The Steel Remains (38 page)

Fucking amateurs.

Egar met the two men head- on. He cut out low with the lance, slashed open the throat on the younger man's horse, let it thrash past in panicked agony. Blood loosed on the air, splattering off the lance blade, the scream of the dying animal and the rider's wild yell as he came off. Egar's horse stepped delicately sideways of it all, as if avoiding a lady's carriage on the Boulevard of Grace Foretold. The second mercenary reined hard and right, trying to avoid the mess in his path, thoughts of attack apparently forgotten. Egar leaned, took his cowl and most of his face off with a savage upward slash. The man shrieked and flailed blindly about with his sword. His helmet was gone, flipped off and away like a mug off a tavern table. Raw flaps and shreds of flesh hung in place of his features, blinding him the way the hood must have earlier. His terrified mount spun about beneath him, screamed along with him, then flung him to the ground. Egar whistled and nudged his warhorse, and it stamped forward, put its steel- shod hooves through the fallen freebooter's rib cage with the same trained delicacy it had danced aside before. Egar heard the crunch it made, felt it right through the horse's frame and up into his own groin. He threw back his head and howled.

And there was Alrag, teeth bared, hurtling in with his own staff lance swung high in one hand for spearing. It wasn't a thrust you could block.

But…

Egar danced the Yhelteth destrier aside, put himself on Alrag's unweaponed flank. His brother spotted the move, couldn't swap the lance about in time and had to settle for a clumsy double- handed defensive block. Egar met it with his own lance double- handed as a staff. The two weapons struck each other a glancing blow and then Alrag was past, wheeling his mount tightly about, turning the charge. Egar knew the animal from camp, it was well trained and spirited, and his eldest brother was a consummate horseman. He didn't have much time.

The two remaining mercenaries had huddled their mounts together
as if for comfort. One of them brandished his sword; the other had a small, horseman's crossbow, was trying desperately to crank it back for action. Egar urged his horse into a gallop, right at the two of them, venting another long berserker scream as he came.

As he'd hoped, their horses panicked and split apart. He ignored the man with the sword, charged down on the crossbow artist before he could get his horse back around and bring his weapon to bear. The lance blade shocked into the freebooter's back with enough force to unseat him, must have gone right through the thin wood- slat armor, if he was wearing it, and severed the spine beneath. Egar yanked back fast and tight so as not to lose the lance as the man went to the ground. The blade came free, the body toppled bonelessly sideways off the horse and onto the ground. Egar never saw it complete the fall— he was already turning his own mount about.

Alrag was right on his tail.

Egar roared and brought his lance swinging around, stabbed out as his brother rode in at him. Alrag flinched, both lances went wide. The two horses passed each other again in the dusk. The clanmaster gathered himself, grabbed glimpses of the steppe left and right, saw the final mercenary in full flight, spurring his horse toward the horizon as if pursued by demons. He snarled a grin.

“Just family now,” he yelled against the darkening sky. “Cozy, isn't it?”

Something hissed through the air. The Yhelteth warhorse screamed and bucked beneath him. A black- fletched arrow sprouted from its shoulder. He whipped about, saw Ershal, recurved short bow in hand, arm reaching down to the saddle box for the next shaft. Remembered too late his younger brother's chief prowess ever since they were children.

“Oh, you little
shit
!”

He urged the destrier forward with his thighs. It wallowed as it tried to obey. A second shaft took it deep in the flank. Blood welled up. It screamed again, staggered forward half a dozen desperate steps, neck arched, stumbling. Egar screamed with it, hefted his lance, willed himself and his mount closer to his brother.

“I'll rip your motherfucking heart out for this, Ershal!”

The third arrow put out the animal's eye. It went mad, reared and tumbled, hurled Egar from its back. He hit the ground and rolled, somehow kept the lance, somehow else managed not to spike himself on it, came to a halt in the grass clutching at its shaft. Behind him, he heard the crash as his horse hit the ground, the sound of it curling and trying to get up, falling back. The endless heart- ripping cries it gave out as it struggled and thrashed.

He got muzzily to his hands and knees. Soft pulsing snarl in the base of his throat.
Back on your feet, back on your fucking feet, Majak.
The horse screamed again. Egar cast about in the gloom of near dark, found Ergund and Ershal a couple of dozen paces away, edged in bandlight. Alrag farther out but trotting back toward them and erect in the saddle, pleased with himself. None of them close enough to take down with a thrown knife.

Off to the left, the young mercenary staggered about groaning, fell down abruptly, lost to view in the grass. It looked as if he'd taken a bad blow to the head when he was unhorsed. He didn't get up again.

Ershal put another arrow into the stricken warhorse. It screamed again, but weakly now.

“Urann's sake, fucking
kill
it, will you.”

Ergund— all his life, he'd hated it when the animals suffered. Egar remembered when he was ten and …

The
hiss- thump
of another arrow. The horse snorted and quieted. Egar slipped through the grass in a low raider's crouch, knuckles white on the staff of his lance, a pulsing vein of fury through his brain like a spike. Whatever else happened now, he was going to take Ershal apart before he died.

“That's far enough, Egar.”

His brother's voice, calm against the fading agony of the destrier. Egar looked up through the night breeze sway of the grass and saw Ershal upright in the saddle, the bow bent on him from less than ten yards. Cold, quailing horror as he waited for the impact— his brother would not miss, and at this range, off the recurved bow, the shaft would go right through him.

“That's it. Up where I can see you.”

Egar straightened from his crouch. A bitter smile touched the corners of his mouth. He heard the snuffling his horse made as it died. He thought maybe his knife would reach from here. He dropped the lance.

“Go on then. You traitorous little fuck. Get it done.”

“You were given every chance to—”

“Oh,
fuck
off.”

Alrag rode up, reined his horse to an unnecessarily savage halt, and glanced back and forth along the line the arrow would take.

“What are you fucking waiting for?” he inquired acidly.

Ershal flickered a glance at Alrag, then Ergund. But his attention never shifted from the draw he had on Egar.

“We're all agreed, then?”

Egar clawed for his knife.

Ershal loosed the arrow.

The world went dark.

NO, NOT DARK,
he realized.

Had
time
to realize.

The arrow had not hit him.

Not dark, just dim, like the dimming of your eyes when you'd stared too hard at the sun before you ducked into a yurt. Like the sudden steeping of gloom in a Yhelteth theater house before the curtains ran back.

The wind across the steppe seemed to hold its breath.

Out of nowhere, there was a figure standing in the path of Ershal's shot. Leather- cloaked, face shadowed beneath a soft- brimmed hat. It reached up and took the arrow out of the air with no more effort than a man grabbing a lance pennant in the breeze. The fingers of the hand seemed— Egar squinted hard— to elongate and flex in places no human hand could have. A voice whispered out to them in the still spaces left by the wind, distant and intimate at once.

“Can't allow that, I'm afraid.”

And suddenly the wind came back, buffeting, and in it Egar caught
the wash of chemical burning once more. His brothers’ horses scented it, too— they whinnied in terror and tried to back up. Ershal cursed and dropped his bow as he fought his mount for control.

“Harjalath!” spat Alrag.

“Not as such, no.” The apparition lowered its arm and snapped the arrow deftly in half, one- handed. It let the pieces fall. “Harjalath is …other, when he cares to manifest himself. Though for your purposes, the end difference here will be negligible.”

Ergund spared one hand from calming his horse, made a hasty ward. “We are about Kelgris's business, demon. Begone. You may not hinder us.”

“It's not that simple,” whispered the thing. “You see.”

With the hand that had snapped the arrow apart, it brushed through the grass as if stirring the surface of water. Waves raced out from its touch, seemingly random, certainly in defiance of the prevailing breeze from the north. The grass bowed, it shivered and whipped about, it made mounds like the racing backs of sea creatures just below the surface.

“Do
you see?”

In the space around the figure, the mounds grew suddenly still, rose silently and took on stricter form. Half a dozen separate shapes, maybe more. Egar felt the breath stop in his throat as he realized what he was looking at. The creature in the leather cloak had surrounded itself abruptly with men— but men woven out of the grass itself, and moving restlessly around on its surface like bathers immersed to the waist in a river.

“No corner of the steppe,” murmured the figure. It sounded oddly distracted, almost sleepy. “But that the blood of men has fallen there and fertilized it. Occasionally, the steppe can be made to recall these things. Kill them.”

And the grass men flung themselves forward.

They had no weapons, nothing beyond their ill- formed stringy tendril hands, but they surged up at the terrified horses like ill-intending waves, and where they gripped, Egar saw blood spring out on the animals’ hide. He saw them pull Ergund's mount right over in a
flounder of limbs and rolling eyes, saw Ergund stagger briefly upright and make frantic warding signs, shrilling the name of Kelgris until they dragged him down into the grass as well, and his screams turned choked and gurgling. He saw Alrag hacking about him with his lance, yelling and cursing, Ershal wheeling his beleaguered horse about in the chaos, face a mask of horror…

There was little enough time for more— a pair of the grass things came at Egar as well, and he was busy grabbing his lance back up off the ground where he'd dropped it. Grass came with it, blades of the stuff folding over and wrapping and clinging stubbornly to the shaft, trying to pull it back down. For one insane moment, it was like a tug- of- war for the weapon with some surprisingly tenacious toddler around the camp, and then Egar had the lance free and was swinging it up to defend himself against a long thin slashing arm and the empty eye sockets of the grass- formed head behind it. He scythed off the arm at what might have approximated an elbow joint, saw it simply re- form as more grass stalks slithered up into place. A ragged gap opened in the thing's head where a mouth would have been on a man. The rustling, keening noise that came out of it turned his blood to ice.

“Not him.”

The leather- cloaked figure spoke without turning, hissed, furious words, made a rapid whiplash gesture back across its shoulder that would have dislocated the limb on a normal man. The two forms slopped like waves collapsing up a beach, and were abruptly gone. Melting motions in the grass and an errant gust of wind, and then nothing at all. Egar drew harsh breath and gaped around him in time to see Alrag hauled, lance still flailing, down to a bellowing death in the grass, and Ershal spurring his horse away at the gallop, lashing wildly behind him with his knife, chopping at the empty air alongside his mount's rump like a man deranged. The summoned forms surged about for a moment or two, perhaps looking for more victims, then they, too, sank back into the grass that had spawned them and Egar stood panting, alone with the thing in the leather cloak.

It turned slowly to face him. That the features below the brim of the hat were no more than nondescript human seemed like the final
impossible thing. The voice that drummed around the inside of his skull hit him like the pulse of a bad hangover.

“You were supposed to run, Dragonbane. That's the purpose of a warning.”

“Who—” Egar struggled to master his breathing. “—the
fuck.
Are you?”

The eyes beneath the hat glinted, another warning in them for him. “That's complicated.”

“Well, hey, everybody's fucking dead. We've got some time.”

“Not as much as you think. You heard your brother Ergund call upon Kelgris? She is awake and abroad. Poltar the shaman has her favor. All I have done here is hold back the tide a little.”

Egar found his rage still had the better of his fear. He clenched fists on the staff of his lance, drew clamped breath. Grimaced.

“Listen. Don't think I'm not grateful to you, because I am. You saved my life. By sorcery or not, I still owe you a blood debt for that, and you won't find me stingy on the payback. But I will have a name for my debt, or it can't be called honorable.”

It was hard to tell in the poor light, but he thought the figure rolled its eyes. It turned away from him for a moment. It seemed to be staring out across the steppe, or maybe just at the thin plume of smoke rising from Egar's fire.

“Can't fucking believe it's come to this,” it muttered. “Negotiating with a fucking herdsman— you know, sometimes it's— listen, I was the thief of
fire
once, you goat- shagging thug. You know that? The fucking doom bringer to kings.” An arm thrown out in exasperation. “Back when the earth was young, back when there was still a
moon
in the fucking sky, I pulled on whatever flesh was needful and I struck terror into the hearts of the powerful and enthroned all across this mudball world, and another dozen like it. I took the spirit form and strode across measureless …
ah, fuck
it, never mind. All right, a name. You
know
my name.”

And, abruptly, he did.