The Steel Remains

A few days after that, the family herd got divided up—as his foreign drinking companion had probably known it would be. As the second youngest—and thus second to last in line—of five sons, Egar found himself the proud owner of about a dozen mangy beasts from the trailing end of the herd. The Yhelteth bodyguard’s words floated back through his mind with sudden appeal. Fighting, fucking, getting paid. Work for men who didn’t mind getting in a scrap, famously skilled whores. Versus a dozen mangy buffalo and getting pushed around by his brothers. It didn’t feel like making a decision at all. Egar stayed with tradition as far as selling out his share in the herd to an elder sibling went, but then, instead of hiring on as a paid herdsman, he gathered his purse, his lance, and a few clothes, bought a new horse, and rode south for Yhelteth, alone.

Yhelteth!

Far from being a haunt of degenerates and women wrapped head-to-foot in sheets, the imperial city turned out to be paradise on earth. Egar’s drinking companion had been right on the money. The Empire was arming for one of its habitual forays into the trading territory of the Trelayne League, and blades for hire were in high demand. Better yet, Egar’s broad frame, fair hair, and pale blue eyes apparently made him all but irresistible to the women of this dark, fine-boned race. And the steppe nomads—for so he came to think of himself in time—had a reputation in Yhelteth that wasn’t much inferior to their own opinion of themselves back home. They were thought pretty much by everyone to be ferocious warriors, phenomenal carousers, and potent, if unsubtle, lovers. In six months, Egar earned more coin, drank and ate more rich food, and woke up in more strange, perfumed beds than he would have believed possible even in his wildest adolescent fantasies. And he hadn’t even seen a battle up to this point, let alone taken part in one. The bloodshed didn’t start until—

Snuffling sounds and a shout yanked him from his memories. He blinked and looked around. Out on the eastern point of the herd, it looked like the animals were proving fractious and Runi was having problems. Egar put his mood away, cupped callused hands to his mouth.

“The bull,” he bellowed in exasperation. How many times did he have to tell the lad, the herd followed its leaders. Dominate the bulls and you had the rest. “Leave the fucking cows alone and get that bu—”

“’Ware runners!”

Klarn’s shout was shrill, the age-old terror of the steppe herdsman named in a panic-stricken cry from the other flank. Egar’s head jerked around and he saw Klarn’s arm outflung to the east. Sighting along the pointer, eyes narrowed, he spotted what had spooked Runi’s side of the herd. Tall, pale figures, half a dozen or more of them, skimming as it seemed through the chest-high steppe grass.

Long runners.

Runi saw them, too, and drew himself up crossways to cover the herd. But by now his mount had snuffed the runners, too, and would not hold. It skittered back and forth, fighting the rein, terrified whinnies clearly audible on the wind.

No, not like that.

The warning yelped in Egar’s mind, closely followed by the knowledge that there was no time to shout it, and just as much point. Runi was barely sixteen, and the steppe ghouls hadn’t troubled the Skaranak seriously for over a decade. The closest the lad had ever been to a living runner were the stories old Poltar told around the campfire, and maybe the odd carcass dragged into camp to impress. He had no knowledge of what Egar had learned in blood before Runi was born. You can’t fight the steppe ghouls standing still.

Klarn, older and wiser, had seen Runi’s error and was spurring his own far from willing mount around the dark mass of buffalo, shouting. He had his bow off his back, was reaching for shafts.

He’d be there too late.

Egar knew that much, the same way he knew when steppe brush was dry enough to burn. The runners were less than five hundred paces out from the herd, ground they could cover in less time than it takes a man to piss. Klarn would be late, the horses would not hold, Runi would come off and die there in the grass.

The Dragonbane cursed, unshipped his staff lance, and kicked his Yhelteth-bred warhorse into a charge.

He was almost there when the first of the runners reached Runi, so he saw what was done. The lead ghoul passed Runi’s shrieking horse, pivoted on one powerful backward-hinging leg, lashed out with the other. Runi tried to spin with the horse panicking beneath him, made one hopeless thrust with his lance—and then talons like scythe blades clouted him backward out of the saddle. Egar saw him reel to his feet, stumbling, and two more of the runners fell on him. A long, wrenching scream floated up from the grass.