The veteran nodded. Thought it had to be something like that. Way you cut that iron. Look, there s no shame in it. Can t all be swinging the steel, you know, someone s got to actually make the fucking stuff. But you got to know your specialty.
He swung the cutters absently, feeling the weight in them. It made a sound through the air like a scythe. The blacksmith stared at him, and the veteran s scarred features creased in something vaguely resembling a smile. He gestured with his newly acquired weapon, up to where the trees thickened toward forest.
Go on, get moving, both of you. Head for the trees. The smile became an awful grin. Be right behind you.
They turned from the lie, the impossible promise in his ruined face, and fled.
The scarred man watched them go. Yelled curses and stumbling behind him as the first of the sword- wielding march-masters kicked their way through to the scene of the revolt. His grin faded slowly out. Amid the chaos of men scrambling to be free, tugging at their chains, and screaming for cutters, he turned to face the newcomers. Two men, both wielding swords, one with a torch upraised. The veteran felt a muscle twitch, deep under the scar tissue in his face.
You! The first march-master saw him, lifted his torch, and peered. He pointed with his sword. Get down on your fucking knees. Do it now.
The veteran closed the gap with three swift paces, ignored the sword, got inside its useful reach before the march-master could grasp what was happening. He loomed over the man.
We left them behind, he said, as if explaining something to a child.
Moth-wing blur of motion the bolt cutters, slashing in at head height.
The march-master staggered sideways, face torn open from the blow, one eye gone, socket caved in. The torch flew away in a splatter of sparks. The march-master made a broken howling sound, dropped his sword, and sagged to his knees. The veteran was already turning on his companion. The second man got the reverse swing of the cutters across his face as well. He fell back in fright, blood oozing from the gouges, sword clutched upright like some kind of magical ward against demons. In the fitful glow from the dropped torch, the veteran came on, snarling.
Orders, he said to the uncomprehending march-master, and hacked him in the head with the cutters, once, twice, until he went down. They made us leave them.
For a moment, he stood like a statue between his two felled adversaries. He looked around in the fitful torchlight as if just waking up.
The second of the armed march-masters was on his back, head twisted to one side, skull a ruined cup. The first was propped on his knees and one trembling arm, trying to hold his shattered face together with the other hand. Weeping, gibbering. The veteran spotted the man s fallen sword, grunted, and let the bolt cutters fall. He took up the sword, hefted it a couple of times, then settled into a two-handed grip, whipped around and heaved it down on the injured march-master s neck. Passable executioner s stroke the blade sliced spine and most of the neck, dropped the man flat to the ground. The veteran flexed, cleared the blade with drilled precision, looked down for a moment at the damage he d done.
We heard them screaming after us for fucking miles, he told the man s corpse.
More cries, the rush of something through the night air, a savage, incoherent yell. The veteran pitched about, saw the next march-master in mid-heave behind the downward slice of a morning-star mace and chain. The veteran seemed to just drift out of the way of the flail blow as if in a trance, let it come down and snag in the grassy ground. He stepped in close, like a newlywed to his bride, and swung the sword at belly height as the march-master struggled to get the morning star s spikes back out of the ground.
Some of them cursed us, he grunted on the stroke.
The march-master screamed as the steel bit through leather jerkin and into the unprotected flesh beneath. The veteran hauled and sliced through, cleared the blade out under the man s ribs at the back.
Some, he said conversationally, just wept.
Beyond the collapsing ruins of the man he d just gutted, he faced three more torch-and-steel-equipped figures. They were holding back now, aware of the corpses of their comrades littering the ground, aware that something serious was happening here. They huddled shoulder-to-shoulder and stared.
But behind them, others were coming.
The veteran settled his grip on the sword, angled it toward the gathering march-masters, and jerked his head for them to come ahead. Torchlight painted him massive and flicker-shadowed behind the blade.
He made them a grin from his scarred and ravaged features.
Do I look like a fucking slave to you? he asked them.
And though, finally, they would bring him down with sheer weight of numbers, none who heard him ask that question lived to see the dawn.
CHAPTER 4
There was an iron alloy tree in one corner of the courtyard, gleaming where the late-afternoon sunlight played off features in the gnarled metal bark. Sharp black shadow ran out from the trunk like spilled ink, then split into branching rivulets that spread out across the stone paving, as if in search of something. Archeth sat well out of reach on the courtyard floor opposite booted legs propped up in front of her, warmth of the sun-drenched courtyard wall at her back and watched the rivulet shadows creep toward her. She bit into an apple she d plucked from another tree in another courtyard, one that humans might have been a little more comfortable with.
Nothing grows at An-Monal, the superstitions whispered across Yhelteth like the wind. Nothing lives there.
Like most things humans believed, it was missing the point. The iron alloy tree was not alive in any conventional sense, true, but every year the blue-black leaves it lifted against the sky would rust through as winter approached, speckling and staining first to a purplish red, then to pale orange, and then finally to a stark silvery white that crumbled and turned to glinting ash in the breeze. And then, every spring, the leaves slid back out of the alloy bark like tiny blades unsheathing, like a winning hand of cards spread out on the table before your eyes.
The quiet metallic process had been going on for as long as Archeth could remember, which was coming up on a couple of centuries now; and despite a slew of idiot prophecies about such things ceasing when the Kiriath abandoned the world when the last of her people s fireships did finally submerge in the An-Monal crater and something seemed to tear for good in Archeth s heart, the tree never missed a beat.
She wasn t really surprised, could have told the prophesying priests it was a stupid idea from the start. Her father s people prided themselves on creating processes and artifacts that did not need them to officiate over.
We are what we build, Grashgal once told her cryptically, in the brief months between the end of the war and the Departure. Forces older and darker than knowing forced knowing upon us and long ago locked us out of paradise. There is no way back. The only victory against those forces is to build. To build well enough that, when we look back along the path of exile we have engineered, the view is bearable.
If there s no way back, she begged him, then why are you leaving?
But by then it was a rancid argument. Grashgal could no more sway the Council of Captains than she could herself. The aftermath of the war had broken something in the Kiriath, had horrified them in some way that was still mostly obscure to her. They wanted out. After thousands of years of settled inertia, they were making plans again, drawing charts and asking their machines for counsel their own delicately damaged minds could not provide. Down in the workshops at An-Monal, the welding torches raged blue-white again, and sparks cascaded vermilion and gold down the curved iron flanks of the fireships in dry dock. The Helmsmen stirred in their brooding, mothballed darkness, and pondered the questions put to them, and said it could be done.
Involuntarily, she glanced left across the courtyard, toward the arched entrance and the paths that wound down to the workshops beyond. Ghost memories of the clangor faded out as she came back to the present; sharp acid taste of apple on her tongue and the warmth of the sun on her skin. She d been down to the workshops that morning, had wandered the deserted iron gantries and crane platforms, leaned there and stared at the few fireships left behind in the cobweb gloom, until the familiar tears, the ones she d been biting back for months now,
