Ричард Морган: The Dark Defiles

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Egar found himself some local whores.

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

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

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

He’d cut the fucker down like barley.

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

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

If Archeth doesn’t beat me to it.

I’m going to—

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

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

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

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

The ram stayed where it was.

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

Silence. A couple of nervous guffaws from the marines.

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

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

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

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

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

There and gone.

Oh, come off it.

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

“Sir?”

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

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

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

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

“Sir.”

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

“Yes, sir.”

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

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

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