‘Yeah, yeah,’ he muttered and plunged the Ravensfriend down point first, impaling the mite on the earth. He watched with sombre satisfaction as it died. ‘That was clean on today, you little shit.’
He stayed among the graves long enough to start feeling the cold again, and to take a brooding interest in the slight but unmistakable paunch that was beginning to threaten the aesthetics of his narrow-hipped waist. No further corpsemites showed themselves. He took an uncontaminated shred of his jerkin as a rag and cleaned the body fluids off the Ravensfriend’s bluish surfaces with fastidious care. Archeth had insisted the Kiriath blade was proof against all and any corrosive substances, but she had been wrong about things before.
The final outcome of the war, to name but one.
Then, finally, Ringil remembered that the creatures had touched him and, as if on cue, the blisters they’d left began to burn. He rubbed at the one on his cheek until it burst, deriving a certain brutal amusement from the thin pain he got out of it. Not what you’d call a heroic wound, but it was all he’d have to show for the evening’s exertions. No one would be coming out here to check on the carnage until it got safely light.
Oh well, maybe you can narrate it into a couple of pints and a fowl platter. Maybe Bashka’ll buy you a replacement jerkin out of sheer gratitude, if he can afford it after he’s paid to rebury his mother. Maybe that tow-headed lad from the stables will listen in and be impressed enough to overlook this gut you’re so intent on developing.
Yeah, and maybe your father’s written you back into his testament. Maybe the Yhelteth Emperor is a queer.
That last was worth a grin. Ringil Angeleyes, scarred hero of Gallows Gap, chuckled to himself a little in the chill of the graveyard, and glanced around at the silent markers as if his long-fallen comrades might share the joke. The quiet and the cold gave him nothing back. The dead stayed stonily unmoved, just the way they’d been now for nine years, and slowly Ringil’s smile faded away. A shiver clung at his back.
He shook it off.
Then he slung the Ravensfriend back across his shoulder, and went in search of a clean shirt, some food and a sympathetic audience.
CHAPTER TWO
The sun lay dying amidst torn cloud the colour of bruises, at the bottom of a sky that never seemed to end. Night drew in across the grasslands from the east, turning the persistent breeze chilly as it came. There’s an ache to the evenings up here, Ringil had said once, shortly before he left. It feels like losing something every time the sun goes down.
Egar the Dragonbane, never very sure what his faggot friend was on about when he got into that kind of mood, still couldn’t make sense of the words now, best part of a decade on.
Couldn’t think why he’d remembered them right now, either.
He snorted, shifted idly in his saddle and turned up the collar on his sheepskin coat. It was a reflexive thing, the breeze didn’t really bother him. He was long past feeling the cold on the steppes at this time of year - yeah, wait ’til winter really gets here and it’s time to grease up - but the mannered huddling gesture was part of a whole wardrobe of idiosyncrasies he’d brought home with him from Yhelteth and never bothered to unlearn. Just a hangover, just like the southern memories that stubbornly refused to fade, and the vague sense of detachment Lara had cited in council when she left him and went back to her family’s yurt.
Damn, I miss you, wench.
He did his best to put some genuine melancholy behind the thought, but his heart wasn’t in it. He didn’t really miss her at all. In the last six or seven years he must have sired close on a dozen squalling bundles from the gates of Ishlin-ichan to the Voronak tundra outposts in the north-east, and at least half the mothers had as close a place in his affections as Lara. The marriage had just never worked at the same level as the initial roll-in-the-summer-grass passion it was based on. In the council hearing for the separation, truth be told, what he’d felt mostly was relief. He’d offered only token objection, and that more so Lara wouldn’t get more pissed off than she already was. He’d paid the settlement and he’d been ploughing another Skaranak milkmaid within a week. They were practically throwing themselves at him, anyway, with the news that he was single again.
Still. A little short of decorous, that one.
He grimaced. Decorous wasn’t a word he used, wasn’t his fucking word at all, but there it was, embedded in his head along with everything else. Lara was right, he should never have made the vows. Probably never would have done but for those eyes as she lay in the dusk-lit grass and opened herself to him, the startling jade pupils that stabbed him through with memories of Imrana and her muslin-hung bedchamber.
Yeah, those eyes, and those tits, my son. Tits she had on her, old Urann himself would have sold his soul for.
That was more like it. That was a thought for a Majak horseman’s head.
Fuck’s sake stop brooding, will you? Count your sky-given blessings.
He scratched beneath his buffalo-hide cap with one hard-nailed finger and watched the twilit figures of Runi and Klarn as they prodded the herd back towards the encampment. Every buffalo he could see was his, not to mention the shares he held in the Ishlinak herds further to the west. The red and grey clan pennants he and the other two flew at the necks of their staff lances bore his name in Majak script. He was known throughout the steppes; every encampment he went to, women fell at his feet with open legs. About the only things he really missed these days were hot-water baths and a decent shave, neither of which the Majak had a lot of use for.
Couple of fucking decades ago, my son, you didn’t have much use for them either. Remember that?
True enough. Twenty years ago, Egar’s outlook, near as he could recall, wasn’t much different to that of his clan fellows. Nothing wrong with cold water, a stoked communal sweat bath every few days and a good beard. Not like these effete fucking southerners with their perfumed manners and woman-soft skins.
Yeah. But twenty years ago you were an ignorant fuck. Twenty years ago you didn’t know your dick from a sword hilt. Twenty fucking years ago—
Twenty fucking years ago, Egar was no different to the next wispy-chinned Majak buffalo herdboy. He’d seen nothing of the lands beyond the steppes, believed himself sophisticated because his elder brothers had taken him to Ishlin-ichan to lose his virginity, and could not have grown a beard to save his life. He believed implicitly in what his father and brothers told him, and what they told him was, basically, that the Majak were the roughest toughest drinkers and fighters on Earth, that of all the Majak clans, the Skaranak were the hardiest, and that the northern grasslands were the only place any real man would even consider living.
It was a philosophy that Egar disproved for himself, at least in part, one night in a tavern in Ishlin-ichan a few years later. Attempting to drink away his father’s untimely death in a stampede, he got into a childish fight with a swarthy, serious-eyed imperial, a visiting Yhelteth merchant’s bodyguard, it later turned out. The fight was largely Egar’s fault; ‘childish’ was the adjective applied to it - and him - by the imperial, who then went on to trounce him with an unfamiliar empty-handed fighting technique and without drawing his sword. Youth and anger and the anaesthetic power of the drink kept Egar on his feet for a while, but he was up against a professional soldier for the first time in his life and the result was a forgone conclusion. The third time he got knocked to the floor, he stayed there.
Effete fucking southerners. Egar grinned in his beard, remembering. Right.
The tavern owner’s sons had thrown him out. Sobering up in the street outside, Egar was smart enough to know that the dark, serious warrior had chosen to spare his life when he could with all justification have killed him outright. He went back in, bowed his head and offered an apology. It was the first time he’d thought something through like that in his life.
The Yhelteth soldier accepted his contrition with a gracious foreign elegance, and then, with the peculiar camaraderie of fighting men who’ve just a
voided having to kill one another, the two of them proceeded to get drunk together. On learning of Egar’s loss, the man offered slightly slurred condolences and then, perhaps shrewdly, a suggestion.
I have got, he enunciated carefully, an uncle in Yhelteth, a recruiter for the imperial levy. And the imperial levy, my friend, is pretty fucking desperate for manpower these days. ’S the truth. Lot of work down there for a young man like you, doesn’t mind getting in a scrap. Pay’s good, the whores are fucking unbelievable. I mean that, they’re famous. Yhelteth women are the most skilled at pleasing a man in the known world. You could have a good life down there, my friend. Fighting, fucking, getting paid.
The words were among the last things Egar clearly remembered from that end of the night. He woke up seven hours later alone on the tavern floor with a screaming head, a vile taste in his mouth, and his father still dead.
A few days after that, the family herd got divided up - as his foreign drinking companion had probably known it would be. As the second youngest - and thus second to last in line - of five sons, Egar found himself the proud owner of about a dozen mangy beasts from the trailing end of the herd. The Yhelteth bodyguard’s words floated back through his mind with sudden appeal. Fighting, fucking, getting paid. Work for men who didn’t mind getting in a scrap, famously skilled whores. Versus a dozen mangy buffalo and getting pushed around by his brothers. It didn’t feel like making a decision at all. Egar stayed with tradition as far as selling out his share in the herd to an elder sibling went, but then, instead of hiring on as a paid herdsman, he gathered his purse, his lance and a few clothes, bought a new horse and rode south for Yhelteth, alone.
Yhelteth!
Far from being a haunt of degenerates and women wrapped head to foot in sheets, the imperial city turned out to be Paradise on Earth. Egar’s drinking companion had been right on the money. The Empire was arming for one of its habitual forays into the trading territory of the Trelayne League and blades for hire were in high demand. Better yet, Egar’s broad frame, fair hair and pale blue eyes apparently made him all but irresistible to the women of this dark, fine-boned race. And the steppe nomads - for so he came to think of himself in time - had a reputation in Yhelteth that wasn’t much inferior to their own opinion of themselves back home. They were thought pretty much by everyone to be ferocious warriors, phenomenal carousers and potent, if unsubtle, lovers. In six months Egar earnt more coin, drank and ate more rich food and woke up in more strange, perfumed beds than he would have believed possible even in his wildest adolescent fantasies. And he hadn’t even seen a battle up to this point, let alone taken part in one. The bloodshed didn’t start until—
Snuffling sounds and a shout yanked him from his memories. He blinked and looked around. Out on the eastern point of the herd, it looked like the animals were proving fractious and Runi was having problems. Egar put his mood away, cupped calloused hands to his mouth.
‘The bull,’ he bellowed in exasperation. How many times did he have to tell the lad, the herd followed its leaders. Dominate the bulls and you had the rest. ‘Leave the fucking cows alone and get that bu—’
‘’Ware runners!!!’
Klarn’s shout was shrill, the age-old terror of the steppe herdsman named in a panic-stricken cry from the other flank. Egar’s head jerked around and he saw Klarn’s arm outflung to the east. Sighting along the pointer, eyes narrowed, he spotted what had spooked Runi’s side of the herd. Tall, pale figures, a half dozen or more of them, skimming as it seemed through the chest-high steppe grass.
Long runners.
Runi saw them too, and drew himself up crossways to cover the herd. But by now his mount had snuffed the runners too, and would not hold. It skittered back and forth, fighting the rein, terrified whinnies clearly audible on the wind.
No, not like that.
The warning yelped in Egar’s mind, closely followed by the knowledge there was no time to shout it, and just as much point. Runi was barely sixteen, and the steppe ghouls hadn’t troubled the Skaranak seriously for over a decade. The closest the lad had ever been to a living runner were the stories old Poltar told around the campfire, and maybe the odd carcase dragged into camp to impress. He had no knowledge of what Egar had learnt in blood before Runi was born. You can’t fight the steppe ghouls standing still.
Klarn, older and wiser, had seen Runi’s error and was spurring his own far from willing mount round the dark mass of buffalo, shouting. He had his bow off his back, was reaching for shafts.
He’d be there too late.
Egar knew that much, the same way he knew when steppe brush was dry enough to burn. The runners were less than five hundred paces out from the herd, ground they could cover in less time than it takes a man to piss. Klarn would be late, the horses would not hold, Runi would come off and die there in the grass.
The Dragonbane cursed, unshipped his staff lance and kicked his Yhelteth-bred warhorse into a charge.
He was almost there when the first of the runners reached Runi, so he saw what was done. The lead ghoul passed Runi’s shrieking horse, pivoted on one powerful backward hinging leg, lashed out with the other. Runi tried to spin with the horse panicking beneath him, made one hopeless thrust with his lance and then talons like scythe blades clouted him backwards out of the saddle. Egar saw him reel to his feet, stumbling, and two more of the runners fell on him. A long, wrenching scream floated up from the grass.
Already at full gallop, Egar played his only remaining card. He hooked back his head and howled, the Majak berserker ululation that had turned blood to ice in the veins of men on a thousand battlefields across the known world. The awful, no-way-back call for death, and company in the dying.
The steppe ghouls heard and their long, pointed heads lifted, bloody-snouted, questing for the threat. For the scant seconds it took, they gaped emptily at the mounted figure that came thundering across the grassland, and then the Dragonbane was upon them.
The first runner took the lance full in the chest and fell back, punched along with the velocity of the horse’s charge, scrabbling and spitting blood. Egar reined in hard, twisted and withdrew the lance, quadrupled the size of the wound. Wet, ropelike organs came out on the serrated edges of the blade, tugged and tore and spilt pale fluids as he ripped the weapon clear. The second ghoul reached for him, but the Dragonbane had already turned about, and his warhorse reared to the attack, flailing out with massive steel-shod hooves. The ghoul yelped as one snaking arm got smashed aside, and then the horse danced forward a step as only the Yhelteth trainers could make them, and one hoof sank a terminal dent into the runner’s skull. Egar yelled, clung on with his thighs and reversed his lance in both hands. Blood sprinkled across the air.
Six and a half feet long, known and feared by every soldier who had ever had to face one, the Majak staff lance was traditionally crafted from the long rib of a bull buffalo and fastened at either end with a foot long double-edged sawtooth blade a hand’s-breadth wide at its base. In earlier years, the iron for these weapons was unreliable, full of impurities and poorly worked in small, mobile forges. Later, hired as mercenaries by the Trelayne League, the Majak learnt the technology for a steel that would match their own ferocious instincts in battle, and the lance shafts came to be made of Naom forest wood, specifically shaped and hardened for the purpose. When the Yhelteth armies finally swept north and west against the cities of the League for the first time, they smashed apart like a wave on the waiting steppe-nomad line and their lances. It was a military reversal the Empire had not seen in more than a century. In the aftermath, it was said, even Yhelteth’s most seasoned warriors quailed at the damage the Majak weapons had done to their comrades. At the battle of Mayne’s Moor, when leave was given to retrieve the bodies of the slain, fully a quarter of the imperial conscript force deserted amidst stories that the Majak berserkers had eaten pieces of the corpses. A Yhelteth historian later said of the carnage on the moor that such scavenging animals that came fed in an agitated state, fearing that som
e mightier predator had already fallen on the carpet of meat and might yet fall on them. It was fanciful writing, but it made its point. The Yhelteth soldiers called the lance ashlan mher thelan, the twice-fanged demon.
The runners came at him on both sides.
Egar struck, quarterstaff style, high left and low right, while his horse was still dropping back to all fours. The low blade gutted the right-hand runner, the high blocked a downward lashing arm from the left and smashed it. The injured ghoul shrilled and Egar paddled the staff. He got an eye and some scrapings of skull on the left blade, nothing from the other side where the gutted runner was down in the grass and screaming as it bled out. The ghoul whose eye and arm he had taken commenced staggering and pawing at the air like a drunk caught in a clothesline. The rest—
Sudden, familiar hissing, a solid thunk, and the injured creature shrilled again as one of Klarn’s steel-headed arrows jutted abruptly out of its chest. It reached down with its remaining functional hand, plucked puzzledly at the protruding thing, and a second arrow took it through the skull. For a moment it clawed up at the new injury and then its brain caught up with the damage, and the long pale body crashed into the grass beside its gutted companion.
The Steel Remains (Gollancz) Page 2