The Steel Remains

“Okay, we won’t stop them.” Archeth nodded along, playing reasonable. “Fair enough. But tell me anyway, just so I know. What are they? What did you summon up?”

Elith’s mouth twisted, hesitant. She seemed to twitch at the end of a rope Archeth couldn’t see.

And then.

“Dwenda,” she enunciated, like someone teaching the word.

And sat back and grinned, a trembling, staring, broken-toothed rictus that Archeth knew she’d need krinzanz to get out of her head that night.

CHAPTER 13

The next morning, he went out to the eastern gate. It probably wasn’t a good idea, but he hadn’t been having many of those since he got back anyway.

The gate was one of the oldest in the city, built a pair of centuries ago along with the great causeway that led to it, back before Trelayne had sprawled as far as the sea, and so serving at the time as the main entrance for visitors. In a blunt, old-fashioned way, it was very beautiful; a fair portion of the city’s rapidly burgeoning trade wealth had once gone to finance the import of glinting, southern-quarried stone and to pay the finest masons in the region to shape and dress it. Twinned arches rose twenty feet over the heads of those entering and leaving Trelayne by the gate, mirror-image ends to a long paved courtyard with crenellated walls and statues of guardian marsh spirits at the corners. When the sun shone on it, the stonework winked and gleamed as if embedded with newly minted gold coins. By night, bandlight turned the currency cool and silver, but the effect was the same. The whole thing was widely acknowledged as one of the architectural wonders of the world.

Pity they have to use it as a torture chamber.

Yeah, well. Got to impress the visitors.

There was grim truth behind the sneer. No one entering Trelayne for the first time by the eastern gate would be left in any doubt about the attitude of the city toward lawbreakers.

He knew as soon as he passed under the inner gateway that there had been no executions recently—there would have been a crowd otherwise. Instead, livestock, carts, and pedestrians all went back and forth unobstructed along the worn center section of the courtyard. Stalls were set up along the side walls; grimy children ran about touting handfuls of cut fruit or sweetmeats. A couple of marsh dwellers had set up a brightly colored fortune-telling blanket in one corner. Elsewhere they were juggling knives or acting out tales from local legend. There was a pressing odor of dung and rancid cooking oil.

Could be worse, Gil.

The cages hung overhead in the sunlight, raised on massive bracketed cranes from the courtyard walls, five to a side. They were onion-shaped and seemed quite delicate at a distance, narrow steel bars billowing down and out from the suspension stalk at the top, curling in at the base and meeting in the central crankspace, where the bleak mechanism of the impaling spike rose back into the body of the cage. As he drew closer, Ringil saw he hadn’t been quite right about the lack of an execution. One of the cages still held the remnants of a human form.

Abruptly his vision scorched across, like muslin drapes on fire. He couldn’t see for the past in his eyes. The memory came on like the glare of a sudden, desert sun.

Jelim, screaming and thrashing as they carried him into the cage in his execution robe. Condemned criminals were sometimes drugged before sentence was carried out, as a mercy or because someone somewhere had put enough coin in the right hands. But not for this crime. Not when an example was to be made.

And Gingren’s hand, clamped shut on his wrist. The mail-and-leather press of his men-at-arms around them both, in case someone in the avid crowd might have heard whispers, might make an unwanted connection with the pale Eskiath youth there on the nobles’ viewing platform and the doomed boy in the cage.

You’ll watch this, my lad. You’ll stand here and you’ll watch every last fucking moment of it, if I have to pinion you myself.

Ringil hadn’t needed pinioning. Fortified with self-loathing, with the reserves of sardonic contempt he’d absorbed in his time spent around Milacar, he’d gone to the gate tight-lipped and filled with a strange, queasy energy, as if walking to his own execution as well as Jelim’s. He’d known at some deep, cold level that he would cope.

He was wrong. Utterly.