The Steel Remains

EPILOGUE

Grace-of-Heaven Milacar jolted awake.

For a moment, he couldn’t remember where he was; he’d been dreaming of the past, the house on Replete Cargo Street, and now the room he woke to felt wrong. He blinked at the full-length balcony windows and their muslin drapes, the polished décor and space around him, and for that first waking moment, it all felt alien, as if it didn’t belong to him or, worse, he didn’t belong to it.

He reached out blindly in the bed beside him. “Gil?”

But the bed was empty.

And he remembered then where he was, remembered how he’d come to be there, the years it had taken, and last of all he remembered he was old.

He sagged back onto the bed. Stared up at the painted ceiling, the debauchery whose details it was too dark to make out.

“Ahhh, f*ck it.”

A sliver of the dream dropped abruptly back into his head, a piece that didn’t fit with the nostalgia and the old house memories of the rest. He’d been standing out on the marsh, quite a long way from the city walls, and it was getting dark. The sunset showed amid ragged black and indigo cloud at the horizon, like a smashed egg in mud. There was salt on the breeze, and a few odd noises in the undergrowth that he could really have done without. There was a chill on the nape of his neck.

A young girl stood before him amid the marsh grass with a flagon of tea clutched in her hands. The wind plucked at the simple oatmeal-colored shift she wore. At first he thought she was going to offer the flagon to him, but as he put out his hands she shook her head and turned away without a word. She started walking away, into the gloom of the marsh, and he was seized with a sudden, unaccountable fear of her leaving.

He called out after her.

Where are you going?

I have other fish to fry, she said obscurely. I don’t need to watch this to the end.

And then she turned back to look at him, and she was suddenly a red-tongued, white-fanged she-wolf, reared upright on its hind legs and grinning.

He fell back with a yell of horror—it was this, he guessed now, that had woken him—but she only turned her back again and walked off into the marsh grass, still balancing delicately upright.

He sat up again in the big bed. The dream had left him sweaty beneath the silk sheets, and he could feel the hairs on his legs pasted to his skin. He swallowed and looked around the room. He felt the sense of ownership, the sense of belonging settling back over him. He felt his skin cooling. He rubbed a hand down his face and sighed.

“Something keeping you from sleep, Grace?” asked the shadowed figure by the window.

This time, it was a full kick to the heart. He was awake, he knew he was awake now, and this was no f*cking dream.

And outside of a dream there was no way anyone should be able to get in here if he hadn’t invited them.

There was a cool breeze wandering through the room. He registered it for the first time, felt it on his skin.

Saw the way the muslin drapes stirred by the open window.

He’d closed it before he went to sleep. He remembered.

The figure stepped out of the shadows at the casement edge. Bandlight crept in from the balcony and did its best to touch the face.

“See—” he began, and then clamped his mouth shut.

The figure shook its head. “No. Not Seethlaw. You won’t be seeing him again.”

“Gil?”

A grave inclination of the shadow-dappled head. Faintly now in the bandlight, he made out the features to go with the voice.

“Gil. How did you get in here?”

“Easily.” A gesture back to the balcony. “You’ve really got to start picking your boys for competence, not looks, Grace. I walked right past three of them in the gardens. Could have been invisible for all the notice they took. Didn’t have to kill them or anything. And then, well, ornate stonework’s never a good bet if you don’t want burglars scaling the walls. Like I said—easy.”

Milacar swallowed. “We all thought you were . . . gone.”

“I was gone, Grace. Into the gray places. You made sure of that.”

Ringil moved again, closer to the bed. Now the bandlight caught him full, painted its pallid glow across his face. Milacar winced as he saw the scarring along the jawline.

“What are you talking—”

“Don’t.” There was a terrifying matter-of-factness in the single word. “Just don’t, Grace. There’s no point. I remember you in the garden. I was just supposed to stay colorful for you here in the slums.

That’s what you said. Here in the slums. Because that’s where we were, wasn’t it? The garden at the old place, across the river on Replete Cargo Street.”

“Gil, listen to me—”

“No, you listen to me.” There was a cold, hypnotic quality to Ringil’s speech that Milacar didn’t remember from before. “That’s where I woke up the morning after Seethlaw. Replete Cargo Street. I thought at the time it seemed familiar, but I didn’t make the connection. Stupid of me really—you even told me you’d hung on to your old address, that first night I came here to see you. It took me awhile to sort all this out in my head, Grace, try to put it all together, decide what was real, what wasn’t. But you see, I’ve had awhile. I’ve had a long leisurely journey back here to think it all through. And you and the garden and the old place, that was real. It felt different from all the other stuff. I remember that now. Only thing I can’t figure out is whether it was Seethlaw’s idea, or whether you suggested it to him. Care to tell me?”

He met Grace’s eye. Milacar sighed and slumped back on his propped elbows. He looked away.

“I don’t . . .” He shook his head wearily. “Make . . . decisions where Seethlaw is concerned. He comes to me. He takes what he wants.”

“Kind of exciting for you, huh?”

“I’m sorry, Gil. I didn’t want you hurt, that’s all.”

Ringil’s voice hardened. “No, that’s not all. You didn’t want me in Etterkal, just like everybody else. Or if I went—because you knew damn well they wouldn’t be able to stop me—you wanted Seethlaw to know and have it covered. You sold me to him, Grace, you told him where to find me. Had to be you, no one else knew I’d gone to Hale’s place.”

Grace-of-Heaven said nothing.

“Back before I had to kill him, Seethlaw accused me of interfering with his affairs, and what he said was quite specific. You brought your blade and your threats, he said, and your pride that no beauty or sorcery could stem your killing prowess. He heard me say that to you, that first night here, out on the balcony. He was here, in your house, wasn’t he? And then later he followed me home, along with a couple of your more inept machete boys. I scared them off easily enough, but Seethlaw stuck around to laugh at me. Can’t blame him for that—you were both on me from the start. Cozy as f*cking spoons in a drawer, and both laughing. Are you in the cabal, Grace?”

Milacar chuckled and shook his head again. There was more energy in it this time.

“Something amusing you?”

“Yeah. You don’t get it, Gil. The cabal touches us all, you don’t have to be in it for that to happen. The cabal is Findrich and Snarl and a few others in Etterkal, a handful in the Chancellery, a couple more up at the Academy. But that’s just what’s at the center. Beyond that, anybody and everybody with an ounce of power in this city has their feet in cabal mud. Just a question of how far up your legs you let it creep, how much you want, and how much you want to know. Me, Murmin Kaad, even your own f*cking father.

One way or another, we’re all beholden. The cabal reaches out for what it needs.”

Ringil nodded. “Needs a traitor in the Marsh Brotherhood, does it? You want to hear what happened to Girsh?”

“I know what happened to Girsh.” A long sigh. “I’m in the middle here, Gil. I try not to get too deep in on any one side, try not to get too committed or locked in. It’s politics. You get used to that.”

“Seethlaw wasn’t politics, though, was he?”

“Seethlaw.” Grace-of-Heaven swallowed. “Seethlaw was—”

“Beautiful. Yeah, I know, you told me that. Of course, you also told me it was secondhand knowledge, but that was just the quick lie to cover your arse. Couldn’t really admit to me you were f*cking the fabulous dwenda in Etterkal, that would have ruined everything. I just wonder why you bothered mentioning him in the first place.”

Milacar bowed his head. “I thought it might scare you off.”

“Yeah? Or you thought I might be competition you could do without?”

“I just didn’t want you hurt, Gil.”

“So you keep saying. Look at my face, Grace. I got hurt.”

“Yeah, well I’m sorry. ” Sudden, flaring anger. “If you’d f*cking stayed out of it like I told you to, maybe you wouldn’t have that ugly scar now.”

“Maybe not.”

Silence, like a shared flandrijn pipe between them. The shape of what was coming began to emerge in the quiet.

“He took you to the gray places,” Milacar said finally, bitterly.

“Oh yeah.” And though, just from looking at Grace-of-Heaven’s eyes, he already knew the answer, Ringil asked the question anyway. “You?”

Milacar stared off across the room, into the dark corner Ringil had come from. “No. He talked about it, but . . . I don’t know. Never the right time, I guess.”

“Don’t feel bad. You don’t know how f*cking lucky you got.” Ringil leaned forward and tapped the scar along his jaw. “You think this is ugly? You should see what I’m carrying inside.”

“You think I can’t?” Milacar looked at him again, and now he was smiling sadly. “You need to take a look in a mirror sometime, Gil. How did you kill him, then? The gorgeous Seethlaw?”

“With the Ravensfriend. I carved his beautiful f*cking face in half.”

“Well.” A shrug. “You did say it wouldn’t stop you. That’s you, Gil, all over. Start you up, you won’t be stopped till it’s done. Have you come to kill me, too?”

It took a moment to bring it to his lips. “Yeah.”

“I’m really sorry, Gil.”

“So am I.” Ringil nodded at the bellpull on the far side of the bed. “You want to try calling your machete boys now?”

“Would it help?”

“No. Not unless you want company dying.”

Grace-of-Heaven Milacar made a lordly gesture. If he was scared of what was coming, he masked it well.

“Then it seems rather wasteful, don’t you think? All those young bodies? I think I’ll just—”

And he came off the bed, very fast for his age, no weapon at all but his own weight and a lifetime of street-fighting prowess. Ringil let him come, it seemed only fair. He left his hands at his sides, made it look like there might be a chance. Then, as Milacar reached him, he dropped the dragon knife from his sleeve and whipped it up, into the side of Grace’s neck. His other hand snapped out, caught the other side of the neck and pushed in against the knife blow.

He held Grace like that, eye-to-eye, as if to kiss him. Blood from the chopped artery flooded out, down the dragon’s tooth and over his right hand. He heard it puddle into the carpet around their feet.

“Ohhh,” Grace moaned. “Hoiran’s . . . twisted . . . cock. That . . . hurts, Gil.”

Ringil held him up while he died, looked steadily into the eyes until they dimmed. Then he jerked the knife out, let go convulsively of Grace’s neck, and watched him hit the ground like a sack of meal.

Flicker of blue fire.

He spun, heart pounding.

Saw himself in the big mirror hung across from the bed.

He sighed, waited for the relief to hit, for the spike of fear to ease and his pulse to climb back down. He waited. But the moment passed, left him there waiting, and no relief came. The figure in the mirror stood and grinned at him. He saw the bloodstained hands, the gaunt, scarred face, and the eyes, the eyes glittering back from the dark glass. The jutting pommel of the Ravensfriend, the faithful killing steel on his back. The jagged curve of the dragon’s tooth in his right hand.

You need to take a look in a mirror sometime, Gil.

He was looking now. Seethlaw’s words in the swamp came back to him, desperate in their intensity. I see what the akyia saw, Gil. I see what you could become, if you’d only let yourself.

He remembered the beach, the creatures in the surf and the sounds they made.

They’re talking about you.

And like a final hammerblow, like a blade going home, he remembered the fortune-teller at the eastern gate. The words he’d discounted at Ibiksinri when he fought the dwenda and took Seethlaw down in bloody ruin.

A fight is coming, a battle of powers you have not yet seen. A battle that will unmake you, that will tear you apart.

The cool night breeze came to find him from the opened window. It carried a faint note of salt.

A dark lord will rise, his coming is in the wind off the marsh.

He stared at himself.

A dark lord will rise.

“It’s like that, is it?” he whispered.

The muslin drapes stirred; the breeze blew through the quiet room. He wiped his hands and the dragon knife on Grace-of-Heaven’s silk sheets, and put the weapon away again in his sleeve. He settled the Ravensfriend a little more comfortably on his back, shifted the pommel a fraction of an inch for a cleaner pull.

Then he faced himself in the mirror once more, and found he was no longer afraid of what he saw looking back at him.

He waited, patiently, for the flicker of blue fire to show itself again, and for whatever else might come with it.