The Steel Remains lffh-1 Page 11

  CHAPTER 9

  It was still light when he got up.

  Somewhat surprised by the fact, Ringil wandered yawning about the house in search of servants, found some, and ordered a hot bath drawn. Then he went down to the kitchens while he was waiting, scavenged a plate of bread and dried meat, and ate it standing at a window, staring absently through the glass at late-afternoon shadows on the lawn. The kitchen staff bustled about him in steam and shouted commands, carefully ignoring his presence, more or less as if he were some expensive and delicate statue dumped inconveniently in their midst. He looked about for the girl who’d served him tea but didn’t see her. When the bath was ready, he went back upstairs and soaked in it until the water started to cool. Then he toweled off without help, dressed with fastidious care from the new wardrobe Ishil had funded for him, put on the Ravensfriend and a feathered cap, and took himself out for a walk.

  The Glades were suffused with dappled amber sunlight and thronged with strollers out enjoying the last of the autumn warmth. For a while he contented himself with drifting among them, ignoring the glances the sword on his back attracted, and letting the last dregs of the krin rinse out in the glow from the declining sun. High in the eastern sky, the edge of the band arched just visible against the blue. Ringil caught himself staring blankly up at it, and out of nowhere he had an idea.

  Shalak.

  He picked his way down to the moss-grown Glades quayside, where there were tables and chairs set up for the view, stalls serving lemonade and cakes at inflated prices, and a steady traffic of small boats picking up and dropping off parties of expensively dressed picnickers from the upriver districts. Eventually, he managed to find a boatman halfway willing to take him downriver to Ekelim, and jumped lightly aboard before the man could change his mind. He stood in the stern as they pulled away from the shore, watching the Glades as it receded, face washed warm with stained-glass sunset light, only faintly aware that he was striking a pose. He sat down, shifted about on the damp wood with due attention to his new clothes and the slant of the Ravensfriend until he was more or less comfortable, and tried to blink the sun out of his eyes.

  “Not many days like this left in the year,” the boatman commented over his oars. “They say we’re in for an Aldrain winter.”

  “Who does?” Ringil asked absently. They were always predicting an Aldrain winter. It would be what passed for presaging doom among the entrail-readers at Strov market now that the war was over and won.

  The boatman was keen to expound. “Everyone thinks it, my lord. The fisher crews down at harbor end all say it’s harder to land silverfry this year than they’ve ever known before. The waters are colder flowing in from the Hironish isles. And there’ve been signs. Hailstones the size of a man’s fist. On the marsh flats at south Klist, they’ve seen strange lights at dawn and evening, and people hear a black dog barking through the night. My wife’s brother stands forward lookout for one of Majak Urdin’s whalers, and he says they’ve had to sail farther north this year to sight spouts. One day at the end of last month they went out beyond the Hironish, and he saw stones of fire falling from the band right into the water. There was a storm that night and . . .”

  And so on.

  Ringil went ashore at Ekelim with the echoes of it all still in his head. He headed up Dray Street from the harbor, hoping a little belatedly that Shalak hadn’t found occasion to move premises anytime in the last decade. It was slow progress through the milling early-evening crowds, but the cut and fabric of his new clothes helped open a path. People didn’t want trouble, even at this end of the river. There were members of the Watch paired on street corners, watching the press and toying twitchily with long wooden day-clubs; in resolving any dispute, they were going to see the same things in Ringil’s clothing as everyone else. He’d get the rich man’s benefit of the doubt, and anyone on the other side of the equation was going to get dragged down a side alley and given a swift, timber-edged lesson in manners.

  He reached the corner of Dray and Blubber, and grinned a little. He needn’t have worried about the passing of time here. Ten years on, Shalak’s place hadn’t changed any more than a priest’s mind. The frontage was the same scoured stonework and dark, coffee-stain windows lit dimly from within, the same heavy browed eaves drooping so low across the front door you could bash your head if you’d grown up sufficiently well nourished to gain the height. The same cryptic sign swinging outside on its rusted iron bracket:

  COME IN AND SEE.

  Back in the early years, before the war, there’d been another set of words up on that sign: COME IN AND LOOK AROUND—YOU MIGHT SEE SOMETHING THAT LIKES YOU, surrounded by a ring of arcane—and, Ringil always suspected, fake—Aldrain glyphs. But then came the ’50s, the war and the dragonfire and the alien invaders from the sea. What had once been a harmless come-on for the dilettante Vanishing Folk enthusiasts Shalak made his living from was now suddenly a statement of sorcerous intent that verged on treason. Some said it was the west that the Aldrain had vanished into, and it was out of the west that the Scaled Folk were coming now; Shalak had his windows smashed by angry mobs a couple of times, had stones thrown at him in the street on more occasions than he could easily count, was summoned repeatedly to appear before the Committee for Public Morals. He got the message. The sign came down, the glyphs were scrubbed off every surface inside the shop, and any claims of magical powers for the items Shalak sold were replaced with disclaimers stating that nothing was known for certain of Aldrain lore, that no one had seen a dwenda in living memory, and that their whole existence was, in all probability, a bunch of children’s fairy stories, nothing more. Ringil always suspected how deeply it hurt Shalak to hand-letter those little notices—whatever the affectations of his clients, the man himself had always been a true believer. But when, with youthful brashness, he broached the subject, Shalak had offered in return only a pained smile and good-citizen platitudes.

  We all must make sacrifices, Ringil. It’s the war. If this is all I suffer, you will not hear me complain.

  Oh, come on! Ringil, plucking a notice from a carving at random, brandishing it. This shit? “No one in living memory has seen a dwenda.” Fuck’s sake, Shal. No one in living memory’s seen Hoiran walk, but I don’t notice them closing down the fucking temples. What a bunch of fucking hypocrites.

  People are frightened, Ringil. There was a livid bruise around Shalak’s left eye. It’s understandable.

  People are sheep, Ringil raged. Moronic fucking sheep.

  With that, Shalak had made no sign that he disagreed.

  He hadn’t changed much, either, in the intervening years. The close-cropped beard was shot through with white now rather than gray, and there was less hair to balance it atop the lined forehead, but otherwise it was the same faintly lugubrious clerk’s face that peered up from the leather-bound tome it was bent over, as Ringil opened the door to the little shop and ducked inside.

  “Yes, noble sir? How may I be of service?”

  “Well, you can knock off the ornate honorifics, for a start.” Ringil took off his cap. “Then you might want to have a go at recognizing me.”

  Shalak blinked. He removed the eyeglasses he’d been using to peruse the book, and stared hard at his new customer. Ringil made a leg.

  “Alish? No, wait a minute. Ringil? Ringil Eskiath? Is that really you?” Shalak hopped off his chair, came forward, and seized Ringil by the arms. “Hoiran’s teeth, what are you doing back here?”

  “Came to see you, Shal.”

  Shalak rolled his eyes and let go. “Oh please. You know Risha’s going to claw your eyes out if she sees you batting your lashes at me like that.” But you could see, despite it all, he was pleased. “Really, why’d you come back?”

  “Long story, not very interesting.” Ringil seated himself on the corner of a table laden with odd lumps of stone, semiprecious gems, and obscure metalwork. “Could use some advice, though, Shal.”

  “Advice from me?”

  “Har
d to believe, huh?” Ringil picked up a chunk of tangled iron wire with a glyph worked into its center. “Where’d you get this?”

  “A source. What do you want advice about?”

  Ringil looked elaborately around the shop. “Take a wild guess.”

  “You want Aldrain advice?” Shalak pulled a face, chuckled. “What’s the matter with you, Gil? You come into some money you don’t need all of a sudden? I’d have thought, you know, a man like you, the Kiriath stuff has got to be more your thing.”

  “I’ve got all the Kiriath stuff I need.” Ringil gestured with two crooked fingers at the pommel jutting over his shoulder. “Anyway, I’m not buying anything. Just want your opinion on a couple of things.”

  “Which are?”

  “If you had to kill a dwenda, what’s the best way to go about it?”

  Shalak gaped. “What?”

  “Come on, you heard me.”

  “You want to know how to kill a dwenda?”

  “Yeah.” Ringil shifted irritably, picked at a loose thread on his, yeah, new fucking tunic, what kind of fucking workmanship did Ishil think . . . “Yeah, that’s right.”

  “Well, I don’t know. First off, you’d need to find one to kill. No one’s seen the Vanishing Folk in—”

  “Living memory. I know, like the sign says. But let’s assume, just for the sake of argument, I have found one. Let’s assume he’s in my way. How do I take him down, Shal?” Ringil tipped his head to indicate the pommel of the Ravensfriend. “Could I do it with this?”

  Shalak pursed his lips. “It’s doubtful. You’d have to be very fast indeed.”

  “Well, that has been said about me on occasion.” He didn’t add that those occasions had receded increasingly into the realm of memory over the past few years. There were always the stories, of course, the war legends, but who—other than himself, in Jhesh’s tavern, increasingly wearily—still told those?

  Shalak took a turn about the cluttered space in the shop. He rubbed at his forehead, dodged a hanging wooden assemblage of wind chimes, grimaced.

  “Thing is, Gil, we don’t really know much about the dwenda. I mean, this stuff I sell, it’s mostly junk—”

  “It is?”

  The merchant gave him a sour look. “All right, all right. I make a living from hints and half-truths, and what people desperately want to believe. I don’t need you to remind me of that. But the core of this, all this, is something even the Kiriath couldn’t map. They fought the dwenda for possession of this world once, you know. But if you read their annals, it’s pretty clear they didn’t really know what they were fighting. There are references to ghosts, shape-shifting, possession, stones and forests and rivers coming to life at Aldrain command—”

  “Oh come off it, Shal.” Ringil shook his head. “Tell me you’re not that naïve. I’m looking for a considered opinion here, not something I can get out of any gibbering idiot down at Strov.”

  “That’s what I’m giving you, Gil. A considered opinion. Outside of oral legend and a few runic scribbles on standing stones along the west coast, we don’t have anything but the Indirath M’nal chronicle to tell us what the Aldrain were really like. It’s the only reputable source. Everything else the Kiriath wrote on the subject draws on it. And the Indirath M’nal says, among other things, that the dwenda could command water and stone and wood to life.”

  “Yeah, and I knew Majak herders back in the day who thought the Kiriath were all fire-blackened demons.” Ringil cranked up an arm, made a jabbering mouth with his hand. “Rejected from the Depths of Hell to walk the Earth in Eternal Damnation. Blab-blab-blab. Kind of shit gets made up every day by people too stupid to look for the realities. You should have heard the boatman who brought me up here from the Glades. Fire in the northern sky, lights in the marshes, a black dog heard barking through the night. Doesn’t occur to anyone to wonder how exactly you can tell it’s a black dog just from the fucking bark it makes.”

  Shalak cocked his head. He frowned. “What is this, Gil? What are you so angry about?”

  It brought him up short. He stared at the neatly swept floor of the little shop and raised an eyebrow at the strain in his own just-silenced voice.

  “What’s wrong, Gil?”

  He shook his head. Sighed. “Doesn’t matter. It’s nothing. Late night, too much carousing, you know me. I’m sorry. Go on, you were saying.”

  “You were saying. That people are too stupid to look for the realities and they hide in superstition instead. And that’s true enough, but you’re missing the point. You’re talking about humans, and ignorant humans at that. The scribes who wrote the Indirath M’nal weren’t either. They were the cream of Kiriath culture, highly educated and already well traveled in places most of us have a hard time imagining. And the dwenda scared those guys, that’s the truth, it’s there in the way the texts are written. Clear as the face on a harbor-end whore.”

  Ringil thought back to the Kiriath he’d known; Grashgal, Naranash, Flaradnam, Kalanak, and all the others, names gone blurred with the years. He thought of the impassive aura of command they’d carried into the war with the Scaled Folk, the methodical savagery with which they fought. It was a mask, Archeth insisted to him once, part of the courtly gravitas that informed Kiriath culture from its roots; but if she was right, it was a mask that never came off, not even when Naranash bled out on the beach at Rajal, grinning and leaking blood through his teeth while Ringil crouched uselessly beside him.

  Looks like you’ll have to do the rest without me, eh. Are we winning, lad?

  Ringil glanced about—the Yhelteth flank, crumpling and tearing like cheap armor under repeated blows as the reptile advance slammed into them, the crisscross panic of fleeing soldiery from the shattered lines and the screams of those broken or burned or ripped apart all along the beach, the landing barges fleeing back across the bight, evacuating those lucky enough to make the shallows . . .

  Yeah, he told Naranash. We’re winning. Looks like Flaradnam held the breakwater after all. We’re driving them back.

  The Kiriath knight spat up blood. That’s good. He’s a good lad, ’Nam, he’ll follow through. Shame I’m going to miss that party. He coughed throatily for a moment. You keep hold of that sword, you hear? Best friend you’ll ever have. Friend to ravens, remember that. Make sure—

  And the reptile peon was on Ringil, long shriek and the rasping, scaled impact against his cuirass. He staggered and went over backward in the sand. The long spiked tail lashed around, the claws dug in, and Ringil screamed back in the creature’s face at the pain, smashed the pommel of the Ravensfriend into its eye. The peon shrilled and its fangs snapped shut inches from his throat. He got his left forearm in the way, guarding, dropped the Ravensfriend and stabbed two stiffened fingers from his freed right hand into the creature’s eye, down past the socket and into the brain behind. The peon thrashed and shrieked and snapped, and he rolled it over in the fountaining storm of sand it was making with its tail. Pinned it there with his body weight while his fingers burrowed and shoved in up to the hilt. The eyelid flapped up and down on his knuckles like a trapped moth’s wing scraping in the cup of a boy’s closed palms. The tail lashed about, damp sand came up in shovel loads, swiped him across the face, got gritty into his mouth as he sucked breath and snarled and fought and then, finally, finally, with a high whining noise in its throat and a shivering convulsion, the fucking thing died.

  And by the time he staggered back to his feet, so had Naranash.

  He never knew if in those last moments the Kiriath knight had seen the peon attack, understood what was going on and had drawn his own fading conclusions about the state of the battle. If at the end he’d known that Ringil had lied to him.

  But Ringil had never seen him afraid.

  “You sure you’re interpreting the texts right?” he asked Shalak. “I mean, maybe the language—”

  “I grew up speaking Tethanne as well as Naomic, Gil. My mother made me learn to read it as well. I’ve seen copies of
the translations they made of the Indirath M’nal in Yhelteth, I’ve seen the commentaries on it, and I know enough of the High Kir original to follow those commentaries. And I’m telling you, Gil, the day the Kiriath went up against the Vanishing Folk, they were scared.”

  Shalak clasped his hands at waist height and cast his head back a little. Ringil remembered the pose from summer gatherings of the city’s Aldrain enthusiasts that he’d attended in his youth. Everybody huddled together and chattering in early-evening gloom, taking wine in little fake Aldrain goblets in the tiny gardens at the back of the shop. There was a quote coming.

  “How should one fight an enemy that is not wholly of this world?” Shal declaimed. “They come to us in ghost form, striking snake-swift out of phantasmal mist, and when we strike back they return to mist and they laugh, low and mocking in the wind. They—”

  But now the rest of it was gone, carried away on the cool breeze out of nowhere that blew up Ringil’s neck. He snapped back to the previous night, the krin-skewed walk home from Grace-of-Heaven’s place and swooping laughter past his face like a caress. He felt the same shiver creep up his neck again and found he’d raised a hand involuntarily to touch his cheek where the laughter had seemed to touch . . .

  “Pretty conclusive, wouldn’t you say?”

  Shalak, finished now with his quotations, looking at him expectantly. Ringil blinked.

  “Uh—yeah.” He scrambled to cover for his disconnection. “I guess. Uhm, that bit about not wholly of this world. They say the Aldrain came from the band originally, don’t they? And that’s where they went back to. You think that’s possible?”

  “With the Aldrain, anything’s possible. But likely?” Shalak shook his head. “You talk to any decent astronomer, here or in the Empire, they’ll tell you the band is made up of a million different moving particles, all catching the sun’s rays. That’s why it shines, it’s like dust motes in a sunbeam. It’s just not a solid arch the way it looks. Hard to see how anything could live in the middle of something like that.”