The Steel Remains (Gollancz)

by Richard Morgan

  ‘Why did you fight for them?’ There was a music to the voice, a deep-toned, melodic vibrancy, for all that the words themselves came quietly across the gloom. The language was Naomic, but tinged with archaisms from old Myrlic and a quaint grammatical ornateness. ‘They’d execute you on a spike for your choice of bed partner, and call it righteousness; they’d watch it done and toast your agony with tankards and songs, and dedicate it to their idiot gods. They’re brutal, moronic, they have the ethical consciousness of apes and the initiative levels of sheep. But you took the field against the reptiles for them nonetheless. Why?’

  Ringil sat up with an effort. Tried to speak, coughed instead. Got it under control, finally, managed a weak shrug.

  ‘Dunno,’ he croaked. ‘Everyone was doing it, I just wanted to be popular.’

  Arid laughter, echoing in the cavern. But the question still hung there in the silence that followed, and the figure did not move. An answer was required, a real one.

  ‘Okay.’ Ringil took his jaw between thumb and forefinger, flexed it and grimaced. He cleared his throat. ‘I wouldn’t swear to it after all this time. But looking back, I think it was probably the children. I saw a couple of towns hit by their raiding parties early on. You know, the Scaled Folk tend to eat their prisoners. And for children, well, that’s got to be the ultimate nightmare, right? Being eaten. Chained up watching, knowing it’s going to happen to them next.’

  ‘I see. For children.’ The seated form cocked its head. The voice stayed soft and silky but somewhere it held the underlying tensile strength of Kiriath skinmail. ‘Children who would in all probability grow to be just as ignorant and brutal and destructive as those that spawned them.’

  Ringil pressed fingers to the throbbing side of his head. ‘Yeah, probably. When you put it like that, does seem kind of stupid. So what about you people? You eat your prisoners at all?’

  The figure rose smoothly to its feet. Even in the gloom, Ringil could see the physical power and grace the motion implied. The speaker came forward into the light.

  For a moment, Ringil forgot to breathe.

  Throbbing pain in his jaw and head, the twinges from the sword-tip slash on his shoulder and chest, a messy, soiled feel to his consciousness and clothes, and behind it all a vague, disconnected sense of fear - still, Ringil felt the spurt of nascent lust in the base of his belly. Grace-of-Heaven Milacar’s words spilled back through his head.

  He’s beautiful, Gil. That’s what they say. That he’s beautiful beyond words.

  Whatever questionable source had carried that word to Milacar, you couldn’t fault their powers of observation.

  The dwenda stood over six feet tall, slender almost to boyishness in hips and limbs but with a sudden breadth and power in chest and shoulders that made his upper body look more like a stylised cuirass than anything living. He - you had to assume it was male from the bulge in the loose black breeches and the flat planes of the chest - stood with the same effortless poise that he’d shown getting up. Long, tapering hands hung pale and slightly crooked, as if they remembered a hawkish past life as talons. The nails each gave up a minute rainbow sheen in the light.

  The face that topped it all was everything Shalak’s Aldrain enthusiasts could have wished for - bone white, mobile and intelligent, long lipped and just fleshy enough in chin and nose to offset the high, cadaverous cheekbones and broad flat forehead. Long black hair hung straight on either side, met the wide shoulders and spilled back over them like dark water. The eyes—

  The eyes were pits of pitch, just the way the legends had it, but even in this low light Ringil saw how they flung back the same faint rainbow glimmer as the dwenda’s nails. He had a sudden flush of absolute certainty that in daylight the whole eyeball would blaze like sunrise over the Trell estuary.

  The dwenda inclined slightly over him. It was at one and the same time something like a reverence, something like predatory intent.

  ‘Would you like me to eat you?’ it asked.

  Ringil felt the squirm in his guts again.

  Get a fucking grip, Gil. This is your enemy, you nearly killed him last night—

  Tonight, still? Some part of him needed, for some reason, to know.

  —you might still be able to manage it.

  Instead, he managed an ironic clearing of the throat and a manufactured lightness of tone belying the trip-trip that went up along his arms and down into his groin.

  ‘Maybe later. Right now, I’ve got this motherfucker of a headache.’

  ‘Yes.’ The head slightly cocked again. Splinters of light danced across the inky eyes. ‘I apologise for the pain. The damage is slight, and in this place you will heal much faster than you would in your world. But even here, a physical price has to be paid. And it was the only means I had of ending the fight without killing you.’

  ‘Then I suppose I should thank you.’

  The dwenda grinned unexpectedly. Teeth. It wasn’t an altogether reassuring sight. ‘I suppose you should.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  The dwenda dropped abruptly into a crouch, faster than Ringil could react, and its hand shot out to cup the side of his face. The long fingers slid up into his hair, tangled in its strands and tugged his head forward.

  ‘I’m afraid in the end I’m going to want more from you than that, Ringil Eskiath.’

  Its lips were cool and firm on his, the subtle pressure split his mouth before he realised he’d wanted to open it, and a slick, flickering tongue met his own. There was the sudden press at his chin of a stubble so soft it was almost like velvet pile. The trickling in his belly flared up like a bonfire. He felt himself hardening.

  The dwenda drew back.

  ‘You are not healed yet,’ it murmured.

  Ringil’s lips peeled off his teeth. ‘I’m feeling a lot better.’

  But the dwenda was back to its feet again, just as rapidly, its grip on him gone, fading to a sense memory; he could still feel the tips of the fingers on his skull, the slip and press of the tongue in his mouth, like a promise of more. The slender figure turned away from him, rather hurriedly, he thought. Like wincing.

  ‘Let me be the judge of that,’ it said harshly.

  Ringil raised an eyebrow at the change. ‘Well, it’s your place.’

  ‘Not mine, exactly.’ A glance back across one shoulder that he could not read. ‘But near enough. You’d do well to let me guide you here.’

  ‘Okay.’ Ringil got himself upright with rather less grace than his host had shown. He stood at the dwenda’s back, close enough to pick up scent. It wasn’t exactly new territory, he’d been here enough times before and to spare; the last-minute panic of a novice partner not sure what it was he really wanted; he’d learned at Grace-of-Heaven’s knee - so to speak, Gil - the patience and guile of when to force the issue, when to back up and wait.

  He waited.

  Silence. Long enough for him to notice that the dwenda gave off a faint musk whose constituent parts he could not quite - despite a tantalising familiarity - pin down.

  ‘Where are we?’ he asked. ‘Under the city?’

  ‘In a manner of speaking.’ The dwenda seemed to have regained a little of its previous poise. It drifted away a couple of steps, turned to face him at what it apparently judged a safe distance. ‘Though it’s not a version of Trelayne you would recognise, I think. In your version, it will take millions of years for the river to lay down the sediment that goes to form this rock.’

  ‘Then did we take the quick paths to get here? Travel through the pressured places under the earth like the Kiriath?’

  ‘No.’ A thin smile. ‘The Black Folk are engineers. They take the long way round to get to everything. Much like humans, in fact. In time you will come to resemble them more than you know.’

  ‘That’s going to upset a few Majak purists I know.’

  The dwenda shrugged. ‘They won’t live to see it. As a culture or as individuals. For that matter, nor will you, the League cities or the Empire.’
>
  ‘You sound irritatingly superior when you talk like that.’ Ringil offered up a smile of his own. ‘If you don’t mind me saying.’

  ‘Why should I mind? The superiority is evident.’

  ‘So it’s true, then. All the stories they tell, all that Aldrain lore they babble. You are immortal.’

  Another shrug. ‘So far.’

  Ringil laughed out loud. He couldn’t help it. ‘Just like that barking black dog, eh? How the hell would anybody know something like that?’

  The echoes flapped at the chamber roof, then chased each other away through the dark. The dwenda frowned. ‘Black dog?’

  ‘Doesn’t matter. Just something I heard the other day.’ Ringil stared around in the gloom, groping after memories of the evenings spent in pointless discussion at Shalak’s place. Speculation run wild amidst cheese and wine and easy company. ‘So, this place, then. This has to be part of the Aldrain marches. The places between, where the constraints of time are not felt. The Ageless Realm.’

  ‘It has been called that, yes. Among other things.’

  ‘And you brought me here with, what? Sorcery?’

  ‘If you like. It might be simpler to say I carried you. When the aspect storm, the maelstrom gate of alternatives, is summoned, it translates everything within its radius. As it wrapped around me, so it brought you as well.’

  ‘Neat trick. You think you can teach it to me?’

  ‘No. You would have to ... evolve before that became possible.’

  Ringil’s eyes fell on the black figure against the wall. He saw now that it was a suit of something like armour, hung a couple of feet up on the stonework in some fashion he couldn’t work out. He moved closer, scrutinising the smooth oval curves of a helm that showed no external decoration at all, that in fact resembled nothing so much as the head of some sleek sea mammal coming up for air.

  ‘This yours?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes.’

  Ringil reached up and touched the suit at one hip. The material it was made of felt cool and smooth, more like leather than mail. He imagined it would mould to the wearer like a second skin. And the visor - he could only now make it out - was a simple sweep of glass as black as the rest of the suit, set in the helm with a precision he had only ever seen before in the finest workings of the Kiriath engineers.

  He felt the dwenda draw closer, behind him. He lifted one slack leg of the armour in his hand, let it swing gently back against the wall.

  ‘You weren’t wearing this when you came for me.’

  ‘No. There wasn’t time.’ Ringil thought the voice turned ironic. ‘Nor much need, in the end.’

  It was like a touch, soft at the nape of his neck. He turned about in the dark drip-sounding damp of the air, and found himself eye to eye with his companion. This time the bonfire in his belly was instant, a roaring, sheeting heat that rushed upward and licked at the underside of his ribs.

  ‘You got lucky,’ Ringil said unsteadily.

  The dwenda seemed to move forward, a single seamless step. His bulk crowded at Ringil’s chest. ‘Did I?’

  And Ringil - Ringil couldn’t do anything at all now with the slippery smile that played around his lips like smeared grease, and would not come off. He felt his breathing deepen, his pulse go dripping like hot wax along the insides of his arms and down his thighs. His prick was a hot iron bar pinned up against his stomach by the suddenly constricting cloth of his breeches. The dwenda’s arms lifted to his sides, a gossamer caress of motion that he felt with shivering intensity, for all that the thing’s hands never touched him.

  ‘What time is it?’ he asked, thickly.

  The question came out of nowhere, he couldn’t fathom a reason for it at all, couldn’t understand it in any way but that it felt like the last flailing of a drowning man.

  The dwenda stepped into him again, drenched his face in its shadow. The candle gleam in the eyes, oh ye gods the pressure of a huge iron-hard erection to match his own pressing against his thigh, and now the dwenda’s hands on him.

  ‘It’s no time at all,’ the voice told him in a whisper. ‘I am time here; I am all the time you need.’

  And then the cool mouth fastened on his, levered his lips apart once again, lozenges of light and dark seemed to slide across and through him, and then the whole world went over sideways in sparks, like a table-top candelabra swiped flat amidst the laden plates of a feast abandoned in the gloom and waiting for anyone with the inclination to come and plunder.

  If the damp air was chilly, he didn’t notice as his clothes came off, as the dwenda’s heated kisses bit their way down his neck and over his exposed chest, as impatient hands tugged down his breeches over boot tops, tore undergarments down to match, as the dwenda knelt and plunged the head of Ringil’s cock into his mouth.

  He gasped and flexed at the sudden heat of it, and then as the friction of teeth and tongue set in, he grabbed at the dwenda’s shoulders, sank his fingers into its hair and twisted. A long moan forced its way up out of him, counterpointed by the small grunting noises the dwenda made as it pumped its lips up and down. A cool hand weighed his balls in their sack, and then one long finger split off from the grip and angled up into the whorl of his anus. From somewhere, the dwenda had conjured the slick wetness of spit or something like it on to the fingertip and Ringil felt himself opened and gently impaled with a sly controlling competence that made his heart turn over.

  Stable boys in Gallows Water had never been like this.

  And then, somehow, the dwenda took him softly to the floor and if the stone was cold under them, Ringil didn’t notice that either. He heaved up and stared down the length of his body, the tangled breeches and boots still not off, the dark form hunched and coiled over his legs and hips head down like a feeding beast, and somewhere seemingly distant beyond vision, the delirious timed motions of mouth up and down, of the probing finger twisting in and out. The scent of the dwenda’s body, that maddening mingle of spices and somewhere, the faintest hinted odour of shit in the air from his opened anus. And the mouth and the finger that went on and on, driving him forward, inches at a time, towards the precipice—

  And threw him off.

  Shuddering, hingeing force as he came into the dwenda’s sucking mouth, it stormed through him, it seemed to want to snap his spine. It hooked him up, then flung him back down on the stone, flapping and twitching and - he realised it with sudden, cold shock - laughing and bubbling out the words oh no, no, no, no ...

  It brought the first tears to his eyes he could remember since his youth, since the carnage of his first battlefield aftermath.

  When he was done, when he lay there drained and hollowed out, and utterly still, he felt the dwenda unfasten itself from him, glide upwards and straddle his chest. It reached down and took hold of its own swollen cock by the shaft, rubbed the glans roughly against his cheek and across his face. The mingled spice scent came with it, headily concentrated now. Ringil followed the soft dragging blows of the prick over his features, opened his mouth and made gentle biting motions after it with his lips. The dwenda hunched over him a little more. He thought it smiled in the gloom as it fed the glans into his mouth, but he couldn’t be sure.

  He reached up awkwardly past the body on his chest with his hands, found the skin-thin velvet of the shaft and gently displaced the dwenda’s fingers with his own. He tried to meet the dark, glimmer-touched eyes above his. He sucked and nipped, was about to go to work in earnest, when the dwenda said something in a language he had never heard, and then it pulled clear of him.

  ‘But I want—’

  Pulled back down his body, perhaps grinning still.

  Reached down with both hands and spread his legs, pushed them hard apart and up, hingeing and folding them at the knees. Did something with its hands at the juncture between, the soft sound of spitting, and then there was pressure at his sphincter again, but harder now, thicker, more insistent than the finger had been. The dwenda reared up over his spread and hinged legs, working itsel
f into place inch by remorseless inch, jaw working - he saw it in the dim light - talking to him in the same odd cadenced tongue as before. And he was helping, hugging his legs up and out to make way, thrusting up his hips, his own jaw tight on the repetition of yes, yes, yes, yes ...

  And the dwenda fell on him, brought its face down to within inches and grasped his skull with both hands and split his mouth with another kiss. The thrusting built, gathered a hungry, gulping momentum, and with it Ringil felt himself growing rock hard once more, saw the dwenda feel it too, saw a glinting grin in the gloom, and knew suddenly beyond question that what the dwenda had said to him was true, there was no time here, there need be none, none that meant anything at all beyond the surrender to this, all this, the thrusting, the pumping, the fucking, clenched jaw yes, oh yes, oh fuck me yes, yes, yes ...