The Steel Remains

chapter 21

They smashed both of Terip Hale’s legs below the knee with the mace, got the whereabouts of the tool shop out of him fairly quickly thereafter, and then let him sink into semiconsciousness where he lay.

They got Girsh settled as comfortably as possible against the opposite wall, put a freshly cranked and loaded crossbow in his lap, and went to fetch the manacle cutters.

“Is it true, then?” Eril asked him as they loped rapidly down a darkened corridor on the other side of the courtyard. “That stuff about you killing the dragon?”

“Pretty much. Why?”

“Uhm—but they don’t call you Dragonbane?”

“No.”

Short pause, the other man not wanting to leave it alone, not knowing how to press the point without offense.

“Never seen a dragon,” he said finally.

“Yeah, well, believe me, that’s the way you want to keep it.”

More quiet. They reached the end of the corridor, found stairs downward.

“He, uh, he kept calling you a queer.”

“Yeah.”

“Well, uh . . .” With an audible sigh, Eril gave it up. “F*cking scumbag, right?”

“Indeed.”

At the bottom of the stair, as they’d been told, there was a door sporting a modest padlock. Eril kicked it in with a poise and economy of motion that looked extensively practiced. A couple of shattering blows at the latch with his heel, the door sprang inward on its hinges, and they found themselves in a long underground chamber lined along one wall with cage-fronted cells. Bandglow seeped in from windows set up near the heavy-beamed roof, much the same construction as the joyous longshank chamber and the same effect: There was just enough pale silver light to make out figures huddled to the back of each cell on the floor. Mostly young women, one or two more androgynous forms that might have been boys—the difference, shrouded in any case beneath each clutched-up, moth-eaten gray blanket, tended to drown out in the low light. Hollow, terrified eyes and curled defensive postures created an unsexed uniformity. Each captive cringed visibly as the booted feet went past their cell, clung harder to the blanket as if it might be torn away from them. One or two started to make a tight-racheted keening, but you couldn’t really tell which of them it was—the sound crept out past the bars and filled the whole chamber like the relentless drip of water. It put Ringil’s teeth instantly on edge. He hadn’t heard anything like it since the war.

“Good thing Girsh isn’t here to see this,” Eril murmured. “He’d probably want to let them all out.”

“Yeah.”

They found the tool section at the end of the row, a long alcove set with three workbenches broad enough to take a human body and lined along the back wall with hanging racks for the tools. Ringil scanned the racks, spotted a couple of delicately finished branding irons and some other suggestively shaped implements whose applications he didn’t want to think about; then his eyes fastened thankfully on what they’d come for. Four identical, long-handled manacle cutters dangling side by side. He lifted one off its hook and flexed the scissor motion a couple of times.

“Should do the trick.”

“Right. Let’s get out of here.”

Ringil hesitated. He tossed the cutters across the chamber to Eril, who fielded them one-handed with a knife fighter’s precision.

“You go. I’ll catch you up.”

“What?” Eril looked from the cutters in his hand to Ringil, and then, with dawning realization, down the long line of cells. “Oh, come on. We haven’t got time for th—”

“I said you go. I won’t be long.”

For a moment it looked as if Eril might argue. He held Ringil’s eye, face unreadable, hefted the cutters a couple of times. Finally, he shrugged.

“Your call. But Girsh is in no state to hang about. Soon as I get that bolt out of his leg, we’re leaving.

Don’t miss the boat.”

“I won’t.”

Eril nodded, turned, and headed back up the line of cells to the door. He didn’t look at any of them, didn’t turn his head at all.

Admirable focus.

Yeah. What are we doing here, then?

Ringil took another pair of manacle cutters from the rack and went to the first cell in the line. The lock was a simple affair, two bolts and a cowled fastener. It took him less than a minute to mangle it apart with the cutters. He opened the cage door and stepped hesitantly into the space behind. Instantly the girl on the floor recoiled into one back corner of the cell, as hard and as fast as the walls would let her. It was almost as if she’d been thrown there by some external force he was radiating. He saw, even in the low wash of bandlight from the windows, that she was trembling violently.

“You’re free to go,” he said, feeling foolish.

She just stared back up at him, eyes and knuckles and the blanket edge. The awkward way she’d sprawled in the corner revealed one thigh to the hip, a small triangular glimpse of buttock and waist beyond—pale, naked flesh and the small weave-patterned discoloration of a brand on the hip bone. The blanket was her only clothing.

F*ck.

He left her, went mechanically along the row of cells, wrenching the locks apart with a rising fury that made him clumsier each time, made the cutters slip and turn as he used them, as if they had a mind of their own. His teeth gritted tighter, his breath came harder, the locks buckled and tore, hung off each door like mangled body parts, or else they slipped and clanked on the floor at his feet. And he knew, all the time, even as he was doing it, that he was wasting his time.

What are they going to do, Gil? Weary, reasonable voice in his head. They’re naked, traumatized, trapped in the middle of Etterkal. They aren’t going to make it a hundred yards down the street outside before some bunch of f*cking urchins blows the whistle on them.

Shut up.

And even if they do make it to Tervinala or the river, even if they can find some way back to the homes they came from, even if they don’t get raped and murdered or abducted all over again by whatever scum they’ll find prowling the streets at this time of night, uniformed or not—

I said shut up.

—even if their families haven’t also been sold, or thrown into the street, or hounded out of the city by their creditors, even if they are still clinging on somehow, who’s to say they’ll want or be able to take them back.

Shut up, shut up.

Thing is, Gil, they’ve been legally sold. Times have changed, remember. Everybody says so, Hale, even your old saddlemate Grace. It’s a brave new age. They go back to their families, the debt reengages. The Watch comes for them all over again. Back to the Chancellery, back up for auction, all over again. With compensation demanded, no doubt, by the brokers, and paid for out of the skins of the family.

I said—

Yeah, all told, it should make for some really beautiful family reunions, Gil—if any of them ever make it that far in the first place.

“SHUT THE F*ck UP!”

The words jumped him, out of his head and suddenly echoing off the walls of the chamber as he yelled.

Metallic clang, he’d wrenched the last lock apart and hurled the cutters back down the row. The slaves flinched and moaned and huddled in the cells. None of them had ventured even as far as the broken-open doors.

See, you’re up against the system here, Gil. The reasonable voice again, it could almost have been Archeth, back in Ennishmin, talking him out of putting his dagger through the throat of an imperial commander. It’s pretty much an endless supply of enemies, something you’ll never finish as long as you live. You burn Hale, you’ve got to pretty much burn down the whole of Etterkal. And these scum-f*cks are legal now. You burn down Etterkal, you’ve got to take on the Chancellery, the Watch, and Kaad’s f*cking Committee, probably most of the upriver clans as well.

Hell, Gil, in the end, you’ll probably have to burn the whole of Trelayne into the f*cking marshes.

For one fleeting moment, it was what he wanted to do. All he wanted to do. He could taste it, like old iron in the back of his mouth. He could smell the smoke.

“You all stay here,” he heard himself say. “I’m going to find clothes for you.”

He retreated from the cells, up the stairs and along the corridor, no clear idea how he was going to do this. The voice in his head jeering at him now . . .

And crossing the courtyard, he heard Girsh scream.

Terror and pain, loud enough to carry up out of the joyous longshank chamber, eldritch enough to raise the small hairs at the back of his neck. Not the sound of Eril’s make-haste surgery in progress, not anything remotely so prosaic.

Plans, considerations, the complications he faced all evaporated like river mist before the morning sun.

His acceptance wiped every other consideration away. It was like seeing an old friend, like picking up an old, much-loved weapon. It was easy. Simplicity itself, the old, clean, steel call to death, or something very like.

His hands rose and unslung the Ravensfriend from his back once more. He paced across what remained of the courtyard space.

He found he was grinning in the cold.

Eril met him on the stairs. The Marsh Brotherhood enforcer came flying up the steps, face contorted with panic in a way Ringil would not have believed possible a few minutes ago. He saw Ringil and brandished his knife like a madman.

“It’s got him,” he shouted. “It took Girsh.”

Chilly tingle along Ringil’s spine.

“What did?” he asked.

“It’s a f*cking—a wraith, a marsh demon, a—” Eril’s eyes were staring with what he’d seen. He tried to push past. “It came right out of the f*cking wall, man! Girsh shot it with the crossbow, the bolt went through, f*cking let me go. ”

Ringil put a hand on Eril’s chest and slammed him hard against the wall. His gaze cut sideways and nailed the enforcer where he was.

“You stand!” he hissed. “Running isn’t going to help now. You stand there, you get a f*cking grip, and tell me what happened.”

But he already knew what had happened. Knew what it had to be.

Dwenda.

He thought he heard laughter ghost upward from the chamber below. Eril swallowed hard, trembling, mastered himself.

“Listen, we’ve got to get out of here,” he said shakily. “You can’t fight this, it’s f*cking sorcery, man. The bolt went right through, didn’t stop it, didn’t even touch it. It’s glowing f*cking blue.”

“What makes you think this thing is going to let us run?”

The laughter again, unmistakable this time, echoing from the bottom of the stairs. Eril shuddered.

“That’s it,” he hissed. “That’s the noise it made.”

Ringil eyed the confines of the stairwell. It was knife-fighting ground at best, no space to wield the Ravensfriend. He nodded over his shoulder.

“Back outside. If it can come through a wall, we need some open ground.”

“Open ground?” Eril managed a choked laugh. “I told you, the bolt went right f*cking through it. What are you going to do to it with a sword?”

Ringil ignored him, backed up the four or five steps he’d come down, through the door and out once more into the courtyard. Eril came with him, but he could see at a glance the enforcer was too close to breaking to be much help. It was a look he knew well enough, had seen on countless faces, League and imperial alike, at Rajal Beach and Demlarashan when the dragons came. It was in the eyes. Men were like blades, they would all break sooner or later, you included. But you looked around at the men you led, and in their eyes you saw what kind of steel you had to hand, how it had been forged and tempered, what blows, if any, it would take.

He sighed.

“Go on, get out of here.”

“What?” Eril’s grip on his knife shifted. He wet his lips. “Look—”

“I said go. You’re right. You can’t fight this.” Ringil suffered a sudden, overpowering urge to put a hand on Eril’s shoulder, on the point where it met the soft rise of his neck. He settled for a tight-lipped smile.

“But I think I can.”

Faint bluish glow now, spilling up what he could see of the stairwell and staining the interior wall with its radiance. Ringil settled into a two-handed guard with the Ravensfriend. Eril was still hovering at his side, wavering on the edge of his own barely controlled terror.

“All right, I’ll stand wi—”

“No.” Sharper now; the time for gestures was past, and Ringil’s own fear was starting to eat into his resolve. “You get the f*ck out of here while you still can. Get back to Milacar alive, tell him what happened here. Make sure the Brotherhood pay Girsh’s family their blood dues.”

“You—”

“Just f*cking go, will you.” Ringil shot him a single angry glance, all he could spare from the will it took to face the doorway and whatever might be coming through it. There was a faint, melodic hum rising through the air now, and it put his teeth on edge. “You’ve already lost this one. Can’t you feel that? All you’re going to do if you stay is die. ”

The thing that had killed Girsh spilled out into the courtyard.

There was a kind of relief in the moment, a letting go of other options that he knew well enough from the half a hundred battlefields in his past. But beside that old familiar slide, Ringil felt an icy blast of terror spike up his spine and into his head. The dwenda was nothing like he’d imagined it would be.

Hoiran’s twisted cock, you should be here to see this, Shalak. You and your circle of Aldrain enthusiasts. They’d shit milk and sugared biscuits.

It walked toward him like fire on paper, the dwenda, like a dancing blue rainstorm a dozen feet across, radiance falling and splashing back up off the floor again, jagged little fissures of brighter light in amid the general glow, eating up the normality of the courtyard paving and the chilly air like the sun chasing out shadows. And it laughed as it came, it chuckled and hummed to itself like a craftsman bent to a task he knew well, like a mountain stream or a well-fed fire, like all of these—the comparisons came to Ringil fully formed—but with an edge to the sounds that invaded his ears like stinging insects, set up a vicious, ringing echo, and left a tight, indefinable ache under his ribs.

“Run! ” he screamed at Eril. It was the last breath he could spare.

It was not a man, it was not anything like a man. The eldritch, lordly creatures in Shalak’s manuscript scraps and illustrations, dropped away in his mind like puppet theater mockeries as the puppet master rises from behind his curtained façade for applause. The dwenda came on, it murmured at him, it sang to him and it shivered, it would have him for its own, and now he identified the ache that lay behind it all.

Loss.

It was the blue-tinged taste of a regret so deep you could never plumb its depths. It was the victory at Rajal that never came, it was his brother walking away down the long dark wood corridor, it was a life he might have had in Yhelteth if disgust and fury had not sent him away in disgrace instead. It was the slaves he could not free, the screaming women and children of Ennishmin he could not save, the piled-up, silent dead and the smashed-in, ruined homes. It was every wrong decision he’d ever made, every path he’d failed to walk, fanned out and held up for him to understand, and it hurt. It ate into him like dragon spit as he stared it down. There was a flickering heart to the dwenda, he now saw, shadows rippling through it, curves that might have been dancing limbs, a lithe, broad torso maybe, the long, leaping straight edge of—

The Ravensfriend swung to guard.

Impact stung down his arms, snagged in his joints. It felt eerily as if the sword had done the work without him. Sparks showered, flung off something he couldn’t fully make out in the glow. A long, echoing chime rang across the courtyard. The dwenda stopped singing.

Oho. The thought pulsed through him, savagely exultant. That shut you the f*ck up, didn’t it?

As if in answer, the barely seen straight edge came rippling back. He twisted and blocked it again, easier now the ringing in his ears had stopped. This time he saw the meeting of blades for what it was. The dwenda was armed with an unfeasibly slender long-sword whose edges gave up light like the jamb of a door cracked open onto a room filled with blue fire. Behind the sweep of the blade, he made out a tall, long-limbed figure, flowing hair, maybe the glint of eyes. The glow still flickered everywhere, but Ringil thought it might be fading.

And the ache was ebbing with it, the whole fan of failed options he’d seen now folding away, reduced to abstract, fleeting acknowledgment, and then to nothing at all. Regret vanished, shriveled up like paper in flames. The fight came on inside him like a stoked furnace. He put on the snarl he’d used to kill Terip Hale’s men. He readied the Ravens-friend.

“Come on, then, you pixie-faced piece of shit. You think you can take me?”

The dwenda bellowed—its voice was like a tolling silver bell—and came in swinging from the left. Ringil parried, locked the blades up, stepped through and kicked out savagely at knee height. Thuggish, tavern-brawl technique—amid the soaking blue radiance, he felt the edge of his boot connect. The dwenda shrilled and staggered. Ringil whipped his blade clear of the clinch and slashed in at midriff height. His opponent leapt back to avoid the cut. Ringil came on, reversing the swing for a higher-angled assault. The dwenda blocked, whiplash-swift. It stopped the Ravensfriend cold. The riposte came slashing down, faster than Ringil could get his own sword in place. He jerked his head back, felt the dwenda’s blade whicker down the side of his face, leave cold air and a faint crackling sensation in its wake. The ghost laughter bubbled—but Ringil thought there was a harder edge on it now, the fading amusement of someone driven to unexpected effort.

Better get used to that, motherf*cker.

Long lunge, all the speed that he had, right for the eyes or where he assumed they had to be. His opponent caught the Ravensfriend, hooked it aside, and sliced back down the blade, scraping up sparks—Ringil had to disengage to save his hand. He fell back. The dwenda came at him again, long-sword all flickering, flirting half cuts and feints. With human steel, Ringil would have been outclassed, reduced to full retreat and broad defensive swings. But the Ravensfriend seemed to rise to the occasion like a trained hound. It rang chimed warnings off the more extended of the dwenda’s attacks, chipped the glow-edged long-sword back, gave Ringil a speeded, feverish battle fervor to match the unearthly poise of his attacker. He was panting with the effort it took, but there was a lifting, grinning passion behind it as well.

He had, he recalled in the midst of the fight, been good at this.

And the glow was dying, no question now. The shadow at the heart of the light was thickening, becoming less a blur of hinted form and more the bulk of a solid opponent he could kill. Now he saw eyes, oddly shaped, still faintly radiant, but recognizable for the organs they were. The blue flickering uncertainties were giving way, the spill of light from the edge of the dwenda’s blade damping down to little more than a gleam. More and more, it was the cold fall of bandlight that lit the duel. More and more, he saw his opponent’s face behind the clash of steel edges—stark-boned and pale, eyes narrowed, teeth bared, the combat rictus to mirror his own. The fight emerged from dream and became what it was—the man-dance, the steel measure, the promise of blood and death on cold courtyard stone.

Let’s get it done, then.

The dwenda might almost have heard him. Shadowy black and silver by bandlight now, it leapt in at him with redoubled speed. Ringil turned the blows, got in weak ripostes, could not break the attack momentum. He staggered back. The dwenda blade got past at the tip, touched his face, dropped and licked across his shoulder and breast. He felt sudden heat, knew he’d been tagged. He yelled and struck back, but the dwenda was ahead of him, had seen the move, and the Ravensfriend skidded off a neat upper block. Ringil twisted, tried for the eyes again, failed, had to fall back.

The dwenda came on.

How do I take him down, Shal?

And the myth vendor in his junk shop, brooding, doubtful. You’d have to be very fast indeed.

Ringil launched the counterattack without warning, out of a parry posture that looked like retreat. It was the last thing you’d expect, and it had every sprung inch of reflexive speed he could muster behind it.

Blade up and inward, lean forward instead of back, savage chop for one thigh. The dwenda wallowed, caught out, wrong-footed for an attack it now had no way to deliver. The block came late, would not turn the force of the Ravensfriend . . .

It almost worked.

Almost.

Instead, the dwenda yowled and leapt, went nearly chest-high straight into the air, crouched like a cat.

The Ravensfriend whooped through empty space beneath, Ringil staggered, splay-legged behind the blow, and the dwenda whirled and shrilled and kicked him in the head coming down.

The courtyard swooped and spun around him, dimmed out, swam with tiny purplish points of light. The band looped overhead, across one corner of his vision, trailing blurry white fire. The stone floor tilted and came up, grabbed him by the shoulder, cuffed him across the side of the head, tore the Ravensfriend from his grasp.

FOR LONG, GROGGY MOMENTS, HE CLUNG TO CONSCIOUSNESS.

The courtyard seemed to have upended itself, was trying to dump him off its surface and into a warm waiting darkness below. He fought it, smeared vision and ebbing strength, groped across cold cobbles for his lost sword, twisted and curled about like some half-crushed insect on a tavern tabletop.

A shadow fell across him.

He managed to turn his head; he struggled for focus.

A towering black figure stood over him, etched in bandlight and the soft blue gleam from the edges of the long-sword in its hands.

The blade came up.

Someone blew out the candles.