He cleared his throat.
‘Just stay where you are,’ Seethlaw murmured. ‘If it wanted to hurt you, it already would have.’
The akyia claw-walked its way down the wall of rock until it really was suspended upside down and almost within touching distance of Ringil’s head. It brought with it the salt waft of its body, the fresh blast of ocean water overlaid with more fragrant elements that were curiously similar to Seethlaw’s scent. Its hair hung in its eyes like the strings of a wrecked fishing net until, with a motion that was startlingly feminine, it lifted one hand from the rock and swept the strands back behind its head. A nictitating membrane flickered up over the left eye, the circular lip of muscle around the mouth flexed in and out like an iris, and Ringil, staring up with a crick in his neck, saw concentric rings of teeth lift themselves briefly erect and then lie down in the throat again. He swallowed hard, fought down the terrible sensation of vulnerability that crawled in his face and scalp. It wasn’t a stretch to assume the akyia could bite open his head as easily as a Yhelteth fisherman’s machete taking the top off a coconut.
From deep in the thing’s throat came the same glutinous chittering he’d heard earlier. It cocked its head back and forth between man and dwenda as if puzzled by the juxtaposition.
Out of the corner of his eye, Ringil thought he saw Seethlaw nod.
Then, rapid as a fleeing lizard, the akyia whipped about on the rock and was gone, back over the top in a succinct thrash of pale curves and coiling rear limbs. Ringil heard it scuttling away somewhere above them.
He sagged with relief, heart thunderous from the shock of that last sudden move.
Wished he’d been carrying some kind of weapon.
Fucking, somewhere, on cool, dew-damp grass in a ring of mist-shrouded standing stones, under stars he did not recognise. There was a flavour to it, a raw abandonment that stung him like a blow across the mouth - Seethlaw sprawled naked and ivory white on hands and knees before him, panting and snarling like a dog as Ringil crouched and thrust into him from behind, hands hooked in and hauling on the hinge of the dwenda’s bent body where hips and thighs met. A shivery sense of exposure came and went through his flesh, as if the standing stones were silent but tautly aroused spectators who’d paid to watch what the two of them were doing. Ringil, feverish with lust, reached round for the dwenda’s cock, found it stony hard and pulsing at the edge of climax.
The feel of it slipped the final leashes on his own control; he heard himself growling now, saw himself as if from a height outside the standing stones, hammering madly against Seethlaw’s split buttocks, pumping the shaft in his hand until it kicked against his grip and the dwenda howled and clawed in the grass and Ringil came in his wake, as if in answer to the call.
And sagging, and collapsing forward, like a burning building coming down into the river, hand trapped beneath the dwenda’s body as they went down, still frantically milking Seethlaw’s cock into the wet grass, face pressed hard between the broad pale shoulders, laughing and sobbing and the tears again, icy this time, as they spilled onto the dwenda’s skin.
Across low hills under a sky thickly carpeted with stars, there was a road of black stone built for giants. Its surface was broken and weed-grown underfoot but it extended for a full fifteen or twenty yards on either side of them. Walking it, from time to time they passed under pale stone bridges higher than the Eastern Gate at Trelayne. Off to the right, there were clusters of towers gathered on the flanks of the hills like sentinels. Ringil’s eye kept sliding out to them. There was something wrong with the architecture. The towers had no features, were as basic and flat-edged as a small child’s drawing of buildings, only taller, so tall they looked stretched beyond any humanly useful dimension.
‘Does anything live in those?’ he asked Seethlaw.
The dwenda cast a long glance at the towers. ‘Not if there’s any other option,’ he said cryptically. ‘Not from choice.’
‘You’re saying they’re prisons?’
‘You could argue that, yeah.’
For a while, Jelim walked with them on the road, but it was a Jelim Ringil had never known. The moody good looks were changed, weathered into something older and wiser than Jelim had ever had the chance to become. He looked, Ringil thought vaguely, like a successful young shipmaster, well travelled enough to have grown wise, still not aged enough to seem weary. He chatted away with coffee-house aplomb, smiled often and touched Ringil with an open confidence that belonged in some fantasy mural Grace-of-Heaven might commission to go with his bedroom ceiling.
And how’s your father keeping these days?
Ringil stared at him. You’ve got to be fucking kidding me.
Saw him in the street a couple of months back. Jelim frowned, reaching for the misplaced memory. Over in Tervinala, I think it was. But you know how it is, neither of us really had the time to stop and talk. Remember me to him, won’t you. Tell him I miss all those fireside debates we used to get into with him.
Sure. I’ll do that.
At some point he couldn’t clearly recall, Ringil had given up arguing with his ghosts.
Anyway, this time, the ground felt a little more solid. The tenuous image of cheery evenings around the hearth with Gingren might creep in, but it stood no earthly chance of gaining any real foothold in his head.
Still, when Jelim leaned across and tousled his hair up, kissed him casually on the neck as the other Jelim always had - it hurt. And when the alternative left him, no farewell, just a slow fade, exclaiming, Come on guys, let’s up the pace a bit, shall we, laughing and striding forward first into transparency and then into nothing - when that happened, something ached in Ringil the way it had when he first faced the dwenda and the blue storm it was wrapped in.
Later they camped under one of the huge pale bridges and Seethlaw summoned a fire out of an ornate, broad-bottomed flask he carried. Whatever was in the vessel burnt with an eerie greenish flame, but it radiated a comforting wash of heat out of all proportion to the size of the thing. Ringil sat and watched shadows leap about on the pale stone support pillar behind the dwenda.
‘When you summon the storm,’ he said slowly, ‘how does it feel?’
‘Feel?’ Seethlaw gave the impression he’d been dozing. ‘Why would it feel like anything? It’s power, it’s just ... power. Potential, and the will to deploy it. That’s all magic is in the end, you know.’
‘I thought there were supposed to be rules to magic.’
‘Did you?’ The long mouth bent into a crooked smile. ‘Who told you that, then? Someone down at Strov market?’
Ringil ignored the sneer. ‘It doesn’t hurt you? The storm?’
‘No.’ A look of dawning comprehension. ‘Ah, that. The regret, is that what you’re talking about? This sense of loss? Yes, he always talked about that too. It’s a mortal thing, as far as I can tell. The aspect storm is a warp in the fabric of every possible outcome the universe will allow. It gathers in the alternatives like a bride gathering in her gown. For a mortal, those alternatives are mostly paths they’ll never take, things they’ll never do. At some level, the organism seems to know that.’
He?
But it was a passing curiosity. There was too much else. The sadness Jelim had left behind still clung around Ringil’s heart in creased folds.
‘But you don’t feel it that way,’ he said bitterly. ‘You’re immortal, right?’
Seethlaw smiled gently. ‘So far.’
And then his gaze drifted out to the left, eyes narrowed. Ringil heard footfalls across the black stone road behind him.
‘... Seethlaw ...’
It was a female voice, fluid and melodic but slightly muffled; the dwenda’s name was the only word Ringil could pick out, and even that was stretched and twisted almost beyond recognition. He turned his head and saw in the glow from the fire that a figure stood behind him. It was garbed in black, wore a long-sword across its back and its head was sleek and rounded. It took him a couple of seconds to realise
he was looking at someone in the suit and helm Seethlaw had shown him under the city. Then the figure lifted a hand to the featureless bulb on its head and pushed back the glass visor. Framed in the space behind was an empty-eyed dwenda face.
A shudder scrawled its way across Ringil’s shoulders - he could not prevent it. For just a moment in the eerie unreliable firelight under the bridge, the featureless dark of the newcomer’s eyes seemed to merge with the black of the helmet, and the bone-white features took on the aspect of a thin, sculpted mask with empty eye-holes, a helmet within a helmet, set on the shoulders of a suit of armour that must, instinct told him, contain nothing but the same emptiness that lay behind the eyes.
Seethlaw got up and ambled across to greet the new arrival. They took each other’s hands loosely at waist height, oddly like two children readying themselves to play a game of slap-me-if-you-can. They talked back and forth for a few seconds in what appeared to be the same tongue the newcomer had used, but then Seethlaw gestured back at Ringil and broke into the antique dialect of Naomic he’d been speaking before.
‘... my guest,’ he said. ‘If you’d be so kind.’
The female dwenda studied Ringil for a moment, showing all the emotion of the mask she had seemed to wear just a moment before. Then her mouth twisted into a crooked half-smile and Ringil thought she muttered something under her breath. She lifted the smooth black helm from her head - it came slowly, as if a very tight fit - shook out long silky hair not quite as dark as Seethlaw’s and rolled her head back and forth a couple of times to loosen her neck muscles. Ringil heard vertebrae crackle. Then the new dwenda tucked her helmet under one arm and stepped forward, free left hand extended languidly to make one half of the greeting she had shared with Seethlaw.
‘My respects to those of your blood.’ Her Naomic, aside from being archaic, was very rusty. ‘I am with name Risgillen of Ilwrack, and sister of already you-know this Seethlaw. How are you called?’
Ringil took the offered hand as he’d seen Seethlaw do, wondering if he was being subtly snubbed with this casual, one-armed variant.
‘Ringil,’ he said. ‘I’ve heard a lot about you.’
Risgillen shot a glance at her brother, who shook his head minutely and said something in the other tongue. The female dwenda peeled her lips back from something that wasn’t really a smile, and let go of his hand.
‘You come by unexpected ways, for this the un-, the dis-, the lack of proper ceremony. I regret.’
‘We ran into some akyia on the coastal path,’ Seethlaw told her. ‘This seemed like a safer option.’
‘The merroigai?’ Risgillen frowned. ‘Shown proper respect, they should not have bothered you.’
‘Well, they did.’
‘I don’t like such event. And with now these other matters too. Something stirs, Seethlaw, and it is not us.’
‘You worry too much. Did you come alone?’
Risgillen gestured back the way she’d come. ‘Ashgrin and Pelmarag, somewhere beyond. But they seek you at different angles, alternatives less than here. None expected you this adrift. I myself, it was by scent only I came to you.’
‘I’ll call them.’
Seethlaw moved out from under the bridge and disappeared into the gloom. Risgillen watched him go, then seated herself with Aldrain elegance beside the fire. She stared into the oddly tinged flames for a while, perhaps marshalling the words she needed before she deployed them.
‘You are not the first,’ she said quietly, still looking into the fire. ‘This we have seen before. This I have done myself, with mortal men and women. But I do not lose myself as my brother can. Clearly, I see.’
‘I’m happy for you.’
‘Yes. So I tell you this.’ Risgillen looked up and fixed him with her empty eyes. ‘Do not doubt; if you bring hurt or harm upon my brother, I will fuck you up.’
Out in the darkness, a little later, howling sounds.
Ringil looked at Risgillen, the perfect geometry of her features in the greenish glow from the flames, saw no reaction beyond the faintest of smiles. The realisation hit him, like icy water, that he recognised the sound.
The howling was Seethlaw, calling for his kind.
Risgillen did not look up, but her smile broadened. She knew he was watching her, knew he’d understood, once again, suddenly, where he really was.
A fight is coming, a battle of powers you have not yet seen.
The words of the fortune teller at the Eastern Gate, welling up in his mind like chilly riverbed ooze. The certainty in her voice.
A dark lord will rise.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
We tried to stop them. But they took her.
For long moments, the words made no kind of sense. Ishgrim was a gift of the Emperor, you’d steal her on peril of a very slow and unpleasant death when the King’s Reach caught up with you, which they inevitably would because with Jhiral they themselves would be facing some pretty stiff penalties if they didn’t. Sure, she was long limbed and beautiful, but so were a lot of northern slave-girls. You wanted one badly enough, you could pick them up down at the harbour clearing houses for less than it cost to buy and tax a decent horse these days.
Never mind that. Krin-driven brain, screaming in her head. How did they even fucking know? Ishgrim’s a gift of the Emperor since yesterday. No one knew she was here. You didn’t even know she was here until the early hours of this morning.
She hugged at Kefanin, worried at the impossibility of the situation. ‘Who? Who, Kef? Who took her?’
The major-domo made a grunting noise deep in his throat. Rapid, battlefield-trained assessment told her his wound wasn’t fatal, but the blow had stunned him badly. She wasn’t sure how much sense he could make in this state.
‘Citadel ... livery,’ he managed.
And then it all came tumbling into place, like some circus trick performed by a dozen inanely-painted, grinning clowns.
Not Ishgrim - get that pale flesh out of your head, Archidi, get a fucking grip - not the Emperor’s gift at all.
Elith.
Menkarak: She’s an infidel, a faithless stone-worshipping northerner who would not convert when the hand of the Revelation was extended to her in friendship, and who persists in her stubborn unbelief deep within our borders. The evidence is plain - she has even torn the kartagh from her garb to blind the eyes of the faithful she dwells among. She is steeped in deceit.
The mix of hysterical accusation and cod-legal posturing rang around the inside of Archeth’s head like a rolling metal ball. Not much doubt what awaited Elith once they got her inside the Citadel.
‘How long?’ she whispered.
But Kefanin had lost consciousness again.
Footfalls outside. She spun to her feet, a knife in her hand like magic. The stable boy, dazed-looking, hesitant in the doorway, backlit by the blast of morning sun.
‘Milady, they—’
‘How long?’ she screamed at him.
‘I—’ Now, as he stepped inside, she saw the bruise blackening beneath his left eye, bubbles of fresh blood at his nostril on the same side. ‘Not half an hour, milady. Not even that.’
A map of the south-side’s maze of streets flared into view behind her eyes. The krinzanz collided with the fury in her veins, inked in the citadel and the path they’d likely take on their way back to it, stitched it on to the map in pulsing red.
‘How many of them?’ she asked, more calmly now.
‘It was six, I think, milady. In the livery of—’
‘Yes, I know.’ She sheathed the knife, felt a muscle twitch in her cheek. ‘Get the doctor. Tell him if Kefanin lives, I’ll double his fee. If he dies, I’ll have him driven out of the fucking city.’
Then she took off, running.
Six men, Citadel livery.
The streets were packed, no way to ride a horse through it faster than a slow clop. She wasn’t uniformed, had no baton and whistle, or blunted sabre to clear her way. And anyway, they’d see her coming a hundr
ed yards off.
She cut left, up a little used dog-leg back alley she knew, sprinting flat out as soon as she had the space. Abrupt relief from the heat of the sun in the narrow angles of the passage. A couple of chickens panicked, screeching away from beneath her booted feet as she took the corner, but nothing else got in her way. She hit the teeming cross street of Horseman’s Victory Drive - where now, ha fucking ha, you couldn’t even take a horse unless it was hauling produce - shouldered through the crowd and got to the white-washed stone steps that led up on to the roof of the Lizard’s Head tavern. From there, she could get her bearings, make a match with the map in her head. Then vault the alley on the other side, get on to the onion-domed rooftop sprawl of the covered bazaar.
The Steel Remains (Gollancz) Page 36
