The Steel Remains (20 page)

“I'm not of the tribes,” the woman muttered, still not looking at her. “My name is Elith. I'm from Ennishmin.”

Oho.

Archeth's lips tightened as if against pain, way before she could beat back the reflex. Her eyes darted across the woman's clothing, found the frayed edges of orange at the breast where the kartagh, the sewn badge of nonconvert citizenry, had been ripped away. No mystery as to why Elith would have done that— marauders and criminals throughout the Empire took nonadherence to the Revelation more or less as license for their depredations; in any raid or other low- grade thuggery, the infidel was an easy mark. Imperial courts tended to concur: Outrages against the property or persons of nonconverts were consistently underpunished, occasionally ignored. When iron clashed and hooves thundered through your streets, you were well advised to tear off the legally required identification of your second- class citizenship quick, before anyone with a blade and a bloodlust- stiffened prick spotted it.

“We came south,” Elith went on, as if blaming Archeth for something. “We were told to come, told we'd be safer here. The Emperor extends his hand in friendship. Now look.”

Archeth remembered the long limping columns out of Ennishmin, the desolate tendrils of smoke from the burning settlements they left behind, scrawled on the washed- out winter sky like a writ in accusation. She'd sat her warhorse on a scorched rise and watched the weary faces go by, mostly on foot, the odd cart piled with possessions and huddled
children, seemingly washed along on the flow like a raft on a slow river. She'd listened to the boisterous clowning and squabbling of a group of imperial troops at her back as they rooted through piles of loot gathered out of the hundreds of homes before they were put to the torch. Shame was a dull heat in her face.

She remembered the rage on Ringil's.

“Listen to me, Elith,” she tried again. “Whoever did this will face the Emperor's justice. That's why I'm here.”

Elith gave up the choked edge of a sneer.

Archeth nodded. “You may not trust us, I understand that. But please at least tell me what you saw. You lose nothing by it.”

Now the woman looked directly at her.

“What I saw?
I saw the end of the world, I saw angels descending from the band, to make good the prophecies told and lay waste all human endeavor and pride.
Is that what you want me to say?”

They were words out of the Revelation. “On Repentance,” fifth song, verses ten to sixteen or thereabouts. Archeth seated herself tiredly on the stump of the wall.

“I don't want you to say anything,” she said mildly. “I could use the truth, if you feel like telling it. Otherwise, we could just sit here for a while. Maybe get you some more water.”

Elith stared down at her own hands for what seemed like a very long time. The sky grew visibly darker against the fire- blackened timbers. A soft breeze wandered into the harbor and scuffed at the water there. Rakan's men shifted about on the quay.

Archeth waited.

At one point Shanta opened his mouth, but Archeth shut him down with a savage glance and a single tight gesture.

If the woman from Ennishmin saw any of this, she gave no sign.

“We prayed for them to come,” she said finally. Her voice was a wrung-out whisper, all emotion long since scorched away. “All through that winter, we sacrificed and prayed, and your soldiers came instead. They burned our homes, they raped my daughters, and when my youngest son tried to stop them, they hung him on a pike by his stomach, in the corner of the room. So that he could watch.”

Archeth leaned elbows on knees, pressed her palms together, and rested her chin on the blade it made.

“When they were done, they took Erlo down, because the soldier needed the pike back, and they left him there on the floor, bleeding to death. They didn't kill him, they said it was imperial mercy. And they laughed.” Elith never looked up from her hands as she talked. It was as if they fascinated her, just by still being there at the ends of her wrists. “They killed Gishlith, my youngest, because she bit one of them when it was his turn, but they let the others live. Ninea killed herself later, she was pregnant. Mirin lived, she was always the strongest.”

A long, almost silent sigh scraped its way up Archeths tightened throat. She swallowed.

“Did you have a husband?”

“He was away. Fighting the Scaled Folk, with our other sons. He came home after, burned and broken from the dragonfire at Rajal Beach. He saw our sons die there, that's what really broke him, not losing his arm and face like they said. He never.” Elith stopped and glanced up at Archeth. “Mirin left, she's in Oronak now, she married a sailor. We don't hear from her.”

Which meant nothing good. Reliable mail was one thing the Empire was good for, the couriers ran like clockwork since Akal's father's time, and Oronak wasn't that far down the coast. Archeth had been there a couple of times, it was a shit- hole. Damp, salt- scoured wooden buildings and boardwalks across gray sand, no paved streets beyond the port frontage. A raddled street whore for every corner, and plenty of business for all of them streaming from the merchant ships that jostled for berth space in the harbor.

“He ran.” Elith held Archeths gaze this time, eyes suddenly flaring, offering to share a disbelief the black woman didn't yet understand. “They came, they finally came, and he ran. With the others, into the hills. I stood in the street and I screamed at them, I screamed for a reckoning, or death if they'd give it to me, but Werleck ran. He ran.”

Archeth frowned. “A reckoning?”

“We
prayed.”
As if to an idiot, as if to someone who hadn't been listening to a word she'd said. “I
told
you. All winter, we prayed for them
to come. The Scaled Folk closing from the north, the imperials from the south and east. We prayed for intervention, and they
did not come.
We sacrificed, and they left us to our fate. And
now
they come,
now,
after ten years, with my sons and daughters dead in the stolen soil of Ennishmin, now when we're scattered like flaxseed in the lands of our despoilers.
What fucking use now!”

Her voice splintered apart on the last words, as if something had torn in her throat. Archeth glanced up at Shanta. The engineer raised an eyebrow and said nothing. Rakan's men stood about and affected not to have heard. Archeth leaned forward, offered her open hand in a gesture whose symbolism she wasn't entirely sure of herself.

“Elith, help me to understand this. You prayed for these … creatures to appear. You uh… you summoned them? To protect you.”

“Ten fucking years gone,” Elith mumbled desolately to herself. “What fucking use now?”

“Yes, ten years ago, in Ennishmin. And now they've come, finally. But what are they, Elith? What are we talking about here?”

The woman from Ennishmin looked up at her, and in the grimed, careworn damage of her face, something almost crafty, almost malicious, seemed to pass behind her watery bright eyes.

“You won't stop them, you know,” she said.

“Okay, we won't stop them.” Archeth nodded along, playing reasonable. “Fair enough. But tell me anyway, just so I know. What are they? What did you summon up?”

Elith's mouth twisted, hesitant. She seemed to twitch at the end of a rope Archeth couldn't see.

And then.

“Dwenda,”
she enunciated, like someone teaching the word.

And sat back and grinned, a trembling, staring, broken- toothed rictus that Archeth knew she'd need krinzanz to get out of her head that night.

he next morning, he went out to the eastern gate. It probably wasn't a good idea, but he hadn't been having many of those since he got back anyway.

The gate was one of the oldest in the city, built a pair of centuries ago along with the great causeway that led to it, back before Trelayne had sprawled as far as the sea, and so serving at the time as the main entrance for visitors. In a blunt, old- fashioned way, it was very beautiful; a fair portion of the city's rapidly burgeoning trade wealth had once gone to finance the import of glinting, southern- quarried stone and to pay the finest masons in the region to shape and dress it. Twinned arches rose twenty feet over the heads of those entering and leaving Trelayne by the gate, mirror- image ends to a long paved courtyard with crenellated walls and statues of guardian marsh spirits at the corners. When the sun shone on it, the stonework winked and gleamed as if
embedded with newly minted gold coins. By night, bandlight turned the currency cool and silver, but the effect was the same. The whole thing was widely acknowledged as one of the architectural wonders of the world.

Pity they have to use it as a torture chamber.

Yeah, well. Got to impress the visitors.

There was grim truth behind the sneer. No one entering Trelayne for the first time by the eastern gate would be left in any doubt about the attitude of the city toward lawbreakers.

He knew as soon as he passed under the inner gateway that there had been no executions recently— there would have been a crowd otherwise. Instead, livestock, carts, and pedestrians all went back and forth unobstructed along the worn center section of the courtyard. Stalls were set up along the side walls; grimy children ran about touting handfuls of cut fruit or sweetmeats. A couple of marsh dwellers had set up a brightly colored fortune- telling blanket in one corner. Elsewhere they were juggling knives or acting out tales from local legend. There was a pressing odor of dung and rancid cooking oil.

Could be worse, Gil.

The cages hung overhead in the sunlight, raised on massive bracketed cranes from the courtyard walls, five to a side. They were onion- shaped and seemed quite delicate at a distance, narrow steel bars billowing down and out from the suspension stalk at the top, curling in at the base and meeting in the central crankspace, where the bleak mechanism of the impaling spike rose back into the body of the cage. As he drew closer, Ringil saw he hadn't been quite right about the lack of an execution. One of the cages still held the remnants of a human form.

Abruptly his vision scorched across, like muslin drapes on fire. He couldn't see for the past in his eyes. The memory came on like the glare of a sudden, desert sun.

Jelim, screaming and thrashing as they carried him into the cage in his execution robe.
Condemned criminals were sometimes drugged before sentence was carried out, as a mercy or because someone somewhere had put enough coin in the right hands. But not for this crime. Not when an example was to be made.

And Gingren's hand, clamped shut on his wrist. The mail- and-leather press of his men- at- arms around them both, in case someone in the avid crowd might have heard whispers, might make an unwanted connection with the pale Eskiath youth there on the nobles’ viewing platform and the doomed boy in the cage.

You'll watch this, my lad. You'll stand here and you'll watch every last fucking moment of it, if I have to pinion you myself.

Ringil hadn't needed pinioning. Fortified with self- loathing, with the reserves of sardonic contempt he'd absorbed in his time spent around Milacar, he'd gone to the gate tight- lipped and filled with a strange, queasy energy, as if walking to his own execution as well as Jelim's. He'd known at some deep, cold level that he would cope.

He was wrong. Utterly.

As they held Jelim in place over the lowered spike, as they forced him down and his thrashing abruptly stopped and his eyes flew open, Ringil held out. As the long, gut- deep shriek of denial ripped out of him, as the executioner below the cage began to crank the mechanism and the barbed steel spike rose inch by cog- toothed inch and Jelim shuddered in the grasp of the men who restrained him, as the shrieks began to peel out of him at intervals broken by inhuman sounds like someone trying to inhale thick mud, as Jelim rose slowly to his feet as if at some kind of obscene attention before the crowd, as his shudders went on in rolling sequence, as blood and shit and piss began to drip below and the cage …

Ringil came to on the boards of the platform, throat raw with his own vomit, one of the Eskiath men- at- arms slapping his face. They'd cleared a space for him, the rest of the assembled nobility probably not wanting to get his sick on their finery. But no one was looking down at him in disgust.

No one was looking at him at all.

All eyes were pinned on the cage, and the source of the noises that came from within it.

Gingren towered above Ringil, arms folded and crushed to his chest, and held his head up as if his neck were stiff. He did not look down at his son, even when Ringil gagged and the man- at- arms stuck a gloved
finger in his throat and twisted his face roughly to the side so he wouldn't choke.

The noises Jelim was making came to find him on the wind. He passed out all over again.

“OH
What's the fucking…” The peasant voice died away on the curse, came back conciliatory. “Oh, my apologies your worthiness. Didn't see you there.”

Ringil shivered back to the present. He'd jammed to a halt in the thoroughfare, was blocking passage. He found he'd closed his eyes without realizing it. He shook his head and stepped sideways, out of the flow of traffic and into the shadow of the cages. The drover who'd sworn at him hurried past behind a brace of donkeys, eyes on the ground, not wanting trouble. Ringil ignored him, forced himself to look upward instead.