The Steel Remains

chapter 25

For 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 f*cking 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 f*cking 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 f*cking 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.

“Where are we going?” he asked Seethlaw’s back.

“Where you wanted to go.” The voice drifted to him over the dwenda’s shoulder. Seethlaw did not turn around or slacken his pace. “I’m going to fulfill your obligations for you.”

“And why would you do that?”

A lewd chuckle that put twinges through Ringil’s sweetly aching groin. “You have a short memory, Ringil Angeleyes.”

“Lucky I’ve got a f*cking memory at all,” Ringil muttered. “Place like this.”

And he shivered again.

BACK IN THE GARDEN, THERE WAS A GRIZZLED SOLDIER IN IMPERIAL cavalry rig who said he knew him and talked incessantly about campaigns in the desert Ringil had never been a part of.

Not like we didn’t warn old Ershnar Kal not to quit the outcrops that time, is it? F*cking coast huggers, got no clue how to fight a desert war. Not much surprise the scale faces took them apart before we got back. You remember what they did to Kal’s ribs, the way they left him?

No, I don’t. Slightly desperate, because the horrors of a screaming, sun-seared image he had never seen were beginning to trickle into his head. Like I told you, I was never f*cking there.

Gave me nightmares for months, that. The imperial seemed to be ignoring his protests. But perhaps he had to, perhaps they all had to, the same way Ringil had to resist each apparition’s false assumptions about him, in order to go on existing at all. Still get it sometimes when it’s a tough summer, still wake up sweating and screaming, dreaming about the scale faces coming up out of the sand all around us. You ever have dreams like that?

The Scaled Folk came from the sea, Ringil told him firmly. They were never in the desert. They came out of the western ocean and we threw them back into it. That’s what I remember, that’s what f*cking happened. And I don’t know who the f*ck you are, either.

Surprised hurt in the soldier’s eyes. Ringil thought of Darby’s face when he offered him the money, thought of how he must have looked when Iscon Kaad skewered him. He dropped his gaze, ashamed.

“You got to hang on, Gil,” Grace-of-Heaven said uncomfortably. The unknown soldier was gone, but the garden remained. “It’s for the best.”

“Yeah?” Ringil slurred. “Whose f*cking best is that then?”

“No one wants you hurt.”

“F*cking trade-up piece of shit. With your house in the Glades.”

“Oh, I see. That’s reserved for the Eskiaths of this world, is it? I guess I was just supposed to stay colorful for you here in the slums.”

Ringil summoned a defensive sneer. “What’s the matter, Grace? You want to be like me? You’re trying way too hard.”

Milacar turned away. Ringil waited for him to dissolve like the soldier, then discovered he wanted him back after all.

“I’m sorry about Girsh,” he called. “But I think Eril had time to get away. I think he made it.”

Grace-of-Heaven gestured impatiently—fast, angry motion, face still turned away. He would not look back or meet Ringil’s eye.

THEY CAME OUT OF THE CAVERNOUS DARKNESS AND PICKED THEIR WAY over a litter of massive granite boulders embedded in smooth white sand. Ringil couldn’t tell how long they’d been walking; the garden was the last thing he remembered clearly, and before that, less clearly, the forest path. Now, overhead, the rough, climbing roof of the sea cave they’d just emerged from made a jagged upper frame for his view down the beach to the surf. Above the sea, the night sky showed a handful of stars and—

Ringil slammed to a halt. “What the f*ck is that?”

Seethlaw paused between two boulders, spared a brief sideways glance. “That’s the moon.”

Ringil stared at the softly glowing dirty-yellow disk that sat fatly just above the line of the horizon, the darker patches like stains across its radiance.

“It’s like the sun,” he murmured. “But it’s so old, look at it. Like it’s almost used up. Is that why the light’s so weak here?”

“No.”

“Is it the Sky Home the Majak talk about?”

A note of impatience crept into the dwenda’s voice. “No, it’s not. Now keep close. This isn’t wholly our territory.”

“What do you . . . ?” Ringil’s voice faded out.

There were figures in the surf.

At first he thought they might be statues or just approximately human-looking rocks for all the movement they showed. But then they did move, and Ringil felt a cool gust of fear up his spine at the sudden change. They were some twenty yards distant, and the light was uncertain, but he thought they had breasts, huge luminous eyes, and circular lamprey-like mouths.

“Might help if I had a weapon,” he hissed at Seethlaw’s back.

“You do,” said the dwenda absently. “Your sword is on your back and that grubby little reptile tooth you’re so handy with is in your belt. Much good they’ll do you if this goes bad.”

Ringil clapped a hand to his shoulder, found the strap of his scabbard hung there, the pommel of the Ravensfriend in place and within reach. He would have sworn only moments ago that he had not felt the weight.

“Don’t touch it.” There was a taut warning in Seethlaw’s tone. “Just smile at the akyia, stay away from the water’s edge, and keep on walking.

Chances are they’ll leave us alone.”

He led the way out around a tumbled pile of granite blocks. The smooth pale sand was soggy underfoot now, and the surf was closer. The figures in the water shifted about, and one or two of them disappeared beneath the waves, but otherwise they seemed content simply to watch their visitors go past.

“They’re not armed,” Ringil pointed out.

“No, they’re not. They don’t need to be.”

Along the gently shelving beach, in and out among the half-buried boulders and tilted blocks of stone.

Light from the feebly glowing phantom sun made the rocks into black silhouettes against the sand. Now Ringil saw that the—he groped for the name Seethlaw had given them —the akyia were keeping pace, diving beneath the surface in sequence, a handful at a time, coming up twenty or thirty yards farther along and waiting for the rest of their companions to catch up. A chittering, sucking noise seemed to come and go faintly on the wind, gusting between the sound of the waves.

Seethlaw stopped and cocked his head to listen. Ringil thought a smile touched the corners of his mouth.

“What’s so funny?”

“They’re talking about you.”

“Yeah, right.”

Now their path apparently took them away from the shoreline again. The cavernous overhang of the sea cave had given way to sections where the cliffs above had collapsed altogether into mounds of gigantic rubble. Seethlaw led him in among it all, up through a narrow ravine between drunkenly angled blocks each the size of an upended imperial coach. They began to climb away from the sea. Ringil touched his hand briefly to the pommel of the Ravensfriend again.

“When did you give me the sword back?”

“You’ve had it from the start. You just weren’t aware of the fact. It’s a simple enough trick. That one, I could teach you.”

“I’ve been carrying this thing all along? Even in the forest, when we camped?”

Seethlaw looked back at him, mouth quirked again. “We haven’t reached the forest yet.”

Ringil felt the strength run out of his legs like water. The rock wall to his left seemed suddenly to be toppling over on him.

“Then . . .”

“Shut up!”

Seethlaw had locked to a halt in the narrow space ahead of him, one closed fist raised, point-man-style, for silence and stillness. Very gently, without moving any other part of his body, he nodded upward.

Ringil followed the direction of his gaze, and stopped breathing.

F*ck.

One of the akyia had not, it seemed, been content to stay in the ocean and watch them leave. It crouched on top of the right-hand block, two yards over their heads, poised lizard-like on arms splayed wide.

Powerful-looking hands curled like claws into the fissures and features of the granite.

Ringil’s hand flew to the pommel of the Ravensfriend. The akyia’s head tilted, lamp-like eyes fixed on the movement.

“I said don’t f*cking touch that!”

For the first time since he’d known the dwenda, Ringil thought he heard genuine fear in Seethlaw’s mellifluous voice. He dropped his hand back to his side. The akyia shifted its head again, met his eyes directly. It felt like a physical blow.

“Don’t do anything stupid,” said Seethlaw, very softly. “Don’t move, don’t do anything sudden at all.”

Ringil swallowed and remembered to breathe. Held the creature’s gaze, stared at it while his mind stumbled after comparisons.

The akyia looked like a harbor-end pimp’s nightmare of womanhood. Like something dreamed into being from the fumes of one too many flandrijn pipes and the constant, stealthy background slap of water against the pilings under the wharf. It was long-haired and full-breasted, pale-skinned in the light from the worn-out moon, and smoothly muscled from a lifetime in the water. But the hair straggled back from a skull built out of angles to make you scream. The eyes were the size of clenched fists, and for all that Ringil sensed a ferocious intelligence in their stare, they were set in sockets that had more in common with the skull of a lizard than anything human. Thickly ridged cheekbones forced them back and up, separating the upper features from a chinless lower face that seemed wholly prehensile, and currently held the circular lamprey mouth aimed at the intruders like another massive eye.

It raised itself on the angle of the rock, scuttled down a couple of feet so it was hanging almost upside down on the wall above them. Ringil watched in fascination as two long, fin-fronded limbs coiled about in dark silhouette behind its head. He could hear them rasping as they sought purchase on the top of the block.

He cleared his throat.

“Just stay where you are,” Seethlaw murmured. “If it wanted to hurt you, it already would have.”

The akyia claw-walked its way down the wall of rock until it really was suspended upside down almost within touching distance of Ringil’s head. It brought with it the salt waft of its body, the fresh blast of ocean water overlaid with more fragrant elements that were curiously similar to Seethlaw’s scent. Its hair hung in its eyes like the strings of a wrecked fishing net until, with a motion that was startlingly feminine, it lifted one hand from the rock and swept the strands back behind its head. A nictitating membrane flickered up over the left eye, the circular lip of muscle around the mouth flexed in and out like an iris, and Ringil, staring up with a crick in his neck, saw concentric rings of teeth lift themselves briefly erect and then lie down in the throat again. He swallowed hard, fought down the terrible sensation of vulnerability that crawled in his face and scalp. It wasn’t a stretch to assume the akyia could bite open his head as easily as a Yhelteth fisherman’s machete taking the top off a coconut.

From deep in the thing’s throat came the same glutinous chittering he’d heard earlier. It cocked its head back and forth between man and dwenda as if puzzled by the juxtaposition.

Out of the corner of his eye, Ringil thought he saw Seethlaw nod.

Then, rapid as a fleeing lizard, the akyia whipped about on the rock and was gone, back over the top in a succinct thrash of pale curves and coiling rear limbs. Ringil heard it scuttling away somewhere above them.

He sagged with relief, heart thunderous from the shock of that last sudden move.

Wished he’d been carrying some kind of weapon.

F*ckING, SOMEWHERE, ON COOL, DEW-DAMP GRASS IN A RING OF mist-shrouded standing stones, under stars he did not recognize. There was a flavor to it, a raw abandonment that stung him like a blow across the mouth—Seethlaw sprawled naked and ivory white on hands and knees before him, panting and snarling like a dog as Ringil crouched and thrust into him from behind, hands hooked in and hauling on the hinge of the dwenda’s bent body where hips and thighs met. A shivery sense of exposure came and went through his flesh, as if the standing stones were silent but tautly aroused spectators who’d paid to watch what the two of them were doing. Ringil, feverish with lust, reached around for the dwenda’s cock, found it stony hard and pulsing at the edge of climax.

The feel of it slipped the final leashes on his own control; he heard himself growling now, saw himself as if from a height outside the standing stones, hammering madly against Seethlaw’s split buttocks, pumping the shaft in his hand until it kicked against his grip and the dwenda howled and clawed in the grass and Ringil came in his wake, as if in answer to the call.

And sagging, and collapsing forward, like a burning building coming down into the river, hand trapped beneath the dwenda’s body as they went down, still frantically milking Seethlaw’s cock into the wet grass, face pressed hard between the broad pale shoulders, laughing and sobbing and the tears again, icy this time, as they spilled onto the dwenda’s skin.

ACROSS LOW HILLS UNDER A SKY THICKLY CARPETED WITH STARS, THERE was a road of black stone built for giants. Its surface was broken and weed-grown underfoot, but it extended for a full fifteen or twenty yards on either side of them. Walking it, from time to time they passed under pale stone bridges higher than the eastern gate at Trelayne. Off to the right, there were clusters of towers gathered on the flanks of the hills like sentinels. Ringil’s eye kept sliding out to them. There was something wrong with the architecture. The towers had no features, were as basic and flat-edged as a small child’s drawing of buildings, only taller, so tall they looked stretched beyond any humanly useful dimension.

“Does anything live in those?” he asked Seethlaw.

The dwenda cast a long glance at the towers. “Not if there’s any other option,” he said cryptically. “Not from choice.”

“You’re saying they’re prisons?”

“You could argue that, yeah.”

For a while, Jelim walked with them on the road, but it was a Jelim that Ringil had never known. The moody good looks were changed, weathered into something older and wiser than Jelim had ever had the chance to become. He looked, Ringil thought vaguely, like a successful young shipmaster, well traveled enough to have grown wise, still not aged enough to seem weary. He chatted away with coffeehouse aplomb, smiled often, and touched Ringil with an open confidence that belonged in some fantasy mural Grace-of-Heaven might commission to go with his bedroom ceiling.

And how’s your father keeping these days?

Ringil stared at him. You’ve got to be f*cking kidding me.

Saw him in the street a couple of months back. Jelim frowned, reaching for the misplaced memory.

Over in Tervinala, I think it was. But you know how it is, neither of us really had the time to stop and talk. Remember me to him, won’t you? Tell him I miss all those fireside debates we used to get into with him.

Sure. I’ll do that.

At some point he couldn’t clearly recall, Ringil had given up arguing with his ghosts.

Anyway, this time the ground felt a little more solid. The tenuous image of cheery evenings around the hearth with Gingren might creep in, but it stood no earthly chance of gaining any real foothold in his head.

Still, when Jelim leaned across and tousled his hair up, kissed him casually on the neck as the other Jelim always had—it hurt. And when the alternative left him, no farewell, just a slow fade, exclaiming Come on, guys, let’s up the pace a bit, shall we, laughing and striding forward first into transparency and then into nothing—when that happened, something ached in Ringil the way it had when he first faced the dwenda and the blue storm it was wrapped in.

Later they camped under one of the huge pale bridges and Seethlaw summoned a fire out of an ornate, broad-bottomed flask he carried. Whatever was in the vessel burned with an eerie greenish flame, but it radiated a comforting wash of heat out of all proportion to the size of the thing. Ringil sat and watched shadows leap about on the pale stone support pillar behind the dwenda.

“When you summon the storm,” he said slowly. “How does it feel?”

“Feel?” Seethlaw gave the impression he’d been dozing. “Why would it feel like anything? It’s power, it’s just . . . power. Potential, and the will to deploy it. That’s all magic is in the end, you know.”

“I thought there were supposed to be rules to magic.”

“Did you?” The long mouth bent into a crooked smile. “Who told you that, then? Someone down at Strov market?”

Ringil ignored the sneer. “It doesn’t hurt you? The storm?”

“No.” A look of dawning comprehension. “Ah, that. The regret, is that what you’re talking about? This sense of loss? Yes, he always talked about that, too. It’s a mortal thing, as far as I can tell. The aspect storm is a warp in the fabric of every possible outcome the universe will allow. It gathers in the alternatives like a bride gathering in her gown. For a mortal, those alternatives are mostly paths they’ll never take, things they’ll never do. At some level, the organism seems to know that.” He?

It was a passing curiosity. There was too much else. The sadness Jelim had left behind still clung around Ringil’s heart in creased folds.

“But you don’t feel it that way,” he said bitterly. “You’re immortal, right?”

Seethlaw smiled gently. “So far.”

And then his gaze drifted out to the left, eyes narrowed. Ringil heard footfalls across the black stone road behind him.

“. . . Seethlaw . . .”

It was a female voice, fluid and melodic but slightly muffled; the dwenda’s name was the only word Ringil could pick out, and even that was stretched and twisted almost beyond recognition. He turned his head and saw in the glow from the fire that a figure stood behind him. It was garbed in black, wore a long-sword across its back; its head was sleek and rounded. It took him a couple of seconds to realize he was looking at someone in the suit and helm Seethlaw had shown him under the city. Then the figure lifted a hand to the featureless bulb on its head and pushed back the glass visor. Framed in the space behind was an empty-eyed dwenda face.

A shudder scrawled its way across Ringil’s shoulders—he could not prevent it. For just a moment in the eerie unreliable firelight under the bridge, the featureless dark of the newcomer’s eyes seemed to merge with the black of the helmet, and the bone-white features took on the aspect of a thin, sculpted mask with empty eye holes, a helmet within a helmet, set on the shoulders of a suit of armor that must, instinct told him, contain nothing but the same emptiness that lay behind the eyes.

Seethlaw got up and ambled across to greet the new arrival. They took each other’s hands loosely at waist height, oddly like two children readying themselves to play a game of slap-me-if-you-can. They talked back and forth for a few seconds in what appeared to be the same tongue the newcomer had used, but then Seethlaw gestured back at Ringil and broke into the antique dialect of Naomic he’d been speaking before.

“. . . my guest,” he said. “If you’d be so kind.”

The female dwenda studied Ringil for a moment, showing all the emotion of the mask she had seemed to wear just a moment before. Then her mouth twisted into a crooked half smile and Ringil thought she muttered something under her breath. She lifted the smooth black helm from her head—it came slowly, as if a very tight fit—shook out long silky hair not quite as dark as Seethlaw’s, and rolled her head back and forth a couple of times to loosen her neck muscles. Ringil heard vertebrae crackle. Then the new dwenda tucked her helmet under one arm and stepped forward, free left hand extended languidly to make one half of the greeting she had shared with Seethlaw.

“My respects to those of your blood.” Her Naomic, aside from being archaic, was very rusty. “I am with name Risgillen of Ilwrack, and sister of already you-know this Seethlaw. How are you called?”

Ringil took the offered hand as he’d seen Seethlaw do, wondering if he was being subtly snubbed with this casual, one-armed variant.

“Ringil,” he said. “I’ve heard a lot about you.”

Risgillen shot a glance at her brother, who shook his head minutely and said something in the other tongue. The female dwenda peeled her lips back from something that wasn’t really a smile, and let go of his hand.

“You come by unexpected ways, for this the un-, the dis-, the lack of proper ceremony. I regret.”

“We ran into some akyia on the coastal path,” Seethlaw told her. “This seemed like a safer option.”

“The merroigai?” Risgillen frowned. “Shown proper respect, they should not have bothered you.”

“Well, they did.”

“I don’t like such event. And with now these other matters, too. Something stirs, Seethlaw, and it is not us.”

“You worry too much. Did you come alone?”

Risgillen gestured back the way she’d come. “Ashgrin and Pelmarag, somewhere beyond. But they seek you at different angles, alternatives less than here. None expected you this adrift. I myself, it was by scent only I came to you.”

“I’ll call them.”

Seethlaw moved out from under the bridge and disappeared into the gloom. Risgillen watched him go, then seated herself with Aldrain elegance beside the fire. She stared into the oddly tinged flames for a while, perhaps marshaling the words she needed before she deployed them.

“You are not the first,” she said quietly, still looking into the fire. “This we have seen before. This I have done myself, with mortal men and women. But I do not lose myself as my brother can. Clearly, I see.”

“I’m happy for you.”

“Yes. So I tell you this.” Risgillen looked up and fixed him with her empty eyes. “Do not doubt; if you bring hurt or harm upon my brother, I will f*ck you up.”

OUT IN THE DARKNESS, A LITTLE LATER, HOWLING SOUNDS.

Ringil looked at Risgillen, the perfect geometry of her features in the greenish glow from the flames, saw no reaction beyond the faintest of smiles. The realization hit him, like icy water, that he recognized the sound.

The howling was Seethlaw, calling for his kind.

Risgillen did not look up, but her smile broadened. She knew he was watching her, knew he’d understood, once again, suddenly, where he really was.

A fight is coming, a battle of powers you have not yet seen.

The words of the fortune-teller at the eastern gate, welling up in his mind like chilly riverbed ooze. The certainty in her voice.

A dark lord will rise.