The Steel Remains (48 page)

There was no sound other than the squelch of their steps.

In the end, it was this that told him where he was. He knew something about marshland expanse from growing up in a city surrounded by one, and he was beginning to miss the signs of life he should have heard. There were no birdcalls, recognizable or otherwise, and no sudden rustling movements from amid the ground- level vegetation as they passed. Here and there, they saw pools and angled stretches of stagnant water bridged with moss- grown fallen tree trunks and stepped in by small mangroves, but nothing living stirred there, not even insects hovering above the leaden surface.

He'd heard of only one swamp this dead. Had even seen the place, once, from a safe distance to the west.

Hannais M'hen the Cursed,
Pelmarag had called it.

Hannais M'hen.

Ennishmin.

Cursed was right, then. Forget the peasant- level legends and ghost stories they liked to weave about this place. He'd lost what little faith in things remained to him at Ennishmin, and for the most prosaic of reasons. Had nearly lost his life as well. Probably would have lost it but for Archeth's prompt medical attention and— he suspected— her intercession with the powers- that- be at camp.
Never tangle with an imperial commander at knifepoint if you plan to let him live,
he'd begun one of the chapters in that treatise on skirmish warfare that never saw print, the chapter headed “Diplomacy.”

“Hss-sst!”

Ahead of him, Seethlaw had locked to a halt. He held up one rigid hand and hinged it downward, then sank smoothly into a crouch. The other dwenda froze and followed suit, and Ringil did his human best to copy them. Seethlaw raised a hand and pointed silently through the trees ahead. A broad gunmetal creek opened out there. They had walked
almost onto its bank— and something made soft splashing sounds as it moved through the water toward them.

Seethlaw's hand moved again.

It was, Ringil thought later, exactly the way to describe what happened. The dwenda's hand moved, but not in any way that suggested its owner had any control over it. It was as if fingers and palm had each acquired a malicious but not quite coordinated will of their own. The wrist flexed at what looked like an impossible angle, the hand made an odd, repeated clawing gesture with three fingers, and Seethlaw hissed out words under his breath. Ringil caught only a half syllable or two, but his skin goose- fleshed with the sound.

Then something seemed to happen to the light around them.

At the same moment, a long, battered- looking canoe glided into view on the creek. It held five men, bearded and scruffily clad, but all armed to the teeth. Ringil spotted broadswords and axes, recurved bows held loosely nocked, and a huge arbalest strapped across a back. Two of the men wielded the paddles, digging and driving with the ease of long custom, strokes that knifed into the water almost silently and propelled the canoe along with barely a ripple. The other three were evidently the lookouts, heads swiveling, eyes tense and watchful above their bearded cheeks. None of them spoke a word to one another the whole time they were in view.

They passed less than five feet from where the dwenda crouched, and apparently did not see them.

Seethlaw waited what seemed like a long time, and then his hand unclawed itself, the light shifted again, and he started breathing, something Ringil now realized the dwenda had stopped doing completely when he first froze there on the bank of the creek.

“And they were—?”

Seethlaw shrugged. “Scavengers. They scour the swamp for trinkets of the Black Folk, sell them on northward as Aldrain curios. Desperate men, mostly, but they know the swamplands well. They have camps out on the fringes. It pays to avoid them.”

“Avoid them?” Ringil frowned, felt an odd tide of mingled hilarity and disappointment rising in him. His mouth twisted with it. “Are you
serious? The mighty fucking dwenda, skulking about in the bushes hiding from swamp trash? Hoiran's twisted cock, Seethlaw, they're only human.”

“Yes, but some of us,” said Risgillen, suddenly, sibilantly, into his left ear as she slipped past him, “are not all that keen on humans. For one thing— they don't wash all that often.”

Seethlaw shot her a warning look, and she said no more.

“It's this way,” he said, and they pressed on parallel to the creek. The channel broadened out as they walked, and a number of tributary arms opened up along the far bank. Drifts of some tubular, tangled floating weed began to appear on the gunmetal water, and an occasional gust of wind scudded the surface. The scent of decay lifted somewhat. They saw no more water traffic, and nothing else living until the water took a sharp bend to the right and suddenly a smooth- headed black- clad form stood ahead of them, sword across its back. Ringil, by now accustomed to the sleek helm and unornamented design of Aldrain armour, barely spared the new dwenda a glance. Most of him was absorbed in the thing that loomed behind.

It was a bridge, that much was clear, but the term
bridge
struck Ringil as a poor attempt at describing what he saw spanning the creek. By the same token, you could call the Imperial Bazaar in Yhelteth a market. It was true as far as it went, but—

The bridge soared out from buttresses as tall as Trelayne's eastern gate, and appeared to be built mostly of wires and light. He made out spiraling stairways at either end, a shallow sweeping support arc from side to side, and spiderweb patterns of structure beneath. There was a delicacy to the construction that made Ringil think if the sun shone through it strongly enough, the whole thing might almost disappear.

Seethlaw, it seemed, had noticed his awe. The dwenda was watching him closely, almost as if he'd just passed some test.

“You approve?”

“It's very beautiful,” Ringil admitted. “The scavengers don't see it?”

“They see something.” Seethlaw stepped closer, breathed across his fingertips, and then pressed them gently to Ringil's eyes. “Look.”

Ringil blinked and stared upward.

The bridge was gone.

Or… not
gone
precisely. The buttresses remained, but now they were composed of pale granite, twin bluffs facing each other across the creek, cracked and seamed with moss and thin- grown lines of yellowish grass, broken apart in places but offering no obvious route up. And where the bridge's span had once been, a pair of slim fallen trees yearned out toward each other from the top of each bluff, branches thinning and then thinning again into twigs as they extended over the gap and grew closer, but never quite touched.

Ringil blinked again, hard. Rubbed at his eyes.

The bridge was there again.

“There are legends, of course,” Seethlaw said. “The boy who stumbles on this place at twilight on Padrow's Eve or some other festival night and sees, in place of the rocks and trees, a fabulous fairy- tale bridge. But very few of your kind can actually see it for more than a passing second.” A wry smile. “As you say, they're only humans.”

They left the helmed and armored dwenda with a brief exchange that sounded formulaic to Ringil, for all he could not understand a word of what was said. Then Seethlaw led them up the spiraling stairs and out onto the span. Ringil, close behind him, took a handful of cautious steps out onto the weave of hairline strands under his feet and then froze. He couldn't help it—it was like walking on the air itself. For long moments, he felt sick with terror of falling. The wind made fluting sounds across the strands around him; the dark water below rippled invitingly. A rift opened in the clouds overhead, and where the stronger light touched the bridge, structure dissolved into the beaded gleam of a dew-soaked cobweb.

He saw the looks he was getting from Risgillen. Swallowed, fixed his gaze firmly ahead, and started walking again. It didn't help that the bridge gave a little underfoot with each step, not unlike the spongy ground they'd been treading on their way through the swamp. And as it gave, the strands seemed to chime very faintly at the upper edge of Ringil's hearing. It wasn't a pleasant sensation, and he was glad when they were over to the other side and coming down the spiral stairs.

At the bottom, they were met by two more armored dwenda. One of them pulled off his helmet and fixed Ringil with a hungry eye until
Seethlaw snapped something at him. The conversation went back and forth a few times, and then the dwenda shrugged and put his helmet back on. He didn't look at Ringil again.

“I'm really not popular around here, huh?”

“It isn't that,” said Seethlaw absently. “They're just worried, looking for something to take it out on.”

“Worried about
what
? Those guys in the canoes?”

The dwenda looked at him speculatively. “No, not them. There's some talk about the Black Folk still being around here. One of our scouts went into a local camp wearing enough of a glamour to get served and sit unnoticed in the alehouse. He heard men talking about a black- skinned warrior in one of the villages to the west.”

“Yeah— come on. That's just going to be some southern mercenary, maybe out of the deserts. Skins get pretty dark once you're south of Demlarashan. Easy mistake to make.”

“Perhaps.”

“No perhaps about it. The Kiriath are
gone,
Seethlaw. I saw them off myself. Stood and watched at An- Monal until the last fireship went under. Wherever they went, they're not coming back.”

“Yes, this is what I have learned in Trelayne. But I've also learned that the tongues of men are not much leashed by concern for accuracy or truth. It seems lies come very easily to your race. They lie to those they lead, to their mates and fellows no matter how close- drawn, even to themselves if it will make the world around them more bearable. It is hard to know what to believe in this place.”

Something about the weariness in his tone stung Ringil into defensive anger.

“Funny, that's always what I heard about your people. That the dwenda were masters of deceit and trickery.”

“Indeed?” Ashgrin, laconic and grave at his shoulder. Ringil had heard his voice so few times it was a genuine shock now. “And from which four- thousand- year- old expert in Aldrain lore did you hear this?”

Risgillen cleared her throat loudly.

“Are we going to get on, brother? It seems to me that we have more to concern ourselves with than the prattling of—”

Seethlaw swung to face her. His voice came out dangerously low.

“Do you want to lead, Risgillen?”

She didn't reply. The other dwenda watched with interest.

“I asked you a question, sister. Do you want charge of this expedition? Will you abandon the pleasures and comforts of our realm and become earthbound as I have? Will you immerse yourself in the brawling filth of human society to achieve our ends?”

Still no response.

“I'll have an answer, sister, if you please. Or I'll take your silence as the
no
it has always been. Is it
no
?
Then shut the fuck up!”

Risgillen started to speak, her own tongue, but Seethlaw slashed the blade of a hand across the flow. He turned slowly about, blank eyes switching from face to face among his fellow Aldrain.

“I hear you complain,” he spat, still in Naomic, perhaps, Ringil guessed, to snub them, to shame them before the human. “All of you, time and again, bemoaning what you must endure here, the journeys and sojourns of a few weeks’ duration that you must make among humans, tied to time and circumstance. I have spent
three fucking years
tied to time so that we could build a path in Trelayne. I have tasted this world on my tongue for so long I can scarcely remember what it was like not to be tainted by its limits. I have swallowed it down, day after day, sickening from the brute animal stupidity of its ways, all so that I might learn its parameters and its possibilities, all so we may in the end take back what is ours. I have done all of this willingly, and would do it again. And I ask for nothing in return but your allegiance and your trust. Is that so very much to give?”

Silence. Very, very faintly, the sound of the Aldrain bridge humming and whining in the wind above them. Seethlaw nodded grimly.

“Very well. You will not gainsay me in this again, Risgillen. Is that clear?”

A half syllable of Aldrain speech in reply. Risgillen bowed her head.

“Good. Then wait here.” Seethlaw nodded at Ringil. “Gil, you come with me. There's something you need to see.”

few hundred yards beyond the Aldrain bridge, as if in some kind of savage architectural riposte, a massive black iron platform jutted out of the swamp at the angle of a sinking ship. It was easily over a hundred feet from side to side, multileveled, six flanges that Ringil could make out as they approached, tipping his head back to count. The top was crowned with spikes and webbed wire assemblies that looked somewhat like fishermen's nets hung out to dry. The whole thing stabbed upward at the murky sky like a blade buried in a wound and then snapped off. In the hanging silence that surrounded it, there was a presence, a heavy tension like the feel in the air before a storm.

“See,” said Seethlaw grimly, “what your allies did to this place.” It wasn't hard to make the connection— the design of the platform could only have one origin.