The Steel Remains

He stood and stared up at the stripped branches. Waited for the panic-flush of sweat across his skin to cool, for his heart to slow back down. He breathed in deep, like a man escaped from drowning.

Not real, not real. His pulse throbbed with the rhythm of the words.

No more real than the thousand other phantoms that had haunted him across the Aldrain marches. He had not died.

Jelim had.

A hand clapped him across the back. His pulse kicked up again for one terrified moment, then eased as he registered the touch. Seethlaw’s hand shifted, squeezed intimately at the nape of his neck.

It felt uncomfortably like ownership.

“Nice to be back in the real world, I imagine,” the dwenda murmured, and stepped past him across the tufted, swampy ground. Tiny squelching noises in the stillness with each step the dwenda took. Ringil saw water well up in the boot prints he left.

The other members of the party followed, Risgillen with wrinkled nose and a sour glance cocked up at the trees, Ashgrin as watchful and impassive as he’d been since Ringil met him. Only Pelmarag acknowledged the human, turned as he passed and gave him a wink.

“Where are we?” Ringil asked.

“Journey’s end,” said Pelmarag. “Hannais M’hen the Cursed. Look.”

He gestured out to the left, and Ringil felt a tiny start in his pulse as he saw a stunted black figure there. It took him a moment to realize it was a statue, a moment longer to realize—how?—that it would not, as the akyia had done in the surf, suddenly move and come to silent, bright-eyed life.

“Tell you a funny story,” Pelmarag said, advancing on the statue without any apparent trace of amusement on his face. Ringil shrugged and followed him.

It waited there for them, set at a tilted angle in the marshy ground, stubby outstretched arms raised to shoulder height on either side like a diminutive preacher facing his congregation or a child asking to be picked up. As Ringil got closer, he saw that the thing was hewn entirely out of black glirsht, sculpted crudely so the body wore no obvious clothing and the face was a blunt, asexual approximation of human features. He noticed the shallow-scooped facets that served as eyes were polished so the crystalline stone glinted, but he couldn’t tell whether the effect was deliberate or not.

Pelmarag stared down at the statue, brow creased as if it had asked him a difficult question.

“Funny story?” Ringil reminded him.

The dwenda stirred. “Yeah. About a month and a half ago the way you people’d look at it, Ashgrin’s brother Tarnval was looking for this place. He was real well equipped, too, came heavy. Never much cared for Seethlaw’s stealth strategies, thought we were all moving way too slow.”

Pelmarag’s Naomic, better than Risgillen’s or Ashgrin’s from the start, had become positively fluent in the time he’d spent talking to Ringil. He was by far the most gregarious of the group. In fact, he seemed to be acquiring a lot of Ringil’s preferred expressions and phrasing. It gave the human a peculiar sensation to hear his own verbal quirks fed back to him this way, and it made him wonder how much time the journey in the Aldrain marches was really taking. How learning and experience might—or even could—function without fixed reference to time.

“Yeah, always one for a frontal assault, Tarnval.” Pelmarag grimaced, apparently at something only he could see. “And he talked a pretty fight, too. Pretty enough to get the support he needed. So, he had about three dozen of us at his back, some storm-callers of reputation among the company. All set to take back Hannais M’hen the Cursed, turn back the clocks, undo all the harm the Black Folk wrought here. We unleashed the talons of the sun through the aspect storm before we deployed, clearing a path. We came storming through in their wake. And you know what? We ended up over a thousand miles southwest of here, up to our waists in seawater on the beach at some shit-hole little imperial port. All because some fucking idiot human moved the marker.”

Not sure if he was supposed to laugh or not, Ringil made a noncommittal noise. Pelmarag’s mouth twisted again with the memory.