The Steel Remains

chapter 12

Faileh Rakan’s find:

A tangled muss of graying chestnut hair, face lined with hardship more than age, and frightened eyes that tracked the Throne Eternal uniforms as they prowled about her or stood and examined their weapons as if they might soon need use. Her hands were scabbed and scraped and still bled in a couple of places, coarse contrast with a worked gold band on one of her fingers. Her lips had cracked during her privation; now they trembled with half-voiced mutterings, and she cradled her own right arm in the left as if it were a nursing infant. Her clothing stank.

“She’s not injured,” said Rakan bluntly. “It’s some kind of shock.”

“You don’t say.”

They had her draped in a horse blanket and seated on a double-folded tent groundsheet in the angle of two shattered low stone walls, pretty much all that was left of a harbor storage shed smashed apart by whatever energies had gotten loose during the attack. The timbers remaining at the least wrecked corner were charred back to angled, black stumps above the woman’s head—Archeth thought involuntarily of a gallows. The ghost-reek of burning still hung in the air. She glanced around reflexively.

“Where’s the invigilator?”

“His holiness has retired to camp,” Rakan said tonelessly. He nodded up the slope of emptied buildings and rubble piles. “In the main market square with the rest of the men. He left before we found her, said it was important that he go to pray for us. It is getting dark, of course.”

It was elaborately done, in true Yhelteth fashion. The captain’s dark, crop-bearded face stayed inexpressive as tanned leather. There was just the hint of creasing in the lines around the jet eyes to match the momentary contempt in the last few syllables he’d spoken.

Archeth took it and ran with it, met Rakan’s eyes and nodded. “Then let’s keep him up there. No sense in disturbing his prayers for something like this, right? I can ask any questions we need answering right here.”

“We’ve already tried questioning her, milady.” The captain leaned in closer, as if to demonstrate something, and the ragged woman flinched back. “Not getting any sense out of her at all. Tried to feed her, too, but she’ll only take water. I guess we could—”

“Thank you, Captain. I think I’ll take it from here.”

Rakan shrugged. “Suit yourself, milady. I need to get a picket organized for the camp, just in case we have visitors tonight. I’ll leave you a couple of men. Bring her up to camp when you’re done, we’ll try to feed her again.” He nodded up past the charred timberwork at the sky. “Best if you don’t take too long.

Like the invigilator said, going to be dark soon.”

He made brief obeisance, turned and gestured three soldiers to stay. The rest followed him away up the street. Shanta stayed, hovering on the far side of the broken-down wall like a hesitant buyer outside a shop. Archeth crouched to the woman’s eye level.

“Can I get you anything?” she asked gently.

The woman gaped at her, fixed, Archeth supposed, on the intensely black skin.

“Kiriath,” she mumbled. “Look at your walls, Kiriath. Look what they did. Get between a swamp dog and its dinner, look what it gets you.”

“Yes.” Archeth had no idea what a swamp dog was. The woman’s accent was not local; she had a way of eliding the Tethanne sibilants that suggested it was not her cradle tongue. “Can you tell me your name?”

The woman looked away. “How’s that going to help?”

“As you wish. I am Archeth Indamaninarmal, special envoy of his imperial radiance Jhiral Khimran the Second.” She made the Teth horseman’s gathering gesture, formally ornate, right-handed across her body to the shoulder. “Sworn in service to all peoples of the Revelation.”

“I’m not of the tribes,” the woman muttered, still not looking at her. “My name is Elith. I’m from Ennishmin.”

Oho.

Archeth’s lips tightened as if against pain, way before she could beat back the reflex. Her eyes darted across the woman’s clothing, found the frayed edges of orange at the breast where the kartagh, the sewn badge of nonconvert citizenry, had been ripped away. No mystery as to why Elith would have done that—marauders and criminals throughout the Empire took nonadherence to the Revelation more or less as license for their depredations; in any raid or other low-grade thuggery, the infidel was an easy mark.

Imperial courts tended to concur: Outrages against the property or persons of nonconverts were consistently underpunished, occasionally ignored. When iron clashed and hooves thundered through your streets, you were well advised to tear off the legally required identification of your second-class citizenship quick, before anyone with a blade and a bloodlust-stiffened prick spotted it.

“We came south,” Elith went on, as if blaming Archeth for something. “We were told to come, told we’d be safer here. The Emperor extends his hand in friendship. Now look.”

Archeth remembered the long limping columns out of Ennishmin, the desolate tendrils of smoke from the burning settlements they left behind, scrawled on the washed-out winter sky like a writ in accusation.

She’d sat her warhorse on a scorched rise and watched the weary faces go by, mostly on foot, the odd cart piled with possessions and huddled children, seemingly washed along on the flow like a raft on a slow river. She’d listened to the boisterous clowning and squabbling of a group of imperial troops at her back as they rooted through piles of loot gathered out of the hundreds of homes before they were put to the torch. Shame was a dull heat in her face.

She remembered the rage on Ringil’s.

“Listen to me, Elith,” she tried again. “Whoever did this will face the Emperor’s justice. That’s why I’m here.”

Elith gave up the choked edge of a sneer.

Archeth nodded. “You may not trust us, I understand that. But please at least tell me what you saw. You lose nothing by it.”

Now the woman looked directly at her.

“What I saw? I saw the end of the world, I saw angels descending from the band, to make good the prophecies told and lay waste all human endeavor and pride. Is that what you want me to say?”

They were words out of the Revelation. “On Repentance,” fifth song, verses ten to sixteen or thereabouts. Archeth seated herself tiredly on the stump of the wall.

“I don’t want you to say anything,” she said mildly. “I could use the truth, if you feel like telling it.

Otherwise, we could just sit here for a while. Maybe get you some more water.”

Elith stared down at her own hands for what seemed like a very long time. The sky grew visibly darker against the fire-blackened timbers. A soft breeze wandered into the harbor and scuffed at the water there. Rakan’s men shifted about on the quay.

Archeth waited.

At one point Shanta opened his mouth, but Archeth shut him down with a savage glance and a single tight gesture.

If the woman from Ennishmin saw any of this, she gave no sign.

“We prayed for them to come,” she said finally. Her voice was a wrung-out whisper, all emotion long since scorched away. “All through that winter, we sacrificed and prayed, and your soldiers came instead.

They burned our homes, they raped my daughters, and when my youngest son tried to stop them, they hung him on a pike by his stomach, in the corner of the room. So that he could watch.”

Archeth leaned elbows on knees, pressed her palms together, and rested her chin on the blade it made.

“When they were done, they took Erlo down, because the soldier needed the pike back, and they left him there on the floor, bleeding to death. They didn’t kill him, they said it was imperial mercy. And they laughed.” Elith never looked up from her hands as she talked. It was as if they fascinated her, just by still being there at the ends of her wrists. “They killed Gishlith, my youngest, because she bit one of them when it was his turn, but they let the others live. Ninea killed herself later, she was pregnant. Mirin lived, she was always the strongest.”

A long, almost silent sigh scraped its way up Archeth’s tightened throat. She swallowed.

“Did you have a husband?”

“He was away. Fighting the Scaled Folk, with our other sons. He came home after, burned and broken from the dragonfire at Rajal Beach. He saw our sons die there, that’s what really broke him, not losing his arm and face like they said. He never.” Elith stopped and glanced up at Archeth. “Mirin left, she’s in Oronak now, she married a sailor. We don’t hear from her.”

Which meant nothing good. Reliable mail was one thing the Empire was good for, the couriers ran like clockwork since Akal’s father’s time, and Oronak wasn’t that far down the coast. Archeth had been there a couple of times, it was a shit-hole. Damp, salt-scoured wooden buildings and boardwalks across gray sand, no paved streets beyond the port frontage. A raddled street whore for every corner, and plenty of business for all of them streaming from the merchant ships that jostled for berth space in the harbor.

“He ran.” Elith held Archeth’s gaze this time, eyes suddenly flaring, offering to share a disbelief the black woman didn’t yet understand. “They came, they finally came, and he ran. With the others, into the hills. I stood in the street and I screamed at them, I screamed for a reckoning, or death if they’d give it to me, but Werleck ran. He ran.”

Archeth frowned. “A reckoning?”

“We prayed. ” As if to an idiot, as if to someone who hadn’t been listening to a word she’d said. “I told you. All winter, we prayed for them to come. The Scaled Folk closing from the north, the imperials from the south and east. We prayed for intervention, and they did not come. We sacrificed, and they left us to our fate. And now they come, now, after ten years, with my sons and daughters dead in the stolen soil of Ennishmin, now when we’re scattered like flaxseed in the lands of our despoilers. What f*cking use now! ”

Her voice splintered apart on the last words, as if something had torn in her throat. Archeth glanced up at Shanta. The engineer raised an eyebrow and said nothing. Rakan’s men stood about and affected not to have heard. Archeth leaned forward, offered her open hand in a gesture whose symbolism she wasn’t entirely sure of herself.

“Elith, help me to understand this. You prayed for these . . . creatures to appear. You uh . . . you summoned them? To protect you.”

“Ten f*cking years gone,” Elith mumbled desolately to herself. “What f*cking use now?”

“Yes, ten years ago, in Ennishmin. And now they’ve come, finally. But what are they, Elith? What are we talking about here?”

The woman from Ennishmin looked up at her, and in the grimed, careworn damage of her face, something almost crafty, almost malicious, seemed to pass behind her watery bright eyes.

“You won’t stop them, you know,” she said.

“Okay, we won’t stop them.” Archeth nodded along, playing reasonable. “Fair enough. But tell me anyway, just so I know. What are they? What did you summon up?”

Elith’s mouth twisted, hesitant. She seemed to twitch at the end of a rope Archeth couldn’t see.

And then.

“Dwenda, ” she enunciated, like someone teaching the word.

And sat back and grinned, a trembling, staring, broken-toothed rictus that Archeth knew she’d need krinzanz to get out of her head that night.