The Steel Remains (54 page)

Ringil spared him a weary look. “Oh, you're a real fucking comedian, Darash. Yeah, Seethlaw was going to let me go home. He was going to let me go because he thought he could control me, and he thought I didn't give a shit about any of this, about the Empire or the League. And you know what, he was right, I
don't.”
The violence jumped out in his voice, sudden and glad. “I think your beloved Jhiral Khimran is a jumped- up little turd masquerading as a leader of men, and I think his beloved father wasn't very much better. And I think the men who control Trelayne are carved from the very same richly stinking shit, they just haven't been as successful up north at feeding it to the rest of us, that's all.”

“You'll answer for that, Eskiath.” Rakan made no dramatic moves, but his face was a mask of cold intent. “No man, imperial citizen or not, speaks of my Emperor that way and lives. The sworn law of Yhelteth forbids it, and I'm sworn to uphold that same law.”

“Oi, Rakan.” Egar jerked his chin at the Throne Eternal captain. “You'll have to come through me first. Bear that in mind, won't you.”

“He'll have to live through the night first, as well,” said Ringil somberly. “None of us is going to have recourse to law, imperial or otherwise, unless we stop Seethlaw in his tracks.”

“Or we fall back,” said Archeth. “We take what we know and we run south. We can make Khartaghnal in three days if we push it. There's a levy garrison there, four hundred men under arms at least, and they have King's Reach messenger relay facilities on to the plains cities. We can get a message through to a heartland military governor inside another two days.”

“Makes sense,” agreed Halgan.

“No,” said Ringil.

Archeth sighed. “It does make sense, Gil. Look—”

“I said no. We aren't going to do that.” Ringil stared around the table, met their eyes one at a time the way he had the captains at Gallows Gap. “We are going to stop them here.”

“Gil, I've got seventeen men, that's including these three sitting here now. With you two and me, that's twenty. The militia's going to run at the first sign of trouble, you know that.”

“Like we're planning to, you mean?” Egar said, grinning.

Darash bristled. “This is a tactical withdrawal we're talking about, Dragonbane.”

“Is it?” Egar shook his head. “Well, you know, there's a Skaranak saying for times like these:
Running away just makes your arse a bigger target.
If the dwenda can follow us downriver through the swamp the way they did last night, they can certainly track us across the uplands before we hit Khartaghnal. Three days means three nights, maybe four. You ready to stay awake that long, ready to fight worn out and maybe in motion on ground they'll choose to suit themselves? Sounds like a fucking stupid idea to me.”

“Egar, it's like I said to Gil.” Archeth spread her hands, gestured at the gathered company. “It's twenty of us, against something we can't quantify, something that scared my people four thousand years ago and still scares the Helmsmen now.”

The Majak shrugged. “Ghost stories. Come the crunch, it can't be any scarier than a dragon, can it? Look, I killed two of these fucking dwenda things last night, and like I said they bleed and fall down just like men. And we all know how to kill men, don't we?”

“Everyone's afraid of what they don't understand,” Ringil said quietly. “You want to remember that, Archidi. The dwenda are as uncertain of us as we are of them. They've got less reason, but they don't know that, and anyway it's not a rational thing. You know what Pelmarag said about your poor, scared shitless marine garrison at Khangset?
Fucking humans everywhere,
he said,
running around screaming and jabbering in the dark like the lost souls of apes, you know, cut one down and there's another right fucking behind him.
What does that sound like to you?”

The others looked at him in silence. No one offered an answer.

“And you, Archeth? Look at you, look at what you represent to them. They have legends about the Black Folk, the way we do about them. Horror stories about how you destroyed their cities and drove them out into the gray places. They talk about you as if you were demons, the same way we used to talk about the Scaled Folk until we understood them. The same way your fucking imperial history books probably
still
talk about them. Look, when Seethlaw and I arrived in the swamp, there was a minor panic on because one of the dwenda scouts had heard some
artifact scavengers talking about a black- skinned warrior somewhere in the vicinity. Which I guess probably
was
you, now I come to think about it, but that's not the point. Even that, even the
rumor
of you, was enough to worry them.”

He rested his arms on the table, and his gaze hooded for a moment. When he looked up again, Archeth caught his stare and a chill slithered between her shoulders and up her neck. It was, for just a moment, as if a stranger had climbed into Ringil Eskiaths skin and stolen his eyes.

“When I trained at the Academy,” he said tonelessly, “they told me there is nothing in this world to fear more than a man who wants to kill you and knows how to do it. We make a stand here, and we can teach that truth to the dwenda. We can stop them, we can send them back to the gray places to think again about taking this world.”

More silence.

The moment tipped, was falling away, when Rakan cleared his throat.

“Why do you care?” he asked. “Five minutes ago you're telling us how you don't give a shit about the Empire or the League. Now suddenly you want to take a stand, make a difference. What's that about?”

Ringil looked coldly at him.

“What's it about, Faileh Rakan? It's about the fucking war, that's what it's about. You're right, I don't give a shit about your Emperor and I care even less about the scum that run Trelayne and the League. But I won't watch them go to war again. I've been to war, you know, to save civilization from the reptile hordes. I bled for it, I saw friends and other men die for it. And then I watched men like you piss it away again, the civilization we'd saved, in squabbles over a few hundred square miles of territory and what language the people get to speak there, what color their skin and hair is and what kind of religious horseshit they get crammed down their throats. I saw men here, right fucking here in Ennishmin, who'd fought for the human alliance, some who'd lost limbs or eyes or their sanity, driven out of their homes with their families and herded onto the road to march or die, all to balance up some filthy fucking piece of political expedience Akal the so- called Great and his erstwhile allies could all save face on, shut your
fucking
mouth, Rakan, I'm not finished yet.”

Ringil's eyes glittered as he stared the Throne Eternal captain down.

“I watched men who'd given everything come back home to Tre-layne and see their women and children sold into slavery to pay debts they didn't know they'd incurred because they'd been away fighting at the time. I saw those slaves shipped south to feed your fucking Empire's brothels and factories and noble homes, and I saw other men who'd given
nothing
in the war get rich off that trade and the sacrifice of those men and women and children.
And I will not watch it happen again.”

Abruptly, he was on his feet. He drew a deep, shuddering breath. His voice grew low and grating, almost another man's altogether.

“Seethlaw doesn't know the Empire, but I do. If we run south, and if we make it, then Jhiral will send his massed levies, and Seethlaw will bring on the dwenda, and behind him will come whatever cobbled-together private armies this fuckwit cabal has managed to assemble in the north, and it will start
all over again.
And I will not fucking permit that, not again. We stop them here. It ends here, and if we die here, ending it, I for one won't be too fucking bothered. You will either stand with me, or all your talk of honor and duty and necessary death is a posturing courtier's lie. We stop them here, together. If I see anyone try to leave between now and tonight, I will hamstring their horse and break their fucking legs and
I will leave them out in the street for the dwenda.
There will
be
no more fucking discussion, there will be no more talk of tactical withdrawal.
We stop them here!”

He drew another hard breath. He stared around at them all. His voice dropped, grew suddenly quiet again, and matter- of- fact.

“We stop them here.”

He walked out. Slammed the door open, left it gaping on their silence. They heard his boots clatter down the stairs, sound fading.

Egar looked around the faces at the table and shrugged.

“I'm with the faggot,” he said.

he dwenda came, finally, with blue fire and terrible, unhuman force, in the small, cold hours before dawn.

AMONG THOSE WHO SURVIVED THE ENCOUNTER, THERE WOULD BE A
lot of speculation over whether it was planned that way. Whether the dwenda knew enough about humans to understand that this was the best time to take their prey, the lowest ebb of the human spirit. Or whether perhaps they simply knew that a long, wakeful, but uneventful night of waiting would wear any enemy down.

Or perhaps they were waiting themselves. Gathering themselves for the assault in the safety of the gray places, or attending to some millennia- old ritual that must be observed there before battle was joined. Seethlaw certainly implied— according to Ringil's rather overwrought and patchy testimony, anyway— that ritual was a matter of
huge cultural significance among the Aldrain. Blood sacrifice was apparently required before the invasion of Ennishmin could be launched. Perhaps then, in this smaller matter also, there were solemn specifics to be honored before the slaughter could begin.

The speculation would go back and forth without end, turn and turn again, snapping at its own tail for lack of solid evidence one way or the other. Perhaps this, perhaps that. Humans, short- lived and locked out of the gray places for life, do not do well with uncertainty. If they cannot have what
might,
what
could,
what
should,
and perhaps most awful of all what
should have
been, then they will dream it up instead, imagine it into being in whatever twisted or beautiful form suits, and then drive their fellows to their knees in chains by the thousand and million to pretend in chorus that it
is so.
The Kiriath might have saved them from this, eventually, with time, had perhaps even tried to do so once or twice already, but they came too subtly, terribly damaged into this world to begin with, and in the end they were driven away again. And so men went on hammering with their bloodied foreheads at the limits of their certainties, like insane prisoners condemned to a lifetime in a cell whose door they have locked themselves.

You've got to laugh,
Ringil would probably have said.

No, you've got to unlock the fucking door,
Archeth might have replied. But of course, by then the key was long lost.

Perhaps, though
— look at it this way, makes a lot of sense if you think about it, man—
the dwenda were delayed by simple necessity. Perhaps navigation in the gray places was not the easy matter Seethlaw had made it appear. Perhaps, once in the Aldrain marches, the dwenda must cast about like wolves for spoor of Ringil and his sudden, murderous new friend from the steppes. Perhaps they must find the thin cool scent of the river with painstaking care, and sift it for the place where their prey disembarked. And perhaps even then, with their targets found, the dwenda storm- callers must struggle for position the way a swimmer struggles to hold station against a current.

Could be.
Those who managed to live through the battle would nod and shrug, touch old wounds and shiver.
Who the fuck knows. Yeah, could be.

Or could be— Ringil would have liked this one— it was politics that
held them up, the disorderly individual dissent that he'd seen playing out among the dwenda. Perhaps it took Seethlaw awhile to convince his fellow Aldrain that this was something that needed to be done.

Or perhaps it was the other way around. Perhaps it was Seethlaw who had to be convinced, or at least to convince himself.

And so it went pointlessly on, the theorizing and head shaking and wonder among survivors of the dwenda encounter at Beksanara— or Ibiksinri, to give it the name those who built it would recognize, those who, for political convenience and a treaty not one in a hundred would have been educated well enough to read, were driven away in cold and hunger or simply butchered there in the street.

Ibiksinri, then. Site once again for blades unleashed and blood spilled and screaming across the murderous night.
Funny,
Ringil might have said,
how nothing ever fucking changes.

The dwenda came in the small, cold hours before dawn.

But before that:

NOT LONG AFTER MIDDAY, THE SUN CAME OUT.

The villagers, who knew the value of such moments, got out and about in its warmth immediately. Bedclothes were brought out and hung up to air, lunch tables were set up in the street and in the small gardens of those homes that had them. Down at the river, while Rakan and some of his men watched in bemusement, the villagers stripped down to underwear and flung themselves into what was still very cold water, and splashed about like children. If the presence of the intensely black Kiriath woman and her soldiers put any kind of damper on the proceedings, it was hard to notice.