The Steel Remains

And the reptile peon was on Ringil, long shriek and the rasping, scaled impact against his cuirass. He staggered and went over backward in the sand. The long spiked tail lashed around, the claws dug in, and Ringil screamed back in the creature’s face at the pain, smashed the pommel of the Ravensfriend into its eye. The peon shrilled and its fangs snapped shut inches from his throat. He got his left forearm in the way, guarding, dropped the Ravensfriend and stabbed two stiffened fingers from his freed right hand into the creature’s eye, down past the socket and into the brain behind. The peon thrashed and shrieked and snapped, and he rolled it over in the fountaining storm of sand it was making with its tail. Pinned it there with his body weight while his fingers burrowed and shoved in up to the hilt. The eyelid flapped up and down on his knuckles like a trapped moth’s wing scraping in the cup of a boy’s closed palms. The tail lashed about, damp sand came up in shovel loads, swiped him across the face, got gritty into his mouth as he sucked breath and snarled and fought and then, finally, finally, with a high whining noise in its throat and a shivering convulsion, the fucking thing died.

And by the time he staggered back to his feet, so had Naranash.

He never knew if in those last moments the Kiriath knight had seen the peon attack, understood what was going on and had drawn his own fading conclusions about the state of the battle. If at the end he’d known that Ringil had lied to him.

But Ringil had never seen him afraid.

“You sure you’re interpreting the texts right?” he asked Shalak. “I mean, maybe the language—”

“I grew up speaking Tethanne as well as Naomic, Gil. My mother made me learn to read it as well. I’ve seen copies of the translations they made of the Indirath M’nal in Yhelteth, I’ve seen the commentaries on it, and I know enough of the High Kir original to follow those commentaries. And I’m telling you, Gil, the day the Kiriathwent up against the Vanishing Folk, they were scared.”

Shalak clasped his hands at waist height and cast his head back a little. Ringil remembered the pose from summer gatherings of the city’s Aldrain enthusiasts that he’d attended in his youth. Everybody huddled together and chattering in early-evening gloom, taking wine in little fake Aldrain goblets in the tiny gardens at the back of the shop. There was a quote coming.

“How should one fight an enemy that is not wholly of this world?” Shal declaimed. “They come to us in ghost form, striking snake-swift out of phantasmal mist, and when we strike back they return to mist and they laugh, low and mocking in the wind. They—”

But now the rest of it was gone, carried away on the cool breeze out of nowhere that blew up Ringil’s neck. He snapped back to the previous night, the krin-skewed walk home from Grace-of-Heaven’s place and swooping laughter past his face like a caress. He felt the same shiver creep up his neck again and found he’d raised a hand involuntarily to touch his cheek where the laughter had seemed to touch . . .

“Pretty conclusive, wouldn’t you say?”

Shalak, finished now with his quotations, looking at him expectantly. Ringil blinked.

“Uh—yeah.” He scrambled to cover for his disconnection. “I guess. Uhm, that bit about not wholly of this world. They say the Aldrain came from the band originally, don’t they? And that’s where they went back to. You think that’s possible?”

“With the Aldrain, anything’s possible. But likely?” Shalak shook his head. “You talk to any decent astronomer, here or in the Empire, they’ll tell you the band is made up of a million different moving particles, all catching the sun’s rays. That’s why it shines, it’s like dust motes in a sunbeam. It’s just not a solid arch the way it looks. Hard to see how anything could live in the middle of something like that.”

Ringil brooded. “The Majak believe that the band is a pathway leading to the Sky Home of the honorable dead. A ghost road.”

“Yes, but they’re savages.”

Ringil remembered Egar’s scarred and tattooed features, slightly surprised at the sudden flare of affection it triggered. It was how the steppe nomad would cheerfully have described himself—I ain’t fucking civilized, Gil, he’d said one campfire night on the march to Hanliahg. That’s not something I’m ever going to need—but still Shalak’s automatic sneer went home like a barb. He held down a spurt of unreasonably defensive anger.