The Steel Remains полностью

She looked at the lights. “Yeah, they say that.”

“That’s got to affect their attitude to the Empire as well, I’d imagine. Got to put pressure on any kind of loyalty they might have.”

“Oh, look. They got Idrashan out already.” Archeth nodded to where a slave was leading her horse out of the stable block. “So that’s me, then. G’night, Mahmal. Hope your carriage doesn’t take too long. Thanks for coming along.”

The engineer smiled gently at her. “My pleasure. It has certainly been instructive.”

She left him there and went to meet the slave halfway. Mounted up, waved a final, wordless farewell to Shanta, and urged her horse out the gate.

On the first sloping downturn of the causeway, she stood in the stirrups and looked back. The naval engineer was an indistinct figure through the railed iron of the gates above, backlit into silhouette by bright-burning torches behind him on the palace walls. But she knew beyond doubt that he was still watching her.

So fucking what? She left the palace behind and let the horse find its own way home through the stew of streets on the south side. Shanta’s no fucking different from the rest of the old guard. Holed up in their positions of privilege and moaning in their little cabal corners about how much better it was when Akal was still around.

Well? Wasn’t it?

Akal was still around when we smashed the rebels at Vanbyr. Let’s not forget that inconvenient little blemish on the face of prior glory.

He was on his sickbed by then.

He still gave the fucking order.

Yes. And you obeyed it.

She passed a sleeping figure, curled into the angle of a darkened smithy’s yard. Ragged cloak and hood; emblazoned on its folds she recognized the sable-on-white horse insignia of an imperial cavalryman. Hard to know if you could take that at face value or not—the city was full of demobbed and damaged soldiery sleeping in the streets, but military garb elicited more pity when you were begging, whoever you might actually be, so it was well worth the risk of stealing it if you got the chance. It could get you fed, even taken in on winter nights if the cold bit hard enough or it rained. Archeth knew a brothel near the harbor whose madame prided herself on letting derelict veterans sleep in her laundry shack. She’d even been known to send out girls from the more raddled end of her stable to provide free hand jobs on feast days.

You found patriotism in the strangest places.

She slowed the horse to a halt and peered hard at the cloak-wrapped form, trying to decide. Something about the posture rang true, the laconic efficiency in the way cloak and hood were used. But without waking the man up . . .

She shrugged, dipped in her purse, and found a five-elemental piece. Leaned over and tossed the coin so it clipped one wall in the corner and hit the paved floor with a loud chink. The figure grunted and moved, and a right hand groped out from under the cloak until it found the money. Ring and little finger gone, along with most of that half of the hand. Archeth grimaced. It was a common enough injury among the horse regiments: Yhelteth cavalry swords were notoriously badly provided with protection for the hand. One powerful, well-judged slice down the blade from a skilled opponent, and you were a cavalryman no longer.

She tossed another five elementals down onto the drape of the cloak, and clucked Idrashan onward.

A couple of streets later and nearly home, she passed through a small, leafy square once called Angel’s Wing Place but now renamed for the victory at Gallows Gap. It was a place she’d walk to sometimes when she needed to get out of the house, both before and after the war, though she’d preferred it before. Then it had hosted a bustling fruit market. Now they’d built a self-important little three-sided stone memorial in the center, grandiose bas-relief images of exclusively imperial soldiers standing on piles of reptile dead, a central column designed to look vaguely like a sword thrusting skyward. There were stone benches built into the structure and lettered homages in rhyme to OUR GLORIOUS IMPERIAL COMMANDER, OUR SONS OF THE CITY INSPIRED. Archeth had read the compositions enough times to have them, unwillingly, by heart, had even, once, at a court ball, been briefly introduced to the poet who’d penned them.