The Steel Remains

Now, along the harbor wall and beach line, the Kiriath fortifications were smashed through in half a dozen places, smooth glassy ramparts showing gouges whose exposed edges were jagged and rainbow-colored in the early-afternoon sun. Whatever had done the damage hadn’t stopped there—beyond each breach, the path of destruction tore into what lay behind with a totality Archeth hadn’t seen since the war. Stone structures had been reduced to stumped ruins; wooden buildings were simply gone, only charred ash and fragments to signal they had ever existed at all. The harbor waters were spined with truncated, listing masts from vessels that had gone straight to the bottom. Rubble from a toppled lighthouse lay along the wharf. The whole place looked as if it had been swiped by some reptile god’s massive clawed hand.

The dead numbered in the hundreds.

She might have guessed that much from what she saw through the glass, but by then guessing was unnecessary. On the landward slopes of the ridge, they’d come upon a tangled exodus of townspeople and beaten soldiery, commanded, if that was the word, by one of the few remaining officers from the Khangset marine garrison. Shaken and wincing, the young lieutenant had given her his tight-lipped account of the raid. Unearthly shrieking from out to sea, balls of living blue fire, and ghost figures stalking the smoke-filled streets, slaughtering all in their path with weapons made of glimmering light. Nothing worked, he told her numbly. I saw our bowmen put shafts into them at fifty feet, full draw. Steel-tipped fletch, at that range, it should go right through a man, full armor, the works. It was like the arrows just fucking dissolved or something. When they got twenty feet off our barricade, I led a charge. It was like fighting in a nightmare. Felt like you were moving underwater, and they were fast, they were so fucking fast . . .

He stared off into the memory of it like someone three times his age.

What’s your name? Archeth asked him gently.

Galt. Still staring emptily away. Parnan Galt, Peacock Company, Fiftieth Imperial Marines, Seventy-third Levy.

Seventy-third. Like the messenger who’d brought the news to Yhelteth, he would have been a boy when the war ended. In all probability, he’d never seen combat outside standard anti-piracy policing and the odd bit of riot control. Few regular troops after the Sixty-sixth had. Archeth pressed a hand on his shoulder, rose, and left him sitting there with his memories. She didn’t ask him to come on with them to the town.

She detailed a Throne Eternal sergeant and his squad to take charge of the refugee column where it was, then pressed on with the rest of the company, skeptical voices in her head warring with a creeping sense that something really was badly wrong. That the young lieutenant and the original messenger actually had both been witness to something new and not easily explained away. That their terrified accounts were not just the babble of men who’d never seen battle in all its filth-caked finery.

No? The skeptic in ascendancy now. Remember your first battle, do you? Majak berserk-skirmishers tearing through the lines at Baldaran. Howling across the field, panic in the ranks. Grass slicked down like a pimp’s hair with the blood. You went down that first time, grabbed at Arashtal’s arm and found it severed in your grasp. You screamed but no one heard, you moved like sludge. Didn’t that feel like a nightmare?

And ghost figures? Glimmering unknown weapons? Dissolving arrows?

Subjective impression. Night-fight terrors. The archers freaked out like everybody else, shot wide or fucked up on the draw.

Hmm.

And now, whatever the raiders had or hadn’t been, Khangset lay below her, gashed and torn and smoking like a freshly disemboweled belly on some chilly northern battleground.