The Steel Remains (34 page)

She looked at the lights. “Yeah, they say that.”

“That's got to affect their attitude to the Empire as well, I'd imagine. Got to put pressure on any kind of loyalty they might have.”

“Oh, look. They got Idrashan out already.” Archeth nodded to where a slave was leading her horse out of the stable block. “So that's me, then. G'night, Mahmal. Hope your carriage doesn't take too long. Thanks for coming along.”

The engineer smiled gently at her. “My pleasure. It has certainly been instructive.”

She left him there and went to meet the slave halfway. Mounted up, waved a final, wordless farewell to Shanta, and urged her horse out the gate.

On the first sloping downturn of the causeway, she stood in the stirrups and looked back. The naval engineer was an indistinct figure through the railed iron of the gates above, backlit into silhouette by bright- burning torches behind him on the palace walls. But she knew beyond doubt that he was still watching her.

So fucking what?
She left the palace behind and let the horse find its own way home through the stew of streets on the south side.
Shanta s no fucking different from the rest of the old guard. Holed up in their positions of privilege and moaning in their little cabal corners about how much better it was when Akal was still around.

Well? Wasn't it?

Akal was still around when we smashed the rebels at Vanbyr. Let's not forget that inconvenient little blemish on the face of prior glory.

He was on his sickbed by then.

He still gave the fucking order.

Yes. And you obeyed it.

She passed a sleeping figure, curled into the angle of a darkened smithy's yard. Ragged cloak and hood; emblazoned on its folds she recognized the sable- on- white horse insignia of an imperial cavalryman. Hard to know if you could take that at face value or not— the city was full of demobbed and damaged soldiery sleeping in the streets, but military garb elicited more pity when you were begging, whoever you might actually be, so it was well worth the risk of stealing it if you got
the chance. It could get you fed, even taken in on winter nights if the cold bit hard enough or it rained. Archeth knew a brothel near the harbor whose madame prided herself on letting derelict veterans sleep in her laundry shack. She'd even been known to send out girls from the more raddled end of her stable to provide free hand jobs on feast days.

You found patriotism in the strangest places.

She slowed the horse to a halt and peered hard at the cloak- wrapped form, trying to decide. Something about the posture rang true, the laconic efficiency in the way cloak and hood were used. But without waking the man up …

She shrugged, dipped in her purse, and found a five- elemental piece. Leaned over and tossed the coin so it clipped one wall in the corner and hit the paved floor with a loud
chink.
The figure grunted and moved, and a right hand groped out from under the cloak until it found the money. Ring and little finger gone, along with most of that half of the hand. Archeth grimaced. It was a common enough injury among the horse regiments: Yhelteth cavalry swords were notoriously badly provided with protection for the hand. One powerful, well- judged slice down the blade from a skilled opponent, and you were a cavalryman no longer.

She tossed another five elementals down onto the drape of the cloak, and clucked Idrashan onward.

A couple of streets later and nearly home, she passed through a small, leafy square once called Angel's Wing Place but now renamed for the victory at Gallows Gap. It was a place she'd walk to sometimes when she needed to get out of the house, both before and after the war, though she'd preferred it before. Then it had hosted a bustling fruit market. Now they'd built a self- important little three- sided stone memorial in the center, grandiose bas- relief images of exclusively imperial soldiers standing on piles of reptile dead, a central column designed to look vaguely like a sword thrusting skyward. There were stone benches built into the structure and lettered homages in rhyme to
OUR GLORIOUS IMPERIAL COMMANDER, OUR SONS OF THE CITY INSPIRED.
Archeth had read the compositions enough times to have them, unwillingly, by heart, had even, once, at a court ball, been briefly introduced to the poet who'd penned them.

Of course, one was not actually
there
at the battle,
this smirking minor noble had told her, and sighed manfully.
However much one might have desired it. But I did visit Gallows Gap last year, and one's muse can always be relied upon in such cases to catch the echoes of the event in the melancholy quiet that remains.

Indeed.
But there must have been something in her face despite her best efforts, because the smirk slipped a little, and the poet's tone turned anxious.

You, uhm, you were not there yourself, milady? At the battle?

Oh no,
she managed urbanely.
But my father died on the expeditionary retreat, and two of my outlander friends led the final Gallows Gap charge.

He left her alone after that.

Home, in the courtyard, she handed Idrashan over to the night watchman and let herself in through a side entrance. The house was lit with lamps turned low, and it was quiet— she kept servant numbers to a minimum, and manumitted the slaves she occasionally bought as soon as custom and city regulations would permit. Kefanin, she guessed, would be dozing in his cubicle by the front door, waiting for her return. She saw no reason to wake him and went directly upstairs to her chambers.

In the dressing room, she hung up her knives, wrestled her boots off one after the other and tossed them into a corner, shucked the rest of her clothes like an old skin and stood there a minute luxuriating in the feel of the warm air on her body. Then, as she bent to scratch an itch on her calf, her own smell mugged her. She wrinkled her nose, glanced at the tapestried bellpull by the wall.

Ah, come on. Fucking Scaled Folk campaign veteran. You bathed under a waterfall in the upper Trell, winter of ‘51. That so long ago?

It was ten years, truth be told, time that had crept up on her somehow; but the fading edge of the krin was a blessing, a twitching impatience under her skin, and she let that carry her. She left the bell unrung and went through to the bathing chamber, not relishing the thought of a cold- water scrub but unwilling to go through the rigmarole of calling down to the basement, getting the slaves to stoke up
the furnace, fill the boiling pans, waiting the time it took while the water heated and they carried it upstairs and—

The water in the big alabaster bathing jugs was not cold.

She blinked, stirred a hand loosely through the water in one of the jugs again to make sure. No question, it was still lukewarm. Kefanin, proving himself once again worth his weight in precious gems, she supposed. She grinned and went through her ablutions with a small measure of relief, scrubbed the worst offending portions of her body, and rinsed herself off. She took a towel from the rack, wrapped herself in it, and wandered through to the bedchamber.

There was someone in her bed.

As she slammed to a halt in the doorway, the scent on the towel she wore caught up with her. She knew it from somewhere, but it was not her own.

“Hoy,” she snapped. “You're supposed to be in the guest wi—”

But it was not Elith.

It took her a moment to place the candlewax- colored hair and the pale features, blurry with sleep, as the woman propped herself up in the bed. It was the scent that triggered the recall, the tight wet grip of Jhiral's hand on her jaw five days ago, the salt- smelling damp of the slave girl's juices drying on his fingers. Archeth felt her nostrils flare slightly at the memory, and abruptly she didn't trust herself to say anything else.

“I—” The girl was clearly terrified. She pushed herself upright in the bed, slipping on the silk sheets. Babbling in Naomic. “I was commanded, milady. The Emperor himself, it was not my doing, I would not wish …”

And now Archeth remembered Jhiral's smug face when she showed up in the throne room.
I understand you had to go home before coming to see us. Did you find everything there to your satisfaction?
His prurient, conspiratorial intimacy in the Chamber of Confidences five days earlier.
She's new. What do you think? Would you like me to send her to your bedchamber when I'm finished with her?
And then, the throwaway decision, the whim.
Come, I shall send the girl to you as soon as you return.

It didn't do to underestimate Jhiral's whims. They were all still
learning that, up at the palace and across the city below. You'd think the lesson would have sunk in by now, but it seemed that—even for Archeth Indamaninarmal, most shrewd and pragmatic of imperial advisers—it hadn't.

Archeth had a moment of retrospective sympathy for Kefanin. She recalled the mayor- domo's face when she handed Elith over, his single, swiftly overridden attempt at a warning.
Milady, there is already…

… an unexpected guest in your house.

… an unexpected young female slave awaiting your approval and command.

Tiny, trickling tingle in her belly at that particular thought.

Stop that.

… an unexpected and gracious gift of the Emperor, delivered and imposed with no possibility of demurral.

It explained what the girl was doing in her bedchamber. Jhiral liked his commands to be carried out to the letter, and didn't mind detailing what would happen if they were not. The imperial messenger who brought the girl would have instructed Kefanin minutely, she supposed; and Kefanin, outlander by birth and slave from age five up, summarily castrated at fifteen, less than four years of manumission and citizenship to his name, mayor- domo or not, would have sprung to obey.

Archeth cleared her throat. Mumbled. “All right, fine. I see. You can—”

But the girl threw back the covers and came out of the bed anyway, naked, curve of hip and pale, bisected arse, soft, heavy swing of breasts, and crawled on her hands and knees across the rug to Archeth's feet, and knelt there.

Archeth gritted her teeth.

“I was told to please you, milady.” Accent thick and intoxicatingly exotic as it softened and slithered on the Tethanne syllables. Her hair fell over her face. “In any way you see fit.”

It had been so long, so very, very long.

She let one hand fall toward the girl's bowed head—

—she's a
slave,
Archeth—

—snatched it back. Her heart felt abruptly like a panicked bird in a
cage. She closed her eyes with the force of it. The blood thumped through her veins at jolting, krin- notched speed.

You are not human, Archidi.
Tears in Grashgal's eyes as he stood on the fireship's gangway at the An- Monal dock.
Never think, because we cannot take you with us, that you are human. You are Archeth, daughter of Flaradnam, of the Kiriath clan Indamaninarmal. Remember it in adversity. You are one of us, you always will be. You are not like them.

And then, of course, it was easy.

She swallowed and opened her eyes. Summoned a dry, self-possessed irony into her voice.

“The Emperor is generous beyond all bounds. It's truly fortunate he is not here, for I am unsure what words I would find to thank him.”

She tucked the towel a little tighter around her. Self- possession or not, she did not trust herself to have the girl rise and stand facing her.

“I will no doubt be able to find work for you in my household, but for now I can think of nothing obvious. You should sleep until morning and then we will talk. What is your name?”

“Ishgrim.” It was barely a murmur.

“Good. Then go back to bed, Ishgrim. It's late. I will summon you tomorrow.”

She turned and headed rapidly back into the dressing room, so she would not have to watch all that long- limbed, full- breasted flesh get up off the floor and move away from her.

SHE FLUNG ON A DRESSING GOWN, STABBED HER FEET INTO SLIPPERS.
Faced herself in the mirror with a scowl, and then went loudly down the staircase. It woke Kefanin up and brought him hurrying out of the cubicle by the door.

“Oh, milady. You are already—”

“Yeah. Already home, already seen what's in my bed. The Emperor is most pressing in his generosity, is he not.”

Kefanin inclined his head. “Just so, milady. I would have preferred—”

“Yeah, me too. Did our other guest settle in okay?”

“I believe so. She ate shortly after sunset and then retired.”

“Good.” She yawned. “I'm going to the east wing study. Can you bring me a decent bottle of wine from the cellar and something to eat?”

“Immediately, milady.”

“Are the lamps lit there?”

“No, milady. But I have a lantern here that—”

“Good enough.” She swiped up the lantern from its rack by the door, tinkered with it until the flame brightened. “Oh yeah, and get me some krinzanz while you're at it, would you? There's a bottle of tincture on top of the right- hand cabinet in the larder. The blue one.”

Kefanin scrutinized her face in the glow from the lantern. “Is that wise, milady?”

“No, it's not. Your point is?”

A grave, deeply made bow, the sort she only got out of Kefanin when he disapproved mightily of a decision she'd made. She grunted, set off along the hall to the east wing, got there in a couple of minutes, a little out of breath. She worked the bolts. A faint, musty chill puffed out at her as she hauled the door open. It had been a while since anyone was in here.

Shadows capered on the walls while she moved about, lighting lamps from the wick of the lantern with a paper spill. A warm yellow glow spread over the untidy piles of books and less easily defined junk that owned the floor. The study emerged by increments from the gloom. Her desk in the center, stacked with papers and more books. The curtained window. Paintings of An- Monal on the walls, a map etched on Kiriath glass.

The Helmsman.

“Hello there, Archeth Indamaninarmal.”

“Hello Angfal.” She cleared off one side of the desk so she could put her feet up, pulled out the chair and sat down. “Been a while, hasn't it?”