The Dark Defiles by Richard K. Morgan

Author:Richard K. Morgan [Morgan, Richard K.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Fiction, Action & Adventure, Fantasy, Epic, Dark Fantasy
ISBN: 9780345545657
Publisher: Del Rey
Published: 2014-09-11T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 36

Menith Tand

Klarn Shendanak

Yilmar Kaptal

Mahmal Shanta

e 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.

Andal Karsh

Nethena Gral

Shab Nyanar

Jhesh Oreni

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

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