The Steel Remains

CHAPTER 8

Khangset was still smoldering.

Archeth sat in the saddle on the ridge above the town, spyglass forgotten in her hands, staring down toward the harbor and the damage. Her mount shifted beneath her, uneasy at the damp acrid stink of ashes that came and went on the buffeting wind. The Throne Eternal detachment spread out along the ridge around her, elaborately impassive and professional, befitting reputation. But Archeth had already heard a couple of bitten-back oaths in the breeze as they saw what lay below. She couldn’t really blame them. Despite everything she’d been warned to expect, she was having a hard time believing it herself.

She knew Khangset somewhat, had been there on several occasions with the Kiriath engineering corps during the war. The Scaled Folk had come ashore all along this coast in the early years of the fighting. They killed and burned everything they found with an efficiency that was almost human, and invariably they retreated beneath the waves again before the Empire’s legions could respond. Akal, always a realist in tactical matters, swallowed his pride and called for Kiriath help. Grashgal sent the engineers.

Now, along the harbor wall and beach line, the Kiriath fortifications were smashed through in half a dozen places, smooth glassy ramparts showing gouges whose exposed edges were jagged and rainbow-colored in the early-afternoon sun. Whatever had done the damage hadn’t stopped there—beyond each breach, the path of destruction tore into what lay behind with a totality Archeth hadn’t seen since the war. Stone structures had been reduced to stumped ruins; wooden buildings were simply gone, only charred ash and fragments to signal they had ever existed at all. The harbor waters were spined with truncated, listing masts from vessels that had gone straight to the bottom. Rubble from a toppled lighthouse lay along the wharf. The whole place looked as if it had been swiped by some reptile god’s massive clawed hand.

The dead numbered in the hundreds.

She might have guessed that much from what she saw through the glass, but by then guessing was unnecessary. On the landward slopes of the ridge, they’d come upon a tangled exodus of townspeople and beaten soldiery, commanded, if that was the word, by one of the few remaining officers from the Khangset marine garrison. Shaken and wincing, the young lieutenant had given her his tight-lipped account of the raid. Unearthly shrieking from out to sea, balls of living blue fire, and ghost figures stalking the smoke-filled streets, slaughtering all in their path with weapons made of glimmering light. Nothing worked, he told her numbly. I saw our bowmen put shafts into them at fifty feet, full draw. Steel-tipped fletch, at that range, it should go right through a man, full armor, the works. It was like the arrows just fucking dissolved or something. When they got twenty feet off our barricade, I led a charge. It was like fighting in a nightmare. Felt like you were moving underwater, and they were fast, they were so fucking fast . . .

He stared off into the memory of it like someone three times his age.

What’s your name? Archeth asked him gently.

Galt. Still staring emptily away. Parnan Galt, Peacock Company, Fiftieth Imperial Marines, Seventy-third Levy.

Seventy-third. Like the messenger who’d brought the news to Yhelteth, he would have been a boy when the war ended. In all probability, he’d never seen combat outside standard anti-piracy policing and the odd bit of riot control. Few regular troops after the Sixty-sixth had. Archeth pressed a hand on his shoulder, rose, and left him sitting there with his memories. She didn’t ask him to come on with them to the town.

She detailed a Throne Eternal sergeant and his squad to take charge of the refugee column where it was, then pressed on with the rest of the company, skeptical voices in her head warring with a creeping sense that something really was badly wrong. That the young lieutenant and the original messenger actually had both been witness to something new and not easily explained away. That their terrified accounts were not just the babble of men who’d never seen battle in all its filth-caked finery.

No? The skeptic in ascendancy now. Remember your first battle, do you? Majak berserk-skirmishers tearing through the lines at Baldaran. Howling across the field, panic in the ranks. Grass slicked down like a pimp’s hair with the blood. You went down that first time, grabbed at Arashtal’s arm and found it severed in your grasp. You screamed but no one heard, you moved like sludge. Didn’t that feel like a nightmare?

And ghost figures? Glimmering unknown weapons? Dissolving arrows?

Subjective impression. Night-fight terrors. The archers freaked out like everybody else, shot wide or fucked up on the draw.

Hmm.

And now, whatever the raiders had or hadn’t been, Khangset lay below her, gashed and torn and smoking like a freshly disemboweled belly on some chilly northern battleground.

“Sacred fucking Mother of the Revelation.” Mahmal Shanta, distracted as he struggled to control his prancing horse at her side. It was unclear if he was cursing the animal or the destruction below. “What the hell happened here?”

“I don’t know,” Archeth said thoughtfully. “Doesn’t look good, does it?”

Shanta glowered and struggled to sit his mount with a modicum of dignity. He was useless in the saddle, always had been. His age-knobbed hands clamped the reins like a rope he was trying to climb.

“Looks like a fucking replay of Demlarashan, is what it looks like,” he growled.

Archeth shook her head. “Dragons didn’t do this. There’s too much left.”

“You know anything other than dragonfire that would go through Kiriath moldings that way? God damn this fucking horse.”

Archeth reached across and laid a soothing hand on the jittery animal’s neck. Murmured and clucked to it the way her father had taught her. The horse settled a little, partway convinced that here at least was someone who knew what was going on and could control it.

Be nice if that were true, she caught herself thinking, perhaps more wryly than current circumstances merited. Failing that, be nice if humans were as easy to fool as horses.

Hey, Archidi, last time I checked, they were.

Oh yeah, that old warrior disconnect. It came on in full force now, humor bleak and black while homes smolder around you and the unarmed afflicted weep for what’s lost so you don’t have to. Pull on the cold, clinking mail of your professional detachment, Archeth Indamaninarmal, inhabit it until it starts to feel warm and accustomed, and in time you’ll forget you’re wearing it at all. You’ll only notice when it works, when it stops you feeling the steel-edged bite of something that might otherwise have gotten through and done you some damage. And then you’ll just grin and shiver and shake off the blow, like warriors do.

It was a part of herself she’d never quite been able to hate.

Which was perhaps fortunate because lately, that very same amused detachment was proving handy at court.

She glanced back over her shoulder, down the ridge to where Pashla Menkarak, Most Holy and Revered Invigilator first class for the Revelation Divine (Throne Eternal attached), sat wrapped in the black-and-gold cloak of his office and perched in his saddle like a vulture. His head was tipped at an angle to beat the sun’s rays, and he was apparently staring directly back up the slope at her.

“Motherfuck,” she muttered.

Shanta saw where she was looking. “You’d better watch what you’re saying around him,” he said softly. “From what I’ve seen so far, this one’s keen.”

“Yeah,” Archeth sneered. “Well, they all start out that way. Give him a couple of months at court, then we’ll see. Be rolling around on a bed of tits and ass getting his dick greased just like all the rest.”

Shanta rolled his eyes at the vulgarity. “Yes, or maybe he’ll remain as immune to court sophistication as you have, Archeth. Ever think of that?”

“Guy like that? He lacks my moral core.”

“Perhaps not. Stories I hear out of the Citadel these days, that’s not the way things are moving. They say it’s a whole new breed coming through the religious colleges now. Hard-line faith.”

“Oh, good.”

Movement down the line. She wheeled her horse about, and the ashen wind blew in her face. Faileh Rakan, captain of the Throne Eternal detachment, was trotting his mount down the rank of his riders toward them. She sighed and put on the mask of command. Shanta sat his horse in expectant silence. Rakan reached Archeth and dismounted for respect. He took sword hilt in his right hand, capped it with his left, and bowed.

“Commander, my men are deployed. We await your orders.”

Archeth nodded.

“Right then,” she said brightly. “I suppose we’d better go down and take a closer look.”

ONCE AMONG THE RUINS, THOUGH, THAT COUNTERFEIT ENTHUSIASM stained through into something that was almost the real thing.

From long acquaintance, she recognized it for the same scavenger urge that fed her expeditions into the desert and, in earlier times, the Kiriath wastes; the same thirst that drove her time and again back to the uncooperative Helmsmen in the few remaining fireships. There was meaning to be gleaned out there, a transcendence of the surface of things that glimmered and beckoned like harbor lights seen through the wrap of foul weather at night. You saw an answer, steered by its beacon, and, briefly, the world seemed that much less pointless. You felt, for just that short time, that you might be getting somewhere.

Tangled in with all of that and gaining force came another, less assured sensation. One she supposed Faileh Rakan and his men were all feeling, clean, upfront, and handily fervent behind their stony Throne Eternal demeanor:

Outrage.

Slow building, incandescent, the mighty and majestic insulted pride of Empire. Rage, that someone had dared, had felt at violent liberty in this time of agreed peace to assail a designated imperial port and do harm to men and women under the Revelation-inspired patronage of his radiance Jhiral Khimran II.

For Archeth, who’d seen rather more than she’d have liked of how the agreed peace had been hammered out, the feeling was fatally tainted. But it hung around anyway, a bit like muscle ache after a long ride or treacle on the edges of a poorly washed baking tray. She knew enough, despite what she’d seen, to rein in her cynicism.

Look:

Yhelteth unites a massive territory in comparison with any of its political competitors, you know. By and large, it treats those living within its borders with a degree of codified respect not popular elsewhere.

I know that.

All right then. It might not be civilized universality the way Grashgal always liked to talk it up, it might not be the future he claimed to see in his dreams. But it’s not a bad functional substitute. Yhelteth at least aspires in that direction.

That much was true: A sort of rough-and-ready inclusiveness prevailed among the imperials, something born in about equal measures out of the religious universalism of the Revelation, an ascetic warrior egalitarianism in the original culture of the nine tribes—now down to seven, yeah, I know, don’t ask—and some shrewdly applied intelligent self-interest. Take up citizenship and the conversion it entailed, send a couple of your sons to the levy when they were of age, pay taxes calculated not to drive you and your family into penury or the mountains and the life of a bandit. Oh, and while you’re at it, steer clear of debt and disease. Chances were—mostly—if you did all that, you’d never starve, never have your home burned down and your children raped before your eyes, never have to wear a slave collar. With luck you might even live to see your grandchildren grow up.

Is that so bad, Grashgal? Is it?

She’d lived her life trying to believe it was not.

This—drifting smoke, and puffs of ash from footfalls, and a charred child’s rib cage crushed under a fallen beam—is not part of the deal. This, we do not fucking permit.

She stood by the cracked and shiny black charcoal angle of the beam, where it met the last remaining upright timber in the roofless house. The sensation surged up in her throat, took her by surprise. The colder, analytical end of her feelings dropped suddenly away, out of easy reach. The ruin rushed her with its silence. Stench from what was left of the bodies in the wreckage around her, uncomfortably familiar despite the years gone past. Ash and less well-defined muck clogged onto her boots to well above the ankle. Her knives were a pointless weight at boot and belt. Smoke came billowing through the wreckage on a change of wind, and stung her in the eyes.

“So there you are.”

Mahmal Shanta stood outside the dwelling, framed in a stone doorway that had somehow escaped the devastation to the wall it was once set in. Off his horse, the engineer seemed to have regained a modicum of good humor. He cocked an eyebrow at the phantom entrance and stepped through, squinted around at the mess and grimaced. She couldn’t tell if he’d spotted the corpses yet or not, but he couldn’t have missed the stench.

“Seen enough?”

She shook her head. “Not enough to make any sense of it.”

“Is that what we’re doing here?” Shanta came closer, peering at her face. “You been crying?”

“It’s the smoke.”

“Right.” He cleared his throat. “Well, since you’re foolhardy enough to actually want an explanation for all this, I thought you might like to know Rakan’s boys have found us a survivor. Maybe we could ask her.”

“A survivor? Here?”

“Yes, here. It seems while everyone else was stampeding out into the surrounding countryside, this one was smart enough to find a hiding place and sit tight in it.” Shanta gestured back out to the street. “They’ve got her down by the harbor, they’re trying to feed her. Apparently, she’s been living off beetles and rainwater for the last four days, hasn’t been out of her hidey-hole since the raid. She’s not what you’d call calm right now.”

“Great.” Archeth looked deliberately around the ruined house one more time. The corner of her gaze caught on the child’s crushed rib cage again, as if each upjutting, snapped-off rib was a barb made expressly for that purpose. “So let’s get the fuck out of here.”

“After you, milady.”

Out in the street, some of the pressure seemed to come off. Late-afternoon sunlight slanted down across the piles of rubble; birds sweetened the air with song. Down the hill, the sea was a burnished, glinting fleece to the horizon. The heat of the day was beginning to ebb.

But the ruin stood at her back like a reproach. She felt like an ungracious guest, walking out on mortified hosts.

Shanta came past her, woke her from the moment and broke her free.

“You coming?” he asked.

Halfway down the road to the harbor with him, she remembered.

“So what was all that about back there? Foolhardy enough to actually want an explanation, what’s that supposed to mean?”

Shanta shrugged. “Oh, you know. We’re not a people that cares much about ultimate causes, are we? Show the flag, roll out the levy. Punish someone so we all feel better, doesn’t much matter who. Remember Vanbyr?”

Archeth stopped and stared at him. “I’m not likely to have forgotten it.”

“Well, there you go then.”

“I’m not here to show the flag and look for scapegoats, Mahmal. This is a fact-finding mission.”

“Is that what Jhiral told you?” The naval engineer pulled a face. “You must have caught him on a good day.”

They stood locked to a halt on the ash-smeared street stones, listening to the echo of Shanta’s words on the breeze, searching each other’s faces for the next step. The silence grew rooted between them. The relationship went back, but they didn’t know each other well enough for this.

“I think,” Archeth said finally, quietly, “that perhaps we’d best both concentrate on doing what we were sent here to do, and let our concerns for our Emperor remain a matter for private thought and prayer.”

Shanta’s lined, hawkish face creased into a well-worn court smile.

“Indeed, milady. Indeed. Not a day goes by that Jhiral Khimran does not feature pointedly in my prayers.” A slight but formal bow from the chest up. “As I am sure is the case for you as well.”

He made no mention of what it was he prayed for on his Emperor’s behalf. Archeth, who didn’t pray at all, made an indeterminate noise of assent in her throat.

And they went on down the ashen thoroughfares together, quiet and a little more hurried now, as if the ambiguity in Shanta’s words stalked after them, nose to the ground and a peeled glimpse of teeth revealed.