The Steel Remains

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.” Seethlaw nodded at Ringil. “Gil, you come with me. There’s something you need to see.”

CHAPTER 28

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, multileveled, 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 belowground, 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 farther 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 to 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 gray 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.