The Steel Remains

chapter 20

Jhiral let them go home not long after midnight. He appeared to have satisfied himself that everything possible was being done and, perhaps more importantly, that his grip on his advisers was no less secure than it had been before the Khangset pot boiled over. He nodded them out with the minimum of ceremony. Faileh Rakan disappeared into the bowels of the palace without a word beyond the necessary honorifics, and Archeth walked out to the front gates with Mahmal Shanta.

“Seemed to go well enough,” the naval engineer said when they got outside.

She couldn’t tell if there was an edge of irony on his words or not. Krinzanz was good for a lot of things, but it was not a subtle drug. The finer points of human interaction tended to go out the window. She shrugged and yawned, checked the immediate vicinity for nosy minions, habitual caution so ingrained it was reflex.

“Jhiral’s not stupid,” she said. “He knows we’ve got to nip this in the bud. If word gets out the Empire can’t protect its ports, we’re going to have a southern trade crisis on our hands.”

“Which our competitive little city-state friends in the north will be only too pleased to exploit.”

“Wouldn’t you?”

Shanta did his own reflexive sweep of the surroundings. “What I would do, my lady, is not fit conversation for environs such as these. Perhaps some other time, over coffee aboard my barge?”

“Perhaps.”

“Did you mean what you said about the Helmsmen? Will they view this as a war context?”

“How the f*ck would I know?” Wearily now, despite a residual wakefulness. Her eyes felt gritty and smeared open. “The one down in dry dock I was trying to debrief last week talks about as much as a Demlarashan mystic in midfast. Makes about as much f*cking sense as well.”

They reached the gates and had to wait in the slightly chilly air while slaves brought Archeth’s horse from the stables, and a carriage was summoned for Shanta. She pulled on her gauntlets and shook off a tiny shiver. Winter was creeping in early this year. It’d be good to get home, peel off her travel-stained clothes, and stand barefoot on heated floors in the cozy warmth of her apartments. Let the last of the krin burn away, give in to sleep. Along the shallow zigzags of the Kiriath-paved approach causeway, pale lamps studded a seductive path down through the darkness the palace mound was sunk in, and into Yhelteth’s carpet of lights at the bottom. The firefly clustering of the city’s illumination spread wide in all directions, split down the center by the dark arm of the estuary. Closer in, Archeth picked out the Boulevard of the Ineffable Divine, lit in bright double rows and straight as a sword blade laid across the more haphazard patterning of the other streets. It seemed almost close enough to touch.

Shanta was watching her keenly.

“They say the ones that stayed are angry,” he murmured. “The Helmsmen, I mean. They feel abandoned, resentful that the Kiriath would not take them.”

She looked at the lights. “Yeah, they say that.”

“That’s got to affect their attitude to the Empire as well, I’d imagine. Got to put pressure on any kind of loyalty they might have.”

“Oh, look. They got Idrashan out already.” Archeth nodded to where a slave was leading her horse out of the stable block. “So that’s me, then. G’night, Mahmal. Hope your carriage doesn’t take too long.

Thanks for coming along.”

The engineer smiled gently at her. “My pleasure. It has certainly been instructive.”

She left him there and went to meet the slave halfway. Mounted up, waved a final, wordless farewell to Shanta, and urged her horse out the gate.

On the first sloping downturn of the causeway, she stood in the stirrups and looked back. The naval engineer was an indistinct figure through the railed iron of the gates above, backlit into silhouette by bright-burning torches behind him on the palace walls. But she knew beyond doubt that he was still watching her.

So f*cking what? She left the palace behind and let the horse find its own way home through the stew of streets on the south side. Shanta’s no f*cking different from the rest of the old guard. Holed up in their positions of privilege and moaning in their little cabal corners about how much better it was when Akal was still around.

Well? Wasn’t it?

Akal was still around when we smashed the rebels at Vanbyr. Let’s not forget that inconvenient little blemish on the face of prior glory.

He was on his sickbed by then.

He still gave the f*cking order.

Yes. And you obeyed it.

She passed a sleeping figure, curled into the angle of a darkened smithy’s yard. Ragged cloak and hood; emblazoned on its folds she recognized the sable-on-white horse insignia of an imperial cavalryman. Hard to know if you could take that at face value or not—the city was full of demobbed and damaged soldiery sleeping in the streets, but military garb elicited more pity when you were begging, whoever you might actually be, so it was well worth the risk of stealing it if you got the chance. It could get you fed, even taken in on winter nights if the cold bit hard enough or it rained. Archeth knew a brothel near the harbor whose madame prided herself on letting derelict veterans sleep in her laundry shack. She’d even been known to send out girls from the more raddled end of her stable to provide free hand jobs on feast days.

You found patriotism in the strangest places.

She slowed the horse to a halt and peered hard at the cloak-wrapped form, trying to decide. Something about the posture rang true, the laconic efficiency in the way cloak and hood were used. But without waking the man up . . .

She shrugged, dipped in her purse, and found a five-elemental piece. Leaned over and tossed the coin so it clipped one wall in the corner and hit the paved floor with a loud chink. The figure grunted and moved, and a right hand groped out from under the cloak until it found the money. Ring and little finger gone, along with most of that half of the hand. Archeth grimaced. It was a common enough injury among the horse regiments: Yhelteth cavalry swords were notoriously badly provided with protection for the hand.

One powerful, well-judged slice down the blade from a skilled opponent, and you were a cavalryman no longer.

She tossed another five elementals down onto the drape of the cloak, and clucked Idrashan onward.

A couple of streets later and nearly home, she passed through a small, leafy square once called Angel’s Wing Place but now renamed for the victory at Gallows Gap. It was a place she’d walk to sometimes when she needed to get out of the house, both before and after the war, though she’d preferred it before.

Then it had hosted a bustling fruit market. Now they’d built a self-important little three-sided stone memorial in the center, grandiose bas-relief images of exclusively imperial soldiers standing on piles of reptile dead, a central column designed to look vaguely like a sword thrusting skyward. There were stone benches built into the structure and lettered homages in rhyme to OUR GLORIOUS IMPERIAL COMMANDER, OUR SONS OF THE CITY INSPIRED. Archeth had read the compositions enough times to have them, unwillingly, by heart, had even, once, at a court ball, been briefly introduced to the poet who’d penned them.

Of course, one was not actually there at the battle, this smirking minor noble had told her, and sighed manfully. However much one might have desired it. But I did visit Gallows Gap last year, and one’s muse can always be relied upon in such cases to catch the echoes of the event in the melancholy quiet that remains.

Indeed. But there must have been something in her face despite her best efforts, because the smirk slipped a little, and the poet’s tone turned anxious.

You, uhm, you were not there yourself, milady? At the battle?

Oh no, she managed urbanely. But my father died on the expeditionary retreat, and two of my outlander friends led the final Gallows Gap charge.

He left her alone after that.

Home, in the courtyard, she handed Idrashan over to the night watchman and let herself in through a side entrance. The house was lit with lamps turned low, and it was quiet—she kept servant numbers to a minimum, and manumitted the slaves she occasionally bought as soon as custom and city regulations would permit. Kefanin, she guessed, would be dozing in his cubicle by the front door, waiting for her return. She saw no reason to wake him and went directly upstairs to her chambers.

In the dressing room, she hung up her knives, wrestled her boots off one after the other and tossed them into a corner, shucked the rest of her clothes like an old skin and stood there a minute luxuriating in the feel of the warm air on her body. Then, as she bent to scratch an itch on her calf, her own smell mugged her. She wrinkled her nose, glanced at the tapestried bellpull by the wall.

Ah, come on. F*cking Scaled Folk campaign veteran. You bathed under a waterfall in the upper Trell, winter of ’51. That so long ago?

It was ten years, truth be told, time that had crept up on her somehow; but the fading edge of the krin was a blessing, a twitching impatience under her skin, and she let that carry her. She left the bell unrung and went through to the bathing chamber, not relishing the thought of a cold-water scrub but unwilling to go through the rigmarole of calling down to the basement, getting the slaves to stoke up the furnace, fill the boiling pans, waiting the time it took while the water heated and they carried it upstairs and—

The water in the big alabaster bathing jugs was not cold.

She blinked, stirred a hand loosely through the water in one of the jugs again to make sure. No question, it was still lukewarm. Kefanin, proving himself once again worth his weight in precious gems, she supposed. She grinned and went through her ablutions with a small measure of relief, scrubbed the worst offending portions of her body, and rinsed herself off. She took a towel from the rack, wrapped herself in it, and wandered through to the bedchamber.

There was someone in her bed.

As she slammed to a halt in the doorway, the scent on the towel she wore caught up with her. She knew it from somewhere, but it was not her own.

“Hoy,” she snapped. “You’re supposed to be in the guest wi—”

But it was not Elith.

It took her a moment to place the candlewax-colored hair and the pale features, blurry with sleep, as the woman propped herself up in the bed. It was the scent that triggered the recall, the tight wet grip of Jhiral’s hand on her jaw five days ago, the salt-smelling damp of the slave girl’s juices drying on his fingers. Archeth felt her nostrils flare slightly at the memory, and abruptly she didn’t trust herself to say anything else.

“I—” The girl was clearly terrified. She pushed herself upright in the bed, slipping on the silk sheets.

Babbling in Naomic. “I was commanded, milady. The Emperor himself, it was not my doing, I would not wish . . .”

And now Archeth remembered Jhiral’s smug face when she showed up in the throne room. I understand you had to go home before coming to see us. Did you find everything there to your satisfaction?

His prurient, conspiratorial intimacy in the Chamber of Confidences five days earlier. She’s new. What do you think? Would you like me to send her to your bedchamber when I’m finished with her? And then, the throwaway decision, the whim. Come, I shall send the girl to you as soon as you return.

It didn’t do to underestimate Jhiral’s whims. They were all still learning that, up at the palace and across the city below. You’d think the lesson would have sunk in by now, but it seemed that—even for Archeth Indamaninarmal, most shrewd and pragmatic of imperial advisers—it hadn’t.

Archeth had a moment of retrospective sympathy for Kefanin. She recalled the mayor-domo’s face when she handed Elith over, his single, swiftly overridden attempt at a warning. Milady, there is already . . .

. . . an unexpected guest in your house.

. . . an unexpected young female slave awaiting your approval and command.

Tiny, trickling tingle in her belly at that particular thought.

Stop that.

. . . an unexpected and gracious gift of the Emperor, delivered and imposed with no possibility of demurral.

It explained what the girl was doing in her bedchamber. Jhiral liked his commands to be carried out to the letter, and didn’t mind detailing what would happen if they were not. The imperial messenger who brought the girl would have instructed Kefanin minutely, she supposed; and Kefanin, outlander by birth and slave from age five up, summarily castrated at fifteen, less than four years of manumission and citizenship to his name, mayor-domo or not, would have sprung to obey.

Archeth cleared her throat. Mumbled. “All right, fine. I see. You can—”

But the girl threw back the covers and came out of the bed anyway, naked, curve of hip and pale, bisected arse, soft, heavy swing of breasts, and crawled on her hands and knees across the rug to Archeth’s feet, and knelt there.

Archeth gritted her teeth.

“I was told to please you, milady.” Accent thick and intoxicatingly exotic as it softened and slithered on the Tethanne syllables. Her hair fell over her face. “In any way you see fit.”

It had been so long, so very, very long.

She let one hand fall toward the girl’s bowed head—

—she’s a slave, Archeth—

—snatched it back. Her heart felt abruptly like a panicked bird in a cage. She closed her eyes with the force of it. The blood thumped through her veins at jolting, krin-notched speed.

You are not human, Archidi. Tears in Grashgal’s eyes as he stood on the fireship’s gangway at the An-Monal dock. Never think, because we cannot take you with us, that you are human. You are Archeth, daughter of Flaradnam, of the Kiriath clan Indamaninarmal. Remember it in adversity.

You are one of us, you always will be. You are not like them.

And then, of course, it was easy.

She swallowed and opened her eyes. Summoned a dry, self-possessed irony into her voice.

“The Emperor is generous beyond all bounds. It’s truly fortunate he is not here, for I am unsure what words I would find to thank him.”

She tucked the towel a little tighter around her. Self-possession or not, she did not trust herself to have the girl rise and stand facing her.

“I will no doubt be able to find work for you in my household, but for now I can think of nothing obvious.

You should sleep until morning and then we will talk. What is your name?”

“Ishgrim.” It was barely a murmur.

“Good. Then go back to bed, Ishgrim. It’s late. I will summon you tomorrow.”

She turned and headed rapidly back into the dressing room, so she would not have to watch all that long-limbed, full-breasted flesh get up off the floor and move away from her.

SHE FLUNG ON A DRESSING GOWN, STABBED HER FEET INTO SLIPPERS. Faced herself in the mirror with a scowl, and then went loudly down the staircase. It woke Kefanin up and brought him hurrying out of the cubicle by the door.

“Oh, milady. You are already—”

“Yeah. Already home, already seen what’s in my bed. The Emperor is most pressing in his generosity, is he not.”

Kefanin inclined his head. “Just so, milady. I would have preferred—”

“Yeah, me too. Did our other guest settle in okay?”

“I believe so. She ate shortly after sunset and then retired.”

“Good.” She yawned. “I’m going to the east wing study. Can you bring me a decent bottle of wine from the cellar and something to eat?”

“Immediately, milady.”

“Are the lamps lit there?”

“No, milady. But I have a lantern here that—”

“Good enough.” She swiped up the lantern from its rack by the door, tinkered with it until the flame brightened. “Oh yeah, and get me some krinzanz while you’re at it, would you? There’s a bottle of tincture on top of the right-hand cabinet in the larder. The blue one.”

Kefanin scrutinized her face in the glow from the lantern. “Is that wise, milady?”

“No, it’s not. Your point is?”

A grave, deeply made bow, the sort she only got out of Kefanin when he disapproved mightily of a decision she’d made. She grunted, set off along the hall to the east wing, got there in a couple of minutes, a little out of breath. She worked the bolts. A faint, musty chill puffed out at her as she hauled the door open. It had been a while since anyone was in here.

Shadows capered on the walls while she moved about, lighting lamps from the wick of the lantern with a paper spill. A warm yellow glow spread over the untidy piles of books and less easily defined junk that owned the floor. The study emerged by increments from the gloom. Her desk in the center, stacked with papers and more books. The curtained window. Paintings of An-Monal on the walls, a map etched on Kiriath glass.

The Helmsman.

“Hello there, Archeth Indamaninarmal.”

“Hello Angfal.” She cleared off one side of the desk so she could put her feet up, pulled out the chair and sat down. “Been a while, hasn’t it?”

“You should not concern yourself on my part.” The Helmsman’s voice was deep and melodious, warmly avuncular and at the same time very slightly unnerving at the edges, as if at any moment it might suddenly scale upward into an inhuman scream. “You know time doesn’t have the significance for me that it does for . . . humans.”

Archeth grinned at the calculated insult. It wasn’t the first time. She cocked one ankle over the other on the corner of the desk and stared through the angle between her feet at the thing she shared the study with.

“Good to see you again, anyway.”

It took up most of the space near the wall, a span of nearly twenty feet and a height of at least ten.

Mostly it looked like guts, riotous loops and coils of dark iron intestine all across the pale plasterwork and trailing down onto the floor, seemingly at random. But there were other parts, too, segments that hung fatly off the wall like lungs or tumors, and the whole thing was speckled with a series of weak green or yellowish lights behind what appeared to be thick glass optics each no larger than a thumbprint. Near the center and high up, two symmetrical sets of angled ribbing gripped the wall and ceiling, braced outward from a swollen oval the width of a man’s arms at full stretch. Not for the first time, Archeth thought that the arrangement was uncomfortably arachnoid—it gave the impression that some giant spider out of a child’s nightmare was somehow oozing through the wall prior to springing down on whoever happened to occupy the study at the time. Or, perhaps, that the same monstrous creature had simply been embedded there in the plaster like some grotesque hunting trophy.

It didn’t help that there were clusters of the little green and yellow lights gathered at the lower end of the oval like eyes.

She knew—because the Kiriath engineers who ripped Angfal out of a derelict fireship’s hull and installed it here had told her—that the Helmsman’s consciousness existed within the whole organic-looking mess at once, but that didn’t help much. Like it or not, she found herself habitually, instinctively, addressing herself to this hanging half-spider central structure, focusing on it whenever—

She was doing it now.

“So what do you want?” it asked her.

“Why should I want anything from you?” She unfixed her gaze from the clustered lights, made a point of gazing off toward the window instead. “Maybe I just stopped by for some light conversation.”

“Really?” Angfal’s voice didn’t change all that much, but Archeth thought there was now an accent of cruelty in the inquiring tone. “Come to reminisce, then, have we? Talk about all those good old times when your father and Grashgal were still alive, and the world was a finer, nobler place?”

She held down the hurt, the old familiar ache.

“Far as I know,” she said tonelessly, “Grashgal’s still alive. Far as you know as well, I’d have thought, given that when they cut you out of the wreckage, they left most of your sense organs behind in the hull.”

A tiny beat of silence.

“Archeth, daughter of Flaradnam, you come to me with elevated pulse, dilated pupils, swelling of blood in breasts and labia—though that’s ebbing now—and a fractionally unsteady vocal range, all clear symptoms of mingled sexual arousal and krinzanz abuse, a combination that is, incidentally, not ideally suited to your physiology, or indeed any physiology beyond the very youthful. And you’re staring out of a window that has a curtain drawn across it. So you see, as we both already know, my sense organs were not all left in the wreckage, and you did not come here for light conversation.”

The quiet seeped in again. She thought maybe one or two of the lights in Angfal’s coils had shifted color or maybe just brightened.

“I’m two hundred and seven years old,” she said. “That is youthful in Kiriath terms.”

“Yes, but not for a half-breed.”

Her temper snapped across, shiny steel rage at the break. “Hey, f*ck you! Grashgal’s alive and laughing, somewhere better than this.”

“Grashgal is dead,” the Helmsman said patiently. “They all are. The Kiriath barely survived the voyage through the quick paths on their way here, and then their strength was at full flow, their science honed, and their minds undamaged. The forces they encountered undid all of that. They did not choose to come here, Archeth, despite anything the chronicles might claim to the contrary. They were shipwrecked here, and if they stayed four thousand years, it wasn’t because they liked the scenery. It was because they were afraid that the return would break them.”

Her rage failed her—she found herself looking at the bright jagged edge of it with weary disenchantment.

This wasn’t the way to get what she wanted.

“Some say the passage opened their minds,” she offered. “Gave them the gift of a new vision, an insight across time. They say it didn’t corrupt, it enhanced.”

“Yes, that’s right,” Angfal jeered. “So much so that the most enhanced among them, those most gifted, as you put it, went off into the desert to contemplate their insight and apparently forgot to eat.”

“Not all of them.”

“Most of them.”

“You’re talking about the extreme cases. As a race, we learned to cope.”

“We? We as a race?”

“Figure of speech. The Kiriath, as a race, adapted. And in the end their adaptation made them stronger, better able to resist the effects of a return voyage.”

“Oh, is that a thesis you’re developing? I’d be very interested to see your evidence.”

“I’m sorry they left you behind, Angfal.”

It broke the rapid parry-riposte pattern of the exchange better than if she’d screamed. A longer silence this time. The lack of motion in the Helmsman’s frozen iron coils and bulges seemed suddenly wrong, ridiculous, some impossible constriction of a natural emotional order and its responses. She looked for a shift in the lights, but they held their color, they burned steadily back at her.

The Helmsmen are not human, Archidi, her father had told her once, when she was still quite a small child. He spoke High Kir, and the word he used for “human” was one the Kiriath used about themselves. They aren’t like you or me or your mother at all, not even like the spirit of one of us in a bottle or a box. They are something . . . other. You must remember that in your dealings with them. They are not human, for all that they might sometimes do a good impression of one.

At the time, it sounded to her awed child’s ears like a warning about demons.

“They left you, too,” said the Helmsman finally.

“Yes, they did.”

More silence. Memories swarmed through her in the space it left, adding their weight to the krinzanz crash. She stared at the fleck-lit, dismembered iron monster on the wall, the way it bulked and coiled there, and she tried to find a similar stillness in herself.

“Well, then.” Angfal’s voice broke smoothly back into the quiet, to all appearances as if none of the previous conversation had happened. “What can I do for you, Archeth Indamaninarmal? What is it you wanted to talk to me about?”