The Steel Remains lffh-1

by Richard K. Morgan

  “Ennishmin must suit them down to the fucking ground then,” Egar grumbled. “I don’t think I’ve seen the sun more than twice since I got here.”

  It provoked an unlooked-for burst of laughter from the imperials. The cranked tension around the table eased. A couple of despairing comments about rain and fog went back and forth. Darash grinned, made a loose vertical fist, and dropped it into his other hand a couple of times, Yhelteth symbol among the urbane for a good joke, a sense of humor well tickled. Egar made modest noises back.

  “Can we stop them?” Archeth asked quietly, and the hilarity disappeared as fast as it had come. The gazes around the table tightened back to her. “At Khangset, they said they fired arrows that passed right through the blue fire and left the dwenda themselves unharmed.”

  Ringil nodded soberly. “Yeah. Eril told me the same thing happened to Girsh’s crossbow bolt when he tried to stop Seethlaw. I think maybe when the aspect storm first comes through, it’s like the dwenda’s not completely there, like he’s a ghost of some sort. But your guys at Khangset weren’t as ineffective as they thought. Pelmarag said the expeditionary force he was in lost men. Six or seven of them on the beach alone. Now, that’s got to be before any close-quarters fighting, we’re talking about the moment the Khangset garrison realizes they’ve got company. So some of those arrows must have hit home. If I had to guess, I’d say this ghost aspect is short-lived. The dwenda has to let go at some point, has to become solid and grounded in this world. When they do.” He smacked fist into palm. “You’ve got them. Pelmarag told me they lost another half a dozen warriors in the fight across town. Your marines did get to them, they were just too scared and demoralized to realize it. That’s not a mistake we have to make. I crossed blades with Seethlaw, I felt the contact, even when the aspect storm was still around him. It can be done.”

  “Yeah, they kill easily enough,” Egar rumbled. “I took two last night. Knife in the throat for one, fists and an ax haft for the other. They go down no different from a man.”

  “And the damage we saw at Khangset?” Archeth asked. “The Kiriath defenses were melted right through. It looked like the sort of thing dragonfire would do.”

  Ringil frowned and fumbled though memories already grown unreal and confused. He pressed his hands together, steepled the fingers, and pressed them to his mouth in thought. The small, carved figure in the swamp, the conversation with Pelmarag. Tell you a funny story.

  “He said something about the talons of the sun. Something they unleashed through the aspect storm, before they went through themselves. Like an arrow flight before an advance or something.”

  “These were not arrow marks,” said Rakan ironically.

  “I don’t think they have these talons of the sun here in the swamp.” Ringil stared emptily off into dim recall. There was an odd ache in there with the memories, and he didn’t like it. “They were different tactics. It was some dwenda commander who didn’t agree with Seethlaw’s approach. He wanted a frontal assault. That’s not what Seethlaw’s trying to achieve here.”

  “You know that for certain?” Archeth’s tone was skeptical. “The dwenda are committed to a stealth campaign?”

  “I don’t . . .” Ringil sighed. “It isn’t as simple as that, Archidi. This isn’t like the Scaled Folk over again. It’s not some massive migration across an ocean to escape a dying land, a whole race on the move, an invading people who have to either conquer or die. The dwenda aren’t unified, they aren’t anything like unified. There are factions, disagreements over strategy, constant individual disputes. There don’t even seem to be that many of them at the moment, and even those, the handful I got to meet were squabbling with each other half the time.”

  “The Helmsmen say they are impulsive and disordered,” Archeth said slowly. “Perhaps not even sane. Would that fit?”

  Ringil thought again about the Aldrain marches. He shivered.

  “Yes, it would,” he said. “It would make a lot of sense. Seethlaw was . . .”

  He stopped.

  “Was what?” asked Rakan.

  Ringil shook his head. “Skip it. Doesn’t matter.”

  “Maybe not to you, degenerate,” said Halgan angrily. “But to my men and I, it matters a great deal. You are asking us to stand and fight, maybe to die, on your word. Under the circumstances, I think you owe us the highest degree of clarity and confessed truthfulness.”

  “That’s true,” said Rakan. “Like an explanation for how exactly you came to be so closely taken into this creature’s confidence in the first place. How it is that you traveled freely with him in these infernal realms, how it is that he allowed you to bring out your slave cousin.”

  Ringil smiled thinly. “You’d like that explained with the highest degree of clarity, would you?”

  “Yes. We all would.”

  “Oh, well, it’s easy enough.” Ringil leaned across the table toward the Throne Eternal captain. “I was fucking him. In the arse, in the mouth. A lot.”

  Quiet slammed onto the table like a pallet of bricks dropped from above. The two Throne Eternal lieutenants looked at each other, and Halgan made a tiny but distinct spitting noise.

  “You are an abomination, Eskiath,” said Rakan softly.

  “Well.” Ringil gave the Throne Eternal captain another brittle little smile. “You know, the thing about fucking is, it’s a lot less wear and tear than trying to kill each other with bits of steel. And it’s the sort of thing that does tend to lead to confidences and favors if you play it right. Ask any woman, she’ll tell you that. Unless of course your experiences in that direction are limited, as, come to think of it, yours probably are, to whores and rape.”

  This time it was Halgan who surged to his feet with an oath on his lips and a hand on the hilt of the sword he wore. Ringil sat back a little where he was, met the other man’s gaze and held it.

  “You clear that blade, and I’ll kill you with it.”

  The moment held, seemed to creak.

  “He means it,” Archeth said quietly. “I’d sit down if I were you, Halgan.”

  Faileh Rakan made a short gesture, and his lieutenant sank back into his seat by inches. Archeth sighed and rubbed at her eyes.

  “You’re saying you insinuated yourself into this Seethlaw’s affections in order to get your cousin back?”

  “Yes, I am.” The tiny, fading ache of memory, like a small, blunt knife turning inside his rib cage. He didn’t know how much truth there was in the words. He couldn’t remember anymore. “That’s exactly what I’m saying.”

  “And you think Seethlaw’s coming to get you because, what, he feels betrayed? Pissed off that you let him down?”

  “No.” Ringil drew a deep breath. “Seethlaw is coming to get me—and you, and you, Rakan, and you two, and everyone else in this fucking village—because he can’t afford to have his plans brought to light. There’s too much in play, too much he can’t predict. You’ve got to understand, Archidi, you’ve got to see it from the dwenda’s point of view. It’s thousands of years since they had dealings with us. They’re rusty, they don’t know how to gauge us anymore. Seethlaw’s had three years to learn contemporary politics in Trelayne, and that’s it. Three miserable fucking years. He’s hasn’t done badly, he’s built a covert power base, but by its very nature it’s got to be limited. And elsewhere he’s working nearly blind. He doesn’t know the Empire at all, except through the lens of northern opinion, and he’s smart enough to know you can’t trust opinion any farther than a whore with your house keys. He has no way of knowing how Yhelteth will respond if it knows the attack on Ennishmin is a ploy. Worse than that, he probably can’t tell what the parts of the Trelayne Chancellery he hasn’t managed to corrupt will do, or any of the other cities in the League come to that. For all Seethlaw knows, the League and the Empire will unite the way they did against the Scaled Folk. He can’t take the chance. Anybody human who knows about this, outside of his little cabal, has to die.”

  “He was going to
let you live before,” Darash pointed out. “He was going to let you go home. You sure this isn’t just a lovers’ tiff we’re dealing with here? A falling-out between faggots, maybe?”

  Ringil spared him a weary look. “Oh, you’re a real fucking comedian, Darash. Yeah, Seethlaw was going to let me go home. He was going to let me go because he thought he could control me, and he thought I didn’t give a shit about any of this, about the Empire or the League. And you know what, he was right, I don’t.” The violence jumped out in his voice, sudden and glad. “I think your beloved Jhiral Khimran is a jumped-up little turd masquerading as a leader of men, and I think his beloved father wasn’t very much better. And I think the men who control Trelayne are carved from the very same richly stinking shit, they just haven’t been as successful up north at feeding it to the rest of us, that’s all.”

  “You’ll answer for that, Eskiath.” Rakan made no dramatic moves, but his face was a mask of cold intent. “No man, imperial citizen or not, speaks of my Emperor that way and lives. The sworn law of Yhelteth forbids it, and I’m sworn to uphold that same law.”

  “Oi, Rakan.” Egar jerked his chin at the Throne Eternal captain. “You’ll have to come through me first. Bear that in mind, won’t you.”

  “He’ll have to live through the night first, as well,” said Ringil somberly. “None of us is going to have recourse to law, imperial or otherwise, unless we stop Seethlaw in his tracks.”

  “Or we fall back,” said Archeth. “We take what we know and we run south. We can make Khartaghnal in three days if we push it. There’s a levy garrison there, four hundred men under arms at least, and they have King’s Reach messenger relay facilities on to the plains cities. We can get a message through to a heartland military governor inside another two days.”

  “Makes sense,” agreed Halgan.

  “No,” said Ringil.

  Archeth sighed. “It does make sense, Gil. Look—”

  “I said no. We aren’t going to do that.” Ringil stared around the table, met their eyes one at a time the way he had the captains at Gallows Gap. “We are going to stop them here.”

  “Gil, I’ve got seventeen men, that’s including these three sitting here now. With you two and me, that’s twenty. The militia’s going to run at the first sign of trouble, you know that.”

  “Like we’re planning to, you mean?” Egar said, grinning.

  Darash bristled. “This is a tactical withdrawal we’re talking about, Dragonbane.”

  “Is it?” Egar shook his head. “Well, you know, there’s a Skaranak saying for times like these: Running away just makes your arse a bigger target. If the dwenda can follow us downriver through the swamp the way they did last night, they can certainly track us across the uplands before we hit Khartaghnal. Three days means three nights, maybe four. You ready to stay awake that long, ready to fight worn out and maybe in motion on ground they’ll choose to suit themselves? Sounds like a fucking stupid idea to me.”

  “Egar, it’s like I said to Gil.” Archeth spread her hands, gestured at the gathered company. “It’s twenty of us, against something we can’t quantify, something that scared my people four thousand years ago and still scares the Helmsmen now.”

  The Majak shrugged. “Ghost stories. Come the crunch, it can’t be any scarier than a dragon, can it? Look, I killed two of these fucking dwenda things last night, and like I said they bleed and fall down just like men. And we all know how to kill men, don’t we?”

  “Everyone’s afraid of what they don’t understand,” Ringil said quietly. “You want to remember that, Archidi. The dwenda are as uncertain of us as we are of them. They’ve got less reason, but they don’t know that, and anyway it’s not a rational thing. You know what Pelmarag said about your poor, scared shitless marine garrison at Khangset? Fucking humans everywhere, he said, 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 him. What does that sound like to you?”

  The others looked at him in silence. No one offered an answer.

  “And you, Archeth? Look at you, look at what you represent to them. They have legends about the Black Folk, the way we do about them. Horror stories about how you destroyed their cities and drove them out into the gray places. They talk about you as if you were demons, the same way we used to talk about the Scaled Folk until we understood them. The same way your fucking imperial history books probably still talk about them. Look, when Seethlaw and I arrived in the swamp, there was a minor panic on because one of the dwenda scouts had heard some artifact scavengers talking about a black-skinned warrior somewhere in the vicinity. Which I guess probably was you, now I come to think about it, but that’s not the point. Even that, even the rumor of you, was enough to worry them.”

  He rested his arms on the table, and his gaze hooded for a moment.

  When he looked up again, Archeth caught his stare and a chill slithered between her shoulders and up her neck. It was, for just a moment, as if a stranger had climbed into Ringil Eskiath’s skin and stolen his eyes.

  “When I trained at the Academy,” he said tonelessly, “they told me there is nothing in this world to fear more than a man who wants to kill you and knows how to do it. We make a stand here, and we can teach that truth to the dwenda. We can stop them, we can send them back to the gray places to think again about taking this world.”

  More silence.

  The moment tipped, was falling away, when Rakan cleared his throat.

  “Why do you care?” he asked. “Five minutes ago you’re telling us how you don’t give a shit about the Empire or the League. Now suddenly you want to take a stand, make a difference. What’s that about?”

  Ringil looked coldly at him.

  “What’s it about, Faileh Rakan? It’s about the fucking war, that’s what it’s about. You’re right, I don’t give a shit about your Emperor and I care even less about the scum that run Trelayne and the League. But I won’t watch them go to war again. I’ve been to war, you know, to save civilization from the reptile hordes. I bled for it, I saw friends and other men die for it. And then I watched men like you piss it away again, the civilization we’d saved, in squabbles over a few hundred square miles of territory and what language the people get to speak there, what color their skin and hair is and what kind of religious horseshit they get crammed down their throats. I saw men here, right fucking here in Ennishmin, who’d fought for the human alliance, some who’d lost limbs or eyes or their sanity, driven out of their homes with their families and herded onto the road to march or die, all to balance up some filthy fucking piece of political expedience Akal the so-called Great and his erstwhile allies could all save face on, shut your fucking mouth, Rakan, I’m not finished yet.”

  Ringil’s eyes glittered as he stared the Throne Eternal captain down.

  “I watched men who’d given everything come back home to Trelayne and see their women and children sold into slavery to pay debts they didn’t know they’d incurred because they’d been away fighting at the time. I saw those slaves shipped south to feed your fucking Empire’s brothels and factories and noble homes, and I saw other men who’d given nothing in the war get rich off that trade and the sacrifice of those men and women and children. And I will not watch it happen again.”

  Abruptly, he was on his feet. He drew a deep, shuddering breath. His voice grew low and grating, almost another man’s altogether.

  “Seethlaw doesn’t know the Empire, but I do. If we run south, and if we make it, then Jhiral will send his massed levies, and Seethlaw will bring on the dwenda, and behind him will come whatever cobbled-together private armies this fuckwit cabal has managed to assemble in the north, and it will start all over again. And I will not fucking permit that, not again. We stop them here. It ends here, and if we die here, ending it, I for one won’t be too fucking bothered. You will either stand with me, or all your talk of honor and duty and necessary death is a posturing courtier’s lie. We stop them here
, together. If I see anyone try to leave between now and tonight, I will hamstring their horse and break their fucking legs and I will leave them out in the street for the dwenda. There will be no more fucking discussion, there will be no more talk of tactical withdrawal. We stop them here!”

  He drew another hard breath. He stared around at them all. His voice dropped, grew suddenly quiet again, and matter-of-fact.

  “We stop them here.”

  He walked out. Slammed the door open, left it gaping on their silence. They heard his boots clatter down the stairs, sound fading.

  Egar looked around the faces at the table and shrugged.

  “I’m with the faggot,” he said.

  CHAPTER 31

  The dwenda came, finally, with blue fire and terrible, unhuman force, in the small, cold hours before dawn.

  AMONG THOSE WHO SURVIVED THE ENCOUNTER, THERE WOULD BE A lot of speculation over whether it was planned that way. Whether the dwenda knew enough about humans to understand that this was the best time to take their prey, the lowest ebb of the human spirit. Or whether perhaps they simply knew that a long, wakeful, but uneventful night of waiting would wear any enemy down.

  Or perhaps they were waiting themselves. Gathering themselves for the assault in the safety of the gray places, or attending to some millennia-old ritual that must be observed there before battle was joined. Seethlaw certainly implied—according to Ringil’s rather overwrought and patchy testimony, anyway—that ritual was a matter of huge cultural significance among the Aldrain. Blood sacrifice was apparently required before the invasion of Ennishmin could be launched. Perhaps then, in this smaller matter also, there were solemn specifics to be honored before the slaughter could begin.

  The speculation would go back and forth without end, turn and turn again, snapping at its own tail for lack of solid evidence one way or the other. Perhaps this, perhaps that. Humans, short-lived and locked out of the gray places for life, do not do well with uncertainty. If they cannot have what might, what could, what should, and perhaps most awful of all what should have been, then they will dream it up instead, imagine it into being in whatever twisted or beautiful form suits, and then drive their fellows to their knees in chains by the thousand and million to pretend in chorus that it is so. The Kiriath might have saved them from this, eventually, with time, had perhaps even tried to do so once or twice already, but they came too subtly, terribly damaged into this world to begin with, and in the end they were driven away again. And so men went on hammering with their bloodied foreheads at the limits of their certainties, like insane prisoners condemned to a lifetime in a cell whose door they have locked themselves.