The Steel Remains by Richard K. Morgan Page B

and looked up and down the empty kitchen as if for witnesses to something, as if for an audience. He rubbed his hands together and sighed.
    Presently, the girl from the cauldron materialized again, at his shoulder this time and with a silent, pallid immediacy that made him jump. She held a hinge- lidded wooden flagon in her hands, out of which crept wisps of steam.
    “An infusion, my lord,” she murmured.
    “Yeah, uhm.” He blinked and shook off a shiver. “Could you not creep up on me like that, please.”
    “I'm sorry, my lord.”
    “Right. Leave it there, then.”
    She did, and then withdrew as silently as she'd appeared. He waited until she was gone before he tipped back the lid on the flagon and hunched over it, breathing in. Bitter green odors steamed out; heat rose off the surface of the water the herbs had been steeped in, soaked around his gritty eyes like a soothing towel. It was far too hot to drink. He stared down instead at the distorted, darkened reflection of his face in the water, cupped the uncertain vision of himself between his palms, as if afraid it might boil off and fade like the steam it was wreathed in. Finally, he slid the flagon carefully aside, slumped forward with his chin to the table, cheek pressed against one outflung arm, and stared blankly down the table and off into the space beyond.
    He heard them coming.
    Booted footfalls on stone, and suddenly something told him, some whispered hint of witch clarity he'd maybe picked up out there in the early- morning mist, some legacy of the uncanny laughter that had brushed by as if inviting him to turn and follow, still whispering now around the bowl of his skull,
telling him what to expect next.
Then again, it might just have been the sputtering remnants of the krin, a hallucinatory effect that wasn't unknown among its users. One way or another, a coldly sober Ringil would later be unable to shake memory of this feeling that was almost knowledge, as shadows darkened the doorway and the footfalls approached. He came up off the table with that premonition, back straightening, sharp enough now, but the whole motion edged with a druggy weariness that felt somehow like resignation …
    “How now, Ringil.” Gingren boomed it out as he stomped down into the kitchen, but there was a false tone in the heartiness, like a missed step. “Your mother said we'd find you down here.”
    “Looks like she was right, then.”
    Father and son looked each other over like reluctant duelists. Gingren cut a big, blocky figure in the low- beamed kitchen space, waist perhaps a little thickened these days, much the same way Grace- of-Heaven's had gone, features maybe a little bloated and blurred with the years and the good living— and now with staying up all night, Ringil supposed— but aside from these things, he was still pretty much the man he'd always been. No give in the flinty stare, no real space for regrets. And his son, well, not much change there, either, no matter how hard Gingren might look for it, and in the few days that Ringil had been back, truth be told, Gingren hadn't done much looking. They'd encountered each other an inevitable number of times in various parts of the house, usually one or the other of them talking to someone else, which served as buffer and barrier and in the end excuse not to offer more than some grunted, grudging acknowledgment as they passed. The hours they kept didn't coincide any better than they had in Ringil's youth, and no one in the house, not even Ishil, saw any merit in trying to bring them closer together than they chose to be.
    But now …
    And finally, the knowledge crashed in on him, like something tearing a seam. Soft- footed and slim despite the years that had grayed his temples, Murmin Kaad stepped down into the room.
    “Good day, Master Ringil.”
    Ringil sat rigid.
    “Ha! Cat got his tongue.” But Gingren had been— was perhaps still, just about— a warrior, and he knew what the sudden stillness in his