The Steel Remains (2 page)

Whatever the truth, no one was quite sure what level of intelligence the corpsemites had. But somewhere in their evolution, natural or otherwise, they'd learned to use the carcases they fed upon for a whole host of other purposes. A body could serve them as a hiding place or an incubation bed for their eggs; if not too badly decayed, it might become a means of rapid motion or disguise; and, in the case of humans or wolves, it could be a digging tool. It was the use of human corpses that triggered the spate of zombie sightings throughout the northwest whenever the winters were hard.

Ringil had occasionally wondered whether the corpsemites didn't also manipulate carcasses as a form of play. It was entirely his own macabre idea, conjured up when he first read about the creatures in accounts by travelers to the Kiriath wastes. After all, he reasoned to his father's librarian, a corpsemite's own secretions would eat through a wooden casket nearly as fast as a corpse's decaying hands could open it, so why else would they bother? The opinion of the librarian, and later of his father, was that Ringil was a very sick young man who ought to
concern himself, as his elder brothers already did, with more natural pursuits like riding, hunting, and bedding the local wenches. His mother, who no doubt already had her suspicions, said nothing.

From his one or two previous encounters with these creatures, Ringil also knew that they could be very—

The corpsemite flexed its body free of the encaging ribs, leapt straight at him.

—fast.

He hacked sideways, rather inelegantly, and succeeded in batting the thing away to the left. It hit a headstone and dropped to the ground writhing, sliced almost in half by the stroke. Ringil brought the sword down again and finished the job, mouth pursed with distaste. The two severed halves of the creature twisted and trembled and then lay still. Demons and the souls of the evil dead were not, it seemed, up to repairing that kind of damage.

Ringil also knew that corpsemites moved in groups. As the slimy filigree of a tendril appendage touched his cheek, he was already spinning around to face the next one. The drops of secretion burned. No time to wipe it off. He spotted the creature, coiled on top of a Yhelteth tomb, skewered it on reflex. The tendrils recoiled and the thing made angry chittering noises as it died. Ringil heard a clatter of response from the other side of the tomb and saw movement. He stepped wide around the worked stone slab, saw the two smaller mites hauling themselves up out of the wreckage of a rotted coffin and its equally far- gone contents. A single downward blow sliced them both irreparably open, body fluids gushing like pale oil from the wounds. He did it again, just to be sure.

The fifth mite landed on his back.

He didn't think at all. In retrospect, he guessed it must have been pure revulsion that drove him. He dropped the sword with a yell, reached down to the fastenings of his jerkin, and tore them open with both hands. In the same motion he shrugged himself halfway out of the garment while the corpsemite was still finding out that the leather was not his real skin. The jerkin sagged under the creature's weight, helped him to pull clear. The tendrils around his waist and over his shoulders
were still creeping toward each other and they didn't have time to tighten against the movement. His left arm came free and he whirled like a discus thrower, hurling the bundle of jerkin and mite off his right sleeve and away among the headstones. He heard it hit something solid.

Tendrils had touched him on the chest and back— later he would find the weals. Now he snatched up the Ravensfriend and stalked after his jerkin, eyes and ears open for any remaining members of the group. He found the garment, partially dissolved, at the base of an ancient moss- grown slab near the back of the cemetery.
Not a bad throw, that, from a standing start.
The corpsemite was still trying to disentangle itself from the leather and flapped confusedly at him as he approached. Its jaws were bared and it was hissing like a new sword in the cooling trough.

“Yeah, yeah,” he muttered and plunged the Ravensfriend down point- first, impaling the mite on the earth. He watched with somber 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 towheaded 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 fathers 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.

he sun lay dying amid torn cloud the color of bruises, at the bottom of a sky that never seemed to end. Night drew in across the grasslands from the east, turned 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 till 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 northeast, 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. At 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 w ouldn't get more pissed off than she already was. He'd paid the settlement and he'd been plowing 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-edged 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 toward the encampment. Every buffalo he could see was
his, not to mention the shares he held in the Ishlinak herds farther to the west. The red- and- gray 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 thing 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 from 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 from 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-hand fighting technique and without drawing his sword. Youth and
anger and the anesthetic 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 foregone 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 avoided having to kill each other, 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.