sprung a leak.

At first it was small, a sudden darkening of the already age-stained wood, like a man pissing his breeches under torture. If his naked foot had not been resting in the center of the patch, he might not even have noticed it. But then the water began forcing its way through in earnest, welling up out of the wood, mounding three full fingers above the floor and—as he jerked his foot out of the patch in alarm—following his moves like a living creature.

He backed up against the far wall of the cell, shaking his head. Watching in dazed fascination, saw the mound of water cast about where he had been, as if confused by his sudden disappearance. It went on swelling as it moved, welling steadily upward, and now it radiated a faint phosphorescence into the cell, like seaweed spores he’d once seen floating in the southern seas.

He wondered numbly if some cunt back at the kitchens in Harbor End had spiked his food with mushroom powder for a laugh. Wouldn’t be Gort, but maybe one of the others. Had to be, because it was either that or—

The water seemed to have detected him again. The mound ceased its circular motion and began to slip like a purposeful jellyfish across the planking toward him. It was over knee height now, and he thought he could discern movement within—soft churning and the spindling turn of pinprick luminescent points.

Fascination chilled away into dread—this was no fucking ’shroom dream.

“Salt Lord,” he croaked, desperate. “Salt Lord, stand by me now and all—”

But his voice caught and stuck. He started to back away again, and his chains brought him up short. An attempted shout caught in his throat. He could feel his eyes starting from their sockets. His new cellmate was almost on him. He shrank from its glistening curve in dread, wrenching his wrists and ankles on the fetters as he fought to escape.

A terrified, inarticulate scream tore its way finally up his rusted throat, shrilled into the damp prison air, just as the water engulfed his legs.

From down the corridor, another shriek answered. And the clatter of something being dropped. He knew the voice for Gort’s, but had no time to care. At his feet, something in the water began to bubble, and a long, thin stain swam up through the commotion. It was the color of blood. He thrashed at his fetters as he saw it, screaming hard now, already feeling the pain, the suction as this thing—

The left manacle gave. His leg came loose.

After four years in chains, it was like the jolt of a dislocated limb. He stumbled with the shock, and his right leg came free, following the left. He floundered and fell, out of the watery mound, backward on his arse on the planking.

His feet…

He became abruptly aware that he was still screaming, and shut his mouth with a snap that hurt.

His feet were free.

Up on deck, more screams.

He dared to stop watching the bubble of water—it had made no move to follow him—and snatched a glance downward instead.

His feet were free.

The manacles were gone. He could see the shiny bands of scar tissue they had laced around his legs just above the ankle, could see the full extent of the scarring for the first time. He would have reached down to touch, but the manacles that still held his arms would not allow it. At his side, the mound of water had grown to waist height and now sat there, like a faithful hound. He peered into it, through the distortions of the faintly glowing water to the other side, where his chains lay loose on the floor. They ended abruptly at the bubble’s edge, and within there was nothing but smears and turdlike crescents of rust.

The bubble quivered impatiently.

Wonderingly, he looked at the wrist cuffs he had worn for the last four years, then back to the mound of water. He drew a deep breath, raised his arms, and sank them into the softly glowing heart of the bubble. It was, he noticed this time, not as cold as seawater should have been and—

Fierce seething around his wrists, and once again he saw the blood-colored stains spinning off through the water, as centuries of corrosion took place in seconds. He felt the first cuff snap apart and fall and he snatched that arm up to his face, feeling tears now as he saw the unfettered flesh. His other arm was free seconds later and suddenly he was shouting, laughing, and crying at the same time. He pushed deeper into the heap of water, crouched so that it covered his body to the shoulders. It was warm and soothing. He ducked his head under and shook it madly. The first bath he had had since capture, unless you counted the buckets of cold water with which his jailers sluiced down prisoner and cell a couple of times each month. He laughed in the water, spewing bubbles. He thrashed his arms about. He erupted from the body of his new friend, kicking and splashing like a child.

The bubble moved abruptly away from him, apparently not pleased with this levity. It cruised pettishly about the cell in figure eights for a few moments, then retreated to the latrine corner and sank abruptly out of sight down the hole. Sharkmaster Wyr bid it good-bye with one inanely waving hand, then stifled his laughter and shook water from his beard and hair. He listened intently. Sprayborne creaked around him, but there was silence aboard. Whatever had been done to Gort was over, and his fellow prisoners had either been similarly silenced or were crouched in their cells, awaiting whatever came next.

On the cell floor, he saw the mound of water’s departing dance had severed his chains in a couple of places, leaving handy lengths rusted apart at each end. Quietly, he moved—still dizzy with the unconstrained ease of doing it—and gathered up the nearest length. He crouched as if in a dream, wrapped the links slowly around his fist, pulled them taut with trembling hands. He’d have to wait until someone came to check on him, but, Hoiran’s barbed and twisted cock, when they did, the first man through that fucking door…

Splinter and crack—the door exploded outward, torn from its hinges and frame, tossed out into the corridor like a playing card.

“Fuck.”

The curse yanked involuntarily from his lips. He crouched at bay, bare feet planted firm on the damp planking. Rusted chain link ends swaying fractionally where they hung from his knotted-up right hand. He waited to see what would come through the hole where the door had been.

Nothing did.

He straightened slowly up, eyes pinned to the wrenched and splintered doorjamb. He listened hard, heard nothing at all. Crept finally out into the corridor.

In his first year of captivity, he’d dreamed of walking this passage, night after night, only to wake each time to the cold grasp of the chains on his wrists and ankles. Sometimes it happened in vague, mist-tinged tones, but in other dreams, the details were more real—a hidden key smuggled in by one of his men who had somehow escaped, a regal pardon from the Chancellery for some convoluted clerkish reason or other. Sometimes they came for him because there was war brewing in the southern seas, and he the wronged hero of the hour…

Sometimes he walked the corridor freely.

Sometimes he fought every inch of the way, and that was better.

Now he had to clench his fist hard on the rusted iron chain, time and again, to remind himself this was not a dream. To stop himself from trembling.

He found Gort at the far end of the passage, near the companionway. The jailer sat slumped on the floor among his spilled and tumbled pails, back to one of the cell doors. His guts were dumped out in his lap like a meal he could no longer manage. Something had slashed him open side to side, and then torn out his throat. From the bloody handprints and the mess, it looked as if he’d tried to climb the companionway with his guts hanging out, but had been dragged back down by something for the finish.

By some thing.

Wyr pursed his lips and looked warily up the companionway to the open deck hatch above. The pale light of day awaited. For a moment, he’d taken his trembling for fear, but now it dawned on him that whatever was waiting up there, he’d gladly face it with no better weapon than the chain in his fist, just for the chance to stand on Sprayborne’s deck again and feel the breeze that blew across it. He’d face it and he’d fucking kill it, whatever it was, whatever that took, just so he could stand there a few moments longer in the open air.

He sniffed hard, hefted the chain once more, and then he climbed the companionway as swiftly as his stiff and unaccustomed limbs would allow.

“GOOD.”

The voice came while he was still clambering out of the hatch, pitched loud across the deck from the port rail. Sharkmaster Wyr scrambled out and pivoted on his bare feet, dropped to a fighting crouch again.

Saw a single cloaked form at the rail, back turned to him. He took a step forward and his heel skidded on something. He swayed and nearly went down, staggered for balance, and some rusted old boarding party reflex kept him on his feet. The figure at the rail didn’t move, didn’t turn. He saw it wore a long sword sheathed across its back, doubted it could clear the blade with any great speed, and felt himself relax just a fraction.

He spared a downward glance, and saw he’d stepped in blood.

Saw, in fact, that the deck was painted with the stuff, splashes and streaks and pools of it, spread between four scattered bodies, one of which was still moving, but not very much.

He did the count, ingrained habits from his plundering days taking over while the disbelief in his head sang a high, whining note like the sound of too much silence in your ears. Four men, all well armed. Two in loose, unremarkable garb with short swords sheathed at the hip, one of them with an eye patch—Gort’s broken-down war veterans no doubt, paid mainly to row—and two more in cheap mail vests and open-face helmets, apparently armed with short-shafted ax-head pikes; by the weapons, Wyr made them for port authority guardsmen. They were all dead, bar the one with the eye patch, who was down but still trying to drag himself toward the stern, an inch at a time on his belly in a broad-painted trail of his own blood.

Apparently not one of the four had managed to get their steel drawn or blooded.

Sharkmaster Wyr raised his head once more to the figure at the rail.

“Salt Lord?” he husked. “Dakovash?”

“No.” The figure turned now to look at him. “But I get that a lot. Did you pray to that fucker for something, too?”

The face was gaunt and scarred down one cheek, the dark hair gathered back from features that might once have been handsome, but now held only a commanding hunger. The eyes were dead as stones, but there seemed to be no threat in them right now. And something in the narrowed gaze unlocked a chamber inside Wyr, let out what was coiled up inside.

“My family.”

“Ah.”

“I called on the Dark Court for aid; they did not come. My family died in cages instead. I called on the Salt Lord to free me for vengeance, I swore to spill blood from the ocean to the Eastern gate in his name, and he did not come then, either.”

“I’m always late,” the figure murmured obscurely. “Well, you’re free now, Sharkmaster Wyr. What will you do with your freedom, I wonder?”

Wyr made himself look away from the figure, look instead at the blood and strewn bodies that lay between them. The man with the eye patch had almost pulled himself clear of the carnage. Wyr’s rage was abruptly loose in his head. Red veined bolts of it split his vision apart—he strode to where the injured man lay. Stood over him a moment, trembling, then lashed down with the chain his fist was wrapped in. His aim was off, his arm shaky and weaker than he’d reckoned with. It took a couple of blows across the man’s hunched shoulders before he got it right. Eye Patch made a choked noise and redoubled his efforts to crawl. The rusted chain caught him in the side of the head, wrapped around. Wyr yanked it loose, flailed down again. Blood flew, the man made a thin, hopeless bawling sound, and then, on the fourth or fifth blow, he slumped flat to the deck. Wyr found he could not stop—he went on flailing until the chain links were clotted with gore, and the noise they made on impact was soggy, and the muscles in his arm ached from shoulder to wrist.

In the end, only a fresh fit of coughing stopped him.

He beat the cough out, bracing his free hand on one knee to stay upright. Cleared his throat and spat on the corpse he’d just made. He lifted the chain in his right hand and turned his head sideways to stare at it as it dripped. His face felt hot and wet. His fist opened as if of its own accord and he shook his hand free of the rusted links, watched them pile stickily up on Eye Patch’s shoulder.

He got some breath back, got himself upright. Turned back to the figure at the rail.

“This—all this,” he said hoarsely. “I have you to thank?”

“Yes.”

Sharkmaster Wyr sniffed. Wiped his right hand up over his face and through his hair. It came away streaked with blood.

“And you are not of the Dark Court?”

“Loosely attached, let’s say.”

Wyr put out his bloodied hand. “Then you have my thanks. I am in your debt. Will you give me your name?”

“Ringil Eskiath.” They made the clasp. “But I’m proscribed the use of that name these days. You can call me Ringil.”

Wyr frowned, chasing vague memory. “Hero of Gallows Gap? That Eskiath?”

“For what it’s worth.”

“And… you were at the siege as well. They gave you a fucking medal, didn’t they? I thought you were dead, I thought you died fighting imperials in Naral. Or Ennishmin.”

“That’s one story. Just not an accurate one. Tell me, Sharkmaster Wyr. Now you are free, as you once asked of the Salt Lord, how will you go about obtaining your revenge?”

Wyr cast about in the cold morning light. The other hulks sat chop-masted and rotting in the delta waters around him, like some waiting fleet of ghost vessels raised from the ocean floor. The three plague ships rode at anchor on the outer edge with the promise of death fluttering at their masts. Beyond all that, Trelayne rose on the skyline to port. And to starboard…

“The marsh,” he said.

It was a fair swim, and not without its risks, but he knew in his newly freed bones that he’d do it. He’d take sustenance from Gort’s spilled buckets, knives from among the slaughtered men for any chance meeting with alligator or dragon eel. And once to the mudflat shallows, it was just wade and stomp and flounder through to the marsh itself, one thigh-deep, sucking step after another and no real risk other than weariness and fading will. Beat those treacherous, seeping enemies and there was really nothing worse to fear—the mudflats were home to thick clouds of stinging flies, but he’d endure them, small lizards and mud-weasels and spiders, but he’d kill and eat them raw before they could bite him, and beyond that, well…

“I am owed debts among the marsh dwellers,” he added. “They will hide me while I gather strength. While I gather men and arms.”

“Hmm. There’s a war on, had you heard?”

“Against the Empire.” Wyr nodded. “The jailers have tattled to me. Hinerion is fallen, imperial forces are in the peninsula. What of it? Should I care?”

“Perhaps you should. You may have a hard time bidding high enough to gather much in the way of men or arms right now. Both will be at a premium.” Ringil Eskiath made him a thin, cold smile. “Who knows? A few more months and perhaps you yourself would have been pardoned back into privateer service.”

Sharkmaster Wyr spat on the blood-streaked deck. “Yeah—just long enough to sail upriver and burn their fucking Glades mansions to the ground.”

Something unreadable flickered on the other man’s face. There and then gone, so fast Wyr thought he might have imagined it. Ringil Eskiath’s voice came across the space between them as gently as a lover’s.

“There is no need to swim ashore, Sharkmaster Wyr. Nor take shelter in the marsh.” A gesture at the deck around their feet. “There are arms here, for the taking. And men with vengeance in their hearts below.”

Wyr blinked. “You’ll free my men, too?”

“Well,” Ringil examined the nails of one hand. “It’s a tiring trick, that one with the door. Why don’t you free them yourself? The jailer had keys, didn’t he?”

It dawned on Wyr then how worn down he was, how very tired. How fogged and short of capacity to think straight. Rage and joy had carried him, brought him up unquestioning out of the cell with chain link in his fist and murder in his heart. But now, abruptly, his footing seemed to fall out from under him. He stood numbly, feeling it all for the first time. He understood then, vaguely, that if he had attempted to swim ashore, he would undoubtedly have died in the water.

“I free my men,” he said flatly. “And then what? We have a pair of ax-head pikes, a handful of knives and short swords between us, and a ship with no masts.”

Ringil nodded out across the water at the other prison hulks. “In fact, Sharkmaster, you have an entire fleet out there with no masts. All crewed by condemned men of similar stripe to your own. Could you honestly wish for a better-suited force with which to bring your retribution down on the Fair City?”

“I could wish,” Wyr enunciated with bitten force, “for some fucking masts, and some sails to rig on them.”

“You will not need them. I’ll provide your vessels with all the motive force they need. I will break their chains the way I broke yours, I will sail them right into the city harbor and past its defenses, I will ram them ashore on the banks of the upper Trel.”

Wyr stared at him.

“You sure you’re not sent here by the Dark Court?”

“Not entirely.” Ringil Eskiath stirred and looked back over his shoulder to where Trelayne rose on the horizon. “But I will hold you to the same terms you offered them. Blood from ocean to the Eastern gate. Can you do that for me, Sharkmaster Wyr?”

A vibrating force seemed to come up through the bloodied planking under Wyr’s feet. He felt it climb his legs and leave new strength there, felt it wrap around his belly and chest like a constricting snake, pour icy clarity into his head. He reached down among the corpses and picked up one of the ax-head pikes.

“Just watch me,” he said grimly.

CHAPTER 43

Later, she’d have time to realize that the ground gave less than a couple of yards under her feet, that more than collapse, it was slide, and that the real subsidence was outside. But whatever the dragon had done out there, whatever crucial bracing beam or member it had found a way to tear loose, it opened a sinkhole that sucked the rubble out of the gateway like water down a millrace at spring thaw.

They all went with it.

Kanan Shent tried to grab her hand, but the drop threw them apart before he could reach. She heard him yell, saw him go over on his back, and then she was fighting not to go down herself in the tumble and grinding slide of masonry all around her. Somehow staggering, windmilling her arms, she stayed upright. Kept her feet, tore free each time a boot started to sink into the funneling carpet of debris. Made it outside into dull gray light and down to the end of what was actually, Archidi, a fairly shallow slope—

At which point she slammed into a vertical block of stone wedged up at the bottom of the slide. She took the impact low across left hip and thigh, was spun and flung down like some sulky child’s discarded rag doll. She hit the jagged ground hard—white-hot twang of pain up her side as stitches in her wound tore out, and her head took a glancing blow. She lay there on her side, looking groggily at ragged chunks of masonry inches from her nose.

Triumphant shriek somewhere overhead, and the dragon’s shadow fell on her.

EGAR RODE THE DROP WITH THE SAME INSTINCTIVE HORSE-BREAKER’S poise he’d ridden out the earth tremor back in Yhelteth that first time. It helped to be drunk, but you could do it sober if you tried. The real problem was being surrounded by seemingly solid walls and floor and ceiling when in reality everything was shaking like a belly dancer’s tits. It confused your senses, fooled your expectations. It threw you out.

He didn’t have that problem here.

The rubble under him slithered and rumbled directly forward and down. He danced to keep up, leaping steps between what he had to hope were more or less solid chunks and blocks of stone in the flow. Two bounds took him out under the gateway and he knew, there and then, he had to weave or he was dead. Because that fucking dragon had to have planned this, knew they were in there, knew exactly how to flush them out, and would pick them off now, like berries off a branch, if he didn’t…

The beast was on his right. He leapt that way, across the flow of the fall, across its muzzle and aim. Heard a shrill scream, a convulsive gagging sound, and something slopped hotly through the air just ahead of him. He caught the acid sting of it in his nose and eyes, heard it hiss and sizzle as it hit the ground. There was just time to glimpse the dragon, crouched on the edge of the sinkhole slope, jaws still gaping wide for the gob of venom it had just coughed at him. Then he tripped and went headlong amidst the rubble. Clipped his head on a chunk of stone, lay still.

It was probably what saved him.

The dragon came slithering and scrabbling downslope from its perch at the edge of the funneling debris, kicking down fresh spills of rubble as it came. One massive rear claw crunched down a scant six feet from his head; he felt the masonry he lay on shift with the impact. Reek of sandalwood and scorching, like a slap in the face. Egar wasn’t sure if the creature thought its spit had already taken him down, or it just had other, more mobile prey to fry. Either way, it wasn’t stopping to eat him. It plunged past, uttered another shriek he knew meant attack.

He lurched upright in the loose rubble, clutching the staff lance for support. Blood ran down the side of his face. He saw Archeth below, sprawled full length in the bottom of the shallow sinkhole, trying dazedly to sit up, right in the dragon’s path. Kanan Shent, scrambling down toward her from the other side, more on his arse than his feet, battle-ax still in hand but he’d get there late, too fucking late, had never faced a dragon before anyway and—

No sign of Nash. Assume he’s dead.

Egar did the only thing he could. He raised the staff lance high in his right hand and howled—high and hollow, long drawn out, the ululating Majak berserker call.

“Turn, motherfucker! Face me!”

Fleeting realization—he’d screamed the words in his people’s tongue. The call and the language, rooted as one in the soil of the steppes he’d left behind. The dragon braked its rush, flailed about on the loose surface. No dim-brained blunderer here—a threat to the rear was a threat you’d better turn and face, especially if it makes a noise like that. The Dragonbane dropped the staff lance into both hands, gripped hard at the alloy shaft—see what this iron demon’s like as a bladesmith, shall we, Eg—and charged in across the rubble.

He had, he guessed, about a half dozen heartbeats before the dragon sorted itself out, saw what the actual threat was, and decided what to do about it. He cut right, in at the tail and hindquarters. It was shit ground, yielding under his feet, but the beast would have to snap its own spine sideways before it could line up another venom spit and hit him in this close. He leapt the last three yards, staff lance up and out to the side as if to pole vault like the tumblers in Ynval park. He came down hard and uneven, would have staggered, but he buried the leading lance blade in the dragon’s haunch with a yell. Saw the Kiriath steel split and splinter scales like they were coins of cheap gray glass.

Now it was the beast’s turn to scream.

Shrill and deafening—in this close, it was like tiny knives slicing deep in his head. He’d seen men drop arms and shields in the midst of battle, clap hands fast to their ears, trying to shut out that awful shriek. He gritted his teeth and gouged with the lance, felt the blade shift downward as it sliced through the dragon’s flesh. The haunch spasmed and lifted, the beast lashed out with its rear leg, trying to kick loose the source of the pain. It took the Dragonbane up into the air; he hung on with both hands, and the Kiriath edge on his lance blade tore a long line right down the dragon’s thigh and out. It dropped him back to his feet again, set him stumbling backward in surprise. Thick, crimson gore on the blade, dripping—a dark cheer rose in him at the sight. Now that’s a fucking blade, Eg!

Now move!

The dragon screamed again and whipped its tail sideways. Instinct snapped him down in a crouch; he ducked and heard the blow strop through the air overhead. Swung up behind the tail swipe and leapt in close again. For brief seconds, he had the creature blindsided. The vital truth of combat against dragons, Gil had once read to him, from some treatise or other he was scribbling at the time—proximity is your friend. Cuddle up close; it’s the one safe place to be. Safe being a relative term. All right then, Gil. He hacked with the lance, tore into the dragon’s hindquarters where the tail thickened to join the body. The scales were softer there, he knew, and the Kiriath blade went through them with no more effort than cutting cloth. He tore the steel loose, reversed the lance’s shaft, gouged again with the other blade.

Loud blurting noise, the soft clump of things falling amid the rubble, and a sudden faint mist around him as the dragon shat itself—he coughed and gagged on the reek, locked up his throat and stumbled to get out of the way. Dragon dung was pretty corrosive when fresh; even the accompanying gas wouldn’t do you a lot of good if you inhaled too much of it. So let’s not do that, Eg. He tried to sprint up the huge scaled flank toward the head and crest, but the creature was turning too rapidly, spinning in its own tracks, stomping and shrilling and lashing out. A glancing blow from the rear limb on that side knocked him flat. He hit the rubble, bit the inside of his cheek almost through with the impact—blood squirted and ran in his mouth, he spat it out, no time, no fucking time for this, Dragonbane. Get up!

He shoved himself hastily back to his feet, staff lance at guard across his body, saw the head of the beast come snaking around and down, crest flexed and flaring, one gleaming green eye fixed in a reptile glare behind the thicket of protecting spines…

And there, suddenly, was Alwar Nash—in at the dragon’s planted forelimb, shield raised, sword chopping solidly down. Egar saw the blade bite and slice, saw the dragon jerk its claw upward in shock, saw Nash dodge back in nifty zigzag fashion, not bad, not bad at all, young man. Might make a dragon-slayer of you yet. Egar was already straight back in, grabbing the chance while it lasted, while the beast was distracted. He leapt for where the forelimb would hit as it came back down, had the staff lance up and poised to hack at the rear tendon where it cabled thickly from elbow joint to heel. Kiriath steel—the blade was going to slice right through that shit, hamstring the beast at the front end in a single blow—

It didn’t happen that way.

Somehow, the dragon knew he was there. It arched and coiled, backed up at whiplash speed, batted at him with the injured forelimb like a cat at play. It caught him full on—he felt the talons rip through his clothing and the flesh beneath, felt the blow hurl him aside like a chewed bone. He hit hard, dull crunch as more than one rib fractured from the force of it, and he smashed his left hand against ragged stone. His little finger caught and snapped, agony stabbed through his hand and up his arm, he lost his grip on the staff lance. The dragon shrilled above him; he breathed the stink of sandalwood and scorching. Scrabbled desperately to get up. He made it halfway, but there was something wrong with his leg. He squirmed on the uneven ground, the clawed forelimb smashed down. Rubble shattered apart beside him, flying fragments of stonework stung his cheek.

“Egar!”

Archeth’s voice.

He lifted his head muzzily, turned toward the sound, saw her there fifty feet away. Knives out in either hand, apparently looking to fucking throw them at this roaring, trampling, coiling storm of scale and rage. Kanan Shent crouched in front of her, shield up—yeah, like that’s going to do any fucking good—battle-ax raised. The dragon’s head swung toward them, then swung further as Alwar Nash charged in past them, broadsword swinging, a wordless yell let loose…

The dragon coughed.

Jaws agape. Almost like it was laughing at them.

The gob of venom spat glistening from its throat, met Nash halfway, splattered him from head to foot. The Throne Eternal screamed, a single high-pitched, wrenched shriek of agony, and then he went down in smoking ruin.

Staff lance—there under the groping fingers of his right hand.

The dragon trod forward, clawed savagely at Nash’s smoldering remains, shrieking in fury. Egar snarled a grin. He’d seen this before, he knew what it meant. Rage instinct—they’d pissed the beast off. It was no longer thinking straight. Should make things a little easier…

On your feet, Dragonbane.

Archeth and Shent over there—gaping disbelief. They were next, if they didn’t snap out of it and fucking move. But horror held them locked in place.

Get up! Get up, and kill this fucking thing, Eg. It’s what you do.

He gripped with his right hand, dug one end of the staff lance into the ground. Levered himself upright, got to his knees. Laid his left arm over his right and stared at his mangled left paw. The little finger stuck up bluntly from the curve of his hand. Can’t have that, can we? He leaned in against the lance shaft, freed his right hand for a moment and snapped the finger back down. Ouch. Something wrong with his vision. Oh yeah—blood running down his face again, it was getting in his eye. He grabbed on to the staff lance again, cuffed the back of his fixed hand clumsily across his brow and then his eye. The blur in his vision wiped clean.

That’s more like it.

Low snarling in his throat now as he tried to rise. He leaned hard, came upright, wavering on his feet. His left hand flared agony where he gripped the shaft of the lance. His left leg dragged. The dragon was a good thirty yards off, still clawing what was left of Nash into the ground. He didn’t think he could stagger that far before it lost interest in the Throne Eternal’s shredded corpse, and looked around for something else to tear apart…

Stones.

Raining down from the façade of the ruin above them. Stones and strained, discordant yelling.

He blinked muzzily upward. Saw forms and faces at windows and gaps in the stonework. The rest of his men were up there, roaring abuse, hurling down whatever projectiles they could find. Some of them, he knew, were equipped with newly made crossbows from the Warhelm’s armory. He saw the dragon pause in its clawing rage, tilt and turn to meet the sudden stone downpour, raise one forelimb in a peculiarly human shielding gesture.

He saw the moment for what it offered. Grasped it.

“Archeth!” Bellowing across the gap between them. “Get out of there!”

She flinched, looked at him. Grabbed Shent by the shoulder and pointed. Sprinted flat out.

Toward him.

“N—” The cry died in his throat. He saw the dragon coil massively, rapidly about.

Saw it grin.

Rain of stones forgotten, ignored and left for later. Perhaps it caught the flicker of motion as Archeth and the Throne Eternal ran, perhaps it just heard him yell. Perhaps, inside that giant spined cranium, rage ebbed just enough to let whatever cold reptile intelligence normally governed there take the helm again and remember what it was about.

Perhaps not. He’d never know.

He knew it was going to turn Archeth and Shent into smoldering chunks of meat, dead before they fell. He took his desperation, the pain flaring across his body, crammed the whole lot into his throat and lungs, hooked back his head and screamed.

“Dragon Bane!”

The dragon’s focus must have slipped. It spat and missed. Venom splattered across masonry a couple of yards left and wide of where Archeth’s feet had just been. Impact splash got Shent, he stumbled and went down yelling. Archeth, almost to where Egar stood by now, spun about. The dragon’s jaws snapped shut with a hollow sound that echoed off the ruin’s walls. It jerked its head and snout backward, for all the world like some suddenly perplexed giant dog. Archeth ducked back to where Shent lay screaming. The dragon leapt forward—an awful, snaking grace to the motion—landed crouched on all fours, looming over Archeth as she tried to drag a flailing Kanan Shent back to his feet. The gigantic head tilted, birdlike, as if trying to get a better look at the two tiny figures it was about to annihilate. Then it drooped low and the jaws gaped open.

Egar crashed in from the side, sliced through the forelimb tendon with a single blow from the staff lance blade. Drenching flurry of reptile blood, and the dragon shrieked. The wounded limb snapped up protectively against its belly. The Dragonbane got in underneath the drooping head. Found the throat.

“You die, motherfucker!”

He hacked upward, left-handed, screaming at the pain from his grip. Sliced through the soft scaling, ripped into the throat, gouged out a long, levering wound. Venom from the tubes and chambers within spilled down, mingled with the dragon’s blood, splattered over him. He reversed the lance fast, before he could feel that shit eat into him, before he could scream. Struck hard upward, with his good right hand now, no pain, no fucking pain, Dragonbane, that’s not pain…

“You! Die!”

Tore out the rest of the dragon’s throat.

Felt it all come down on him, felt the pain come searing.

Felt how it dropped him to his knees, choked the breath in his chest, drove him backward from himself.

Thought he heard his father’s voice calling, faintly in the roaring dark.

And—tilting downward now—saw through dimming vision how the rubble he knelt on came barreling up at his face.

He never felt it hit.