The Steel Remains lffh-1

by Richard K. Morgan

  Like many other things in Ringil’s life, the oppressive stillness at the heart of the swamp had not seemed so hard to endure until he walked away from it.

  They followed one of the creeks as it turned into a river, stopping to rest at frequent intervals along the bank. After a while, Sherin was able to walk by herself, though she still shrank against Ringil’s side whenever any of the dwenda came close or turned a blank-eyed gaze on her. She didn’t talk at all, seemed in fact to be treating the whole experience as if it might at any moment turn out to be a hallucination or a dream.

  Ringil sympathized.

  Seethlaw, for his part, was almost as silent. He led the group with a minimum of verbal and gestured instruction, and didn’t speak to Ringil any more than his fellow Aldrain. If he’d selected the other dwenda who accompanied them, Ringil had not seen him do it. Pelmarag and Ashgrin simply fell in beside them as they crossed the Aldrain bridge, and another two dwenda he didn’t know were waiting for them at the other side. Brief snatches of conversation went back and forth among these four as they walked, but Seethlaw was not included, and didn’t seem much to care.

  At twilight, they came to a scavenger camp built beside the creek.

  “There’s a ferry across,” Seethlaw explained as they stood under trees at the edge of the little knot of cabins and storehouses. “And from there, the road bends northwest. We’ve come this far south to avoid the worst of the swamp, but the ground from now on is a lot easier. It’s a couple of days’ walk to Pranderghal, that’s a fair-sized village. We’ll get horses there.”

  Ringil knew Pranderghal. He’d watched its original inhabitants driven from their homes and onto the road south, back when it was still called Iprinigil. He nodded.

  “And tonight?”

  “We spend here. The ferry won’t run now until morning.” Seethlaw grinned unpleasantly. “Unless you want me to bring the aspect storm and find a way around in the marches.”

  Ringil held down a shiver. He glanced at Sherin. “No thanks. I don’t think either of us is up for that.”

  “Are you quite sure?” The grin stayed. “Think about it. You could be home in Trelayne in a matter of days instead of weeks. And it won’t feel like days anyway; it won’t feel like time at all.”

  “Yeah. I know what it’ll feel like. Give it a fucking rest, why don’t you?”

  They went into the only inn in the camp, an earthen-floor-and-straw establishment with a dozen trestle tables and a long wooden bar at ground level. There was a staircase against the far wall and a railed landing overhead with doors leading off. They forced their way through the din and press of bearded, unwashed-smelling men to the bar and procured rooms for the night. Ringil saw no obvious change in Seethlaw or the other dwenda, but they’d evidently cast some kind of glamour about themselves, because no one reacted to their looks or outlandish garb. The innkeeper, a thickset, swarthy individual hard to tell apart from his clientele, took coin from Pelmarag with a curt nod, bit into it and pocketed it, then gestured toward a trestle table in the corner near a window. They took their seats and were served a hog-rib dinner along with tankards of thick-foamed ale shortly thereafter. It all proved surprisingly digestible, at least to Ringil’s stomach, though he saw the dwenda shooting one another wry glances as they chewed.

  He found he couldn’t remember what they’d eaten in the Aldrain marches. Only that Seethlaw had supplied it, magicked it forth from somewhere, and it had melted like the finest cuts of honeyed meat in his mouth, like the most sought-after of Glades cellar vintages on his tongue. Beyond that . . .

  Even that . . .

  It was all fading now, he realized, fading fast, the marches and everything he’d seen and done there like fragments of a last dream before waking, pieces of self in action that made no obvious sense, tantalizing images without context and an incoherent tumble of events loosed from any mooring in time or sequence—

  He stopped chewing abruptly, and for just that moment the tavern food was a clotted mouthful of sawdust and grease he couldn’t bring himself to swallow. The heat and lamplight and noise in the place swelled to a dull, unbearable roar. He stared across at Seethlaw, seated directly opposite, and saw the dwenda was watching him.

  “It’s fading . . . ,” he said through the food stuck in his mouth. “I can’t . . .”

  Seethlaw nodded. “Yes. That’s to be expected. You’ve returned to the defined world, you’re tied to time and circumstance again. Your sanity will suffer if you remember anything else clearly, if the alternatives seem too real.”

  Ringil swallowed his mouthful, forced it down.

  “It’s like it’s all turning into a dream I had,” he said numbly.

  The dwenda gave him a small, sad smile. He leaned forward a little.

  “I’ve heard it said that dreams are the only way your kind can find their way into the gray places. And that only the insane or the inhumanly strong of will can stay.”

  “I—”

  Someone bumped heavily into Ringil from behind, jolted loose what he wanted say before he could frame it properly. The thought spilled away from him like coins across the street and down a grate, little glints of gleaming meaning, gone.

  He snapped around angrily on the bench.

  “Why the fuck don’t you watch where you’re going?”

  “Oops, sorry, citizen, sorry. Look, I’ll gladly make good any spillage if you . . . Gil? Fucking Ringil?”

  Egar the Dragonbane.

  Out of the lamplight and tavern hubbub like a figure from legend emerging from battlefield mist. Broad and tall and tangled looking, hair a wild knotted mass with little iron talismanic ornaments hanging in it. One leather-sheathed blade of his staff lance jutted up over his shoulder; there was a short-handled ax matched with a broad-bladed dirk at his belt. He smelled of marsh and cold, and had obviously just come through the door. His scarred and bearded face split into a huge grin. He clapped hands on Ringil’s shoulders, dragged him up off the bench with no more effort than a father picking up his infant son.

  “Urann’s fucking balls, let me get a look at you,” he bellowed. “What the fuck are you doing in this shit-pile dump? You’re the fucking face from the past I’m supposed to recognize and save? You’re the one that cloaked fuck was on about?”

  And then everything came apart.

  For Ringil it was like stepping suddenly back into some aspect of the marches. Time stopped working, slowed to a pace that was like moving in mud. His perceptions stretched and smeared; he saw what was happening as if through some other, entirely more attenuated set of senses.

  Seethlaw, slamming to his feet, eyes wide.

  Egar, warrior’s senses suddenly awake to the tension, hand falling without fuss to the broad dirk at his hip.

  Heads turning at neighboring tables.

  Ashgrin, seated at Seethlaw’s side, turning, reaching down for something.

  A faint shimmer on the air. A darkening.

  “I think you are mistaken, sir,” Seethlaw said, and raised a hand a few inches off the table at his side, fingers spread loosely to make a spider. A ripple seemed to run through the fingers, as if they were suddenly boneless. “This is not your friend.”

  Egar snorted. “Listen, old man, I’d know this guy any . . .”

  He frowned.

  “A mistake,” repeated the dwenda caressingly. “Easily made.”

  “You must be very tired,” agreed Ashgrin.

  Egar yawned cavernously. “Yeah, ain’t that the fucking truth. Funny, I could have sworn—”

  Ringil, for no clear reason he could later name, screamed and swept an arm savagely across the table. Tavern-brawl tactics, tugged out from some dark pocket of response he rarely went to these days. The lamp in the center went over, oil spilled out. Flame caught and sprinted a line among the platters and tumbled tankards. He came to his feet, heels of both palms under the trestle, upended it at Seethlaw.

  “It is me, Eg,” he was yelling. “It fucking is me. Get the girl
.”

  Later, tears would squeeze into his eyes as he recalled the Majak’s reaction. Egar’s lips peeled off a snarl, he surged back in at Ringil’s side. The dirk came out, broad dark glint in the dancing light from the flames now loose in the straw on the floor. He brandished it at the stumbling dwenda.

  “Right you are, Gil,” he roared. “Who wants this right up their fucking arse? Fucking magicking old cunts.”

  His other hand had already flashed out, seized Sherin by the arm, and dragged her off the bench. As Pelmarag tried to stop him, the dirk flashed out. Pelmarag’s arm got in the way, the blade sliced, and blood darkened the dwenda’s sleeve. Pelmarag made a wolfish snarling sound of his own and leapt at Egar. The steppe nomad’s eyes widened in shock. Whatever he’d seen in Pelmarag before, whatever glamour had sullied his perception, it was gone now.

  “Wraith!” he bellowed. “’Ware spirits! Swamp wraith!”

  Then he went over on the floor with Pelmarag on top of him.

  Weapon, weapon. It gibbered through Ringil’s head. Sell my fucking soul to Hoiran for a weapon.

  He spun and dropped on Pelmarag’s back instead. Knew it was a matter of seconds before the other dwenda at the table had him. Did it anyway. Egar was locked up in the knife fighter’s clinch, arms braced and straining to bring his blade to bear against Pelmarag’s grip. The legs of dwenda and man thrashed about on the earthen floor, looking for purchase. Ringil hooked the fingers of his right hand into the dwenda’s eyes and hauled back. Pelmarag howled and flailed. Egar broke the dwenda’s grip and shoved the dirk through his throat from the side. Blood gouted everywhere. It smelled, Ringil would later realize, bittersweet and strong, quite unlike anything out of human veins.

  For now he was already spinning about, crouched and yelling, looking for the others in the rising smoke. He had one moment to lock gazes with Seethlaw, who was poised to leap the upended trestle, features an awful mask of blank-eyed, snarling rage. Then a surging mass of humanity swept in between them.

  “Swamp wraith! Swamp wraith! Get the motherfuckers!”

  Out of nowhere, Ashgrin had a terrible blue long-sword blade flashing in his hands. The first humans to reach him went down in butchered pieces. The surge turned chaotic and shrill, some scrambling backward away from the sudden steel, others who had weapons bawling for space and struggling to get to the front.

  “Ringil!” Egar, yelling in his ear. “Let’s get the fuck out of here!”

  He gulped air. “Gladly. Get the—”

  “Got her! Just fucking go!”

  The Majak’s hand was firmly around Sherin’s arm again, engulfing it just above the elbow. She’d have bruises tomorrow, Ringil knew.

  If we live that long.

  They made the door somehow, elbowing and tripping others who’d had the same idea. Ringil kicked it open and tumbled out into the cold and dark. The inn was built on a slight rise and he fell over with his own momentum, landed in a winded heap.

  Shattering of glass. A dwenda came leaping, shrieking through the window like a lost soul, landed like a cat, and stalked toward them, blade in hand, grinning.

  Egar let go of Sherin’s arm.

  “Get behind me, girl,” he grunted.

  He freed his small ax, hefted it left-handed, kept the dirk in his right. No time to unship the lance, much though he’d have loved the extra reach. He eyed the creature’s sword with professional calm. The empty inhuman eyes had been a shock with the first one, but now his blood was up, he wasn’t fussed. No worse than a steppe ghoul, he supposed. A fighting grin licked around his lips.

  “Fuck you looking at?” he barked.

  The creature ran in, shrilling. Terrifying speed, but Egar had seen that a few times before as well. He hurled his dirk upward, underhand at its face. The long-sword flashed out, deflecting, but it was an awkward block, anyone could see that. Egar was in behind, now with the ax in both hands, hacking sideways under the twisted sword. The swamp wraith yowled and leapt out of the way. Egar pressed in, got the hook-backed edge of the ax on the blade and yanked it out of the way, left-handed. His right hand curled to a fist, smashed his opponent in the face. The swamp wraith reeled. Egar followed through. Another punch, into the face again—leave the body alone, assume armor of some sort under that weird black leatherish gear—and he felt the nose break with a solid crunch. The wraith screamed and tried to slash back at him with its blocked blade. Speed it had, but not the brute strength it needed. Egar grinned and reached down, hooked an arm under a thigh, and heaved. The creature went over on its back. Egar dropped on its chest with a knee and his full weight. Something creaked and cracked. The swamp wraith screamed again, weakly. Egar got his ax free, no time to reverse it, and smashed the iron-shod haft down into the empty-eyed face. He put out an eye, shattered a cheekbone. Smashed the mouth and the already broken nose.

  Movement behind him.

  He whipped around, saw Ringil standing there swaying in the feeble light. Blew out a sigh of relief and eased his grip on the ax.

  “Get up,” the Trelayne knight said hoarsely. “We’ve got to get out of here. Before the others get outside.”

  Egar glanced toward the inn. The sounds of violence raged from the broken window and the doorway, where a mob of men was gathering, torn between the fascination of spectators and the terror of what they’d seen. There was smoke and the jumping light of flames. No one seemed to have noticed the three of them yet, down here in the gloom. All attention was on the building.

  “There’s got to be better than sixty men in there,” he told Ringil. He was breathing hard from the fight. “Even if only two-thirds of them want to mix it up, they’ll finish these fuckers, easy.”

  “No, they won’t.” An awful urgency split Ringil’s voice open. “Believe me, we’ve got minutes at most.”

  You don’t follow a man to almost certain death in the baking heat of a mountain pass without learning his measure first. Without learning to trust what he says in a coin-spin instant, even if he is a fucking faggot. Egar got up and stared around.

  “Right. We take the ferry.”

  “What?” Ringil frowned. “Don’t these bumpkins lock up their oars?”

  “Yeah, who gives a shit about oars, time like this. The Idrikarn flows hard this far out of the swamp, it’ll carry us south faster than you can fucking run, mate.”

  The thing at Egar’s feet stirred and moaned. The Majak looked down in surprise.

  “Tough motherfucker, huh?” he said, almost admiring.

  Then he reversed the ax in his hands, shifted stance, and chopped down with the bladed end. The swamp wraith’s head rolled free in a messy burst of blood. He wiped some of it off his face, sniffed it curiously and shrugged. He cast about and found his dirk, gathered it up, and clapped Ringil on the shoulder.

  “Come on, then,” he said. “Arse in the saddle.”

  “Wait, give me his sword.”

  “What do you want his fucking sword for? What’s wrong with the one on your back?”

  Ringil stared at him as if he’d suddenly started gibbering like a Demlarashan mystic. Egar stopped in midturn, spread his bloodied hands.

  “What?”

  Ringil lifted his right hand as if it pained him, put it slowly and wonderingly up to his shoulder, and touched the pommel of his sword like, well, like he was caressing someone’s prick, to be honest. Egar shifted uncomfortably, fiddled with his ax.

  “You’re a fucking weirdo, Gil. Same as it ever was. Come on.”

  Down to the darkened landing stage at a sprint, Sherin stumbling between them, and Ringil saw it was true, even at the bent edge of the river there was current running. Tiny leaves and other specks of river detritus drifted by at ambling pace. In the center of the stream, a taut swirl showed on the fitfully bandlit water. The ferry, a fat little demasted fishing skiff barely four yards long, wagged at the end of its moorings as if in a hurry to be off.

  “Hoy! You!” They’d been spotted. “Wait, there—thieves—look. Hoy, s
top them, that’s my fucking boat—”

  They leapt aboard. Egar hacked the ropes apart and gave the pilings a punt with one boot. Behind them, a spill of dark figures came pelting down toward the landing stage, yelling, gesticulating, brandishing weapons and fists. The skiff drifted away from the shore, agonizingly slow at first and then, as the current caught, swinging briskly out into flow. Balanced amidships, crouched over the collapsed and sobbing form of Sherin, Egar grinned at Ringil.

  “Haven’t done this in a while.”

  “You’d better get down,” Ringil advised him. “They’re going to start shooting in a minute.”

  “Nah. Too much else going on, they won’t have a strung bow between them. They’re not soldiers, Gil.” But he bent and hand-braced himself to a seat on one of the skiff’s cross-strut benches anyway. He craned sideways and peered. “That’s just Radresh, pissed off ’cause we’ve nicked his ferry.”

  “You can see his point.”

  “Yeah, well. Never did like his fucking prices.”

  The two of them looked back in silence as the crowd on the landing stage boiled about in its own impotence. Something heavy splashed in their wake, but too far aft to be a cause for concern. No one was getting in the water, that was for sure. A couple of pursuers with some presence of mind ran along the bank, trying to keep pace. Ringil watched narrowly for a few seconds, saw them run into thickening undergrowth at the edge of the camp and clog to a halt. The pursuit died in curses and bawled abuse, growing ever fainter. He felt his heart starting to ease.

  Until—

  Up on the rise, flames burned merrily in the windows and opened door of the inn. It was hard to tell at the growing distance, but he thought a single tall, dark figure loomed in the doorway, unmoved by the fire at its back, staring after them with lightless eyes.

  Run if you like, whispered a voice in his head. I’ll count to a hundred.

  He shivered.

  The boat tugged onward, downriver on the water’s dark swirl.

  CHAPTER 30

  I had thought of Ennishmin, my lord.