The Steel Remains

Inside the blockhouse, screams.

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ARCHETH FOUGHT IN A BLUR OF KNIFE BLADES AND KRIN.

Wraithslayer was gone from her hand, buried up to the hilt in a dwenda’s back, and no time to withdraw it before she must move, dance on and duck and swing back in. Laughing Girl lay gleaming dully in a corner, thrown in error, wasted. She wielded Bandgleam and Falling Angel, right hand and left, and she still had Quarterless in the sheath at her back. There was blood on her face from a long-sword slash, a shrill Kiriath battle shriek in her throat, and bodies all around.

“Indamaninarmal!” The High Kir syllables poured from her mouth in venomous rolling torrent. “My father’s house! Indamaninarmal!”

The dwenda had welled up inside the blockhouse like burning blue ghosts, exactly the way Ringil had warned they might. She was in the tower room when it happened, heard panicked yelling downstairs and went down the steps at a run. On the first turn, she met a dwenda coming up, all blue fire and vague, darker motion at the core. She cannoned into the thing, passed through it, distinctly felt the tugging it made, but came out the other side unharmed. No time, no fucking time. She tumbled down the remaining stairs barely on her feet and erupted into the main room of the blockhouse. Chaos flapped across her vision; two of the Throne Eternal already down, dead or dying on the flagstones, a third with his back to the wall, defending himself just barely with a long-hafted ax. No helmet, he must have taken it off earlier in the night—his face was bloodied and grim with knowledge of his chances. There were three dwenda in the room, driving him along the wall, spreading to bracket him. In another second, the angle would be too wide and he’d be dead. Archeth yelled and sprang. Two of the figures whipped around to face the new sound, black-garbed bodies and blank oval heads swathed in flickering blue light, long-swords raised toward her as if in admonishment. But she thought—yeah, that’s right, the Black Folk are here after all, motherfuckers—they were taken aback.

She had Laughing Girl in her right hand.

She loosed the knife at the closest of the figures well ahead of conscious decision. The dwenda ducked and the knife spun off the gleaming curve of the helmet. She cursed, drew Wraithslayer on her way across the room, matched it with Falling Angel. A long-sword licked out, she was no longer there. Almost no longer there—she felt the heated wire of the stroke paint a line over one temple as she ducked. She let the shock drive her, whipped about behind the dwenda and drove Wraithslayer in hard at kidney height. The Kiriath steel went through whatever the dwenda was wearing; the creature shrilled and bucked, staggered away from her. She had to let go of the knife, leave it where it was. She filled her hand with Bandgleam.

The second dwenda rushed her, swinging his sword. She flinched aside, caught the weapon at its tip with Falling Angel’s blade, and looped it away from her. Bandgleam flashed and probed, but the dwenda was quicker and swayed back out of the way. In the corner, the last remaining Throne Eternal was nearly done, wounded in one leg and fighting to stay on his feet. Blood poured down his thigh from the join in his armor. His attacker pressed in, gave him no space or respite. She dare not risk another throw; it wasn’t clear the Kiriath blades would penetrate the dwenda’s garb without a hand on the hilt to drive them in.

“Hold on,” she screamed, and leapt back just in time to avoid another long-sword thrust from her opponent.

The move took her toward the door to the tower, and she knew it was an error as soon as she jumped. She knew—the krinzanz knew—the dwenda she’d met on the stairs was there, back down having found no one to slaughter up there, blade drawn and—

She dropped to the floor, heard the sword hiss past where she’d been, rolled desperately to get some space. A fallen chair blocked her, the dwenda from the tower came after her. Blank, smooth helmet inclined, long-sword held two-handed before him, poised and looking for the moment. It was like being stalked by something mechanical, as if there was nothing under the helm but air and a raw spirit of malice.

“Dwenda!”

It was almost a shout of joy.

It was Elith.

Up the stairs from the basement cells, half awake by the look of it, a tranced, wondering expression on her face, dressed only in a gray silk nightgown Archeth had given her. A few hours before, she’d been sleeping peacefully beneath a blanket beside Sherin, the two women huddled, perhaps unconsciously, together for warmth. Now she moved like a sleepwalker, and her voice had the tones of someone meeting her true love after years of absence.

“Dwenda!”