The Steel Remains (3 page)

A few days after that, the family herd got divided up— as his foreign drinking companion had probably known it would be. As the second y oungest— and thus second to last in line— of five sons, Egar found himself the proud owner of about a dozen mangy beasts from the trailing end of the herd. The Yhelteth bodyguard's words floated back through his mind with sudden appeal.
Fighting, fucking, getting paid.
Work for men who didn't mind getting in a scrap, famously skilled whores. Versus a
dozen mangy buffalo and getting pushed around by his brothers. It didn't feel like making a decision at all. Egar stayed with tradition as far as selling out his share in the herd to an elder sibling went, but then, instead of hiring on as a paid herdsman, he gathered his purse, his lance, and a few clothes, bought a new horse, and rode south for Yhelteth, alone.

Yhelteth!

Far from being a haunt of degenerates and women wrapped head-to- foot in sheets, the imperial city turned out to be paradise on earth. Egar's drinking companion had been right on the money. The Empire was arming for one of its habitual forays into the trading territory of the Trelayne League, and blades for hire were in high demand. Better yet, Egar's broad frame, fair hair, and pale blue eyes apparently made him all but irresistible to the women of this dark, fine- boned race. And the steppe nomads— for so he came to think of himself in time— had a reputation in Yhelteth that wasn't much inferior to their own opinion of themselves back home. They were thought pretty much by everyone to be ferocious warriors, phenomenal carousers, and potent, if unsubtle, lovers. In six months, Egar earned more coin, drank and ate more rich food, and woke up in more strange, perfumed beds than he would have believed possible even in his wildest adolescent fantasies. And he hadn't even
seen
a battle up to this point, let alone taken part in one. The bloodshed didn't start until—

Snuffling sounds and a shout yanked him from his memories. He blinked and looked around. Out on the eastern point of the herd, it looked like the animals were proving fractious and Runi was having problems. Egar put his mood away, cupped callused hands to his mouth.

“The bull,” he bellowed in exasperation. How many times did he have to tell the lad, the herd followed its leaders. Dominate the bulls and you had the rest. “Leave the fucking cows alone and get that bu—”

“‘Ware runners!”

Klarn's shout was shrill, the age- old terror of the steppe herdsman named in a panic- stricken cry from the other flank. Egar's head jerked around and he saw Klarn's arm outflung to the east. Sighting along the pointer, eyes narrowed, he spotted what had spooked Runi's side of the
herd. Tall, pale figures, half a dozen or more of them, skimming as it seemed through the chest- high steppe grass.

Long runners.

Runi saw them, too, and drew himself up crossways to cover the herd. But by now his mount had snuffed the runners, too, and would not hold. It skittered back and forth, fighting the rein, terrified whinnies clearly audible on the wind.

No, not like that.

The warning yelped in Egar's mind, closely followed by the knowledge that there was no time to shout it, and just as much point. Runi was barely sixteen, and the steppe ghouls hadn't troubled the Skaranak seriously for over a decade. The closest the lad had ever been to a living runner were the stories old Poltar told around the campfire, and maybe the odd carcass dragged into camp to impress. He had no knowledge of what Egar had learned in blood before Runi was born.
You can't fight the steppe ghouls standing still.

Klarn, older and wiser, had seen Runi's error and was spurring his own far from willing mount around the dark mass of buffalo, shouting. He had his bow off his back, was reaching for shafts.

He'd be there too late.

Egar knew that much, the same way he knew when steppe brush was dry enough to burn. The runners were less than five hundred paces out from the herd, ground they could cover in less time than it takes a man to piss. Klarn would be late, the horses would not hold, Runi would come off and die there in the grass.

The Dragonbane cursed, unshipped his staff lance, and kicked his Yhelteth- bred warhorse into a charge.

He was almost there when the first of the runners reached Runi, so he saw what was done. The lead ghoul passed Runi's shrieking horse, pivoted on one powerful backward- hinging leg, lashed out with the other. Runi tried to spin with the horse panicking beneath him, made one hopeless thrust with his lance—and then talons like scythe blades clouted him backward out of the saddle. Egar saw him reel to his feet, stumbling, and two more of the runners fell on him. A long, wrenching scream floated up from the grass.

Already at full gallop, Egar played his only remaining card. He hooked back his head and howled, the Majak berserker ululation that had turned blood to ice in the veins of men on a thousand battlefields across the known world. The awful, no- way- back call for death, and company in the dying.

The steppe ghouls heard and their long, pointed heads lifted, bloody- snouted, questing for the threat. For the scant seconds it took, they gaped emptily at the mounted figure that came thundering across the grassland, and then the Dragonbane was upon them.

The first runner took the lance full in the chest and fell back, punched along with the velocity of the horse's charge, scrabbling and spitting blood. Egar reined in hard, twisted and withdrew the lance, quadrupled the size of the wound. Wet, rope- like organs came out on the serrated edges of the blade, tugged and tore and spilled pale fluids as he ripped the weapon clear. The second ghoul reached for him, but the Dragonbane had already turned about, and his warhorse reared to the attack, flailing out with massive steel- shod hooves. The ghoul yelped as one snaking arm got smashed aside, and then the horse danced forward a step as only the Yhelteth trainers could make them, and one hoof sank a terminal dent into the runner's skull. Egar yelled, clung on with his thighs, and reversed his lance in both hands. Blood sprinkled across the air.

Six and a half feet long, known and feared by every soldier who had ever had to face one, the Majak staff lance was traditionally crafted from the long rib of a bull buffalo and fastened at either end with a foot- long double- edged sawtooth blade a handbreadth wide at its base. In earlier years, the iron for these weapons was unreliable, full of impurities and poorly worked in small, mobile forges. Later, hired as mercenaries by the Trelayne League, the Majak learned the technology for a steel that would match their own ferocious instincts in battle, and the lance shafts came to be made of Naom forest wood, specifically shaped and hardened for the purpose. When the Yhelteth armies finally swept north and west against the cities of the League for the first time, they smashed apart like a wave on the waiting steppe nomad line and their lances. It was a military reversal the Empire had not seen in more than a century. In the aftermath, it was said, even Yhelteth's most seasoned warriors quailed at
the damage the Majak weapons had done to their comrades. At the battle of Mayne's Moor, when leave was given to retrieve the bodies of the slain, fully a quarter of the imperial conscript force deserted amid stories that the Majak berserkers had eaten pieces of the corpses. A Yhelteth historian later said of the carnage on the moor that
such scavenging animals that came fed in an agitated state, fearing that some mightier predator had already fallen on the carpet of meat and might yet fall on them.
It was fanciful writing, but it made its point. The Yhelteth soldiers called the lance
ashlan mher thelan,
the twice- fanged demon.

The runners came at him on both sides.

Egar struck quarterstaff- style, high left and low right, while his horse was still dropping back to all fours. The low blade gutted the right- hand runner, the high blocked a downward- lashing arm from the left and smashed it. The injured ghoul shrilled and Egar paddled the staff. He got an eye and some scrapings of skull on the left blade, nothing from the other side where the gutted runner was down in the grass and screaming as it bled out. The ghoul whose eye and arm he had taken commenced staggering and pawing at the air like a drunk caught in a clothesline. The rest—

Sudden, familiar hissing, a solid
thunk,
and the injured creature shrilled again as one of Klarn's steel- headed arrows jutted abruptly out of its chest. It reached down with its remaining functional hand, plucked puzzledly at the protruding thing, and a second arrow took it through the skull. For a moment it clawed up at the new injury and then its brain caught up with the damage, and the long pale body crashed into the grass beside its gutted companion.

Egar counted three more ghouls, hunkered down and hesitating on the other side of Runi's body. They seemed unsure what to do. With Klarn nudging his horse in from the side, a fresh arrow nocked and at his eye, the odds had tipped. No one Egar had met, not even Ringil or Archeth, knew if the long runners were a race with the reasoning powers of men or not. But they had been harrying the Majak and their herds for centuries, and the two sides had each other's measure.

Egar dismounted into sudden quiet.

“If they move,” he told Klarn.

Hefting his lance in both hands, he stalked through the grass toward Runi and the creatures that wanted him. Behind his unmoving features, in the pit of his stomach, he felt the inevitable worm of fear. If they rushed him now, Klarn might have time to put two shafts in the air at most, and the runners stood close to three yards tall when they cared to.

He'd just given away his advantage.

But Runi was down, bleeding into the cold steppe earth, and every second he lay there meant the difference between reaching the healers in time and not.

The ghouls shifted in the sea of grass, hunched white backs like the whales he had once seen sounding off the Trelayne coast. Their narrow, fanged faces hovered at the end of long skulls and muscular necks, watching him slyly. There might be another one crouched prone somewhere, as he had seen them do when stalking. He could not remember now how many he'd counted in that first glimpse.

It seemed suddenly colder.

He reached Runi, and the chill gripped him tighter. The boy was dead, chest and belly laid open, eyes staring up at the sky from his grimy face. It had at least been quick; the ground around him was drenched with the sudden emptying of blood from his body. In the fading light, it seemed black.

Egar felt the pounding come up through the soles of his feet like drums. His teeth clenched and his nostrils flared with it. It swelled and washed out the chill, exploded through the small spaces in his throat and behind his eyes. For a moment he stood in silence, and it felt as if something was rooting him to the ground.

His eyes snapped up to the three steppe ghouls in the gloom ahead of him. He lifted his lance in one trembling hand and threw back his head and
howled,
howled as if it might crack the sky, might reach Runi's soul on its path along the Sky Road, sunder the band he walked on, and tumble him back to earth again.

Time ceased. Now there was only death.

He barely heard the hiss of Klarn's first arrow past his flank as he stormed toward the remaining runners, still howling.

he window shattered with a clear, high tinkling and whatever had come through it thumped hard on the threadbare carpet in the center of the room.

Ringil shifted in the disarray of bed linen and forced one eye open. The edges of the broken glass glinted down at him in sunlight far too bright to look at directly in his present condition. He rolled over on his back, one arm pawing about on the bed for his companion of the night before. His hand encountered only an expanse of patchily damp sheet. The boy was gone, as they usually were well before the sun came up. His mouth tasted like the inside of a dueling gauntlet and his head, it dawned on him slowly, was thumping like a Majak war drum.

Padrow's Day. Hurrah.

He rolled back over and groped around on the floor beside the bed until his fingers brushed a heavy, irregularly shaped object. Further exploration proved it to be a stone, wrapped in what felt like expensive
parchment. He dredged it up to his face, confirmed what his fingers had told him, and unraveled the paper. It was a carelessly torn piece of a larger sheet, scented and scrawled with words in Trelayne script.

Get Up.

The writing was familiar.

Ringil groaned and sat up amid the sheets. Wrapping himself in one of them, he clambered off the bed and stumbled to the newly broken window. Down in the snow- sprinkled courtyard, men sat on horses, all dressed in steel cuirasses and helmets that winked mercilessly in the sun. A carriage stood in their midst, curved lines in the snow marking where it had turned to a halt. A woman in fur- lined hood and Trelayne robes of rank stood by the carriage, shading her eyes as she looked up.

“Good afternoon, Ringil,” she called.

“Mother.” Ringil suppressed another groan. “What do you want?”

“Well, I'd say breakfast, but the hour is long gone. Did you enjoy your Padrow's Eve?”