The Steel Remains lffh-1

by Richard K. Morgan

  “But you don’t feel it that way,” he said bitterly. “You’re immortal, right?”

  Seethlaw smiled gently. “So far.”

  And then his gaze drifted out to the left, eyes narrowed. Ringil heard footfalls across the black stone road behind him.

  “. . . Seethlaw . . .”

  It was a female voice, fluid and melodic but slightly muffled; the dwenda’s name was the only word Ringil could pick out, and even that was stretched and twisted almost beyond recognition. He turned his head and saw in the glow from the fire that a figure stood behind him. It was garbed in black, wore a long-sword across its back; its head was sleek and rounded. It took him a couple of seconds to realize he was looking at someone in the suit and helm Seethlaw had shown him under the city. Then the figure lifted a hand to the featureless bulb on its head and pushed back the glass visor. Framed in the space behind was an empty-eyed dwenda face.

  A shudder scrawled its way across Ringil’s shoulders—he could not prevent it. For just a moment in the eerie unreliable firelight under the bridge, the featureless dark of the newcomer’s eyes seemed to merge with the black of the helmet, and the bone-white features took on the aspect of a thin, sculpted mask with empty eye holes, a helmet within a helmet, set on the shoulders of a suit of armor that must, instinct told him, contain nothing but the same emptiness that lay behind the eyes.

  Seethlaw got up and ambled across to greet the new arrival. They took each other’s hands loosely at waist height, oddly like two children readying themselves to play a game of slap-me-if-you-can. They talked back and forth for a few seconds in what appeared to be the same tongue the newcomer had used, but then Seethlaw gestured back at Ringil and broke into the antique dialect of Naomic he’d been speaking before.

  “. . . my guest,” he said. “If you’d be so kind.”

  The female dwenda studied Ringil for a moment, showing all the emotion of the mask she had seemed to wear just a moment before. Then her mouth twisted into a crooked half smile and Ringil thought she muttered something under her breath. She lifted the smooth black helm from her head—it came slowly, as if a very tight fit—shook out long silky hair not quite as dark as Seethlaw’s, and rolled her head back and forth a couple of times to loosen her neck muscles. Ringil heard vertebrae crackle. Then the new dwenda tucked her helmet under one arm and stepped forward, free left hand extended languidly to make one half of the greeting she had shared with Seethlaw.

  “My respects to those of your blood.” Her Naomic, aside from being archaic, was very rusty. “I am with name Risgillen of Ilwrack, and sister of already you-know this Seethlaw. How are you called?”

  Ringil took the offered hand as he’d seen Seethlaw do, wondering if he was being subtly snubbed with this casual, one-armed variant.

  “Ringil,” he said. “I’ve heard a lot about you.”

  Risgillen shot a glance at her brother, who shook his head minutely and said something in the other tongue. The female dwenda peeled her lips back from something that wasn’t really a smile, and let go of his hand.

  “You come by unexpected ways, for this the un-, the dis-, the lack of proper ceremony. I regret.”

  “We ran into some akyia on the coastal path,” Seethlaw told her. “This seemed like a safer option.”

  “The merroigai?” Risgillen frowned. “Shown proper respect, they should not have bothered you.”

  “Well, they did.”

  “I don’t like such event. And with now these other matters, too. Something stirs, Seethlaw, and it is not us.”

  “You worry too much. Did you come alone?”

  Risgillen gestured back the way she’d come. “Ashgrin and Pelmarag, somewhere beyond. But they seek you at different angles, alternatives less than here. None expected you this adrift. I myself, it was by scent only I came to you.”

  “I’ll call them.”

  Seethlaw moved out from under the bridge and disappeared into the gloom. Risgillen watched him go, then seated herself with Aldrain elegance beside the fire. She stared into the oddly tinged flames for a while, perhaps marshaling the words she needed before she deployed them.

  “You are not the first,” she said quietly, still looking into the fire. “This we have seen before. This I have done myself, with mortal men and women. But I do not lose myself as my brother can. Clearly, I see.”

  “I’m happy for you.”

  “Yes. So I tell you this.” Risgillen looked up and fixed him with her empty eyes. “Do not doubt; if you bring hurt or harm upon my brother, I will fuck you up.”

  OUT IN THE DARKNESS, A LITTLE LATER, HOWLING SOUNDS.

  Ringil looked at Risgillen, the perfect geometry of her features in the greenish glow from the flames, saw no reaction beyond the faintest of smiles. The realization hit him, like icy water, that he recognized the sound.

  The howling was Seethlaw, calling for his kind.

  Risgillen did not look up, but her smile broadened. She knew he was watching her, knew he’d understood, once again, suddenly, where he really was.

  A fight is coming, a battle of powers you have not yet seen.

  The words of the fortune-teller at the eastern gate, welling up in his mind like chilly riverbed ooze. The certainty in her voice.

  A dark lord will rise.

  CHAPTER 26

  We tried to stop them. But they took her.

  For long moments, the words made no kind of sense. Ishgrim was a gift of the Emperor; you’d steal her on peril of a very slow and unpleasant death when the King’s Reach caught up with you, which they inevitably would because with Jhiral they themselves would be facing some pretty stiff penalties if they didn’t. Sure, she was long-limbed and beautiful, but so were a lot of northern slave girls. You wanted one badly enough, you could pick them up down at the harbor clearinghouses for less than it cost to buy and tax a decent horse these days.

  Never mind that. Krin-driven brain, screaming in her head. How did they even fucking know? Ishgrim’s a gift of the Emperor since yesterday. No one knew she was here. You didn’t even know she was here until the early hours of this morning.

  She hugged at Kefanin, worried at the impossibility of the situation. “Who? Who, Kef? Who took her?”

  The mayor-domo made a grunting noise deep in his throat. Rapid, battlefield-trained assessment told her his wound wasn’t fatal, but the blow had stunned him badly. She wasn’t sure how much sense he could make in this state.

  “Citadel . . . livery,” he managed.

  And then it all came tumbling into place, like some circus trick performed by a dozen inanely painted, grinning clowns.

  Not Ishgrim—get that pale flesh out of your head, Archidi, get a fucking grip—not the Emperor’s gift at all.

  Elith.

  Menkarak: She’s an infidel, a faithless stone-worshipping northerner who would not convert when the hand of the Revelation was extended to her in friendship, and who persists in her stubborn unbelief deep within our borders. The evidence is plain—she has even torn the kartagh from her garb to blind the eyes of the faithful she dwells among. She is steeped in deceit.

  The mix of hysterical accusation and cod-legal posturing rang around the inside of Archeth’s head like a rolling metal ball. Not much doubt what awaited Elith once they got her inside the Citadel.

  “How long?” she whispered.

  But Kefanin had lost consciousness again.

  Footfalls outside. She spun to her feet, a knife in her hand like magic. The stable boy, dazed looking, hesitant in the doorway, backlit by the blast of morning sun.

  “Milady, they—”

  “How long?” she screamed at him.

  “I—” Now, as he stepped inside, she saw the bruise blackening beneath his left eye, bubbles of fresh blood at his nostril on the same side. “Not half an hour, milady. Not even that.”

  A map of the south side’s maze of streets flared into view behind her eyes. The krinzanz collided with the fury in her veins, inked in the Citadel and the path they’d
likely take on their way back to it, stitched it onto the map in pulsing red.

  “How many of them?” she asked, more calmly now.

  “It was six, I think, milady. In the livery of—”

  “Yes, I know.” She sheathed the knife, felt a muscle twitch in her cheek. “Get the doctor. Tell him if Kefanin lives, I’ll double his fee. If he dies, I’ll have him driven out of the fucking city.”

  Then she took off, running.

  SIX MEN, CITADEL LIVERY.

  The streets were packed, no way to ride a horse through it faster than a slow clop. She wasn’t uniformed, had no baton and whistle or blunted saber to clear her way. And anyway, they’d see her coming a hundred yards off.

  She cut left, up a little-used dogleg back alley she knew, sprinting flat out as soon as she had the space. Abrupt relief from the heat of the sun in the narrow angles of the passage. A couple of chickens panicked screeching away from beneath her booted feet as she took the corner, but nothing else got in her way. She hit the teeming cross street of Horseman’s Victory Drive—where now, ha fucking ha, you couldn’t even take a horse unless it was hauling produce—shouldered through the crowd, and got to the whitewashed stone steps that led up onto the roof of the Lizard’s Head tavern. From there, she could get her bearings, make a match with the map in her head. Then vault the alley on the other side, get onto the onion-domed rooftop sprawl of the covered bazaar.

  “Hoy, you can’t come up—”

  She shoved the heavy-gutted publican back in his deck chair as he tried to rise. Danced past, ducking and dodging lines of washing. Grabbed a look amid the glaring white of hung sheets and rooftops beyond. Right, Archidi. Think. Bazaar. Clothmaker Row. The Hustray strait-back Narrows. If they’d taken the most direct route for the Citadel, by now they were headed up Desert Wisdom Drive, off the main boulevard at a forty-five-degree angle. To cut them off . . .

  She ran at the lip of the roof, flexed legs into the jump, and over onto the flat top of the bazaar. Pain jarred up into both knees, but she came up running. No time, no time. Around the first of the onion-dome protrusions, and shit, shit, right onto a broad stained-glass skylight. She—

  Staggered, threw herself into an ungainly, flailing leap.

  Caught a fragmentary glimpse of shoppers moving fishily through a red-and-blue-tinged crowd below, saw herself crashing through and down among them—

  Made the other side instead, cleared the glass by inches, landed awkwardly, swayed back, pinwheeled her arms desperately for balance and—

  Upright. Running again, looping between the onion domes and roughly southeast.

  It was like sprinting across the top of the world. Sounds of the city lost below, the glinting sword of sunlight and a cooling breeze out of the west. The tall rows of houses that fringed Desert Wisdom Drive angling in, closing from the left.

  The market beneath her feet was one of the largest in the city—not quite up to the sprawling grandeur of the Imperial Bazaar north of the river, but it still covered several city blocks. She used its roof to cover ground in minutes that would have taken the best part of half an hour at street level.

  Fetched up on the eastern edge, trotted rapidly along the guttering until she spotted a grain cart parked below and leapt down into it. Startled oaths and the slugging pain of the impact along arse and back and one thigh. She rolled up from the fall, stood unsteadily, up to her ankles in the grain. Faces peered in at her.

  “Fuck was that?”

  “Hey. Listen, bitch, that’s my—”

  “Oooh, no, but look at ’er, Perg, she’s black as a burned bun. It’s a fucking keeriass, it is.”

  “Kiriath,” she snarled and jumped down among them. Shoved her way clear and set off at a fast jog along the sparsely used delivery and storage alleys that constituted the Narrows. She dodged among tradesmen laden with trays of produce, past squatting laborers sharing bread. Six men, Citadel livery. If Menkarak was playing true to type, that meant an invigilator—advocate general to oversee the legality of the proceedings—he’d be oldish—and five men-at-arms.

  In the pulse of the krin, it seemed like pretty good odds.

  The Narrows spilled out at various points along a curved and crooked street called Bridle Trail Walk. It was lined with low-end jewelers and curio shops, and busy with citizens browsing the iron-caged windows. Archeth skittered through, pushing and cursing, getting angry looks until her color registered, and then averted eyes and a few wards against evil.

  Three blocks up, savage elbows and flat hand shoves, Come on, come on, Archidi, pick it the fuck up, and right, into Sailcloth Yard. A few seamstress stalls set up in corners, otherwise quiet. She sprinted the short, right-angled length of it, slammed into the railing at the end, and stared, panting, down a loose soil slope onto a bend in Desert Wisdom Drive.

  Citadel livery, Citadel livery, Citad—

  There!

  Desert Wisdom was tangled up worse than Bridle Trail Walk or the boulevard. They’d made even less headway than she’d thought. She spotted the invigilator-advocate’s robes first, black and gold and the gray silk hood that marked his legal standing. The men-at-arms, a worn, white-clad figure trudging among them, head bowed, arms tied back. If they were in a hurry, it didn’t show.

  Archeth sucked in a sobbing breath and vaulted the rail.

  Her feet hit the slope six feet below, tried to sink in the soil and tip her headlong. She tore loose and ran, long, uncontrolled flopping strides to stay ahead of her own falling weight. Came hammering down into Desert Wisdom Drive hard and fast enough to smash passersby in her path to the ground. She got back control of her gait, swerved through the confusion she’d sown, and started into the crowd. Couple of hundred yards to close up, at most.

  “From the palace, from the palace!” Chanting it at the top of heaving lungs. “Move! Get out of the fucking way!”

  Slowly at first—the cry met only with jeers and unresponsive backs turned. But then the people she cannoned into started to look around, saw what she was, and almost fell over themselves to obey. They opened passage for her, and the scramble transmitted itself through the crowd ahead like a wave on water. A hundred yards on, she barely needed to push.

  “From the palace, from the—”

  Two of the men-at-arms had turned back, stood now squarely in her path. She saw wolfish grins, a short-sword drawn, a raised club, went for her knives with less thought than it took to blink. In the crowd beside her, someone screamed. Panic in all directions, the scream found a mate, and then another. The crowd swayed apart, scattered like frightened fish.

  Archeth threw left-handed, put the knife in the sword wielder’s right eye. It was Bandgleam, narrower than the rest, eager and skipping white in the sun. It went in up to the hilt. The man staggered back, squalling like a scalded infant, sword gone, scrabbling at his face and the worn metal thing that now protruded from it. Archeth came in behind the throw, yelling, and she had Laughing Girl light and low in her right hand. The second Citadel thug started visibly at the sound she made, panicked like anyone else in the crowd, and swung massively with his club. He succeeded only in knocking down his shrieking companion. Archeth swayed back in and grabbed, rode the momentum of the swing, carried the man to the ground and cut his throat before he could recover.

  She came halfway upright, splattered with the blood. Saw the invigilator-advocate at bay fifteen yards off, amid fleeing and stumbling bystanders, one hand locked around Elith’s upper arm, staring in disbelief at the bodies of his men and the bloodied black woman crouched over them.

  The remaining three men-at-arms bracketed the street, a cordon of sorts around their master and his prize. Two swords, another club. The club wielder had a crossbow, but it was on his back. On the ground, the man with Bandgleam buried in his eye had curled up in the dirt and was screaming.

  Left-handed, reflexive, Archeth drew Quarterless from the sheath in the small of her back. She stalked forward, Laughing Girl raised and pointing.

  “Th
at’s my guest you’ve got there,” she called. “Whether you live or die, you will give her back.”

  The street had cleared—impossible to believe it had been crowded scant seconds before. Archeth came on, boots crunching detritus underfoot. Quarterless glinted as she hefted it in the sunlight. The men-at-arms glanced at one another uneasily.

  “Are you insane?” The invigilator-advocate had found his voice, if not a very deep timbre for it. His face darkened with rage as he screeched. “How dare you impede the sacred work of the Revelation?”

  She ignored him, stared down the three men-at-arms instead.

  “Sacred?” she asked them, tone rich with disgust. “Among the seven tribes, a guest is sacred. You know this much, or at least your forefathers did. Which of you wants to die first?”

  “Fuck you, bitch,” said the one with the club uncertainly.

  “Mama,” screamed the man on the ground suddenly. “It hurts, I can’t see anything. Where are you?”

  Archeth smiled like winter ice.

  “Want to join him?” she asked.

  “This Kiriath whore is an abomination, an affront to the Revelation.” The invigilator-advocate had mustered some depth of tone now, was bellowing at them all. “It’s your sacred duty to cut her down where she stands, it’s a holy act to take her fucking life.”

  The injured man gave out an inarticulate, sobbing cry, then trailed off into soft, hopeless weeping. Archeth waited.

  The swordsman on the right broke first. Flung himself forward, yelling something garbled at the top of his voice.

  Laughing Girl took him in the throat at the second step. He went down choking and coughing blood. Archeth had Wraithslayer in her right hand before he hit the street. The club wielder, surging forward in his comrade’s wake, stopped dead as he saw the new knife. Or maybe he spotted the hilt of Falling Angel, still sheathed in her boot. Or both. Archeth met his eyes, showed him the smile again. He broke and ran.

  The final man-at-arms hesitated a moment, then fled into the press of the watching crowd with his friend.