The Steel Remains полностью

Something hissed through the air. The Yhelteth warhorse screamed and bucked beneath him. A black-fletched arrow sprouted from its shoulder. He whipped about, saw Ershal, recurved short bow in hand, arm reaching down to the saddle box for the next shaft. Remembered too late his younger brother’s chief prowess ever since they were children.

“Oh, you little shit!”

He urged the destrier forward with his thighs. It wallowed as it tried to obey. A second shaft took it deep in the flank. Blood welled up. It screamed again, staggered forward half a dozen desperate steps, neck arched, stumbling. Egar screamed with it, hefted his lance, willed himself and his mount closer to his brother.

“I’ll rip your motherfucking heart out for this, Ershal!”

The third arrow put out the animal’s eye. It went mad, reared and tumbled, hurled Egar from its back. He hit the ground and rolled, somehow kept the lance, somehow else managed not to spike himself on it, came to a halt in the grass clutching at its shaft. Behind him, he heard the crash as his horse hit the ground, the sound of it curling and trying to get up, falling back. The endless heart-ripping cries it gave out as it struggled and thrashed.

He got muzzily to his hands and knees. Soft pulsing snarl in the base of his throat. Back on your feet, back on your fucking feet, Majak. The horse screamed again. Egar cast about in the gloom of near dark, found Ergund and Ershal a couple of dozen paces away, edged in bandlight. Alrag farther out but trotting back toward them and erect in the saddle, pleased with himself. None of them close enough to take down with a thrown knife.

Off to the left, the young mercenary staggered about groaning, fell down abruptly, lost to view in the grass. It looked as if he’d taken a bad blow to the head when he was unhorsed. He didn’t get up again.

Ershal put another arrow into the stricken warhorse. It screamed again, but weakly now.

“Urann’s sake, fucking kill it, will you.”

Ergund—all his life, he’d hated it when the animals suffered. Egar remembered when he was ten and . . .

The hiss-thump of another arrow. The horse snorted and quieted. Egar slipped through the grass in a low raider’s crouch, knuckles white on the staff of his lance, a pulsing vein of fury through his brain like a spike. Whatever else happened now, he was going to take Ershal apart before he died.

“That’s far enough, Egar.”

His brother’s voice, calm against the fading agony of the destrier. Egar looked up through the night breeze sway of the grass and saw Ershal upright in the saddle, the bow bent on him from less than ten yards. Cold, quailing horror as he waited for the impact—his brother would not miss, and at this range, off the recurved bow, the shaft would go right through him.

“That’s it. Up where I can see you.”

Egar straightened from his crouch. A bitter smile touched the corners of his mouth. He heard the snuffling his horse made as it died. He thought maybe his knife would reach from here. He dropped the lance.

“Go on then. You traitorous little fuck. Get it done.”

“You were given every chance to—”

“Oh, fuck off.”

Alrag rode up, reined his horse to an unnecessarily savage halt, and glanced back and forth along the line the arrow would take.

“What are you fucking waiting for?” he inquired acidly.

Ershal flickered a glance at Alrag, then Ergund. But his attention never shifted from the draw he had on Egar.

“We’re all agreed, then?”

Egar clawed for his knife.

Ershal loosed the arrow.

The world went dark.

NO, NOT DARK, HE REALIZED.

Had time to realize.

The arrow had not hit him.

Not dark, just dim, like the dimming of your eyes when you’d stared too hard at the sun before you ducked into a yurt. Like the sudden steeping of gloom in a Yhelteth theater house before the curtains ran back.

The wind across the steppe seemed to hold its breath.

Out of nowhere, there was a figure standing in the path of Ershal’s shot. Leather-cloaked, face shadowed beneath a soft-brimmed hat. It reached up and took the arrow out of the air with no more effort than a man grabbing a lance pennant in the breeze. The fingers of the hand seemed—Egar squinted hard—to elongate and flex in places no human hand could have. A voice whispered out to them in the still spaces left by the wind, distant and intimate at once.

“Can’t allow that, I’m afraid.”

And suddenly the wind came back, buffeting, and in it Egar caught the wash of chemical burning once more. His brothers’ horses scented it, too—they whinnied in terror and tried to back up. Ershal cursed and dropped his bow as he fought his mount for control.

“Harjalath!” spat Alrag.

“Not as such, no.” The apparition lowered its arm and snapped the arrow deftly in half, one-handed. It let the pieces fall. “Harjalath is . . . other, when he cares to manifest himself. Though for your purposes, the end difference here will be negligible.”