The Steel Remains полностью

“Grashgal is dead,” the Helmsman said patiently. “They all are. The Kiriath barely survived the voyage through the quick paths on their way here, and then their strength was at full flow, their science honed, and their minds undamaged. The forces they encountered undid all of that. They did not choose to come here, Archeth, despite anything the chronicles might claim to the contrary. They were shipwrecked here, and if they stayed four thousand years, it wasn’t because they liked the scenery. It was because they were afraid that the return would break them.”

Her rage failed her—she found herself looking at the bright jagged edge of it with weary disenchantment. This wasn’t the way to get what she wanted.

“Some say the passage opened their minds,” she offered. “Gave them the gift of a new vision, an insight across time. They say it didn’t corrupt, it enhanced.”

“Yes, that’s right,” Angfal jeered. “So much so that the most enhanced among them, those most gifted, as you put it, went off into the desert to contemplate their insight and apparently forgot to eat.”

“Not all of them.”

“Most of them.”

“You’re talking about the extreme cases. As a race, we learned to cope.”

“We? We as a race?”

“Figure of speech. The Kiriath, as a race, adapted. And in the end their adaptation made them stronger, better able to resist the effects of a return voyage.”

“Oh, is that a thesis you’re developing? I’d be very interested to see your evidence.”

“I’m sorry they left you behind, Angfal.”

It broke the rapid parry-riposte pattern of the exchange better than if she’d screamed. A longer silence this time. The lack of motion in the Helmsman’s frozen iron coils and bulges seemed suddenly wrong, ridiculous, some impossible constriction of a natural emotional order and its responses. She looked for a shift in the lights, but they held their color, they burned steadily back at her.

The Helmsmen are not human, Archidi, her father had told her once, when she was still quite a small child. He spoke High Kir, and the word he used for “human” was one the Kiriath used about themselves. They aren’t like you or me or your mother at all, not even like the spirit of one of us in a bottle or a box. They are something . . . other. You must remember that in your dealings with them. They are not human, for all that they might sometimes do a good impression of one.

At the time, it sounded to her awed child’s ears like a warning about demons.

“They left you, too,” said the Helmsman finally.

“Yes, they did.”

More silence. Memories swarmed through her in the space it left, adding their weight to the krinzanz crash. She stared at the fleck-lit, dismembered iron monster on the wall, the way it bulked and coiled there, and she tried to find a similar stillness in herself.

“Well, then.” Angfal’s voice broke smoothly back into the quiet, to all appearances as if none of the previous conversation had happened. “What can I do for you, Archeth Indamaninarmal? What is it you wanted to talk to me about?”

They smashed both of Terip Hale’s legs below the knee with the mace, got the whereabouts of the tool shop out of him fairly quickly thereafter, and then let him sink into semiconsciousness where he lay. They got Girsh settled as comfortably as possible against the opposite wall, put a freshly cranked and loaded crossbow in his lap, and went to fetch the manacle cutters.

“Is it true, then?” Eril asked him as they loped rapidly down a darkened corridor on the other side of the courtyard. “That stuff about you killing the dragon?”

“Pretty much. Why?”

“Uhm—but they don’t call you Dragonbane?”

“No.”

Short pause, the other man not wanting to leave it alone, not knowing how to press the point without offense.

“Never seen a dragon,” he said finally.

“Yeah, well, believe me, that’s the way you want to keep it.”

More quiet. They reached the end of the corridor, found stairs downward.

“He, uh, he kept calling you a queer.”

“Yeah.”

“Well, uh . . .” With an audible sigh, Eril gave it up. “Fucking scumbag, right?”

“Indeed.”