The Steel Remains

CHAPTER 23

Waking up felt like riding one of the huge iron navigation buoys in the channel at Yhelteth port. The taste of rust in his mouth, a cold, black watery rushing around him, and a wavering patch of light on the surface of the dark above. He felt a hot twinge through shoulder and chest, wasn’t surprised to feel it but couldn’t quite recall why. Through the jagged glimmer of approaching consciousness, he thought he saw a dark figure waiting for him.

Don’t you fucking get it, Dad. Mumbling through an oddly aching jaw. It’s all a fucking lie, the whole stinking edifice from the marsh up . . .

And awake.

He lay on smooth, cold stone. Limestone drip of water somewhere in the gloom. A pale light danced on raw vaulting rock overhead. The dark figure stood against a dressed stone wall to his left.

“Why did you do it?”

But the voice came from the right. Ringil blinked and propped himself up on one shaky elbow. Pain lanced up from his jaw and through the right side of his head. Memory crashed in on him. The fight—the dwenda—the damage he’d taken. He peered around, saw little beyond the vague loom of overhanging rock and stalactites.

“Do what?” he asked groggily.

Shadows moved on the stone floor where he lay. It was paving, he noticed, dressed to match the wall on his left. He squinted and made out a cross-legged form seated just beyond the fall of light around him. Whoever it was seemed to be staring down into cupped hands.

“Why did you fight for them?” There was a music to the voice, a deep-toned, melodic vibrancy, for all that the words themselves came quietly across the gloom. The language was Naomic, but tinged with archaisms from old Myrlic and a quaint grammatical ornateness. “They’d execute you on a spike for your choice of bed partner, and call it righteousness; they’d watch it done and toast your agony with tankards and songs, and dedicate it to their idiot gods. They’re brutal, moronic, they have the ethical consciousness of apes and the initiative levels of sheep. But you took the field against the reptiles for them nonetheless. Why?”

Ringil sat up with an effort. Tried to speak, coughed instead. Got it under control, finally, managed a weak shrug.

“Dunno,” he croaked. “Everyone was doing it, I just wanted to be popular.”

Arid laughter, echoing in the cavern. But the question still hung there in the silence that followed, and the figure did not move. An answer was required, a real one.

“Okay.” Ringil took his jaw between thumb and forefinger, flexed it and grimaced. He cleared his throat. “I wouldn’t swear to it after all this time. But looking back, I think it was probably the children. I saw a couple of towns hit by their raiding parties early on. You know, the Scaled Folk tend to eat their prisoners. And for children, well, that’s got to be the ultimate nightmare, right? Being eaten. Chained up watching, knowing it’s going to happen to them next.”

“I see. For children.” The seated form cocked its head. The voice stayed soft and silky, but somewhere it held the underlying tensile strength of Kiriath skinmail. “Children who would in all probability grow to be just as ignorant and brutal and destructive as those that spawned them.”

Ringil pressed fingers to the throbbing side of his head. “Yeah, probably. When you put it like that, does seem kind of stupid. So what about you people? You eat your prisoners at all?”

The figure rose smoothly to its feet. Even in the gloom, Ringil could see the physical power and grace the motion implied. The speaker came forward into the light.

For a moment, Ringil forgot to breathe.

Throbbing pain in his jaw and head, the twinges from the sword-tip slash on his shoulder and chest, a messy, soiled feel to his consciousness and clothes, and behind it all a vague, disconnected sense of fear—still, Ringil felt the spurt of nascent lust in the base of his belly. Grace-of-Heaven Milacar’s words spilled back through his head.

He’s beautiful, Gil. That’s what they say. That he’s beautiful beyond words.

Whatever questionable source had carried that word to Milacar, you couldn’t fault their powers of observation.

The dwenda stood over six feet tall, slender almost to boyishness in hips and limbs but with a sudden breadth and power in chest and shoulders that made his upper body look more like a stylized cuirass than anything living. He—you had to assume it was male from the bulge in the loose black breeches and the flat planes of the chest—stood with the same effortless poise that he’d shown getting up. Long, tapering hands hung pale and slightly crooked, as if they remembered a hawkish past life as talons. The nails each gave up a minute rainbow sheen in the light.

The face that topped it all was everything Shalak’s Aldrain enthusiasts could have wished for—bone white, mobile and intelligent, long-lipped, and just fleshy enough in chin and nose to offset the high, cadaverous cheekbones and broad flat forehead. Long black hair hung straight on either side, met the wide shoulders and spilled back over them like dark water. The eyes—

The eyes were pits of pitch, just the way the legends had it, but even in this low light Ringil saw how they flung back the same faint rainbow glimmer as the dwenda’s nails. He had a sudden flush of absolute certainty that in daylight the whole eyeball would blaze like sunrise over the Trell estuary.

The dwenda inclined slightly over him. It was at one and the same time something like a reverence, something like predatory intent.

“Would you like me to eat you?” it asked.

Ringil felt the squirm in his guts again.

Get a fucking grip, Gil. This is your enemy, you nearly killed him last night—

Tonight, still? Some part of him needed, for some reason, to know.

—you might still be able to manage it.

Instead, he managed an ironic clearing of the throat and a manufactured lightness of tone belying the trip-trip that went up along his arms and down into his groin.

“Maybe later. Right now, I’ve got this motherfucker of a headache.”

“Yes.” The head slightly cocked again. Splinters of light danced across the inky eyes. “I apologize for the pain. The damage is slight, and in this place you will heal much faster than you would in your world. But even here, a physical price has to be paid. And it was the only means I had of ending the fight without killing you.”

“Then I suppose I should thank you.”

The dwenda grinned unexpectedly. Teeth. It wasn’t an altogether reassuring sight. “I suppose you should.”

“Thanks.”

The dwenda dropped abruptly into a crouch, faster than Ringil could react, and its hand shot out to cup the side of his face. The long fingers slid up into his hair, tangled in its strands, and tugged his head forward.

“I’m afraid in the end I’m going to want more from you than that, Ringil Eskiath.”

Its lips were cool and firm on his, the subtle pressure split his mouth before he realized he’d wanted to open it, and a slick, flickering tongue met his own. There was the sudden press at his chin of a stubble so soft it was almost like velvet pile. The trickling in his belly flared up like a bonfire. He felt himself hardening.

The dwenda drew back.

“You are not healed yet,” it murmured.

Ringil’s lips peeled off his teeth. “I’m feeling a lot better.”

But the dwenda was back to its feet again, just as rapidly, its grip on him gone, fading to a sense memory; he could still feel the tips of the fingers on his skull, the slip and press of the tongue in his mouth, like a promise of more. The slender figure turned away from him, rather hurriedly, he thought. Like wincing.

“Let me be the judge of that,” it said harshly.

Ringil raised an eyebrow at the change. “Well, it’s your place.”

“Not mine, exactly.” A glance back across one shoulder that he could not read. “But near enough. You’d do well to let me guide you here.”

“Okay.” Ringil got himself upright with rather less grace than his host had shown. He stood at the dwenda’s back, close enough to pick up scent. It wasn’t exactly new territory, he’d been here enough times before and to spare: the last-minute panic of a novice partner not sure what it was he really wanted. He’d learned at Grace-of-Heaven’s knee—so to speak, Gil—the patience and guile of when to force the issue, when to back up and wait.

He waited.

Silence. Long enough for him to notice that the dwenda gave off a faint musk whose constituent parts he could not quite—despite a tantalizing familiarity—pin down.

“Where are we?” he asked. “Under the city?”

“In a manner of speaking.” The dwenda seemed to have regained a little of its previous poise. It drifted away a couple of steps, turned to face him at what it apparently judged a safe distance. “Though it’s not a version of Trelayne you would recognize, I think. In your version, it will take millions of years for the river to lay down the sediment that goes to form this rock.”

“Then did we take the quick paths to get here? Travel through the pressured places under the earth like the Kiriath?”

“No.” A thin smile. “The Black Folk are engineers. They take the long way around to get to everything. Much like humans, in fact. In time you will come to resemble them more than you know.”

“That’s going to upset a few Majak purists I know.”

The dwenda shrugged. “They won’t live to see it. As a culture or as individuals. For that matter, nor will you, the League cities or the Empire.”

“You sound irritatingly superior when you talk like that.” Ringil offered up a smile of his own. “If you don’t mind me saying.”

“Why should I mind? The superiority is evident.”

“So it’s true, then. All the stories they tell, all that Aldrain lore they babble. You are immortal.”

Another shrug. “So far.”

Ringil laughed out loud. He couldn’t help it. “Just like that barking black dog, eh? How the hell would anybody know something like that?”

The echoes flapped at the chamber roof, then chased each other away through the dark. The dwenda frowned. “Black dog?”

“Doesn’t matter. Just something I heard the other day.” Ringil stared around in the gloom, groping after memories of the evenings spent in pointless discussion at Shalak’s place. Speculation run wild amid cheese and wine and easy company. “So, this place, then. This has to be part of the Aldrain marches. The places between, where the constraints of time are not felt. The Ageless Realm.”

“It has been called that, yes. Among other things.”

“And you brought me here with, what? Sorcery?”

“If you like. It might be simpler to say I carried you. When the aspect storm, the maelstrom gate of alternatives, is summoned, it translates everything within its radius. As it wrapped around me, so it brought you as well.”

“Neat trick. You think you can teach it to me?”

“No. You would have to . . . evolve before that became possible.”

Ringil’s eyes fell on the black figure against the wall. He saw now that it was a suit of something like armor, hung a couple of feet up on the stonework in some fashion he couldn’t work out. He moved closer, scrutinizing the smooth oval curves of a helm that showed no external decoration at all, that in fact resembled nothing so much as the head of some sleek sea mammal coming up for air.

“This yours?” he asked.

“Yes.”

Ringil reached up and touched the suit at one hip. The material it was made of felt cool and smooth, more like leather than mail. He imagined it would mold to the wearer like a second skin. And the visor—he could only now make it out—was a simple sweep of glass as black as the rest of the suit, set in the helm with a precision he had only ever seen before in the finest workings of the Kiriath engineers.

He felt the dwenda draw closer behind him. He lifted one slack leg of the armor in his hand, let it swing gently back against the wall.

“You weren’t wearing this when you came for me.”

“No. There wasn’t time.” Ringil thought the voice turned ironic. “Nor much need, in the end.”

It was like a touch, soft at the nape of his neck. He turned about in the dark drip-sounding damp of the air, and found himself eye-to-eye with his companion. This time the bonfire in his belly was instant, a roaring, sheeting heat that rushed upward and licked at the underside of his ribs.

“You got lucky,” Ringil said unsteadily.

The dwenda seemed to move forward, a single seamless step. His bulk crowded at Ringil’s chest. “Did I?”

And Ringil—Ringil couldn’t do anything at all now with the slippery smile that played around his lips like smeared grease, and would not come off. He felt his breathing deepen, his pulse go dripping like hot wax along the insides of his arms and down his thighs. His prick was a hot iron bar pinned up against his stomach by the suddenly constricting cloth of his breeches. The dwenda’s arms lifted to his sides, a gossamer caress of motion that he felt with shivering intensity, for all that the thing’s hands never touched him.

“What time is it?” he asked, thickly.

The question came out of nowhere. He couldn’t fathom a reason for it at all, couldn’t understand it in any way but that it felt like the last flailing of a drowning man.

The dwenda stepped into him again, drenched his face in its shadow. The candle gleam in the eyes, oh ye gods the pressure of a huge iron-hard erection to match his own pressing against his thigh, and now the dwenda’s hands on him.

“It’s no time at all,” the voice told him in a whisper. “I am time here, I am all the time you need.”

And then the cool mouth fastened on his, levered his lips apart once again, lozenges of light and dark seemed to slide across and through him, and then the whole world went over sideways in sparks, like a tabletop candelabra swiped flat amid the laden plates of a feast abandoned in the gloom and waiting for anyone with the inclination to come and plunder.

IF THE DAMP AIR WAS CHILLY, HE DIDN’T NOTICE AS HIS CLOTHES CAME off, as the dwenda’s heated kisses bit their way down his neck and over his exposed chest, as impatient hands tugged down his breeches over boot tops, tore undergarments down to match, as the dwenda knelt and plunged the head of Ringil’s cock into his mouth.

He gasped and flexed at the sudden heat of it, and then as the friction of teeth and tongue set in, he grabbed at the dwenda’s shoulders, sank his fingers into its hair and twisted. A long moan forced its way up out of him, counterpointed by the small grunting noises the dwenda made as it pumped its lips up and down. A cool hand weighed his balls in their sack, and then one long finger split off from the grip and angled up into the whorl of his anus. From somewhere, the dwenda had conjured the slick wetness of spit or something like it onto the fingertip and Ringil felt himself opened and gently impaled with a sly controlling competence that made his heart turn over.

Stable boys in Gallows Water had never been like this.

And then, somehow, the dwenda took him softly to the floor and if the stone was cold under them, Ringil didn’t notice that, either. He heaved up and stared down the length of his body, the tangled breeches and boots still not off, the dark form hunched and coiled over his legs and hips head-down like a feeding beast, and somewhere seemingly distant beyond vision, the delirious timed motions of mouth up and down, of the probing finger twisting in and out. The scent of the dwenda’s body, that maddening mingle of spices and somewhere, the faintest hinted odor of shit in the air from his opened anus. And the mouth and the finger that went on and on, driving him forward, inches at a time, toward the precipice—

And threw him off.

Shuddering, hinging force as he came into the dwenda’s sucking mouth, it stormed through him, it seemed to want to snap his spine. It hooked him up, then flung him back down on the stone, flapping and twitching and—he realized it with sudden, cold shock—laughing and bubbling out the words oh no, no, no, no . . .

It brought the first tears to his eyes he could remember since his youth, since the carnage of his first battlefield aftermath.

When he was done, when he lay there drained and hollowed out, and utterly still, he felt the dwenda unfasten itself from him, glide upward, and straddle his chest. It reached down and took hold of its own swollen cock by the shaft, rubbed the glans roughly against his cheek and across his face. The mingled-spice scent came with it, headily concentrated now. Ringil followed the soft dragging blows of the prick over his features, opened his mouth and made gentle biting motions after it with his lips. The dwenda hunched over him a little more. He thought it smiled in the gloom as it fed the glans into his mouth, but he couldn’t be sure.

He reached up awkwardly past the body on his chest with his hands, found the skin-thin velvet of the shaft, and gently displaced the dwenda’s fingers with his own. He tried to meet the dark, glimmer-touched eyes above his. He sucked and nipped, was about to go to work in earnest when the dwenda said something in a language he had never heard, and then it pulled clear of him.

“But I want—”

Pulled back down his body, perhaps grinning still.

Reached down with both hands and spread his legs, pushed them hard apart and up, hinging and folding them at the knees. Did something with its hands at the juncture between, the soft sound of spitting, and then there was pressure at his sphincter again, but harder now, thicker, more insistent than the finger had been. The dwenda reared up over his spread and hinged legs, working itself into place inch by remorseless inch, jaw working—he saw it in the dim light—talking to him in the same odd cadenced tongue as before. And he was helping, hugging his legs up and out to make way, thrusting up his hips, his own jaw tight on the repetition of yes, yes, yes, yes . . .

And the dwenda fell on him, brought its face down to within inches and grasped his skull with both hands and split his mouth with another kiss. The thrusting built, gathered a hungry, gulping momentum, and with it Ringil felt himself growing rock-hard once more, saw the dwenda feel it, too, saw a glinting grin in the gloom, and knew suddenly beyond question that what the dwenda had said to him was true, there was no time here, there need be none, none that meant anything at all beyond the surrender to this, all this, the thrusting, the pumping, the fucking, clenched jaw yes, oh yes, oh fuck me yes, yes, yes . . .

And the bonfire in them both now, sheeting through them, turning flesh incandescent with sensation and skin unbearably delicate, stretched to breaking—

And lost, to time and all that mattered in other places that were not this and were not here.

Lost.

THIS TIME,RINGIL WOKE TO HAZY DAWN LIGHT THROUGH NARROW windows, and small garden sounds beyond. He lay in silk sheets, balls and body muscles stung to a pleasant ache, the alkaline odor of his own body fluids mingled with something more spiced and nudging at the edge of his awareness, tugging a faint smile onto his lips. He grinned up at the architecture of the window arch, breathed in the garden air. There was a soft and easy familiarity to it all; it felt like a return to youth. He had one long moment of complete peace, too profound to permit the intrusion of conscious thought.

He smiled again, harder, and turned over.

Dawn.

Recollection slammed him upright amid the sheets.

Dawn. Fuck!

And then it was all gone, the peace and the unthinking bliss, taken jaggedly away from him like Jelim, like home, like the victory they all once thought they’d won.

He kicked himself clear of the silk that wrapped him up, cast about on the floor of the chamber for clothes.

Found them tidied and carefully folded on top of a wooden chest under the window instead.

The Ravensfriend propped casually against the wall nearby in its scabbard.

He stood and gaped at it. Outside the windows, birds made stupid, early-morning noises to counterpoint the sudden stillness. It felt, in some aching way, as if he already knew the room he was in.

What the fuck . . . ?

“Thought you’d have to fight your way out, did you?”

He spun about, one hand groping back after the weapon. The dwenda leaned in the arch of an entryway on the other side of the chamber, grinning, dressed. His hair was gathered back from his face, his arms folded over a doublet of black and sapphire-blue weave. His feet were booted in black to match; his breeches were no lighter, and they clung to the lines of his legs before they tucked in. He was not armed.

If you ignored the blank dark eyes, he might almost have been human.

Ringil made himself turn away from the empty gaze. He picked up and started to unfold his clothes.

“I have to go,” he said, not quite firmly.

“No, you don’t.”

Ringil fumbled his way into his shirt. “You don’t understand. I have an appointment. I’m going to be late.”

“Ah, just like the estranged princess of fairy tale.” A whip-crack snapping of fingers behind him, to jog memory that must, Shalak had always argued, stretch back through thousands upon thousands of years. “Now what’s her name? You know, the one who loses track of time at the ball, the one who stays and dances all night, until the night wears thin, as thin as the soles of her shoes and then she finds—”

“You know.” Underwear, breeches. Bending to pull them on, breath held tight. “I could probably do without the fucking fairy-tale jokes right now.”

“All right.” And the voice so suddenly close, the cold-water shock of it on his neck. Right behind him. He spun about and found the dwenda standing two feet away in the light from the window. “Try this. You’re not going anywhere.”

“Try and stop me.”

“I already have. What time do you think it is really?”

Ringil met the Aldrain gaze and he saw the eyes glow, just as he’d known they would, with the rinsed-out rosy tints of the approaching sunrise. He felt the spike in his heart, felt how he sagged as the realization hit. The dwenda nodded.

“Dawn itself, properly speaking, has come and gone while you slept. You are out of time. They waited for you at Brillin Hill Fields a full half hour, as custom apparently dictates these days. Then your second, a man named Darby, stood in for you and was duly killed by your opponent. He gave a good account of himself, it seems, but was simply not well enough versed with a court sword to hold his own.”

Ringil closed his eyes, bit his lip until he tasted blood. Behind his curtained-off vision he saw it, the little gathered knots of men on the open ground down by the fish pools. Gray sketched figures, not enough light yet to color them in. And the two men between, the back-and-forth shunt of the duel. He heard its miserly metallic tones on the cool air, the clink and scrape of the court sword blades. Saw Darby drawn in, wrong-sided, feinted out. Riposte—the grating blade goes home. Bright crimson on the graying pastel palette of a day that Darby now won’t live to see.

How long did it take Iscon Kaad to find the opening? Was Darby sober, had he made that much effort for the man that might have been his commander once?

Ringil opened his eyes. Whatever the dwenda saw there, it didn’t like much. It swayed back a fraction.

“Easy there.”

“You knew. You fucking knew.”

The dwenda nodded. “So did you. But you allowed yourself to forget.”

Ringil wrenched his shirt straight. “You take me back. Back into the Aldrain marches, back before it happens. You—”

“I’m afraid that can’t be done.”

Through clenched teeth now. “You fucking take me back or—”

“Or what?” Abruptly the dwenda’s arms whipped out. A grabbed handful of shirt, Ringil was jerked forward. A flat palm came at him like stone, slapped palm-first into his forehead, and suddenly he was on the floor, arms and legs robbed of anything resembling motive force. He flopped like a landed fish.

The dwenda stood over him, arms folded.

“Ageless Realm is a misnomer, you see,” it said somberly. “We can swim to the shallows, yes; with practice we can step into places where time slows to a crawl, slows almost to a stopping point, even dances around itself in spirals. It’s a matter of gradient relative to, well . . . never mind, it’s not something you’re equipped to understand. But however slow the crawl, we cannot actually stop time, and nor can we turn it back. What is done, cannot be undone. You will have to accept this as truth.”

Ringil managed to get onto his front and force his knees under him. The room rocked and shifted around him, ice trickled down his limbs. He struggled for strength to push himself upright.

He heard the dwenda sigh.

“I was afraid it might come to this, Ringil Eskiath, but not so soon. We are none of us used to dealing with humans after so long. It’s a constant learning experience.”

A booted foot came out and gently shoved him over on his side. Getting up faded to a distant dream. Ringil summoned what breath he could.

“Who sent you?” he panted.

“I am not sent, as you put it.” The dwenda knelt beside him. “But you do have your petitioners for my favor. There are those, it seems, who have no wish to see your grim but still rather beautiful face get slashed to ribbons in squabbles of petty honor.”

He raised his hand again, palm-down, fingers lightly flexed. The gesture blocked light from Ringil’s eyes.

“Wait, wait.”

It took Ringil a moment to understand that the dwenda had obeyed. He could not read the sudden flurry of expression that chased across the unhuman face as it hung there. He thought he saw impatience, but impatience with whom it was hard to tell.

“Well?”

“Tell me.” Faintly. Ringil’s voice was almost emptied out, no stronger now than his limbs. “One thing, I need to know. It’s important.”

The palm hovered. “Yes?”

“What’s your name? We fucked all night, and I never asked.”

Another hesitation, but finally it gave way to a curious smile. “Very well. You may call me Seethlaw, if that will serve.”

“Oh, it will.” And now Ringil smiled as well. “It will.”

Silence dripped between them. The dwenda’s palm stayed where it was.

“You mind telling me why now you suddenly want to know my name?” it asked him finally.

Ringil nodded weakly. Summoned some last fragments of breath and made his lips move.

“Simple enough,” he whispered. “A cheap fuck doesn’t need to have a name. But I like to know what to call the men I’m going to kill.”

Then the dwenda’s hand came down, touched his face, lifted gently off again. It seemed to lift consciousness away from him as well, like a delicate mask he’d been wearing and hadn’t noticed until now.

The last thing he saw, as his own vision inked out, was the dwenda’s gaze as it raised its head to face the windows; the featureless empty eyes, now washed the color of blood by the rising sun.