The Steel Remains

“Yeah, I’ll miss—” He stumbled on it, old shards of caution, even here. “Our conversations, too.”

No you won’t.

The realization lit up like a crumpled paper tossed into the fire. Bright lick of flame and a twisting, sparkling away that ached briefly, then was gone. You’re not going to miss your nights of chess and chat with Bashka here, Gil, and you know it. And he did know it, knew that in the upriver districts of Trelayne, company twice as sophisticated as the schoolmaster’s could be had at pretty much any coffeehouse you cared to step into. Knew also that, despite Bashka’s kindness and the few topics of common interest they had, the man was not and never really had been his friend, not in any sense that mattered.

It hit him then, for the first time really, through the stubborn ache in his head, that he really was going back. And not just back to bladework—that was an old quickening, already touched, like checking coin in your purse, and then tamped away again in the pulse of his blood. That wasn’t it. More than that, he was going back to the brawling, bargaining human sprawl of Trelayne and all it meant. Back into the heated womb of his youth, back to the hothouse dilettante climate that had bred and then sickened him. Back to a part of himself he’d thought long rooted out and burned in the charnel days of the war.

Guess not, Gil.

He made his farewells to the schoolmaster, clowned his way out with a wink at the bedroom door, got away as fast as he decently could.

He hauled himself into the carriage, sank into a corner in silence. The eager coachman cracked his horses into motion. They pulled away, through the quiet streets, past the town limits and low wooden watchtowers, up the high road along the foothills below the mountains and Gallows Gap, westward toward the forests and the Naom plain and the sea beyond. Westward to where Trelayne waited for him in shimmering splendor on the shore, sucking at him, now the image was planted in his mind, even from here.

Ringil stared out of the window at the passing scenery.

“So how was he?” Ishil asked at last. “Your teacher friend?”

“Hungover and broke from whoring, why do you ask?”

Ishil sighed with elaborate disdain and turned her face pointedly to stare out of the other side of the carriage. The coach bumped and rattled along. The ladies-in-waiting smirked and glanced and talked among themselves about clothes.

The new knowledge sat beside him like a corpse no one else could see.

He was going back to what he used to be, and the worst of it was that he couldn’t make himself regret it at all.

In fact, now the whole thing was in motion, he could hardly wait.

CHAPTER 4

Bring me Archeth.

The summons went out from the throne room like a circular ripple from the flung stone of the Emperor’s command. Courtiers heard and, each competing for favor, gave hurried orders to their attendants, who sped in turn through the labyrinthine palace in search of the Lady kir-Archeth. The word passed from attendants to servants, and from servants to slaves, as the entire pyramid of authority turned its attention to this sudden diversion from the day-to-day drudgery of palace life. Serpent rumor coiled outward alongside the bare instruction, placing the tone in the Emperor’s voice somewhere between irritation and anger, a vocal spectrum that everyone at court, including even quite senior invigilators, had learned in recent years to treat with acute alarm. Best for all concerned, then, that Archeth present herself at speed.

Unfortunately, as was so often the case these days, the Lady Archeth was nowhere to be found. Since the Shaktur expedition, it was whispered, she had grown moody and taciturn and ever more unpredictable in situations where considered diplomacy really should have been the order of the day. She was given to prowling the corridors of the palace and the streets of the city at odd hours, or disappearing into the eastern desert alone for weeks on end, equipped, they muttered, with rations of food and water that verged on the suicidal. In the daily round at the palace, she was equally insensitive to lethal risk; she neglected her duties and heard rebukes with an impassivity that verged on insolence. Her days at court, it was said, were numbered.

Bring me Archeth.