kind of war. The slavers to name but one. The League aren t necessarily bound to listen to what the shipmasters want. They
Archeth, will you stop building castles in the air!
I before she could stop herself trust Sang about as far as I could throw his fat arse. He s not reliable.
Oh, and the fucking Helmsmen are?
Suddenly he was in her face. Hands clamping down on her shoulders, thumbs hooking in, cabled strength in the arms. She was forcibly reminded that if Prince Jhiral, heir apparent, had never seen anything of the war against the Scaled Folk or his father s earlier campaigns, had in fact never struck a sword blow in anger his whole life well, neither then had he missed a day s combat schooling for anything other than sickness since he was twelve years old. There was a lot of muscle under the ocher-and-black draped shoulders, a lot of trained and channeled power.
But even with the krinzanz jitters, she could have put Bandgleam in his throat faster than he could blink.
Could have
She met his eyes.
Perhaps he sensed it. He let her go. Straightened up.
Archeth, you were at An-Naranash. You saw how it went down. His voice was back to regal, council- chamber calm. He gestured, throwaway, with one open palm. All that Helmsman burbling, months to cross the desert, all the diplomatic wrangling with the nautocrats in Shaktur, the lake tolls and bribes, and what do we end up with? A mausoleum on stilts, centuries deserted, stripped of anything even remotely valuable.
She remembered. The slow-dying excitement in her guts as they swung in closer to An-Naranash s silent, towering bulk, and she saw the extent of the dilapidation. The clenched, sickening disappointment as she boarded at one massive, barnacle-crusted leg, climbed the endless damp-reeking stairwells, and prowled the echoing gloom of spaces as abandoned as anything she knew at An-Monal.
It cost us half a million elementals to mount that expedition, Archeth. All because the Helmsmen said go. It s one of the biggest mistakes my father ever made. Do you really expect me to follow in his footsteps? Is that what you want?
For that, she had no answer.
Because you forced the Shaktur expedition, Archidi, and you know it. It wasn t the Helmsmen, not really. You squeezed it out of Akal in his dying melancholy and regret, funds and men he could ill afford in the postwar mess, a paid penance, an old man s attempt to atone the unspoken bargain that she would no longer torment him with the tales of what she saw at Vanbyr, if he underwrote the expedition and gave her the command. That she would, in some unclear fashion, absolve him.
Strange how you could become a man s god without noticing.
Akal died before she returned. It was probably just as well she d been in no fucking mood for absolution when she got back.
Archeth, look. Akal s son, conciliatory now, leaning back toward the dissolute aristo loucheness he wore so well. I m not saying we don t take this seriously. Go do some reading, by all means. I know how much you love that clerkish shit. Chase up this changeling fairy tale in the Indirath M nal. Talk to Angfal, if you can drag anything out of him. But for the Prophet s sake, cool off. Go get drunk, chew some krin fuck it, get yourself laid, Archeth. Go play with that curvy little Trelayne trollop I gave you last year. Bet you still haven t touched that, have you?
In a way, she was almost relieved. It was a side of Jhiral she found far easier to deal with, a role he d been playing since his early teens, a thrust to which she knew all the smart parries and ripostes because she d been making them for a decade or more. A decadence you could comfortably despise.
But she wondered, not for the first time, what he armored himself against with it.
Maybe it s not armor maybe he just fucking likes it. Revels in it. Ever think of that?
Ishgrim sprang into her head, pale portions of flesh that begged for hands to cup and grasp. Long, smooth limbs to revel among. Bet you still haven t touched that, have you? The smart bet, my lord. Whatever mannered game Jhiral was playing with her over Ishgrim, he was winning it hands down.
She pushed herself upright off the arched root. Drew a long breath.
I shall do some reading, my lord, she said.
Good. Then we can leave it there, I think. The Helmsman should
If, Anasharal said, out of the empty green-fragrant air, like any divine visitation. I might interject.
Emperor of All Lands and Kiriath half-breed semi-immortal their gazes snapped together like those of small children called in for dinner by an unfamiliar voice. Even Archeth, elder sister and halfway expecting this
She built a shrug, elaborately casual.
You ve been listening to us?
You truly have a talent for stating the obvious, daughter of Flaradnam. Manathan did mention it. He puts it down to your muddied half-breed blood. But oddly enough, you have still not spotted the very obvious solution to the impasse you face.
There s no impasse here, said Jhiral, mustering some regal disdain.
I was not talking to you, Jhiral Khimran.
It was an affront that would have earned any human speaker a swift and probably fatal trip to the palace dungeons. The Helmsmen well, over the centuries the Khimran dynasty had learned to adjust. You didn t bite the hand that fed your power, for all it might be taloned and demonic beneath that urbane, avuncular surface.
Perhaps you d better explain, Archeth said hastily. What impasse?
The impasse you will face, daughter of Flaradnam, when you ve done your reading, and you ve satisfied yourself that an expedition to find An-Kirilnar is indeed necessary, and you still face the same strictures from this stuttering apology for an Empire s depleted treasury.
Yeah, maybe you can just point us to a handy pot of gold, sneered Jhiral.
Again, the beat of silence Archeth was learning to interpret as reproach. The icy schoolmaster tone.
In point of fact, Jhiral Khimran, that is exactly what I am going to do. So once again, it would behoove you to quell your sense of throne room entitlement and listen carefully to what I m about to say.
CHAPTER 21
Some unmeasured time later, still alone, but roughly on the bearing the ghost claiming to be his mother gave him, he stumbles across a paved track through the marsh.
It s not much to look at scuffed and worn white stone, muddied black in the grain, a couple of feet wide at best, almost covered over by the marsh grass growing back in from margins long untrimmed and up between the cobbles. He shoves back a tuft with one boot, examines the paving curiously. It looks a lot like the paths through the Glades district in Trelayne, the paths leading among other places to the gates of his home or at least the way they ll probably look a thousand years hence.
Without Ishil s guidance, it would have been easy to miss this.
He looks left and right, shrugs, and picks the direction that seems to lead closer to the scribble of firelight on the sky ahead. Almost unnoticed, some tiny increment of satisfaction thaws and drips inside him. The going is easier now, no more soggy give with each step. The stone sounds firm under his heels, pushes back solidly as he walks, and though the cobwebs sweep in sometimes on either side, they never touch or cross the track.
Instead, eventually, he finds skulls.
Scores of them, maybe hundreds, dotted grinning out across the marsh on either side of the path. Each skull sits perfectly upright, atop a low tree stump whose wood has gone gray and cracked with age. A hundred and more leveled pairs of eye sockets, rinsed through with the cold wind, surveying the marsh horizon. But for that perfect sentinel rigor in every hollow gaze, these might be inventive cairns, built to the dead of some battlefield long forgotten, the fallen warriors of some race that preferred not to pile cold stones on the face of their loved ones in death.
But they are not cairns.
Ringil slows reluctantly to a halt where one of the skulls sits a couple of paces off to the left of the path. It
