The Steel Remains полностью

“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.”