The Steel Remains

CHAPTER 10

Robed and hooded astride an undistinguished horse, Poltar the shaman reached the gates of Ishlin-ichan as night was falling. A pair of burly Ishlinak sentries ambled up to meet him, amiably enough but at lance-point nonetheless. Their captain came out of the flicker-lit brazier warmth of the guard hut, grinning and blowing on his hands.

“Twelve,” he said, yawning.

“The levy is seven,” Poltar said stiffly.

“Well, nighttime rates.” The captain stamped his feet, coughed and spat. “Gets cold at night, you know. It’s twelve. You coming in or not?”

Ordinarily, the shaman would have used his status to demand free entry, or failing that at least beat the price back down with some arcane threats. But right now he preferred to give up the handful of coins, stomach the extortion, and stay anonymous. He had business in the town not normally approved of in holy men, and besides, with the stories of his shaming at the Dragonbane’s hands spreading far and wide, he wasn’t sure exactly what status he now had, even this far from the Skaranak tents.

He would not be laughed at, whatever the cost.

The levy paid, he passed under the wooden wall and clopped slowly through the narrow streets of the settlement, cursing Egar ceaselessly under his breath and ducking to avoid the low-level washing lines strung from house to house. Ishlin-ichan, though the name might rather grandiosely mean “city of the Ishlinak,” could only by a generous stretch of the imagination lay claim to the title. It was less a town than a sprawling winter camp with walls, a bright idea based on milder climate and a couple of advantageous meanders in the River Janarat. About a century ago, encouraged by these factors and the burgeoning possibilities of trade with the south, a hard core of Ishlinak ancestors started replacing their tents with more static constructions. In time they gave up the nomad life altogether. Why chase your livelihood across the freezing steppe, they must have reasoned, when it may quite possibly come directly to your campfires and offer itself for slaughter.

In time, they were proved right. The focal point offered by Ishlin-ichan brought merchants out from both the Trelayne League and the Empire, eager for trade and delighted not to have to live under canvas while they were about it. Mirroring the attraction from the other side of the market, the herdsmen from the other Majak clans started bringing their produce to Ishlin-ichan in preference to other, closer but less lucrative temporary venues across the steppe. Secondary industries sprang up, catering to the influx. The essentials at first: bakeries, butchers, whorehouses, and taverns. Then stables, established horse traders, and fixed smithies with decent-sized furnaces, finally supplying high-quality steel. The young men of the Majak came to Ishlin-ichan to outfit themselves and to swagger in the streets. Recruiting officers from the south, once forced to ride the steppes from band to nomadic band and track down promising fighters by word of mouth, now found it infinitely easier to maintain an office in the fledgling town and wait for the recruits to come to them. So the cabins of Ishlin-ichan became stone and mud-brick houses, sometimes even rising more than a single story high. The streets began to be cobbled—a technique taught to the Ishlinak by unemployed Trelayne architects seeking refuge from another economic downturn in the League—and as neighboring clans began to show an unhealthy interest in the rapidly accumulating wealth, the whole settlement was hastily walled and fortified. Finally, the diplomats arrived from the League and the Empire, setting a seal upon the place. They tended to regard Ishlin-ichan as a hardship posting, to be endured in the climb toward more rewarding appointments elsewhere, but while they were there they pushed for anything that might ease their discomfort a little. Plumbing improved; public order patrols were instituted. The more important thoroughfares were torchlit by night, often for their entire length.

The house Poltar wanted was not on one of these streets. It stood in the seclusion and gloom of a darkened side alley by design rather than economic necessity. The alley ran alongside a section of the city wall and Madame Ajana’s rose two stories above the parapet, leaning there as if tired by the effort of hoisting itself up to see out across the plain. The height and position were also deliberate—from a mile out on the steppe, you could make out the red glowing lanterns of the whorehouse, beckoning.

In the alley, the brothel was no more subtly appointed. The windows were brightly lit within, and those of Ajana’s girls not working were paid to sit in plain view displaying their wares. Incense and softly thudding music smoked out into the street, catching at the throats and ears of those whose eyes were not already captivated by the spread-legged, arch-backed postures of the girls in the windows. A luxurious velour drape curtained the open doors, meant to imitate the drop flap of a yurt, and above hung a wooden sign announcing it as AJANA’S PLACE, a name that in the Majak tongue had a crude and fairly obvious double meaning.

Poltar climbed down off his horse, slipped coins—more fucking coins—to the impassive attendants at the door, and let them lead it away. He stepped through into the dimly lit chamber beyond and put back his hood. He was recognized by some of the girls, but none of them smiled at him the way he had sometimes noted that they did with other customers. He gathered in their flinching glances with satisfaction; this was as it should be. He wasn’t some drunken herdsman, easily muzzled with a fat tit and coaxed to a bleating climax in a mother substitute’s arms. Not some child-hearted brute, content to smother himself in a welter of female flesh.

He was Poltar Wolfeye, Chief Shaman to the Skaranak. He was a man of power, and he had long ago in his initiation broken the bonds that women wove over men.

Ajana came toward him with her painted smile.

“Shaman, you honor us again so soon. What’s your pleasure? Will you have the upper room?”

He nodded a curt assent.

“Then I’ll have a girl prepared. Come and join me while you wait. A glass of wine? Some sweetmeats?” She snapped her fingers and an effeminate tray bearer came hurrying. Poltar averted his face in distaste. Ajana muttered something in the man’s ear as he set down the tray, and he withdrew, nodding. Poltar settled onto the cushioned couch and accepted the goblet Ajana proffered. The vague, restless anger that had consumed him since his confrontation with the Dragonbane began to solidify into something more tangible in the pit of his stomach. He felt a slight shiver of anticipation.

“The new girls are very eager,” said the madam, keenly attuned to her customer’s moods and massaging where it would do most good. “Hot young sluts from the League, looking for a big Majak prick to suck.”

The shaman shifted impatiently. “Just make sure she’s not drugged like the last one. I want her to feel what I’m doing.”

“Yes, yes, that was a most lamentable error.” Ajana offered him a plate of spiced cake slices. Her voice purred, soft and cozy as wine from the flask neck. “But it won’t be repeated. Ajana’s Place draws your pleasure from you exactly as you would most wish to give it up. All preparations are being made to this single end, of that you may lie back and rest assured.”

It took half an hour to make the preparations, by which time the shaman was lightly drunk and swollen almost to bursting with Ajana’s subtle verbal ministrations. The madam led him up the three flights of stairs with ritual slowness, pausing on each landing so that he could regain his breath and witness through half-drawn curtains scenes of orgiastic abandon that would fuel his arousal. Finally, at the door of the upper room, Ajana took a key from her voluminous robes and handed it to him.

“The lock is oiled and ready,” she said. “Enter and enjoy.”

She left him facing the door. He paused a moment, then inserted the key, twisted, and let himself into the small perfumed space beyond.

Incense candles burned in the corners of the room, giving off more smoke than light. The shadows on the walls flickered like impatient observers as his entry moved the flames. One tiny window showed faint starlight over the plain beyond the city. In the center of the room, the girl was roped to an inverted Y-frame that hung suspended on a pulley system, her arms bound together above her head, her legs spread along the arms of the Y. Her limbs gleamed with recent oiling, and the mass of dark hair around her face was still damp. She was made up in the southern fashion, eyelids heavy with kohl and cheeks painted with Yhelteth symbols, though she was fairly clearly of Trelayne stock.

Beneath it all she was very young and, he saw, afraid.

His grunt of satisfaction seemed to emanate from his stomach.

“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?”

The hand squeezed tighter still. Poltar felt skin split, and then the sudden wetness of blood.

“Yes,” he shrieked. “Yes, chaste.”

“You will not spill your seed in this fashion again without my permission. Do I make myself clear?”

“Yes, yes, yes . . .” Now he was weeping from the pain. The hand released as abruptly as it had clenched, and the shaman reeled backward, stumbling and collapsing to the floor.

“Then abase yourself,” said the voice, still sweetly reasonable. “Abase yourself and, uhm, rejoice, that the gods have returned to you.”

The shaman flung himself flat before the staked body on the frame. Contact with the rough floor stung his mutilated prick, but he stayed immobile, quivering and gibbering and praying, until voices and an urgent hammering on the door of the little room brought him to his senses.

He looked up, wild-eyed and shaking, and saw that Kelgris had gone, leaving nothing but stillness in her wake. The room was dark, the candles snuffed out. Light from the window made a gaunt silhouette of the Y-frame, where the body of the girl was still tied, neck lolling broken and stretched and twisted to one side, eyes wide open in mute accusation.

Kelgris’s smile was still pressed on her dead mouth.