The Steel Remains lffh-1 Read online

  The house Poltar wanted was not on one of these streets. It stood in the seclusion and gloom of a darkened side alley by design rather than economic necessity. The alley ran alongside a section of the city wall and Madame Ajana’s rose two stories above the parapet, leaning there as if tired by the effort of hoisting itself up to see out across the plain. The height and position were also deliberate—from a mile out on the steppe, you could make out the red glowing lanterns of the whorehouse, beckoning.

  In the alley, the brothel was no more subtly appointed. The windows were brightly lit within, and those of Ajana’s girls not working were paid to sit in plain view displaying their wares. Incense and softly thudding music smoked out into the street, catching at the throats and ears of those whose eyes were not already captivated by the spread-legged, arch-backed postures of the girls in the windows. A luxurious velour drape curtained the open doors, meant to imitate the drop flap of a yurt, and above hung a wooden sign announcing it as AJANA’S PLACE, a name that in the Majak tongue had a crude and fairly obvious double meaning.

  Poltar climbed down off his horse, slipped coins—more fucking coins—to the impassive attendants at the door, and let them lead it away. He stepped through into the dimly lit chamber beyond and put back his hood. He was recognized by some of the girls, but none of them smiled at him the way he had sometimes noted that they did with other customers. He gathered in their flinching glances with satisfaction; this was as it should be. He wasn’t some drunken herdsman, easily muzzled with a fat tit and coaxed to a bleating climax in a mother substitute’s arms. Not some child-hearted brute, content to smother himself in a welter of female flesh.

  He was Poltar Wolfeye, Chief Shaman to the Skaranak. He was a man of power, and he had long ago in his initiation broken the bonds that women wove over men.

  Ajana came toward him with her painted smile.

  “Shaman, you honor us again so soon. What’s your pleasure? Will you have the upper room?”

  He nodded a curt assent.

  “Then I’ll have a girl prepared. Come and join me while you wait. A glass of wine? Some sweetmeats?” She snapped her fingers and an effeminate tray bearer came hurrying. Poltar averted his face in distaste. Ajana muttered something in the man’s ear as he set down the tray, and he withdrew, nodding. Poltar settled onto the cushioned couch and accepted the goblet Ajana proffered. The vague, restless anger that had consumed him since his confrontation with the Dragonbane began to solidify into something more tangible in the pit of his stomach. He felt a slight shiver of anticipation.

  “The new girls are very eager,” said the madam, keenly attuned to her customer’s moods and massaging where it would do most good. “Hot young sluts from the League, looking for a big Majak prick to suck.”

  The shaman shifted impatiently. “Just make sure she’s not drugged like the last one. I want her to feel what I’m doing.”

  “Yes, yes, that was a most lamentable error.” Ajana offered him a plate of spiced cake slices. Her voice purred, soft and cozy as wine from the flask neck. “But it won’t be repeated. Ajana’s Place draws your pleasure from you exactly as you would most wish to give it up. All preparations are being made to this single end, of that you may lie back and rest assured.”

  It took half an hour to make the preparations, by which time the shaman was lightly drunk and swollen almost to bursting with Ajana’s subtle verbal ministrations. The madam led him up the three flights of stairs with ritual slowness, pausing on each landing so that he could regain his breath and witness through half-drawn curtains scenes of orgiastic abandon that would fuel his arousal. Finally, at the door of the upper room, Ajana took a key from her voluminous robes and handed it to him.

  “The lock is oiled and ready,” she said. “Enter and enjoy.”

  She left him facing the door. He paused a moment, then inserted the key, twisted, and let himself into the small perfumed space beyond.

  Incense candles burned in the corners of the room, giving off more smoke than light. The shadows on the walls flickered like impatient observers as his entry moved the flames. One tiny window showed faint starlight over the plain beyond the city. In the center of the room, the girl was roped to an inverted Y-frame that hung suspended on a pulley system, her arms bound together above her head, her legs spread along the arms of the Y. Her limbs gleamed with recent oiling, and the mass of dark hair around her face was still damp. She was made up in the southern fashion, eyelids heavy with kohl and cheeks painted with Yhelteth symbols, though she was fairly clearly of Trelayne stock.

  Beneath it all she was very young and, he saw, afraid.

  His grunt of satisfaction seemed to emanate from his stomach.

  “You do well to fear me, whore,” he said thickly, pushing the door closed with his back. “Because I’m going to hurt you, just the way you deserve to be hurt.”

  On the stairs below, Ajana winced as the first cries floated down to her, and then hurried away to where she wouldn’t have to hear them.

  BY THE TIME POLTAR FORCED HIS WAY INTO THE GIRL, HE WAS PANTING from his efforts and the palms of his hands stung from the slaps he’d delivered. He seized the pulleys and worked them, moving both Y-frame and its load down to where he could gloat over the rapidly bruising flesh. The girl’s initial screams for help had changed to more intimate pleas when she realized that no one was coming to rescue her from this honored customer—but she still uttered one more little shriek as he stabbed inside her. He came almost immediately, the pent-up pressure gushing out of him before he had completed a dozen thrusts. His hands, which had been clenched around the girl’s breasts, relaxed and he sagged forward. A string of spittle drooled out of him and onto her flesh.

  “Oh, Urann,” he breathed, wiping his mouth. “Oh Ye Gods.”

  The sudden pain was as intense as it was incomprehensible. It felt as if his prick had been clamped in a swordsmith’s vise and someone was tightening the screw. He yelped and tried to pull away from the girl, but that part of his anatomy would not go with him. He looked down at himself in confusion and what he saw in the uncertain light brought a high, womanish scream to his lips. The girl’s sex was gone, the flesh between her thighs replaced by a clenched fist whose fingers he could clearly see pulping his shriveling member.

  “Don’t go so soon,” said a voice from the girl’s lips.

  He looked up and saw that her eyes were open again, that now the kohl and face-paint mask of arousal had smoldered to genuine life. The eyes hooded and looked at him seductively, and then, as he watched, the girl’s neck lifted sinuously from the frame against which it lay and lifted the head toward him. He leaned as far away as he could but it came after him like the head of a snake, little crunching and popping sounds emanating from the vertebrae as they stretched. The muscles in the girl’s face writhed in the flickering light of the candles, as if whatever was using her had not recently worn human flesh.

  “You called upon us,” the voice that was not a young girl’s said ironically. “To what purpose?”

  “Uh-uh-Urann?” the shaman managed, trembling like a man with a high fever.

  “Not I.” The face glided fractionally nearer, attempting a smile. “But close. I believe you know me as Kelgris.”

  Even in the extremity of his terror and pain, Poltar had a moment to be puzzled. Kelgris, Mistress of First Blood and the Falcon, belonged to the mewling rituals of the Voronak, was supplicated by young lovers, pregnant women, and the odd, wizened female herbalist. Among the Skaranak, she’d long been ushered into obscurity by the warrior rituals. Her name cropped up as a curse used by small children and the butt of various lewd jokes about the Majak afterlife, but beyond that . . .

  The girl’s face hissed at him, very much like the serpent it appeared to think it was.

  “Beyond that is a level of intelligence, oh Poltar of the dozen mighty strokes, that your kind will need millennia to assemble. What is rather more important here is that you have asked for the intercession of the Dwellers. Y
ou begged for us in your prayers and your dreams, you cut the throats of small animals for us at every opportunity—and drank the blood—you burned pots full of that rather overstated incense you seem to believe gets our attention. You wanted the Dwellers, well now you’re going to get them, and they won’t be the playmates you envisaged, of that you may lie back and rest assured.” The thing inside the girl mimicked the words of Ajana an hour earlier with evident relish. “I bring a message from my brother Hoiran, the one you call Urann. That message is wait and watch.”

  The shaman dropped one hand to the burning pain between his legs. “Will Urann revenge himself on the Dragonbane?” he gritted. “Will I be vindicated?”

  “That,” said Kelgris sweetly, “depends upon your conduct. If you behave as is fitting in, uhm, a Wayfarer of the Sky Road, you may make some headway. Displease us and I shall make a plaything of your soul in the ice hell beyond the world. Or something. As for this—” The fist at the juncture of the girl’s thighs unbent its index finger without loosening the vise-like hold it had on Poltar’s prick. The finger flicked bruisingly at his fright-shriveled scrotum. “This might conceivably amuse my brother on a bad day, but me it does not amuse. A holy man must be chaste if he is to channel his energy where and when it is most needed. Chaste. Do you remember the meaning of that word?”

  The hand squeezed tighter still. Poltar felt skin split, and then the sudden wetness of blood.

  “Yes,” he shrieked. “Yes, chaste.”

  “You will not spill your seed in this fashion again without my permission. Do I make myself clear?”

  “Yes, yes, yes . . .” Now he was weeping from the pain. The hand released as abruptly as it had clenched, and the shaman reeled backward, stumbling and collapsing to the floor.

  “Then abase yourself,” said the voice, still sweetly reasonable. “Abase yourself and, uhm, rejoice, that the gods have returned to you.”

  The shaman flung himself flat before the staked body on the frame. Contact with the rough floor stung his mutilated prick, but he stayed immobile, quivering and gibbering and praying, until voices and an urgent hammering on the door of the little room brought him to his senses.

  He looked up, wild-eyed and shaking, and saw that Kelgris had gone, leaving nothing but stillness in her wake. The room was dark, the candles snuffed out. Light from the window made a gaunt silhouette of the Y-frame, where the body of the girl was still tied, neck lolling broken and stretched and twisted to one side, eyes wide open in mute accusation.

  Kelgris’s smile was still pressed on her dead mouth.

  CHAPTER 11

  It took the best part of an hour to fix everything up. As with any aftermath, the trick was in the momentum.

  You keep everyone moving, Flaradnam had told him that day, from his stretcher in the surgeon’s tent. Hoarse breath, face knotted with the pain he was swamped in. Summer rain hissed down on the other side of the canvas. Outside, the slanted ground would be turning muddy and treacherous underfoot. Don’t give them time to think, don’t give them time to bitch and moan. They want orders and certainty from you, nothing more. You find that certainty, Gil, fake it if you have to. But you get them out of here. You get them moving.

  He did not survive the surgeon’s table.

  And out across the mountain’s flank, the broken remnants of the expeditionary force huddled miserably against the rain, mail and once gaily colored uniforms like a variegated mold on the landscape. Framed in the tent flap, listening to the gritted shrieks and grating kitchen sounds of surgery at his back, Ringil stared out through the downpour with no earthly clue how to get done what Flaradnam wanted. The Kiriath war machines were lost, abandoned in the rout. The injured and dying numbered in the hundreds, the lizards were coming.

  Gallows Water was two days’ hard march, south and east over steep, exposed mountain terrain.

  You keep everyone moving.

  So. Nothing ever changes, huh ’Nam?

  Get the injured watchmen back to their senses and their feet, downplay the obviously quite serious harm Darby’s assault had done them. Cold water from Shalak’s yard pump, and some judicious slaps. Ferry the whole squad—amid a sudden crowd of well-wishers, backslappers, and general hangers-on—across into the tavern. Get the wine flowing and paid for in quantity enough to keep everyone clustered there. Call for music. Sip at the god-awful vintages the tavern had to offer, keep the smile pinned on your face. Watch the whores move sinuously in on the company, like cats after scraps. Play the role of gracious-noble-with-the-common-touch until memory and rancor for the fight fogged out and faded in the general merriment.

  Leave.

  Ringil slipped away as the singing took hold, got out to where a soft blue dusk was stealing up the street from the river. Overhead, the band was out in all its shimmering glory. The thoroughfare had more or less emptied now, only a handful of people hurrying home and the lantern-jacks with their ladders to disturb the evening. Compared with the raucous heat of the tavern, it was very cool and quiet. Ringil crossed the street back to Shalak’s shop, saw that Darby was sitting huddled on the doorstep. On the way across to the veteran, he scooped up an abandoned day-club from the cobbles and twirled it through the air with absentminded dexterity.

  “Souvenir?” he asked, holding out the club.

  Darby shook his head, patted the cudgel that was propped between his knees and cuddled into his shoulder like a sleeping child. “I’ll stick with Old Lurlin here. She’s seen me right enough times.”

  “Fair enough.”

  “I’m much obliged to your worthiness. For the intervention, I mean. I think they had the best of me there.” A hand rose to touch his bruised and bloodied face. The fingers came away clotted with gore. Darby grimaced. “Yep. Caught me a good one here, and I’d say the ribs are cracked again.”

  “Can you walk?”

  “Oh yes, Darby can always move on, sir. Be out of your sight directly. Only stayed to thank you.”

  “That’s not what I meant.” Ringil reached for his depleted purse, dug out a fresh handful of coin. “Look, I want you—”

  The veteran shook his head emphatically.

  “No, sir. Wouldn’t hear of it. The kindness you done me already, that’s more than most would dare these days. Those pretty bend-over boy clerks and their sodomite fucking lawyers, they’ve got this whole city by the balls. Means nothing to any of them that a man once fought the lizards for them all.”

  “I know,” Ringil said quietly.

  “Yes, sir, I know you do, sir.” The look on Darby’s damaged face changed. It took Ringil a couple of seconds to nail the new expression for what it was—shyness. “Saw you at Rajal, sir. I was fighting in the surf not twenty feet from you when the dragons came. Took me some time to place your face this time, my memory’s not what it once was, sir. But I’d know that blade on your back anywhere.”

  Ringil sighed. “Hard to miss, huh?”

  “That it is, sir.”

  The evening gloom closed in on them. Across the street a lantern-jack burned his fingers and cursed in the quiet. Ringil prodded at a loose cobble with the day-club. He was finding it easier to ignore Darby’s unwashed stink now he was used to it. He’d reeked that way himself often enough during the war.

  “I’m afraid I don’t remember you from Rajal at all,” he said.

  “No reason why you should, sir. No reason at all. There was a lot of us that day. Only wish I’d been there with you at Gallows Gap.”

  Now it was Ringil’s turn to grimace. “Careful what you wish for. We lost a lot more men there than we did at Rajal. Chances are you’d be pushing up daisies now if you’d been in that fight.”

  “Yes, sir. But we won at Gallows Gap.”

  From the tavern, suddenly, explosive laughter and a new song. A war song, one of the classics. “Lizard Blood Like Water to Wash In.” Stomping martial rhythm, it sounded as if they were pounding on the tables in there. Darby levered himself to his feet, wincing a little as he did.


  “Best be off then,” he said, voice tight with his pain. A knowing nod toward the noise, a crooked grin. “Wouldn’t want to still be on hand when the old patriotic fervor gets beyond feeling up the whores and drinking. They’ll be out looking for blood soon enough, someone to take it out on.”

  Ringil glanced at Shalak’s windows, thought that he’d better get in there and help the shopkeeper douse the lights.

  “You’re probably right,” he said.

  “Probably am, sir.” Darby squared his shoulders. “Well, I’ll be going then. It was a real pleasure talking to someone who understands. Only sorry you find me in such straitened circumstances. I wasn’t always this way, sir.”

  “No, I don’t suppose you were.”

  “It’s just the memories, sir. Things I saw, things I had to do. Feels like they’re branded in my head, sir. Hard to let it go sometimes. The drinking helps, and the flandrijn, when I can get it.” He fiddled awkwardly with his cudgel, wouldn’t meet Ringil’s eye. “I’m not what I once was, sir, that’s the plain truth of it.”

  “We’re none of us what we once were.” Ringil staved off his own brooding with an effort, looked for something good to say. Something Flaradnam might have approved. “Seems to me you gave a pretty good account of yourself, all things considered. One of those watchmen has smashed ribs for sure, and the other one can’t focus on anything. I’d say you gave him a solid brain fuck with Lurlin there.”

  The veteran looked up again. “Well, I’m sorry for that, sir. They’re not bad men, I had an uncle in the Watch myself years ago. It’s a tough job. But they meant to have me, sir. You saw that.”