The Steel Remains

“You do well to fear me, whore,” he said thickly, pushing the door closed with his back. “Because I’m going to hurt you, just the way you deserve to be hurt.”

On the stairs below, Ajana winced as the first cries floated down to her, and then hurried away to where she wouldn’t have to hear them.

BY THE TIME POLTAR FORCED HIS WAY INTO THE GIRL, HE WAS PANTING from his efforts and the palms of his hands stung from the slaps he’d delivered. He seized the pulleys and worked them, moving both Y-frame and its load down to where he could gloat over the rapidly bruising flesh. The girl’s initial screams for help had changed to more intimate pleas when she realized that no one was coming to rescue her from this honored customer—but she still uttered one more little shriek as he stabbed inside her. He came almost immediately, the pent-up pressure gushing out of him before he had completed a dozen thrusts. His hands, which had been clenched around the girl’s breasts, relaxed and he sagged forward. A string of spittle drooled out of him and onto her flesh.

“Oh, Urann,” he breathed, wiping his mouth. “Oh Ye Gods.”

The sudden pain was as intense as it was incomprehensible. It felt as if his prick had been clamped in a swordsmith’s vise and someone was tightening the screw. He yelped and tried to pull away from the girl, but that part of his anatomy would not go with him. He looked down at himself in confusion and what he saw in the uncertain light brought a high, womanish scream to his lips. The girl’s sex was gone, the flesh between her thighs replaced by a clenched fist whose fingers he could clearly see pulping his shriveling member.

“Don’t go so soon,” said a voice from the girl’s lips.

He looked up and saw that her eyes were open again, that now the kohl and face-paint mask of arousal had smoldered to genuine life. The eyes hooded and looked at him seductively, and then, as he watched, the girl’s neck lifted sinuously from the frame against which it lay and lifted the head toward him. He leaned as far away as he could but it came after him like the head of a snake, little crunching and popping sounds emanating from the vertebrae as they stretched. The muscles in the girl’s face writhed in the flickering light of the candles, as if whatever was using her had not recently worn human flesh.

“You called upon us,” the voice that was not a young girl’s said ironically. “To what purpose?”

“Uh-uh-Urann?” the shaman managed, trembling like a man with a high fever.

“Not I.” The face glided fractionally nearer, attempting a smile. “But close. I believe you know me as Kelgris.”

Even in the extremity of his terror and pain, Poltar had a moment to be puzzled. Kelgris, Mistress of First Blood and the Falcon, belonged to the mewling rituals of the Voronak, was supplicated by young lovers, pregnant women, and the odd, wizened female herbalist. Among the Skaranak, she’d long been ushered into obscurity by the warrior rituals. Her name cropped up as a curse used by small children and the butt of various lewd jokes about the Majak afterlife, but beyond that . . .

The girl’s face hissed at him, very much like the serpent it appeared to think it was.

“Beyond that is a level of intelligence, oh Poltar of the dozen mighty strokes, that your kind will need millennia to assemble. What is rather more important here is that you have asked for the intercession of the Dwellers. You begged for us in your prayers and your dreams, you cut the throats of small animals for us at every opportunity—and drank the blood—you burned pots full of that rather overstated incense you seem to believe gets our attention. You wanted the Dwellers, well now you’re going to get them, and they won’t be the playmates you envisaged, of that you may lie back and rest assured.” The thing inside the girl mimicked the words of Ajana an hour earlier with evident relish. “I bring a message from my brother Hoiran, the one you call Urann. That message is wait and watch.”

The shaman dropped one hand to the burning pain between his legs. “Will Urann revenge himself on the Dragonbane?” he gritted. “Will I be vindicated?”

“That,” said Kelgris sweetly, “depends upon your conduct. If you behave as is fitting in, uhm, a Wayfarer of the Sky Road, you may make some headway. Displease us and I shall make a plaything of your soul in the ice hell beyond the world. Or something. As for this—” The fist at the juncture of the girl’s thighs unbent its index finger without loosening the vise-like hold it had on Poltar’s prick. The finger flicked bruisingly at his fright-shriveled scrotum. “This might conceivably amuse my brother on a bad day, but me it does not amuse. A holy man must be chaste if he is to channel his energy where and when it is most needed. Chaste. Do you remember the meaning of that word?”