The Steel Remains

CHAPTER 24

She went up to the palace at first light.

Earlier would have invited arrest. While the lower echelons of palace life—the lighting of stoves, the cleaning of acres of marble flooring—got under way well before dawn, courtiers did not present themselves before breakfast. It was a rule of thumb with strong precedent. Two years ago, a provincial governor had made the mistake of bringing his concerns before Jhiral while the Emperor was still in bed. The occasion was a local revolt by resettled eastern nomads who’d jumped their reservation and reverted to banditry against the trade caravans, so there was some justification for the urgency, at least in the eyes of the governor’s special envoy, who rode up to the main gate at the head of a cavalry squad just as the sun was rising, and started yelling for the Emperor’s immediate attention.

He got it. Jhiral had him thrown in jail for a week, along with his men, summary sanction for lack of respect before the imperial throne. Protests by senior advisers at court were in vain; the punishment stood. By the time the man was brought into the imperial presence and formally reprimanded, the revolt had more or less sputtered out, and the issue was moot. Proving, Jhiral observed drily, that there’d been nothing to get so worked up about in the first place. He took a rhetorical turn about the throne room to drive the point home, gesturing, pitching his voice for effect in the vaulted space. These are not the days of my father’s reign, my friends. Not the days of bitter warfare and privation, however much various of my father’s faithful friends and advisers in that struggle appear, inexplicably, to wish otherwise. Give it a rest, gentlemen. We are no longer at war, we face no implacable enemies or unhuman threats. There is no need for panic-stricken counsel and steely decision before the dawn comes up. Our Empire is prosperous and at peace. Our difficulties in these times are small and undramatic, admitting of equally small-scale solutions, which, though they may offer scant chance of wild glory, should nonetheless be effective. I, for one, welcome that change. It has been given to us to enjoy the legacy of all those who sacrificed for us—not to imitate their suffering. I am glad and grateful for that fact, as I am grateful for their sacrifices, and I would have thought that those of you who went through the horror of the war with my family would feel the same.

Does anybody here not feel the same?

Eloquent silence in the gathered ranks of the court. Somewhere off to the right, someone cleared his throat, then evidently thought better of speaking up. The sound turned magically into a cough. Jhiral heard it, knew what it meant, and smiled. He waited the echoes out, then clapped his hands.

Excellent. I am, as ever, indebted to you all for your loyal support. Now—next order of business, and please tell me it’s a simple budget for city sewer repairs.

The laughter was largely sycophantic, but Archeth had found her mouth stretching to echo it anyway. Privately, though she commiserated with some of her friends from the old guard, she felt there was a lot in what Jhiral said. She knew the provincial governor who’d sent the emissary, and didn’t hold him in much regard. Quite conceivably, he’d overreacted to a situation a shrewder man could have handled without rising from his desk. The revolt very likely could have been extinguished with relatively little fuss—could perhaps even have been avoided altogether, with a little intelligent foresight. You kept your finger on the pulse, you picked up the warning signals well before matters reached boiling point. You made a few examples, you made a few concessions, nine times out of ten the combination paid off. She’d done it herself enough times in the past, when Akal was still on the throne.

Panic and overreaction—the late response of fools.

Now, waiting in an antechamber for Jhiral to get out of bed, going over what the Helmsmen had told her, she couldn’t be sure if, sleepless and churned up and raw from the krin, she wasn’t giving in to a similar fool’s impulse herself.

But:

The dwenda are gone, Archeth. Thousands of years ago. They fled the parameters of this world when they couldn’t defeat us.

Apparently, they’re back.

One of the Helmsman’s unnerving silences. Then, severely:

That’s really not funny. The dwenda are not something you joke about, daughter of Flaradnam.

I’m not trying to be funny, Angfal. I’ve got better things to do with my time than come down here and tell you jokes.

You certainly have. To start with—if you’re right and the dwenda really have returned, now, with the Kiriath gone—then you have graves to dig. About a hundred thousand ought to do it—you might want to get started ahead of time.

“The Emperor will see you now.”

She glanced up and saw the smirk on the chamberlain’s face. She supposed there weren’t a lot of courtiers receiving audience in Jhiral’s bedchamber. It begged a rather obvious question, and court gossip would doubtless provide a dozen different salacious answers by lunchtime.

“You can wipe that fucking grin off your face,” she told him as she got up. “Or I’ll come back and cut it off for you.”

The smirk vanished as if dragged downward off the man’s visage with a claw. He shrank from her as she passed. The krin made her glad.

Better get ahold of that temper, Archidi. His radiance Jhiral Khimran II won’t bully as easily as his servants.

She stepped through into a room that reeked of sex.

The imperial bedchamber faced east by careful design and had floor-to-ceiling windows for the view. The sun flooded in, struck deep into the back of the room, and gilded what it touched—the drapes on the huge four-poster bed, the rumpled covers, and the three tousle-haired sleeping forms that lay amid them. Archeth registered the curves, made herself look carefully away.

“Archeth! Good morning!” Jhiral was over by the wood-paneled partions on the far side of the room, wrapped in a long silk robe and picking at an extravagant spread of breakfast platters set out on three separate tables. He turned to face her, put a quail’s egg into his mouth and chewed vigorously. Lifted a wagging finger. “You know, when I said I’d hold you to your promise of rapid progress, I didn’t intend you to take it quite this hard. Sometime this afternoon would have been fine.”

She bowed. “I must apologize for intruding on your rest so early, my lord, but—”

Jhiral waved it away, still chewing. “No, it’s fine. Educational.” He swallowed and gestured at the breakfast spread. “Some of this stuff, it’s the first time I’ve ever tasted it when it’s still hot. So what’s the news? Did you have a good night in the sheets with my little gift?”

“Your generosity . . . overwhelms me, my lord. I have not yet actually been to bed.”

“What a pity.” Jhiral picked up an apple and bit into it. His eyes met hers across the top of the fruit, and the look in them was suddenly hard and predatory. He gouged the chunk of fruit loose with his teeth, chomped it down, and wiped his mouth on the back of his hand. “I’d rather hoped we could compare notes, actually. Maybe even share young Ishgrim’s training between us.”

“My lord, the reaction of the Helmsmen to my news about the dwenda incursion has been . . . disturbing.”

“Yes. Well, you certainly look disturbed.” Jhiral stared down at the bitten apple for a moment, then tossed it back among the platters on the middle table. “Oh, very well then. You’d better come through.”

He forced the slides of the partition apart at the join and walked through into the chamber beyond. There was a surfeit of sunlight in here as well, though diluted down and tinged in various colors by stained-glass panels set into the lower half of each window and depicting scenes of historic triumph from imperial history. Vibrant little smears of pink and blue lay across the wooden floor and paneled walls, and the green leather surface of a large writing desk in one corner. Armchairs were set up at the back of the room around another, low table covered to match the desk.

“Sit.” Jhiral gestured her to a chair and took the one opposite. He covered a leonine yawn with one hand, sank back in the arms of the chair, put a slippered foot on the edge of the low table, and steepled his fingers. The robe split and gave her a narrow view of an impressive—if you liked that sort of thing—prick and balls. She couldn’t tell if it was deliberate. “So—disturbing. In what way?”

Archeth hesitated. “I think the Helmsmen are afraid, my lord.”

“Afraid.” Jhiral coughed up a short, uncertain laugh. He shifted in the chair and straightened his robe. “Come on. They don’t understand things like fear. You told me yourself, they aren’t anything like human. Anyway, suddenly you’re talking in plural here? How many Helmsmen have you actually spoken to?”

“Two, my lord. Angfal, who is installed in the study in my home, and Kalaman in the fireship Toward the Candle of Vigil Maintained at the Kiriath Museum. Their attitudes are somewhat different, Kalaman is more pragmatic, less inclined to drama, but their basic responses are the same. Both give extensive warnings about what the dwenda are capable of; both are of the opinion that if these creatures are returning to this world, then the results will be catastrophic.”

“Hmm.” Jhiral stroked at his chin. He seemed to have been doing some thinking of his own since the night before. “Catastrophic for whom, though? The way you’ve explained it, this is a northern thing, this dwenda mythology. Is it possible these creatures might confine their depredations to that part of the world?”

“They came to Khangset, my lord.”

“Yes, in response to either the prayers and idolatry of a northerner or the presence of a type of stone found only in the north.”

“Found mostly in the north, my lord.” Holding down a tremor of alarm, because she could see where this was going. “Glirsht deposits are to be found in various parts of the Empire as well.”

Jhiral gave her a shrewd look. “But you don’t really believe it’s the glirsht itself, do you, Archeth? If the dwenda use this stuff as a beaconing device, it would need to be shaped in some way, crafted to its purpose. The way our little friend from Khangset crafted her idol.”

“I don’t believe th—”

“Don’t interrupt your Emperor when he’s thinking aloud, Archeth. It’s rude.”

She swallowed. “My apologies.”

“Oh, accepted. Accepted.” A languid gesture. “Now look; our trade ships don’t just steer down the coast by any old fire they happen to see on a clifftop, any piece of brightly colored junk floating in the water that they might pass. They look for lighthouses and marker buoys. The dwenda are going to be the same—they’re going to be looking for a specific form of this rock, something shaped. Something prepared by their acolytes, by those who worship them.”

Got to nip this in the bud, Archidi. He’ll do it, this little shit trying to fill his father’s boots, he’ll sign an order to get it done without a second thought, and you’ll watch the refugee columns form from horizon to horizon all over again . . .

“The dwenda have been gone for several thousand years, my lord.” Voice as smooth as lack of sleep and krinzanz would let it get. “I think it’s safe to say that any acolytes they may once have had among humans are now dead. And this woman Elith certainly did not herself craft the idol she owns. She refers to it as an heirloom of her clan, and it certainly has the look of something many centuries old.”

“But perhaps, Archeth,” the Emperor said softly, “Elith herself is many centuries old, as well. Did you think of that? Perhaps she’s been kept alive by the sorceries of her dwenda masters, gifted with eternal youth in return for her services. Perhaps she is a witch. Or even, a creature crafted from stone and given sorcerous life.”

Archeth sat as if poised on the edge of the An-Monal crater. Lives spun past in her head, held in a balance whose mechanism she had only the slightest influence over. She saw Elith, screaming her lungs out on the rack or pincered apart, opened and probed with red-hot steel. Thousands like her, driven from their homes, no food or water beyond what they could carry, starving on the roads, brutalized and extorted of what little they still owned by the soldiery supposed to watch over them.

She was accustomed to reading Jhiral’s face, but could make nothing of the bland expression he wore now.

“Do you believe that, my lord?” she asked with knife-edge caution. “That this woman is a . . . a witch? Or some kind of golem even?”

The Emperor studied his hands, gazed critically at his manicure for a few moments before he would meet Archeth’s eyes. He sighed.

“Oh, I suppose not. Not really, no.”

“Then—”

A sudden jabbing finger. “But—and I told you before about interrupting me, God fuck it, Archeth—what I am beginning to think is that maybe my father’s policy of resettlement after the war was a mistake. It wouldn’t be the first mistake he made, would it? You remember that god-awful mess in Vanbyr. So, the way I see it, we’ve got tens of thousands of these people living among us, refusing to convert, most of them, turning their backs on the civilized benefits the Empire offers, going on with their idolatry and who knows what else besides. I don’t want to start sounding like that little twat Menkarak, but if permitting the kind of religious freedom we do is going to bring down some millennia-old curse on us all, well, then maybe we need to rethink our values. And maybe we don’t want these people inside our borders after all.”

She sat and waited.

“Well?” he snapped.

“Do I have your majesty’s permission to speak?”

“Oh, Mother of the fucking Revelation, Archeth, don’t sulk! Yes, speak. Speak. It’s what I pay you for, isn’t it?”

She marshaled her words with care. She’d come to the palace with the avowed intention of scaring the shit out of Jhiral. Now she wasn’t so sure it was a good idea.

“My lord, according to the Helmsmen, the dwenda were a race with mastery of worlds that lie parallel to our own, worlds that in some way seem to occupy almost the same space as ours, that are no farther away than your bedchamber is from where we sit now. I can’t say I understand how this is supposed to work, but it does correspond to some of the common Aldrain legends in the north, which claim that certain places are inhabited by otherworldly creatures in a way that is hidden from human eyes. An isolated mountain crag becomes a fairy-tale castle at certain hours of the night, or in the midst of a powerful lightning storm; you can knock on a forest oak and it will be opened to you like a gate, but only on certain nights of the year; and so forth. I find in these stories an echo of the Kiriath tales of voyaging here from another world, which is why I am inclined to take them seriously, but there is one major difference. My people were forced to seek out the deepest, hottest, most pressurized places in the bowels of the earth before they could find a way to pass between worlds.” She paused, measured her tone again before she plunged on. “The dwenda, it seems, can effect this passage anywhere they choose. They can enter this world at will, at any given point.”

Her words seemed to evaporate into the quiet. Small, domestic sounds seeped in from elsewhere in the palace. Banging of doors, voices giving instructions. Behind the wall, water gurgled in pipes. The Emperor looked at his hands again.

“You’re saying this isn’t just a northern problem, then,” he muttered.

“I’m saying, my lord, that until we have a clear idea of what the dwenda want, geography as we understand it is largely meaningless. These creatures could show up anywhere from the Demlarashan wastes to the palace gardens right here in Yhelteth. We simply do not know.”

Jhiral grunted. “And this stone idol? You seemed pretty fucking convinced last night that it was the key to the incursion. Changed your mind all of a sudden?”

“No, my lord. I still believe it is important. But it’s the first of its kind that I’ve ever seen.” Though both Angfal and Kalaman recognized it from my description and nearly shit rivets when they did. But you don’t need to know that right now, my lord. “Elith brought it with her when she was resettled, but she was already at that point a deeply disturbed woman. It is heavy, bulky, and far from attractive in aspect. I think it’s safe to say such things are not a common possession of Naomic peoples, either here or in the north. A few might exist, here or there, but—”

“We could always institute a search. House-to-house, immigrant districts throughout the Empire.”

Hoiran’s fucking balls. “We could do that, my lord, but I am not convinced that it would be an efficient use of manpower. In fact, I have an equally direct but somewhat smaller-scale plan of action that perhaps my lord would—”

“Yes, all right.” Jhiral gestured wearily. “Don’t sugarcoat it to death. I already guessed you wouldn’t have come all the way up here at this time of day unless you wanted something. Come on then, let’s hear your bright idea.”

It felt like stepping off a bobbing coracle and onto a slippery but solid jetty. Archeth tried not to let her relief show. Carefully, then, very carefully:

“The woman Elith and the idol she brought with her are originally from Ennishmin, more precisely from the eastern fringes of that province.”

The imperial lip curled. “Yes, that’s a godforsaken corner of the world. You’d think she’d have been glad to get south to some decent weather.”

“Uhm—yes, my lord.”

“That was a joke, Archeth.”

“Yes, my lord.” She patched together a smile. “Ennishmin is not blessed with ideal weather.”

The look in Jhiral’s eyes hardened. “Don’t fucking humor me, woman. You really think I’d have put up with your drug-soaked insubordination and superior airs this long if I didn’t value you for something other than sycophancy? Revelation knows, I get enough of that from the rest of the court. You, Archeth, I trust to tell me the truth, even if it upsets me. So get on with it. Upset me, if that’s what you’re planning to do. What about Ennishmin?”

“Yes, my lord.” The krin was building a shrill desire to scream in his face. She held it down, barely. “When I mentioned the origins of the idol to the Helmsmen, both of them independently concluded that the Khangset incursion was probably a navigation error on the part of the dwenda. That they had intended to arrive in the east of Ennishmin and the relocation of the idol threw them off. Imagine trying to follow a map that’s thousands of years old. It would be easy enough to make mistakes.”

“So these creatures are not perfect, then. Not angelic essences condensed to flesh, the way the Revelation promises. I suppose that’s some relief.”

“They are very far from perfect, my lord. What the Helmsmen told me suggests a wildly impulsive nature, barely governed by the wisdom they must have accumulated over a million or more years of unchanging existence. And—” She hesitated, because even remembering this next piece of the puzzle still sent a chill scrabbling up her spine. “According to Angfal, they may not even be sane, not as we would understand the concept.”

Jhiral frowned. “I’ve heard that said about outlanders and enemies before, and I don’t generally trust it. Just too bloody convenient, the quick and easy way to deal with difference. Oh, they’re not like us, they’re insane. It saves you having to think too much. They said the Majak were insane when we first ran into them, said they were semi-human beasts that howled and ate human flesh, and it turned out they were just a lot tougher than us on the battlefield. Come on, Archeth, I’ve heard it said on occasion that your people were insane by human standards.”

“Yes, my lord. Which is precisely Angfal’s point. The mental . . . changes . . . that the Kiriath went through on their voyage here appear to have been the result of a single passage through the spaces between worlds, a single exposure. The dwenda, it seems, live in these spaces, inhabit them as a matter of course. I don’t like to think what that must have done to their sanity. I’m quite certain a human could not survive it undamaged.”

Jhiral sat and thought about it for a while. He rested his arm on the chair, put his chin on a loosely curled fist, and stared at Archeth as if hoping she’d go away. He sighed.

“So you’re telling me—you seriously believe this, Archeth—that these immensely powerful, possibly insane beings have some special interest in Ennishmin.” The coughed-up laugh again, the throwaway gesture. “Well, I mean, they’d have to be insane, wouldn’t they? A shit-hole northern province that grows turnips or hunts swamp snakes for a living, and barely makes its tax bill each year. What possible earthly use is it going to be to them?”

“The Helmsmen have an explanation of sorts, my lord. It seems what is now eastern Ennishmin was once the site of a decisive battle against the dwenda. The swamps at the eastern end of the province are apparently not wholly natural. According to Angfal, they were originally created by some cataclysmic weapon the Kiriath deployed there. I wonder if that weapon didn’t have some effect on the barriers between worlds, perhaps make them easier to breach than elsewhere. Stories of hauntings and apparitions apparently persist in the local culture, and there’s some kind of trade in so-called Aldrain artifacts, things retrieved from the swamps that are reckoned to have magical powers.”

Jhiral snorted. Archeth nodded a measured dose of agreement.

“Yes, it’s improbable, I agree. In fact, these artifacts are probably mostly bits and pieces left behind by the Kiriath armies in the past. But there may be an element of truth to the tales as well. In the markets and specialist shops in Trelayne, where Aldrain lore is an affectation among the rich, I quite often saw objects that didn’t appear to be of human manufacture, but were not reminiscent of anything my people might build, either.”

“You’re saying the dwenda have come back to the site of an old defeat. What for, revenge?” Jhiral shook his head. He even smiled, but she thought there was an edge of bitterness on it. “Well, they’ve come a little late for that. Perhaps someone should go up there and tell them they just missed their ancient enemies on the way out the door at An-Monal. Maybe then they’ll leave us alone.”

“Or maybe not, my lord. The war against the dwenda was apparently an alliance of Kiriath and human, in much the same way as the war against the Scaled Folk. If your enemy has fled but his dogs remain guarding the hearth, what will you do with those dogs?”

Jhiral nodded. It was logic he understood.

“So you want to go to Ennishmin. Is that it?”

“I think leading an expeditionary force there might be advisable. A thousand men, say, with engineering support, could—”

“A thousand men?” Jhiral seemed genuinely aghast. “Where exactly do you think I’m going to snap my fingers and get a thousand men from? This isn’t wartime, you know.”

“No, my lord. Not yet, it isn’t.”

“Oh, that’s a ridiculous thing to say.” The Emperor surged to his feet, stormed to the window, and stood staring out. Came back. “And—look—even if it’s not, Archeth, even if this is the prelude to some kind of conflict—the attack came from Khangset, from the west and from the ocean. You’re asking me to commit a major force twelve hundred miles away on a completely different frontier, all staked on not much more than some mumblings from senile machinery and a theory you haven’t slept on yet.”

“My lord, I realize—”

“Well, I don’t think you do, Archeth.” His voice trod hers down. “I don’t think you’ve noticed, in the depths of your drugged-up self-pity and obsession, that we’re trying to run an Empire here. Currently, we’ve got the Trelayne League stamping their collective feet and making angry diplomatic noises about trade restriction again—those motherfuckers certainly forgot pretty fucking fast who kept them afloat during the war—and by all accounts they’re building a new navy into the bargain. We’ve got an upsurge in piracy along the southern coast, some kind of horseshit religious schism going on at Demlarashan that’ll probably need riot control before the end of the year. And on top of that I have provincial governors marching into my throne room every fucking month like clockwork to whinge at me about supply lines and banditry and public health crises, but not one single one of them ever wants to come up with the taxes we’d need to solve those problems. The long and the short of it is, Archeth, I can’t fucking give you your thousand men, because I don’t fucking have them to spare.”

AND THAT WAS THAT.

Archeth collected her horse and wended her way back down into the city, muttering to herself and grinding her teeth; clear indications—as if I fucking needed them—that she’d overdone the krinzanz. The strengthening midmorning sun stung her eyes, layered her shoulders with the promised heat of the day to come. Worst of all was the knowledge within her that Jhiral had a point. The Empire didn’t have a lot of excess military capacity. The war dead numbered in the tens of thousands, and the devastation wrought by the Scaled Folk was massive. Across the whole imperial domain, the population was only just starting to get back on its breeding feet. Most farms and manufacturies were still desperately short of labor. The levies had been cut back as soon as a workable peace and a stable frontier could be hammered out with Trelayne, not because the Empire was weary of war, but because Akal’s economic advisers had bluntly told him that if he didn’t slacken the demand for soldiers soon, his harvests would rot in the fields and his subjects would starve. It was that as much as anything else that brought imperial ambitions in the northwest to an abrupt, conciliatory halt.

Bring me some evidence, Jhiral told her as she was leaving. Something solid. I’ll put the army back on a war footing if I have to, but I won’t do it for rumor and conjecture and a few trinkets you once saw in a shop window in Trelayne.

Then give me a reduced force, she’d pleaded. A few hundred. Let me—

No. I’m sorry, Archeth. He did genuinely seem to be. Quite apart from anything else, I need you here. If there is a crisis, I need to be able to point you at it pretty fucking fast, and I can’t do that if you’ve gone haring off to the wrong end of the Empire.

Perhaps he was even right. Degenerate lifestyle aside, he wasn’t a stupid man.

She thought abruptly of Ishgrim’s pale curves, thought about owning them the way Jhiral had, the way he owned the three sleeping girls in his bed now. Owning the belief, no not even that, owning the knowledge that this was flesh you had a right to use like any other purchased thing you might have in the house. Like the flesh of the fruit you kept in the larder, the leather of a jerkin you liked to wear.

Perhaps you’re the stupid one, Archidi. Ever think of that?

She dismounted into the sunlit quiet of the courtyard, beset by her own murmuring, circling thoughts. No sign of the stable boy. Well, he wasn’t the sharpest pin in the box, but still, he should have heard Idrashan’s hooves on the cobbles when she rode in. She glanced sourly toward the stables, felt a spike of krin-driven anger, and tamped it back down with great care. You don’t take it out on the servants, Flaradnam had told her when she was about six, and it stuck. She led Idrashan over to the hitching rail by the stables, looped the reins there, and went to look for Kefanin.

Found him.

Bloodied and crawling on hands and knees, just inside the main door. He’d heard her come in, was trying to get up. The blood made a darkened, matted mass of his hair on one whole side of his head. It dripped off his face onto the flagstones, spotted them in a line where he’d crawled.

She stopped dead, rigid with shock.

“Kef? Kef?”

Kefanin looked up at her, mouth working, making the repeated silent gape of a gaffed fish. She dropped to her knees at his side, gathered him up, and got his mouth close to her ear. She felt the blood smear on her cheek.

“I’m sorry, milady,” he uttered, voice clicking and breathless, barely audible. “We tried to stop them. But they took her.”