Once, after Jelim s death, he let the tow take him and didn t care much one way or the other what happened next.
What happened next, as near as he recalls, was that the water bore him up despite his best efforts to drown, as if wet muscular hands were gathered under his neck and chest and thighs, and somehow, as the sun declined and the light above the swell thickened toward dark, he found the shore creeping in closer once more. It seemed the ocean didn t want him. The current spat him out miles down the coastal sweep of the beaches, he came in staggering and exhausted in the surf, and the waves cuffed him brutally ashore like blows from his father s sword-grip-callused hand.
Yes, and I don t suppose it ever occurred to you to wonder about those helpful hands, now, did it? Sardonic voice at his ear he whirls violently about to face it, sees a shadowy form slip between two of the standing stones, trailing edge of a cloak and gone before he can fix on it. The voice drifts behind in its stead. Never occurred to you to wonder what exactly it was that was holding you up in the water all that time?
A chill wraps the back of his neck, stealthy, prehensile. The damp division of webbed fingers, pressing firmly up.
He shudders at the touch. Shakes it off. Cannot now recall if the memory is real or if Dakovash has reached back and placed it there.
Oh yes, that s right. I m just making all this up. The merroigai were never there, you swam in to shore all by yourself, of course you did. Beyond the stones, the Salt Lord s voice prowls, not quite in step with the flitting shadow of his form. There s an angry agitation to both, like the flicker and spit of an oil lamp flame dying down. Fucking mortals. You know, it s I am so sick of this shit. Where s the respect? Where s the supplicant awe? I thought you, Ringil Eskiath, you of all people
A long pause, the figure stops between two monoliths and faces Ringil with one pale hand pressed claw-like to its chest. The face beneath the hat is all shadow and gleaming teeth and eyes like a wolf. The voice rasps out again.
Look at me, Eskiath, fucking look at me. If you can t manage respect, then at least grow a sense of self-preservation, why don t you? I am a lord of the Dark Court. I m a fucking demon god. Do you have any idea what I ve done to the flesh and souls of men a thousand times as powerful as you ll ever be, for no other reason than they spoke back to me the way you do, as if you had the fucking right? Look at me. I am Dakovash. I stole when I was still young when this whole fucking world was still young I stole fire from the High Gods, and forged it into a new weapon against them. I commanded angels in battle, brought bat-winged demons out of the dark to overthrow the old order, I crossed the void as a fucking song so that the old order would fall. I broke those fuckers in battle over the arch of this world when none could or would do it but me. And you think you re going to judge me? Judge me on some fifteen-year-old marsh brat that couldn t lift a fucking broadsword to save his life? What am I supposed to do with that? Train him? The Salt Lord throws out one arm, rakes crooked fingers through the darkened air in some paroxysm of exasperated disbelief. Somewhere behind him, thunder rumbles through the Gray Places. What find some fucking monastery on a mountain someplace and pay his board and lodging for a decade among kindly warrior monks, all so he can grow into his ascendant power, fulfill his destiny, and become The One? Give me a fucking break, Eskiath. You really think that s how it works?
I wouldn t know how it works, Ringil says flatly. You re the demon lord here, not me.
The Salt Lord s hand drops to his side. Well, then try giving it some thought, why don t you? Apply that finely tutored mind of yours to all those bullshit hero-with-a-high-destiny legends you people are so fucking fond of telling one another. You really think, in a mudball slaughterhouse of a world like this, where war and privation harden whole populations to inhuman brutality and ignorance, where the ruling classes dedicate their sons to learning the science of killing men the way they consign their daughters to breeding till they crack you really think the gods of a world like that have got no better thing to do with their time than take some random piece of lowborn trash and spend long years carving him into shape for a cat s-paw?
I had Ringil swallows on an abrupt gut-swooping gust of insolence that licks up in the pit of his belly like flames no idea that time was so precious a commodity among the denizens of the Immortal Watch.
Beat of silence among the shrouded stones. Then Dakovash grunts, as if from some old pain returning.
Not many call us by that name any longer.
Ringil shrugs. Not many can read. Or care about any past beyond their own fucked-up selective remembrance.
He thinks the shadowed figure smiles at that.
You sound bitter, hero.
Do I? Ringil gestures impatiently against the returning chill in his bones. I m not the one complaining about a lack of supplicant awe, though, am I? I m not the one short of time for my immortal designs.
More quiet. Framed on either side by the silent monoliths, the Salt Lord seems to be studying him as if through the bars of a cage.
Finally, he says this:
The march of time is broken, Ringil Eskiath. Something in that softly rasping voice that might be admission, concession, or maybe just a bone-deep weariness. The bounds of possibility come adrift around us, the old certainties are all in their graves. Cats can no longer be considered alive or dead.
Cats?
The skeins are tangled. Some butterfly shaman up in the north beats his puny fucking wings and the storm gathers before you know it. Chaos gathers, like a bad poet s verse. We run damage control, but the rules of engagement have changed. You think we re any happier about it than you? We ve got our balls to the wall here, hero. We re fighting half blind, nothing works, not the way it should, not anymore. Which being the case, well A shrug. Let us just say that in a situation like that, you work with the tools at hand. And speaking of which
Like a scything shard of darkness, the Ravensfriend, still in its scabbard, pitches through the gloom from the Salt Lord s pale grasp, through the gap between the standing stones, and onto the long, wind-matted grass at Ringil s feet.
Try not to drop that again. You re going to need it.
I teeth now clenched for a swirl of reasons, fear, anger, the growing cold, that he cannot unpick am not your fucking cat s-paw.
But the space between the two stones, when he looks up from his sword, is empty. Only a faint breeze, wandering through as if following the sword, touching his face with cold.
It leaves traceries in the mist like the motions of a languid hand in water.
The Salt Lord is gone.
Eyes open, on blinding blue sky.
He blinked, vision tearing up from all the sudden brightness. He propped himself up a little and rubbed hard at his eyes. He was back on the flat rock under a declining afternoon sun. The Ravensfriend lay at his side. He rolled over, reached convulsively for the sword. Discovered he was shivering despite the warmth still in the day. More than shivering, actually a feverish chill rode his bones and racked him with a desire to curl into a ball. He coughed, and found a razor s edge in his throat.
Great. And now he remembered the boy sneezing on him the night before. Marsh flu, that s all I fucking need.
He levered himself to his feet and stared around. Treetops nodding in the breeze, the thickly wooded slopes and the unattainable road north threading between. Over everything a blue haze of distance that seemed to be thickening.
Shadows a little longer than they d been.
Farther up the rock, Eril snored throatily, one arm cast up to shield his eyes from the sun, but otherwise unmoved since Ringil had last looked at him.
The hovering hawk was gone. And no sign of Dakovash. It could all have been yeah, right a dream.
Chaos gathers, like a bad poet s verse.
He looked westward, frowning.
Hey now, come on. That s just stupid
Is it? He turned the sudden glimmer of it carefully, panning for some truthful assessment of its value. Got a better plan, do you,
Gil? State you re in?
He held down a fresh bout of shivering, wrapped his cloak tighter about himself, and crouched beside Eril s sleeping form. Made a tight hssst he knew would waken the Marsh Brotherhood enforcer without fuss.
Sure enough, Eril s eyes slid open at the sound, as wakeful as if he d only closed them a moment before. His hand was already on his knife hilt.
Yeah?
Time to get moving, Ringil told him.
Eril got to his feet, staying low, and didn t argue. He looked about at their unchanged surroundings, then back at Ringil, curiously.
Did I miss something? he asked.
No, said Ringil briskly. You didn t miss a thing. But I ve got an idea how to get us out of here.
CHAPTER 12
It called itself Anasharal.
Archeth had never seen anything like it. The Helmsmen of her youth came large and semi-visible at best mostly they were in the walls, or the hulls and bulkheads of the fireships, like helpful rats out of some fairy tale or shelved talking library books. They engaged you in solemn conversation, sometimes they solved your problems for you or at least told you why they couldn t and they could manipulate numerous aspects of the Kiriath domain in ways she d never been able to think of as anything but magical. As a child, she d gotten the impression some of them were taking a slightly scary avuncular delight in guiding her, and not always along paths her parents approved.
But one thing they weren t was mobile.
Later, when the engineers started stripping some of the old fireships preparatory to leaving, she saw why: The component parts came out into the light like giant iron organs and loops of intestine surgically removed. Angfal, once Helmsman for the wrecked flagship rough translation Sung Through Lava Like the Petal of an Autumn Rose on the Scorching Late-Summer Breeze, now hung on the walls of her study in Yhelteth, looking discomfortingly like a huge, gross-bodied spider oozing through from the next room. But the impression was fleeting at best Angfal could no more move unaided than the next fat keg of ale waiting in a tavern cellar.
Anasharal had limbs.
It wasn t a feature that was immediately apparent. Archeth and the eight men Hald detailed to go down with her came awkwardly across the glassy surface in the bottom half of the crater, aping the motions of wading through cold water on a stony shore, and found themselves staring at something rather like a moldy, half-eaten pie that someone had mistakenly put back in the oven. The heat shimmer rose off a roughly hemispherical knobbed gray carapace cracked neatly apart across the middle. It was the gray crust itself that was smoking, but where the crack ran through, there was a faint white mist that spilled steadily out onto the glassy ground and crawled about there in wisps that gave out a faint, sorcerous chill. Peering into the space the mist was vacating, they saw a nested hollow about four feet across, something like an opened rose with its heart punched out. In the middle, something like a huge egg was rocking back and forth.
The men drew back, doing their best not to step in the puddles of chilly mist. They looked to Archeth for guidance. She shrugged.
We do not understand how to help you, she said flatly, to the air in general.
Yes, just a moment.
Another loud cracking sound. A couple of the marines jumped visibly. One whole quarter of the broken gray crust fell abruptly aside and lay there like a chunk of abandoned wasps nest. From the gap it left, the thing that had rocked back and forth within came scrabbling out like some gigantic crab looking for food.
Oaths laced the air. The soldiers backed up even farther. Archeth tried not to; it wouldn t have looked good.
The crab-like thing finished extricating itself and dropped to the floor, where it lay for a moment, feebly twitching one or two of its limbs as if exhausted. A pair of halberds swung down off marine shoulders and prodded inward.
That really won t be necessary, said the voice. Nagarn, Khiran, thank you. You can put those away.
The named halberdiers gaped at each other. Their weapons drooped in shock. The crab-like thing propped itself up and waddled sideways in the gap, then collapsed again. Archeth crouched to look closer. The new arrival was fully three feet across at the widest point, smooth and featureless gray on top, apart from a scattering of thumb-sized optics glowing softly blue or white. At a glance you could be forgiven for thinking you were looking at some Kiriath-grown metallic giant mushroom until it moved. But even then, she saw, there was something awkward about the motion. The legs folded out from sculpted recesses in the lower half of the creature, but they seemed to work poorly, as if unused to supporting the thing s weight.
It will take three or four of you to pick me up. Briskly, as if it had heard her thoughts. I suggest we improvise some kind of sling.
She learned its name as they carried it, grunting and scuffling with the weight, up the slope of the crater. Later, once they d put together the suggested sling out of horse blankets and two halberd shafts and were on their way back to the river, she also got a vague, lengthy, and rather improbable sketch of its life story told in archaic High Kir, which she soon grew weary of trying to stay focused on. Like most Helmsmen of her acquaintance, Anasharal liked the sound of its own voice and seemed largely immune to modesty. and in return for which services, I was flung up into the heavens by the grateful king, set among the stars to gleam there in guidance for all travelers of good heart forever after.
Yeah? Archeth, riding alongside the sling and its carriers, slouched back in her saddle. So what are you doing back down here, then?
There was more snap in her voice than she d intended. Relentless desert heat and the constant darting glances from the men that wrapped her in with this burbling chunk of sorcery and iron it all added to her mounting irritability. But more than any of that was the dawning realization that when Manathan had spoken of messengers, she had assumed rushed to assume that he meant the Kiriath themselves, returning somehow, in some fairy-tale improbable fashion, from the veins of the Earth into which they had disappeared.
Instead, she had this.
I really don t think, daughter of Flaradnam, that you or any of your, uhm, friends here could remotely comprehend the complexity of decision making involved in letting me fall to Earth at this precise moment. Command decisions, I m talking about, taken in an arena so cold and empty that it would render your body a block of ice in a heartbeat and boil your blood in your veins.
I think you mean freeze.
Anasharal was silent for a moment, motionless in the sag and jog of the horse-blanket sling. Dry, metronome crunch of marching feet on either side but even the men carrying the sling looked down, surprised at the sudden quiet from their cargo.
You did say cold. Archeth, twisting the knife.
Think what you will. Like clockwork wound back up she couldn t be sure if the voice had turned sulky or was sneering. It won t affect anything that matters. Your perspective is as Earthbound as any mortal. I, on the other hand, have seen the rise and fall of kingdoms across the continents and through the ages, witnessed the passing of the Aldrain and the bloody, midwifed renaissance of Men, watched the brief, multitudinous lives of humans spinning by like dandelion seed on the wind, wrestled with the almost but actually not quite incalculable mathematics of it all, and I m telling you not to bother trying to comprehend any of it or me. Just follow my instructions and try to keep up.
We are carrying you, Archeth pointed out.
Yes, as your horse carries you but I doubt you ve tried to teach the beast basic algebra.
Seemingly satisfied with this retort, Anasharal lapsed again into silence and stayed that way until they reached the boats. There, it seemed to derive a childish satisfaction from startling the marines who crowded around the sling to see what their comrades had brought back. It called various of them by name, asked after their individual circumstances in perfect Tethanne Ganch, if the reptile peon bite wound in his shoulder still gave him trouble in winter, Hrandan whether he preferred assignment on the river frigate to his previous du
ties at Khangset, Shalag how he d found his time in Demlarashan and if things down there were as bad, in his opinion, as they were all saying. It was the most blatant piece of showing off Archeth could ever recall, even from a Helmsman and like all such tricks, it was spellbinding.
In the end, Senger Hald had to bellow for order over a drawn blade to get his men back about their tasks and everybody onto the small boats.
The good news, though, was that Lal Nyanar had succeeded in re-floating the Sword of Justice Divine. He met them at the hull door as they embarked the horses, rubbing his hands briskly, clearly pleased with himself. Hard sunlight slanted down through the open hatch, caught dust motes dancing in the damp gloom of the belowdeck. Painted a bright stripe across the satisfaction on Nyanar s face.
So then. What did you find?
They found me, said Anasharal. And it took them long enough.
Nyanar jumped. He stared at the inert chunk of metal the men were carrying onto his ship in its horse-blanket sling. You could see him struggling to make the connection with the irritable voice that had just spoken into his ear.
It s like a Helmsman, Senger Hald told him, stepping off the bobbing small boat and aboard the frigate.
A Helmsman fallen from the heavens, it says.
But so small?
Hald spread his arms eloquently. Both men looked at Archeth.
Great like I know any more about this than you do.
She faked a command confidence. We have no reason to doubt its word. We ll find out more when we get it back to Yhelteth.
Yeah just wait a minute. Nyanar gestured at the men carrying the sling, and they set it down on the planking with evident relief. We have no reason to trust it, either, whatever it is. This could be a, a trickster demon. An evil spirit enchained in iron.
Oh, charming.
It needed us to carry it here, Archeth said shortly. I really don t think we re in any danger.
No physical danger, perhaps. But what of our souls?
Lal Nyanar if Mahmal Shanta could only hear you now. What would he think of the man he once named his most promising student. His most promising collaborator?
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