The Steel Remains

CHAPTER 33

The road northwest out of Pranderghal rose into the hills on slow, looping hairpin turns, fading finally to a thin, pale gray line as it disappeared over the saddle between two peaks. On a day with clear weather—like today—you could see riders coming for a good two or three hours before they hit town.

Or you could watch a couple of them riding away.

Archeth and Egar sat out drinking tankards of ale in the garden of the Swamp Dog Inn, still slightly disbelieving that the warmth and good weather could hold up this long. There was a sporadic, ruffling breeze out of the north that robbed the sun of some of its comfort whenever it gusted, but it was tough to see how that would have justified complaint. Mostly, they were both just glad to be alive when so many others they knew were not. It was, Egar supposed, much the same feeling Marnak had talked about—you start wondering why you made it to the end of the day, why you’re still standing when the field is clogged with other men’s blood and corpses. Why the Dwellers are keeping you alive, what purpose the Sky Home has laid out for you—but mellowed into a slightly numb bliss beyond caring, beyond worrying much about the why.

“Swamp dog,” said Archeth, tapping idly at the raised emblem on her tankard. It was a crude miniature copy of the painted sign that hung on the street side of the inn, and showed a monstrous-looking hound, up to its belly in swamp water with a dead snake in its jaws and a spiked collar around its neck. “Always wondered about that. First thing Elith said to me—get between a swamp dog and its dinner, I had no idea what she meant.”

Egar snorted. “Seems pretty fucking obvious to me.”

“Yeah, but you were out here working scavenger crews for months, working with swamp dogs day in, day out probably.”

“Working a month before you showed up, a single month, and that was only because Takavach told me I had to. Not like I exactly took to the trade. Anyway.” He spread his hands, gestured at her tankard. “Swamp. Dog. Got a sort of self-evident ring to it, don’t you think?”

“Ah, fuck you then.”

“Yeah, you keep promising, I keep waiting.”

She kicked him under the trestle. But her grin smeared away almost immediately, and she grew serious again.

“This Takavach. You say he wore a leather cloak and a brimmed hat.”

“Yeah. Always does, it’s in all the stories. He’s from, uhm.” Egar frowned, groping for a decent translation from the Majak. “ ‘All the places the ocean will always be heard.’ Something like that. Cavorts with mermaids in the surf and so forth. Cloak and hat’s like a symbol for it; it’s like a northern ship captain’s rig.” Egar propped himself up a little in his seat and peered at her. “Why?”

Archeth shook her head. “Forget it.”

“C’mon. Why?”

She sighed. “I don’t know. Just, the day Idrashan got better, got back on his feet again, one of the stable boys swore to me he’d walked in on some guy in a hat and cloak like that. Apparently, he was leaning over the rail of Idrashan’s stall and talking to him in some weird foreign language. And I remember now, there was some talk of the same figure walking the streets at evening in Beksanara when we first arrived. Thought it was just the usual swamp horseshit at the time.”

They looked at each other for a few moments in silence. For Archeth at least, it seemed that the breeze chose just that moment to chill the air, and a cloud wiped out the sun. But Egar only shrugged.

“Sure, could have been.”

“Could have been what? Horseshit?”

“No, could have been that fucker Takavach.”

Archeth blinked. “You believe that?”

Egar leaned forward a little. “Look, if he took the trouble to save my arse and magic me all the way down to Ennishmin, just so I could procure our old pal Angeleyes for the battle of Beksanara . . .” A shrug. “Well then, he’s certainly not going to balk at feeding your horse a few rotten apples to keep you pinned there for the same reason, is he? Or are you going to tell me you don’t believe in gods and demons and dwenda?”

“I don’t know what I believe anymore,” she muttered.

“Believe it, if it’s cruel and unjust and brutal on the weak,” said a somber voice behind her. “That way, you won’t be far out.”

They both turned to look at him, and it was still a struggle for Archeth not to catch her breath at the sight.

He stood in the knee-deep grass of the garden, clad mostly in black that made even his southern-blooded skin seem yellowish pale. His right arm was bound up in a gray cloth sling, the black cotton stitches were still in the wound along his jaw, and the other bruises and scrapes on his face had not yet faded fully away. But mostly, it was the eyes that told the story, that made her think Ringil Eskiath had not, after all, survived the dwenda encounter at Beksanara the way she and Egar had.

The pommel of the Ravensfriend jutted up over his shoulder like a spike driven into him.

“All set?” she asked, with a breeziness she didn’t much feel.

“Yeah. Sherin’s with the horses. Turns out, she’s pretty good with them. Used to keep quite a stable apparently, back before Bilgrest pissed all their money away.”

“You—” Archeth stopped herself. “She going to be okay?”

He shrugged. “I don’t know.”

“The doctor says she hadn’t been harmed physically, at least not in the recent past. He’s a good man, Gil, I know him. I asked for him specifically when we sent to Khartaghnal. If he says she’s unharmed—”

“He’s used to dealing with soldiers.” There was a floating emptiness in Ringil’s tone, as if none of this really mattered anymore. “With men grateful just because they can still walk out of his tent on two feet. Doesn’t matter how good a man he is, his opinion’s not going to be worth a harbor-end fuck. Sherin screams in her dreams, all the time. She flinches at the mention of Poppy Snarl’s name, which I imagine means it was Snarl’s company that bought her at the Chancellery clearinghouse. She’s been a slave, Archeth. I know you imperials don’t think that’s any big deal, but—”

“Hoy!” She stood up to face him. “It’s me you’re talking to here, Gil.”

The confrontation lasted a couple of moments longer than it should have. She felt a faint chill on her neck as she stared into her friend’s eyes. Then he looked away, past her to the road and the hills it led into.

“Sorry,” he said quietly. “You’re right, of course. You’re not like the rest of them.”

But Ishgrim’s lush pale form floated through her mind, and Archeth was suddenly terrified that Ringil could see into her head and know what she was thinking.

“Don’t suppose the swamp time did her any favors, either,” Egar rumbled with what was, for him, an oddly deft diplomacy. “Stuck out there with the dwenda and those ruins and all those fucking heads fencing her in night and day.”

“That won’t have helped,” Ringil agreed quietly.

She heard the damage in his voice.

The heads were too much for most of them. The few Throne Eternal survivors of the Beksanara encounter, the war-hardened levy reinforcements from Khartaghnal or the Ennishmin scavenger toughs hired to guide them, even Egar, it made no real difference. Men stumbled away, sick-faced and shaking, after the few seconds it took to understand what they’d walked into. For quite a while, the stillness of the swamp was salted with the repeated sounds of Archeth’s forces retching.

Ringil just stood immobile and looked on.

“Risgillen” was all he said.

It wasn’t the ring of failed escapees beyond the fence that he’d described, not anymore. The dwenda had pulled out and whether for warning, ritual, or revenge, they had left nothing in their wake to be salvaged. The stable-type housing had been reduced by some process no one readily understood to a scattering of wet gray mulch, and out across the pools and soggy ground of the swamp, there were more than a hundred living heads, a more or less evenly sown crop, all carefully supplied with the depth of water that apparently served to keep them conscious.

While Archeth’s men braced themselves against fallen trees or boulders, and trembled and cursed or wept as was their inclination, Ringil went quietly about, lifting each head from the water and placing it gently on raised ground, where the roots of the sorcerous trunks could not get sustenance. Behind the thick swatches of bandage masking his face, it was hard to know what his expression might have been. He grimaced occasionally, but that might have been the pain in his injured arm.

After a while, some of the other men regained enough self-possession to help.

When the heads were dry enough that life seemed to have left them, when the eyes had closed and the tears dried, and when they’d scoured the vicinity to be sure that there was not one single fucking possibility they’d missed any, Archeth drew axmen from the levy and had them split each skull apart.

That took quite awhile.

When it was done, they gathered what dry fuel they could find and built a pyre, then seeded it with some of the new oily wax cakes the levy carried for starting campfires. Archeth lit the pile and they all stood in silence for the time it took to catch. At Ringil’s insistence, they pitched a camp down by the creek and waited for the pyre to burn down. Archeth found tasks to keep her men busy, but still the acrid smell drifted through the winter trees and found them, and men stopped what they were doing and swallowed hard or spat when they caught the scent.

Later that afternoon, Archeth missed Ringil and, following a not particularly inspired hunch, tracked him back to the pyre. By then, it had burned down to embers and bone fragments and ash. He stood in front of it in rigid silence, but when her foot cracked a rotten tree branch behind him, he whipped about with inhuman speed.

That was when she saw it for the first time—the thing in his eyes that still chilled her now.

“Always something worse,” he’d murmured when she moved closer.

“Perhaps they don’t just fall down like men, perhaps they are men. Or they were once.”

She stood beside him and watched the ashes smoke. She put a hand on his arm, and he turned to look at her, and for just a moment it was as if she was a total stranger touching him.

Then, abruptly, he smiled, and it was the Ringil she remembered.

“Do you think they’ll be back?” she asked him.

He was quiet for a while, so quiet she thought he hadn’t heard. She was about to ask again when he spoke.

“I don’t know. Maybe we scared them away, yeah.”

“We can stop them,” she quoted his own words back at him. “We can send them back to the gray places to think again about taking this world.”

The smile came back, faint and crooked. “Yeah. What idiot said that? Sounds kind of pompous, doesn’t it?”

“Even idiots get it right sometimes.”

“Yeah.” But she could see that somewhere inside he didn’t really believe it enough to dwell on. He turned instead and gestured at the great black buried spike of the Kiriath weapon. “Anyway, look at that fucking thing. It murdered an entire city, and turned what was left into swamp. If that won’t scare you off, what will?”

“Scares me,” she agreed.

It did, but not for the reasons she let him assume.

When they finally found the place—and even with the scavenger guides and Ringil’s help, it took longer than you’d expect—most of the humans in the party could not see the black iron spike any better than the Aldrain bridge that led to it. She didn’t know whether that was the dwenda’s doing, some cloaking glamour to keep the scavengers away, or if it was something her own people had done when they built and unleashed the weapon in the first place. She saw it clearly enough, and so did Ringil. Some others could manage it for a few seconds at a time, if they stayed and stared and squinted for long enough, which most did not care to do. The majority claimed to see only an impenetrable mass of dead mangrove, a tangle of poisonous-colored vegetation, or simply an empty space that every instinct screamed at them not to approach.

“This is an evil place,” she heard one grizzled levy corporal mutter.

That was one way to look at it, and another helpful corollary was that the evil came from the dwenda presence here, either the once-long-ago mythical city or the more recent incursion. But Archeth could not help, could not stop herself from wondering, if that sensation of evil came from the weapon itself; if there was not some smoldering remnant of its awful power still buried at the tip and if that was what came rising from the surrounding swamp like some ancient phantom in black rotting robes.

She had for so long been confident of Kiriath civilization, of a moral superiority that lifted her and her whole people above the brutal morass of the human world. Now she thought back to some of Grashgal’s and her father’s more brooding moments, their less intelligible meditations on the past and the essence of who they were, and she wondered if they had lived with this knowledge, of weapons to murder entire cities, and had hidden it from her, out of shame.

These fucking humans, Archidi, Grashgal had told her, and shuddered. If we stay, they’re going to drag us into every squalid fucking skirmish and border dispute their short-term greed and fear can invent. They’re going to turn us into something we never used to be.

But what if, Archidi, that wasn’t the truth of the revulsion in his voice at all. What if the truth of Grashgal’s fears was that these fucking humans are going to turn us back into something we haven’t been for a long, long time.

She didn’t want to think about it. She buried it in the day-to-day tasks of the clear-up, the creation of the new garrisons at Beksanara and Pranderghal and half a dozen other strategically placed villages around the swamp. If the dwenda were coming back, it was her job to ensure that the Empire was equipped to repel them with massive force. For the moment, nothing else need matter.

But for all that, the knowledge would not go away.

Even here and now, in the sun and the garden at Pranderghal, the great black iron spike stayed buried in the back of her mind just the way it was buried in the swamp, and she knew she’d never get rid of it. Knew, abruptly, looking at Ringil’s slowly healing face and the stitched wound that would inevitably leave a scar, that he was not the only one the dwenda encounter had damaged for good.

He caught her watching him and gave her a grin, one of the old ones.

“Want to finish your beer?” he asked her. “Come out and wave goodbye?”

SO THEY ALL WENT OUT TO THE START OF THE ROAD TO SAY FAREWELL. Archeth had gifted Ringil and Sherin both with good Yhelteth levy mounts—and she thought she’d seen the faintest of sparks kindle in Sherin’s eyes when the woman glimpsed her horse, and understood that it was hers to keep. It was a tiny increment, a trickling spring-melt droplet of good feeling inside Archeth, but she supposed it would have to do.

“What are you going to do when you get back?” she asked Ringil as they stood beside the horses.

He frowned. “Well, Ishil owes me some money. I guess that might be first port of call, once I’ve seen Sherin here safely home.”

“And after that?”

“I don’t know. I’ve done what was asked of me, there wasn’t a plan after that. And to be honest, I doubt I’m very popular in Trelayne right now. I’ve dishonored myself and the Eskiath name by not showing up to a duel. I’ve crippled a member in good standing of the Etterkal slave traders’ association, and killed most of his men. Fucked up the cabal’s plans for a new war. I have a feeling it might be time to leave town again, soon as I’m paid.”

Egar grinned and poked him in the chest. “Hey, there’s always Yhelteth. They won’t give a shit what you’ve done, long as you can swing a blade.”

“There is always that,” Ringil said gravely.

He took his arm out of the sling to get on his horse, winced a little as he swung up. In the saddle, he flexed the arm again a couple of times and grimaced, but he didn’t put the sling back on.

“See you again, then,” he said. “Someday.”

“Someday,” Archeth echoed. “Well, you know where I’ll be.”

“And me,” the Majak said. “Don’t leave it too long, though. We’re not all semi-immortal half-breeds around here.”

Laughter, again, in the warm sun. They made the clasp all around, and then Ringil nudged his horse into motion and Sherin, wan and quiet, fell in alongside. Archeth and Egar stood together and watched them ride away. Fifty yards out, Ringil raised a hand straight into the air for them, but that was all. He didn’t look back.

Another five minutes and watching the tiny figures recede started to seem faintly ridiculous. Egar nudged her with an elbow.

“C’mon, I’ll buy you another beer. We can watch them disappear over the hill from the garden.”

Archeth stirred, as if from a doze. “What? Okay, sure. Yeah.”

And then, as they wandered back toward the inn, “So, did I hear right? You’re going to come back to Yhelteth with me?”

The Majak shrugged elaborately.

“Been thinking about it, yeah. Like Gil said, I’m not exactly popular back home right now. And I could use some sun. And from what you said about the Citadel, you could use some armed protection about the house.”

“Nah.” She shook her head. “I’m a fucking hero now. No way they can touch me after this.”

“Yeah, not publicly, maybe.”

“Okay, okay. You’re invited. Stay as long as you want.”

“Thanks.” Egar hesitated, cleared his throat. “You uh, you ever run into Imrana these days?”

Archeth grinned. “Yeah, sure. Seen her around the court, on and off. Why?”

“Dunno, just wondered. I suppose she’s married by now.”

“A couple of times at least,” Archeth agreed. “But I don’t think she lets it get in the way of anything that matters to her.”

“Really?”

“Really.”