The Steel Remains lffh-1

by Richard K. Morgan

  He nodded at the sword pommel. “Unstrap that. Make it slow.”

  A tiny breeze got in from somewhere and made the lantern flames flicker behind their metal mesh. Shadows danced and shivered across the floor.

  Ringil dropped the dragon knife from his sleeve. He took one rapid step left.

  The Majak had made them, in the last years of the war, once the tide had turned. Mostly they were ceremonial, a statement of the victory to come, not ideal for fighting, even close in. Egar had given him his in a drunken fit of affection one campfire night on the Anarsh plain. Fucking useless thing, he’d mumbled, looking away. You might as well have it. It was basically an infant dragon fang, triangular in section, serrated up the two back edges, razor-sharp and smooth at the front. The artist, whoever he was, had carved a serviceable hilt into the base, weave-patterned it on both sides for grip. The whole thing was barely nine inches long—small enough to conceal, long enough to prick the life out of a man’s heart. It shone a dirty amber in the lanternlight as it came clear.

  Ringil pivoted from the hip, rammed the knife home under Varid’s chin.

  “Nooooooooooooooo!”

  Someone bellowing with hysterical fury. It certainly wasn’t Varid—his tongue was nailed to his palate on the fang, his mouth was jammed shut. The best he could manage was a strangling agonized grunt, and his eyes were already turning up in their sockets as the rest of the dragon knife ripped his brain in half from below. Blood burst through his locked teeth in a gurgling crimson spray. Ringil held him up, stayed close in to his bulk, blinking the blood from his eyes, made the yell for Hale’s—no one else could have seen quite what was going on yet, probably no one else would be giving orders . . .

  “Shoot, fucking shoot, will you!”

  What Ringil had hoped for happened. He heard the flesh-cringing twang-clatter as the crossbows went off at close range. All three—skirmish-schooled, he counted them off and knew. Varid jolted with the impact. A quarrel head tore through the big man’s shoulder and nearly clipped Ringil’s nose off. The other two went somewhere else, Ringil couldn’t tell where. Crossbows—now, there’s a fucking useless weapon for you. He grinned—quick, pulse-jumping relief. Sensed rather than saw Hale’s men come storming out of their alcoves. Bolts shot, the advantage thrown away—it was down to the steel. He shoved Varid’s corpse away, left the dragon knife where it was. Gained a scant few necessary feet of space as they rushed him. The combat moments seemed to float loose of each other, spun out and unreal . . .

  Freed hands both rising for the pommel now, so natural, so smooth, it was like Kiriath machinery, as if he were machinery, a cunningly crafted clockwork Kiriath mannequin, built to complement the steel.

  He felt the accustomed kiss of the grip on his palms, felt the grin on his face turn into a snarl.

  Cold chime as the scabbard gave up its embrace.

  And the Ravensfriend came out.

  YOU WANT TO KNOW HOW IT ENDS, GIL? GRASHGAL, CRYPTIC AND rambling and more than a little drunk one evening at An-Monal, holding up the newly forged Ravensfriend in scarred black hands and squinting critically down the runnel. Fireglow from the big room’s hearth seemed to drip molten off the edges of the steel. The carved beam-end gargoyles leered down from the gloom in the roof space above. I’ve seen how it ends. Someday, in a city where the people rise through the air with no more effort than it takes to breathe, where they give their blood to strangers as a gift, instead of stealing it with edged iron and rage the way we do, someday, in a place like that, this motherfucker is going to hang up behind glass for small children to stare at. Grashgal hefted the Ravensfriend one-handed, made a couple of idle strokes through the air, and the sword whispered to itself in the firelit gloom. I’ve seen it, Gil. They look at this thing through the glass it’s kept behind, they put their noses up so close to that glass their breath fogs it, and you can see the small, slow-fading print of their hands in the condensation after they’ve run off to look at something else. And it doesn’t mean a thing to them. You want to know why that is?

  Ringil gestured amenably from the depths of the armchair he was sprawled in. He wasn’t hugely sober himself.

  No. I mean, yeah. Can’t guess, I mean. You tell me.

  No one in that city understands, Gil, because it doesn’t matter to them anymore. They’ve never learned to fear the steel and the men who carry it, and none of them ever will, because they don’t have to. Because in this place I’ve seen, men like that don’t exist anymore. We don’t exist anymore.

  Sounds like a beautiful fucking place. How do I get there? Ringil grinned fiercely up at the Kiriath clan captain. Oh wait—you’re going to tell me the rents are sky-high, right? And how am I going to earn a living if they keep their swords in a museum?

  Grashgal looked back down at him for what seemed like a long time. Finally, he smiled.

  You don’t get to go, I’m afraid, Gil. Too far off, and the quick paths are too twisted for humans to follow. And on the straight road, you and I will be dust and half-remembered tales before they even start to build that city. But it will come, and when it does, this sword will still be there to see it. Kiriath steel—built to harm, built to last. When all the damage it’s done and the grief it’s caused have been forgotten, even by the gods, when the Kiriath themselves have passed into discredited myth, this murderous fucking . . . thing . . . will hang unused, and harmless, and gaped at by children. That’s how it ends, Gil. With no one to remember, or care, or understand what this thing could do when you set it free.

  Ringil met the first of Hale’s men in a blur of eager motion and the blue sweeping arc of the blade. The man was hacking down with a hand ax, and Ringil already had the Ravensfriend at high guard. He blocked, two-handed, hard, angled not for the hatchet but the arm that held it up. The Kiriath blade took the man’s hand off cleanly at the wrist. Blood gouted from the stump, rained on him, and something savage in Ringil’s heart shrilled with joy. The arm completed its downward arc, still spurting, painting them both, and the hatchet hit the ground with a thud. Its owner gaped dumbly at his own hand still gripping the haft, the yell dried up in his throat. Ringil chopped down at the juncture of shoulder and neck, severed artery and sinew, finished it.

  The next man was close behind, short-sword in one hand, mace in the other. Ringil feinted high and right, let his opponent raise both weapons to the misdirection, dropped the Ravensfriend low and almost horizontal, swung in for the belly. No broadsword made of human steel would have allowed the abrupt shift of vector; the Kiriath alloy not only allowed it—it sang. The stroke opened the other man up from side to side and carved a notch off the base of his spine before the blade tugged clear.

  Fuck.

  Sudden cold sweat—it was sloppy bladework, and against better men it might have gotten him killed. He’d been off the battlefield too long.

  But these were not better men, and the edge on the Kiriath steel was forgiving of such errors. Ringil got clear, stepped past. The gutted man wallowed in his wake, not yet fully aware of what had been done to him, tried muzzily to turn and follow as his attacker slipped away, and then his intestines and the contents of his bisected stomach fell out on the rug, and he tangled in it all and went down screaming like a child.

  Ringil’s third attacker flinched back, hampered by his gutted comrade. He had an ax and a club, but didn’t seem to know quite what to do with either. He was young, no older than seventeen or eighteen, and he looked sick with the sudden fear of combat. Ringil darted forward, boot on the dying man’s chest to close the gap, put a straight thrust into the youth’s throat and watched his face contort as he tried to cope with the pain. The blood rushed out, drenched his clothes dark from neck to waist. Then, as if the weight of all that soaking cloth was pulling him down, he sank gracefully to the floor. He was still clutching the weapons he had never gotten around to using. His gaze clawed upward after Ringil’s face, his mouth worked for words.

  Ringil was already turning away.

 
It was the breathing space, the first moment he’d had to assess the field. Taste of the blood he’d spilled metallic warm on his tongue, the paint of it on his face. Discordant yelling all around, the fight in its various splintered, snapping pieces. He saw Eril backed to a wall, a knife in each hand, fending off two attackers with kicks and slashes. A third lay bleeding on the floor at his feet. A short distance away, Girsh was down, a crossbow bolt through the thigh. A bulky figure stood above him, sword raised. Girsh rolled away as the blade came down, slammed his mace backhand into his opponent’s shin. The man howled and staggered, wagged his sword about ineffectually. Girsh belted the blade aside, propped himself up on an elbow, and chopped sideways into his attacker’s knee. The swordsman collapsed in a heap beside him, still howling. Girsh rolled again, came up on top, and started smashing in his attacker’s face and forehead with the mace.

  Peripheral flicker from the right—Ringil swung and saw Terip Hale stabbing at him with what looked like a fucking fruit knife, for Hoiran’s sake. Bad angle, no time. He jerked aside, let go of the Ravensfriend with his left hand, and fended off the blow with a Yhelteth empty-hand chop. He hit Hale in the face with the pommel of the Ravensfriend at the same time. The slaver yelped and fell down. Ringil left him there, turned back just in time to block a looping mace attack from Janesh the doorman. He caught the mace on the edge of his blade, turned the attack crossways on its own momentum, and kicked Janesh’s feet out from under him as he swayed. The doorman hit the floor, rolling desperately to get away. Ringil followed impatiently, hacked down and severed his spine. He looked back to see how Girsh was doing, saw instead two more of the joyous longshank crew rushing him at once.

  He bared his teeth and yelled in their faces, grabbed the momentary gap it gave him to dance sideways, across the chamber toward Girsh, and drag the fight’s center of gravity with him. The two men came around, squared up to him again, but you could see in their faces they’d lost a lot of their initial bloodlust to that one feral snarl.

  “Come on then,” Ringil spat. “Don’t you want to know what Kiriath steel feels like in your vitals? Do I have to bring it to you, you fucking pansies?”

  They came on then, flushed and angry at the insult, but far too late. The momentary flash of fear had already tripped them, sapped their commitment to killing this blood-splattered sneering maybe-hero with the blurring blue Kiriath blade in his hands. They came in clumsy and shaken, brandishing their weapons without strategy, and Ringil took them apart. One sweeping circular block sent the man on the left stumbling into his comrade’s path. Ringil followed through on the spin, slammed into the man, hip and shoulder, sent him sprawling. It put the other fighter almost in front of him with his back turned, and by the time the man worked out where Ringil had gone, Ringil had the Ravensfriend up and through his neck in a shallow-angled slash from the side. The man tried to turn, as if to find out what the fuck had happened that hurt so much, and his head flopped almost off with the motion. He was dead before he hit the floor.

  Ringil cast about, found the first man gamely getting back to his feet; he kicked him in the face with the instep of his boot, then again with the toe. Solid crunch of the jaw breaking on the second blow. There wasn’t time for more—a couple of feet away, Girsh was about to get brained by some giant with a spiked club. Ringil stepped closer, hacked low and hamstrung the man, watched as he fell—

  And abruptly, before he could consciously register it, the fight was done.

  Ringil stared around as his senses caught up. It really was over. Eril was off the wall, driving back a single opponent. On the ground, Girsh was killing the hamstrung giant with his mace. The rest was blood-painted carnage and crawling forms and moans. Between them, they’d accounted for a dozen men, at least. He became vaguely aware that he was panting.

  Right.

  He strode heavily up behind Eril’s opponent, swung tiredly at the man’s sword arm, and stopped the fight. The man screamed, dropped his weapon, and spun about, mouth gaping wide in shock and betrayal. Then Eril stepped in like a dance partner, hooked him with one arm, and buried his long knife upward under the sternum. The man gagged and thrashed and Eril hugged him close, twisting and gouging with the knife, finishing it. Over the dying man’s shoulder, teeth gritted, half his attention still on the killing, he nodded at Ringil.

  “Thanks, man. Thought I’d never fucking get an opening with this one.”

  Ringil waved it off and went to take care of Girsh.

  THE CROSSBOW BOLT HAD GONE IN THROUGH THE FLESHY PART OF THE thigh at a downward angle and stuck there. It showed a clear two inches of blood-streaked shaft behind the blunt octagon of the quarrel where it protruded out the other side. To Ringil’s battle-schooled eye, it suggested that either the weapon had misfired or the owner hadn’t racked up the tension enough—at that range, it should by rights have gone straight through an unarmored limb, ripped a hole the width of the brutal iron fletching on the thing. Instead, the damage seemed to be quite limited. The entry and exit wounds were messy, sopping and treacly with blood, but there was none of the telltale heavy-duty welling-up that would have signified major blood vessels torn apart.

  “Looks like you got lucky.”

  “Yeah,” gritted Girsh. “Fucking feels like it.”

  Ringil went and retrieved his dragon knife from Varid’s chin—a glutinous, messy business in itself—and set about using the serrated edges to cut cloth from the dead man’s shirt for a tourniquet. Eril went upstairs to the door into the courtyard and listened for signs that the fight had been heard by anyone who cared to do anything about it. He came back looking satisfied.

  “All quiet up there. Looks like we got the lot of them. I guess that joyous longshank number means all hands to the killing chamber. Cute.”

  Ringil grunted, preoccupied with knotting the tourniquet tight on Girsh’s thigh. The Marsh Brotherhood man bit back a groan. Eril came over to watch.

  “We need to get that out of his leg,” he said soberly. “If there’s rust on it—”

  “I know. But if you pull it back as it is, we’re going to rip up the wound and maybe open a major blood vessel. We need something to cut the quarrel off.”

  Eril nodded. “Okay, then. It’s a slave house. They’ve got to have ironwork tools around here somewhere. Manacle cutters, something like that.”

  “I can walk,” Girsh rasped. Attempting to push himself upright and prove it. He turned white with what it cost him, sagged back to the horizontal again.

  “Not far, you can’t,” Ringil told him.

  He sat back on his heels and looked around. Thought about time remaining and what they’d come here to do. Despite the subsiding pulse in his veins, the relative quiet of the aftermath, they were not even close to done with Hale and his household. He wasn’t much looking forward to the next part.

  He stifled the waking qualm like an infant in the crib.

  “All right,” he said finally. “Eril, you take care of the wounded. I’m going to see if we can’t get some answers out of our gracious host over there.”

  Girsh grinned savagely, biting down on his pain. “Yeah, now that I’m going to fucking enjoy.”

  “You stay put,” Ringil warned him. “I don’t want you moving that bolt about any more than you have to. And I don’t need the help. This isn’t going to be difficult.”

  Right, Gil. Hardened Etterkal people trafficker, lifetime criminal success before he got legal. Should be a pushover.

  While Eril went around checking bodies and slitting the throats of the injured, Ringil heaved Hale’s semiconscious form off the floor and into a sitting position against the curve of the chamber’s back wall. The slaver was bleeding from where the Ravensfriend’s pommel had smashed into his face earlier, and his right eye was already swelling shut. Blood had splashed down onto his silk robe and into the hair on his chest where it was exposed. Ringil cut a piece out of the garment with his dragon knife, cleaned up Hale’s face, and then started slapping him methodically back
to wakefulness. Across the room, someone squalled weakly as Eril pulled back his head by the hair, ready for the knife. It was Janesh the doorman, flopping snap-spined and desperate between the Marsh Brotherhood soldier’s booted feet.

  You did that, Gil, some perpetually unsoiled, disbelieving part of him whispered. That was you.

  “Hold it.”

  Eril paused, looked up at him expectantly.

  “Just give me a minute here.” He peered closely at Terip Hale as the slaver started to come around, slapped him a couple of times more to speed the process up. “Figure we could maybe use the leverage.”

  “Got it.” Eril lowered Janesh’s head almost gently back to the floor. He settled into a patient crouch above the injured man. Janesh barely moved beyond a couple of twitches in one arm. He’d maybe passed out from the pain of his wound, or just into the realm of quiet delirium.

  Terip Hale, meanwhile, woke to a vision of carnage strewn across the joyous longshank chamber, and a small fixed smile on Ringil Eskiath’s face.

  “Welcome back. Remember me?”

  To his credit, Hale snarled, made fists, and came almost off the wall with rage. There was a lifetime of street fighter’s venom in the twisted lines of his face. His legs flailed free of the robe’s silken folds. But he wasn’t a young man anymore. Ringil shoved him back with a palm heel in the chest.

  “You just sit there and behave.”

  “Fuck you!”

  “No, thank you. But I have got some questions I want answered. It’d really be in your best interests to tell me what I want to know.”

  “Yeah, well fuck your questions.” Hale’s voice drawled slower, contemptuous. He gathered his mutilated robe back around him, covered the parts of his body the disarray had exposed. “And fuck you, too, you fucking queer.”