The Steel Remains (Gollancz)

by Richard Morgan

  ‘You know she’s barren.’ Ringil was shouting now, somehow couldn’t stop himself. Could barely stop himself, in fact, from going back to work on Hale with the knife right now. ‘You know she’s got dweller blood. You give her to me, or so help me Hoiran, I’ll take your guts out hand over hand right here and now.’

  ‘It’s not her.’

  Ringil seized him by the throat. The sketch of Sherin fluttered away. ‘You fucking piece of shit, that’s it—’

  ‘No, no.’ Babbling, working weakly at Ringil’s grip with both hands, voice gone almost sleepy with terror. ‘Don’t, don’t - it’s not her.’

  ‘What’s not her?’

  ‘It’s not ... I didn’t think you ... not one girl - it’s all of them, fucking all of them he wants. He takes them all.’

  Something portcullis heavy seemed to clank down behind Ringil’s eyes. Abruptly, the rage drained out of him and he felt the shiver of an apprehension he couldn’t name in its place. He let go of Hale’s throat.

  ‘He? You’re talking about the dwenda?’

  Hale nodded brokenly, still trying to edge away from Ringil along the curve of the wall. Ringil took a handful of silk robe and dragged him back. He leaned close.

  ‘Talk to me.’ Voice trembling from the sudden collapse of the fury. Blood singing in the depths of his hearing like the sea. ‘You want to live, you talk to me. You tell me about this dwenda.’

  ‘They’ll kill me if I do.’

  ‘And I will kill you if you don’t, right here and now. Make a choice, Terip. The dwenda. What’s he doing here?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ The slave trader made a peculiarly morose gesture.

  ‘He talks to the cabal, not me. Word came down. Any marsh cunt, anything looks like it might have the blood, make sure the warlocks check it out. If it can’t breed, you set it aside. Count it as a tithe.’

  ‘Right. And anyone comes asking after a woman like that, you show them the joyous longshank girls. Right?’

  Hale stared downward, would not meet Ringil’s eye. The silence stretched. Blood dripped off the slaver’s face and into his soiled silk lap.

  Eril came over and crouched at Ringil’s side.

  ‘We’re done here,’ he murmured. ‘No one breathing left. You want me to do him too?’

  Ringil shook his head. ‘Get me that mace over there. We need a messenger. I don’t want to leave Findrich and the rest in any doubt about what happened here.’ He raised his voice. ‘You hear that, Terip?’

  The slave trader twitched at the sound of his name. He would not look up. Ringil leaned in and took Hale’s skull firmly in his two cupped hands. He tilted it with a lover’s care, until the slaver was forced to meet his eyes.

  ‘You pay attention,’ he said quietly. ‘You tell this to Findrich, or Snarl, or whoever it is you report to in this idiot cabal of yours. You tell them Ringil Eskiath wants his cousin Sherin back. Soon, and unhurt - it’s not negotiable. If I don’t get what I want, I’m coming back to Etterkal to ask again. Believe me, they don’t want that, and nor do you.’

  Hale jerked his head out of Ringil’s hands. Outrage at the intimacy or maybe just the knowledge he was not going to die seemed to kindle a new fire in him.

  ‘Fucking touch me,’ he muttered. ‘Piece of shit queer.’

  Silently, Eril handed Ringil the mace. Ringil smiled faintly, beat it very gently in the cup of his palm.

  ‘You’re missing the point, Hale.’

  ‘And you’re fucking insane.’ The slave trader managed a shaky laugh. ‘You do know that, don’t you, Eskiath? Come in here talking like some relic out of the pre-war, some gang tough from harbour end. Don’t you get it? Things aren’t like that any more - we’re legal now. You can’t come around here acting like this. You can’t touch us.’

  Ringil nodded. ‘Go on telling yourself that if it helps. Meantime, tell the others I want my cousin back. Sherin Herlirig Mernas. There’ll be records, and I’ll leave you the sketch. You make sure they get the message. Because if I do have to come back to Etterkal and ask again, I promise you it’ll make what happened tonight look like minor tooth-ache. I’ll kill you and your whole fucking family, and I’ll burn this place to the ground around the corpses. Then I’ll move on to Findrich and Snarl, and anyone else who gets in my way. I’ll torch the whole fucking neighbourhood if I have to. You think things changed after the war, fuckhead?’ He reached out and chucked the slave trader hard under the chin. He hefted the mace. ‘Got news for you. Things just changed back.’

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Jhiral let them go home not long after midnight. He appeared to have satisfied himself that everything possible was being done and, perhaps more importantly, that his grip on his advisers was no less secure than it had been before the Khangset pot boiled over. He nodded them out with the minimum of ceremony. Faileh Rakan disappeared into the bowels of the palace without a word beyond the necessary honorifics, and Archeth walked out to the front gates with Mahmal Shanta.

  ‘Seemed to go well enough,’ the naval engineer said when they got outside.

  She couldn’t tell if there was an edge of irony on his words or not. Krinzanz was good for a lot of things but it was not a subtle drug. The finer points of human interaction tended to go out the window. She shrugged and yawned, checked the immediate vicinity for nosy minions, habitual caution so ingrained it was reflex.

  ‘Jhiral’s not stupid,’ she said. ‘He knows we’ve got to nip this in the bud. If word gets out the Empire can’t protect its ports, we’re going to have a southern trade crisis on our hands.’

  ‘Which our competitive little city state friends in the north will be only to pleased to exploit.’

  ‘Wouldn’t you?’

  Shanta did his own reflexive sweep of the surroundings. ‘What I would do, my lady, is not fit conversation for environs such as these. Perhaps some other time, over coffee aboard my barge?’

  ‘Perhaps.’

  ‘Did you mean what you said about the Helmsmen? Will they view this as a war context?’

  ‘How the fuck would I know?’ Wearily now, despite a residual wakefulness. Her eyes felt gritty and smeared open. ‘The one down in dry dock I was trying to debrief last week talks about as much as a Demlarashan mystic in mid-fast. Makes about as much fucking sense as well.’

  They reached the gates and had to wait in the slightly chilly air while slaves brought Archeth’s horse from the stables, and a carriage was summoned for Shanta. She pulled on her gauntlets and shook off a tiny shiver. Winter was creeping in early this year. It’d be good to get home, peel off her travel-stained clothes and stand barefoot on heated floors in the cosy warmth of her apartments. Let the last of the krin burn away; give in to sleep. Along the shallow zig-zags of the Kiriath-paved approach causeway, pale lamps studded a seductive path down through the darkness the palace mound was sunk in, and into Yhelteth’s carpet of lights at the bottom. The firefly clustering of the city’s illumination spread wide in all directions, split down the centre by the dark arm of the estuary. Closer in, Archeth picked out the Boulevard of the Ineffable Divine, lit in bright double rows and straight as a sword blade laid across the more haphazard patterning of the other streets. It seemed almost close enough to touch.

  Shanta was watching her keenly.

  ‘They say the ones that stayed are angry,’ he murmured. ‘The Helmsmen, I mean. They feel abandoned, resentful that the Kiriath would not take them.’

  She looked at the lights. ‘Yeah, they say that.’

  ‘That’s got to affect their attitude to the Empire as well, I’d imagine. Got to put pressure on any kind of loyalty they might have.’

  ‘Oh, look. They got Idrashan out already.’ Archeth nodded to where a slave was leading her horse out of the stable block. ‘So that’s me, then. G‘night, Mahmal. Hope your carriage doesn’t take too long. Thanks for coming along.’

  The engineer smiled gently at her. ‘My pleasure. It has certainly been instructive.’

  She
left him there and went to meet the slave halfway. Mounted up, waved a final, wordless farewell to Shanta and urged her horse out the gate.

  On the first sloping downturn of the causeway, she stood in the stirrups and looked back. The naval engineer was an indistinct figure through the railed iron of the gates above, backlit into silhouette by bright-burning torches behind him on the palace walls. But she knew beyond doubt that he was still watching her.

  So fucking what? She left the palace behind and let the horse find its own way home through the stew of streets on the southside. Shanta’s no fucking different to the rest of the old guard. Holed up in their positions of privilege and moaning in their little cabal corners about how much better it was when Akal was still around.

  Well? Wasn’t it?

  Akal was still around when we smashed the rebels at Vanbyr. Let’s not forget that inconvenient little blemish on the face of prior glory.

  He was on his sickbed by then.

  He still gave the fucking order.

  Yes. And you obeyed it.

  She passed a sleeping figure, curled into the angle of a darkened smithy’s yard. Ragged cloak and hood; emblazoned on its folds she recognised the sable-on-white horse insignia of an imperial cavalryman. Hard to know if you could take that at face value or not - the city was full of demobbed and damaged soldiery sleeping in the streets, but military garb elicited more pity when you were begging, whoever you might actually be, so it was well worth the risk of stealing it if you got the chance. It could get you fed, even taken in on winter nights if the cold bit hard enough or it rained. Archeth knew a brothel near the harbour whose madame prided herself on letting derelict veterans sleep in her laundry shack. She’d even been known to send out girls from the more raddled end of her stable to provide free hand-jobs on feast days.

  You found patriotism in the strangest places.

  She slowed the horse to a halt and peered hard at the cloak-wrapped form, trying to decide. Something about the posture rang true, the laconic efficiency in the way cloak and hood were used. But without waking the man up ...

  She shrugged, dipped in her purse and found a five elemental piece. Leaned over and tossed the coin so it clipped one wall in the corner and hit the paved floor with a loud chink. The figure grunted and moved, and a right hand groped out from under the cloak until it found the money. Ring and little finger gone, along with most of that half of the hand. Archeth grimaced. It was a common enough injury among the horse regiments, Yhelteth cavalry swords were notoriously badly provided with protection for the hand. One powerful, well-judged slice down the blade from a skilled opponent, and you were a cavalryman no longer.

  She tossed another five elementals down on to the drape of the cloak, and clucked Idrashan onward.

  A couple of streets later and nearly home, she passed through a small, leafy square once called Angel’s Wing Place but now re-named for the victory at Gallows Gap. It was a place she’d walk to sometimes when she needed to get out of the house, both before and after the war, though she’d preferred it before. Then it had hosted a bustling fruit-market. Now they’d built a self-important little three-sided stone memorial in the centre, grandiose bas-relief images of exclusively imperial soldiers standing on piles of reptile dead, a central column designed to look vaguely like a sword thrusting skyward. There were stone benches built into the structure and lettered homages in rhyme to our glorious imperial commander, our sons of the city inspired. Archeth had read the compositions enough times to have them, unwillingly, by heart, had even, once, at a court ball, been briefly introduced to the poet who’d penned them.

  Of course, one was not actually there at the battle, this smirking minor noble had told her, and sighed manfully. However much one might have desired it. But I did visit Gallows Gap last year, and one’s muse can always be relied upon in such cases to catch the echoes of the event in the melancholy quiet that remains.

  Indeed. But there must have been something in her face despite her best efforts, because the smirk slipped a little, and the poet’s tone turned anxious.

  You, uhm, you were not there yourself, milady? At the battle?

  Oh no, she managed urbanely. But my father died on the expeditionary retreat, and two of my outlander friends led the final Gallows Gap charge.

  He left her alone after that.

  Home, in the courtyard, she handed Idrashan over to the night watchman and let herself in through a side entrance. The house was lit with lamps turned low, and it was quiet - she kept servant numbers to a minimum, and manumitted the slaves she occasionally bought as soon as custom and city regulations would permit. Kefanin, she guessed, would be dozing in his cubicle by the front door, waiting for her return. She saw no reason to wake him and went directly upstairs to her chambers.

  In the dressing room, she hung up her knives, wrestled her boots off one after another and tossed them into a corner, shucked the rest of her clothes like an old skin and stood there a minute luxuriating in the feel of the warm air on her skin. Then, as she bent to scratch an itch on her calf, her own smell mugged her. She wrinkled her nose, glanced at the tapestried bell-pull by the wall.

  Ah, come on. Fucking Scaled Folk campaign veteran. You bathed under a waterfall in the upper Trell, winter of ’51. That so long ago?

  It was ten years, truth be told, time that had crept up on her somehow; but the fading edge of the krin was a blessing, a twitching impatience under her skin, and she let that carry her. She left the bell unrung and went through to the bathing chamber, not relishing the thought of a cold water scrub, but unwilling to go through the rigmarole of calling down to the basement, getting the slaves to stoke up the furnace, fill the boiling pans, waiting the time it took while the water heated and they carried it upstairs and—

  The water in the big alabaster bathing jugs was not cold.

  She blinked, stirred a hand loosely through the water in one of the jugs again to make sure. No question, it was still lukewarm. Kefanin, proving himself once again worth his weight in precious gems, she supposed. She grinned and went through her ablutions with a small measure of relief, scrubbed the worst offending portions of her body and rinsed herself off. She took a towel from the rack, wrapped herself in it and wandered through to the bedchamber.

  There was someone in her bed.

  As she slammed to a halt in the doorway, the scent on the towel she wore caught up with her. She knew it from somewhere, but it was not her own.

  ‘Hoy,’ she snapped. ‘You’re supposed to be in the guest wi—’

  But it was not Elith.

  It took her a moment to place the candle-wax coloured hair and the pale features, blurry with sleep, as the woman propped herself up in the bed. It was the scent that triggered the recall, the tight wet grip of Jhiral’s hand on her jaw five days ago, the salt-smelling damp of the slave girl’s juices drying on his fingers. Archeth felt her nostrils flare slightly at the memory, and abruptly she didn’t trust herself to say anything else.

  ‘I ...’ The girl was clearly terrified. She pushed herself upright in the bed, slipping on the silk sheets. Babbling in Naomic, ‘I was commanded, milady. The Emperor himself, it was not my doing, I would not wish ...

  And now Archeth remembered Jhiral’s smug face when she showed up in the throne room. I understand you had to go home before coining to see us. Did you find everything there to your satisfaction? His prurient, conspiratorial intimacy in the Chamber of Confidences five days earlier. She’s new. What do you think? Would you like me to send her to your bedchamber when I’m finished with her? And then, the throwaway decision, the whim. Come, I shall send the girl to you as soon as you return.

  It didn’t do to underestimate Jhiral’s whims. They were all still learning that, up at the palace and across the city below. You’d think the lesson would have sunk in by now, but it seemed, even for Archeth Indamaninarmal, most shrewd and pragmatic of imperial advisers, that it hadn’t.

  Archeth had a moment of retrospective sympathy for Kefanin. S
he recalled the major-domo’s face when she handed Elith over, his single, swiftly overridden attempt at a warning. Milady, there is already ...

  ... an unexpected guest in your house.

  ... an unexpected young female slave awaiting your approval and command.

  Tiny, trickling tingle in her belly at that particular thought.

  Stop that.

  ... an unexpected and gracious gift of the Emperor, delivered and imposed with no possibility of demurral.

  It explained what the girl was doing in her bedchamber. Jhiral liked his commands to be carried out to the letter, and didn’t mind detailing what would happen if they were not. The imperial messenger who brought the girl would have instructed Kefanin minutely, she supposed; and Kefanin, outlander by birth and slave from age five up, summarily castrated at fifteen, less than four years of manumission and citizenship to his name, major-domo or not, would have sprung to obey.