The Steel Remains

chapter 29

Sherin didn’t know him.

You couldn’t blame her, Ringil supposed. It had been a long time, and there probably wasn’t a lot left in him of the little boy who refused to play with her in the gardens at Lanatray. Certainly there wasn’t much of the wan little girl he remembered in the woman slumped before him. He’d very likely have walked right past her in the Glades without recognition if he hadn’t been staring a hole in Ishil’s charcoal sketch of her for the last couple of weeks. In fact, even the sketch wasn’t such a great match now. Sherin’s privations seemed to have melted the flesh from her face, turned her eyes hollow and inward, and added a brutal burden of years she hadn’t yet lived. There were streaks of tangled gray in her hair and gathered lines of pain around mouth and eyes that wouldn’t have looked amiss on a harbor-end tavern drudge twice her age.

Looking at her, he wondered briefly what marks his time with the dwenda had left on his own face. He hadn’t seen a mirror since the night he left the Glades for Etterkal, and now, suddenly, the thought of facing one filled him with unease.

“Sherin?” he said, very gently. He knelt to her level. “It’s your cousin Ringil. I’ve come to take you home.”

She didn’t look at him. Her eyes were fixed past his shoulder on Seethlaw, and she cowered into the corner of the stall as if the mother-of-pearl weave of the walls would absorb her. When Ringil reached out to touch her arm, she flinched violently away and her hands crept up to clutch and cover her neck.

She rocked back and forth minutely in the corner and began a high single-note keening, a sound so divorced from human voice that at first he could not be sure it came from her throat.

Ringil twisted on his haunches, looked up at Seethlaw’s pale, Aldrain features.

“You want to get the f*ck out?” he snapped. “Give me a minute with her?”

The dwenda’s gaze went from his face to Sherin and back again. His shoulders lifted minimally. He turned and slipped out through the half-open door like smoke.

“Listen, Sherin, he isn’t going to hurt you. He’s . . .” Ringil weighed it up. “A friend. He’s going to let me take you home. Really. There’s no trick here, no sorcery. I really am your cousin. Your mother and Ishil asked me to come. Been looking for you for . . . for a while. Don’t you remember me from Lanatray? I never wanted to play with you in the gardens, remember, even when Ishil made me.”

That seemed to do it. Inch by inch, her face came around. The keening broke up, caught on shards of breath, then soaked away into the quiet like water into parched earth. She looked at him out of one eye, shivering, both hands still clasped at her neck. Her voice creaked like a rusty hinge.

“Ri-ringil?”

He put together something resembling a smile. “Yeah.”

“It’s really you?”

“Yeah. Ishil sent me.” He tried the smile again. “You know what that means. Ishil. What she’s like. I f*cking had to find you, didn’t I?”

“Ringil. Ringil.”

And then she threw herself onto him, collapsed over his neck and shoulders, weeping and clutching and screaming as if a thousand possessing demons were trapped inside her and had decided now, finally, that they’d been there too long, they wanted out, and it was time to let go.

He held her while it lasted, rocking her gently, murmuring platitudes and stroking her rat’s-nest hair. The screams ran down to sobbing, then to shuddering breaths and quiet. He peered at her face, cleaned it of tears as best he could with his shirtsleeve, and then he picked her up and carried her out, bits of straw from the stall’s floor still clinging to the simple swamp-stained shift she wore.

Happy now, Mother? Have I done enough?

Outside, the sky was moving, thick cloud boiling past overhead at menacing speed. The light had changed, thickening and staining toward a day’s-end dimness, and the air reeked of a coming storm.

There were no sounds from the other stables or the other stalls in this one; if their occupants were awake, terror or apathy was keeping them quiet. Ringil found himself glad—it was easier to pretend there was no one else kept prisoner here but the woman he now held in his arms.

Seethlaw stood with his back to the wall of the stable and his arms folded, looking at nothing at all. Ringil walked past him without a word, stopped a couple of steps past with Sherin in his arms. She buried her face in his neck and moaned.

“So,” the dwenda said at his back. “Satisfied? You have everything you want now?”

Ringil did not look around. “You put us both on a good horse, you point me to the Trelayne road, and you let me get a full day’s ride away from this shit-hole. Then we can maybe talk about promises kept.”

“Sure.” He heard the sound of Seethlaw levering himself off the wall, straightening up and gliding in behind him. His voice fell drab and cold, lifted hairs on the nape of Ringil’s neck. “Why not. After all, there’s nothing more for you here, is there?”

“You said it.”

He walked toward the gate in the stormlight, bracing his steps a little because Sherin was heavier to carry than he’d expected when he first picked her up. Some forever insouciant part of him remembered a time when he could fight all day in plate armor and still stand as night fell, find the energy to go among the conscripted men at camp and build their spirits for the next day’s slaughter, talk up victory he did not believe in and share their brutally crude jokes about spending and f*cking and hurting as if he found them funny.

Were you a better man then, Gil? Or just a better liar?

Your arse cheeks and belly were tighter, anyway. Your shoulders were bigger and harder.

Perhaps that was enough, for them and for you.

He cleared the gate, working grimly to keep his eyes away from the heads in the water beyond. He almost succeeded. One slippery, sliding glance as he walked out, the corner of his eye grabbed by the despairing muddied features of the woman nearest the gate. He jerked his gaze away before he could glimpse more than one tear-soiled cheek and the mumbling desperate mouth. He never met her eyes.

On through the swamp and the failing light, with Sherin weighing ever heavier in his arms and Seethlaw cold and remotely beautiful at his side, all three of them like symbolic characters from some irritatingly pompous morality-tale play whose original moral had somehow been scrambled and compromised and lost and was now, to audience and participants alike, anybody’s f*cking guess.

ON THE SOUTHWESTERN FRINGES OF THE SWAMP, THE LAND GREW slowly less hostile to human use, and apparently to life of other kinds as well. It started with the odd mosquito bite and sparse clouds of flies rising around their boots as they plashed through marshy portions of the path. Then, slowly, birdsong began to seep into the silence, and a short time after that Ringil started to spot the birds themselves, perched or hopping about in plain view on branches and fallen tree trunks. Increasingly, water gave up its unpredictable claims to the earth, ceased to ooze up out of the ground wherever they stepped and confined itself more and more to creeks and inlets. The path they walked hardened up; the ever-present stench of the stagnant pools receded to an infrequent wafting. The ground rose and folded itself, while the sound of flowing water over rock announced the presence of streams. Even the sky seemed to brighten as the threatening storm crawled off somewhere else for a while.

Like many other things in Ringil’s life, the oppressive stillness at the heart of the swamp had not seemed so hard to endure until he walked away from it.

They followed one of the creeks as it turned into a river, stopping to rest at frequent intervals along the bank. After a while, Sherin was able to walk by herself, though she still shrank against Ringil’s side whenever any of the dwenda came close or turned a blank-eyed gaze on her. She didn’t talk at all, seemed in fact to be treating the whole experience as if it might at any moment turn out to be a hallucination or a dream.

Ringil sympathized.

Seethlaw, for his part, was almost as silent. He led the group with a minimum of verbal and gestured instruction, and didn’t speak to Ringil any more than his fellow Aldrain. If he’d selected the other dwenda who accompanied them, Ringil had not seen him do it. Pelmarag and Ashgrin simply fell in beside them as they crossed the Aldrain bridge, and another two dwenda he didn’t know were waiting for them at the other side. Brief snatches of conversation went back and forth among these four as they walked, but Seethlaw was not included, and didn’t seem much to care.

At twilight, they came to a scavenger camp built beside the creek.

“There’s a ferry across,” Seethlaw explained as they stood under trees at the edge of the little knot of cabins and storehouses. “And from there, the road bends northwest. We’ve come this far south to avoid the worst of the swamp, but the ground from now on is a lot easier. It’s a couple of days’ walk to Pranderghal, that’s a fair-sized village. We’ll get horses there.”

Ringil knew Pranderghal. He’d watched its original inhabitants driven from their homes and onto the road south, back when it was still called Iprinigil. He nodded.

“And tonight?”

“We spend here. The ferry won’t run now until morning.” Seethlaw grinned unpleasantly. “Unless you want me to bring the aspect storm and find a way around in the marches.”

Ringil held down a shiver. He glanced at Sherin. “No thanks. I don’t think either of us is up for that.”

“Are you quite sure?” The grin stayed. “Think about it. You could be home in Trelayne in a matter of days instead of weeks. And it won’t feel like days anyway; it won’t feel like time at all.”

“Yeah. I know what it’ll feel like. Give it a f*cking rest, why don’t you?”

They went into the only inn in the camp, an earthen-floor-and-straw establishment with a dozen trestle tables and a long wooden bar at ground level. There was a staircase against the far wall and a railed landing overhead with doors leading off. They forced their way through the din and press of bearded, unwashed-smelling men to the bar and procured rooms for the night. Ringil saw no obvious change in Seethlaw or the other dwenda, but they’d evidently cast some kind of glamour about themselves, because no one reacted to their looks or outlandish garb. The innkeeper, a thickset, swarthy individual hard to tell apart from his clientele, took coin from Pelmarag with a curt nod, bit into it and pocketed it, then gestured toward a trestle table in the corner near a window. They took their seats and were served a hog-rib dinner along with tankards of thick-foamed ale shortly thereafter. It all proved surprisingly digestible, at least to Ringil’s stomach, though he saw the dwenda shooting one another wry glances as they chewed.

He found he couldn’t remember what they’d eaten in the Aldrain marches. Only that Seethlaw had supplied it, magicked it forth from somewhere, and it had melted like the finest cuts of honeyed meat in his mouth, like the most sought-after of Glades cellar vintages on his tongue. Beyond that . . .

Even that . . .

It was all fading now, he realized, fading fast, the marches and everything he’d seen and done there like fragments of a last dream before waking, pieces of self in action that made no obvious sense, tantalizing images without context and an incoherent tumble of events loosed from any mooring in time or sequence—

He stopped chewing abruptly, and for just that moment the tavern food was a clotted mouthful of sawdust and grease he couldn’t bring himself to swallow. The heat and lamplight and noise in the place swelled to a dull, unbearable roar. He stared across at Seethlaw, seated directly opposite, and saw the dwenda was watching him.

“It’s fading . . . ,” he said through the food stuck in his mouth. “I can’t . . .”

Seethlaw nodded. “Yes. That’s to be expected. You’ve returned to the defined world, you’re tied to time and circumstance again. Your sanity will suffer if you remember anything else clearly, if the alternatives seem too real.”

Ringil swallowed his mouthful, forced it down.

“It’s like it’s all turning into a dream I had,” he said numbly.

The dwenda gave him a small, sad smile. He leaned forward a little.

“I’ve heard it said that dreams are the only way your kind can find their way into the gray places. And that only the insane or the inhumanly strong of will can stay.”

“I—”

Someone bumped heavily into Ringil from behind, jolted loose what he wanted say before he could frame it properly. The thought spilled away from him like coins across the street and down a grate, little glints of gleaming meaning, gone.

He snapped around angrily on the bench.

“Why the f*ck don’t you watch where you’re going?”

“Oops, sorry, citizen, sorry. Look, I’ll gladly make good any spillage if you . . . Gil? F*cking Ringil?”

Egar the Dragonbane.

Out of the lamplight and tavern hubbub like a figure from legend emerging from battlefield mist. Broad and tall and tangled looking, hair a wild knotted mass with little iron talismanic ornaments hanging in it.

One leather-sheathed blade of his staff lance jutted up over his shoulder; there was a short-handled ax matched with a broad-bladed dirk at his belt. He smelled of marsh and cold, and had obviously just come through the door. His scarred and bearded face split into a huge grin. He clapped hands on Ringil’s shoulders, dragged him up off the bench with no more effort than a father picking up his infant son.

“Urann’s f*cking balls, let me get a look at you,” he bellowed. “What the f*ck are you doing in this shit-pile dump? You’re the f*cking face from the past I’m supposed to recognize and save? You’re the one that cloaked f*ck was on about?”

And then everything came apart.

For Ringil it was like stepping suddenly back into some aspect of the marches. Time stopped working, slowed to a pace that was like moving in mud. His perceptions stretched and smeared; he saw what was happening as if through some other, entirely more attenuated set of senses.

Seethlaw, slamming to his feet, eyes wide.

Egar, warrior’s senses suddenly awake to the tension, hand falling without fuss to the broad dirk at his hip.

Heads turning at neighboring tables.

Ashgrin, seated at Seethlaw’s side, turning, reaching down for something.

A faint shimmer on the air. A darkening.

“I think you are mistaken, sir,” Seethlaw said, and raised a hand a few inches off the table at his side, fingers spread loosely to make a spider. A ripple seemed to run through the fingers, as if they were suddenly boneless. “This is not your friend.”

Egar snorted. “Listen, old man, I’d know this guy any . . .”

He frowned.

“A mistake,” repeated the dwenda caressingly. “Easily made.”

“You must be very tired,” agreed Ashgrin.

Egar yawned cavernously. “Yeah, ain’t that the f*cking truth. Funny, I could have sworn—”

Ringil, for no clear reason he could later name, screamed and swept an arm savagely across the table.

Tavern-brawl tactics, tugged out from some dark pocket of response he rarely went to these days. The lamp in the center went over, oil spilled out. Flame caught and sprinted a line among the platters and tumbled tankards. He came to his feet, heels of both palms under the trestle, upended it at Seethlaw.

“It is me, Eg,” he was yelling. “It f*cking is me. Get the girl. ”

Later, tears would squeeze into his eyes as he recalled the Majak’s reaction. Egar’s lips peeled off a snarl, he surged back in at Ringil’s side. The dirk came out, broad dark glint in the dancing light from the flames now loose in the straw on the floor. He brandished it at the stumbling dwenda.

“Right you are, Gil,” he roared. “Who wants this right up their f*cking arse? F*cking magicking old cunts.”

His other hand had already flashed out, seized Sherin by the arm, and dragged her off the bench. As Pelmarag tried to stop him, the dirk flashed out. Pelmarag’s arm got in the way, the blade sliced, and blood darkened the dwenda’s sleeve. Pelmarag made a wolfish snarling sound of his own and leapt at Egar. The steppe nomad’s eyes widened in shock. Whatever he’d seen in Pelmarag before, whatever glamour had sullied his perception, it was gone now.

“Wraith!” he bellowed. “’Ware spirits! Swamp wraith! ”

Then he went over on the floor with Pelmarag on top of him.

Weapon, weapon. It gibbered through Ringil’s head. Sell my f*cking soul to Hoiran for a weapon.

He spun and dropped on Pelmarag’s back instead. Knew it was a matter of seconds before the other dwenda at the table had him. Did it anyway. Egar was locked up in the knife fighter’s clinch, arms braced and straining to bring his blade to bear against Pelmarag’s grip. The legs of dwenda and man thrashed about on the earthen floor, looking for purchase. Ringil hooked the fingers of his right hand into the dwenda’s eyes and hauled back. Pelmarag howled and flailed. Egar broke the dwenda’s grip and shoved the dirk through his throat from the side. Blood gouted everywhere. It smelled, Ringil would later realize, bittersweet and strong, quite unlike anything out of human veins.

For now he was already spinning about, crouched and yelling, looking for the others in the rising smoke.

He had one moment to lock gazes with Seethlaw, who was poised to leap the upended trestle, features an awful mask of blank-eyed, snarling rage. Then a surging mass of humanity swept in between them.

“Swamp wraith! Swamp wraith! Get the motherf*ckers!”

Out of nowhere, Ashgrin had a terrible blue long-sword blade flashing in his hands. The first humans to reach him went down in butchered pieces. The surge turned chaotic and shrill, some scrambling backward away from the sudden steel, others who had weapons bawling for space and struggling to get to the front.

“Ringil!” Egar, yelling in his ear. “Let’s get the f*ck out of here!”

He gulped air. “Gladly. Get the—”

“Got her! Just f*cking go!”

The Majak’s hand was firmly around Sherin’s arm again, engulfing it just above the elbow. She’d have bruises tomorrow, Ringil knew.

If we live that long.

They made the door somehow, elbowing and tripping others who’d had the same idea. Ringil kicked it open and tumbled out into the cold and dark. The inn was built on a slight rise and he fell over with his own momentum, landed in a winded heap.

Shattering of glass. A dwenda came leaping, shrieking through the window like a lost soul, landed like a cat, and stalked toward them, blade in hand, grinning.

Egar let go of Sherin’s arm.

“Get behind me, girl,” he grunted.

He freed his small ax, hefted it left-handed, kept the dirk in his right. No time to unship the lance, much though he’d have loved the extra reach. He eyed the creature’s sword with professional calm. The empty inhuman eyes had been a shock with the first one, but now his blood was up, he wasn’t fussed. No worse than a steppe ghoul, he supposed. A fighting grin licked around his lips.

“F*ck you looking at?” he barked.

The creature ran in, shrilling. Terrifying speed, but Egar had seen that a few times before as well. He hurled his dirk upward, underhand at its face. The long-sword flashed out, deflecting, but it was an awkward block, anyone could see that. Egar was in behind, now with the ax in both hands, hacking sideways under the twisted sword. The swamp wraith yowled and leapt out of the way. Egar pressed in, got the hook-backed edge of the ax on the blade and yanked it out of the way, left-handed. His right hand curled to a fist, smashed his opponent in the face. The swamp wraith reeled. Egar followed through.

Another punch, into the face again —leave the body alone, assume armor of some sort under that weird black leatherish gear— and he felt the nose break with a solid crunch. The wraith screamed and tried to slash back at him with its blocked blade. Speed it had, but not the brute strength it needed. Egar grinned and reached down, hooked an arm under a thigh, and heaved. The creature went over on its back. Egar dropped on its chest with a knee and his full weight. Something creaked and cracked. The swamp wraith screamed again, weakly. Egar got his ax free, no time to reverse it, and smashed the iron-shod haft down into the empty-eyed face. He put out an eye, shattered a cheekbone. Smashed the mouth and the already broken nose.

Movement behind him.

He whipped around, saw Ringil standing there swaying in the feeble light. Blew out a sigh of relief and eased his grip on the ax.

“Get up,” the Trelayne knight said hoarsely. “We’ve got to get out of here. Before the others get outside.”

Egar glanced toward the inn. The sounds of violence raged from the broken window and the doorway, where a mob of men was gathering, torn between the fascination of spectators and the terror of what they’d seen. There was smoke and the jumping light of flames. No one seemed to have noticed the three of them yet, down here in the gloom. All attention was on the building.

“There’s got to be better than sixty men in there,” he told Ringil. He was breathing hard from the fight.

“Even if only two-thirds of them want to mix it up, they’ll finish these f*ckers, easy.”

“No, they won’t. ” An awful urgency split Ringil’s voice open. “Believe me, we’ve got minutes at most.”

You don’t follow a man to almost certain death in the baking heat of a mountain pass without learning his measure first. Without learning to trust what he says in a coin-spin instant, even if he is a f*cking faggot.

Egar got up and stared around.

“Right. We take the ferry.”

“What?” Ringil frowned. “Don’t these bumpkins lock up their oars?”

“Yeah, who gives a shit about oars, time like this. The Idrikarn flows hard this far out of the swamp, it’ll carry us south faster than you can f*cking run, mate.”

The thing at Egar’s feet stirred and moaned. The Majak looked down in surprise.

“Tough motherf*cker, huh?” he said, almost admiring.

Then he reversed the ax in his hands, shifted stance, and chopped down with the bladed end. The swamp wraith’s head rolled free in a messy burst of blood. He wiped some of it off his face, sniffed it curiously and shrugged. He cast about and found his dirk, gathered it up, and clapped Ringil on the shoulder.

“Come on, then,” he said. “Arse in the saddle.”

“Wait, give me his sword.”

“What do you want his f*cking sword for? What’s wrong with the one on your back?”

Ringil stared at him as if he’d suddenly started gibbering like a Demlarashan mystic. Egar stopped in midturn, spread his bloodied hands.

“What?”

Ringil lifted his right hand as if it pained him, put it slowly and wonderingly up to his shoulder, and touched the pommel of his sword like, well, like he was caressing someone’s prick, to be honest. Egar shifted uncomfortably, fiddled with his ax.

“You’re a f*cking weirdo, Gil. Same as it ever was. Come on. ”

Down to the darkened landing stage at a sprint, Sherin stumbling between them, and Ringil saw it was true, even at the bent edge of the river there was current running. Tiny leaves and other specks of river detritus drifted by at ambling pace. In the center of the stream, a taut swirl showed on the fitfully bandlit water. The ferry, a fat little demasted fishing skiff barely four yards long, wagged at the end of its moorings as if in a hurry to be off.

“Hoy! You!” They’d been spotted. “Wait, there—thieves—look. Hoy, stop them, that’s my f*cking boat—”

They leapt aboard. Egar hacked the ropes apart and gave the pilings a punt with one boot. Behind them, a spill of dark figures came pelting down toward the landing stage, yelling, gesticulating, brandishing weapons and fists. The skiff drifted away from the shore, agonizingly slow at first and then, as the current caught, swinging briskly out into flow. Balanced amidships, crouched over the collapsed and sobbing form of Sherin, Egar grinned at Ringil.

“Haven’t done this in a while.”

“You’d better get down,” Ringil advised him. “They’re going to start shooting in a minute.”

“Nah. Too much else going on, they won’t have a strung bow between them. They’re not soldiers, Gil.”

But he bent and hand-braced himself to a seat on one of the skiff ’s cross-strut benches anyway. He craned sideways and peered. “That’s just Radresh, pissed off ’cause we’ve nicked his ferry.”

“You can see his point.”

“Yeah, well. Never did like his f*cking prices.”

The two of them looked back in silence as the crowd on the landing stage boiled about in its own impotence. Something heavy splashed in their wake, but too far aft to be a cause for concern. No one was getting in the water, that was for sure. A couple of pursuers with some presence of mind ran along the bank, trying to keep pace. Ringil watched narrowly for a few seconds, saw them run into thickening undergrowth at the edge of the camp and clog to a halt. The pursuit died in curses and bawled abuse, growing ever fainter. He felt his heart starting to ease.

Until—

Up on the rise, flames burned merrily in the windows and opened door of the inn. It was hard to tell at the growing distance, but he thought a single tall, dark figure loomed in the doorway, unmoved by the fire at its back, staring after them with lightless eyes.

Run if you like, whispered a voice in his head. I’ll count to a hundred.

He shivered.

The boat tugged onward, downriver on the water’s dark swirl.