The Steel Remains

As they held Jelim in place over the lowered spike, as they forced him down and his thrashing abruptly stopped and his eyes flew open, Ringil held out. As the long, gut-deep shriek of denial ripped out of him, as the executioner below the cage began to crank the mechanism and the barbed steel spike rose inch by cog-toothed inch and Jelim shuddered in the grasp of the men who restrained him, as the shrieks began to peel out of him at intervals broken by inhuman sounds like someone trying to inhale thick mud, as Jelim rose slowly to his feet as if at some kind of obscene attention before the crowd, as his shudders went on in rolling sequence, as blood and shit and piss began to drip below and the cage . . .

Ringil came to on the boards of the platform, throat raw with his own vomit, one of the Eskiath men-at-arms slapping his face. They’d cleared a space for him, the rest of the assembled nobility probably not wanting to get his sick on their finery. But no one was looking down at him in disgust.

No one was looking at him at all.

All eyes were pinned on the cage, and the source of the noises that came from within it.

Gingren towered above Ringil, arms folded and crushed to his chest, and held his head up as if his neck were stiff. He did not look down at his son, even when Ringil gagged and the man-at-arms stuck a gloved finger in his throat and twisted his face roughly to the side so he wouldn’t choke.

The noises Jelim was making came to find him on the wind. He passed out all over again.

“Oi! What’s the fucking . . .” The peasant voice died away on the curse, came back conciliatory. “Oh, my apologies your worthiness. Didn’t see you there.”

Ringil shivered back to the present. He’d jammed to a halt in the thoroughfare, was blocking passage. He found he’d closed his eyes without realizing it. He shook his head and stepped sideways, out of the flow of traffic and into the shadow of the cages. The drover who’d sworn at him hurried past behind a brace of donkeys, eyes on the ground, not wanting trouble. Ringil ignored him, forced himself to look upward instead.

The man in the cage hadn’t been dead all that long. There were still no outward signs of decay, and the birds had not yet taken his eyes—something that Ringil knew could sometimes happen even before the last vestiges of life guttered out in the victim. In fact, there was something unpleasantly life-like about this corpse. Aside from the head, now rolled bonelessly sideways and forward on the neck, the man still stood erect to the demand of the steel spike that held him up. At a glance, and but for the stained ankle-length cream-colored execution robe, he might almost have been a soldier on duty caught rolling his neck around to loosen midwatch stiffness. Even the spike, where it emerged through blood-drenched cloth at the man’s right shoulder, might almost have been the pommel of a slung broadsword.

Ringil edged unwillingly a few steps closer so he could see up through the curving bars and into the face. The sun blocked out behind the head, gave it a soft halo. He felt himself grimace as he met the frozen eyes.

“Fuck are you looking at?”

He staggered back, rigid with shock. The corpse lifted its face to follow, kept the sun behind its head, the dead eyes on him. The lips drew back from blackened teeth. He saw a dry shred of tongue flicker between them.

“Yeah, you, pretty boy. I’m talking to you. Pretty fucking brave back in the comfort of your own home last night, weren’t you. So now what?”

Ringil locked his teeth behind lips clamped shut. He breathed hard through his nose. He thought he caught the faintest sickly sweet hint of the charnel house.

“Who are you?”

The corpse grinned. “Don’t you know?”

Ringil’s hand slid up toward his neck and the pommel of the Ravensfriend. The corpse’s grin widened to snarling, inhuman proportions.

“Come off it, Gil. This is a krinzanz flashback. You know that.”

And gone.

The corpse stood unmoving on the spike, head hanging once more, silent. Autumn sunlight spilled down over its shoulder, through the cage, and laid the shadows of bars across Ringil’s face. He drew a deep, shuddering breath and let his sword hand drop. He glanced around surreptitiously and saw no one paying him any attention.

Well, almost no one.

“Oh, he was my daughter’s husband, my lord.” A shawl-wrapped marsh dweller woman had appeared beside him, one of the ones with the fortune-telling gig in the courtyard corner. She carried with her an odor of salt and damp, and her hand was already out for coin. Ringil reckoned her no older than Ishil, but life out on the marsh had turned her into a crone. The characteristic dweller delicacy of her features was not yet completely worn down, but the hand she held out was already knobbed and wrinkled with age, and her voice was cracked and coarse. “Woe is upon us, he left nine hungry mouths to feed, eight little ones and my own widowed daughter, no help for us but—”

“What was his name?”

“His name, uhm, was Ferdin.”