The Steel Remains

chapter 6

By the time they made camp, a clouded darkness held the sky above the steppe.

The news of the runner attack had reached the tents ahead of them; the night herdsmen who came out to relieve them included a cousin of Runi’s who rode back at speed to tell his other kin. Egar followed on foot, leading his horse with Runi’s body slung over it while Klarn rode at a respectful distance, watchful as a raven. When they reached the Skaranak encampment, there were torches burning everywhere and practically the whole clan gathered with Runi’s family at their head. Even Poltar was there, the gaunt, shaven-skulled shaman and his acolytes standing aloof from the throng, the implements of consecration ready in their hands. There had been a subdued muttering back and forth among those waiting, but it died away to nothing when they saw the blood-soaked form of their clanmaster leading the horse into the glow of the torches.

The steppe ghouls had died hard. Their marks were on the Dragonbane from head to foot.

Egar lowered his eyes so he would not have to look at Narma and Jural. Neither Runi’s mother nor father had wanted their son to ride herd so early, but in council Egar would not forbid it since the boy was of age. Runi had promise, he was an enthusiastic boy, and he’d had a way with the animals since he could walk.

Added to which, anything was preferable to having him slouch around with the other sons of buffalo-wealthy Skaranak, swilling rice wine and yelling unimaginative abuse at passing women.

Right, Clanmaster? Better that young Runi pack that in and start making something of himself.

And now Runi was torn apart and already cooling as Egar lifted his roughly bound body from the horse’s back. The Dragonbane shifted his burden, bore it up in both arms, wincing as the weight pressed back against slash wounds on chest and upper arms. He came forward one numb step at a time to present Runi to his parents.

Narma broke down crying and fell on her son’s exposed face, so it was hard for Egar to keep the body in his arms. He tried not to stagger. Jural turned his face away, hid his tears in the darkness so he would not be shamed before the clan.

It was at times like this that the Dragonbane wished heartily he’d never f*cking returned from the south or assumed the mantle of clanmaster.

“He died a warrior’s death.”

He intoned the ritual words, cursing inwardly at the idiocy of it all. A sixteen-year-old boy, for f*ck’s sake. If he’d had the time to become a warrior, maybe he’d have lived through the raid. “He will be honored with the name of clan defender forever in our hearts.” He hesitated and mumbled, almost inaudibly, “I’m sorry, Narma.”

Her wailing went up a notch. It was that moment that Poltar the shaman chose to assert his own formalized role.

“Woman, be still. Will the Dwellers look with favor on a warrior so beset with female noisemaking? Even now he looks down on you from the Sky Road to his forefathers, and is shamed before them by this hubbub. Get away and light candles for him, as a woman should.”

What happened next was by no means clear in anybody’s mind afterward, least of all Egar’s own.

Narma, it seemed, was not going to relinquish her hold on Runi’s corpse. Poltar stepped closer and tried to persuade her by main force. There was a brief scuffle, an escalation of weeping, and the flat cracking sound of a palm against a face. Runi tumbled from Egar’s arms and hit the earth with a dull thud, headfirst. Narma started screaming at the shaman and Poltar hit her openhanded. She collapsed over her son like a badly tied bundle of firewood. Egar pivoted, guilt and undispelled rage surging for release, and decked the shaman with every ounce of strength left in his right arm. Poltar flew fully five feet backward from the end of the Dragonbane’s fist and hit the ground on his back.

There was a breath-choked pause while everyone caught up.

One of the acolytes took a step toward Egar and then thought better of it as he saw the look on the Dragonbane’s bloodied face. The other three hurried to Poltar’s side and helped him to sit up. The crowd murmured uneasily, a word slithering on the edge of being pronounced. The shaman spat blood and said it for them.

“Sacrilege!”

“Oh, give it a rest.” Egar, drawling but a lot less unconcerned than he made out. Because Poltar was about to be a f*cking problem.

If there was one force on the steppes that the Majak acknowledged equal to their own general toughness, it was the shifty, lightning-blast power of the Sky Dwellers. The Dwellers were not like the southerners’ God in His meticulous, archive-keeping imperialism. They were jealous, fickle, and unpredictably violent, and had no time for such clerkish, inclusive ways—they sent storms or plagues at random to remind the Majak of their place in the scheme of things, set men against each other for amusement, and then played dice with one another to decide who would live or die. In short, they acted not unlike the leisured and powerful among men, and the shaman was their only empowered messenger under the sky. To offend the shaman was to offend the Dwellers, and those who offended, it was understood, would sooner or later pay a heavy price.

Now the oldest acolyte took it up, brandishing his summoning stick at the assembled Skaranak.

“Sacrilege! Sacrilege has been done! Who will atone?”

“You’ll f*cking atone if you don’t shut up.” Egar strode toward the speaker, determined to nip this in the bud. The acolyte stood his ground, eyes wide with fear and insane faith.

“Urann the Gray will—”

Egar grabbed him by the throat. “I said shut up. Where was Urann the Gray when I needed him out there? Where was Urann when this boy needed his help?” He cast a glance around at the frightened faces in the torchlight, and for the first time in his life he felt an overpowering contempt for his own people. His voice rang louder. ‘Where is f*cking Urann every time we need him, heh? Where was he, Garath, when the runners took your brother? When the wolves stole your daughter from her cradle, Inmath? Where was he when the coughing fever came and the smoke from the funeral pyres rose on every horizon from here to Ishlin-ichan. Where was that gray motherf*cker when my father died? ”

Then Poltar was back on his feet and facing him.

“You speak as a child,” he said in a quiet, deadly voice that nonetheless carried to the whole watching crowd. Consummately staged—it was the man’s profession after all. “Your time in the south has corrupted you to our ways, and now you’d bring disaster on the Skaranak with your sacrilege. You are no longer fit to govern as clanmaster. The Grey One speaks it with the death of this boy.”

The crowd murmured, but it was a confused sound. There were plenty of them who had little time for Poltar and the leisurely lifestyle his status brought him. Egar wasn’t the only cynic on the steppe, nor the only Skaranak warrior to have gone south and come back with a wider picture of how the world worked. Three or four of the associate herd owners had themselves been mercenary captains for Yhelteth, and one of them, Marnak, had fought beside the Dragonbane at Gallows Gap. He was older than Egar by at least a decade, but still whiplash-swift when it was needed, and his loyalty was forged deeper than anything the shaman could call on. Egar spotted his grim, leathered face there in the torchlight, watchful and ready to skin steel. Marnak caught his clanmaster’s look and nodded, just once.

Egar felt gratitude sting at his eyes.

But there were others.

The weak and the stupid, in their dozens, huddled now in among their fellows, afraid of the cold night beyond the firelight and anything in it. Afraid almost as much of anything new that might unseat a vision hemmed in by vast empty skies and the unchanging steppe horizon. Egar saw their faces, knew them for the ones who looked away as he met their eyes.

And behind these faces, feeding and playing on these fears, stood the greedy and the entrenched, whose hatred of change welled up from the more prosaic concern that it might upset the old order, and so their own privileged position within the clan. Those for whom the Dragonbane’s return as a hero had been hailed not with joy but with cool mistrust and a sharp look to herd ownership and hierarchy. Those who—it shamed him to admit the fact—included a couple of his own brothers at least.

For all these people, Poltar the shaman and his stubborn beliefs represented everything that the Majak stood for, and everything that might be lost if the balance shifted. They would not stand with Egar; at best they might only stand by. And others might well do something worse.

Clouds shredded across the band as if frayed by its edge; silver light spilled on the plain to the south.

Egar cast a seasoned commander’s eye across the simmering uncertainty he saw in his people, and called it.

“If Urann the Gray has something to say to me,” he said loudly, “he can come here and say it personally.

He doesn’t need a broken-down buzzard too idle to earn his meat like a man to speak for him. Here I am, Poltar.” He held his arms wide. “Call him. Call on Urann. If I have committed sacrilege, let him open the sky and strike me down here and now. And if he doesn’t, well, then I guess we’ll know that you do not have his ear, won’t we?”

There were gusts of indrawn breath, but it was the sound of spectators at street circus, not outraged faith.

And the shaman was glaring poisonously at him, but he didn’t open his mouth. Egar masked a savage joy.

Got you, you motherf*cker!

Poltar was trapped. He knew as well as Egar that the Dwellers were not given to manifesting themselves much these days. Some said it was because they were elsewhere, others because they had ceased to exist, and still others because they never had existed. The true reasons were, as Ringil would have put it, hugely f*cking immaterial. If Poltar called on Urann, nothing would happen and he’d be made out a fool, not to mention powerless. And Egar’s borderline flirtation with sacrilege could then be safely construed by the other men of the clan as warrior honor in the face of a mangy old broken-down charlatan.

“Well, Shaman?”

Poltar drew his moth-eaten wolf-skin robe about him and cast a look around at the crowd.

“The south has addled this one’s brains,” he spat. “Mark me, he will bring the ruin of the Gray One upon you all.”

“Get to your yurt, Poltar.” The boredom in Egar’s voice was layered on but entirely manufactured. “And see if you can’t find your misplaced manners there. Because the next time I see you lay hands on a grieving parent like that, I’ll slit your f*cking throat and hang you out for the buzzards. You.” His arm shot out to indicate the oldest acolyte. “You’ve got something to say?”

The acolyte looked back at him, face rancid with hatred, biting back the words that were so obviously swilling around in his mouth. Then Poltar leaned across, muttered something to him, and he subsided. The shaman threw one more haughty look back at the Dragonbane, then pushed his way rudely into the crowd and left, followed by his four companions. People turned to stare after them.

“Help for the family of this fallen warrior,” called Egar, and gazes swiveled back to where Narma still crouched weeping over her dead son. Women went to her, laying on soft hands and words. The Dragonbane nodded at Marnak, and the grizzled captain crossed to his side.

“That was well done,” Marnak murmured. “But who’s going to officiate at the pyre if the shaman stays sulking in his yurt?”

Egar shrugged. “If needs must, we’ll send to the Ishlinak for a spellsinger. They owe me favors in Ishlin-ichan. Meantime, you keep an eye on that particular yurt. If he so much as lights a pipe in there, I want to know about it.”

Marnak nodded and slipped away, leaving the Dragonbane to brood on what might be coming. Of one thing he was certain.

This was far from over.