The Steel Remains

chapter 27

They emerged into vague, greenish gray light and the overarching striation of winter trees. Faint odor of decay on a slack and sickly breeze.

At first, Ringil registered the change with little more than weary mistrust. His time in the Aldrain marches had shown him far worse, and the shift had not been without its advance warnings. The great black road they’d met Risgillen and the others on had been fading for some time now, either aging at some fantastically accelerated rate as they walked it, or rotting through from beneath as they pressed into new territory that would not permit its existence. Jagged cracks started to appear, some broad and deep enough to put an incautious foot in and snap your ankle. Ringil thought he saw human skulls wedged down into them at intervals, but that might have been another marchland hallucination, and he was getting numb to those.

Well, most of them.

______

JELIM COMES BACK TO HIM ONE MORE TIME, PERHAPS IN A DREAM WHILE they’re camped on the road, perhaps not; in the marches it’s hard to tell. This time Ringil is standing above him with the Ravensfriend across his back, though slanted the wrong way, pommel jutting over his right shoulder. The difference feels bizarre, uncomfortable. Jelim stops a short distance away and looks up without speaking. The face is the same, though stained and mottled with weeping, but he’s dressed in far finer garb than the real Jelim, minor merchant’s son that he was, had ever been able to afford. He stares up at Ringil, meets his eyes, and fresh tears start down his cheeks. Ringil feels a deep aching in his chest at the sight. He wants to speak, but the words are jammed up in his throat.

I’m sorry, Jelim weeps. Gil, I’m so sorry.

And now the pain in Ringil’s chest will not be contained. It rips through him, upward and downward, right up into the muscles of his shoulder, right down to—

I’m sorry, Gil, I’m so sorry. Jelim seems to whisper it endlessly, staring up in horrified fascination.

It should have been me.

And the thing that juts from his right shoulder is not the pommel of the Ravensfriend at his back, it’s the end of the impaling spike where they drove it through the final nine inches and locked the mechanism in the base of the cage, and the pain is not an ache in his heart, it’s an oceanic, white-hot shredding, scalding agony that drives up from between his legs and rips through his guts and then across his chest, neatly avoiding his heart so he need not die for days . . .

I’m sorry, I’m so sorry.

And then he’s screaming, as he realizes where he is, shrieking, for mercy, for Hoiran, for his father, for his mother, for anyone or anything to come and stop the pain. Screaming with such force that it seems it must blow his veins apart, explode his skull, shatter it and let his lifeblood drain out through the ruined mess.

But he knows it won’t.

And he knows that no one will come, that in the long, slow-leaking agony ahead, there will be no rescue of any kind.

______

HE STAMPED DOWN ON THE MEMORY, BATHED IN SUDDEN SWEAT, HEART hammering. Focused on where he was instead.

Winter trees. Quiet.

He stood and stared up at the stripped branches. Waited for the panic-flush of sweat across his skin to cool, for his heart to slow back down. He breathed in deep, like a man escaped from drowning.

Not real, not real. His pulse throbbed with the rhythm of the words.

No more real than the thousand other phantoms that had haunted him across the Aldrain marches. He had not died.

Jelim had.

A hand clapped him across the back. His pulse kicked up again for one terrified moment, then eased as he registered the touch. Seethlaw’s hand shifted, squeezed intimately at the nape of his neck.

It felt uncomfortably like ownership.

“Nice to be back in the real world, I imagine,” the dwenda murmured, and stepped past him across the tufted, swampy ground. Tiny squelching noises in the stillness with each step the dwenda took. Ringil saw water well up in the boot prints he left.

The other members of the party followed, Risgillen with wrinkled nose and a sour glance cocked up at the trees, Ashgrin as watchful and impassive as he’d been since Ringil met him. Only Pelmarag acknowledged the human, turned as he passed and gave him a wink.

“Where are we?” Ringil asked.

“Journey’s end,” said Pelmarag. “Hannais M’hen the Cursed. Look.”

He gestured out to the left, and Ringil felt a tiny start in his pulse as he saw a stunted black figure there. It took him a moment to realize it was a statue, a moment longer to realize —how?— that it would not, as the akyia had done in the surf, suddenly move and come to silent, bright-eyed life.

“Tell you a funny story,” Pelmarag said, advancing on the statue without any apparent trace of amusement on his face. Ringil shrugged and followed him.

It waited there for them, set at a tilted angle in the marshy ground, stubby outstretched arms raised to shoulder height on either side like a diminutive preacher facing his congregation or a child asking to be picked up. As Ringil got closer, he saw that the thing was hewn entirely out of black glirsht, sculpted crudely so the body wore no obvious clothing and the face was a blunt, asexual approximation of human features. He noticed the shallow-scooped facets that served as eyes were polished so the crystalline stone glinted, but he couldn’t tell whether the effect was deliberate or not.

Pelmarag stared down at the statue, brow creased as if it had asked him a difficult question.

“Funny story?” Ringil reminded him.

The dwenda stirred. “Yeah. About a month and a half ago the way you people’d look at it, Ashgrin’s brother Tarnval was looking for this place. He was real well equipped, too, came heavy. Never much cared for Seethlaw’s stealth strategies, thought we were all moving way too slow.”

Pelmarag’s Naomic, better than Risgillen’s or Ashgrin’s from the start, had become positively fluent in the time he’d spent talking to Ringil. He was by far the most gregarious of the group. In fact, he seemed to be acquiring a lot of Ringil’s preferred expressions and phrasing. It gave the human a peculiar sensation to hear his own verbal quirks fed back to him this way, and it made him wonder how much time the journey in the Aldrain marches was really taking. How learning and experience might—or even could—function without fixed reference to time.

“Yeah, always one for a frontal assault, Tarnval.” Pelmarag grimaced, apparently at something only he could see. “And he talked a pretty fight, too. Pretty enough to get the support he needed. So, he had about three dozen of us at his back, some storm-callers of reputation among the company. All set to take back Hannais M’hen the Cursed, turn back the clocks, undo all the harm the Black Folk wrought here.

We unleashed the talons of the sun through the aspect storm before we deployed, clearing a path. We came storming through in their wake. And you know what? We ended up over a thousand miles southwest of here, up to our waists in seawater on the beach at some shit-hole little imperial port. All because some f*cking idiot human moved the marker.”

Not sure if he was supposed to laugh or not, Ringil made a noncommittal noise. Pelmarag’s mouth twisted again with the memory.

“Had to fight our way up off that beach,” he said softly. “We lost six or seven dwenda doing it. Across town and up the hill, f*cking humans everywhere, running around screaming and jabbering in the dark like the lost souls of apes, you know, cut one down and there’s another right f*cking behind it. We took another five casualties, and Tarnval himself down by then with a chest wound, searched that f*cking town, tore it apart till we finally found our beacon. And when we finally did, we found they’d moved the f*cking thing and we were nowhere close to where we were supposed to be. No Hannais M’hen, cursed or otherwise. We were south, way south. And with that kind of sun coming up in a couple of hours’

time, well . . . nothing to do but collect the dead and injured, let the storm-callers take us back out of there. Tarnval died from the storm-stress on the way out, so did a couple of others. After that?”

Pelmarag shrugged. “We all went back to listening to Seethlaw.”

“Talking about me again?”

Seethlaw had come up behind them. His expression as he looked at Pelmarag was unreadable.

“Just a little reflection on strategy.”

“Yeah?” Seethlaw put a hand on Ringil’s shoulder. Something chilly poured into the air between the two dwenda. “Gil here isn’t a part of our strategy, Pel. He doesn’t need to know anything about it.”

Pelmarag held the other dwenda’s gaze. He said something short and bitten-sounding in the language they used when Ringil was not included in the conversation, then turned away and went to join the others.

Seethlaw grunted and nodded after him, a quick, chin-jutting gesture that had nothing friendly in it.

“So what’s that all about?” Ringil asked.

“Nothing that concerns you.” Seethlaw’s grip on his shoulder tightened slightly. “Come on. We’re not there yet.”

THROUGH THE WINTER TREES, ALONG PATHS THROUGH THE SWAMP THAT the dwenda either knew by heart or could sense without much effort. Ringil took an experimental detour at one point, around the other side of a rotting tree stump, and found himself abruptly up to his shins in yielding black morass.

Gray, soupy water pooled rapidly in the holes he’d made and brought with it a stench like death. He floundered back out, boots liberally streaked and plastered with mud. No one said anything, but he thought he caught Risgillen sneering. He stayed carefully in file after that.

There was no sound other than the squelch of their steps.

In the end, it was this that told him where he was. He knew something about marshland expanse from growing up in a city surrounded by one, and he was beginning to miss the signs of life he should have heard. There were no birdcalls, recognizable or otherwise, and no sudden rustling movements from amid the ground-level vegetation as they passed. Here and there, they saw pools and angled stretches of stagnant water bridged with moss-grown fallen tree trunks and stepped in by small mangroves, but nothing living stirred there, not even insects hovering above the leaden surface.

He’d heard of only one swamp this dead. Had even seen the place, once, from a safe distance to the west.

Hannais M’hen the Cursed, Pelmarag had called it.

Hannais M’hen.

Ennishmin.

Cursed was right, then. Forget the peasant-level legends and ghost stories they liked to weave about this place. He’d lost what little faith in things remained to him at Ennishmin, and for the most prosaic of reasons. Had nearly lost his life as well. Probably would have lost it but for Archeth’s prompt medical attention and—he suspected—her intercession with the powers-that-be at camp. Never tangle with an imperial commander at knifepoint if you plan to let him live, he’d begun one of the chapters in that treatise on skirmish warfare that never saw print, the chapter headed “Diplomacy.”

“Hss-sst!”

Ahead of him, Seethlaw had locked to a halt. He held up one rigid hand and hinged it downward, then sank smoothly into a crouch. The other dwenda froze and followed suit, and Ringil did his human best to copy them. Seethlaw raised a hand and pointed silently through the trees ahead. A broad gunmetal creek opened out there. They had walked almost onto its bank—and something made soft splashing sounds as it moved through the water toward them.

Seethlaw’s hand moved again.

It was, Ringil thought later, exactly the way to describe what happened. The dwenda’s hand moved, but not in any way that suggested its owner had any control over it. It was as if fingers and palm had each acquired a malicious but not quite coordinated will of their own. The wrist flexed at what looked like an impossible angle, the hand made an odd, repeated clawing gesture with three fingers, and Seethlaw hissed out words under his breath. Ringil caught only a half syllable or two, but his skin goose-fleshed with the sound.

Then something seemed to happen to the light around them.

At the same moment, a long, battered-looking canoe glided into view on the creek. It held five men, bearded and scruffily clad, but all armed to the teeth. Ringil spotted broadswords and axes, recurved bows held loosely nocked, and a huge arbalest strapped across a back. Two of the men wielded the paddles, digging and driving with the ease of long custom, strokes that knifed into the water almost silently and propelled the canoe along with barely a ripple. The other three were evidently the lookouts, heads swiveling, eyes tense and watchful above their bearded cheeks. None of them spoke a word to one another the whole time they were in view.

They passed less than five feet from where the dwenda crouched, and apparently did not see them.

Seethlaw waited what seemed like a long time, and then his hand unclawed itself, the light shifted again, and he started breathing, something Ringil now realized the dwenda had stopped doing completely when he first froze there on the bank of the creek.

“And they were—?”

Seethlaw shrugged. “Scavengers. They scour the swamp for trinkets of the Black Folk, sell them on northward as Aldrain curios. Desperate men, mostly, but they know the swamplands well. They have camps out on the fringes. It pays to avoid them.”

“Avoid them?” Ringil frowned, felt an odd tide of mingled hilarity and disappointment rising in him. His mouth twisted with it. “Are you serious? The mighty f*cking dwenda, skulking about in the bushes hiding from swamp trash? Hoiran’s twisted cock, Seethlaw, they’re only human.”

“Yes, but some of us,” said Risgillen, suddenly, sibilantly, into his left ear as she slipped past him, “are not all that keen on humans. For one thing—they don’t wash all that often.”

Seethlaw shot her a warning look, and she said no more.

“It’s this way,” he said, and they pressed on parallel to the creek. The channel broadened out as they walked, and a number of tributary arms opened up along the far bank. Drifts of some tubular, tangled floating weed began to appear on the gunmetal water, and an occasional gust of wind scudded the surface. The scent of decay lifted somewhat. They saw no more water traffic, and nothing else living until the water took a sharp bend to the right and suddenly a smooth-headed black-clad form stood ahead of them, sword across its back. Ringil, by now accustomed to the sleek helm and unornamented design of Aldrain armour, barely spared the new dwenda a glance. Most of him was absorbed in the thing that loomed behind.

It was a bridge, that much was clear, but the term bridge struck Ringil as a poor attempt at describing what he saw spanning the creek. By the same token, you could call the Imperial Bazaar in Yhelteth a market. It was true as far as it went, but—

The bridge soared out from buttresses as tall as Trelayne’s eastern gate, and appeared to be built mostly of wires and light. He made out spiraling stairways at either end, a shallow sweeping support arc from side to side, and spiderweb patterns of structure beneath. There was a delicacy to the construction that made Ringil think if the sun shone through it strongly enough, the whole thing might almost disappear.

Seethlaw, it seemed, had noticed his awe. The dwenda was watching him closely, almost as if he’d just passed some test.

“You approve?”

“It’s very beautiful,” Ringil admitted. “The scavengers don’t see it?”

“They see something.” Seethlaw stepped closer, breathed across his fingertips, and then pressed them gently to Ringil’s eyes. “Look.”

Ringil blinked and stared upward.

The bridge was gone.

Or . . . not gone precisely. The buttresses remained, but now they were composed of pale granite, twin bluffs facing each other across the creek, cracked and seamed with moss and thin-grown lines of yellowish grass, broken apart in places but offering no obvious route up. And where the bridge’s span had once been, a pair of slim fallen trees yearned out toward each other from the top of each bluff, branches thinning and then thinning again into twigs as they extended over the gap and grew closer, but never quite touched.

Ringil blinked again, hard. Rubbed at his eyes.

The bridge was there again.

“There are legends, of course,” Seethlaw said. “The boy who stumbles on this place at twilight on Padrow’s Eve or some other festival night and sees, in place of the rocks and trees, a fabulous fairy-tale bridge. But very few of your kind can actually see it for more than a passing second.” A wry smile. “As you say, they’re only humans.”

They left the helmed and armored dwenda with a brief exchange that sounded formulaic to Ringil, for all he could not understand a word of what was said. Then Seethlawled them up the spiraling stairs and out onto the span. Ringil, close behind him, took a handful of cautious steps out onto the weave of hairline strands under his feet and then froze. He couldn’t help it—it was like walking on the air itself. For long moments, he felt sick with terror of falling. The wind made fluting sounds across the strands around him; the dark water below rippled invitingly. A rift opened in the clouds overhead, and where the stronger light touched the bridge, structure dissolved into the beaded gleam of a dew-soaked cobweb.

He saw the looks he was getting from Risgillen. Swallowed, fixed his gaze firmly ahead, and started walking again. It didn’t help that the bridge gave a little underfoot with each step, not unlike the spongy ground they’d been treading on their way through the swamp. And as it gave, the strands seemed to chime very faintly at the upper edge of Ringil’s hearing. It wasn’t a pleasant sensation, and he was glad when they were over to the other side and coming down the spiral stairs.

At the bottom, they were met by two more armored dwenda. One of them pulled off his helmet and fixed Ringil with a hungry eye until Seethlaw snapped something at him. The conversation went back and forth a few times, and then the dwenda shrugged and put his helmet back on. He didn’t look at Ringil again.

“I’m really not popular around here, huh?”

“It isn’t that,” said Seethlaw absently. “They’re just worried, looking for something to take it out on.”

“Worried about what? Those guys in the canoes?”

The dwenda looked at him speculatively. “No, not them. There’s some talk about the Black Folk still being around here. One of our scouts went into a local camp wearing enough of a glamour to get served and sit unnoticed in the alehouse. He heard men talking about a black-skinned warrior in one of the villages to the west.”

“Yeah—come on. That’s just going to be some southern mercenary, maybe out of the deserts. Skins get pretty dark once you’re south of Demlarashan. Easy mistake to make.”

“Perhaps.”

“No perhaps about it. The Kiriath are gone, Seethlaw. I saw them off myself. Stood and watched at An-Monal until the last fireship went under. Wherever they went, they’re not coming back.”

“Yes, this is what I have learned in Trelayne. But I’ve also learned that the tongues of men are not much leashed by concern for accuracy or truth. It seems lies come very easily to your race. They lie to those they lead, to their mates and fellows no matter how close-drawn, even to themselves if it will make the world around them more bearable. It is hard to know what to believe in this place.”

Something about the weariness in his tone stung Ringil into defensive anger.

“Funny, that’s always what I heard about your people. That the dwenda were masters of deceit and trickery.”

“Indeed?” Ashgrin, laconic and grave at his shoulder. Ringil had heard his voice so few times it was a genuine shock now. “And from which four-thousand-year-old expert in Aldrain lore did you hear this?”

Risgillen cleared her throat loudly.

“Are we going to get on, brother? It seems to me that we have more to concern ourselves with than the prattling of—”

Seethlaw swung to face her. His voice came out dangerously low.

“Do you want to lead, Risgillen?”

She didn’t reply. The other dwenda watched with interest.

“I asked you a question, sister. Do you want charge of this expedition? Will you abandon the pleasures and comforts of our realm and become earthbound as I have? Will you immerse yourself in the brawling filth of human society to achieve our ends?”

Still no response.

“I’ll have an answer, sister, if you please. Or I’ll take your silence as the no it has always been. Is it no?

Then shut the f*ck up! ”

Risgillen started to speak, her own tongue, but Seethlaw slashed the blade of a hand across the flow. He turned slowly about, blank eyes switching from face to face among his fellow Aldrain.

“I hear you complain,” he spat, still in Naomic, perhaps, Ringil guessed, to snub them, to shame them before the human. “All of you, time and again, bemoaning what you must endure here, the journeys and sojourns of a few weeks’ duration that you must make among humans, tied to time and circumstance. I have spent three f*cking years tied to time so that we could build a path in Trelayne. I have tasted this world on my tongue for so long I can scarcely remember what it was like not to be tainted by its limits. I have swallowed it down, day after day, sickening from the brute animal stupidity of its ways, all so that I might learn its parameters and its possibilities, all so we may in the end take back what is ours. I have done all of this willingly, and would do it again. And I ask for nothing in return but your allegiance and your trust. Is that so very much to give?”

Silence. Very, very faintly, the sound of the Aldrain bridge humming and whining in the wind above them.

Seethlaw nodded grimly.

“Very well. You will not gainsay me in this again, Risgillen. Is that clear?”

A half syllable of Aldrain speech in reply. Risgillen bowed her head.

“Good. Then wait here.” Seethlaw nodded at Ringil. “Gil, you come with me. There’s something you need to see.”