The Steel Remains

“Oh come off it, Shal.” Ringil shook his head. “Tell me you’re not that naïve. I’m looking for a considered opinion here, not something I can get out of any gibbering idiot down at Strov.”

“That’s what I’m giving you, Gil. A considered opinion. Outside of oral legend and a few runic scribbles on standing stones along the west coast, we don’t have anything but the Indirath M’nal chronicle to tell us what the Aldrain were really like. It’s the only reputable source. Everything else the Kiriath wrote on the subject draws on it. And the Indirath M’nal says, among other things, that the dwenda could command water and stone and wood to life.”

“Yeah, and I knew Majak herders back in the day who thought the Kiriath were all fire-blackened demons.” Ringil cranked up an arm, made a jabbering mouth with his hand. “Rejected from the Depths of Hell to walk the Earth in Eternal Damnation. Blab-blab-blab. Kind of shit gets made up every day by people too stupid to look for the realities. You should have heard the boatman who brought me up here from the Glades. Fire in the northern sky, lights in the marshes, a black dog heard barking through the night. Doesn’t occur to anyone to wonder how exactly you can tell it’s a black dog just from the fucking bark it makes.”

Shalak cocked his head. He frowned. “What is this, Gil? What are you so angry about?”

It brought him up short. He stared at the neatly swept floor of the little shop and raised an eyebrow at the strain in his own just-silenced voice.

“What’s wrong, Gil?”

He shook his head. Sighed. “Doesn’t matter. It’s nothing. Late night, too much carousing, you know me. I’m sorry. Go on, you were saying.”

“You were saying. That people are too stupid to look for the realities and they hide in superstition instead. And that’s true enough, but you’re missing the point. You’re talking about humans, and ignorant humans at that. The scribes who wrote the Indirath M’nal weren’t either. They were the cream of Kiriath culture, highly educated and already well traveled in places most of us have a hard time imagining. And the dwenda scared those guys, that’s the truth, it’s there in the way the texts are written. Clear as the face on a harbor-end whore.”

Ringil thought back to the Kiriath he’d known; Grashgal, Naranash, Flaradnam, Kalanak, and all the others, names gone blurred with the years. He thought of the impassive aura of command they’d carried into the war with the Scaled Folk, the methodical savagery with which they fought. It was a mask, Archeth insisted to him once, part of the courtly gravitas that informed Kiriath culture from its roots; but if she was right, it was a mask that never came off, not even when Naranash bled out on the beach at Rajal, grinning and leaking blood through his teeth while Ringil crouched uselessly beside him.

Looks like you’ll have to do the rest without me, eh. Are we winning, lad?

Ringil glanced about—the Yhelteth flank, crumpling and tearing like cheap armor under repeated blows as the reptile advance slammed into them, the crisscross panic of fleeing soldiery from the shattered lines and the screams of those broken or burned or ripped apart all along the beach, the landing barges fleeing back across the bight, evacuating those lucky enough to make the shallows . . .

Yeah, he told Naranash. We’re winning. Looks like Flaradnam held the breakwater after all. We’re driving them back.

The Kiriath knight spat up blood. That’s good. He’s a good lad, ’Nam, he’ll follow through. Shame I’m going to miss that party. He coughed throatily for a moment. You keep hold of that sword, you hear? Best friend you’ll ever have. Friend to ravens, remember that. Make sure—