The Steel Remains

chapter 22

I t can’t be, it can’t be it can’t f*cking be . .

He knew it was.

Egar saddled his horse again with numb competence, slung ax and shield, pegged the lance upright in the ground. Noticed his fingers trembling. The leather-cloaked figure fluttered in memory behind his eyes. He forced it down, no time for that now, or the icy shivering questions cramming into his head alongside. He scanned again for the riders, found them, down off the horizon now and almost invisible against the twilit flank of the steppe they were crossing. Drab colors, not a common thing among the Majak unless a sneak raid was the order of the day.

Or a brotherslaying.

Egar’s mouth tightened. He counted heads. Seven, maybe eight of them, in single file. Long odds, and time running out. The riders weren’t moving particularly fast, but there was a steady purpose to the motion and to the path they picked out. And you didn’t have to watch them for long to know they were heading for the tree and Erkan’s grave.

The fire crackled to itself, unconcerned. It was gaining strength now.

Oh, you faithless motherf*ckers.

He stared blindly across the horse’s back for a moment, eyes defocusing on the riders, remembering Ergund’s face.

I’ll go with him, Eg. You know what Alrag gets like when he thinks about Dad, when he drinks.

He’ll get in a fight as soon as spit, if I’m not there to drag him out.

Yeah. Egar, recalling his own drunken brawl with the quiet imperial, nearly two decades gone. Getting a bit old for that shit, isn’t he?

Ergund gave him a strange look. We all find different ways to live with it, Eg. Who’s to say yours is the best?

I wasn’t saying that.

No, but—

Okay, skip it. Whatever. You keep an eye out for him.

And off to some meeting of herd owners he hoped he could choke down to a couple of hours, by which time Sula should have gotten her chores done and her hot little body across to the yurt, and would no doubt be admiring herself in the big Kiriath mirror he kept there. He was going to come up behind her there and—

He remembered that, staring out at the riders now, how that feeling had snaked tight across his belly, how he’d watched Ergund slope off to Ishlin-ichan, and been glad to see him go.

Glad the vigil called for a single son, glad for once that rank and tradition demanded he fulfill the role. He badly didn’t want to have to spend the night in the company of Ergund and Alrag, or any of his other brothers, come to that, whether sunk in the reeking, steaming, bellowing chaos of an Ishlin-ichan tavern or out here on the cold quiet sweep of the steppe, with nothing at all to say to one another.

He swung himself up into the saddle, wheeled the horse about, and yanked the staff lance up out of the ground. His lips peeled back off a grimace.

Well, there’ll be no shortage of things to say now, I expect.

He nudged the horse up the rise until it stood just clear of the tree. He rested the lance across the saddlebow at a slanting angle and waited for the riders to reach him.

HE SPOTTED ALRAG WHILE THE NEW ARRIVALS WERE STILL A GOOD hundred yards out—his eldest brother had a cockerel swagger in the way he sat a horse, and for all he was swathed in a heavy cowled cloak, Egar would have known him anywhere by stance alone.

The others—he now saw it was seven, not eight, thank Urann for small f*cking mercies— also went cloaked and cowled. Their weapons made vague lumps in the cloth, could in some cases have been anything, mace, hand ax, who knew. But four out of the company carried broadswords, naked blades jutting clearly down below the hem of their outer garment. Mercenaries, then. The Majak didn’t have much time for broadswords; too expensive, too southern-showy, and only really good for the one thing—killing men. It offended the steppe nomad soul to wield a weapon you couldn’t hunt with or use around the camp for chores. So it seemed Alrag had hired for the occasion—either southern freebooter scum too low-grade to hack it in the south, or wannabe Majak renegades aping the manners of those they aspired to be.

Something in Egar eased a little. These he could probably kill without too much trouble. He sat motionless, head tipped down, and let them draw near. When the distance was down to easy hailing, he looked up. Only his eyes moved.

“Well, brother, ” he called. “Are you going to take that priest bollocks hood off and show me your f*cking face?”

Three different hands twitched at the reins; one even rose halfway, then fell back. Egar nodded bleakly to himself. The three without swords. The betrayal was almost complete, then. Alrag and Ergund, without question. One other, Gant or Ershal. Had to be Gant, he’d mouthed off enough in the past about what a shit clanmaster Egar was, he’d want to be here for this.

The party drew to an ill-coordinated halt less than twenty yards away. Egar held his posture.

“What about you, Ergund? You come to murder me, but you won’t look me in the eye? Father would be proud.”

One of the cloaked figures reached up and tugged back its cowl. Ergund’s face emerged, helmeted for battle. In the failing steppe light, he looked pale beneath the metal, but determined.

“We haven’t come to murder you,” he shouted. “If you’d just—”

“Yeah, we have.” Now Alrag shook off his hood as well. He, too, wore a helmet, a little more ornate than Ergund’s, with a low horsehair crest. “He’s too f*cking stubborn to bow out gracefully. Anyone can see that.”

“It doesn’t have to—”

“Yes, it does, Ergund.” Ershal’s quiet tones from beneath one of the other cowls. He did not unmask.

“Alrag’s right about this. There won’t be any half measures.”

Egar forced down his surprise, and a little unlooked-for hurt.

“Hello, little brother. Didn’t expect to see you here. I thought better of you.”

“Yeah, well we all thought better of you, too,” Ershal snapped. “Once upon a time, when it still looked like you deserved it. Seven years we’ve given you, Egar. Seven f*cking years! And what have you done with our fealty? You pissed it away, man. Made us the laughingstock of the Majak, made our family the laughingstock of the clan. You’re not fit for the mastery. That’s the truth, and everybody knows it.”

“Everybody, huh? So what happened to Gant? He break a leg getting on his horse? Or has he just not poured as much tavern courage down his throat as the rest of you?”

Ershal put back his hood. Of the three brothers, he was the only one who had chosen to ride bare-headed. “We’re not drunk,” he said calmly. “And Gant will not involve himself in this, but he will approve the outcome. He knows as well as anyone, the mastery must pass to safer hands.”

Egar stared back at him, unmoving.

“You do know you’re going to have to kill me,” he said.

“That choice is yours.” Ershal held his gaze. “But you have left us no choice at all. The shaman is right. If we don’t act, you’ll bring the ruin of the Gray One on us all.”

“The shaman, eh? Been listening to that dried-up old buzzard, have you? You stupid f*cking—”

“We’ve been vouchsafed a vision,” shouted Ergund. “You profane the names of the Dwellers for all to hear. You snub the respected men of the clan as if they were hirelings, so you can rush back to your yurt, get pissed, and shove your prick into whatever teenage slut takes your fancy. You barely bother to honor the rituals, you drink and brood and sit alone instead, or you get out of your face and stumble about all night telling everyone how f*cking wonderful it was in the south, how much you miss it, how we’ve all got to f*cking change and be more like the imperials, be more civilized. You’ve sired no honorable heirs, nor given any good example for our young men to follow except to escape their obligations and go adventuring in the south. Oh yeah, and to f*ck whatever piece of cheap milkmaid arse they can get the leggings down on.”

“Jealous much, Ergund?”

“Hey, f*ck you!”

Egar snapped a glance at Alrag. Their gazes locked.

“And you, brother. Do I get to hear your list of complaints, too?

Some hallowed boundary I’ve overstepped in your eyes as well, is there?”

Alrag shrugged. “I don’t care who you f*ck. You’re in my way.”

It was like a cowl thrown back from everything, the truth of the moment exposed and grinning skullishly at them all. The mask of talk peeled off, discarded somewhere in the quiet. The chill of what had to be done stood waiting.

Ergund must have felt it more than the others.

“Listen, Egar. It doesn’t have to be like this. You can walk away. Just give up your weapons and your horse. Give an oath on father’s cairn that you won’t come back. They’ll take you as far as the mountains and turn you loose.”

It was almost worth laughter—Egar made do with a thin grin. “Is that what they told you, Ergund? Is that how they got you saddled up for this?”

“It’s the truth. ”

“It’s a f*cking lie. It’s not even a very imaginative one.” Egar nodded at the hooded, silent sword carriers. “These men? They’ll slit my throat as soon as you’re over the horizon, just to save themselves the ride. I’m surprised they even agreed to show up before you had me disarmed. I hope you haven’t paid them in advance.”

A couple of growled oaths from the freebooters—one of them cleared his sword from its straps, leveled the blade one-handed at Egar. But his mount skittered a couple of steps at the movement and ruined the gesture. His voice came across young and tense.

“You shut your f*cking mouth.”

“I think I’ll wait till you come over here and make me.” Neither the clanmaster nor his Yhelteth warhorse had shifted more than a statue. Egar saw the sword tremble as the mercenary worked to hold its weight out horizontally. Saw the tip waver and grinned into the blank shadow under the hood. “Son, you have been misinformed. Did they not tell you who I am?”

The young freebooter swiped back his hood, used the move to drop his sword and leave it at an easier angle to maintain. In the space cleared by the fallen cowl, Egar saw a crude metal helmet but only leather at his shoulders and throat, perhaps at most some kind of thin wood-slat cuirass. No shielding steel. The face above the collar matched the voice—wispy-bearded, acne-scarred, pale features out of the free cities or somewhere close. No more than eighteen or nineteen years old. Mouth stretched wet and wide to let out all the youthful rage.

“I know you’re a f*cking dead man,” he yelled.

“We all are, sooner or later. But I think you’ll be on the Sky Road before me. I used to kill dragons for a living, son. You, I’m going to use for a toothpick.”

“We’re going to f*cking gut you!”

“In your syphilitic whore mother’s dreams, you are.”

And then, of course, it all came apart.

He heard Alrag yell, wasn’t sure if it was an attempt to stop the slide toward slaughter, or just impatient incitement to get on with it. Either way, it was irrelevant—the young freebooter had already kicked his horse into an untidy charge, mouth working, face contorted. Another of the mercenaries went with him, tugging his sword up and out as he came, hood still up and flopping in his eyes. Yelling a name. Maybe the word son; in the tilt of the moment it was hard to tell.

F*cking amateurs.

Egar met the two men head-on. He cut out low with the lance, slashed open the throat on the younger man’s horse, let it thrash past in panicked agony. Blood loosed on the air, splattering off the lance blade, the scream of the dying animal and the rider’s wild yell as he came off. Egar’s horse stepped delicately sideways of it all, as if avoiding a lady’s carriage on the Boulevard of Grace Foretold. The second mercenary reined hard and right, trying to avoid the mess in his path, thoughts of attack apparently forgotten. Egar leaned, took his cowl and most of his face off with a savage upward slash. The man shrieked and flailed blindly about with his sword. His helmet was gone, flipped off and away like a mug off a tavern table. Raw flaps and shreds of flesh hung in place of his features, blinding him the way the hood must have earlier. His terrified mount spun about beneath him, screamed along with him, then flung him to the ground. Egar whistled and nudged his warhorse, and it stamped forward, put its steel-shod hooves through the fallen freebooter’s rib cage with the same trained delicacy it had danced aside before.

Egar heard the crunch it made, felt it right through the horse’s frame and up into his own groin. He threw back his head and howled.

And there was Alrag, teeth bared, hurtling in with his own staff lance swung high in one hand for spearing.

It wasn’t a thrust you could block.

But . . .

Egar danced the Yhelteth destrier aside, put himself on Alrag’s unweaponed flank. His brother spotted the move, couldn’t swap the lance about in time and had to settle for a clumsy double-handed defensive block. Egar met it with his own lance double-handed as a staff. The two weapons struck each other a glancing blow and then Alrag was past, wheeling his mount tightly about, turning the charge. Egar knew the animal from camp, it was well trained and spirited, and his eldest brother was a consummate horseman. He didn’t have much time.

The two remaining mercenaries had huddled their mounts together as if for comfort. One of them brandished his sword; the other had a small, horseman’s crossbow, was trying desperately to crank it back for action. Egar urged his horse into a gallop, right at the two of them, venting another long berserker scream as he came.

As he’d hoped, their horses panicked and split apart. He ignored the man with the sword, charged down on the crossbow artist before he could get his horse back around and bring his weapon to bear. The lance blade shocked into the freebooter’s back with enough force to unseat him, must have gone right through the thin wood-slat armor, if he was wearing it, and severed the spine beneath. Egar yanked back fast and tight so as not to lose the lance as the man went to the ground. The blade came free, the body toppled bonelessly sideways off the horse and onto the ground. Egar never saw it complete the fall—he was already turning his own mount about.

Alrag was right on his tail.

Egar roared and brought his lance swinging around, stabbed out as his brother rode in at him. Alrag flinched, both lances went wide. The two horses passed each other again in the dusk. The clanmaster gathered himself, grabbed glimpses of the steppe left and right, saw the final mercenary in full flight, spurring his horse toward the horizon as if pursued by demons. He snarled a grin.

“Just family now,” he yelled against the darkening sky. “Cozy, isn’t it?”

Something hissed through the air. The Yhelteth warhorse screamed and bucked beneath him. A black-fletched arrow sprouted from its shoulder. He whipped about, saw Ershal, recurved short bow in hand, arm reaching down to the saddle box for the next shaft. Remembered too late his younger brother’s chief prowess ever since they were children.

“Oh, you little shit!”

He urged the destrier forward with his thighs. It wallowed as it tried to obey. A second shaft took it deep in the flank. Blood welled up. It screamed again, staggered forward half a dozen desperate steps, neck arched, stumbling. Egar screamed with it, hefted his lance, willed himself and his mount closer to his brother.

“I’ll rip your motherf*cking heart out for this, Ershal!”

The third arrow put out the animal’s eye. It went mad, reared and tumbled, hurled Egar from its back. He hit the ground and rolled, somehow kept the lance, somehow else managed not to spike himself on it, came to a halt in the grass clutching at its shaft. Behind him, he heard the crash as his horse hit the ground, the sound of it curling and trying to get up, falling back. The endless heart-ripping cries it gave out as it struggled and thrashed.

He got muzzily to his hands and knees. Soft pulsing snarl in the base of his throat. Back on your feet, back on your f*cking feet, Majak. The horse screamed again. Egar cast about in the gloom of near dark, found Ergund and Ershal a couple of dozen paces away, edged in bandlight. Alrag farther out but trotting back toward them and erect in the saddle, pleased with himself. None of them close enough to take down with a thrown knife.

Off to the left, the young mercenary staggered about groaning, fell down abruptly, lost to view in the grass. It looked as if he’d taken a bad blow to the head when he was unhorsed. He didn’t get up again.

Ershal put another arrow into the stricken warhorse. It screamed again, but weakly now.

“Urann’s sake, f*cking kill it, will you.”

Ergund—all his life, he’d hated it when the animals suffered. Egar remembered when he was ten and . . .

The hiss-thump of another arrow. The horse snorted and quieted. Egar slipped through the grass in a low raider’s crouch, knuckles white on the staff of his lance, a pulsing vein of fury through his brain like a spike. Whatever else happened now, he was going to take Ershal apart before he died.

“That’s far enough, Egar.”

His brother’s voice, calm against the fading agony of the destrier. Egar looked up through the night breeze sway of the grass and saw Ershal upright in the saddle, the bow bent on him from less than ten yards. Cold, quailing horror as he waited for the impact—his brother would not miss, and at this range, off the recurved bow, the shaft would go right through him.

“That’s it. Up where I can see you.”

Egar straightened from his crouch. A bitter smile touched the corners of his mouth. He heard the snuffling his horse made as it died. He thought maybe his knife would reach from here. He dropped the lance.

“Go on then. You traitorous little f*ck. Get it done.”

“You were given every chance to—”

“Oh, f*ck off.”

Alrag rode up, reined his horse to an unnecessarily savage halt, and glanced back and forth along the line the arrow would take.

“What are you f*cking waiting for?” he inquired acidly.

Ershal flickered a glance at Alrag, then Ergund. But his attention never shifted from the draw he had on Egar.

“We’re all agreed, then?”

Egar clawed for his knife.

Ershal loosed the arrow.

The world went dark.

NO, NOT DARK, HE REALIZED.

Had time to realize.

The arrow had not hit him.

Not dark, just dim, like the dimming of your eyes when you’d stared too hard at the sun before you ducked into a yurt. Like the sudden steeping of gloom in a Yhelteth theater house before the curtains ran back.

The wind across the steppe seemed to hold its breath.

Out of nowhere, there was a figure standing in the path of Ershal’s shot. Leather-cloaked, face shadowed beneath a soft-brimmed hat. It reached up and took the arrow out of the air with no more effort than a man grabbing a lance pennant in the breeze. The fingers of the hand seemed—Egar squinted hard—to elongate and flex in places no human hand could have. A voice whispered out to them in the still spaces left by the wind, distant and intimate at once.

“Can’t allow that, I’m afraid.”

And suddenly the wind came back, buffeting, and in it Egar caught the wash of chemical burning once more. His brothers’ horses scented it, too—they whinnied in terror and tried to back up. Ershal cursed and dropped his bow as he fought his mount for control.

“Harjalath!” spat Alrag.

“Not as such, no.” The apparition lowered its arm and snapped the arrow deftly in half, one-handed. It let the pieces fall. “Harjalath is . . . other, when he cares to manifest himself. Though for your purposes, the end difference here will be negligible.”

Ergund spared one hand from calming his horse, made a hasty ward. “We are about Kelgris’s business, demon. Begone. You may not hinder us.”

“It’s not that simple,” whispered the thing. “You see.”

With the hand that had snapped the arrow apart, it brushed through the grass as if stirring the surface of water. Waves raced out from its touch, seemingly random, certainly in defiance of the prevailing breeze from the north. The grass bowed, it shivered and whipped about, it made mounds like the racing backs of sea creatures just below the surface.

“Do you see?”

In the space around the figure, the mounds grew suddenly still, rose silently and took on stricter form.

Half a dozen separate shapes, maybe more. Egar felt the breath stop in his throat as he realized what he was looking at. The creature in the leather cloak had surrounded itself abruptly with men—but men woven out of the grass itself, and moving restlessly around on its surface like bathers immersed to the waist in a river.

“No corner of the steppe,” murmured the figure. It sounded oddly distracted, almost sleepy. “But that the blood of men has fallen there and fertilized it. Occasionally, the steppe can be made to recall these things.

Kill them.”

And the grass men flung themselves forward.

They had no weapons, nothing beyond their ill-formed stringy tendril hands, but they surged up at the terrified horses like ill-intending waves, and where they gripped, Egar saw blood spring out on the animals’ hide. He saw them pull Ergund’s mount right over in a flounder of limbs and rolling eyes, saw Ergund stagger briefly upright and make frantic warding signs, shrilling the name of Kelgris until they dragged him down into the grass as well, and his screams turned choked and gurgling. He saw Alrag hacking about him with his lance, yelling and cursing, Ershal wheeling his beleaguered horse about in the chaos, face a mask of horror . . .

There was little enough time for more—a pair of the grass things came at Egar as well, and he was busy grabbing his lance back up off the ground where he’d dropped it. Grass came with it, blades of the stuff folding over and wrapping and clinging stubbornly to the shaft, trying to pull it back down. For one insane moment, it was like a tug-of-war for the weapon with some surprisingly tenacious toddler around the camp, and then Egar had the lance free and was swinging it up to defend himself against a long thin slashing arm and the empty eye sockets of the grass-formed head behind it. He scythed off the arm at what might have approximated an elbow joint, saw it simply re-form as more grass stalks slithered up into place. A ragged gap opened in the thing’s head where a mouth would have been on a man. The rustling, keening noise that came out of it turned his blood to ice.

“Not him.”

The leather-cloaked figure spoke without turning, hissed, furious words, made a rapid whiplash gesture back across its shoulder that would have dislocated the limb on a normal man. The two forms slopped like waves collapsing up a beach, and were abruptly gone. Melting motions in the grass and an errant gust of wind, and then nothing at all. Egar drew harsh breath and gaped around him in time to see Alrag hauled, lance still flailing, down to a bellowing death in the grass, and Ershal spurring his horse away at the gallop, lashing wildly behind him with his knife, chopping at the empty air alongside his mount’s rump like a man deranged. The summoned forms surged about for a moment or two, perhaps looking for more victims, then they, too, sank back into the grass that had spawned them and Egar stood panting, alone with the thing in the leather cloak.

It turned slowly to face him. That the features below the brim of the hat were no more than nondescript human seemed like the final impossible thing. The voice that drummed around the inside of his skull hit him like the pulse of a bad hangover.

“You were supposed to run, Dragonbane. That’s the purpose of a warning.”

“Who—” Egar struggled to master his breathing. “—the f*ck. Are you?”

The eyes beneath the hat glinted, another warning in them for him. “That’s complicated.”

“Well, hey, everybody’s f*cking dead. We’ve got some time.”

“Not as much as you think. You heard your brother Ergund call upon Kelgris? She is awake and abroad.

Poltar the shaman has her favor. All I have done here is hold back the tide a little.”

Egar found his rage still had the better of his fear. He clenched fists on the staff of his lance, drew clamped breath. Grimaced.

“Listen. Don’t think I’m not grateful to you, because I am. You saved my life. By sorcery or not, I still owe you a blood debt for that, and you won’t find me stingy on the payback. But I will have a name for my debt, or it can’t be called honorable.”

It was hard to tell in the poor light, but he thought the figure rolled its eyes. It turned away from him for a moment. It seemed to be staring out across the steppe, or maybe just at the thin plume of smoke rising from Egar’s fire.

“Can’t f*cking believe it’s come to this,” it muttered. “Negotiating with a f*cking herdsman—you know, sometimes it’s—listen, I was the thief of fire once, you goat-shagging thug. You know that? The f*cking doom bringer to kings.” An arm thrown out in exasperation. “Back when the earth was young, back when there was still a moon in the f*cking sky, I pulled on whatever flesh was needful and I struck terror into the hearts of the powerful and enthroned all across this mudball world, and another dozen like it. I took the spirit form and strode across measureless . . . ah, f*ck it, never mind. All right, a name. You know my name.”

And, abruptly, he did.

It was as if someone had taken a binding from his eyes, as if he’d suddenly shed the blurry fog of a fever.

He saw the sea captain’s cloak as if for the first time, remembered tales and associations from a lifetime of Majak myth. A traveler, by land but more often by sea, a master of disguises and stratagems, a murderous, barely discriminate force when unleashed, a wry borrower of the human form. The least predictable, most violently capricious of the Sky Dwellers.

The chill of it blew through him.

“Takavach,” he whispered.

The hat-brim-shadowed visage tipped back toward him. There might have been the glimmer of a cold smile. “Good. Are you happy now, with your name, with your knowing?”

“What?” Egar swallowed. Voice still a whisper. “What do you want with me?”

“That’s better. First and foremost, I want you to shut up and listen. Your brother Ershal has escaped. In a matter of hours he’ll have roused the whole camp and told them that you are possessed by demons.”

“Demons? There’s no f*cking way they’ll be—”

“The next time you interrupt me, I’ll sew your f*cking lips up with grass. And don’t think I won’t.” The thing that claimed to be Takavach drew a deep breath. “Now listen to me. Ershal will say that he and your other brothers, perhaps drunkenly—which would explain the impropriety of the matter—rode out to greet you at your vigil. That you flew into a fury, summoned demonic forces, and slaughtered Alrag and Ergund; that he barely escaped with his life. Poltar will vouchsafe his story with the usual superstitious horseshit about your southern manners polluting your Majak purity, which is a line he’s been spreading about you for some time now, incidentally. And at dawn, they’ll all ride out here and see for themselves.

Would you like to take a closer look at how your brothers died?”

The question appeared to be rhetorical. Takavach was already drifting through the grass to where Alrag had fallen. Egar went after him, mouth pulled tight for what he was about to see. They came upon the occluding bulk of his brother’s murdered horse first, collapsed massively sideways, streaked everywhere with blood and clinging blades of grass. Egar stepped around it at the rump end and saw, mingled with the animal’s spilled entrails, the ruined mess that lay beyond.

Alrag lay in a flattened, blood-drenched patch of grass, and he was roped to the ground. The blades and tendrils had lashed around his limbs and trunk at every juncture and pulled him down so tight that at his wrists and neck they had sunk through the skin and into the flesh beneath. They’d burrowed into his eyes and nose and ears, had turned the eyes themselves to bloodied mush in the process. Had twisted his head and neck sideways, wrenched his mouth down to the ground and so wide that the jaw was dislocated. Had crowded inside and down his throat in a twisted rope of grass as thick around as Egar’s forearm and now slick with blood.

Bandlight turned the image unreal, like an acid etching on metal. Egar made himself stare at it, unblinking until his eyes began to hurt.

Brotherslayer.

He was not sure whom the voice in his head was accusing.

At his side, Takavach shot him a curious glance, then went and crouched by Alrag’s head. His leather cloak pooled around him, made him seem hunched and unhuman. Egar thought of a solitary vulture settling to feast. The Dweller looked back up over his shoulder at the clanmaster.

“Would you like to see Ergund as well?”

“No,” Egar heard himself say thickly. “That won’t be necessary.”

“No, I suppose not.” Takavach took hold of the woven rope emerging from Alrag’s broken mouth and tugged at it experimentally. It didn’t move much. “Well, I think you’d agree that outside of sorcery, this is going to be hard to explain.”

“Explain?” Egar drank in the sight of his eldest brother for one more measured moment, then turned on his heel. He slung his lance across one shoulder, cast a glance at the sky, and gauged a straight line back to camp. “I’ll f*cking explain it. I’ll cram that bow down Ershal’s throat the exact same f*cking way.”

“And the—where do you think you’re going?” Takavach’s words came hurriedly after him. “And the shaman? Kelgris? ”

Egar didn’t look around or stop walking. “I’m going to gut that scrawny motherf*cker, the way I should have done months ago, and then stake him out for the buzzards, still living. And if Kelgris shows up in support, I’ll do the same f*cking thing to her.”

Faint rumble of thunder walking at the horizon. The clouds there lit briefly from within with a malevolent mauve radiance.

“So.” Takavach was suddenly at his side again. “Now it’s Egar the f*cking Godbane, is it? Do you not think you’re biting off a little more than you can chew here, herdsman? Kelgris is a Sky Dweller. You don’t know how to kill her, you wouldn’t know where to start.”

Egar kept walking. “So tell me.”

Brief silence. Takavach kept pace with him. “I’m not at liberty to do that. There are certain . . . protocols that have to be observed. Agreed rules, if you like. Oaths and ties that bind.”

“Fine. Then don’t tell me. You’ve already done enough.”

“And what’s that supposed to mean?”

“Nothing,” Egar said violently. “It means nothing. Two of my brothers are dead back there, I’m on my way to finish the job. That’s all. Now will you stop f*cking following me! ”

To his surprise, the Dweller did exactly that. He stood in the grass and watched the clanmaster stride away. The thunder at the horizon came again, and if Egar had looked back then, he might have seen Takavach shiver.

“Fine. Go to your f*cking death, then, if that’s the way you want it. Kelgris will put a legion of steppe ghouls between you and the camp, a legion of rabid f*cking wolves, maybe even a flapping wraith or three if she’s feeling inventive. And you’re on f*cking foot!”

Egar ignored it. The image of Alrag’s death danced behind his eyes.

“So,” the Dweller shouted furiously after him. “This is what it means to be owed thanks and a blood debt by a Skaranak clanmaster, is it?”

It stopped him like a crossbow bolt. He lowered his head for a moment, breathed deep. Nodded to himself and turned back to the cloaked figure that stood behind him.

“What do you want from me, Takavach?”

“At the moment, I want to help you stay alive. Would that be so terrible?”

His brothers lay dead and cooling in the grass behind him, scant yards from their father’s grave.

Marnak’s words floated back through his mind. You start wondering why you made it to the end of the day, why you’re still standing when the field is clogged with other men’s blood and corpses.

Why the Dwellers are keeping you alive, what purpose the Sky Home has laid out for you.

Thunder rattled at the chained doors of the world.

Egar’s face twitched as he heard it. Closer now, and out across the steppe the clouds were massing. He felt his own future come and touch him with one cold hand at the neck. The long purpose of the Sky Home was rarely beneficial to those who served as its instruments, heroes least of all. You only had to look at the legends.

He spat in the grass.

Went back to where the cloaked god stood waiting for him. He met the glimmering eyes beneath the hat brim and discovered that in the strange storm blowing through his heart now, there was no longer any room for fear.

“All right,” he said.