The Steel Remains

“All right.”

Brief pause. Ging and his father exchanged glances again.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Gingren asked.

“It means I won’t take any chances tomorrow, and I’ll make sure I kill him the first opening I get. Happy now?”

“You really expect me to second you in this duel?” Ging asked him.

“No.”

The monosyllable hung there. It silenced both father and brother for longer this time. They both stood there waiting for it to lead somewhere, to an explanation, Ringil supposed.

Fuck that.

Sometimes it seemed that his whole life had been that silent wait, that cold-eyed, staring demand from someone or other, from everyone, that he explain himself. Explain himself away.

The Scaled Folk, at least, had not wanted that much from him.

The tableau broke, to the sound of servant’s footsteps. A face peered diffidently around the door.

“My lord Ringil?”

Ringil sighed with relief. “Yes.”

“A messenger for you. From the Milacar residence.”

CHAPTER 16

They got back into Yhelteth just as the lamps were coming on across the city. Archeth, saddle-sore and stuffed with questions she couldn’t answer, would have willingly gone straight to her apartments on the Boulevard of the Ineffable Divine, and to bed. But you didn’t do that kind of thing when you were about the Emperor’s business. She compromised, sent Shanta and the others on ahead to the palace, and stopped off at her apartments with Elith. She handed the old woman over to her major-domo, told him to put her up in the guest chambers.

“Milady, there is already—” the man began, but she waved it off.

“Later, Kefanin, later. His imperial radiance awaits my presence at the palace. I speed to do his will, y’know.”

She swung back on her horse and clattered back out of the house’s courtyard, under the arch, and onto the main thoroughfare. Sunset made a dusty furnace glow in the west, backdrop for the blackening silhouettes of minarets and domes across the city. The evening crowds pressed around her, trudged onward toward the end of their laboring day. She felt a twinge of envy. If she knew anything at all, Jhiral would probably keep her waiting a couple of hours before he’d even see her, just to make a point. And even without that expected pettiness, his imperial radiance didn’t habitually rise much before noon anyway; it wasn’t uncommon for him to hold long counsel with bleary-eyed advisers right through to dawn, then send them directly off to their usual daily duties while he retired to bed. He’d likely have Archeth telling and retelling the details of her report a dozen different ways until the small hours.

She stifled a yawn with the back of a gauntleted hand. Dug in her pouch until she found a small pellet of krinzanz, slipped it into her mouth, and chewed it down to thin saliva-laced mulch. Grimace at the bitter, granulated taste, and swallow. She rubbed the residue against her gums with a leather finger and waited for the gloom of evening to recede a little from her eyes, for the drug to prop the weariness away and lend her its counterfeit lust for life.

DOORS BANGED BACK FOR HER, PIKE-MEN CAME TO ATTENTION AS she passed them down long marble halls. She tugged off her gauntlets impatiently, muttering to herself as she strode the familiar path to her Emperor’s presence. From the walls, representations of the Prophet and other notables of imperial history glowered down at her. The krin buzz made some of the better-executed portraits quiver with a simulacrum of hostile life around the eyes. It was scrutiny she could have done without, and it didn’t help that there was not a single Kiriath face among those pictured.

You’ll have to make it work without us, Grashgal had told her, toward the end. I can’t hold the captaincies any longer. They want out. They’ve consulted the Helmsmen, all the stable ones anyway, and the answer keeps coming back pretty much the same. It’s time to go.

Oh come on. Hiding her desperation in a snort. Fucking Helmsman’ll give you sixty different answers to the same question depending on how it’s phrased. You know that. We’ve been here before, at least twice that I can remember, and I’m only a couple of hundred years old. It’ll pass.

But Grashgal just stood there at the balcony’s edge and stared down into the red glow of the workshops.

The engineers already have orders to refit, he said quietly. They’ll have a fleet that works by year’s end. I’m sorry, Archidi. This time it’s real.

But why? Why now?

A shrug that came close to a shudder. These fucking humans, Archidi. If we stay, they’re going to drag us into every squalid fucking skirmish and border dispute their short-term greed and fear can invent. They’re going to turn us into something we never used to be.

These fucking humans.

“The Lady kir-Archeth Indamaninarmal,” bellowed the herald as the last set of doors opened before her, and across the vaulted and pillared space of the throne room, all the fucking humans turned to stare as she came in.

“Ah, Archeth, you grace us with your presence after all.” Jhiral was propped at a sardonic angle in the grandiose architecture of the Burnished Throne, one heel laid four-square over his knee. Light from the Kiriath-engineered radiant stones set into the walls of the chamber behind him conferred the borrowed glow of divine authority. He flashed her a boyish grin. “Almost on time for once, as well. I understand you had to go home before coming to see us. Did you find everything there to your satisfaction?”

Archeth shrugged it off. “I thought it best to come before you fully prepared, my lord. I am ready to deliver my report.”

“Oh, good. We have in fact already been hearing from my other, loyal servants.” A casual gesture to where Mahmal Shanta, Faileh Rakan, and Pashla Menkarak stood before him in a loose arc. Just the hint of a pause after other, the lightest of accents on loyal. It was done with masterful subtlety, and Archeth saw how secret smiles flickered among the courtiers. “It seems there’s some disagreement about how the situation in Khangset was handled. Some question of you overstepping the limits of your authority?”

Shanta slid her an apologetic glance. She could already guess how things were going. Menkarak had raged all the way back, had in fact been fulminating from the moment he woke up in the camp at Khangset and found Archeth had been busy all night without bothering to secure his approval for anything she’d done.

“It was my understanding, my lord, that the expedition was placed exclusively under my command.”

“Within the framework of the Holy Revelation,” snapped Menkarak. “To which all secular rule is subordinate. There can be no light to outshine the radiance of truth, and the servants of truth must brook none.”

“You were fucking asleep,” said Archeth.

“And you abroad by night in the company of an infidel sorceress.”

Jhiral lounged back in the throne and gri

Archeth pulled in a deep breath, held it, let it out. She tried for authoritative calm.

“The woman Elith believes she is a sorceress, that much is true. But her claims are suspect to say the least. I do not think she is wholly sane. She and her family suffered greatly in the war, she was forci—. . . she became an imperial resident under very difficult circumstances. She lost almost her entire family in the war. I would say she was probably half mad with grief well before this raid took place. What she saw when Khangset was attacked may simply have pushed her the rest of the way.”