The Steel Remains lffh-1 Read online

  Grinning, tongue lolling, all sharp white puncturing fangs and eyes, balancing back on legs never made for walking upright, wrapped head-to-foot in wolf the way she had in Ishlin-ichan wrapped herself in whore.

  She did not speak. The wind howled on her behalf.

  He rose, the chill in his bones and on his face forgotten, and he went to her like a man to the marriage bed.

  CHAPTER 15

  Gingren was installed in the western lounge when Ringil got in, pacing noisily up and down and barking at someone whose responses were much softer. They’d left the door ajar, which seemed invitation enough to eavesdrop. Ringil hovered for a moment in the corridor outside, listening to his father’s gruff tones and a low, diffident voice that he made as that of his oldest brother, Gingren Junior. A cold memory gusted through him at the sound.

  A long corridor . . .

  He was about to slip away when Gingren, showing a quite remarkable sixth sense, looked up and caught him there.

  “Ringil!” he bellowed. “Just the man. Get in here, will you!”

  Ringil sighed. He took a couple of steps inside the room and stood there, barely over the threshold.

  “Yes, Father.”

  Gingren and Gingren Junior exchanged a glance. Ringil’s brother was sprawled on a couch by the window, rigged for the street in boots and court sword, clearly on a visit from his own family home over in Linardin. It was the first time Ringil had seen him in nearly seven years, and changes weren’t flattering. He’d put on weight and grown a beard that didn’t really suit him.

  “We were just talking about you.”

  “That’s nice.”

  His father cleared his throat. “Yes, well, Ging’s been saying, we can probably nip this idiocy in the bud. Kaad doesn’t want it any more than we do, looks like Iscon just went overboard on his own account. It’s not the right time for the notable families of Trelayne to be squabbling over trivia like this.”

  “The Kaads are a notable family now, are they?”

  Gingren Junior chortled, then shut up abruptly as his father glared at him.

  “You know what I mean.”

  “Not really, no.” Ringil looked at his elder brother, and Gingren Junior looked away. “You come to offer yourself as a second, Ging?”

  An awkward silence.

  “I didn’t think so.”

  His brother flushed. “Gil, it’s not like that.”

  “No?”

  “What your brother is trying to say is that there is no need for seconds, or any other element of this ridiculous charade. Iscon Kaad will not fight, and neither will you. We will resolve this with intelligence.”

  “Yeah? What if I don’t want to?”

  Gingren made a noise in his throat. “I’m getting tired of this attitude, Ringil. Why would you want to fight?”

  Ringil shrugged. “I don’t know. It’s your family name he insulted coming here the way he did. Threatening steel on the premises.”

  Gingren Junior bristled forward in his seat. “It’s your family, too.”

  “Good. We’re agreed then.”

  “No, we are not fucking agreed!” Gingren yelled. “You cannot just fucking cut your way through everything with that cursed sword of yours, Ringil. That’s not how we do things here in the city. Not anymore.”

  Ringil examined his nails. “Well, I’ve been away.”

  “Yeah.” His father clenched a fist at his hip. “Maybe you should have fucking stayed away.”

  “Hey—blame your gracious lady wife.”

  Ging came to his feet. “Don’t you dare talk about Mother like that!”

  “Oh, shut up.” Ringil closed his eyes briefly in exasperation. “Look, I’m fucking sick of this. Are you in on this Etterkal thing as well, Ging? You keen to stop me looking for our cousin Sherin, too, in case it puts too many lucrative backstreet deals in the lamplight? Upsets too many of our scummy new harbor-end friends?”

  “Sherin always was a stupid little tart,” said Ging bluntly. “We all told her not to marry Bilgrest.”

  “Stupid little tart or not, your honored mother wants her back.”

  “I told you—”

  Ringil grinned wolfishly. “Shame she had to work her way down all three brothers before she found one with the balls to do what she asked.”

  Gingren Junior surged forward. Ringil went to meet him. He was still shaken up from the events at the gate, would welcome the chance to hit something.

  “Ging! Ringil!”

  At the sound of their father’s voice, both brothers stopped, arm’s reach apart in the center of the lounge, gazes locked. Ringil watched his brother’s furious face, distantly aware that there was nothing in his own expression to match, nothing there at all but a faint smile and the blank promise of violence.

  “Well?” he asked gently.

  Ging looked away. “She never asked me.”

  “I wonder why.”

  “Hey—fuck you.” Ging doubled his lowered fists, unconscious echo of his father’s anger. Ringil remembered Ging picking it up, back in their shared youth. “I came here to see if I could help.”

  “You can’t help me, Ging, you never could. You were always soooooo fucking obedient.”

  A long corridor . . .

  A LONG CORRIDOR IN THE ACADEMY DORMITORY WING, AND COLD winter-afternoon light slanting down through the row of side windows. Dark reek of the waxed wood floor he was pinned to, stinging in his bloodied nose. The reflection of the windows shimmered up out of the polished surface for him, made a receding line of pale pools in the wood, down the corridor to the unattainable door at the end. There was weight on his back from the little knot of seniors holding him down. They were too many to fight, and they were dragging him back from the doorway he’d made a break for, back into the gloom and seclusion of the dormitory. He remembered the chill around his thighs and arse as they forced his breeches down.

  He remembered his brother, stopped dead in the corridor coming the other way and staring, just staring.

  Most of all, he remembered the look on Ging’s face, queasy and weak, as if he’d just eaten something that was going to make him sick. Ringil knew, looking at that expression, that he’d get no help.

  The seniors knew it, too.

  “Fuck are you doing here, Gingren?” Mershist, the pledge guardian and ringleader, breathing heavily, climbing up off Ringil’s neck and squaring up in the corridor. He got his breath back, seemed almost amused. “This isn’t your affair. Get the fuck back to drill where you belong. Before I put you on report.”

  Gingren said nothing, didn’t move. He had no weapon—outside of the training yards and salons, the Academy didn’t permit the cadets to go armed—but he had some of his father’s build about him, was bulkier than Ringil would ever be, and three years into the Academy program was getting a reputation as a canny fighter.

  The moment hovered for heartbeats, like a crow on beating wings the instant before it lands. Even Ringil paused in his attempts to thrash free, eyes suddenly on Gingren’s face. Hope quavered up in him like small, newly kindled flames.

  Then another of the seniors came and stood at Mershist’s shoulder, and something indefinable changed about the setting. Even with his face pressed hard to the floor, Ringil felt it. Perhaps Ging might have faced Mershist down alone. But not this. The balance tipped, the moment sideslipped, skidded, and landed on its black-feathered arse. Mershist glanced sideways at his supporting companion, then back to Gingren and grinned. His tone turned conversational, reasonable.

  “Look, mate. Little Gil here’s getting initiated, whether he fancies it or not. What did you think, your little brother’d get a pass for some reason? You know that’s not going to happen. You know how this place works.”

  Ging’s mouth twitched. He was going to try for talk. “It doesn’t—”

  “I’m doing him a fucking favor, Ging.” Mershist let a tinge of exasperated warning seep into his voice. “Gil hasn’t exactly made a lot of friends since he matricu
lated. There’s seniors over in Dolmen House want to do him with a fucking mace head. And to be honest with you, I can see their point. He took Kerril’s eye right fucking out, you know.”

  Ging swallowed. It made an audible click. “Kerril shouldn’t have—”

  “Kerril was doing what needed to be done.” Now the reasonable tone was shredding thin and through. Playtime was coming to an end. Mershist stabbed a finger at Ringil where he lay on the floor. “Your little brother here thinks he’s something special, and he fucking isn’t. We all go through this, Ging, and we’re all stronger for it. You know that. It binds us together, it makes us what we are. Hoiran’s fucking balls, it’s not like you didn’t have old man Reshin’s prick up your arse three years ago, just like the rest of us.”

  Something shifted in Gingren’s face then, and the last hope in Ringil guttered out for good. His elder brother’s eyes flickered to meet his, skittered away again. He’d flushed with shame. When he spoke again, his voice was almost pleading.

  “Mershist, he’s only—”

  Mershist trod down the words. His voice rasped like steel coming out of the scabbard.

  “He’s a little fucking pansy, is what he is, Ging. You know it, and so do I. So now he’s going to get what he probably secretly wanted all along, from all of us. And you will not fucking stop us. So unless you want to join in or watch, I suggest you fuck off back to practice.”

  And Gingren went.

  Just once, as he faltered and turned away, he looked at Ringil, and Ringil thought, later or at that moment, he could not recall which, that it was like meeting someone’s eyes across jail cell bars. Ging’s mouth worked again, but nothing came out.

  Ringil stared back at him. He would not beg.

  And Gingren went away, down the dark wood corridor, slowly, like a man carrying an injury, and the declining afternoon lit him coldly at each window he passed.

  Ringil closed his eyes.

  They dragged him back in.

  NOW, IN THE RIVERSIDE LOUNGE, HE LOOKED AT GING OUT OF THE welter of memories, and he saw that his brother was pinned there, too.

  Those memories, and all that came after.

  The pain, and the bleeding that he kept thinking had stopped but then found hadn’t. He didn’t need the infirmary the way some initiates did; Mershist and his crew had known what they were about to that extent at least. He supposed he had that much to thank them for. But he had to bite back screams at his toilet for a week.

  Then there was the sniggering. The whispered stories about the way Ringil’s body had reacted to the rape. No big surprise, it was a fairly common occurrence and cadets at the Academy were used to seeing it. But coupled with the gossip about Ringil’s preferences, it provoked an entirely predictable set of minor myths. Should have seen him, they would mutter as Ringil limped past on the other side of a courtyard. Came like a fucking fountain, man, all over everything. You could fucking see he was loving it, every minute of it. Didn’t even scream once.

  That much was true. He hadn’t given up a single cry.

  As they crammed brutally inside him, one after the other, as he was at first just scraped, and then torn, and then for what seemed like a long time, far too long, searingly raw at each stroke, and then finally just increasingly numb to it all, as they dragged clawed hands through his long dark hair and caught it up in savage fistfuls, as they grunted into their own climaxes and spat on him and whispered excited filth in his ears—through it all he gritted his teeth and ground his tongue against the tiny serrated gaps where they met, he fixed his eyes on the weave of the blanket under his face, and he remembered Jelim, and somehow he kept silent.

  “I came to help,” Ging repeated. His voice sounded hollow, used up. Ringil just looked at him.

  “Don’t underestimate Kaad,” Gingren rumbled. “That’d be a big mistake. Ringil, he may look like a fop on his father’s sinecure, but he took a silver medal at the Tervinala salons last year. They let imperial bodyguards compete in that one. It means something when you take a medal there.”

  “All right.”

  Brief pause. Ging and his father exchanged glances again.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” Gingren asked.

  “It means I won’t take any chances tomorrow, and I’ll make sure I kill him the first opening I get. Happy now?”

  “You really expect me to second you in this duel?” Ging asked him.

  “No.”

  The monosyllable hung there. It silenced both father and brother for longer this time. They both stood there waiting for it to lead somewhere, to an explanation, Ringil supposed.

  Fuck that.

  Sometimes it seemed that his whole life had been that silent wait, that cold-eyed, staring demand from someone or other, from everyone, that he explain himself. Explain himself away.

  The Scaled Folk, at least, had not wanted that much from him.

  The tableau broke, to the sound of servant’s footsteps. A face peered diffidently around the door.

  “My lord Ringil?”

  Ringil sighed with relief. “Yes.”

  “A messenger for you. From the Milacar residence.”

  CHAPTER 16

  They got back into Yhelteth just as the lamps were coming on across the city. Archeth, saddle-sore and stuffed with questions she couldn’t answer, would have willingly gone straight to her apartments on the Boulevard of the Ineffable Divine, and to bed. But you didn’t do that kind of thing when you were about the Emperor’s business. She compromised, sent Shanta and the others on ahead to the palace, and stopped off at her apartments with Elith. She handed the old woman over to her major-domo, told him to put her up in the guest chambers.

  “Milady, there is already—” the man began, but she waved it off.

  “Later, Kefanin, later. His imperial radiance awaits my presence at the palace. I speed to do his will, y’know.”

  She swung back on her horse and clattered back out of the house’s courtyard, under the arch, and onto the main thoroughfare. Sunset made a dusty furnace glow in the west, backdrop for the blackening silhouettes of minarets and domes across the city. The evening crowds pressed around her, trudged onward toward the end of their laboring day. She felt a twinge of envy. If she knew anything at all, Jhiral would probably keep her waiting a couple of hours before he’d even see her, just to make a point. And even without that expected pettiness, his imperial radiance didn’t habitually rise much before noon anyway; it wasn’t uncommon for him to hold long counsel with bleary-eyed advisers right through to dawn, then send them directly off to their usual daily duties while he retired to bed. He’d likely have Archeth telling and retelling the details of her report a dozen different ways until the small hours.

  She stifled a yawn with the back of a gauntleted hand. Dug in her pouch until she found a small pellet of krinzanz, slipped it into her mouth, and chewed it down to thin saliva-laced mulch. Grimace at the bitter, granulated taste, and swallow. She rubbed the residue against her gums with a leather finger and waited for the gloom of evening to recede a little from her eyes, for the drug to prop the weariness away and lend her its counterfeit lust for life.

  DOORS BANGED BACK FOR HER, PIKE-MEN CAME TO ATTENTION AS she passed them down long marble halls. She tugged off her gauntlets impatiently, muttering to herself as she strode the familiar path to her Emperor’s presence. From the walls, representations of the Prophet and other notables of imperial history glowered down at her. The krin buzz made some of the better-executed portraits quiver with a simulacrum of hostile life around the eyes. It was scrutiny she could have done without, and it didn’t help that there was not a single Kiriath face among those pictured.

  You’ll have to make it work without us, Grashgal had told her, toward the end. I can’t hold the captaincies any longer. They want out. They’ve consulted the Helmsmen, all the stable ones anyway, and the answer keeps coming back pretty much the same. It’s time to go.

  Oh come on. Hiding her desperation in a snort. Fucking H
elmsman’ll give you sixty different answers to the same question depending on how it’s phrased. You know that. We’ve been here before, at least twice that I can remember, and I’m only a couple of hundred years old. It’ll pass.

  But Grashgal just stood there at the balcony’s edge and stared down into the red glow of the workshops.

  The engineers already have orders to refit, he said quietly. They’ll have a fleet that works by year’s end. I’m sorry, Archidi. This time it’s real.

  But why? Why now?

  A shrug that came close to a shudder. These fucking humans, Archidi. If we stay, they’re going to drag us into every squalid fucking skirmish and border dispute their short-term greed and fear can invent. They’re going to turn us into something we never used to be.

  These fucking humans.

  “The Lady kir-Archeth Indamaninarmal,” bellowed the herald as the last set of doors opened before her, and across the vaulted and pillared space of the throne room, all the fucking humans turned to stare as she came in.

  “Ah, Archeth, you grace us with your presence after all.” Jhiral was propped at a sardonic angle in the grandiose architecture of the Burnished Throne, one heel laid four-square over his knee. Light from the Kiriath-engineered radiant stones set into the walls of the chamber behind him conferred the borrowed glow of divine authority. He flashed her a boyish grin. “Almost on time for once, as well. I understand you had to go home before coming to see us. Did you find everything there to your satisfaction?”

  Archeth shrugged it off. “I thought it best to come before you fully prepared, my lord. I am ready to deliver my report.”

  “Oh, good. We have in fact already been hearing from my other, loyal servants.” A casual gesture to where Mahmal Shanta, Faileh Rakan, and Pashla Menkarak stood before him in a loose arc. Just the hint of a pause after other, the lightest of accents on loyal. It was done with masterful subtlety, and Archeth saw how secret smiles flickered among the courtiers. “It seems there’s some disagreement about how the situation in Khangset was handled. Some question of you overstepping the limits of your authority?”