The Steel Remains lffh-1

by Richard K. Morgan

  Archeth drew a long, deep breath. Over.

  The invigilator stood with Elith collapsed in a heap at his side, bawling at Archeth and the bystanders and apparently everyone else in this city of sinners to get down on bended knees, to humble themselves before the majesty of the Revelation, to repent, to fucking repent before it was—

  Archeth strode up to him and slashed his throat open with Quarterless.

  He staggered backward a few steps and fell into the arms of the crowd behind. Blood welled up along the line of the knife wound, spilled down his front and soaked into his robes. His mouth worked, chewing, she supposed, on the rest of the unfinished sermon, but no sound came out. Archeth knelt beside Elith, satisfied herself that she was only doped up and with something innocuous. Her breathing was fine. She spared a final glance for the invigilator, whom the crowd was now gathering around as he flapped and bled out, then she went back to the man-at-arms with Bandgleam in his eye. He was still alive, and when she crouched beside him and reached for the knife, he put his hands softly on hers and made a faint mewling sound. She pressed one hand onto his forehead for purchase, and he smiled like a baby at the touch.

  When she pulled Bandgleam out, he died.

  “GOD DAMN IT, ARCHETH, I AM NOT PLEASED WITH THIS MESS.”

  “No more am I, my lord.” She felt sick and shaky, but there was nowhere to sit down and no acceptable way to ask for a chair. “I am at a loss to understand the Citadel’s behavior.”

  “Oh, you are, are you?” Jhiral paced tigerishly back and forth across the floor of the emptied throne room. He’d thrown everybody out in an incandescent display of imperial rage, and now Archeth stood alone with him, still thrumming from the chase and combat, still covered in blood, and chilled in the stomach with too much krin. “Come on, woman, don’t be so fucking naïve. This is a power play, and you know it.”

  “If that’s so, my lord, then it’s a remarkably unsubtle one.”

  “No.” He stopped and came up to her with one menacing finger raised. “What you did about it was remarkably unsubtle. Had you not chased, caught, and slaughtered this little crew of zealots in full view of half the fucking city, then we would not be facing this particular crisis.”

  “No. We’d be facing a different one.”

  “Precisely.” He turned away, went back up the steps to the throne, and dumped himself into its burnished arms. Stared gloomily into space. “We’d be facing a politely impassive Citadel, everybody closing ranks, whether they’re happy about it or not, around a clique headed up by that little cunt Menkarak, who’d strenuously deny ever making off with your guest, while at the same time loudly and semi-publicly insisting that the secular powers of Empire apparently just lack the force of will to protect the faithful from outside evil forces.”

  “That’s probably still going to be his line now.”

  “Yeah. Going to be like the fucking Ninth Tribe Remembrance Brotherhood all over again.” Jhiral shot her a brooding look. “You remember those guys, right? I mean, you were around for that.”

  “Yes. Your grandfather had them all executed.”

  “Don’t fucking tempt me.”

  It was empty noise, and they both knew it. Those days were over. Akal had long ago mortgaged himself to the Citadel to feed his wars of expansion—loans and blessings and a firm helping hand from prayer towers and pulpits to recruit extra troop strength from the zealous masses. Yhelteth marched to its conquests under Akal the Great with fully a third of its soldiery believing they were holy warriors. Not nearly enough of them were killed in the process for Archeth’s liking, not even when the Scaled Folk came. There were still far too many hot-eyed young men out there, trained and hardened in war under false pretenses, looking now for continuance of the struggle. Wouldn’t much matter against whom.

  Jhiral inherited them all, along with the debts and the solemnly agreed twining of secular and spiritual authority at court.

  “How many of the Citadel’s mastery can you count on?” she asked him quietly.

  “Situation like this?” He shrugged. “Not many. Archeth, you slit an invigilator’s throat. In broad fucking daylight, on a busy street. What are they supposed to say about that?”

  “How many, my lord?” An edge on her voice. She was getting past caring about throne room etiquette.

  Jhiral blew out a dispirited breath. “The ones we can bribe, the ones we can blackmail? I don’t know, maybe fifteen or twenty. Add in a few of my father’s old friends on top of that, men who can see the dangers if things get out of hand. That’s half a dozen more at most.”

  “So—twenty-five, say?”

  “If we lean hard, and if we’re very lucky, yes.”

  “It’s not a majority.”

  Jhiral grimaced. “Tell me about it.”

  “All right, then.” The queasiness in her stomach took a new twist. She held out her hands at waist height and stared at them, flexed her fingers wide and willed them to stop trembling. “So let’s see. They’ll vote, reach an obvious decision, and at a minimum they’ll require me at the Citadel to face an inquisitorial court. They’ll drag Elith into it as well, if only as a witness. Chances are, they won’t get the answers they want and that means further questioning. After that—”

  “Don’t you fucking worry.” The sudden, grim vehemence in his tone jerked her gaze up to where he sat. “I made my father a promise on his deathbed, and I aim to keep it. There’s no fucking way I hand you over to that scum.”

  Shocked gratitude stung tears into her eyes. It was like a different man speaking, a different man sitting there on the throne. She’d have fled the city before she gave herself up for questioning, was already at some level in her mind beginning to lay the first tentative plans for it. But this . . . ?

  “I . . . thank you, my lord, I have no words to express—”

  “Yes, all right.” He gestured it away. “I think we can take all that as read, don’t you? I wouldn’t like to be facing the Citadel’s grubby little inquisitors and their toys, either. The question is, how exactly do we get out from under this without having to roll out the troops. It’s the Prophet’s fucking birthday at the end of the month. Going to be enough breast-beating hysteria in the streets as it is. I don’t need a mob marching on the palace as well.”

  “From a legal point of view—”

  He shook his head. “Forget the law. It isn’t going to help. They’ll cite it where it suits them, ignore it where it doesn’t. They’re clerics, Archeth. They spend their whole fucking lives selectively interpreting textual authority to advantage. We have to hamstring them before they even get started.” He bridged his hands and brooded. “Basically, Archeth, you have to disappear for a while.”

  “And Elith.”

  “Oh, all right, yes. Fine. Your northern witch as well. Works out better like that anyway, I suppose. With both of you gone, the whole basis for their grievance collapses.” He nodded slowly, but with building vigor. “Yeah, that’ll work. That will work. We get you out of the city under cover, before nightfall. I’ll have Faileh Rakan put together an escort squad to do it. Meantime, I agree to an emergency session of the mastery and field the Citadel’s demands. We send for you, you’re nowhere to be found. Repeated summons, no result. With a bit of prevaricating—and the Holy fucking Mother knows it’s what the court does best—that gets us to some early hour tonight. By the time it’s clear that you’ve fled, it’s dark and you could be anywhere. I undertake to have the militia out scouring the streets for you at dawn. When they don’t find you, we say we’ve sent out the King’s Reach as well. Might even do it with a few of them I can trust to look in the wrong places and keep their mouths shut about it. Anyway: Rumors of you heading northwest for Trelayne, or maybe into the wastes. Doing all we can, gentlemen, thank you for your time. We’ll keep you posted.” He wagged a finger at Archeth. “Meantime, we stash you . . . where? Any idea where you’ll go?”

  And something moved in her head like the oiled components of a fireship
hatch mechanism, everything sliding and locking into new configurations. She almost heard the solid clunk as it happened. A fresh excitement shouldered the krin crash aside, picked up the beat in her veins. She cleared her throat.

  “I had thought of Ennishmin, my lord.”

  CHAPTER 27

  They emerged into vague, greenish gray light and the overarching striation of winter trees. Faint odor of decay on a slack and sickly breeze.

  At first, Ringil registered the change with little more than weary mistrust. His time in the Aldrain marches had shown him far worse, and the shift had not been without its advance warnings. The great black road they’d met Risgillen and the others on had been fading for some time now, either aging at some fantastically accelerated rate as they walked it, or rotting through from beneath as they pressed into new territory that would not permit its existence. Jagged cracks started to appear, some broad and deep enough to put an incautious foot in and snap your ankle. Ringil thought he saw human skulls wedged down into them at intervals, but that might have been another marchland hallucination, and he was getting numb to those.

  Well, most of them.

  JELIM COMES BACK TO HIM ONE MORE TIME, PERHAPS IN A DREAM WHILE they’re camped on the road, perhaps not; in the marches it’s hard to tell. This time Ringil is standing above him with the Ravensfriend across his back, though slanted the wrong way, pommel jutting over his right shoulder. The difference feels bizarre, uncomfortable. Jelim stops a short distance away and looks up without speaking. The face is the same, though stained and mottled with weeping, but he’s dressed in far finer garb than the real Jelim, minor merchant’s son that he was, had ever been able to afford. He stares up at Ringil, meets his eyes, and fresh tears start down his cheeks. Ringil feels a deep aching in his chest at the sight. He wants to speak, but the words are jammed up in his throat.

  I’m sorry, Jelim weeps. Gil, I’m so sorry.

  And now the pain in Ringil’s chest will not be contained. It rips through him, upward and downward, right up into the muscles of his shoulder, right down to—

  I’m sorry, Gil, I’m so sorry. Jelim seems to whisper it endlessly, staring up in horrified fascination. It should have been me.

  And the thing that juts from his right shoulder is not the pommel of the Ravensfriend at his back, it’s the end of the impaling spike where they drove it through the final nine inches and locked the mechanism in the base of the cage, and the pain is not an ache in his heart, it’s an oceanic, white-hot shredding, scalding agony that drives up from between his legs and rips through his guts and then across his chest, neatly avoiding his heart so he need not die for days . . .

  I’m sorry, I’m so sorry.

  And then he’s screaming, as he realizes where he is, shrieking, for mercy, for Hoiran, for his father, for his mother, for anyone or anything to come and stop the pain. Screaming with such force that it seems it must blow his veins apart, explode his skull, shatter it and let his lifeblood drain out through the ruined mess.

  But he knows it won’t.

  And he knows that no one will come, that in the long, slow-leaking agony ahead, there will be no rescue of any kind.

  HE STAMPED DOWN ON THE MEMORY, BATHED IN SUDDEN SWEAT, HEART hammering. Focused on where he was instead.

  Winter trees. Quiet.

  He stood and stared up at the stripped branches. Waited for the panic-flush of sweat across his skin to cool, for his heart to slow back down. He breathed in deep, like a man escaped from drowning.

  Not real, not real. His pulse throbbed with the rhythm of the words.

  No more real than the thousand other phantoms that had haunted him across the Aldrain marches. He had not died.

  Jelim had.

  A hand clapped him across the back. His pulse kicked up again for one terrified moment, then eased as he registered the touch. Seethlaw’s hand shifted, squeezed intimately at the nape of his neck.

  It felt uncomfortably like ownership.

  “Nice to be back in the real world, I imagine,” the dwenda murmured, and stepped past him across the tufted, swampy ground. Tiny squelching noises in the stillness with each step the dwenda took. Ringil saw water well up in the boot prints he left.

  The other members of the party followed, Risgillen with wrinkled nose and a sour glance cocked up at the trees, Ashgrin as watchful and impassive as he’d been since Ringil met him. Only Pelmarag acknowledged the human, turned as he passed and gave him a wink.

  “Where are we?” Ringil asked.

  “Journey’s end,” said Pelmarag. “Hannais M’hen the Cursed. Look.”

  He gestured out to the left, and Ringil felt a tiny start in his pulse as he saw a stunted black figure there. It took him a moment to realize it was a statue, a moment longer to realize—how?—that it would not, as the akyia had done in the surf, suddenly move and come to silent, bright-eyed life.

  “Tell you a funny story,” Pelmarag said, advancing on the statue without any apparent trace of amusement on his face. Ringil shrugged and followed him.

  It waited there for them, set at a tilted angle in the marshy ground, stubby outstretched arms raised to shoulder height on either side like a diminutive preacher facing his congregation or a child asking to be picked up. As Ringil got closer, he saw that the thing was hewn entirely out of black glirsht, sculpted crudely so the body wore no obvious clothing and the face was a blunt, asexual approximation of human features. He noticed the shallow-scooped facets that served as eyes were polished so the crystalline stone glinted, but he couldn’t tell whether the effect was deliberate or not.

  Pelmarag stared down at the statue, brow creased as if it had asked him a difficult question.

  “Funny story?” Ringil reminded him.

  The dwenda stirred. “Yeah. About a month and a half ago the way you people’d look at it, Ashgrin’s brother Tarnval was looking for this place. He was real well equipped, too, came heavy. Never much cared for Seethlaw’s stealth strategies, thought we were all moving way too slow.”

  Pelmarag’s Naomic, better than Risgillen’s or Ashgrin’s from the start, had become positively fluent in the time he’d spent talking to Ringil. He was by far the most gregarious of the group. In fact, he seemed to be acquiring a lot of Ringil’s preferred expressions and phrasing. It gave the human a peculiar sensation to hear his own verbal quirks fed back to him this way, and it made him wonder how much time the journey in the Aldrain marches was really taking. How learning and experience might—or even could—function without fixed reference to time.

  “Yeah, always one for a frontal assault, Tarnval.” Pelmarag grimaced, apparently at something only he could see. “And he talked a pretty fight, too. Pretty enough to get the support he needed. So, he had about three dozen of us at his back, some storm-callers of reputation among the company. All set to take back Hannais M’hen the Cursed, turn back the clocks, undo all the harm the Black Folk wrought here. We unleashed the talons of the sun through the aspect storm before we deployed, clearing a path. We came storming through in their wake. And you know what? We ended up over a thousand miles southwest of here, up to our waists in seawater on the beach at some shit-hole little imperial port. All because some fucking idiot human moved the marker.”

  Not sure if he was supposed to laugh or not, Ringil made a noncommittal noise. Pelmarag’s mouth twisted again with the memory.

  “Had to fight our way up off that beach,” he said softly. “We lost six or seven dwenda doing it. Across town and up the hill, fucking humans everywhere, running around screaming and jabbering in the dark like the lost souls of apes, you know, cut one down and there’s another right fucking behind it. We took another five casualties, and Tarnval himself down by then with a chest wound, searched that fucking town, tore it apart till we finally found our beacon. And when we finally did, we found they’d moved the fucking thing and we were nowhere close to where we were supposed to be. No Hannais M’hen, cursed or otherwise. We were south, way south. And with that kind of sun coming up
in a couple of hours’ time, well . . . nothing to do but collect the dead and injured, let the storm-callers take us back out of there. Tarnval died from the storm-stress on the way out, so did a couple of others. After that?” Pelmarag shrugged. “We all went back to listening to Seethlaw.”

  “Talking about me again?”

  Seethlaw had come up behind them. His expression as he looked at Pelmarag was unreadable.

  “Just a little reflection on strategy.”

  “Yeah?” Seethlaw put a hand on Ringil’s shoulder. Something chilly poured into the air between the two dwenda. “Gil here isn’t a part of our strategy, Pel. He doesn’t need to know anything about it.”

  Pelmarag held the other dwenda’s gaze. He said something short and bitten-sounding in the language they used when Ringil was not included in the conversation, then turned away and went to join the others. Seethlaw grunted and nodded after him, a quick, chin-jutting gesture that had nothing friendly in it.

  “So what’s that all about?” Ringil asked.

  “Nothing that concerns you.” Seethlaw’s grip on his shoulder tightened slightly. “Come on. We’re not there yet.”

  THROUGH THE WINTER TREES, ALONG PATHS THROUGH THE SWAMP THAT the dwenda either knew by heart or could sense without much effort. Ringil took an experimental detour at one point, around the other side of a rotting tree stump, and found himself abruptly up to his shins in yielding black morass. Gray, soupy water pooled rapidly in the holes he’d made and brought with it a stench like death. He floundered back out, boots liberally streaked and plastered with mud. No one said anything, but he thought he caught Risgillen sneering. He stayed carefully in file after that.

  There was no sound other than the squelch of their steps.

  In the end, it was this that told him where he was. He knew something about marshland expanse from growing up in a city surrounded by one, and he was beginning to miss the signs of life he should have heard. There were no birdcalls, recognizable or otherwise, and no sudden rustling movements from amid the ground-level vegetation as they passed. Here and there, they saw pools and angled stretches of stagnant water bridged with moss-grown fallen tree trunks and stepped in by small mangroves, but nothing living stirred there, not even insects hovering above the leaden surface.