The Steel Remains

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.

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.”

Out of the corner of one eye, Ringil almost thought he saw the corpse shake its lowered head in sanguine and slightly weary denial.

“Right.” He ignored the outstretched hand, gestured at the blanket laid out by the wall and the other old woman sitting on it. “I’m curious, madam. Could you read me my future?”

“Oh yes, my lord. For no more than . . .” Her eyes flickered about. “Seven . . . florins, I shall cast the scrying bones for you.”

“Seven florins, eh?” It wasn’t quite daylight robbery.

The woman lifted one grubby, sunburned arm so her shawl fell back from it. She touched a long vein in her wrist. “The blood that flows here belongs to the marsh clans at Ushirin, the children of Nimineth and Yolar. I am not a cheap spell-chanter from the stalls at Strov.”

“You’re certainly not cheap, no.”

It was water off a duck’s back, no impediment at all to the fortuneteller’s pitch now it was rolling. As he watched, she freed her other arm from the wrap of the shawl and crossed her wrists in front of her, palms cupped upward. “I trace my family line back eighty-six generations, undiluted, to those among the People who mated with the Aldrain. I have the eye. The shape of things to come opens before me, it is no more mystery than the shape of that which has already been.”

“Hmm. Pity you didn’t throw the bones for your son-in-law then, isn’t it?” Ringil nodded up at the corpse. “He could have used a little insight into the shape of things to come, don’t you think?”

It brought the woman up short. Her eyes narrowed, and he saw the hate come up in them. No surprises there, he was almost pleased to see it. Beneath their garish, played-for-the-crowd affectations of fey, the true marsh dwellers had a thin spine of pride that was mostly extinct in the rest of the Naom clans. They lived outside the city in more senses than the merely physical, and that brought its own detachment. There was a marked lack of deference in their manner when confronted with the trappings of wealth or political power. It was the one quality that Ringil could find to admire amid what was otherwise a fairly grubby and brutal cultural hangover from Naom’s pre-urban past. Like most kids, he’d dreamed often enough, smarting from a tanning Gingren or one of his tutors had given him, of running away to live out on the marsh with the dwellers. Often enough, he’d seen the faint flickering lanterns of their encampments out across the plain, had felt the distance and escape under open sky that they promised, just like any other kid.

Nice image. But the reality was altogether too backbreaking, damp, and smelly to seriously entertain.

And fucking freezing in winter.

The fortune-teller dropped her crossed wrists abruptly. Her arms hung at her sides, her shawl fell back and covered her hands. Her eyes nailed his. Nothing of her moved but her lips as she spoke.

“I’ll tell you what,” she said softly. “I’ll tell you what I see, and at no charge. You know much of war, you carry its spirit stabbed deep inside you, just as he up there has the steel within him. Just as deeply buried, just as hard and unyielding to all the softer things you are and want and own to. And just as bitter in its wounding. You think you’ll be free of it one day; you carry it as if the wound will someday heal. But for you, just as for him, there will be no healing.”

“Wow.” Ringil reached up left-handed and tapped the pommel of the Ravensfriend with his fingers. “Nice guesses. I’m sorry, Granny. It’s still no sale.”

The old woman’s voice rose slightly. “Mark me. A fight is coming, a battle of powers you have not yet seen. A battle that will unmake you, that will tear you apart. A dark lord will rise, his coming is in the wind off the marsh.”

“Yeah. I lost a pocketknife a couple of weeks ago. I don’t suppose you’d know where that is?”

She bared teeth at him.

“Among the dead,” she said savagely. “Forgotten.”

“Right.” He made her a brief bow, began turning away. “Well, I have to be going.”

“You have killed children,” she said to his retreating back. “Do not think that will heal, either.”

He stopped dead.

Once again, his vision seemed to burn out and be replaced. He stood in the courtyard again, amid a thin crowd of rubberneckers at Jelim Dasnel’s dying. The viewing stand had been taken down, the cage hoisted high. The stains on the stonework below were drying.

Day two.

It had taken that long for him to get out from under the house arrest. Ishil’s decision. When Gingren finally brought him home on the first day of the execution, pale and trembling, vomit-stained, Ishil had taken one look at her son and snapped. She sent Ringil to his room with icy aplomb, and as soon as he was gone she turned on her husband like a storm. The whole house heard her bawling him out. It was the only time Ringil could remember that she’d truly unleashed her anger at Gingren, and though he was not there to see the results, the lack of marks on his mother’s face the next day suggested Gingren had withered in the blast. In the aftermath, the servants crept about the place, and the orders stood in no uncertain terms—Ringil was not to leave the house before the end of the week. Jelim had been a husky boy, and it was well known that Kaad’s executioners could, on request, draw out the suffering of an impaled criminal for a good three or four days, if the victim was strong.

Ringil got out at dawn, out of his bedroom window, along fingertip ledges of stone to the corner of the house, and then over the roof to the stables. He went wrapped in a nondescript brown cloak that didn’t show what it was worth, squeezed through the hole in the fence, and fled toward the eastern gate.

When he got there, Jelim was still conscious.

And children were throwing stones.

It wasn’t unheard of, wasn’t even uncommon. If your aim was good and you had a decent-sized stone, you could jolt the condemned man on his spike and make him scream. In the absence of the Watch, enterprising souls among the urchins had been known to bring a supply of rocks and sell them for pennies from a tray.

The first child Ringil noticed was about eight—fresh-faced and grinning, hefting his stone as he stepped forward and cocked his arm. Comrades of a similar age offered jeering advice. Numb and dizzy, Ringil failed to grasp what was happening until the missile flew, and clanged off one of the cage bars.

Jelim made a girlish, shrilling noise. Ringil thought he heard the raw edge of the word please submerged in the agony.

“Oi, you kids,” someone shouted. “Pack that in.”

Laughter, some of it adult.

“Yeah, fuck off, Granddad,” said the fresh-faced boy, and squared up for another throw. His arm came back.

Ringil killed him.

It happened so fast no one, Ringil himself least of all, realized what he was doing. He grabbed the raised arm at the elbow, locked his hand into the boy’s neck, and wrenched. The boy screamed, but not loud enough to drown out the hollow, meaty sound as his shoulder joint snapped.

It was not enough.

Ringil bore him struggling to the ground and smashed his face into the paving. Blood on the dung-strewn stone, and a wet mewling. He thought the kid was still alive when he dragged the head up the first and second times, thought he heard him still wailing, but on the third impact he went abruptly silent. And by the fourth and fifth, it was definitely all over.

He kept on pounding.

Thin, high screaming in his ears like a steam kettle left on the stove.

By the time they dragged him off, the kid’s features were pulp, barely recognizable as human. It was only then, as they hauled Ringil bodily away, thrashing and snarling and lunging out at the openmouthed terror of the other urchins, that he registered the high-pitched shriek in his ears for what it was—his own voice, like nails scraping at the doors of madness.

You have killed children.

He shook it off. Lizardshit and safe guesses, Gil, just like the rest of it. The war is furniture—anyone able-bodied your age or older was in it. A man with a blade on his back and a warrior stance, a man with the distance in the eyes that he knew he had. A shrewd fortune-teller could read the implications of it all, just the way you’d read a path through the marsh.

He walked away.

At his back, he thought he heard her cursing him.

HE WAS ALMOST BACK TO THE GLADES WHEN HE REMEMBERED THE last time he’d seen that pocketknife.

He’d put it in a pocket of his leather jerkin in Gallows Water, the night of the corpsemites. The jerkin he wore out to the graveyard and lost there in the fight.

Left there among the dead.