The Steel Remains

chapter 2

The 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 Ishlinichan 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 wouldn’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 f*cking 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.

F*ck’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 f*cking 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 f*cking southerners with their perfumed manners and woman-soft skins.

Yeah. But twenty years ago you were an ignorant f*ck. Twenty years ago you didn’t know your dick from a sword hilt. Twenty f*cking years ago—

Twenty f*cking 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 f*cking 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 f*cking 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 f*cking 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, f*cking, 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.

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 youngest—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, f*cking, 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 f*cking 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.