The Steel Remains lffh-1

by Richard K. Morgan

  Marnak shrugged. “That never bothered me much. You take imperial coin, chances are sooner or later you’re going up against the League. You go up against the League, chances are sooner or later you’re going to find yourself facing Majak. Just the way it is. No different from squabbling with the Ishlinak up here like we used to. I fought for the League myself once or twice, back in the day, before the Empire really started hiring. And yeah, it always figured if we did ever beat the lizards, everyone’d go back to fighting each other again, just like before.”

  “So why not stay and make some more coin?”

  “Don’t think I didn’t give it some thought. I had a line commander’s commission by then. But like I said, it’s all well and good if you’re young. I just wasn’t anymore, wasn’t anything close to young.” Marnak shook his head bemusedly. These weren’t places his mind habitually went. “I don’t know, you get older and each battle you survive starts to feel like luck. 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. Like that. When the Scaled Folk came, I thought I’d understood that purpose. I thought I knew why I’d survived, thought I’d probably die fighting them, didn’t even mind that much so long as it was a good death.”

  “But you didn’t die.”

  “No.” Egar thought he heard something that was almost disappointment in the other man’s tone. “I didn’t. Not even at Gallows Gap, and Urann knows we came close enough there. Now, that was a perfect place for a good death, if ever I saw one.”

  And now it was Egar’s turn to chuckle. But it was a grim sound he made, not much humor in it.

  Marnak’s lips bent in silent echo. “Instead of which, we all became heroes. You, me, even that fucking faggot friend of yours.”

  “Look, he wasn’t exactly my—”

  “And next thing you know, we’re back to fighting humans again. And that’s fine, you know, like I said, but . . .” Another helpless gesture. “It got old. Felt like some kind of massive wheel coming right the way back around to start. There were all these new Majak kids flooding into Yhelteth on the recruiting wagon, looking to fill the gaps in the ranks, no fucking clue what it was all about—”

  “Yeah, I remember.” Mostly, what Egar remembered was wanting to break their shiny, enthusiastic faces for them. The fact that they reminded him so much of himself a decade earlier only made it worse. “Weird times, huh?”

  “You know what it felt like?” Marnak slipped off his cap, scrubbed vigorously at his scalp with the nails of a half-clenched fist. “You remember those round-and-round-about machines the Kiriath put into the tea gardens at Ynval? The ones with the wooden horses?”

  “Yeah. Been on them a couple of times.”

  “Yeah, well, you know what it’s like when the ride’s finished, then. Everything comes to a halt, you’re sitting there, getting used to the whole world not spinning around you, and you’ve got a whole new set of people, mostly kids, all swarming to get on. You don’t know whether you want to give up your seat or not, and then it suddenly hits you.” He slipped his cap back on again, shot Egar a sidelong glance. “You realize you don’t want to go around again. In fact, you’re not even fucking sure anymore whether you really enjoyed it the first time around.”

  They both laughed this time, and loud. Quick bark of tension released, then the looser, more reflective stretch of genuine amusement, shared under the massive sky. The small, human sounds it made held briefly against the landscape, then soaked away into the vast quiet and the wind, like piss into the ground.

  “You know,” Marnak said, maybe loath to let the silence win. “I broke one of those horses once. I ever tell you that? I mean, broke its neck right fucking off, hanging off it when I was blasted on pipe one time. They were going to make me pay for the fucking repairs, too, about half a week’s wages as it happens. Called the City Guard on me when I wouldn’t cough up. I ever tell you that story?”

  In fact, he had, but Egar shook his head amiably and the other man launched into the tale. There was an easy pleasure to be had from hearing the escapade again, all its wall-scaling, roof-leaping, harem-invading chases and shocks and reversals, plus a couple of fresh embellishments added into the mix, just to keep it sharp. It was like sitting around the fire and listening to a skilled storyteller run through the Tale of Takavach and the Mermaid’s Virtue, or something equally well worn.

  When the tale was done, with Marnak safely back across the river and into barracks before dawn, when their laughter had soaked away once again, the clanmaster nodded and told another Yhelteth story from his own stock. How a noted imperial knight had once come home to find the young Egar in bed with his wives, all four of them at once. And you know, more than anything, that seemed to be what he was so pissed off about. Standing there, yelling at me with that fucking stupid court sword in his fist. Apparently, the Revelation says yes, you can have up to six wives, but it absolutely forbids you doing it with more than one of them at a time. Egar let drop the reins, spread his hands wide. Hell, how was I supposed to know that?

  More laughter.

  Another tale.

  And so, eventually, they came to Erkan’s grave. They quieted and looked at each other. For a while they’d been able to forget where they were going, but that was over now. Egar dismounted.

  “Thanks for the company.”

  “Yeah.” Marnak cast glances around. A slight rise, a single stooped and gnarled tree with the ball of the declining sun tangled in its leafless branches. It was a bleak place, not made for the living.

  “I’ll be fine,” Egar said quietly. “He was a good man in life, he isn’t going to hurt me now.”

  Marnak grimaced. It wasn’t the received wisdom among the Majak that good men made good ghosts. A spirit must be placated, regardless of its origins; rituals must be honored. So said the shaman. No one ever explained exactly why, but the implication was that if you didn’t get that stuff right, there’d be a heavy price, for you and your people.

  “Go on, get moving. You ride hard, you’ll make it back not much after full dark.” Egar watched the other man wheel his horse about. “Oh yeah, and if Sula asks, you left me half a league out, doing the last stretch on foot. Right?”

  Marnak grinned back over his shoulder. “Right.” He clucked and heeled his horse into a gathering trot, canter, finally a full gallop back the way they’d come.

  Egar watched him go, until horse and rider were a single dot that faded slowly into the gloom. Then he sighed and turned to his father’s grave.

  It wasn’t much to look at. Steppe soils made for hard digging at this time of year, and the grave was shallow, piled over with rocks it took them the whole day to gather. They’d built the traditional cairn end pile at the buried man’s feet, warded it about with daubed symbols in the Skaranak colors and iron talismans hung off the stones on buffalo-hide thongs. They shredded tundra rose and crocus petals over the stones and set a dwarf oak sapling in the ground at Erkan’s head, so in a couple of years’ time he’d have shade when summer swung around.

  Now the clan colors were bleached with age, and the branches of the grown tree were naked and skeletal overhead. Only the shaped iron ornaments remained, though—Egar squinted suspiciously—it looked as if even one or two of those might have been stolen from the grave over the past year.

  “Motherfucking Voronak tinks,” he muttered.

  Yeah, this far south and west it’s just as likely Skaranak renegades, or even some bunch of fuckwit explorers from the south. He’d seen Skaranak grave wards in more than one imperial museum over the years, had never quite been able to drive home to anyone the rage it aroused in him. In Yhelteth, in the city itself at least, they tolerated a variety of beliefs well enough, but behind that there was always the base assumption of a civilized superiority in the Revelation that never failed to piss him off. In the end, the imperials d
idn’t much care whose sensibilities they trampled on.

  Let’s stick to the task at hand, shall we.

  He left his horse to crop the grass a short distance off, unstoppered the rice wine flask he’d brought with him, held it lowered in clasped hands, and stood a moment looking down at the grave.

  “Hey, Dad,” he said loudly. “Brought you something special this time.”

  The quiet wind keened. There was no other reply for him.

  “It’s good stuff. Used to drink it in the south all the time. This tavern down by the harbor had it, not far from Imrana’s place. I think you would have liked it in there, Dad. Noisy, full of all these tough guys off the docks. You could see the sea from the front door.” He paused, stared down at the cairn. “I would have liked to show you the sea, Dad.”

  He blinked hard a couple of times. Cleared his throat.

  “Can’t believe they’re selling this stuff in Ishlin-ichan these days. Bringing it all the way up here. Cost me a ball and an eye, of course, but hey, I’m the fucking clanmaster these days, right?”

  Got to relax, Eg. Loosen off. You’ve got a full night out here, and the sun isn’t even down yet.

  He lifted the flask and tipped it, poured slowly and steadily, working little circles into the action. The rice wine splattered and darkened the stones, ticked and dripped in the dark places between. When the flask was empty, he upended it and shook out the last drops, then placed it carefully against the base of the cairn. His fingers lingered on it awhile, kept him bent there, face turned slightly away, listening to wind. Then, abruptly, he straightened up. A grimace chased across his face—whether from the brief, flaring pain of holding the posture too long, or something else, he couldn’t say. He cleared his throat again.

  “So—I guess, we’re going to build this vigil fire.”

  He unsaddled the horse, set out his weapons, blankets, and provisions with drilled, soldier’s neatness. Unbundled the firewood and put the fire together on the scorched and balding patch of grass that marked the previous vigils. The sun dropped free of the tree branches, hung increasingly low at the horizon. He shivered a little, gave it the occasional glance as he worked. He went about collecting a few storm-torn branches he’d noticed lying in the grass earlier, dragged them over and stamped them into manageable lengths, stripped the biggest of the twigs from them, and piled it all up beside the waiting fire. He reckoned the bundle he’d brought with him should last until dawn, but the extra couldn’t hurt. More importantly, the work had shaken some of the shiver from his bones.

  He knelt by the unlit fire. Like most Majak, he carried kindling grass and flint in a dry pouch under his shirt. He now dug them out, struck sparks into a wiry fistful of the kindling until it caught, and then poked it carefully into the hollow heart of the fire pile. He tipped his head sideways, almost to the ground, and peered in. Smoke and tiny flames licked upward at the underside of the wood. The smaller pieces began to catch, smoldering and then popping alight. A cheery yellow light spilled out. The warmth of it washed his eyes and face, felt a little like tears. He hauled himself quickly upright again, back into the gathering gloom and chill of the air around him. He stowed the kindling pouch, brushed off his hands. Glanced back at the gnarled marker tree and the declining sun.

  “Well, Dad, I—”

  A figure stood there.

  It was a hammerblow to his heart, an icy clutch of fear that dropped his right hand reflexively to the hilt of the knife at his hip.

  It was not his father.

  At least, not in any form that made sense. He saw a drab, full-length patched leather cloak of the sort favored by League sea captains, a soft-brimmed hat tilted forward to shade the face, though the sun was behind and in any case almost gone. Erkan, colorful, boisterous, a Majak to the bone, had never owned anything remotely resembling either item.

  No. Wouldn’t have been seen dead wearing them, either.

  Egar felt the corner of his mouth quirk. The humor pushed out the shock, brought in a shrewd skirmisher’s calculation instead. The cloaked figure looked to be alone. No visible companions or weapons, no horse nearby. Egar sidled a glance across to where his own mount stood, still placidly cropping the grass and apparently unaware of the newcomer, then to the neat piles of his gear on the ground—staff lance and ax, both well out of reach. He could not believe he’d allowed himself to be ambushed this easily.

  He kept his hand loose on the hilt of his knife.

  “I’m not here to harm you, Dragonbane.”

  The voice came across the distance between them as if from much farther away, as if carried on the wind. Egar blinked at the effect.

  “You know me?”

  “After a fashion, yes. May I approach?”

  “Are you armed?”

  “No. I have no real need for such accoutrements.”

  Egar set his mouth in a thin line. “You’re a shaman?”

  Abruptly the cloaked figure loomed a scant two feet in front of him. It happened so fast, Egar would have sworn he never saw the newcomer move at all. A hand clamped brutally on his wrist, held it down so he could not have drawn his knife if his life depended on it. The face beneath the brim of the hat loomed, gaunt and hard-eyed. A gust of acrid chemical burning swirled in the wind, something like the smells that sometimes blew off the Kiriath brewing stacks south of An-Monal.

  “There is not much time,” the voice admonished, no less distant sounding than before. “Your brothers are coming to murder you.”

  And gone.

  Egar jumped, and nearly fell down with the sudden release of the pressure on his arm. He cleared his knife from its sheath, belatedly, whirled about. The figure was nowhere to be seen. It was gone, into the chill of the air and the long grass, like memory of the voice into the wind, like the acrid chemical tang into the sweeter smell of wood smoke from the fire. Like the fading pressure on his wrist.

  He wheeled about once more, breathing tightly, knife balanced on his palm.

  Quiet, and thickening gray gloom across the steppe.

  The band like a hoop of blood. His father’s cairn, the emptied flask laid beside it. The blackening silhouette of the tree.

  “My brothers are in Ishlin-ichan,” he told the silence. “Getting drunk.”

  He jerked his head westward, roughly the direction you’d take. Threw a glance out to the setting sun.

  Saw silhouetted riders there, approaching.

  CHAPTER 19

  Ringil tried, just the once, on fading hope, for the outrage of imperial nobility.

  “Just what is the meaning of this? You intend to rob me, like common criminals? My father will have you—”

  Terip Hale shook his head. “Let it go, friend. I don’t imagine that accent is any more real than the rest of this charade, so drop it, why don’t you. This is going to be painful enough for you as it is. Now, like I asked you before, who the fuck are you? What are you doing here, asking after barren marsh dwellers?”

  Ah.

  “All right,” Ringil said, because he guessed he had perhaps another half a minute, at most, before Hale did the obvious thing and had them all disarmed.

  Yeah, and after that, it’s down to whatever disciplinary facilities Hale keeps around here for recalcitrant slaves. Where we’ll be put to the question repeatedly, until Hale gets what he wants to hear from us, and then, if we’re lucky, they might put us out of our scorched and mutilated misery with a quick slit throat.

  Nice going, Gil.

  Ringil measured the possibilities. Eril and Girsh had both frozen when the trap was sprung, arms well out from their bodies so as not to invite a crossbow bolt for twitching a hand the wrong way, faces taut with concentrated tension. They looked like men wading belly-high across an icy river, like adults caught out midstep in a children’s game of closer-closer-statue. They would have already assessed the odds. Now they watched for Ringil’s lead.

  There were three crossbows leveled at them, as far as he could see. The rest was hand-to-hand cutl
ery.

  “All right what?” grated Hale.

  “All right, you win. I’m not Laraninthal of Shenshenath, and I’m not an imperial. My name’s Ringil Eskiath.”

  Hale blinked. “The Ringil Eskiath? Yeah, right.”

  But Ringil had seen how that same taken-aback flinch ran around the armed men in the alcoves. He felt the way their casual thug focus gave way to curious stares. He saw a couple of them mutter to each other. The siege of Trelayne was eight years in the past, the triumph at Gallows Gap a year older than that. The war itself had been over now for more than half a decade. But the stories lingered on, attenuated maybe, yet still there in the city’s consciousness.

  “Eskiath died at Ennishmin,” someone sneered. “Fighting imperials.”

  Ringil forced a calm he didn’t feel.

  “Heard that one before a couple of times,” he said lightly. “And it’s almost true. Still got the scars. But it takes more than three Yhelteth sneak assassins to put me away.”

  Another of the men voiced a faint cheer. His companion elbowed him savagely to shut up. Ringil pushed as hard as it would go. He raised a cautious thumb, well out from his body so it wouldn’t be misinterpreted, gesturing up at his left shoulder.

  “This is the Ravensfriend,” he said loudly. “Kiriath steel. Forged at An-Monal for the clan Indamaninarmal, gifted to me by Grashgal the Wanderer. Rinsed in lizard blood at Rajal Beach and Gallows Gap and the siege of Trelayne. I am Ringil of the Glades house of Eskiath.”

  Another voice from one of the alcoves. “He does look kind of—”

  “Yeah?” Terip Hale wasn’t having this. “Well, you know what I heard? I heard Ringil Eskiath was a fucking queer. That true as well?”

  Ringil bent him a smile. “Would I have come to you looking for slave girls if it were?”

  “I don’t know why you’re here.” Hale nodded at the muscle with the flail. “But we are going to find out. Varid.”

  The big man moved across to Ringil, stepped in close enough to block any attempt to bring the Ravensfriend out of its scabbard, far enough off to beat a grapple move. It was done with sober professional care—no grin like the doorman’s, no jeering. Just a custom-hardened watchfulness in the eyes. Chances were that Varid had been a soldier once.