The Steel Remains полностью

Eril approached the sergeant in charge and coins changed hands, subtly enough that Ringil almost missed it. Most of him was focused on the gloom on the other side of Black Sail Boulevard, where there were no lamps and the ancient torch brackets were either empty or held torches long since burned down to a blackened wick. The Watch had set up a couple of braziers beside the barricade, presumably more to ward off the gathering autumn chill than to throw light; the light they gave barely stretched across the paved street. The houses beyond were sunk in shadow. Vague shapes moved about in windows at the second and third floors, in all probability urchin gang lookouts, but the darkness and the distance painted them shifty and unhuman, all hunched posture, sharp features, and oddly angled bones.

Well, here are your dwenda already then, Gil. And all it took to see them was an overworked imagination.

But his smile faded as soon as it touched his lips. He could not shake the memory of Milacar’s fear. The story of the amputated, living heads.

The Watch sergeant called out orders to a couple of his men. Eril turned and beckoned to Ringil and Girsh. The sergeant gestured to one side of the barricade, where one of the pike bearers stood aside to let them through. For show, Ringil muttered a string of ornate thanks in Tethanne, then, turning to Eril, the first couple of lines of a Yhelteth nursery rhyme.

“Eleven, six, twenty-eight,” replied Eril with a straight face, and they were on their way, moving across to the darkened side of the boulevard.

Behind them, perhaps trying to be helpful, a watchman stabbed vigorously at one of the braziers with his sword, stirring up the dull glowing coals. But all it did was set long shadows dancing past their feet and up the brickwork ahead.

“YOU EVER KILL A CHILD?”

Girsh asked it idly as they passed under a narrow covered bridge—the third or fourth so far—over whose unglassed stone gallery ledges urchins hung their arms and chins and stared down with unblinking calculation.

But he wasn’t joking.

Ringil remembered the eastern gate.

“I was in the war, remember,” he evaded.

“Yeah, I don’t mean lizard pups. I mean humans. Kids, like those ones back there watching us.”

Ringil looked at him curiously. He supposed it wasn’t Girsh’s fault. It was a common enough conceit in Trelayne that the war had been a straightforward battle for the human race—with a little technical support from the Kiriath—against an implacably evil and alien foe. And Girsh, for all his quiet enforcer’s competence, wouldn’t be any better informed or educated than the next street thug; in all probability, he’d never been outside the borders of the League in his life. Possibly, he’d never even been out of the sight of Trelayne itself. And quite clearly, he had never been within a hundred miles of Naral, or Ennishmin, or any of the other half a dozen fucked-up little border disputes the war had degenerated into at the end. Because if he had—

No point in getting into that now. Let it go, Archeth had urged him last time they met, and he’d tried. Really tried.

Was still trying.

“I won’t have any problem, if it comes to it,” he said quietly.

Girsh nodded and left it alone.

Others were less compliant.

No, you never really did have a problem, did you, whispered something that might have been Jelim Dasnel’s ghost. Not when it came to it.

He shook it off. Tried letting go of that as well.

In doorways, from windows and the lowest of the rooftops, and from a few dozen furtive steps behind them in the street, the urchins kept track.

As if they knew.

Ah, come on. Stop that shit.