Richard Morgan: The Steel Remains

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.

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.

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.

TAKESHI KOVACS NOVELS

• Altered Carbon

• Broken Angels

• Woken Furies

Market Forces

Thirteen

The Steel Remains

The Steel Remains is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2009 by Richard Morgan

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Del Rey, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

DEL REY is a registered trademark and the Del Rey colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.

Originally published in hardcover in Great Britain by Gollancz, a division of The Orion Publishing Group, in 2008.

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