The Steel Remains lffh-1

by Richard K. Morgan

  Ringil glanced around at the bodies and the blood. “I think you’re missing the specifics of who won here.”

  “You think you’re going to get away with this?”

  Ringil tilted his head, put a cupped hand to his ear. “You hear that? On the stairs? That’s the sound of no one coming to stop us, Terip. It is over. You pulled the joyous longshank girls on us, and it didn’t work.”

  He nodded at Eril, who yanked Janesh’s head back up. The doorman shrieked as he realized what was happening, woke maybe from a dreamed escape to something better. Eril’s knife dipped in, did its severing and opening—dark crimson gush of blood and Janesh’s face went suddenly idiot-soft and pale. Eril let go of his head, and it hit the floor with an audible bump.

  Ringil masked himself in what felt like stone.

  “You want to live?” he asked Hale quietly.

  Hardened or not, the slave trader had gone almost as pale as his murdered minion. Respectability, or perhaps just age, seemed to have sapped some of his edge. His mouth twitched over words he didn’t appear to know how to voice.

  “I’m sorry, you’ll have to speak up.”

  “The cabal.” Hale licked his lips. “They won’t let this stand.”

  “The cabal.” Ringil nodded. “Okay. Why don’t you scare me with some names? Who are they? Who do they represent?”

  “Oh, I think you’ll find that out soon enough.”

  “I’m not a patient man, Terip.”

  The slave trader scraped together an awful, lopsided grin. “It doesn’t matter what you do to me, if you kill me here or not. They’ll find out about this either way.”

  Ringil, out of nowhere—some combination of twanging battle-comedown nerves, general weariness, who knew what besides—took a blind leap.

  “Going to stick your head on a tree trunk, are they?”

  He saw the jolt go through Terip Hale, almost as if the slaver had been struck by one of his own men’s crossbow bolts. He saw the fear in the one unswollen eye.

  “You—”

  “Yeah.” Grab the advantage, run with it. “I know all about it. That’s why they sent me. See, Terip—I used to kill lizards for a living. One time in Demlarashan, I helped take down a whole fucking dragon, me and just one other guy. So I got no problem putting away your pet dwenda if he gets in my way. Now, you tell me—what’s so fucking special about Sherin Herlirig Mernas that you’ve got to try to kill me when I ask after her?”

  “Who?”

  “You heard.”

  “I don’t know that name.”

  “No?” Ringil produced the dragon knife and held it up in front of Hale’s good eye. He breathed deep. “You remember well enough that she’s barren, that she comes from marsh dweller stock, but you don’t know her name? That’s lizardshit. Now where the fuck is she?”

  And something seemed to break in Hale. Maybe the talk of sorcery, maybe Janesh’s murder, or maybe he just wasn’t as tough as he used to be. He flinched back from the tip of the fang.

  “Don’t . . . wait, listen to me. I can’t—”

  Ringil tapped his eyelid with the knife. “Yeah, you can.”

  “I don’t fucking know, all right.” Hale seemed to see an opening, to grab at it. The desperation in his voice scaled down a little. “Look. This marsh bitch you’re looking for, how long ago was she sold?”

  “About a month.”

  “A month?” A harsh, high-pitched laugh—the slaver’s bravado was seeping back in. “A fucking month? Are you insane? You got any idea how much cunt comes through this place every month? You think I got nothing better to stuff my head with than their fucking names? Forget it. Give it up, man.”

  Ringil slammed his palm against Hale’s forehead for purchase, dragged the dragon knife tip down the man’s cheek, and tore the skin open to the bone. Blood spritzed everywhere. Hale shrieked and flailed. Ringil let him go, as if he were hot to the touch. He felt his own face twitch, felt a deep pounding start somewhere in his chest. The moment was an unbroken Yhelteth horse, bucking under him, taking him away, body and soul. With shaking hands, he fumbled in his pocket, found the charcoal sketch of Sherin and rolled it open in both hands, still holding the dragon knife at the top edge of the parchment like some ornate scroll end. He tried to get his breathing back.

  “You are going to tell me,” he said tightly. “One way or the other. Now. Let’s try again. This girl. You bought her, right?”

  Hale cupped a hand at his wounded cheek, staring.

  “You know she’s barren.” Ringil was shouting now, somehow couldn’t stop himself. Could barely stop himself, in fact, from going back to work on Hale with the knife right now. “You know she’s got dweller blood. You give her to me, or so help me Hoiran, I’ll take your guts out hand-over-hand right here and now.”

  “It’s not her.”

  Ringil seized him by the throat. The sketch of Sherin fluttered away. “You fucking piece of shit, that’s it—”

  “No, no.” Babbling, working weakly at Ringil’s grip with both hands, voice gone almost sleepy with terror. “Don’t, don’t—it’s not her.”

  “What’s not her?”

  “It’s not . . . I didn’t think you . . . not one girl—it’s all of them, fucking all of them he wants. He takes them all.”

  Something portcullis-heavy seemed to clank down behind Ringil’s eyes. Abruptly the rage drained out of him and he felt the shiver of an apprehension he couldn’t name in its place. He let go of Hale’s throat.

  “He? You’re talking about the dwenda?”

  Hale nodded brokenly, still trying to edge away from Ringil along the curve of the wall. Ringil took a handful of silk robe and dragged him back. He leaned close.

  “Talk to me.” Voice trembling from the sudden collapse of the fury. Blood singing in the depths of his hearing like the sea. “You want to live, you talk to me. You tell me about this dwenda.”

  “They’ll kill me if I do.”

  “And I will kill you if you don’t, right here and now. Make a choice, Terip. The dwenda. What’s he doing here?”

  “I don’t know.” The slave trader made a peculiarly morose gesture. “He talks to the cabal, not me. Word came down. Any marsh cunt, anything looks like it might have the blood, make sure the warlocks check it out. If it can’t breed, you set it aside. Count it as a tithe.”

  “Right. And anyone comes asking after a woman like that, you show them the joyous longshank girls. Right?”

  Hale stared downward, would not meet Ringil’s eye. The silence stretched. Blood dripped off the slaver’s face and into his soiled silk lap.

  Eril came over and crouched at Ringil’s side. “We’re done here,” he murmured. “No one breathing left. You want me to do him, too?”

  Ringil shook his head. “Get me that mace over there. We need a messenger. I don’t want to leave Findrich and the rest in any doubt about what happened here.” He raised his voice. “You hear that, Terip?”

  The slave trader twitched at the sound of his name. He would not look up. Ringil leaned in and took Hale’s skull firmly in his two cupped hands. He tilted it with a lover’s care, until the slaver was forced to meet his eyes.

  “You pay attention,” he said quietly. “You tell this to Findrich, or Snarl, or whoever it is you report to in this idiot cabal of yours. You tell them Ringil Eskiath wants his cousin Sherin back. Soon, and unhurt—it’s not negotiable. If I don’t get what I want, I’m coming back to Etterkal to ask again. Believe me, they don’t want that, and neither do you.”

  Hale jerked his head out of Ringil’s hands. Outrage at the intimacy, or maybe just the knowledge he was not going to die, seemed to kindle a new fire in him.

  “Fucking touch me,” he muttered. “Piece-of-shit queer.”

  Silently, Eril handed Ringil the mace. Ringil smiled faintly, beat it very gently in the cup of his palm.

  “You’re missing the point, Hale.”

  “And you’re fucking insane.” The slave trader managed a sha
ky laugh. “You do know that, don’t you, Eskiath? Come in here talking like some relic out of the prewar, some gang tough from harbor end. Don’t you get it? Things aren’t like that anymore—we’re legal now. You can’t come around here acting like this. You can’t touch us.”

  Ringil nodded. “Go on telling yourself that if it helps. Meantime, tell the others I want my cousin back. Sherin Herlirig Mernas. There’ll be records, and I’ll leave you the sketch. You make sure they get the message. Because if I do have to come back to Etterkal and ask again, I promise you it’ll make what happened tonight look like a minor toothache. I’ll kill you and your whole fucking family, and I’ll burn this place to the ground around the corpses. Then I’ll move on to Findrich, and Snarl, and anyone else who gets in my way. I’ll torch the whole fucking neighborhood if I have to. You think things changed after the war, fuckhead?” He reached out and chucked the slave trader hard under the chin. He hefted the mace. “Got news for you. Things just changed back.”

  CHAPTER 20

  Jhiral let them go home not long after midnight. He appeared to have satisfied himself that everything possible was being done and, perhaps more importantly, that his grip on his advisers was no less secure than it had been before the Khangset pot boiled over. He nodded them out with the minimum of ceremony. Faileh Rakan disappeared into the bowels of the palace without a word beyond the necessary honorifics, and Archeth walked out to the front gates with Mahmal Shanta.

  “Seemed to go well enough,” the naval engineer said when they got outside.

  She couldn’t tell if there was an edge of irony on his words or not. Krinzanz was good for a lot of things, but it was not a subtle drug. The finer points of human interaction tended to go out the window. She shrugged and yawned, checked the immediate vicinity for nosy minions, habitual caution so ingrained it was reflex.

  “Jhiral’s not stupid,” she said. “He knows we’ve got to nip this in the bud. If word gets out the Empire can’t protect its ports, we’re going to have a southern trade crisis on our hands.”

  “Which our competitive little city-state friends in the north will be only too pleased to exploit.”

  “Wouldn’t you?”

  Shanta did his own reflexive sweep of the surroundings. “What I would do, my lady, is not fit conversation for environs such as these. Perhaps some other time, over coffee aboard my barge?”

  “Perhaps.”

  “Did you mean what you said about the Helmsmen? Will they view this as a war context?”

  “How the fuck would I know?” Wearily now, despite a residual wakefulness. Her eyes felt gritty and smeared open. “The one down in dry dock I was trying to debrief last week talks about as much as a Demlarashan mystic in midfast. Makes about as much fucking sense as well.”

  They reached the gates and had to wait in the slightly chilly air while slaves brought Archeth’s horse from the stables, and a carriage was summoned for Shanta. She pulled on her gauntlets and shook off a tiny shiver. Winter was creeping in early this year. It’d be good to get home, peel off her travel-stained clothes, and stand barefoot on heated floors in the cozy warmth of her apartments. Let the last of the krin burn away, give in to sleep. Along the shallow zigzags of the Kiriath-paved approach causeway, pale lamps studded a seductive path down through the darkness the palace mound was sunk in, and into Yhelteth’s carpet of lights at the bottom. The firefly clustering of the city’s illumination spread wide in all directions, split down the center by the dark arm of the estuary. Closer in, Archeth picked out the Boulevard of the Ineffable Divine, lit in bright double rows and straight as a sword blade laid across the more haphazard patterning of the other streets. It seemed almost close enough to touch.

  Shanta was watching her keenly.

  “They say the ones that stayed are angry,” he murmured. “The Helmsmen, I mean. They feel abandoned, resentful that the Kiriath would not take them.”

  She looked at the lights. “Yeah, they say that.”

  “That’s got to affect their attitude to the Empire as well, I’d imagine. Got to put pressure on any kind of loyalty they might have.”

  “Oh, look. They got Idrashan out already.” Archeth nodded to where a slave was leading her horse out of the stable block. “So that’s me, then. G’night, Mahmal. Hope your carriage doesn’t take too long. Thanks for coming along.”

  The engineer smiled gently at her. “My pleasure. It has certainly been instructive.”

  She left him there and went to meet the slave halfway. Mounted up, waved a final, wordless farewell to Shanta, and urged her horse out the gate.

  On the first sloping downturn of the causeway, she stood in the stirrups and looked back. The naval engineer was an indistinct figure through the railed iron of the gates above, backlit into silhouette by bright-burning torches behind him on the palace walls. But she knew beyond doubt that he was still watching her.

  So fucking what? She left the palace behind and let the horse find its own way home through the stew of streets on the south side. Shanta’s no fucking different from the rest of the old guard. Holed up in their positions of privilege and moaning in their little cabal corners about how much better it was when Akal was still around.

  Well? Wasn’t it?

  Akal was still around when we smashed the rebels at Vanbyr. Let’s not forget that inconvenient little blemish on the face of prior glory.

  He was on his sickbed by then.

  He still gave the fucking order.

  Yes. And you obeyed it.

  She passed a sleeping figure, curled into the angle of a darkened smithy’s yard. Ragged cloak and hood; emblazoned on its folds she recognized the sable-on-white horse insignia of an imperial cavalryman. Hard to know if you could take that at face value or not—the city was full of demobbed and damaged soldiery sleeping in the streets, but military garb elicited more pity when you were begging, whoever you might actually be, so it was well worth the risk of stealing it if you got the chance. It could get you fed, even taken in on winter nights if the cold bit hard enough or it rained. Archeth knew a brothel near the harbor whose madame prided herself on letting derelict veterans sleep in her laundry shack. She’d even been known to send out girls from the more raddled end of her stable to provide free hand jobs on feast days.

  You found patriotism in the strangest places.

  She slowed the horse to a halt and peered hard at the cloak-wrapped form, trying to decide. Something about the posture rang true, the laconic efficiency in the way cloak and hood were used. But without waking the man up . . .

  She shrugged, dipped in her purse, and found a five-elemental piece. Leaned over and tossed the coin so it clipped one wall in the corner and hit the paved floor with a loud chink. The figure grunted and moved, and a right hand groped out from under the cloak until it found the money. Ring and little finger gone, along with most of that half of the hand. Archeth grimaced. It was a common enough injury among the horse regiments: Yhelteth cavalry swords were notoriously badly provided with protection for the hand. One powerful, well-judged slice down the blade from a skilled opponent, and you were a cavalryman no longer.

  She tossed another five elementals down onto the drape of the cloak, and clucked Idrashan onward.

  A couple of streets later and nearly home, she passed through a small, leafy square once called Angel’s Wing Place but now renamed for the victory at Gallows Gap. It was a place she’d walk to sometimes when she needed to get out of the house, both before and after the war, though she’d preferred it before. Then it had hosted a bustling fruit market. Now they’d built a self-important little three-sided stone memorial in the center, grandiose bas-relief images of exclusively imperial soldiers standing on piles of reptile dead, a central column designed to look vaguely like a sword thrusting skyward. There were stone benches built into the structure and lettered homages in rhyme to OUR GLORIOUS IMPERIAL COMMANDER, OUR SONS OF THE CITY INSPIRED. Archeth had read the compositions enough times to have them, unwillingly, by heart, had even,
once, at a court ball, been briefly introduced to the poet who’d penned them.

  Of course, one was not actually there at the battle, this smirking minor noble had told her, and sighed manfully. However much one might have desired it. But I did visit Gallows Gap last year, and one’s muse can always be relied upon in such cases to catch the echoes of the event in the melancholy quiet that remains.

  Indeed. But there must have been something in her face despite her best efforts, because the smirk slipped a little, and the poet’s tone turned anxious.

  You, uhm, you were not there yourself, milady? At the battle?

  Oh no, she managed urbanely. But my father died on the expeditionary retreat, and two of my outlander friends led the final Gallows Gap charge.

  He left her alone after that.

  Home, in the courtyard, she handed Idrashan over to the night watchman and let herself in through a side entrance. The house was lit with lamps turned low, and it was quiet—she kept servant numbers to a minimum, and manumitted the slaves she occasionally bought as soon as custom and city regulations would permit. Kefanin, she guessed, would be dozing in his cubicle by the front door, waiting for her return. She saw no reason to wake him and went directly upstairs to her chambers.

  In the dressing room, she hung up her knives, wrestled her boots off one after the other and tossed them into a corner, shucked the rest of her clothes like an old skin and stood there a minute luxuriating in the feel of the warm air on her body. Then, as she bent to scratch an itch on her calf, her own smell mugged her. She wrinkled her nose, glanced at the tapestried bellpull by the wall.

  Ah, come on. Fucking Scaled Folk campaign veteran. You bathed under a waterfall in the upper Trell, winter of ’51. That so long ago?

  It was ten years, truth be told, time that had crept up on her somehow; but the fading edge of the krin was a blessing, a twitching impatience under her skin, and she let that carry her. She left the bell unrung and went through to the bathing chamber, not relishing the thought of a cold-water scrub but unwilling to go through the rigmarole of calling down to the basement, getting the slaves to stoke up the furnace, fill the boiling pans, waiting the time it took while the water heated and they carried it upstairs and—