The Steel Remains (Gollancz)

by Richard Morgan

  He saw the looks he was getting from Risgillen. Swallowed, fixed his gaze firmly ahead and started walking again. It didn’t help that the bridge gave a little underfoot with each step, not unlike the spongy ground they’d been treading on their way through the swamp. And as it gave, the strands seemed to chime very faintly at the upper edge of Ringil’s hearing. It wasn’t a pleasant sensation, and he was glad when they were over to the other side and coming down the spiral stairs.

  At the bottom, they were met by two more armoured dwenda. One of them pulled off his helmet and fixed Ringil with a hungry eye until Seethlaw snapped something at him. The conversation went back and forth a few times and then the dwenda shrugged and put his helmet back on. He didn’t look at Ringil again.

  ‘I’m really not popular around here, huh?’

  ‘It isn’t that,’ said Seethlaw absently. ‘They’re just worried, looking for something to take it out on.’

  ‘Worried about what? Those guys in the canoes?’

  The dwenda looked at him speculatively. ‘No, not them. There’s some talk about the Black Folk still being around here. One of our scouts went into a local camp wearing enough of a glamour to get served and sit unnoticed in the alehouse. He heard men talking about a black-skinned warrior in one of the villages to the west.’

  ‘Yeah - come on. That’s just going to be some southern mercenary, maybe out of the deserts. Skins get pretty dark once you’re south of Demlarashan. Easy mistake to make.’

  ‘Perhaps.’

  ‘No perhaps about it. The Kiriath are gone, Seethlaw. I saw them off myself. Stood and watched at An-Monal until the last fireship went under. Wherever they went, they’re not coming back.’

  ‘Yes, this is what I have learnt in Trelayne. But I’ve also learnt that the tongues of men are not much leashed by concern for accuracy or truth. It seems lies come very easily to your race. They lie to those they lead, to their mates and fellows no matter how close drawn, even to themselves if it will make the world around them more bearable. It is hard to know what to believe in this place.’

  Something about the weariness in his tone stung Ringil into defensive anger.

  ‘Funny, that’s always what I heard about your people. That the dwenda were masters of deceit and trickery.’

  ‘Indeed?’ Ashgrin, laconic and grave at his shoulder. Ringil had heard his voice so few times it was a genuine shock now. ‘And from which four-thousand-year-old expert in Aldrain lore did you hear this?’

  Risgillen cleared her throat loudly.

  ‘Are we going to get on, brother? It seems to me that we have more to concern ourselves with than the prattling of—’

  Seethlaw swung to face her. His voice came out dangerously low.

  ‘Do you want to lead, Risgillen?’

  She didn’t reply. The other dwenda watched with interest.

  ‘I asked you a question, sister. Do you want charge of this expedition? Will you abandon the pleasures and comforts of our realm and become Earthbound as I have? Will you immerse yourself in the brawling filth of human society to achieve our ends?’

  Still no response.

  ‘I’ll have an answer, sister, if you please. Or I’ll take your silence as the no it has always been. Is it no? Then shut the fuck up!’

  Risgillen started to speak, her own tongue, but Seethlaw slashed the blade of a hand across the flow. He turned slowly about, blank eyes switching from face to face among his fellow Aldrain.

  ‘I hear you complain,’ he spat, still in Naomic, perhaps, Ringil guessed, to snub them, to shame them before the human. ‘All of you, time and again, bemoaning what you must endure here, the journeys and sojourns of a few weeks’ duration that you must make among humans, tied to time and circumstance. I have spent three fucking years tied to time, so that we could build a path in Trelayne. I have tasted this world on my tongue for so long I can scarcely remember what it was like not to be tainted by its limits. I have swallowed it down, day after day, sickening from the brute animal stupidity of its ways, all so that I might learn its parameters and its possibilities, all so we may in the end take back what is ours. I have done all of this willingly, and would do it again. And I ask for nothing in return but your allegiance and your trust. Is that so very much to give?’

  Silence. Very, very faintly, the sound of the Aldrain bridge humming and whining in the wind above them. Seethlaw nodded grimly.

  ‘Very well. You will not gainsay me in this again, Risgillen. Is that clear?’

  A half-syllable of Aldrain speech in reply. Risgillen bowed her head.

  ‘Good. Then wait here.’ Seethiaw nodded at Ringil. ‘Gil, you come with me. There’s something you need to see.’

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  A few hundred yards beyond the Aldrain bridge, as if in some kind of savage architectural riposte, a massive black iron platform jutted out of the swamp at the angle of a sinking ship. It was easily over a hundred feet from side to side, multi-levelled, six flanges that Ringil could make out as they approached, tipping his head back to count. The top was crowned with spikes and webbed-wire assemblies that looked somewhat like fishermen’s nets hung out to dry. The whole thing stabbed upward at the murky sky like a blade buried in a wound and then snapped off. In the hanging silence that surrounded it, there was a presence, a heavy tension like the feel in the air before a storm.

  ‘See,’ said Seethlaw grimly. ‘What your allies did to this place.’

  It wasn’t hard to make the connection - the design of the platform could only have one origin.

  ‘You’re talking about the Kiriath?’

  ‘The Black Folk, yes. Look around you, Ringil Eskiath. This was once the site of the greatest Aldrain city on the continent. They called it Enheed-idrishinir, dwelling place of the joyful winds. You’ve seen the bridge. Imagine streets and towers made the same way, stretching to the horizon. Sculpted rivers whose waters flow in and out of the real world as easily as a Trelayne canal emerges from a tunnel or passes under a toll station. Trees, and built structures like trees, to echo and worship their form, reaching up to catch the breeze and sing. I was a child the last time I saw Enheed-idrishinir, before the Black Folk came.’

  He pointed at the platform again.

  ‘It fell from the sky. They say it screamed as it came. You see the six levels? There are twenty-seven more below ground, buried past the swamp and into the bedrock beneath. At the spear point was a device that tore reality apart. Fifty thousand died or were swept away, out in the wash of the greater march. We still sometimes find their remains today. Some still live, after a fashion.’

  ‘Nothing ever changes, huh,’ said Ringil quietly, and thought of Grashgal’s visions of a museum for swords. Children mystified by an edged-steel past that was locked away safe behind glass.

  It always had sounded like an unlikely piece of wish-fulfillment.

  ‘No, things will change.’ Seethlaw turned and fixed him with the dark, empty stare. His voice rose a little in the quiet of the swamp, took on faint echoes of a passion Ringil had only previously seen in him when they were fucking. ‘The Aldrain are coming back, Ringil. This world is ours. We dominated it for millennia before what you understand as human history had even begun. We were driven out, but it remains our ancestral home, our birth canal. Ours by right of blood and blade and origin. We will take it back.’

  ‘How you going to do that, then?’ Somehow, this new aspect of Seethlaw left Ringil obscurely disappointed. ‘There don’t seem to be that many of you.’

  ‘No, not yet. The Aldrain are wanderers by nature, individual by inclination, always happiest at the edge of our known domains and pressing further outward to see what else lies beyond. But buried at the heart of each of us is an ache for this world, for a unity, a certain place to carry in the heart and to return to at journey’s end. When the gates are opened again here, my people will come from every corner and aspect of the marches. They will flock here like crows at evening.’

  ‘Is that supposed t
o cheer me up?’

  The blank-eyed gaze bent on him again. ‘Have I used you so ill then?’

  ‘Oh, no. I’ve seen slaves treated far worse.’

  Seethlaw’s face turned aside as if he’d slapped it. He stared past Ringil at the sunken platform. His voice turned toneless.

  ‘I could have killed you, Ringil Eskiath. I could have taken my pleasure, wiped myself on you like a rag and thrown you away. Left you to wither from the soul outward in the grey places, or finished our duel as it began, with steel. You came into my domain, you brought your blade and your threats and your pride that no beauty or sorcery could stem your killing prowess. You stirred up my affairs in Etterkal, killed and mutilated useful servants of mine, forced me to intervene when it was hardly convenient. I ask you again. Have I used you ill?’

  Since there was only one fair answer to that, Ringil ignored it.

  ‘Just tell me something,’ he asked instead. ‘I see your end of this, you get your sacred ancestral ... lizardshit ... blood-right ... whatever ... promised fucking land back. I see that, it isn’t what you’d call a fresh concept. But what’s in it for the cabal ? Looks to me like you’ve got the whole Chancellery dancing to your tune one way or the other. What the fuck did you promise them?’

  The dwenda gave him a thin smile. What do you think? You see where we are, you know what Ennishmin represents to the League.’

  The knowledge must already have been there inside him in some shape or form. He felt no real surprise, only an icy sliding sensation in the pit of his stomach.

  ‘You told them you’d take it back for them?’

  ‘Yes, more or less.’

  ‘You’re going to invade imperial territory? Break the accords?’

  Seethlaw shrugged. ‘I signed no accord. Nor did my people. It’s a service I’m rendering my hosts in Trelayne.’

  ‘But ...’ Now the trickle of ice in his guts was swelling, was filling him up. ‘The Empire isn’t going to sit still for that, Seethlaw. Not the way things are right now. They’ll go to war. It’ll mean another fucking war. You must know that.’

  ‘Yes.’ Another blank-eyed shrug. ‘What of it? The League and the Empire will go to war over their relative hypocrisies, with my hand on the Trelayne side of the scales to render the struggle evenly matched. They’ll fight for years, I imagine. They’ll spend their strength and drag each other down, and when it’s done, when they’re finally sick of the slaughter, when they’re tired and broken, my people will walk through the ruins and take up their rightful place once again in this world.’ Seethlaw’s voice turned oddly soft and urgent. ‘You shouldn’t object, Gil. It’ll be a far better world for it. No more hysterical hatreds and petty factional bloodshed. No more hypocrisy to cover for the abuse of power, no more lies.’

  ‘No, that’s right. Just domination by the Aldrain. I think I’ve got some sense of what that’ll be like.’

  ‘That’s a stupid thing to say.’ A quick trace of anger in the dwenda’s voice, as quickly wiped away. ‘There is no reason human and dwenda can’t co-exist as we did once before. Our chronicles are full of warriors from your race, taken in out of pity or love and rising to great stature among us. I myself—’

  He stopped. Made a small gesture.

  ‘No matter. I’m not some market trader at Strov, hawking his wares, nor a member of the Chancellery making his empty speeches for funds and a hand’s-grab more power over his fellow humans. If your own wits and experience will not convince you, then I will not drag you to an understanding you do not want to own.’ He turned abruptly away. ‘Come, we are here on other business.’

  They picked a careful path through the swampy ground, around the massive iron flank of the platform, to where something like a partially roofed corral had been built against the lowest visible flange. There was a fence of some material similar to the wires of the Aldrain bridge, though nowhere near as subtly worked. Woven more thickly, the same webbing went to form three long, low structures like stables which were backed up to the ironwork of the platform. The ground the corral occupied was firm and looked dry, was perhaps reinforced with the same Aldrain building materials as the rest, but outside the fence, swamp water pooled and sat in stagnant, greyish expanses. The path through was twisted and deceptive and ended at a chained gate.

  Around the corral, and set back about a yard from the fence, a number of small, blunt objects protruded from the water. Ringil made them for rotted tree stumps until they were almost at the gate, and one of the nearer protrusions made a wet, sucking sound. He looked down at it more carefully.

  And recoiled.

  Fuck!

  The object was a human head, fixed neatly at the neck to the tree stump he’d believed it to be. A young woman’s head, long hair trailing down into the soupy grey water in clotted rats-tails. As he stared at it, the neck corded and twisted about, and out of a pale, mud-streaked face, the woman’s eyes found his. Mud streaked, her mouth twisted and formed a silent word.

  ... please ...

  Grace-of-Heaven’s story slammed back through him:

  I didn’t say these men were dead. I said all that came back were their heads. Each one still living, grafted at the neck to a seven-inch tree stump.

  Swamp water tears started from the woman’s eyes, ran dirty down her face.

  Ringil’s eyes darted out across the swamp water, and the other protrusions that studded the surface. It was an arc of the same horror, living human heads staring inward at the corral.

  He’d seen dragon fire and the charred bodies of children on spits over roasting pits. He’d thought himself hardened to pretty much anything by now.

  He was not.

  ‘What the fuck is this, Seethlaw?’

  The dwenda was occupied with the chain on the fence, hands laid on and murmuring softly to it. He looked up distractedly.

  ‘What?’ He saw the direction of Ringil’s stare. ‘Oh, those are the escapees. Got to hand it to you, you humans are a stubborn lot. We told them where they were, told them there wasn’t any easy way out of the swamp, told them it was dangerous to try. We told them if they stayed put they’d be fed and well-treated. They still kept trying. So those are a kind of object lesson. We don’t have so many escape attempts now. In fact, mostly they stay inside, and certainly well away from the fence.’

  Ringil’s eyes went to the stable construction in the shadow of the Kiriath iron. He pressed his tongue hard against the roof of his mouth.

  ‘These are the marsh-blood slaves? You’re keeping them here.’

  ‘Yes.’ Seethlaw lifted the suddenly unfastened chain aside and pushed the gate open. He seemed to notice Ringil’s expression for the first time. ‘So what? What’s the matter?’

  ‘You.’ It was as if he suddenly could not draw breath properly. ‘Did this, to them, just to warn the others?’

  ‘Yes. An object lesson, as I said.’

  ‘How long do they go on living like that?’

  ‘Well.’ Seethlaw frowned. ‘Indefinitely, given water supply to the roots. Why?’

  ‘You motherfuckers.’ Involuntarily, Ringil found he was shaking his head. ‘Ahhh, you fucking piece of shit. You cunt. No reason human and dwenda cannot co-exist? What do you call that, then? What kind of fucking co-existence is that?’

  Seethlaw stopped and fixed him with a stare.

  ‘Is it any worse,’ he asked softly, ‘than the cages at the Eastern Gate in Trelayne, where your transgressors hang in agony for days at a time as an example to the masses? There is no pain involved in this process, you know.’

  Ringil forced down memory of the searing agony he had never suffered. ‘No pain involved? Would you choose it for yourself, you fucker?’

  ‘No. Clearly not.’ The dwenda seemed genuinely perplexed by the question. ‘But their path is not mine, nor would I have walked it the way they have. This really is a minor matter, Ringil. You’re making far too much of it.’

  In that single instant, Ringil would willingly have given his sou
l to have the weight of the Ravensfriend on his back, the dragon tooth dagger in his sleeve. Instead, he swallowed hard, swallowed down his hate and looked away from the muddied woman’s face, through the open gate of the corral.

  ‘Why?’ he managed, in a shaking voice. ‘Why have you brought them here? What purpose does it serve?’

  Seethlaw studied him for a long moment.

  ‘I’m not sure you will understand,’ he said. ‘You are being very obtuse at the moment.’

  Ringil bared his teeth. ‘Try me.’

  ‘Very well. They are to be honoured.’

  ‘Oh, that sounds delightful. That’s better than the Revelation’s purifying inquisitorial love, that is.’