The Steel Remains (Gollancz)

by Richard Morgan

  ‘As I said, I do not expect you to understand. The marsh dwellers on the Naom plain are the closest to kin that the Aldrain have in this world. Thousands of years ago, their clans were favoured retainers to the dwenda, favoured enough that we mingled our blood with theirs. Their descendants, in however attenuated a form, carry our bloodline.’

  ‘That’s a fucking myth,’ Ringil said disgustedly. ‘That’s the lie they sell down at Strov market so they can jack you twice as much to read your fortune. Don’t tell me you fell for that shit. What, three fucking years of politics in Trelayne, rubbing shoulders with the best liars and thieves in the League, and you still can’t see a simple street scam like that coming at you?’

  Seethlaw smiled. ‘No. The myth, like most of its kind, is based on truth, or at least on an understanding of the truth. There are ways to confirm it. How strongly the dwenda heritage emerges among the marsh clans varies enormously. But when a female child is born unable to conceive in human congress, there the bloodline is strong. It’s harder to tell in males, but something similar applies.’

  ‘So you’ve been creaming them off through Etterkal and bringing them here. Your cousins at a hundredth remove. Come on, what does that really mean, honoured ?’

  He was aware of the same savage grin, still pinned to his face. He saw the way Seethlaw was looking at him, and in some tiny way it felt like loss. There was another test here, like seeing the Aldrain bridge, and he was failing it.

  ‘I think you know what it means,’ the dwenda said quietly.

  From Ringil’s throat, came a single, jolting, almost soundless sneer. ‘You’re going to sacrifice them.’

  ‘If you care to call it that.’ Seethlaw shrugged. ‘Yes.’

  ‘That’s great. You know, I’m just some scum-fuck human, I’ve barely seen three decades of life, and even I know there are no gods worthy of the name out there. So what is it you fucks believe in so desperately it needs a blood ritual?’

  The dwenda looked pained. ‘Do you really require an answer to this tirade?’

  ‘Hey, we’re fucking talking, aren’t we?’

  Another shrug. ‘Well, then. It’s less a question of gods than of mechanisms, of the way things are bound up and acted upon. Of ritual, if you like. You may as well ask why humans bury their dead, when eating them would make more sense. There are powers, entities with sway in these matters, though the Aldrain do not consider themselves bound by them in any meaningful way. But there is also an etiquette, an observance of hallowed rules, and for this, blood has always been the channel. You might think of it as the signature on the treaties your people make with each other - though we at least honour our agreements once they are made. If there must be blood, we will offer it. The blood of birth, the blood of death, the blood of animals when a minor shift in fate is required, of one’s own people when something greater is desired. In our history, those chosen for this honour have always gone willingly to their end, as a warrior goes willingly to battle, knowing what their sacrifice is worth.’

  ‘I don’t think that’s going to be the case with your distant cousins here.’

  ‘No,’ Seethlaw agreed. ‘It’s not ideal. But it will have to serve. In the end, the fact that we are willing to spill blood we know is our own, well, that will have to be sacrifice enough.’

  ‘Oh, good. Glad you’ve got it all worked out.’

  The dwenda sighed. ‘You know, Gil, I had thought you of all people might be able to understand. From what I know of you—’

  ‘You know nothing of me.’ Through clenched teeth. ‘Nothing. You’ve fucked me, that’s all. Well, that’s a crowded hole you’re in, darling. And us humans, we’re a lying, dissembling bunch, remember. Doesn’t pay to trust us between the sheets any more than anywhere else.’

  ‘You’re wrong, Gil. I know you better than you know yourself.’

  ‘Oh, lizardshit !’

  ‘I’ve seen you in the marches, Gil. I see how you handled yourself there.’ Seethlaw leaned across and seized him by the shoulders. ‘I see what the akyia saw, Gil. I see what you could become, if you’d only let yourself.

  Ringil raised his arms, sharp empty-hand technique, broke the dwenda’s hold, shook him off. He felt an odd calm settling over him.

  ‘I’ve done all the becoming I’m going to in this life. I’ve seen enough to know where it all goes. Now you made me a fucking promise. Are you going to keep it? Or do you want to give me back my sword and we’ll finish this thing the way we started it?’

  They stared at each other. Ringil felt himself falling into the dwenda’s empty eyes. He locked up the feeling, kept the stare.

  ‘Well?’

  ‘I keep my promises,’ said Seethlaw.

  ‘Good. Then let’s get on with it.’

  Ringil turned brusquely and shouldered his way past, into the corral. Seethlaw stared after him for a long moment, face unreadable, and then he followed.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  Sherin didn’t know him.

  You couldn’t blame her, Ringil supposed. It had been a long time, and there probably wasn’t a lot left in him of the little boy who refused to play with her in the gardens at Lanatray. Certainly there wasn’t much of the wan little girl he remembered in the woman slumped before him. He’d very likely have walked right past her in the Glades without recognition, if he hadn’t been staring a hole in Ishil’s charcoal sketch of her for the last couple of weeks. In fact, even the sketch wasn’t such a great match now. Sherin’s privations seemed to have melted the flesh from her face, turned her eyes hollow and inward, and added a brutal burden of years she hadn’t yet lived. There were streaks of tangled grey in her hair and gathered lines of pain around mouth and eyes that wouldn’t have looked amiss on a harbour-end tavern drudge twice her age.

  Looking at her, he wondered briefly what marks his time with the dwenda had left on his own face. He hadn’t seen a mirror since the night he left the Glades for Etterkal, and now, suddenly, the thought of facing one filled him with unease.

  ‘Sherin?’ he said, very gently. He knelt to her level. ‘It’s your cousin Ringil. I’ve come to take you home.’

  She didn’t look at him. Her eyes were fixed past his shoulder on Seethlaw, and she cowered into the corner of the stall as if the mother-of-pearl weave of the walls would absorb her. When Ringil reached out to touch her arm, she flinched violently away and her hands crept up to clutch and cover her neck. She rocked back and forth minutely in the corner and began a high single-note keening, a sound so divorced from human voice that at first he could not be sure it came from her throat.

  Ringil twisted on his haunches, looked up at Seethlaw’s pale, Aldrain features.

  ‘You want to get the fuck out?’ he snapped. ‘Give me a minute with her?’

  The dwenda’s gaze went from his face to Sherin and back again. His shoulders lifted minimally. He turned and slipped out through the half-open door like smoke.

  ‘Listen, Sherin, he isn’t going to hurt you. He’s ...’ Ringil weighed it up. ‘A friend. He’s going to let me take you home. Really. There’s no trick here, no sorcery. I really am your cousin. Your mother and Ishil asked me to come. Been looking for you for ... for a while. Don’t you remember me from Lanatray? I never wanted to play with you in the gardens, remember, even when Ishil made me.’

  That seemed to do it. Inch by inch, her face came round. The keening broke up, caught on shards of breath, then soaked away into the quiet like water into parched earth. She looked at him out of one eye, shivering, both hands still clasped at her neck. Her voice creaked like a rusty hinge.

  ‘Ri-Ringil ?’

  He put together something resembling a smile. ‘Yeah.’

  ‘It’s really you?’

  ‘Yeah. Ishil sent me.’ He tried the smile again. ‘You know what that means. Ishil. What she’s like. I fucking had to find you, didn’t I?’

  ‘Ringil. Ringil.’

  And then she threw herself on to him, collapsed over his neck and shoulde
rs, weeping and clutching and screaming as if a thousand possessing demons were trapped inside her and had decided now, finally, that they’d been there too long, they wanted out, and it was time to let go.

  He held her while it lasted, rocking her gently, murmuring platitudes and stroking her rat’s-nest hair. The screams ran down to sobbing, then to shuddering breaths and quiet. He peered at her face, cleaned it of tears as best he could with his shirt-sleeve, and then he picked her up and carried her out, bits of straw from the stall’s floor still clinging to the simple swamp-stained shift she wore.

  Happy now, Mother? Have I done enough?

  Outside, the sky was moving, thick cloud boiling past overhead at menacing speed. The light had changed, thickening and staining towards a day’s end dimness, and the air reeked of a coming storm. There were no sounds from the other stables or the other stalls in this one; if their occupants were awake, terror or apathy was keeping them quiet. Ringil found himself glad - it was easier to pretend there was no one else kept prisoner here but the woman he now held in his arms.

  Seethlaw stood with his back to the wall of the stable and his arms folded, looking at nothing at all. Ringil walked past him without a word, stopped a couple of steps beyond with Sherin in his arms. She buried her face in his neck and moaned.

  ‘So,’ the dwenda said at his back. ‘Satisfied? You have everything you want now?’

  Ringil did not look round. ‘You put us both on a good horse, you point me to the Trelayne road, and you let me get a full day’s ride away from this shit-hole. Then we can maybe talk about promises kept.’

  ‘Sure.’ He heard the sound of Seethlaw levering himself off the wall, straightening up and gliding in behind him. His voice fell drab and cold, lifted hairs on the nape of Ringil’s neck. ‘Why not? After all, there’s nothing more for you here, is there?’

  ‘You said it.’

  He walked towards the gate in the stormlight, bracing his steps a little because Sherin was heavier to carry than he’d expected when he first picked her up. Some forever insouciant part of him remembered a time when he could fight all day in plate armour and still stand as night fell, find the energy to go among the conscripted men at camp and build their spirits for the next day’s slaughter, talk up victory he did not believe in and share their brutally crude jokes about spending and fucking and hurting as if he found them funny.

  Were you a better man then, Gil? Or just a better liar?

  Your arse cheeks and belly were tighter, anyway. Your shoulders were bigger and harder.

  Perhaps that was enough, for them and for you.

  He cleared the gate, working grimly to keep his eyes away from the heads in the water beyond. He almost succeeded. One slippery, sliding glance as he walked out, the corner of his eye grabbed by the despairing muddied features of the woman nearest the gate. He jerked his gaze away before he could glimpse more than the one tear-soiled cheek and the mumbling desperate mouth. He never met her eyes.

  On through the swamp and the failing light, with Sherin weighing ever heavier in his arms and Seethlaw cold and remotely beautiful at his side, all three of them like symbolic characters from some irritatingly pompous morality-play whose original moral had somehow been scrambled and compromised and lost and was now, to audience and participants alike, anybody’s fucking guess.

  On the south-western fringes of the swamp, the land grew slowly less hostile to human use, and apparently to life of other kinds as well. It started with the odd mosquito bite and sparse clouds of flies rising around their boots as they plashed through marshy portions of the path. Then, slowly, birdsong began to seep into the silence, and a short time after that Ringil started to spot the birds themselves, perched or hopping about in plain view on branches and fallen tree trunks. Increasingly, water gave up its unpredictable claims to the earth, ceased to ooze up out of the ground wherever they stepped and confined itself more and more to creeks and inlets. The path they walked hardened up, the ever-present stench of the stagnant pools receded to an infrequent wafting. The ground rose and folded itself; the sound of flowing water over rock announced the presence of streams. Even the sky seemed to brighten as the threatening storm crawled off somewhere else for a while.

  Like many other things in Ringil’s life, the oppressive stillness at the heart of the swamp had not seemed so hard to endure until he walked away from it

  They followed one of the creeks as it turned into a river, stopping to rest at frequent intervals along the bank. After a while, Sherin was able to walk by herself, though she still shrank against Ringil’s side whenever any of the dwenda came close or turned their blank-eyed gaze on her. She didn’t talk at all, seemed in fact to be treating the whole experience as if it might at any moment turn out to be a hallucination or a dream.

  Ringil sympathised.

  Seethlaw, for his part, was almost as silent. He led the group with a minimum of verbal and gestured instruction, and didn’t speak to Ringil any more than his fellow Aldrain. If he’d selected the other dwenda who accompanied them, Ringil had not seen him do it. Pelmarag and Ashgrin simply fell in beside them as they crossed the Aldrain bridge, and another two dwenda he didn’t know were waiting for them at the other side. Brief snatches of conversation went back and forth between these four as they walked, but Seethlaw was not included, and didn’t seem much to care.

  At twilight, they came to a scavenger camp built beside the creek.

  ‘There’s a ferry across,’ Seethlaw explained as they stood under trees at the edge of the little knot of cabins and storehouses. ‘And from there, the road bends north-west. We’ve come this far south to avoid the worst of the swamp, but the ground from now on is a lot easier. It’s a couple of days walk to Pranderghal, that’s a fair-sized village. We’ll get horses there.’

  Ringil knew Pranderghal. He’d watched its original inhabitants driven from their homes and onto the road south, back when it was still called Iprinigil. He nodded.

  ‘And tonight?’

  We spend here. The ferry won’t run now until morning.’ Seethlaw grinned unpleasantly. ‘Unless you want me to bring the aspect storm and find a way around in the marches.’

  Ringil held down a shiver. He glanced at Sherin. ‘No thanks. I don’t think either of us are up for that.’

  ‘Are you quite sure?’ The grin stayed. ‘Think about it. You could be home in Trelayne in a matter of days instead of weeks. And it won’t feel like days anyway, it won’t feel like time at all.’

  ‘Yeah. I know what it’ll feel like. Give it a fucking rest, why don’t you?’

  They went into the only inn in the camp, an earthen-floor-and-straw establishment with a dozen trestle tables and a long wooden bar at ground level. There was a staircase against the far wall and a railed landing overhead with doors leading off. They forced their way through the din and press of bearded, unwashed-smelling men to the bar and procured rooms for the night. Ringil saw no obvious change in Seethlaw or the other dwenda, but they’d evidently cast some kind of glamour about themselves, because no one reacted to their looks or outlandish garb. The innkeeper, a thickset, swarthy individual hard to tell apart from his clientele, took coin from Pelmarag with a curt nod, bit into it and pocketed it, then gestured towards a trestle table in the corner near a window. They took their seats, and were served a hog-rib dinner along with tankards of thick-foamed ale shortly thereafter. It all proved surprisingly digestible, at least to Ringil’s stomach, though he saw the dwenda shooting each other wry glances as they chewed.

  He found he couldn’t remember what they’d eaten in the Aldrain marches. Only that Seethlaw had supplied it, magicked it forth from somewhere, and it had melted like the finest cuts of honeyed meat in his mouth, like the most sought after of Glades cellar vintages on his tongue. Beyond that ...

  Even that ...

  It was all fading now, he realised, fading fast, the marches and everything he’d seen and done there like fragments of a last dream before waking, pieces of self in action that m
ade no obvious sense, tantalising images without context and an incoherent tumble of events loosed from any mooring in time or sequence—

  He stopped chewing abruptly, and for just that moment, the tavern food was a clotted mouthful of sawdust and grease he couldn’t bring himself to swallow. The heat and lamplight and noise in the place swelled to a dull, unbearable roar. He stared across at Seethlaw, seated directly opposite, and saw the dwenda was watching him.

  ‘It’s fading ...’ he said through the food stuck in his mouth. ‘I can’t ...’

  Seethlaw nodded. ‘Yes. That’s to be expected. You’ve returned to the defined world, you’re tied to time and circumstance again. Your sanity will suffer if you remember anything else clearly, if the alternatives seem too real.’

  Ringil swallowed his mouthful, forced it down.