The Steel Remains полностью

Thing is, Gil, if I’d taken that attitude at Gallows Gap, where would we be now? I’d never have made it back in one piece.

What attitude? Ringil shook his head numbly, stared back at the seamed anthracite features. You didn’t make it back, ’Nam. You never got to Gallows Gap in the first place. You died on the surgeon’s table.

Flaradnam pulled a face, as if he’d just been told a joke in very poor taste. Oh come on. So who led the charge at the Gap, if it wasn’t me?

I did.

You?

Yes! Me! Shouting now. You were fucking dead, ’Nam. We left your body for the lizards.

Gil, what’s the matter with you? You’re not well.

And so on.

“DO YOU EVER GET USED TO IT?” HE ASKED SEETHLAW ACROSS A SOFTLY snapping campfire in a forest he didn’t remember walking into. Thick green scent of pine needles mingled with the smoke. He was shivering, but not with cold. “How long does it take?”

The dwenda cocked his head. “Get used to what?”

“Oh, what do you think? The ghosts, the visitors I’m getting. And don’t tell me you don’t fucking see them.”

Seethlaw nodded, more to himself than to the human he faced. “No, you’re correct. I do see them. But not as you do. They are not my alternatives, they mean nothing to me. I see a faint gathering of motion around you, that’s all. Like a fog. It’s always that way with humans.”

“Yeah, well there’s no fucking fog around you,” Ringil snapped. “How long before I can learn to do that?”

“Longer than you have, I suspect.” The dwenda stared into the fire, and its light turned his eyes incandescent. “No human has managed it to my knowledge, except maybe . . . well, but he was not truly human anyway.”

“Who wasn’t?”

“It no longer matters.” Seethlaw looked up and smiled sadly. “You ask how long. In all honesty, I wouldn’t know. I was born to it, we all were. Our young flicker in and out of the gray places from birth.”

Later, they walked in single file along a worn footpath through the trees and up across the shoulder of the hill. Ringil followed the broad-shouldered figure of the dwenda without question, something that seemed wrong to him, but in some oddly shaped way he could not define. A pale but strengthening glow seeped in between the jagged barked trunks, brought the ground underfoot into clearer view, but it never really got light.

“Where are we going?” he asked Seethlaw’s back.

“Where you wanted to go.” The voice drifted to him over the dwenda’s shoulder. Seethlaw did not turn around or slacken his pace. “I’m going to fulfill your obligations for you.”

“And why would you do that?”

A lewd chuckle that put twinges through Ringil’s sweetly aching groin. “You have a short memory, Ringil Angeleyes.”

“Lucky I’ve got a fucking memory at all,” Ringil muttered. “Place like this.”

And he shivered again.

BACK IN THE GARDEN, THERE WAS A GRIZZLED SOLDIER IN IMPERIAL cavalry rig who said he knew him and talked incessantly about campaigns in the desert Ringil had never been a part of.

Not like we didn’t warn old Ershnar Kal not to quit the outcrops that time, is it? Fucking coast huggers, got no clue how to fight a desert war. Not much surprise the scale faces took them apart before we got back. You remember what they did to Kal’s ribs, the way they left him?

No, I don’t. Slightly desperate, because the horrors of a screaming, sun-seared image he had never seen were beginning to trickle into his head. Like I told you, I was never fucking there.

Gave me nightmares for months, that. The imperial seemed to be ignoring his protests. But perhaps he had to, perhaps they all had to, the same way Ringil had to resist each apparition’s false assumptions about him, in order to go on existing at all. Still get it sometimes when it’s a tough summer, still wake up sweating and screaming, dreaming about the scale faces coming up out of the sand all around us. You ever have dreams like that?