Ричард Морган - The Dark Defiles

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

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

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

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

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

The breath stopped in Ringil’s throat.

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

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

But it was beautiful.

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

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

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

“Do you see me now?”

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

“Yes,” he said. “I see you.”

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

Ringil swallowed, dry-throated. Nodded.

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

“Walk with you whe—”

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

Walk with me here, says Firfirdar quietly.

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

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

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

Then stop them, why don’t you?

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

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

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

So try again.

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

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

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

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

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

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

That was the book-keeper? he asks reluctantly.

One of them, yes.

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

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

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

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

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

After a while, nor do his.

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

He hoped.

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

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

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