‘Well, I’ve seen beauty too,’ he said sombrely. ‘And that never stopped me killing anything that got in my way either.’
CHAPTER SIX
By the time they made camp, a clouded darkness held the sky above the steppe.
The news of the runner attack had reached the tents ahead of them; the night herdsmen who came out to relieve them included a cousin of Runi’s who rode back at speed to tell his other kin. Egar followed on foot, leading his horse with Runi’s body slung over it while Klarn rode at a respectful distance, watchful as a raven. When they reached the Skaranak encampment, there were torches burning everywhere and practically the whole clan gathered with Runi’s family at their head. Even Poltar was there, the gaunt, shaven-skulled shaman and his acolytes standing aloof from the throng, the implements of consecration ready in their hands. There had been a subdued muttering back and forth among those waiting, but it died away to nothing when they saw the blood-soaked form of their clanmaster leading the horse into the glow of the torches.
The steppe ghouls had died hard. Their marks were on the Dragonbane from head to foot.
Egar lowered his eyes so he would not have to look at Narma and Jural. Neither Runi’s mother nor father had wanted their son to ride herd so early, but in council Egar would not forbid it since the boy was of age. Runi had promise, he was an enthusiastic boy and he’d had a way with the animals since he could walk.
Added to which, anything was preferable to having him slouch around with the other sons of buffalo-wealthy Skaranak, swilling rice wine and yelling unimaginative abuse at passing women. Right, Clanmaster ? Better that young Runi pack that in and start making something of himself
And now Runi was torn apart and already cooling as Egar lifted his roughly bound body from the horse’s back. The Dragonbane shifted his burden, bore it up in both arms, wincing as the weight pressed back against slash wounds on chest and upper arms. He came forward one numb step at a time to present Runi to his parents.
Narma broke down crying and fell on her son’s exposed face so it was hard for Egar to keep the body in his arms. He tried not to stagger. Jural turned his face away, hid his tears in the darkness so he would not be shamed before the clan.
It was at times like this that the Dragonbane wished heartily he’d never fucking returned from the south or assumed the mantle of clanmaster.
‘He died a warrior’s death.’
He intoned the ritual words, cursing inwardly at the idiocy of it all. A sixteen-year-old boy, for fuck’s sake. If he’d had the time to become a warrior, maybe he’d have lived through the raid. ‘He will be honoured with the name of clan defender for ever in our hearts.’ He hesitated and mumbled, almost inaudibly. ‘I’m sorry, Narma.’
Her wailing went up a notch. It was that moment that Poltar the shaman chose to assert his own formalised role.
‘Woman, be still. Will the Dwellers look with favour on a warrior so beset with female noisemaking? Even now he looks down on you from the Sky Road to his forefathers, and is shamed before them by this hubbub. Get away and light candles for him, as a woman should.’
What happened next was by no means clear in anybody’s mind afterwards, least of all Egar’s own. Narma, it seemed, was not going to relinquish her hold on Runi’s corpse. Poltar stepped closer and tried to persuade her by main force. There was a brief scuffle, an escalation of weeping and the flat cracking sound of a palm against a face. Runi tumbled from Egar’s arms and hit the earth with a dull thud, head first. Narma started screaming at the shaman and Poltar hit her open handed. She collapsed over her son like a badly tied bundle of firewood. Egar pivoted, guilt and undispelled rage surging for release, and decked the shaman with every ounce of strength left in his right arm. Poltar flew fully five feet backwards from the end of the Dragonbane’s fist and hit the ground on his back.
There was a breath-choked pause while everyone caught up.
One of the acolytes took a step towards Egar and then thought better of it as he saw the look on the Dragonbane’s bloodied face. The other three hurried to Poltar’s side and helped him to sit up. The crowd murmured uneasily, a word slithering on the edge of being pronounced. The shaman spat blood and said it for them.
‘Sacrilege!’
‘Oh, give it a rest.’ Egar, drawling but a lot less unconcerned than he made out. Because Poltar was about to be fucking problem.
If there was one force on the steppes that the Majak acknowledged equal to their own general toughness, it was the shifty, lightning-blast power of the Sky Dwellers. The Dwellers were not like the southerner’s god in his meticulous, archive-keeping imperialism. They were jealous, fickle and unpredictably violent, and had no time for such clerkish, inclusive ways - they sent storms or plagues at random, to remind the Majak of their place in the scheme of things, set men against each other for amusement and then played dice with one another to decide who would live or die. In short, they acted not unlike the leisured and powerful among men, and the shaman was their only empowered messenger under the sky. To offend the shaman was to offend the Dwellers, and those who offended, it was understood, would sooner or later pay a heavy price.
Now the oldest acolyte took it up, brandishing his summoning stick at the assembled Skaranak.
‘Sacrilege! Sacrilege has been done! Who will atone?’
‘You’ll fucking atone if you don’t shut up.’ Egar strode towards the speaker, determined to nip this in the bud. The acolyte stood his ground, eyes wide with fear and insane faith.
‘Urann the Grey will—’
Egar grabbed him by the throat. ‘I said shut up. Where was Urann the Grey when I needed him out there? Where was Urann when this boy needed his help?’ He cast a glance around at the frightened faces in the torchlight, and for the first time in his life he felt an overpowering contempt for his own people. His voice rang louder. ‘Where is fucking Urann every time we need him, heh? Where was he, Garath, when the runners took your brother? When the wolves stole your daughter from her cradle, Inmath? Where was he when the coughing fever came and the smoke from the funeral pyres rose on every horizon from here to Ishlin-ichan. Where was that grey motherfucker when my father died?’
Then Poltar was back on his feet and facing him.
‘You speak as a child,’ he said in a quiet, deadly voice that nonetheless carried to the whole watching crowd. Consummately staged - it was the man’s profession after all. ‘Your time in the south has corrupted you to our ways, and now you’d bring disaster on the Skaranak with your sacrilege. You are no longer fit to govern as clanmaster. The Grey One speaks it with the death of this boy.’
The crowd murmured, but it was a confused sound. There were plenty of them who had little time for Poltar and the leisurely lifestyle his status brought him. Egar wasn’t the only cynic on the steppe, nor the only Skaranak warrior to have gone south and come back with a wider picture of how the world worked. Three or four of the associate herd-owners had themselves been mercenary captains for Yhelteth, and one of them, Marnak, had fought beside the Dragonbane at Gallows Gap. He was older than Egar by at least a decade, but still whiplash-swift when it was needed, and his loyalty was forged deeper than anything the shaman could call on. Egar spotted his grim, leathered face there in the torchlight, watchful and ready to skin steel. Marnak caught his clanmaster’s look and nodded, just once. Egar felt gratitude sting at his eyes.
But there were others.
The weak and the stupid, in their dozens, huddled now in among their fellows, afraid of the cold night beyond the firelight and anything in it. Afraid almost as much of anything new that might unseat a vision hemmed in by vast empty skies and the unchanging steppe horizon. Egar saw their faces, knew them for the ones who looked away as he met their eyes.
And behind these faces, feeding and playing on these fears, stood the greedy and the entrenched, whose hatred of change welled up from the more prosaic concern that it might upset the old order, and so their own privileged position within the clan. Those fo
r whom the Dragonbane’s return as a hero had been hailed not with joy but with cool mistrust and a sharp look to herd ownership and hierarchy. Those who, it shamed him to admit the fact, included a couple of his own brothers at least.
For all these people, Poltar the shaman and his stubborn beliefs represented everything that the Majak stood for, and everything that might be lost if the balance shifted. They would not stand with Egar, at best they might only stand by. And others might well do something worse.
Cloud shredded across the band as if frayed by its edge - silver light spilled on the plain to the south. Egar cast a seasoned commander’s eye across the simmering uncertainty he saw in his people, and called it.
‘If Urann the Grey has something to say to me,’ he said loudly, ‘he can come here and say it personally. He doesn’t need a broken-down buzzard too idle to earn his meat like a man to speak for him. Here I am, Poltar.’ He held his arms wide. ‘Call him. Call on Urann. If I have committed sacrilege, let him open the sky and strike me down here and now. And if he doesn’t, well then I guess we’ll know that you do not have his ear, won’t we?’
There were gusts of indrawn breath, but it was the sound of spectators at street circus, not outraged faith. And the shaman was glaring poisonously at him, but he didn’t open his mouth. Egar masked a savage joy.
Got you, you motherfucker !
Poltar was trapped. He knew as well as Egar that the Dwellers were not given to manifesting themselves much these days. Some said it was because they were elsewhere, others because they had ceased to exist and still others because they never had existed. The true reasons were, as Ringil would have put it, hugely fucking immaterial. If Poltar called on Urann, nothing would happen and he’d be made out a fool, not to mention powerless. And Egar’s borderline flirtation with sacrilege could then be safely construed by the other men of the clan as warrior honour in the face of a mangy old broken-down charlatan.
‘Well, Shaman?’
Poltar drew his moth-eaten wolfskin robe about him and cast a look around at the crowd.
‘The south has addled this one’s brains,’ he spat. ‘Mark me, he will bring the ruin of the Grey One upon you all.’
‘Get to your yurt, Poltar.’ The boredom in Egar’s voice was layered on but entirely manufactured. ‘And see if you can’t find your misplaced manners there. Because the next time I see you lay hands on a grieving parent like that, I’ll slit your fucking throat and hang you out for the buzzards. You.’ His arm shot out to indicate the oldest acolyte. ‘You’ve got something to say?’
The acolyte looked back at him, face rancid with hatred, biting back the words that were so obviously swilling around in his mouth. Then Poltar leaned across, muttered something to him, and he subsided. The shaman threw one more haughty look back at the Dragonbane, then he pushed his way rudely into the crowd and left, followed by his four companions. People turned to stare after them.
‘Help for the family of this fallen warrior,’ called Egar, and gazes swivelled back to where Narma still crouched weeping over her dead son. Women went to her, laying on soft hands and words. The Dragonbane nodded at Marnak and the grizzled captain crossed to his side.
‘That was well done,’ Marnak murmured. ‘But who’s going to officiate at the pyre if the shaman stays sulking in his yurt?’
Egar shrugged. ‘If needs must, we’ll send to the Ishlinak for a spellsinger. They owe me favours in Ishlin-ichan. Meantime, you keep an eye on that particular yurt. If he so much as lights a pipe in there, I want to know about it.’
Marnak nodded and slipped away, leaving the Dragonbane to brood on what might be coming. Of one thing he was certain.
This was far from over.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Ringil went home, bad-tempered and grit-eyed with the krin.
The Glades presented an accustomed pre-dawn palette for his mood - low-lying river mist snagged through the tortured black silhouettes of the mangroves, high mansion windows like the lights of ships moored or run aground. The cloud-smudged arching smear of the band, night-time glimmer gone dull and used with the approach of the day. The pale, unreal gleaming of the paved carriageway beneath his feet, and others like it snaking away through the trees. All the worn old images. He followed the path home with a sleep-walker’s assurance, decade-old memories overlaid with the last few days of his return. Nothing much had changed on this side of the river - excepting of course Grace-of-Heaven’s polished insinuation into the neighbourhood - and this might easily have been any given morning of his misspent youth.
Bar this bloody great sword you’ve got slung on your back, that is, Gil. And the belly you’ve grown.
The Ravensfriend wasn’t a heavy weapon for its size - part of the joy of Kiriath blades was the light and supple alloys their smiths had preferred to work in - but this morning it hung like the stump of some ship’s mast he’d been lashed to in a storm, and was now forced to drag on his back one sodden step at a time up on to a beach of doubtful respite. Lot of things have changed since you went away, Gil. He felt washed up with the drug and Grace’s caving in. He felt empty. The things he’d once clung to were gone, his shipmates were taken by the storm, and he already knew the natives around here weren’t friendly.
Someone behind you.
He drifted to a slow halt, neck prickling with the knowledge.
Someone moving, scuffing softly among the trees, off to the left of the path. Maybe more than one. He grunted and flexed the fingers of his right hand. Called out in the damp, still air
‘I’m not in the fucking mood for this.’
And knew it for a lie. His blood went shivering along his veins, his heart was abruptly stuffed full with the sharp, joyous quickening of it. He’d love to kill something right now.
Movement again, whoever it was hadn’t scared off. Ringil whirled, hand up and reaching past his head for the Ravensfriend’s jutting pommel. The sword rasped at his ear as he drew, nine inches of the murderous alloy dragging up from the battle scabbard and over his shoulder before the rest of the clasp-lipped sheath on his back split apart along the side, just as it was made to. The rest of the blade rang clear, widthways. It made a cold, clean sound in the pre-dawn air. His left hand joined his right on the long, worn hilt, the scabbard fell back emptied, swung a little on its ties, Ringil came to rest on the turn.
It was a neat trick, all Kiriath elegance, and an unlooked for turn of speed that had cheated unwary attackers more times than he could easily recall. All part of the Ravensfriend mystique, the package he’d bought into when Grashgal gifted him with the weapon. Better yet, it put him directly into a side-on, overhead guard, the bluish alloy blade up there for all to see and know for what it was. Their move - up to them to decide if they really did want to take on the owner of a Kiriath weapon after all. There’d been more than a handful of backings down in the last ten years when that blue glinting edge came out. Ringil faced back along the path, hoping wolfishly that this wouldn’t be one of them.
Nothing.
Flickered glances to the foliage on either side, a measuring of angles and available space, then he dropped into a more conventional forward guard. The Ravensfriend hushed the air apart as it described the geometric shift, faint swoop of the sound as the blade moved.
‘That’s right,’ he called. ‘Kiriath steel. It’ll take your soul.’
He thought he heard laughter in return, high and whispering through the trees. Another sensation slipped like a chilled collar about the back of his neck. As if his surroundings had been abruptly lifted clear of any Earthly context, as if in some way he was gone, taken out of everything familiar. Distance announced itself, cold as the void between stars, and pushed things apart. The trees stood witness. The river mist crawled and coiled like something living.
Irritable rage gusted through him, took the shiver back down.
‘I’m really not fucking about here. You want to waylay me, let’s get to it. Sun’s coming up, time for scum like you to be home in bed or i
n a grave.’
Something yelped, off to the right, something crashed suddenly through branches. His vision twitched to the sound, he caught a glimpse of limbs and a low, ape-like gait, but crabbing away, fleeing. Another motion behind it, another similar form. He thought maybe he saw the glint of a short blade, but it was hard to tell - the pre-dawn light painted everything so leaden.
The laughter again.
This time it seemed to swoop down on him, pass by at his ear with a caress. He felt it, and flinched with the near physicality of it, twisted half around, staring ...
Then it was gone, the whole thing, in a way he felt sink into his bones like sunlight. He waited in the quiet for it to return, the Ravensfriend held motionless before him. But whatever it was, it seemed it was finished with him for now. The two scrambling, maybe human shadows did not return either. Finally, Ringil gave up an already loosening tension and stance, angled the scabbard carefully off his back and slid the unused sword back into place. He cast a final look around and resumed walking, stepping lighter now, rinsed out and thrumming lightly inside with the unused fight arousal. He buried the memory of the laughter, put it away where he wouldn’t have to look at it again too closely.
The Steel Remains (Gollancz) Page 8
