The Steel Remains

When it was done, they gathered what dry fuel they could find and built a pyre, then seeded it with some of the new oily wax cakes the levy carried for starting campfires. Archeth lit the pile and they all stood in silence for the time it took to catch. At Ringil’s insistence, they pitched a camp down by the creek and waited for the pyre to burn down. Archeth found tasks to keep her men busy, but still the acrid smell drifted through the winter trees and found them, and men stopped what they were doing and swallowed hard or spat when they caught the scent.

Later that afternoon, Archeth missed Ringil and, following a not particularly inspired hunch, tracked him back to the pyre. By then, it had burned down to embers and bone fragments and ash. He stood in front of it in rigid silence, but when her foot cracked a rotten tree branch behind him, he whipped about with inhuman speed.

That was when she saw it for the first time—the thing in his eyes that still chilled her now.

“Always something worse,” he’d murmured when she moved closer.

“Perhaps they don’t just fall down like men, perhaps they are men. Or they were once.”

She stood beside him and watched the ashes smoke. She put a hand on his arm, and he turned to look at her, and for just a moment it was as if she was a total stranger touching him.

Then, abruptly, he smiled, and it was the Ringil she remembered.

“Do you think they’ll be back?” she asked him.

He was quiet for a while, so quiet she thought he hadn’t heard. She was about to ask again when he spoke.

“I don’t know. Maybe we scared them away, yeah.”

“We can stop them,” she quoted his own words back at him. “We can send them back to the gray places to think again about taking this world.”

The smile came back, faint and crooked. “Yeah. What idiot said that? Sounds kind of pompous, doesn’t it?”

“Even idiots get it right sometimes.”

“Yeah.” But she could see that somewhere inside he didn’t really believe it enough to dwell on. He turned instead and gestured at the great black buried spike of the Kiriath weapon. “Anyway, look at that fucking thing. It murdered an entire city, and turned what was left into swamp. If that won’t scare you off, what will?”

“Scares me,” she agreed.

It did, but not for the reasons she let him assume.

When they finally found the place—and even with the scavenger guides and Ringil’s help, it took longer than you’d expect—most of the humans in the party could not see the black iron spike any better than the Aldrain bridge that led to it. She didn’t know whether that was the dwenda’s doing, some cloaking glamour to keep the scavengers away, or if it was something her own people had done when they built and unleashed the weapon in the first place. She saw it clearly enough, and so did Ringil. Some others could manage it for a few seconds at a time, if they stayed and stared and squinted for long enough, which most did not care to do. The majority claimed to see only an impenetrable mass of dead mangrove, a tangle of poisonous-colored vegetation, or simply an empty space that every instinct screamed at them not to approach.

“This is an evil place,” she heard one grizzled levy corporal mutter.

That was one way to look at it, and another helpful corollary was that the evil came from the dwenda presence here, either the once-long-ago mythical city or the more recent incursion. But Archeth could not help, could not stop herself from wondering, if that sensation of evil came from the weapon itself; if there was not some smoldering remnant of its awful power still buried at the tip and if that was what came rising from the surrounding swamp like some ancient phantom in black rotting robes.

She had for so long been confident of Kiriath civilization, of a moral superiority that lifted her and her whole people above the brutal morass of the human world. Now she thought back to some of Grashgal’s and her father’s more brooding moments, their less intelligible meditations on the past and the essence of who they were, and she wondered if they had lived with this knowledge, of weapons to murder entire cities, and had hidden it from her, out of shame.

These fucking humans, Archidi, Grashgal had told her, and shuddered. If we stay, they’re going to drag us into every squalid fucking skirmish and border dispute their short-term greed and fear can invent. They’re going to turn us into something we never used to be.