And ghost figures? Glimmering unknown weapons? Dissolving arrows?
Subjective impression. Night-fight terrors. The archers freaked out like everybody else, shot wide or fucked up on the draw.
Hmm.
And now, whatever the raiders had or hadn’t been, Khangset lay below her, gashed and torn and smoking like a freshly disembowelled belly on some chilly northern battleground.
‘Sacred fucking Mother of the Revelation.’ Mahmal Shanta, distracted as he struggled to control his prancing horse at her side. It was unclear if he was cursing the animal or the destruction below. ‘What the hell happened here?’
‘I don’t know,’ Archeth said thoughtfully. ‘Doesn’t look good, does it?’
Shanta glowered and struggled to sit his mount with a modicum of dignity. He was useless in the saddle, always had been. His age-knobbed hands clamped the reins like a rope he was trying to climb.
‘Looks like a fucking replay of Demlarashan, is what it looks like,’ he growled.
Archeth shook her head. ‘Dragons didn’t do this. There’s too much left.’
‘You know anything other than dragonfire that would go through Kiriath mouldings that way? God damn this fucking horse.’
Archeth reached across and laid a soothing hand on the jittery animal’s neck. Murmured and clucked to it the way her father had taught her. The horse settled a little, partway convinced that here at least was someone who knew what was going on and could control it.
Be nice if that was true, she caught herself thinking, perhaps more wryly than current circumstances merited. Failing that, be nice if humans were as easy to fool as horses.
Hey, Archidi, last time I checked, they were.
Oh yeah, that old warrior disconnect. It came on in full force now, humour bleak and black while homes smoulder around you and the unarmed afflicted weep for what’s lost so you don’t have to. Pull on the cold, clinking mail of your professional detachment, Archeth Indamaninarmal, inhabit it until it starts to feel warm and accustomed, and in time you’ll forget you’re wearing it at all. You’ll only notice when it works, when it stops you feeling the steel-edged bite of something that might otherwise have got through and done you some damage. And then you’ll just grin and shiver and shake off the blow, like warriors do.
It was a part of herself she’d never quite been able to hate.
Which was perhaps fortunate because, lately, that very same amused detachment was proving handy at court.
She glanced back over her shoulder, down the ridge to where Pashla Menkarak, Most Holy and Revered Invigilator first class for the Revelation Divine (Throne Eternal attached) sat wrapped in the black and gold cloak of his office and perched in his saddle like a vulture. His head was tipped at an angle to beat the sun’s rays and he was apparently staring directly back up the slope at her.
‘Motherfuck,’ she muttered.
Shanta saw where she was looking. ‘You’d better watch what you’re saying around him,’ he said softly. ‘From what I’ve seen so far, this one’s keen.’
‘Yeah.’ Archeth sneered. ‘Well, they all start out that way. Give him a couple of months at court, then we’ll see. Be rolling around on a bed of tits and ass getting his dick greased just like all the rest.’
Shanta rolled his eyes at the vulgarity. ‘Yes, or maybe he’ll remain as immune to court sophistication as you have, Archeth. Ever think of that?’
‘Guy like that? He lacks my moral core.’
‘Perhaps not. Stories I hear out of the Citadel these days, that’s not the way things are moving. They say it’s a whole new breed coming through the religious colleges now. Hardline faith.’
‘Oh, good.’
Movement down the line. She wheeled her horse about, and the ashen wind blew in her face. Faileh Rakan, captain of the Throne Eternal detachment, was trotting his mount down the rank of his riders towards them. She sighed and put on the mask of command. Shanta sat his horse in expectant silence. Rakan reached Archeth and dismounted for respect. He took sword hilt in his right hand, capped it with his left and bowed.
‘Commander, my men are deployed. We await your orders.’
Archeth nodded.
‘Right then,’ she said brightly. ‘I suppose we’d better go down and take a closer look.’
Once among the ruins, though, that counterfeit enthusiasm stained through into something that was almost the real thing.
From long acquaintance, she recognised it for the same scavenger urge that fed her expeditions into the desert and, in earlier times, the Kiriath wastes; the same thirst that drove her time and again back to the uncooperative Helmsmen in the few remaining fireships. There was meaning to be gleaned out there, a transcendence of the surface of things that glimmered and beckoned like harbour lights seen through the wrap of foul weather at night. You saw an answer, steered by its beacon and, briefly, the world seemed that much less pointless. You felt, for just that short time, that you might be getting somewhere.
Tangled in with all of that and gaining force, came another, less assured sensation. One she supposed Faileh Rakan and his men were all feeling, clean, upfront and handily fervent behind their stony Throne Eternal demeanour:
Outrage.
Slow building, incandescent, the mighty and majestic insulted pride of Empire. Rage, that someone had dared, had felt at violent liberty in this time of agreed peace to assail a designated imperial port and do harm to men and women under the Revelation-inspired patronage of his radiance Jhiral Khimran II.
For Archeth, who’d seen rather more than she’d have liked of how the agreed peace had been hammered out, the same feeling was fatally tainted. But it hung around anyway, a bit like muscle ache after a long ride or treacle on the edges of a poorly washed baking tray. She knew enough, despite what she’d seen, to rein in her cynicism.
Look:
Yhelteth unites a massive territory in comparison to any of its political competitors, you know. By and large, it treats those living within its borders with a degree of codified respect not popular elsewhere.
I know that.
All right then. It might not be civilised universality the way Grashgal always liked to talk it up, it might not be the future he claimed to see in his dreams. But it’s not a bad functional substitute. Yhelteth at least aspires in that direction.
That much was true - a sort rough-and-ready inclusiveness prevailed among the imperials, something born in about equal measures out of the religious universalism of the Revelation, an ascetic warrior egalitarianism in the original culture of the nine tribes - now down to seven, yeah, I know, don’t ask - and some shrewdly applied intelligent self-interest. Take up citizenship and the conversion it entailed, send a couple of your sons to the levy when they were of age, pay taxes calculated not to drive you and your family into penury or the mountains and the life of a bandit. Oh, and while you’re at it, steer clear of debt and disease. Chances were - mostly - if you did all that, you’d never starve, never have your home burnt down and your children raped before your eyes, never have to wear a slave collar. With luck you might even live to see your grandchildren grow up.
Is that so bad, Grashgal ? Is it?
She’d lived her life trying to believe it was not.
This - drifting smoke, and puffs of ash from footfalls, and a charred child’s ribcage crushed under a fallen beam - is not part of the deal. This, we do not fucking permit.
She stood by the cracked and shiny black charcoal angle of the beam, where it met the last remaining upright timber in the roofless house. The sensation surged up in her throat, took her by surprise. The colder, analytical end of her feelings dropped suddenly away, out of easy reach. The ruin rushed her with its silence. Stench from what was left of the bodies in the wreckage around her, uncomfortably familiar despite the years gone past. Ash and less well-defined muck, clogged on to her boots to well above the ankle. Her knives were a pointless weight at boot and belt. Smoke came billowing through the wreckage on a change of wind, an
d stung her in the eyes.
‘So there you are.’
Mahmal Shanta stood outside the dwelling, framed in a stone doorway that had somehow escaped the devastation to the wall it was once set in. Off his horse, the engineer seemed to have regained a modicum of good humour. He cocked an eyebrow at the phantom entrance and stepped through, squinted around at the mess and grimaced. She couldn’t tell if he’d spotted the corpses yet or not, but he couldn’t have missed the stench.
‘Seen enough?’
She shook her head. ‘Not enough to make any sense of it.’
‘Is that what we’re doing here?’ Shanta came closer, peering at her face. ‘You been crying?’
‘It’s the smoke.’
‘Right.’ He cleared his throat. ‘Well, since you’re foolhardy enough to actually want an explanation for all this, I thought you might like to know Rakan’s boys have found us a survivor. Maybe we could ask her.’
‘A survivor? Here?’
‘Yes, here. It seems while everyone else was stampeding out into the surrounding countryside, this one was smart enough to find a hiding place and sit tight in it.’ Shanta gestured back out to the street. ‘They’ve got her down by the harbour, they’re trying to feed her. Apparently, she’s been living off beetles and rainwater for the last four days, hasn’t been out of her hidey-hole since the raid. She’s not what you’d call calm right now.’
‘Great.’ Archeth looked deliberately around the ruined house one more time. The corner of her gaze caught on the child’s crushed ribcage again, as if each up-jutting, snapped-off rib was a barb made expressly for that purpose. ‘So let’s get the fuck out of here.’
‘After you, milady.’
Out in the street, some of the pressure seemed to come off. Late afternoon sunlight slanted down across the piles of rubble, birds sweetened the air with song. Down the hill, the sea was a burnished, glinting fleece to the horizon. The heat of the day was beginning to ebb.
But the ruin stood at her back like a reproach. She felt like an ungracious guest, walking out on mortified hosts.
Shanta came past her, woke her from the moment and broke her free.
‘You coming?’ he asked.
Halfway down the road to the harbour with him, she remembered.
‘So what was all that about back there? Foolhardy enough to actually want an explanation, what’s that supposed to mean?’
Shanta shrugged. ‘Oh, you know. We’re not a people that cares much about ultimate causes, are we? Show the flag, roll out the levy. Punish someone so we all feel better, doesn’t much matter who. Remember Vanbyr?’
Archeth stopped and stared at him. ‘I’m not likely to have forgotten it.’
‘Well, there you go then.’
‘I’m not here to show the flag and look for scapegoats, Mahmal. This is a fact-finding mission.’
‘Is that what Jhiral told you?’ The naval engineer pulled a face. ‘You must have caught him on a good day.’
They stood locked to a halt on the ash-smeared street stones, listening to the echo of Shanta’s words on the breeze, searching each other’s faces for the next step. The silence grew rooted between them. The relationship went back, but they didn’t know each other well enough for this.
‘I think,’ Archeth said finally, quietly, ‘that perhaps we’d best both concentrate on doing what we were sent here to do, and let our concerns for our Emperor remain a matter for private thought and prayer.’
Shanta’s lined, hawkish face creased into a well-worn court smile.
‘Indeed, milady. Indeed. Not a day goes by that Jhiral Khimran does not feature pointedly in my prayers.’ A slight but formal bow from the chest up. ‘As I am sure is the case for you as well.’
He made no mention of what it was he prayed for on his Emperor’s behalf. Archeth, who didn’t pray at all, made an indeterminate noise of assent in her throat.
And they went on down the ashen thoroughfares together, quiet and a little more hurried now, as if the ambiguity in Shanta’s words stalked after them, nose to the ground and a peeled glimpse of teeth revealed.
CHAPTER NINE
It was still light when he got up.
Somewhat surprised by the fact, Ringil wandered yawning about the house in search of servants, found some and ordered a hot bath drawn. Then he went down to the kitchens while he was waiting, scavenged a plate of bread and dried meat and ate it standing at a window, staring absently through the glass at late afternoon shadows on the lawn. The kitchen staff bustled about him in steam and shouted commands, carefully ignoring his presence, more or less as if he were some expensive and delicate statue dumped inconveniently in their midst. He looked about for the girl who’d served him tea, but didn’t see her. When the bath was ready, he went back upstairs and soaked in it until the water started to cool. Then he towelled off without help, dressed with fastidious care from the new wardrobe Ishil had funded for him, put on the Ravensfriend and a feathered cap, and took himself out for a walk.
The Glades were suffused with dappled amber sunlight and thronged with strollers out enjoying the last of the autumn warmth. For a while he contented himself with drifting among them, ignoring the glances the sword on his back attracted, and letting the last dregs of the krin rinse out in the glow from the declining sun. High in the eastern sky, the edge of the band arched just visible against the blue. Ringil caught himself staring blankly up at it, and out of nowhere he had an idea.
Shalak.
He picked his way down to the moss-grown Glades quayside, where there were tables and chairs set up for the view, stalls serving lemonade and cakes at inflated prices and a steady traffic of small boats picking up and dropping off parties of expensively dressed picnickers from the upriver districts. Eventually, he managed to find a boatman halfway willing to take him downriver to Ekelim, and jumped lightly aboard before the man could change his mind. He stood in the stern as they pulled away from the shore, watching the Glades as it receded, face washed warm with stained-glass sunset light, and only faintly aware that he was striking a pose. He sat down, shifted about on the damp wood with due attention to his new clothes and the slant of the Ravensfriend, until he was more or less comfortable, and tried to blink the sun out of his eyes.
‘Not many days like this left in the year,’ the boatman commented over his oars. ‘They say we’re in for an Aldrain winter.’
‘Who does?’ Ringil asked absently. They were always predicting an Aldrain winter. It would be what passed for presaging doom among the entrail-readers at Strov market now that the war was over and won.
The boatman was keen to expound. ‘Everyone thinks it, my lord. The fisher crews down at harbour end all say it’s harder to land silverfry this year than they’ve ever known before. The waters are colder flowing in from the Hironish isles. And there’ve been signs. Hailstones the size of a man’s fist. On the marsh flats at south Klist, they’ve seen strange lights at dawn and evening, and people hear a black dog barking through the night. My wife’s brother stands forward look-out for one of Majak Urdin’s whalers, and he says they’ve had to sail further north this year to sight spouts. One day at the end of last month they went out beyond the Hironish and he saw stones of fire falling from the band right into the water. There was a storm that night and ...’
And so on.
Ringil went ashore at Ekelim with the echoes of it all still in his head. He headed up Dray Street from the harbour, hoping a little belatedly that Shalak hadn’t found occasion to move premises any time in the last decade. It was slow progress through the milling early evening crowds, but the cut and fabric of his new clothes helped open a path. People didn’t want trouble, even at this end of the river. There were members of the Watch paired on street corners, watching the press and toying twitchily with long wooden day-clubs; in resolving any dispute, they were going to see the same things in Ringil’s clothing as everyone else. He’d get the rich man’s benefit of the doubt, and anyone on the other side of the equation was goin
g to get dragged down a side alley and given a swift, timber-edged lesson in manners.
He reached the corner of Dray and Blubber, and grinned a little. He needn’t have worried about the passing of time here. Ten years on, Shalak’s place hadn’t changed any more than a priest’s mind. The frontage was the same scoured stonework and dark, coffee-stain windows lit dimly from within, the same heavy browed eaves drooping so low across the front door you could bash your head if you’d grown up sufficiently well nourished to gain the height. The same cryptic sign swinging outside on its rusted iron bracket:
Come in and See.
Back in the early years, before the war, there’d been another set of words up on that sign; Come in and Look Around - You Might See Something that Likes You, surrounded by a ring of arcane - and, Ringil always suspected, fake - Aldrain glyphs. But then came the fifties, the war and the dragon-fire and the alien invaders from the sea. What had once been a harmless come-on for the dilettante Vanishing Folk enthusiasts Shalak made his living from, was now suddenly a statement of sorcerous intent that verged on treason. Some said it was the west that the Aldrain had vanished into, and it was out of the west that the Scaled Folk were coming now; Shalak had his windows smashed by angry mobs a couple of times, had stones thrown at him in the street on more occasions than he could easily count, was summoned repeatedly to appear before the Committee for Public Morals. He got the message. The sign came down, the glyphs were scrubbed off every surface inside the shop and any claims of magical powers for the items Shalak sold were replaced with disclaimers stating that nothing was known for certain of Aldrain lore, that no one had seen a dwenda in living memory, and that their whole existence was, in all probability, a bunch of children’s fairy stories, nothing more. Ringil always suspected how deeply it hurt Shalak to hand-letter those little notices - whatever the affectations of his clients, the man himself had always been a true believer. But when, with youthful brashness, he broached the subject, Shalak had offered in return only a pained smile and good-citizen platitudes.
The Steel Remains (Gollancz) Page 11
