The Steel Remains (35 page)

“You should not concern yourself on my part.” The Helmsman's voice was deep and melodious, warmly avuncular and at the same time very slightly unnerving at the edges, as if at any moment it might suddenly scale upward into an inhuman scream. “You know time doesn't have the significance for me that it does for… humans.”

Archeth grinned at the calculated insult. It wasn't the first time. She
cocked one ankle over the other on the corner of the desk and stared through the angle between her feet at the thing she shared the study with.

“Good to see you again, anyway.”

It took up most of the space near the wall, a span of nearly twenty feet and a height of at least ten. Mostly it looked like guts, riotous loops and coils of dark iron intestine all across the pale plasterwork and trailing down onto the floor, seemingly at random. But there were other parts, too, segments that hung fatly off the wall like lungs or tumors, and the whole thing was speckled with a series of weak green or yellowish lights behind what appeared to be thick glass optics each no larger than a thumbprint. Near the center and high up, two symmetrical sets of angled ribbing gripped the wall and ceiling, braced outward from a swollen oval the width of a man's arms at full stretch. Not for the first time, Archeth thought that the arrangement was uncomfortably arachnoid— it gave the impression that some giant spider out of a child's nightmare was somehow oozing through the wall prior to springing down on whoever happened to occupy the study at the time. Or, perhaps, that the same monstrous creature had simply been embedded there in the plaster like some grotesque hunting trophy.

It didn't help that there were clusters of the little green and yellow lights gathered at the lower end of the oval like eyes.

She knew— because the Kiriath engineers who ripped Angfal out of a derelict fireship's hull and installed it here had told her— that the Helmsman's consciousness existed within the whole organic- looking mess at once, but that didn't help much. Like it or not, she found herself habitually, instinctively, addressing herself to this hanging half- spider central structure, focusing on it whenever—

She was doing it now.

“So what do you want?” it asked her.

“Why should I want anything from you?” She unfixed her gaze from the clustered lights, made a point of gazing off toward the window instead. “Maybe I just stopped by for some light conversation.”

“Really?” Angfal's voice didn't change all that much, but Archeth thought there was now an accent of cruelty in the inquiring tone. “Come to reminisce, then, have we? Talk about all those good old times
when your father and Grashgal were still alive, and the world was a finer, nobler place?”

She held down the hurt, the old familiar ache.

“Far as I know,” she said tonelessly, “Grashgal's still alive. Far as
you
know as well, I'd have thought, given that when they cut you out of the wreckage, they left most of your sense organs behind in the hull.”

A tiny beat of silence.

“Archeth, daughter of Flaradnam, you come to me with elevated pulse, dilated pupils, swelling of blood in breasts and labia— though that's ebbing now— and a fractionally unsteady vocal range, all clear symptoms of mingled sexual arousal and krinzanz abuse, a combination that is, incidentally, not ideally suited to your physiology, or indeed any physiology beyond the very youthful. And you're staring out of a window that has a curtain drawn across it. So you see, as we both already know, my sense organs were not all left in the wreckage, and you did not come here for light conversation.”

The quiet seeped in again. She thought maybe one or two of the lights in Angfal's coils had shifted color or maybe just brightened.

“I'm two hundred and seven years old,” she said. “That is youthful in Kiriath terms.”

“Yes, but not for a half- breed.”

Her temper snapped across, shiny steel rage at the break. “Hey,
fuck you!
Grashgal's alive and laughing, somewhere better than this.”

“Grashgal is dead,” the Helmsman said patiently. “They all are. The Kiriath barely survived the voyage through the quick paths on their way here, and then their strength was at full flow, their science honed, and their minds undamaged. The forces they encountered undid all of that. They did not choose to come here, Archeth, despite anything the chronicles might claim to the contrary. They were shipwrecked here, and if they stayed four thousand years, it wasn't because they liked the scenery. It was because they were afraid that the return would break them.”

Her rage failed her— she found herself looking at the bright jagged edge of it with weary disenchantment. This wasn't the way to get what she wanted.

“Some say the passage opened their minds,” she offered. “Gave them the gift of a new vision, an insight across time. They say it didn't corrupt, it enhanced.”

“Yes, that's right,” Angfal jeered. “So much so that the most enhanced among them, those most
gifted,
as you put it, went off into the desert to contemplate their insight and apparently forgot to eat.”

“Not all of them.”

“Most
of them.”

“You're talking about the extreme cases. As a race, we learned to cope.”

“We?
We
as a race?”

“Figure of speech. The
Kiriath,
as a race, adapted. And in the end their adaptation made them stronger, better able to resist the effects of a return voyage.”

“Oh, is that a thesis you're developing? I'd be very interested to see your evidence.”

“I'm sorry they left you behind, Angfal.”

It broke the rapid parry-riposte pattern of the exchange better than if she'd screamed. A longer silence this time. The lack of motion in the Helmsman's frozen iron coils and bulges seemed suddenly wrong, ridiculous, some impossible constriction of a natural emotional order and its responses. She looked for a shift in the lights, but they held their color, they burned steadily back at her.

The Helmsmen are not human, Archidi,
her father had told her once, when she was still quite a small child. He spoke High Kir, and the word he used for “human” was one the Kiriath used about themselves.
They aren't like you or me or your mother at all, not even like the spirit of one of us in a bottle or a box. They are something… other. You must remember that in your dealings with them. They are not human, for all that they might sometimes do a good impression of one.

At the time, it sounded to her awed child's ears like a warning about demons.

“They left you, too,” said the Helmsman finally.

“Yes, they did.”

More silence. Memories swarmed through her in the space it left,
adding their weight to the krinzanz crash. She stared at the fleck- lit, dismembered iron monster on the wall, the way it bulked and coiled there, and she tried to find a similar stillness in herself.

“Well, then.” Angfal's voice broke smoothly back into the quiet, to all appearances as if none of the previous conversation had happened. “What can I do for you, Archeth Indamaninarmal? What is it you wanted to talk to me about?”

hey smashed both of Terip Hale's legs below the knee with the
L
mace, got the whereabouts of the tool shop out of him fairly quickly thereafter, and then let him sink into semiconsciousness where he lay. They got Girsh settled as comfortably as possible against the opposite wall, put a freshly cranked and loaded crossbow in his lap, and went to fetch the manacle cutters.

“Is it true, then?” Eril asked him as they loped rapidly down a darkened corridor on the other side of the courtyard. “That stuff about you killing the dragon?” “Pretty much. Why?”

“Uhm— but they don't call you Dragonbane?” “No.”

Short pause, the other man not wanting to leave it alone, not knowing how to press the point without offense.

“Never seen a dragon,” he said finally.

“Yeah, well, believe me, that's the way you want to keep it.”

More quiet. They reached the end of the corridor, found stairs downward.

“He, uh, he kept calling you a queer.”

“Yeah.”

“Well, uh…” With an audible sigh, Eril gave it up. “Fucking scumbag, right?”

“Indeed.”

At the bottom of the stair, as they'd been told, there was a door sporting a modest padlock. Eril kicked it in with a poise and economy of motion that looked extensively practiced. A couple of shattering blows at the latch with his heel, the door sprang inward on its hinges, and they found themselves in a long underground chamber lined along one wall with cage- fronted cells. Bandglow seeped in from windows set up near the heavy- beamed roof, much the same construction as the joyous longshank chamber and the same effect: There was just enough pale silver light to make out figures huddled to the back of each cell on the floor. Mostly young women, one or two more androgynous forms that might have been boys— the difference, shrouded in any case beneath each clutched- up, moth- eaten gray blanket, tended to drown out in the low light. Hollow, terrified eyes and curled defensive postures created an unsexed uniformity. Each captive cringed visibly as the booted feet went past their cell, clung harder to the blanket as if it might be torn away from them. One or two started to make a tight- racheted keening, but you couldn't really tell which of them it was— the sound crept out past the bars and filled the whole chamber like the relentless drip of water. It put Ringil's teeth instantly on edge. He hadn't heard anything like it since the war.

“Good thing Girsh isn't here to see this,” Eril murmured. “He'd probably want to let them all out.”

“Yeah.”

They found the tool section at the end of the row, a long alcove set with three workbenches broad enough to take a human body and lined along the back wall with hanging racks for the tools. Ringil scanned the
racks, spotted a couple of delicately finished branding irons and some other suggestively shaped implements whose applications he didn't want to think about; then his eyes fastened thankfully on what they'd come for. Four identical, long- handled manacle cutters dangling side by side. He lifted one off its hook and flexed the scissor motion a couple of times.

“Should do the trick.”

“Right. Let's get out of here.”

Ringil hesitated. He tossed the cutters across the chamber to Eril, who fielded them one- handed with a knife fighter's precision.

“You go. I'll catch you up.”

“What?” Eril looked from the cutters in his hand to Ringil, and then, with dawning realization, down the long line of cells. “Oh, come
on.
We haven't got time for th—”

“I said you go. I won't be long.”

For a moment it looked as if Eril might argue. He held Ringil's eye, face unreadable, hefted the cutters a couple of times. Finally, he shrugged.

“Your call. But Girsh is in no state to hang about. Soon as I get that bolt out of his leg, we're leaving. Don't miss the boat.”

“I won't.”

Eril nodded, turned, and headed back up the line of cells to the door. He didn't look at any of them, didn't turn his head at all.

Admirable focus.

Yeah. What are we doing here, then?

Ringil took another pair of manacle cutters from the rack and went to the first cell in the line. The lock was a simple affair, two bolts and a cowled fastener. It took him less than a minute to mangle it apart with the cutters. He opened the cage door and stepped hesitantly into the space behind. Instantly the girl on the floor recoiled into one back corner of the cell, as hard and as fast as the walls would let her. It was almost as if she'd been thrown there by some external force he was radiating. He saw, even in the low wash of bandlight from the windows, that she was trembling violently.

“You're free to go,” he said, feeling foolish.

She just stared back up at him, eyes and knuckles and the blanket
edge. The awkward way she'd sprawled in the corner revealed one thigh to the hip, a small triangular glimpse of buttock and waist beyond— pale, naked flesh and the small weave- patterned discoloration of a brand on the hip bone. The blanket was her only clothing.

Fuck.

He left her, went mechanically along the row of cells, wrenching the locks apart with a rising fury that made him clumsier each time, made the cutters slip and turn as he used them, as if they had a mind of their own. His teeth gritted tighter, his breath came harder, the locks buckled and tore, hung off each door like mangled body parts, or else they slipped and clanked on the floor at his feet. And he knew, all the time, even as he was doing it, that he was wasting his time.

What are they going to do, Gil?
Weary, reasonable voice in his head.
They're naked, traumatized, trapped in the middle of Etterkal. They aren't going to make it a hundred yards down the street outside before some bunch of fucking urchins blows the whistle on them.

Shut up.

And even if they
do
make it to Tervinala or the river, even if they
can
find some way back to the homes they came from, even if they
don't
get raped and murdered or abducted all over again by whatever scum they'll find prowling the streets at this time of night, uniformed or not—