The Steel Remains (Gollancz)

by Richard Morgan

  Ringil met the first of Hale’s men in a blur of eager motion and the blue sweeping arc of the blade. The man was hacking down with a hand axe and Ringil already had the Ravensfriend at high guard. He blocked, two-handed, hard, angled not for the hatchet but the arm that held it up. The Kiriath blade took the man’s hand off cleanly at the wrist. Blood gouted from the stump, rained on him, and something savage in Ringil’s heart shrilled with joy. The arm completed its downward arc, still spurting, painting them both, and the hatchet hit the ground with a thud. Its owner gaped dumbly at his own hand still gripping the haft, the yell dried up in his throat. Ringil chopped down at the juncture of shoulder and neck, severed artery and sinew, finished it.

  The next man was close behind, short sword in one hand, mace in the other. Ringil feinted high and right, let his opponent raise both weapons to the misdirection, dropped the Ravensfriend low and almost horizontal, swung in for the belly. No broadsword made of human steel would have allowed the abrupt shift of vector; the Kiriath alloy not only allowed it - it sang. The stroke opened the other man up from side to side and carved a notch off the base of his spine before the blade tugged clear.

  Fuck.

  Sudden cold sweat - it was sloppy bladework, and against better men it might have got him killed. He’d been off the battlefield too long.

  But these were not better men, and the edge on the Kiriath steel was forgiving of such errors. Ringil got clear, stepped past. The gutted man wallowed in his wake, not yet fully aware of what had been done to him, tried muzzily to turn and follow as his attacker slipped away, and then his intestines and the contents of his bisected stomach fell out on the rug, and he tangled in it all and went down screaming like a child.

  Ringil’s third attacker flinched back, hampered by his gutted comrade. He had an axe and a club, but didn’t seem to know quite what to do with either. He was young, no older than seventeen or eighteen, and he looked sick with the sudden fear of combat. Ringil darted forward, boot on the dying man’s chest to close the gap, put a straight thrust into the youth’s throat and watched his face contort as he tried to cope with the pain. The blood rushed out, drenched his clothes dark from neck to waist. Then, as if the weight of all that soaking cloth was pulling him down, he sank gracefully to the floor. He was still clutching the weapons he had never got around to using. His gaze clawed upward after Ringil’s face; his mouth worked for words.

  Ringil was already turning away.

  It was the breathing space, the first moment he’d had to assess the field. Taste of the blood he’d spilled, metallic warm on his tongue, the paint of it on his face. Discordant yelling all around, the fight in its various splintered, snapping pieces. He saw Eril backed to a wall, a knife in each hand, fending off two attackers with kicks and slashes. A third lay bleeding on the floor at his feet. A short distance away, Girsh was down, a crossbow bolt through the thigh. A bulky figure stood above him, sword raised. Girsh rolled away as the blade came down, slammed his mace backhand into his opponent’s shin. The man howled and staggered, wagged his sword about ineffectually. Girsh belted the blade aside, propped himself up on an elbow and chopped sideways into his attacker’s knee. The swordsman collapsed in a heap beside him, still howling. Girsh rolled again, came up on top and started smashing in his attacker’s face and forehead with the mace.

  Peripheral flicker from the right - Ringil swung and saw Terip Hale stabbing at him with what looked like a fucking fruit knife, for Hoiran’s sake. Bad angle, no time. He jerked aside, let go of the Ravensfriend with his left hand and fended off the blow with a Yhelteth empty-hand chop. He hit Hale in the face with the pommel of the Ravensfriend at the same time. The slaver yelped and fell down. Ringil left him there, turned back just in time to block a looping mace attack from Janish the doorman. He caught the mace on the edge of his blade, turned the attack crossways on its own momentum and kicked Janish’s feet out from under him as he swayed. The doorman hit the floor, rolling desperately to get away. Ringil followed impatiently, hacked down and severed his spine. He looked back to see how Girsh was doing, saw instead two more of the joyous longshank crew rushing him at once.

  He bared his teeth and yelled in their faces, grabbed the momentary gap it gave him to dance sideways, across the chamber towards Girsh, and drag the fight’s centre of gravity with him. The two men came around, squared up to him again, but you could see in their faces they’d lost a lot of their initial blood-lust to that one feral snarl.

  ‘Come on then,’ Ringil spat. ‘Don’t you want to know what Kiriath steel feels like in your vitals? Have I got to bring it to you, you fucking pansies?’

  They came on then, flushed and angry at the insult, but far too late. The momentary flash of fear had already tripped them, sapped their commitment to killing this blood-splattered sneering maybe hero with the blurring blue Kiriath blade in his hands. They came in clumsy and shaken, brandishing their weapons without strategy, and Ringil took them apart. One sweeping circular block sent the man on the left stumbling into his comrade’s path. Ringil followed through on the spin, slammed into the man, hip and shoulder, sent him sprawling. It put the other fighter almost in front of him with his back turned, and by the time the man worked out where Ringil had gone, Ringil had the Ravensfriend up and through his neck in a shallow angled slash from the side. The man tried to turn, as if to find out what the fuck had happened that hurt so much, and his head flopped almost off with the motion. He was dead before he hit the floor.

  Ringil cast about, found the first man gamely getting back to his feet; he kicked him in the face with the instep of his boot, then again with the toe. Solid crunch of the jaw breaking on the second blow. There wasn’t time for more - a couple of feet away, Girsh was about to get brained by some giant with a spiked club. Ringil stepped closer, hacked low and hamstrung the man, watched as he fell—

  And abruptly, before he could consciously register it, the fight was done.

  Ringil stared around as his senses caught up. It really was over. Eril was off the wall, driving back a single opponent. On the ground, Girsh was killing the hamstrung giant with his mace. The rest was blood-painted carnage and crawling forms and moans. Between them, they’d accounted for a dozen men, at least. He became vaguely aware that he was panting.

  Right.

  He strode heavily up behind Eril’s opponent, swung tiredly at the man’s sword arm and stopped the fight. The man screamed, dropped his weapon and spun about, mouth gaping wide in shock and betrayal. Then Eril stepped in like a dance partner, hooked him with one arm and buried his long knife upward under the sternum. The man gagged and thrashed and Eril hugged him close, twisting and gouging with the knife, finishing it. Over the dying man’s shoulder, teeth gritted, half his attention still on the killing, he nodded at Ringil.

  ‘Thanks, man. Thought I’d never get an opening with this one.’

  Ringil waved it off, and went to take care of Girsh.

  The crossbow bolt had gone in through the fleshy part of the thigh at a downward angle and stuck there. It showed a clear two inches of blood-streaked shaft behind the blunt octagon of the quarrel where it protruded out the other side. To Ringil’s battle-schooled eye, it suggested either the weapon had misfired or the owner hadn’t racked up the tension enough - at that range, it should by rights have gone straight through an un-armoured limb, ripped a hole the width of the brutal iron fletching on the thing. Instead, the damage seemed to be quite limited. The entry and exit wounds were messy, sopping and treacly with blood, but there was none of the tell-tale heavy-duty welling up that would have signified major blood vessels torn apart.

  ‘Looks like you got lucky.’

  ‘Yeah,’ gritted Girsh. ‘Fucking feels like it.’

  Ringil went and retrieved his dragon knife from Varid’s chin - a glutinous, messy business in itself - and set about using the serrated edges to cut cloth from the dead man’s shirt for a tourniquet. Eril went upstairs to the door into the courtyard and listened for signs that the f
ight had been heard by anyone who cared to do anything about it. He came back looking satisfied.

  ‘All quiet up there. Looks like we got the lot of them. I guess that joyous longshank number means all hands to the killing chamber. Cute.’

  Ringil grunted, preoccupied with knotting the tourniquet tight on Girsh’s thigh. The Marsh Brotherhood man bit back a groan. Eril came over to watch.

  ‘We need to get that out of his leg,’ he said soberly. ‘If there’s rust on it—’

  ‘I know. But if you pull it back as it is, we’re going to rip up the wound and maybe open a major blood vessel. We need something to cut the quarrel off.’

  Eril nodded. ‘Okay, then. It’s a slave house. They’ve got to have ironwork tools around here somewhere. Manacle cutters, something like that.’

  ‘I can walk,’ Girsh rasped. Attempting to push himself upright and prove it. He turned white with what it cost him, sagged back to the horizontal again.

  ‘Not far, you can’t,’ Ringil told him.

  He sat back on his heels and looked around. Thought about time remaining, and what they’d come here to do. Despite the subsiding pulse in his veins, the relative quiet of the aftermath, they were not even close to done with Hale and his household. He wasn’t much looking forward to the next part.

  He stifled the waking qualm like an infant in the crib.

  ‘All right,’ he said finally. ‘Eril, you take care of the wounded. I’m going to see if we can’t get some answers out of our gracious host over there.’

  Girsh grinned savagely, biting down on his pain. ‘Yeah, now that I’m going to fucking enjoy.’

  ‘You stay put,’ Ringil warned him. ‘I don’t want you moving that bolt about any more than you have to. And I don’t need the help. This isn’t going to be difficult.’

  Right, Gil. Hardened Etterkal people trafficker, lifetime criminal success before he got legal. Should be a pushover.

  While Eril went round checking bodies and slitting the throats of the injured, Ringil heaved Hale’s semi-conscious form off the floor and into a sitting position against the curve of the chamber’s back wall. The slaver was bleeding from where the Ravensfriend’s pommel had smashed into his face earlier, and his right eye was already swelling shut. Blood had splashed down on to his silk robe and into the hair on his chest where it was exposed. Ringil cut a piece out of the garment with his dragon knife, cleaned Hale’s face up, and then started slapping him methodically back to wakefulness. Across the room, someone squalled weakly as Eril pulled back their head by the hair, ready for the knife. It was Janesh the doorman, flopping snap-spined and desperate between the Marsh Brotherhood soldier’s booted feet.

  You did that, Gil, some perpetually unsoiled, disbelieving part of him whispered. That was you.

  ‘Hold it.’

  Eril paused, looked up at him expectantly.

  ‘Just give me a minute here.’ He peered closely at Terip Hale as the slaver started to come round, slapped him a couple of times more to speed the process up. ‘Figure we could maybe use the leverage.’

  ‘Got it.’ Eril lowered Janesh’s head almost gently back to the floor. He settled into a patient crouch above the injured man. Janesh barely moved beyond a couple of twitches in one arm. He’d maybe lost conscience from the pain of his wound, or just passed into the realm of quiet delerium.

  Terip Hale, meanwhile, woke to a vision of carnage strewn across the joyous longshank chamber, and a small fixed smile on Ringil Eskiath’s face.

  ‘Welcome back. Remember me?’

  To his credit, Hale snarled, made fists and came almost off the wall with rage. There was a lifetime of street-fighter venom in the twisted lines of his face. His legs flailed free of the robe’s silken folds. But he wasn’t a young man any more. Ringil shoved him back with a palm heel in the chest.

  ‘You just sit there and behave.’

  ‘Fuck you!’

  ‘No, thank you. But I have got some questions I want answered. It’d really be in your best interests to tell me what I want to know.’

  ‘Yeah, well fuck your questions.’ Hale’s voice drawled slower, contemptuous. He gathered his mutilated robe back around him, covered the parts of his body the disarray had exposed. ‘And fuck you too, you fucking queer.’

  Ringil glanced around at the bodies and the blood. ‘I think you’re missing the specifics of who won here.’

  ‘You think you’re going to get away with this?’

  Ringil tilted his head, put a cupped hand to his ear. ‘You hear that? On the stairs? That’s the sound of no one coming to stop us, Terip. It is over. You pulled the joyous longshank girls on us, and it didn’t work.’

  He nodded at Eril, who yanked Janesh’s head back up. The doorman shrieked as he realised what was happening, woke maybe from a dreamed escape to something better. Eril’s knife dipped in, did its severing and opening - dark crimson gush of blood and Janesh’s face went suddenly idiot soft and pale. Eril let go of his head and it hit the floor with an audible bump.

  Ringil masked himself in what felt like stone.

  ‘You want to live?’ he asked Hale quietly.

  Hardened or not, the slave trader had gone almost as pale as his murdered minion. Respectability, or perhaps just age, seemed to have sapped some of his edge. His mouth twitched over words he didn’t appear to know how to voice.

  ‘I’m sorry, you’ll have to speak up.’

  ‘The cabal.’ Hale licked his lips. ‘They won’t let this stand.’

  ‘The cabal.’ Ringil nodded. ‘Okay. Why don’t you scare me with some names? Who are they? Who do they represent?’

  ‘Oh, I think you’ll find that out soon enough.’

  ‘I’m not a patient man, Terip.’

  The slave trader scraped together an awful, lopsided grin. It doesn’t matter what you do to me, if you kill me here or not. They’ll find out about this either way.’

  Ringil, out of nowhere - some combination of twanging battle-comedown nerves, general weariness, who knew what besides - took a blind leap.

  ‘Going to stick your head on a tree trunk, are they?’

  He saw the jolt go through Terip Hale, almost as if the slaver had been struck by one of his own men’s crossbow bolts. He saw the fear in the one unswollen eye.

  ‘You—’

  ‘Yeah.’ Grab the advantage, run with it. ‘I know all about it. That’s why they sent me. See, Terip - I used to kill lizards for a living. One time in Demlarashan, I helped take down a whole fucking dragon, me and just one other guy. So, I got no problem putting away your pet dwenda if he gets in my way. Now you tell me - what’s so fucking special about Sherin Herlirig Mernas that you’ve got to try and kill me when I ask after her?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘You heard.’

  ‘I don’t know that name.’

  ‘No?’ Ringil produced the dragon knife and held it up in front of Hale’s good eye. He breathed deep. ‘You remember well enough that she’s barren, that she comes from marsh-dweller stock, but you don’t know her name? That’s lizardshit. Now where the fuck is she?’

  And something seemed to break in Hale. Maybe the talk of sorcery, maybe Janesh’s murder, or maybe he just wasn’t as tough as he used to be. He flinched back from the tip of the fang.

  ‘Don’t ... wait, listen to me. I can’t—’

  Ringil tapped his eyelid with the knife. ‘Yeah, you can.’

  ‘I don’t fucking know, all right.’ Hale seemed to see an opening, to grab at it. The desperation in his voice scaled down a little. ‘Look. This marsh bitch you’re looking for, how long ago was she sold?’

  ‘About a month.’

  ‘A month?’ A harsh, high-pitched laugh - the slaver’s bravado was seeping back in. ‘A fucking month? Are you insane? You got any idea how much cunt comes through this place every month? You think I got nothing better to stuff my head with than their fucking names? Forget it. Give it up, man.’

  Ringil slammed his palm against Hale’s forehead
for purchase, dragged the dragon knife tip down the man’s cheek and tore the skin open to the bone. Blood spritzed everywhere. Hale shrieked and flailed. Ringil let him go, as if he were hot to the touch. He felt his own face twitch, felt a deep pounding start somewhere in his chest. The moment was an unbroken Yhelteth horse, bucking under him, taking him away, body and soul. With shaking hands, he fumbled in his pocket, found the charcoal sketch of Sherin and rolled it open in both hands, still holding the dragon knife at the top edge of the parchment like some ornate scroll end. He tried to get his breathing back.

  ‘You are going to tell me,’ he said tightly. ‘One way or the other. Now. Let’s try again. This girl. You bought her, right?’

  Hale cupped a hand at his wounded cheek, staring.