Seethlaw swung to face her. His voice came out dangerously low.
“Do you want to lead, Risgillen?”
She didn’t reply. The other dwenda watched with interest.
“I asked you a question, sister. Do you want charge of this expedition? Will you abandon the pleasures and comforts of our realm and become earthbound as I have? Will you immerse yourself in the brawling filth of human society to achieve our ends?”
Still no response.
“I’ll have an answer, sister, if you please. Or I’ll take your silence as the no it has always been. Is it no? Then shut the fuck up!”
Risgillen started to speak, her own tongue, but Seethlaw slashed the blade of a hand across the flow. He turned slowly about, blank eyes switching from face to face among his fellow Aldrain.
“I hear you complain,” he spat, still in Naomic, perhaps, Ringil guessed, to snub them, to shame them before the human. “All of you, time and again, bemoaning what you must endure here, the journeys and sojourns of a few weeks’ duration that you must make among humans, tied to time and circumstance. I have spent three fucking years tied to time so that we could build a path in Trelayne. I have tasted this world on my tongue for so long I can scarcely remember what it was like not to be tainted by its limits. I have swallowed it down, day after day, sickening from the brute animal stupidity of its ways, all so that I might learn its parameters and its possibilities, all so we may in the end take back what is ours. I have done all of this willingly, and would do it again. And I ask for nothing in return but your allegiance and your trust. Is that so very much to give?”
Silence. Very, very faintly, the sound of the Aldrain bridge humming and whining in the wind above them. Seethlaw nodded grimly.
“Very well. You will not gainsay me in this again, Risgillen. Is that clear?”
A half syllable of Aldrain speech in reply. Risgillen bowed her head.
“Good. Then wait here.” Seethlaw nodded at Ringil. “Gil, you come with me. There’s something you need to see.”
CHAPTER 28
A few hundred yards beyond the Aldrain bridge, as if in some kind of savage architectural riposte, a massive black iron platform jutted out of the swamp at the angle of a sinking ship. It was easily over a hundred feet from side to side, multileveled, six flanges that Ringil could make out as they approached, tipping his head back to count. The top was crowned with spikes and webbed wire assemblies that looked somewhat like fishermen’s nets hung out to dry. The whole thing stabbed upward at the murky sky like a blade buried in a wound and then snapped off. In the hanging silence that surrounded it, there was a presence, a heavy tension like the feel in the air before a storm.
“See,” said Seethlaw grimly, “what your allies did to this place.”
It wasn’t hard to make the connection—the design of the platform could only have one origin.
“You’re talking about the Kiriath?”
“The Black Folk, yes. Look around you, Ringil Eskiath. This was once the site of the greatest Aldrain city on the continent. They called it Enheed-idrishinir, dwelling place of the joyful winds. You’ve seen the bridge. Imagine streets and towers made the same way, stretching to the horizon. Sculpted rivers whose waters flow in and out of the real world as easily as a Trelayne canal emerges from a tunnel or passes under a toll station. Trees, and built structures like trees, to echo and worship their form, reaching up to catch the breeze and sing. I was a child the last time I saw Enheed-idrishinir, before the Black Folk came.”
He pointed at the platform again.
“It fell from the sky. They say it screamed as it came. You see the six levels? There are twenty-seven more belowground, buried past the swamp and into the bedrock beneath. At the spear-point was a device that tore reality apart. Fifty thousand died or were swept away, out in the wash of the greater march. We still sometimes find their remains today. Some still live, after a fashion.”
“Nothing ever changes, huh,” said Ringil quietly, and thought of Grashgal’s visions of a museum for swords. Children mystified by an edged-steel past that was locked away safe behind glass.
It always had sounded like an unlikely piece of wish fulfillment.
“No, things will change.” Seethlaw turned and fixed him with the dark, empty stare. His voice rose a little in the quiet of the swamp, took on faint echoes of a passion Ringil had only previously seen in him when they were fucking. “The Aldrain are coming back, Ringil. This world is ours. We dominated it for millennia before what you understand as human history had even begun. We were driven out, but it remains our ancestral home, our birth canal. Ours by right of blood and blade and origin. We will take it back.”
“How you going to do that then?” Somehow, this new aspect of Seethlaw left Ringil obscurely disappointed. “There don’t seem to be that many of you.”
“No, not yet. The Aldrain are wanderers by nature, individual by inclination, always happiest at the edge of our known domains and pressing farther outward to see what else lies beyond. But buried at the heart of each of us is an ache for this world, for a unity, a certain place to carry in the heart and to return to at journey’s end. When the gates are opened again here, my people will come from every corner and aspect of the marches. They will flock here like crows at evening.”
“Is that supposed to cheer me up?”
The blank-eyed gaze bent on him again. “Have I used you so ill then?”
“Oh no. I’ve seen slaves treated far worse.”
Seethlaw’s face turned aside as if he’d slapped it. He stared past Ringil at the sunken platform. His voice turned toneless.
“I could have killed you, Ringil Eskiath. I could have taken my pleasure, wiped myself on you like a rag, and thrown you away. Left you to wither from the soul outward in the gray places, or finished our duel as it began, with steel. You came into my domain, you brought your blade and your threats and your pride that no beauty or sorcery could stem your killing prowess. You stirred up my affairs in Etterkal, killed and mutilated useful servants of mine, forced me to intervene when it was hardly convenient. I ask you again. Have I used you ill?”
Since there was only one fair answer to that, Ringil ignored it.
“Just tell me something,” he asked instead. “I see your end of this, you get your sacred ancestral . . . lizardshit . . . blood right . . . whatever . . . promised fucking land back. I see that, it isn’t what you’d call a fresh concept. But what’s in it for the cabal? Looks to me like you’ve got the whole Chancellery dancing to your tune one way or the other. What the fuck did you promise them?”
The dwenda gave him a thin smile. “What do you think? You see where we are, you know what Ennishmin represents to the League.”
The knowledge must already have been there inside him in some shape or form. He felt no real surprise, only an icy sliding sensation in the pit of his stomach.
“You told them you’d take it back for them?”
“Yes, more or less.”
“You’re going to invade imperial territory? Break the accords?”
Seethlaw shrugged. “I signed no accord. Nor did my people. It’s a service I’m rendering my hosts in Trelayne.”
“But . . .” Now the trickle of ice in his guts was swelling, was filling him up. “The Empire isn’t going to sit still for that, Seethlaw. Not the way things are right now. They’ll go to war. It’ll mean another fucking war. You must know that.”
“Yes.” Another blank-eyed shrug. “What of it? The League and the Empire will go to war over their relative hypocrisies, with my hand on the Trelayne side of the scales to render the struggle evenly matched. They’ll fight for years, I imagine. They’ll spend their strength and drag each other down, and when it’s done, when they’re finally sick of the slaughter, when they’re tired and broken, my people will walk through the ruins and take up their rightful place once again in this world.” Seethlaw’s voice turned oddly soft and urgent. “You shouldn’t object, Gil. It’ll be a far better world for it. No more hysterical hatreds and petty factional bloodshed. No more hypocrisy to cover for the abuse of power, no more lies.”