The Steel Remains

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, Ura

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-Ura

“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 mille

The shaman dropped one hand to the burning pain between his legs. “Will Ura