“Seethlaw wasn’t politics, though, was he?”
“Seethlaw.” Grace-of-Heaven swallowed. “Seethlaw was—”
“Beautiful. Yeah, I know, you told me that. Of course, you also told me it was secondhand knowledge, but that was just the quick lie to cover your arse. Couldn’t really admit to me you were fucking the fabulous dwenda in Etterkal, that would have ruined everything. I just wonder why you bothered mentioning him in the first place.”
Milacar bowed his head. “I thought it might scare you off.”
“Yeah? Or you thought I might be competition you could do without?”
“I just didn’t want you hurt, Gil.”
“So you keep saying. Look at my face, Grace. I got hurt.”
“Yeah, well I’m sorry.” Sudden, flaring anger. “If you’d fucking stayed out of it like I told you to, maybe you wouldn’t have that ugly scar now.”
“Maybe not.”
Silence, like a shared flandrijn pipe between them. The shape of what was coming began to emerge in the quiet.
“He took you to the gray places,” Milacar said finally, bitterly.
“Oh yeah.” And though, just from looking at Grace-of-Heaven’s eyes, he already knew the answer, Ringil asked the question anyway. “You?”
Milacar stared off across the room, into the dark corner Ringil had come from. “No. He talked about it, but . . . I don’t know. Never the right time, I guess.”
“Don’t feel bad. You don’t know how fucking lucky you got.” Ringil leaned forward and tapped the scar along his jaw. “You think this is ugly? You should see what I’m carrying inside.”
“You think I can’t?” Milacar looked at him again, and now he was smiling sadly. “You need to take a look in a mirror sometime, Gil. How did you kill him, then? The gorgeous Seethlaw?”
“With the Ravensfriend. I carved his beautiful fucking face in half.”
“Well.” A shrug. “You did say it wouldn’t stop you. That’s you, Gil, all over. Start you up, you won’t be stopped till it’s done. Have you come to kill me, too?”
It took a moment to bring it to his lips. “Yeah.”
“I’m really sorry, Gil.”
“So am I.” Ringil nodded at the bellpull on the far side of the bed. “You want to try calling your machete boys now?”
“Would it help?”
“No. Not unless you want company dying.”
Grace-of-Heaven Milacar made a lordly gesture. If he was scared of what was coming, he masked it well.
“Then it seems rather wasteful, don’t you think? All those young bodies? I think I’ll just—”
And he came off the bed, very fast for his age, no weapon at all but his own weight and a lifetime of street-fighting prowess. Ringil let him come, it seemed only fair. He left his hands at his sides, made it look like there might be a chance. Then, as Milacar reached him, he dropped the dragon knife from his sleeve and whipped it up, into the side of Grace’s neck. His other hand snapped out, caught the other side of the neck and pushed in against the knife blow.
He held Grace like that, eye-to-eye, as if to kiss him. Blood from the chopped artery flooded out, down the dragon’s tooth and over his right hand. He heard it puddle into the carpet around their feet.
“Ohhh,” Grace moaned. “Hoiran’s . . . twisted . . . cock. That . . . hurts, Gil.”
Ringil held him up while he died, looked steadily into the eyes until they dimmed. Then he jerked the knife out, let go convulsively of Grace’s neck, and watched him hit the ground like a sack of meal.
Flicker of blue fire.
He spun, heart pounding.
Saw himself in the big mirror hung across from the bed.
He sighed, waited for the relief to hit, for the spike of fear to ease and his pulse to climb back down. He waited. But the moment passed, left him there waiting, and no relief came. The figure in the mirror stood and grinned at him. He saw the bloodstained hands, the gaunt, scarred face, and the eyes, the eyes glittering back from the dark glass. The jutting pommel of the Ravensfriend, the faithful killing steel on his back. The jagged curve of the dragon’s tooth in his right hand.
You need to take a look in a mirror sometime, Gil.
He was looking now. Seethlaw’s words in the swamp came back to him, desperate in their intensity. I see what the akyia saw, Gil. I see what you could become, if you’d only let yourself.
He remembered the beach, the creatures in the surf and the sounds they made.
They’re talking about you.
And like a final hammerblow, like a blade going home, he remembered the fortune-teller at the eastern gate. The words he’d discounted at Ibiksinri when he fought the dwenda and took Seethlaw down in bloody ruin.
A fight is coming, a battle of powers you have not yet seen. A battle that will unmake you, that will tear you apart.
The cool night breeze came to find him from the opened window. It carried a faint note of salt.
A dark lord will rise, his coming is in the wind off the marsh.
He stared at himself.
A dark lord will rise.
“It’s like that, is it?” he whispered.
The muslin drapes stirred; the breeze blew through the quiet room. He wiped his hands and the dragon knife on Grace-of-Heaven’s silk sheets, and put the weapon away again in his sleeve. He settled the Ravensfriend a little more comfortably on his back, shifted the pommel a fraction of an inch for a cleaner pull.
Then he faced himself in the mirror once more, and found he was no longer afraid of what he saw looking back at him.
He waited, patiently, for the flicker of blue fire to show itself again, and for whatever else might come with it.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
In case the influences worn so prominently on the sleeve of this novel should remain unclear, thanks are due to the following, for initial, momentous inspiration, way back when:
To Michael Moorcock for Hawkmoon, Elric, and Corum.
To the memory of Karl Edward Wagner for Kane.
To the memory of Poul Anderson for The Broken Sword and The Dancer from Atlantis.
There are a lot of little anchoring glints of realism embedded in the fantasy of The Steel Remains, and for making some of these possible, I’m indebted to Robert Low, author of The Whale Road, and to Jon Weir. I’m also grateful to Alan Beatts for sowing a seed with his comments about sanity, and to Gillian Redfearn for hemming and hawing about the dimensions of staff lances.
For the rest, endless appreciation once again to my editors Simon Spanton and Chris Schluep, for—quite literally—buying into the idea in the first place, and then for putting up with the butchered and mutilated bodies of deadlines when things took longer than expected to whip into the shape I wanted. And thanks also to my agent Carolyn Whitaker for her continuing weather eye and all-around support.
And finally, and most of all, thanks to Virginia, for living day in, day out with the brooding excesses and antisocial abandon of Morgan the Barbarian, for the time it took to complete the work.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
RICHARD K. MORGAN is the acclaimed author of Thirteen, which won the Arthur C. Clarke Award, Woken Furies, Market Forces, Broken Angels, and Altered Carbon, a New York Times Notable Book that also won the Philip K. Dick Award. Morgan sold the movie rights for Altered Carbon to Joel Silver and Warner Bros. His third book, Market Forces, has also been sold to Warner Bros. and was the winner of the John W. Campbell Award. He lives in Scotland.