The Steel Remains (43 page)

“The Helmsmen have an explanation of sorts, my lord. It seems what is now eastern Ennishmin was once the site of a decisive battle against the dwenda. The swamps at the eastern end of the province are apparently not wholly natural. According to Angfal, they were originally created by some cataclysmic weapon the Kiriath deployed there. I wonder if that weapon didn't have some effect on the barriers between worlds, perhaps make them easier to breach than elsewhere. Stories of hauntings and apparitions apparently persist in the local culture, and there's some kind of trade in so- called Aldrain artifacts, things retrieved from the swamps that are reckoned to have magical powers.”

Jhiral snorted. Archeth nodded a measured dose of agreement.

“Yes, it's improbable, I agree. In fact, these artifacts are probably mostly bits and pieces left behind by the Kiriath armies in the past. But there may be an element of truth to the tales as well. In the markets and specialist shops in Trelayne, where Aldrain lore is an affectation among the rich, I quite often saw objects that didn't appear to be of human manufacture, but were not reminiscent of anything my people might build, either.”

“You're saying the dwenda have come back to the site of an old defeat. What for, revenge?” Jhiral shook his head. He even smiled, but she thought there was an edge of bitterness on it. “Well, they've come a little late for that. Perhaps someone should go up there and tell them they just missed their ancient enemies on the way out the door at An-M onal. Maybe then they'll leave us alone.”

“Or maybe not, my lord. The war against the dwenda was apparently an alliance of Kiriath and human, in much the same way as the war against the Scaled Folk. If your enemy has fled but his dogs remain guarding the hearth, what will you do with those dogs?”

Jhiral nodded. It was logic he understood.

“So you want to go to Ennishmin. Is that it?”

“I think leading an expeditionary force there might be advisable. A thousand men, say, with engineering support, could—”

“A thousand men?”
Jhiral seemed genuinely aghast. “Where exactly do you think I'm going to snap my fingers and get a thousand men from? This isn't wartime, you know.”

“No, my lord. Not yet, it isn't.”

“Oh, that's a ridiculous thing to say.” The Emperor surged to his feet, stormed to the window, and stood staring out. Came back. “And— look— even if it's not, Archeth, even if this is the prelude to some kind of conflict— the attack came from Khangset, from the west and from the ocean. You're asking me to commit a major force twelve hundred miles away on a completely different frontier, all staked on not much more than some mumblings from senile machinery and a theory you haven't slept on yet.”

“My lord, I realize—”

“Well, I don't think you do, Archeth.” His voice trod hers down. “I don't think you've noticed, in the depths of your drugged- up self- pity and obsession, that we're trying to run an Empire here. Currently, we've got the Trelayne League stamping their collective feet and making angry diplomatic noises about trade restriction again—those motherfuckers certainly forgot pretty fucking fast who kept them afloat during the war— and by all accounts they're building a new navy into the bargain. We've got an upsurge in piracy along the southern coast, some kind of horseshit religious schism going on at Demlarashan that'll probably need riot control before the end of the year. And on top of that I have provincial governors marching into my throne room every fucking month like clockwork to whinge at me about supply lines and banditry and public health crises, but not one single one of them ever wants to come up with the taxes we'd need to solve those problems. The long and the short of it is, Archeth, I can't fucking give you your thousand men, because I don't fucking have them to spare.”

AND THAT WAS THAT.

Archeth collected her horse and wended her way back down into the city, muttering to herself and grinding her teeth; clear indications
—as if
I fucking needed them—
that she'd overdone the krinzanz. The strengthening midmorning sun stung her eyes, layered her shoulders with the promised heat of the day to come. Worst of all was the knowledge within her that Jhiral had a point. The Empire didn't have a lot of excess military capacity. The war dead numbered in the tens of thousands, and the devastation wrought by the Scaled Folk was massive. Across the whole imperial domain, the population was only just starting to get back on its breeding feet. Most farms and manufacturies were still desperately short of labor. The levies had been cut back as soon as a workable peace and a stable frontier could be hammered out with Trelayne, not because the Empire was weary of war, but because Akal's economic advisers had bluntly told him that if he didn't slacken the demand for soldiers soon, his harvests would rot in the fields and his subjects would starve. It was that as much as anything else that brought imperial ambitions in the northwest to an abrupt, conciliatory halt.

Bring me some evidence,
Jhiral told her as she was leaving.
Something solid. I'll put the army back on a war footing if I have to, but I won't do it for rumor and conjecture and a few trinkets you once saw in a shop window in Trelayne.

Then give me a reduced force,
she'd pleaded.
A few hundred. Let me—

No. I'm sorry, Archeth.
He did genuinely seem to be.
Quite apart from anything else, I need you here. If there is a crisis, I need to be able to point you at it pretty fucking fast, and I can't do that if you've gone haring off to the wrong end of the Empire.

Perhaps he was even right. Degenerate lifestyle aside, he wasn't a stupid man.

She thought abruptly of Ishgrim's pale curves, thought about owning them the way Jhiral had, the way he owned the three sleeping girls in his bed now. Owning the belief, no not even that, owning the
knowledge
that this was flesh you had a right to use like any other purchased thing you might have in the house. Like the flesh of the fruit you kept in the larder, the leather of a jerkin you liked to wear.

Perhaps you're the stupid one, Archidi. Ever think of that?

She dismounted into the sunlit quiet of the courtyard, beset by her own murmuring, circling thoughts. No sign of the stable boy. Well, he wasn't the sharpest pin in the box, but still, he should have heard
Idrashan's hooves on the cobbles when she rode in. She glanced sourly toward the stables, felt a spike of krin- driven anger, and tamped it back down with great care.
You don't take it out on the servants,
Flaradnam had told her when she was about six, and it stuck. She led Idrashan over to the hitching rail by the stables, looped the reins there, and went to look for Kefanin.

Found him.

Bloodied and crawling on hands and knees, just inside the main door. He'd heard her come in, was trying to get up. The blood made a darkened, matted mass of his hair on one whole side of his head. It dripped off his face onto the flagstones, spotted them in a line where he'd crawled.

She stopped dead, rigid with shock.

“Kef?
Kef?”

Kefanin looked up at her, mouth working, making the repeated silent gape of a gaffed fish. She dropped to her knees at his side, gathered him up, and got his mouth close to her ear. She felt the blood smear on her cheek.

“I'm sorry, milady,” he uttered, voice clicking and breathless, barely audible. “We tried to stop them. But they took her.”

or Ringil, the days that followed were like fever dreams from some battlefield injury that wouldn't heal.

He couldn't be sure how much of it Seethlaw was inducing for his own purposes and how much was just a levy- standard human reaction to time spent in the Aldrain marches. Either way, it was pretty horrible. Landscapes and interiors he thought were real would suddenly melt without warning, collapse around him like walls of candlewax bowing to the flame; worse still, behind them was a radiance that glimmered coldly like bandlight on distant water, and a sense of exposure to the void that made him want to curl up and cry. Figures came and went who could not possibly be there, stooped close to him and bestowed cryptic fragments of wisdom on him, each with the chilly intimacy of serpents hissing in his ear. Some of them he knew; others brought with them a nightmarish half familiarity that said he
ought
to know them,
maybe
would have
known them if his life had only turned out fractionally different. They at any rate affected to know him, and the dream logic of their assumption was the thing he came to dread most, because he was tolerably sure he could feel aspects of himself ebbing away or shifting in response.

If it's true,
Shalak pontificated, one warm spring evening in the garden behind the shop,
if it's really a fact that the Aldrain realms stand outside time, or at least in the shallow surf on time's shores, then the constraints of time aren't going to apply to anything that goes on there. You think about that for a moment. Never mind all that old marsh- shit about young men seduced by Aldrain maids into spending a single night with them and going home the next day to find forty years have passed. That's the least of it. A lack of time presupposes a lack of limits on what
can
happen at any given point as well. You'd be living inside a million different possibilities all at once. Imagine the will it would take to survive that. Your average peasant human is just going to go screaming insane.

You think about that,
he repeated, and leaned in close to whisper.
Give us a kiss, Gil.

Ringil flinched. Shalak wavered and went away. So did a large chunk of the garden behind him. Flaradnam stepped through the blurry space it left, seated himself opposite as if it were the most natural thing in the world.

Thing is, Gil, if I'd taken that attitude at Gallows Gap, where would we be now? I'd never have made it back in one piece.

What attitude?
Ringil shook his head numbly, stared back at the seamed anthracite features.
You
didn't
make it back, ‘Nam. You never got to Gallows Gap in the first place. You died on the surgeon's table.

Flaradnam pulled a face, as if he'd just been told a joke in very poor taste.
Oh come on. So who led the charge at the Gap, if it wasn't me?

I did.

You?

Yes! Me!
Shouting now.
You were fucking dead, ‘Nam. We left your body for the lizards.

Gil, what's the matter with you? You're not well.

And so on.

“DO YOU EVER GET USED TO IT?” HE ASKED SEETHLAW ACROSS A SOFTLY
snapping campfire in a forest he didn't remember walking into. Thick green scent of pine needles mingled with the smoke. He was shivering, but not with cold. “How long does it take?”

The dwenda cocked his head. “Get used to what?”

“Oh, what do you think? The ghosts, the visitors I'm getting. And don't tell me you don't fucking see them.”

Seethlaw nodded, more to himself than to the human he faced. “No, you're correct. I do see them. But not as you do. They are not my alternatives, they mean nothing to me. I see a faint gathering of motion around you, that's all. Like a fog. It's always that way with humans.”

“Yeah, well there's no fucking fog around you,” Ringil snapped. “How long before I can learn to do that?”

“Longer than you have, I suspect.” The dwenda stared into the fire, and its light turned his eyes incandescent. “No human has managed it to my knowledge, except maybe… well, but he was not truly human anyway.”

“Who wasn't?”

“It no longer matters.” Seethlaw looked up and smiled sadly. “You ask how long. In all honesty, I wouldn't know. I was born to it, we all were. Our young flicker in and out of the gray places from birth.”

Later, they walked in single file along a worn footpath through the trees and up across the shoulder of the hill. Ringil followed the broad-shouldered figure of the dwenda without question, something that seemed wrong to him, but in some oddly shaped way he could not define. A pale but strengthening glow seeped in between the jagged barked trunks, brought the ground underfoot into clearer view, but it never really got light.