The Steel Remains

“I don’t know,” he said carefully. “You spend any time that far north, you get to see some strange shit in the sky. You should get yourself up there sometime. And anyway, here we are talking about the Aldrain as ghost warriors. So you know, maybe there’s something in it.”

“Ringil, I really don’t think you can stack a bunch of shamanistic gibbering up against the gathered writings of the Kiriath’s finest minds and expect it to make a pile the same height.”

“All right. So you tell me—how did these finest minds among the Kiriath beat the Aldrain?”

Shalak shrugged. “With machinery, it seems. The way the Kiriath did most things. There are a lot of references to—”

Outside in the street, someone started shouting. Something thumped audibly against the wall. Shalak flinched, perhaps with the old memories, and went swiftly to one of the shop’s grimy windows. He peered out for a moment, then relaxed.

“It’s just Darby,” he said. “Another one of his episodes, looks like.”

“Darby?” Ringil got up and drifted toward the window, ducking the wind chimes. “What’s he, a neighbor of yours?”

“Thankfully not.” Shalak shifted slightly to give Ringil space at his side, and nodded at the scene on the other side of the glass. “Look.”

In the early-evening sunlight outside, the crowds had parted and drawn back, become a silhouetted whole, a curtain closing in a broad oval of cobbled street. In the center of this impromptu arena, a solitary figure stood isolated. His clothing was obviously ragged beneath a longish, dirty blue coat that looked somehow familiar, and he brandished some kind of crude cudgel in a two-handed ax grip. At his feet, a pair of elegantly attired forms rolled about on the cobbles, clutching at themselves where blows had obviously been delivered.

“Darby,” Shalak repeated, as if that were explanation enough.

“And the others?”

The shopkeeper pulled a face. “No idea. Clerks-at-law by their coats, they’re probably down from the courts at Lim Cross, sessions’ll be turning out about now. Darby doesn’t like lawyers much.”

That much was evident. Darby loomed over the two men he’d put on the ground, lips peeled back off his teeth, eyes staring. His hair was a tangled gray mess, visibly greasy from lack of washing, and he had a beard down to his chest to match. He was saying something to the men, but you couldn’t hear it through the window glass.

For all of that, the weapon in his hands was absolutely steady.

The sinking sun caught on an epaulet buckle, and inside Ringil’s krinzanz-tender head, familiarity leapt into recognition. He swore softly to himself.

And then the Watch arrived.

Six men strong, they forced their way through the curtaining crowd of spectators with shoulders and well-judged jolts from the ends of their day-clubs. Darby watched them come. They spilled out into the cleared space in a loose group, saw the cudgel, and maybe recognized the coat the way Ringil just had. They glanced back and forth at one another. The stunned men at Darby’s feet lay where they were, still prone, dazed in the flooding sunlight, half aware at best of what was going on. No one said anything. Then the watchmen began to spread out, sliding warily around the edge of the cleared space like coffee in the rim of a tipped saucer, skirting their target, looking to surround and overwhelm.

Darby saw it and grinned in his beard.

Ringil was already on his way out the door.

The first attacker came up on Darby from the rear, just off his left shoulder. It was an obvious move, not hard for him to anticipate. Those in front couldn’t, after all, conduct the fight across the living bodies of fallen worthy citizens. Plus, the long shadows cast on the cobbles telegraphed the attack. The watchman came in swinging his club down, and Darby wasn’t there anymore. He’d stepped back and aside, an odd, unlooked-for elegance in the move, almost like dance. The watchman was caught, arms up with the club, falling forward into his move. Darby swung hard, with the cudgel held horizontal, into the man’s unprotected belly and lower ribs. The impact sounded like an ax in wood. The watchman made a choked shriek.

The others rushed in as best they could.