The Steel Remains

It was all fading now, he realized, 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 made no obvious sense, tantalizing 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.

“It’s like it’s all turning into a dream I had,” he said numbly.

The dwenda gave him a small, sad smile. He leaned forward a little.

“I’ve heard it said that dreams are the only way your kind can find their way into the gray places. And that only the insane or the inhumanly strong of will can stay.”

“I—”

Someone bumped heavily into Ringil from behind, jolted loose what he wanted say before he could frame it properly. The thought spilled away from him like coins across the street and down a grate, little glints of gleaming meaning, gone.

He snapped around angrily on the bench.

“Why the fuck don’t you watch where you’re going?”

“Oops, sorry, citizen, sorry. Look, I’ll gladly make good any spillage if you . . . Gil? Fucking Ringil?”

Egar the Dragonbane.

Out of the lamplight and tavern hubbub like a figure from legend emerging from battlefield mist. Broad and tall and tangled looking, hair a wild knotted mass with little iron talismanic ornaments hanging in it. One leather-sheathed blade of his staff lance jutted up over his shoulder; there was a short-handled ax matched with a broad-bladed dirk at his belt. He smelled of marsh and cold, and had obviously just come through the door. His scarred and bearded face split into a huge grin. He clapped hands on Ringil’s shoulders, dragged him up off the bench with no more effort than a father picking up his infant son.

“Urann’s fucking balls, let me get a look at you,” he bellowed. “What the fuck are you doing in this shit-pile dump? You’re the fucking face from the past I’m supposed to recognize and save? You’re the one that cloaked fuck was on about?”

And then everything came apart.

For Ringil it was like stepping suddenly back into some aspect of the marches. Time stopped working, slowed to a pace that was like moving in mud. His perceptions stretched and smeared; he saw what was happening as if through some other, entirely more attenuated set of senses.

Seethlaw, slamming to his feet, eyes wide.

Egar, warrior’s senses suddenly awake to the tension, hand falling without fuss to the broad dirk at his hip.

Heads turning at neighboring tables.

Ashgrin, seated at Seethlaw’s side, turning, reaching down for something.

A faint shimmer on the air. A darkening.

“I think you are mistaken, sir,” Seethlaw said, and raised a hand a few inches off the table at his side, fingers spread loosely to make a spider. A ripple seemed to run through the fingers, as if they were suddenly boneless. “This is not your friend.”

Egar snorted. “Listen, old man, I’d know this guy any . . .”

He frowned.

“A mistake,” repeated the dwenda caressingly. “Easily made.”

“You must be very tired,” agreed Ashgrin.

Egar yawned cavernously. “Yeah, ain’t that the fucking truth. Funny, I could have sworn—”

Ringil, for no clear reason he could later name, screamed and swept an arm savagely across the table. Tavern-brawl tactics, tugged out from some dark pocket of response he rarely went to these days. The lamp in the center went over, oil spilled out. Flame caught and sprinted a line among the platters and tumbled tankards. He came to his feet, heels of both palms under the trestle, upended it at Seethlaw.

“It is me, Eg,” he was yelling. “It fucking is me. Get the girl.”

Later, tears would squeeze into his eyes as he recalled the Majak’s reaction. Egar’s lips peeled off a snarl, he surged back in at Ringil’s side. The dirk came out, broad dark glint in the dancing light from the flames now loose in the straw on the floor. He brandished it at the stumbling dwenda.

“Right you are, Gil,” he roared. “Who wants this right up their fucking arse? Fucking magicking old cunts.”