The Steel Remains (15 page)

“Come on, you heard me.”

“You want to know how to kill a
dwenda
?”

“Yeah.” Ringil shifted irritably, picked at a loose thread on his, yeah,
new
fucking tunic, what kind of fucking workmanship did Ishil think …”Yeah, that's right.”

“Well, I don't know. First off, you'd need to
find
one to kill. No one's seen the Vanishing Folk in—”

“Living memory. I know, like the sign says. But let's assume, just for the sake of argument, I
have
found one. Let's assume he's in my way. How do I take him down, Shal?” Ringil tipped his head to indicate the pommel of the Ravensfriend. “Could I do it with this?”

Shalak pursed his lips. “It's doubtful. You'd have to be very fast indeed.”

“Well, that has been said about me on occasion.” He didn't add that those occasions had receded increasingly into the realm of memory over the past few years. There were always the stories, of course, the war legends, but who— other than himself, in Jhesh's tavern, increasingly wearily—still told those?

Shalak took a turn about the cluttered space in the shop. He rubbed at his forehead, dodged a hanging wooden assemblage of wind chimes, grimaced.

“Thing is, Gil, we don't really know much about the dwenda. I mean, this stuff I sell, it's mostly junk—”

“It is?”

The merchant gave him a sour look. “All right, all right. I make a living from hints and half- truths, and what people desperately want to believe. I don't need you to remind me of that. But the core of this, all this, is something even the Kiriath couldn't map. They fought the dwenda for possession of this world once, you know. But if you read their annals, it's pretty clear they didn't really know what they were fighting. There are references to ghosts, shape- shifting, possession, stones and forests and rivers coming to life at Aldrain command—”

“Oh
come
off it, Shal.” Ringil shook his head. “Tell me you're not that naïve. I'm looking for a considered opinion here, not something I can get out of any gibbering idiot down at Strov.”

“That's what I'm giving you, Gil. A considered opinion. Outside of oral legend and a few runic scribbles on standing stones along the west coast, we don't have anything but the Indirath M'nal chronicle to tell us what the Aldrain were really like. It's the only reputable source. Everything else the Kiriath wrote on the subject draws on it. And the Indirath M'nal says, among other things, that the dwenda could command water and stone and wood to life.”

“Yeah, and I knew Majak herders back in the day who thought the Kiriath were all fire- blackened demons.” Ringil cranked up an arm, made a jabbering mouth with his hand. “Rejected from the Depths of Hell to walk the Earth in Eternal Damnation. Blab- blab- blab. Kind of shit gets made up every day by people too stupid to look for the realities. You should have heard the boatman who brought me up here from the Glades. Fire in the northern sky, lights in the marshes, a black dog heard
barking through the night. Doesn't occur to anyone to wonder how exactly you can tell it's a
black
dog just from the fucking
bark
it makes.”

Shalak cocked his head. He frowned. “What is this, Gil? What are you so angry about?”

It brought him up short. He stared at the neatly swept floor of the little shop and raised an eyebrow at the strain in his own just- silenced voice.

“What's wrong, Gil?”

He shook his head. Sighed. “Doesn't matter. It's nothing. Late night, too much carousing, you know me. I'm sorry. Go on, you were saying.”

“You
were saying. That people are too stupid to look for the realities and they hide in superstition instead. And that's true enough, but you're missing the point. You're talking about humans, and ignorant humans at that. The scribes who wrote the Indirath M'nal weren't either. They were the cream of Kiriath culture, highly educated and already well traveled in places most of us have a hard time imagining. And the dwenda
scared
those guys, that's the truth, it's there in the way the texts are written. Clear as the face on a harbor- end whore.”

Ringil thought back to the Kiriath he'd known; Grashgal, Naranash, Flaradnam, Kalanak, and all the others, names gone blurred with the years. He thought of the impassive aura of command they'd carried into the war with the Scaled Folk, the methodical savagery with which they fought. It was a mask, Archeth insisted to him once, part of the courtly gravitas that informed Kiriath culture from its roots; but if she was right, it was a mask that never came off, not even when Naranash bled out on the beach at Rajal, grinning and leaking blood through his teeth while Ringil crouched uselessly beside him.

Looks like you'll have to do the rest without me, eh. Are we winning, lad?

Ringil glanced about— the Yhelteth flank, crumpling and tearing like cheap armor under repeated blows as the reptile advance slammed into them, the crisscross panic of fleeing soldiery from the shattered lines and the screams of those broken or burned or ripped apart all along the beach, the landing barges fleeing back across the bight, evacuating those lucky enough to make the shallows …

Yeah,
he told Naranash.
We're winning. Looks like Flaradnam held the breakwater after all. We're driving them back.

The Kiriath knight spat up blood.
That's good. He's a good lad, ‘Nam, he'll follow through. Shame I'm going to miss that party.
He coughed throatily for a moment.
You keep hold of that sword, you hear? Best friend you'll ever have. Friend to
ravens,
remember that. Make sure—

And the reptile peon was on Ringil, long shriek and the rasping, scaled impact against his cuirass. He staggered and went over backward in the sand. The long spiked tail lashed around, the claws dug in, and Ringil screamed back in the creature's face at the pain, smashed the pommel of the Ravensfriend into its eye. The peon shrilled and its fangs snapped shut inches from his throat. He got his left forearm in the way, guarding, dropped the Ravensfriend and stabbed two stiffened fingers from his freed right hand into the creature's eye, down past the socket and into the brain behind. The peon thrashed and shrieked and snapped, and he rolled it over in the fountaining storm of sand it was making with its tail. Pinned it there with his body weight while his fingers burrowed and shoved in up to the hilt. The eyelid flapped up and down on his knuckles like a trapped moth's wing scraping in the cup of a boy's closed palms. The tail lashed about, damp sand came up in shovel loads, swiped him across the face, got gritty into his mouth as he sucked breath and snarled and fought and then, finally,
finally,
with a high whining noise in its throat and a shivering convulsion, the fucking thing died.

And by the time he staggered back to his feet, so had Naranash.

He never knew if in those last moments the Kiriath knight had seen the peon attack, understood what was going on and had drawn his own fading conclusions about the state of the battle. If at the end he'd known that Ringil had lied to him.

But Ringil had never seen him afraid.

“You sure you're interpreting the texts right?” he asked Shalak. “I mean, maybe the language—”

“I grew up speaking Tethanne as well as Naomic, Gil. My mother made me learn to read it as well. I've seen copies of the translations they made of the Indirath M'nal in Yhelteth, I've seen the commentaries on it, and I
know enough of the High Kir original to follow those commentaries. And I'm telling you, Gil, the day the Kiriath went up against the Vanishing Folk, they were scared.”

Shalak clasped his hands at waist height and cast his head back a little. Ringil remembered the pose from summer gatherings of the city's Aldrain enthusiasts that he'd attended in his youth. Everybody huddled together and chattering in early- evening gloom, taking wine in little fake Aldrain goblets in the tiny gardens at the back of the shop. There was a quote coming.

“How should one fight an enemy that is not wholly of this world?”
Shal declaimed.
“They come to us in ghost form, striking snake- swift out of phantasmal mist, and when we strike back they return to mist and they laugh, low and mocking in the wind. They—”

But now the rest of it was gone, carried away on the cool breeze out of nowhere that blew up Ringil's neck. He snapped back to the previous night, the krin- skewed walk home from Grace- of- Heaven's place and swooping laughter past his face like a caress. He felt the same shiver creep up his neck again and found he'd raised a hand involuntarily to touch his cheek where the laughter had seemed to touch …

“Pretty conclusive, wouldn't you say?”

Shalak, finished now with his quotations, looking at him expectantly. Ringil blinked.

“Uh— yeah.” He scrambled to cover for his disconnection. “I guess. Uhm, that bit about
not wholly of this world.
They say the Aldrain came from the band originally, don't they? And that's where they went back to. You think that's possible?”

“With the Aldrain, anything's
possible.
But likely?” Shalak shook his head. “You talk to any decent astronomer, here or in the Empire, they'll tell you the band is made up of a million different moving particles, all catching the sun's rays. That's why it shines, it's like dust motes in a sunbeam. It's just not a solid arch the way it looks. Hard to see how anything could live in the middle of something like that.”

Ringil brooded. “The Majak believe that the band is a pathway leading to the Sky Home of the honorable dead. A ghost road.”

“Yes, but they're savages.”

Ringil remembered Egar's scarred and tattooed features, slightly surprised at the sudden flare of affection it triggered. It was how the steppe nomad would cheerfully have described himself
— I ain't fucking civilized, Gil,
he'd said one campfire night on the march to Hanliahg.
That's not something I'm ever going to need—
but still Shalak's automatic sneer went home like a barb. He held down a spurt of unreasonably defensive anger.

“I don't know,” he said carefully. “You spend any time that far north, you get to see some strange shit in the sky. You should get yourself up there sometime. And anyway, here we are talking about the Aldrain as ghost warriors. So you know, maybe there's something in it.”

“Ringil, I really don't think you can stack a bunch of shamanistic gibbering up against the gathered writings of the Kiriath's finest minds and expect it to make a pile the same height.”

“All right. So you tell me— how did these finest minds among the Kiriath beat the Aldrain?”

Shalak shrugged. “With machinery, it seems. The way the Kiriath did most things. There are a lot of references to—”

Outside in the street, someone started shouting. Something thumped audibly against the wall. Shalak flinched, perhaps with the old memories, and went swiftly to one of the shop's grimy windows. He peered out for a moment, then relaxed.

“It's just Darby,” he said. “Another one of his episodes, looks like.”

“Darby?” Ringil got up and drifted toward the window, ducking the wind chimes. “What's he, a neighbor of yours?”

“Thankfully not.” Shalak shifted slightly to give Ringil space at his side, and nodded at the scene on the other side of the glass. “Look.”

In the early- evening sunlight outside, the crowds had parted and drawn back, become a silhouetted whole, a curtain closing in a broad oval of cobbled street. In the center of this impromptu arena, a solitary figure stood isolated. His clothing was obviously ragged beneath a longish, dirty blue coat that looked somehow familiar, and he brandished some kind of crude cudgel in a two- handed ax grip. At his feet, a pair of elegantly attired forms rolled about on the cobbles, clutching at themselves where blows had obviously been delivered.

“Darby,” Shalak repeated, as if that were explanation enough.

“And the others?”

The shopkeeper pulled a face. “No idea. Clerks- at- law by their coats, they're probably down from the courts at Lim Cross, sessions'll be turning out about now. Darby doesn't like lawyers much.”

That much was evident. Darby loomed over the two men he'd put on the ground, lips peeled back off his teeth, eyes staring. His hair was a tangled gray mess, visibly greasy from lack of washing, and he had a beard down to his chest to match. He was saying something to the men, but you couldn't hear it through the window glass.

For all of that, the weapon in his hands was absolutely steady.

The sinking sun caught on an epaulet buckle, and inside Ringil's krinzanz- tender head, familiarity leapt into recognition. He swore softly to himself.

And then the Watch arrived.

Six men strong, they forced their way through the curtaining crowd of spectators with shoulders and well- judged jolts from the ends of their day- clubs. Darby watched them come. They spilled out into the cleared space in a loose group, saw the cudgel, and maybe recognized the coat the way Ringil just had. They glanced back and forth at one another. The stunned men at Darby's feet lay where they were, still prone, dazed in the flooding sunlight, half aware at best of what was going on. No one said anything. Then the watchmen began to spread out, sliding warily around the edge of the cleared space like coffee in the rim of a tipped saucer, skirting their target, looking to surround and overwhelm.

Darby saw it and grinned in his beard.

Ringil was already on his way out the door.

The first attacker came up on Darby from the rear, just off his left shoulder. It was an obvious move, not hard for him to anticipate. Those in front couldn't, after all, conduct the fight across the living bodies of fallen worthy citizens. Plus, the long shadows cast on the cobbles telegraphed the attack. The watchman came in swinging his club down, and Darby wasn't there anymore. He'd stepped back and aside, an odd, unlooked- for elegance in the move, almost like dance. The watchman was caught, arms up with the club, falling forward into his move. Darby
swung hard, with the cudgel held horizontal, into the man's unprotected belly and lower ribs. The impact sounded like an ax in wood. The watchman made a choked shriek.