The Steel Remains

Ringil’s eyes glittered as he stared the Throne Eternal captain down.

“I watched men who’d given everything come back home to Trelayne and see their women and children sold into slavery to pay debts they didn’t know they’d incurred because they’d been away fighting at the time. I saw those slaves shipped south to feed your fucking Empire’s brothels and factories and noble homes, and I saw other men who’d given nothing in the war get rich off that trade and the sacrifice of those men and women and children. And I will not watch it happen again.”

Abruptly, he was on his feet. He drew a deep, shuddering breath. His voice grew low and grating, almost another man’s altogether.

“Seethlaw doesn’t know the Empire, but I do. If we run south, and if we make it, then Jhiral will send his massed levies, and Seethlaw will bring on the dwenda, and behind him will come whatever cobbled-together private armies this fuckwit cabal has managed to assemble in the north, and it will start all over again. And I will not fucking permit that, not again. We stop them here. It ends here, and if we die here, ending it, I for one won’t be too fucking bothered. You will either stand with me, or all your talk of honor and duty and necessary death is a posturing courtier’s lie. We stop them here, together. If I see anyone try to leave between now and tonight, I will hamstring their horse and break their fucking legs and I will leave them out in the street for the dwenda. There will be no more fucking discussion, there will be no more talk of tactical withdrawal. We stop them here!”

He drew another hard breath. He stared around at them all. His voice dropped, grew suddenly quiet again, and matter-of-fact.

“We stop them here.”

He walked out. Slammed the door open, left it gaping on their silence. They heard his boots clatter down the stairs, sound fading.

Egar looked around the faces at the table and shrugged.

“I’m with the faggot,” he said.

CHAPTER 31

The dwenda came, finally, with blue fire and terrible, unhuman force, in the small, cold hours before dawn.

AMONG THOSE WHO SURVIVED THE ENCOUNTER, THERE WOULD BE A lot of speculation over whether it was planned that way. Whether the dwenda knew enough about humans to understand that this was the best time to take their prey, the lowest ebb of the human spirit. Or whether perhaps they simply knew that a long, wakeful, but uneventful night of waiting would wear any enemy down.

Or perhaps they were waiting themselves. Gathering themselves for the assault in the safety of the gray places, or attending to some millennia-old ritual that must be observed there before battle was joined. Seethlaw certainly implied—according to Ringil’s rather overwrought and patchy testimony, anyway—that ritual was a matter of huge cultural significance among the Aldrain. Blood sacrifice was apparently required before the invasion of Ennishmin could be launched. Perhaps then, in this smaller matter also, there were solemn specifics to be honored before the slaughter could begin.

The speculation would go back and forth without end, turn and turn again, snapping at its own tail for lack of solid evidence one way or the other. Perhaps this, perhaps that. Humans, short-lived and locked out of the gray places for life, do not do well with uncertainty. If they cannot have what might, what could, what should, and perhaps most awful of all what should have been, then they will dream it up instead, imagine it into being in whatever twisted or beautiful form suits, and then drive their fellows to their knees in chains by the thousand and million to pretend in chorus that it is so. The Kiriath might have saved them from this, eventually, with time, had perhaps even tried to do so once or twice already, but they came too subtly, terribly damaged into this world to begin with, and in the end they were driven away again. And so men went on hammering with their bloodied foreheads at the limits of their certainties, like insane prisoners condemned to a lifetime in a cell whose door they have locked themselves.

You’ve got to laugh, Ringil would probably have said.

No, you’ve got to unlock the fucking door, Archeth might have replied. But of course, by then the key was long lost.