Ричард Морган: The Dark Defiles

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

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

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

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

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

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

“And you are?”

“And still he does not know me.”

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

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

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

“Fifirdar?”

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

“Not by my choice,” he said starkly.

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

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

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

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

“Then why am I here?”

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

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

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

His fingers flexed and formed a brief fist—

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

Time to do what?

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

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

—and so…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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