The Steel Remains

CHAPTER 5

Where the broad westward flow of the River Trel split and spread in tributaries, and wore itself into the soft cushioned loam of the Naom coastal plain like the lines etched across a man’s palm, where the sea spent its force across acres of mudflat and marsh and could not easily threaten man-made structure, one of Grace-of-Heaven Milacar’s distant ancestors had once spotted a less-than-obvious strategic truth—to wit, that a city surrounded by such a maze of mingled land and water would in effect be a kind of fortress. Well, being by nature a modest as well as an inventive man, this root patriarch of the Milacar line not only went ahead and founded an ingenious settlement you could only reach with local guides through the marsh; he also renounced the right to name the city after himself and called it instead Trel-a-lahayn, from the old Myrlic lahaynir—blessed refuge. Out of this vision, and the eventual laziness of men’s tongues, Trelayne was born. And over time, as stone replaced wood, and cobbles covered mud streets, as blocks and then towers rose gracefully over the plain to become the city we all know and love, as the lights, the very lights of that subtle fortress came to be visible to caravanserai and ship captains a full day and night before they reached it, so the origins of the city were lost, and the clan name Milacar, sadly, came to be valued no more than any other . . .

At least, that was Grace-of-Heaven’s end of the tale, backed up now as always with consistent narrative passion if not actual evidence. There weren’t many who would have had the nerve to call him a liar to his face, far less interrupt him with the accusation at his own dinner table.

Ringil stood in the brocade-hung entryway and grinned.

“Not this horseshit again,” he drawled loudly. “Haven’t you got any new stories, Grace?”

Conversation drained out of the candlelit dining chamber like the last of the sand from an hourglass. Bandlight seeped coldly into the quiet from window drapes along the far wall. Gazes flickered about, on and off the newcomer, in among the gathered company. Some at the broad oval table looked around, arms in richly tailored cloth braced on chair backs—squeak of shifting chair legs and the soft brush of heavy robes in motion across the floor. Well-fed and contented faces turned, some of them still chewing their last mouthful, momentarily robbed of their self-assurance. Mouths open, eyes wide. The machete boy crouched at Milacar’s right hip blinked, and his hand tightened on the hilt of the ugly eighteen-inch chopping blade at his belt.

Ringil caught the boy’s eye. Held it a moment, no longer grinning.

Milacar made a tiny clucking sound, tongue behind his top teeth. It sounded like a kiss. The boy let go of the machete hilt.

“Hello, Gil. I heard you were back.”

“You heard right, then.” Ringil switched his gaze from boy to master. “Seems you’re as well informed as ever.”

Milacar—always rather less svelte than he would probably have liked, rather less tall than his claim to ancestral Naom blood suggested he should be. But if these elements had not changed, then neither had the stocky, muscular energy that smoked off him even when he sat, the sense that it wouldn’t take much to have him come up out of the chair, big cabled arms falling to a street fighter’s guard, fists rolled up and ready to beat the unceremonious shit out of anyone who was asking for it.

For now, he settled for a pained frown, and rubbed at his chin with the pads of his index and middle fingers. His eyes creased and crinkled with a smile that stayed just off his lips. Deep, gorgeous blue, like the sunstruck ocean off the headland at Lanatray, dancing alive in the light from the candles. He held Ringil’s look and his mouth moved, something inaudible, something for Ringil alone.

The moment broke.

Milacar’s doorman, whom Ringil had left encumbered and struggling to hang his cloak and the Ravensfriend, arrived red-faced and cringing in his wake. He wasn’t a young man and he was puffed from sprinting up the stairs and down the corridor after his escaped charge.

“Uhm, his worthiness Master Ringil of Eskiath Fields, licensed knight graduate of Trelayne and—”

“Yes, yes, Quon, thank you,” Milacar said acidly. “Master Ringil has already announced himself. You may go.”

“Yes, your honor.” The doorman darted a poisonous glance at Ringil. “Thank you, your honor.”

“Oh, and Quon. Try to keep up with the uninvited arrivals, if you could. You never know, the next one might be an assassin.”

“Yes, your honor. I’m truly sorry, your honor. It won’t happen agai—”

Milacar waved him out. Quon shut up and withdrew, bowing and wringing his hands. Ringil crushed out a quiver of sympathy for the man, stepped on it like a spilled pipe ember. No time for that now. He advanced into the room. The machete boy watched him with glittering eyes.

“You’re not an assassin, are you, Gil?”

“Not tonight.”

“Good. Because you seem to have left that big sword of yours behind somewhere.” Milacar paused delicately. “If, of course, you still have it. That big sword of yours.”

Ringil reached the table at a point roughly opposite Grace-of-Heaven.

“Yeah, still got it.” He grinned, made a leg for his host. “Still as big as ever.”

A couple of outraged gasps from the assembled company. He looked around at the faces.

“I’m sorry, I’m forgetting my manners. Good evening, gentlemen. Ladies.” Though there were, technically, none of the latter in the room. Every female present had been paid. He surveyed the heaped table, matched gazes with one of the whores at random, spoke specifically to her.

“So what’s good, my lady?”

Shocked, gently rocking quiet. The whore opened her purple-painted mouth in disbelief, gaped back at him. Ringil smiled patiently. She looked hopelessly around for guidance from one or another of her outraged clients.

“It’s all good, Gil.” If the room bristled at Ringil’s subtle insult in addressing a prostitute ahead of the gathered worthies, Milacar at least was unmoved. “That’s why I pay for it. But why don’t you try the cougar heart, there in the yellow bowl. That’s especially good. A Yhelteth marinade. I don’t imagine you’ll have tasted much of that sort of thing in recent years, out there in the sticks.”

“No, that’s right. Strictly mutton and wolf, down among the peasants.” Ringil leaned in and scooped a chunk of meat from the bowl. His fingers dripped sauce back across the table in a line. He bit in, chewed for a while, and nodded. “That’s pretty good for a bordello spread.”

More gasps. At his elbow, someone shot to his feet. Bearded face, not much older than forty, and not as overfed as others around the table. Burly beneath the purple-and-gold upriver couture, some muscle on that frame by the look of it. A hand clapped to a court rapier that had not been checked at the door. Ringil spotted a signet ring with the marsh daisy emblem.

“This is an outrage! You will not insult this company with impunity, Eskiath. I demand—”

“I’d rather you didn’t call me that,” Ringil told him, still chewing. “Master Ringil will do fine.”

“You, sir, need a lesson in—”

“Sit down.”

Ringil’s voice barely rose, but the flicker of his look was a lash. He locked gazes with his challenger, and the other man flinched. It was the same threat he’d offered the machete boy, given voice this time in case the recipient was drunk or just hadn’t ever stood close enough to a real fight to read Ringil’s look for what it promised.

The burly man sat.

“Perhaps you should sit down, too, Gil,” Grace-of-Heaven suggested mildly. “We don’t eat standing up in the Glades. It’s considered rude.”

Ringil licked his fingers clean.

“Yeah, I know.” He looked elaborately around the table. “Anyone care to give up their seat?”

Milacar nodded at the whore nearest to him, one seated guest away from where he held court in the big chair. The woman got to her feet with well-schooled alacrity, and without a word. She backed gracefully off to one of the curtained alcove windows and stood there motionless, hands gathered demurely at one hip, posed slightly to display her muslin-shrouded form for the rest of the room.

Ringil moved around the table to the vacated seat, inclined his head in the woman’s direction, and lowered himself onto her chair. The velvet plush was warm from her arse, an unwelcome intimacy that seeped up through his breeches. The diners on either side of him looked studiously elsewhere. He held down an urge to shift in his seat.

You lay frozen in your own piss for six hours at Rajal Beach and played dead while the Scaled Folk nosed up and down the breakwaters with their reptile peons looking for survivors. You can sit still in a whore’s heat for half an hour. You can make polite Glades conversation here with the great and gracious of Trelayne.

Grace-of-Heaven Milacar cleared his throat, lifted a goblet.

“A toast, then. To one of our city’s most heroic sons, returned home and not before time.”

There was a pause, then a sort of grumbling tide of response around the table. The faces all buried themselves hurriedly in their drinks. It was, Ringil thought, a little like watching pigs at a trough. They finished the toast and Milacar leaned across his nearest guest to get his face less than a foot from Ringil’s. His breath was sweet with the wine.

“So now the theatrics are out of the way,” he said urbanely, “perhaps you’d like to tell me what you’re doing here, Gil.”

The pale eyes were crinkled at the corners, amused despite themselves. Between the trimmed mustache and goatee, the long, mobile lips were downcurved with humor, taut with anticipatory lust, tips of the teeth just showing. Ringil remembered the look with a jolt under his heart.

Milacar had gone bald, or nearly so, just like he’d said would happen. And he’d shaved it all down to a stubble, just like he’d always said he would.

“Came to see you, Grace,” he said, and it was almost the whole truth.

“CAME TO SEE ME, HUH?” MILACAR MURMURED IT LATER, AS THEY LAY in the big silk-sheeted bed upstairs, spent and stained and curled together, pillowed on each other’s thighs. He raised himself slightly, grabbed Ringil’s hair at the back of his neck, and dragged his face, mock-tough, back toward his flaccid crotch. “The fuck you did. You’re a lying sack of highborn shit, Gil, same as you ever were.” He twisted his fingers, tugging the small hairs, hurtfully. “Same as when you first came to me fifteen fucking years ago, Eskiath youth.”

“Sixteen years.” Ringil beat the grip on his nape, tangled fingers with Grace, and brought the back of the other man’s hand around to his lips. He kissed it. “I was fifteen, remember. Sixteen fucking years ago, and don’t call me that.”

“What, youth?”

“Eskiath. You know I don’t like it.”

Milacar pulled his hand free and propped himself back a little on his elbows, looking down at the younger man who lay coiled across him. “It’s your mother’s name as well.”

“She married it.” Ringil stayed with his face bedded in the damp warmth of Milacar’s crotch, staring off into the gloom near the bedchamber door. “Her choice. I didn’t get that much.”

“I’m not convinced she had much choice herself, Gil. She was, what, twelve when they gave her to Gingren?”

“Thirteen.”

Small quiet. The same muffled bandlight from the dining chamber spilled in here unrestrained, an icy flood of it across the carpeted floor from the bedroom’s broad river-facing balcony. The casements were back, the drapes stirred like languid ghosts, and a cool autumn breeze blew in past them, not yet the chill and bite there was in the upland air at Gallows Water, but getting that way. Winter would find him here as well. Ringil shifted, skin caressed to goose bumps, small hairs on his arms pulled erect. He breathed in Grace’s acrid, smoky scent and it carried him back a decade and a half like a drug. Riotous wine and flandrijn nights at Milacar’s house on Replete Cargo Street in the warehouse district; carefully steeping himself in the decadence of it all, thrilling at the subtle compulsion of doing Grace-of-Heaven’s will, whether in bed or out. Down to the docks for collections with Milacar’s thuggish wharf soldiers, sneaking the streets of the Glades and upriver for deliveries; occasionally chased by the Watch when someone got caught and squealed, the odd scuffle in a darkened alley or a safe house, the odd few moments of forced swordplay or a knifing somewhere, but all of it, the fights included, too highly colored, too much fucking fun at the time to really seem like the danger it was.

“So tell me why you’re really here,” Grace said gently.

Ringil rolled over, rested his head and neck on the other man’s belly. The muscle was still there, firm beneath a modest layer of middle-aged spread. It barely quivered when it took the weight of his sweat-soaked head. Ringil gazed up idly at the painted scenes of debauchery on Milacar’s ceiling. Two stable lads and a serving wench doing something improbable with a centaur. Ringil blew a dispirited breath up at them in their perfect little pastoral world.

“Got to help out the family,” he said drearily. “Got to find someone. Cousin of mine, got herself into some trouble.”

“And you think I’ve started moving in the same circles as the Eskiath clan.” The belly Ringil was pillowed on juddered with Milacar’s laughter. “Gil, you have seriously overestimated my place in the scheme of things these days. I’m a criminal, remember.”

“Yeah, I noticed how you were sticking to your roots. Big fuck-off house in the Glades, dinner with the Marsh Brotherhood and associated worthies.”

“I still keep the place over on Replete Cargo, if it makes you feel any better. And in case you’ve forgotten, I am from a Brotherhood family.” There was a slight edge in Grace-of-Heaven’s voice now. “My father was a pathfinder captain before the war.”

“Yeah, and your great-great, great-great, great-and-so-on grandfather founded the whole fucking city of Trel-a-lahayn. I heard it coming in, Grace. And the truth is still, fifteen years ago you wouldn’t have given civil house room to that prick with the dueling cutlery on his hip tonight. And you wouldn’t have been living upriver like this, either.”

He felt the stomach muscles beneath his head tense a little.

“Do I disappoint you?” Milacar asked him softly.

Ringil went on staring up at the ceiling. He shrugged. “It all turned to shit after ’55, we all had to ride it out somehow. Why should you be any different?”

“You’re too kind.”

“Yeah.” Ringil hauled himself up into a sitting position, swiveled a little to face Grace-of-Heaven’s sprawl. He got cross-legged, put his hands together in his lap. Shook his hair back off his face. “So. You want to help me find this cousin of mine?”

Milacar made a no-big-deal face. “Sure. What kind of trouble she in?”

“The chained-up kind. She went to the auction blocks at Etterkal about four weeks ago as far as I can work out.”

“Etterkal?” The no-big-deal expression slid right off Milacar’s face. “Was she sold legally?”

“Yeah, payment for a bad debt. Chancellery clearinghouse auction, the Salt Warren buyers took a shine to her, chain-ganged her out there the same day apparently. But the paperwork’s scrambled, or lost, or I just didn’t bribe the right officials. Got this charcoal sketch I’m showing around that no one wants to recognize, and I can’t get anyone to talk to me about the Etterkal end. And I’m getting tired of being polite.”

“Yes, I did notice that.” Grace of Heaven shook his head bemusedly. “How the blue fuck did a daughter of clan Eskiath end up getting as far as the Warren anyway?”

“Well, she’s not actually an Eskiath. Like I said, she’s a cousin. Family name’s Herlirig.”

“Oho. Marsh blood, then.”

“Yeah, and she married in the wrong direction, too, from an Eskiath point of view.” Ringil heard the angry disgust trickling into his voice, but he couldn’t be bothered to do anything about it. “To a merchant. Clan Eskiath didn’t know what was going on at the time, but really, I don’t think they’d have lifted a finger to stop it even if they had.”

“Hmm.” Milacar looked at his hands. “Etterkal.”

“That’s right. Your old pals Snarl and Findrich, among others.”

“Hmm.”

Ringil cocked his head. “You got a problem with this all of a sudden?”

More quiet. Somewhere in the lower levels of the house, someone was pouring water into a large vessel. Milacar seemed to be listening to it.

“Grace?”

Grace-of-Heaven met his eye, flexed a suddenly hesitant smile. It wasn’t a look Ringil recognized.

“Lot of things have changed since you went away, Gil.”

“Yeah, tell me about it.”

“That includes Etterkal. Salt Warren’s a whole different neighborhood these days, you wouldn’t recognize the place since Liberalization. I mean, everyone knew slaving was going to take off, it was obvious. Poppy used to talk about it all the time, Findrich, too, when you could get him to talk at all.” The words coming out of Milacar’s mouth seemed oddly hurried now, as if he was scared he’d be interrupted. “But you wouldn’t believe how big it’s grown, Gil. I mean, really big money. Bigger than flandrijn or krinzanz ever was.”

“You sound jealous.”

The smile flickered back to life a moment, then guttered out. “That kind of money buys protection, Gil. You can’t just wander into Etterkal and thug it like we used to when it was all whore masters and street.”

“Now, there you go, disappointing me all over again.” Ringil kept his tone light, mask to a creeping disquiet. “Time was, there wasn’t a street anywhere in Trelayne you wouldn’t walk down.”

“Yes, well, as I said, things have changed.”

“That time they tried to keep us out of the Glades balloon regatta. My people built this fucking city, they aren’t going to keep me penned up in the dreg end of it with their fucking silk-slash uniformed bully boys.” The levity sliding out of his tone now as he echoed the Milacar of then-ago. “Remember that?”

“Look—”

“Of course, now you live in the Glades.”

“Gil, I told you—”

“Things have changed, yeah. Heard you the first time.”

And now he couldn’t cloak it any longer, the leaking sense of loss, more fucking loss, soaking through into the same old general, swirling sense of betrayal, years upon pissed-away years of it, made bitter and particular on his tongue now, as if Grace-of-Heaven had come wormwood into his mouth in those final clenched, pulsing seconds. Pleasure into loss, lust into regret, and there, suddenly, the same sick spiral of fucked-up guilt they sold down at the temples and all through the po-faced schooling and lineage values and Gingren’s lectures and the new-recruit rituals of bullying and sterile manhood at the academy and every fucking thing ever lied and pontificated about by men in robes or uniform and—

He climbed off the bed as if there were scorpions in the sheets. Last shreds of afterglow smoking away. He stared down at Milacar, and the other man’s scent on him was suddenly just something he wanted to wash off.

“I’m going home,” he said drably.

He cast about for his clothes on the floor.

“They’ve got a dwenda, Gil.”

Gathering up breeches, shirt, crumpled hose. “Sure they have.”

Milacar watched him for a moment, and then, abruptly, he was off the bed and on him like a Yhelteth war cat. Grappling hands, body weight heaving for a tumble, pressed in, wrestler close. Raging echo of the flesh-to-flesh dance they’d already had on the bed. Grace-of-Heaven’s acrid scent and grunting street fighter’s strength.

Another time, it might have lasted. But the anger was still hard in Ringil’s head, the frustration itching through his muscles, siren whisper of reflexes blackened and edged in the war years. He broke Milacar’s hold with a savagery he’d forgotten he owned, threw a Yhelteth empty-hand technique that put the other man on the floor in tangled limbs. He landed on him with all his weight. Milacar’s breath whooshed out, his furious grunting collapsed. Ringil fetched up with one thumb hooked into Grace-of-Heaven’s mouth and the other poised an inch off his left eyeball.

“Don’t you pull that rough-trade shit on me,” he hissed. “I’m not one of your fucking machete boys, I’ll kill you.”

Milacar choked and floundered. “Fuck you, I’m trying to help. Listen to me, they’ve got a dwenda in Etterkal.”

Locked gazes. The seconds stretched.

“A dwenda?”

Milacar’s eyes said yes, said he at least believed it was true.

“A fucking Aldrain, you’re telling me?” Ringil let Grace-of-Heaven free of the thumb hook. “An honest-to-Hoiran member of the Vanishing Folk, right here in Trelayne?”

“Yes. That’s what I’m telling you.”

Ringil got off him. “You’re full of shit.”

“Thank you.”

“Well, it’s either that or you’ve been smoking too much of your own supply.”

“I know what I’ve seen, Gil.”

“They’re called the Vanishing Folk for a reason, Grace. They’re gone. Even the Kiriath don’t remember them outside of legends.”

“Yes.” Milacar picked himself up. “And before the war, no one believed in dragons, either.”

“It’s not the same thing.”

“Well, then you explain it to me.” Grace-of-Heaven stomped across the bedchamber to where a row of gorgeous Empire-styled kimonos hung from a rack.

“Explain what? That some albino scam artist with a lot of eye makeup has got you all making wards and running for cover like a bunch of Majak herdsmen when the thunder rolls?”

“No.” Milacar shouldered himself brusquely into plum-colored silk, tugged and knotted the sash at his waist. “Explain to me how the Marsh Brotherhood sent three of their best spies into Etterkal, men with a lifetime of experience and faces no one but their lodge master could match with their trade, and all that came back out, a week later, were their heads.”

Ringil gestured. “So this albino motherfuck’s got better sources than you, and he’s handy with a blade.”

“You misunderstand me, Gil.” Grace-of-Heaven smeared on the uncertain smile again. “I didn’t say these men were dead. I said all that came back were their heads. Each one still living, grafted at the neck to a seven-inch tree stump.”

Ringil stared at him.

“Yeah, that’s right. Explain that to me.”

“You saw this?”

A taut nod. “At a lodge meeting. They brought one of the heads in. Put the roots in a bowl of water and about two minutes after that the fucking thing opens its eyes and recognizes the lodge master. You could see by the expression on its face. It’s opening its mouth, trying to talk, but there’s no throat, no vocal cords, so all you can hear is this clicking sound and the lips moving, the tongue coming out, and then it starts fucking weeping, tears rolling down its face.” Milacar swallowed visibly. “About five minutes of that, they take the thing out of the water and it stops. The tears stop first, like they’re drying up, and then the whole head just stops moving, slows down to nothing like an old man dying in bed. Only it wasn’t fucking dead. Soon as you put it back in the water . . .” He made a helpless motion with his hand. “Back again, same thing.”

Ringil stood, naked, and the bandlight through the opened balcony windows felt suddenly colder. He turned to look at the night outside, as if something were calling to him from beyond the casements.

“You got any krin?” he asked quietly.

Milacar nodded across the room at his dressing table. “Sure. Top left drawer there, couple of twigs already made up. Help yourself.”

Ringil crossed to the dresser and opened the drawer. Three yellowing leaf cylinders rolled about in the bottom of the little wooden compartment. He lifted one out, went to the lamp at the bedside, and bent to light up from the wick. The krinzanz flakes inside the cylinder crackled as the flame caught; the acid odor prickled at his nostrils. He drew hard, pulled the old familiar taste down into his lungs. Scorching bite, chill moving outward. The krin came on like an icy fire in his head. He looked back out to the balcony, sighed and walked out there, still naked, trailing smoke.

After a couple of moments, Grace-of-Heaven went after him.

Outside, it was a rooftop view across the Glades to the water. The lights of sister mansions to Milacar’s place glimmered amid the trees in their gardens and the lamp-dotted, twisting streets between, streets that centuries ago had been footpaths through the marsh. The estuary curved in from the west, the old dock buildings on the other bank swept away now to make space for ornamental gardens and expensive thanksgiving shrines to the gods of Naom.

Ringil leaned on the balcony balustrade, held back a sneer, and struggled to be honest with himself about the changes. There’d been money in the Glades from the very beginning. But in the old days it was a little less smug, it was clan homes with views to the wealth that had built them unloading across the river. Now, with the war and the reconstruction, the docks had moved downstream and out of sight, and the only structures that looked back across the water at the Glades mansions were the shrines, ponderous stone echoes of the clans’ renewed piety and faith in their own worthiness to rule.

Ringil plumed acrid smoke at it all. Sensed without looking around that Milacar had followed him out onto the balcony.

“That ceiling’s going to get you arrested, Grace,” he said distantly.

“Not in this part of town it’s not.” Milacar joined him at the balustrade, breathed in the Glades night air like perfume. “The Committee doesn’t do house calls around here. You should know that.”

“So some things haven’t changed, then.”

“No. The salients remain.”

“Yeah, saw the cages coming in.” A sudden, chilly recollection that he didn’t need, one he had in fact thought was safely buried until day before yesterday when his mother’s carriage rattled across the causeway bridge at the eastern gate. “Is Kaad still running things up at the Chancellery?”

“That aspect of things, yes. And looking younger on it every day. Have you ever noticed that? How power seems to nourish some men and suck others dry? Well, Murmin Kaad is definitely in the former camp.”

In the Hearings Chamber, they uncuff and pinion Jelim, haul him twisting bodily from the chair. He’s panting with disbelief, coughing up deep, gabbled screams of denial at the sentence passed, a skein of pleadings that puts gooseflesh on skin among the watchers in the gallery, brings sweat to palms and drives shard-like needles of chill deep under the flesh of warmly clothed arms and legs.

Between Gingren and Ishil, Ringil sits transfixed.

And as the condemned boy’s eyes flare and wallow like those of a panicking horse, as his gaze claws along the faces of the assembled worthies above him as if in search of some fairy-tale salvation that might somehow have fought its way in here, suddenly he sees Ringil instead. Their eyes meet and Ringil feels it as if he’s been stabbed. Against all probability, Jelim flails an arm free and jabs upward in accusation, and screams: It was him, please, take him, I didn’t mean it, it was him, IT WAS HIM, TAKE HIM, IT WAS HIM, HIM, NOT ME . . .

And they drag him out that way, on a dreadful, trailing shriek that everyone assembled knows is only the beginning, the very least of the raptured agonies he’ll vent in the cage tomorrow.

Below in the chamber, on the raised dais of the justices, Murmin Kaad, until now watching the proceedings with impassive calm, looks up and meets Ringil’s gaze as well.

And smiles.

“Motherfucker.” A tremor in the matter-of-fact tone he was trying for. He drew on the twig for sustenance. “Should have had him killed back in ’53 when I had the chance.”

He glanced sideways, caught the way Grace-of-Heaven was looking at him.

“What?”

“Oh beautiful youth,” Milacar said gently. “Do you really think it would have been that easy?”

“Why not? It was chaos that summer, the whole place was packed with soldiery and loose blades. Who would have known?”

“Gil, they just would have replaced him with someone else. Maybe someone worse.”

“Worse? Fucking worse?”

Ringil thought about the cages, how in the end he’d been unable to look out of the carriage window at them as they passed. The scrutiny in Ishil’s face as he turned back to the interior of the carriage, the impossibility of meeting her eyes. The warm flush of gratitude he felt that the rumble and rattle of the carriage’s passage drowned out whatever other noises might otherwise have reached his ears. He was wrong, he knew then. His time away from the city, time buried in the shadow of Gallows Gap and its memories, had not kept him hardened as he’d hoped. Instead, it had left him as soft and unready as he’d ever been, as the belly he’d grown.

At his side, Milacar sighed. “The Committee for Public Morals is not dependent on Kaad for its venom, nor was it ever. There’s a general hate in the hearts of men. You went to war, Gil, you should know that better than anyone. It’s like the heat of the sun. Men like Kaad are just the focal figures, like lenses to gather the sun’s rays on kindling. You can smash a lens, but that won’t put out the sun.”

“No. Makes it a lot harder to start the next fire, though.”

“For a little while, yes. Until the next lens, or the next hard summer, and then the fires begin again.”

“Getting a bit fucking fatalistic in your old age, aren’t you?” Ringil nodded out over the mansion lights. “Or does that just come with the move upriver?”

“No, it comes with living long enough to appreciate the value of the time you’ve got left. Long enough to recognize the fallacy of a crusade when you’re called to one. Hoiran’s teeth, Gil, you’re the last person I should need to be telling this to. Have you forgotten what they did with your victory?”

Ringil smiled, felt how it leaked across his face like spilled blood. Reflex, tightening up against the old pain.

“This isn’t a crusade, Grace. It’s just some scum-fuck slavers who’ve gone off with the wrong girl. All I need is a list of names, likely brokers in Etterkal I can lean on until something gives.”

“And the dwenda?” Milacar’s voice jabbed angrily. “The sorcery?”

“I’ve seen sorcery before. It never stopped me killing anything that got in my way.”

“You haven’t seen this.”

“Well, that’s what keeps life interesting, isn’t it. New experience.” Ringil drew hard on the krinzanz twig. Glow from the flaring ember lit the planes of his face and put glitter into his eyes. He let the smoke up, glanced across at Grace-of-Heaven again. “Anyway, have you seen this creature?”

Milacar swallowed. “No. I haven’t, personally. They say he keeps to himself, even within the Warren. But there are those who have had audience with him, yes.”

“Or so they claim.”

“These are men whose word I trust.”

“And what do these trustworthy men have to say about our Aldrain friend? That his eyes are black pits? That his ears are those of a beast? That he flickers with lightning as he walks?”

“No. What they say is . . .” Another hesitation. Milacar’s voice had grown quiet. “He’s beautiful, Gil. That’s what they say. That he’s beautiful beyond words.”

For just a second, a tiny chill ran along Ringil’s spine. He put it away, shrugged to shake it off. He pitched the stub of his krinzanz twig away into the nighttime garden below and stared after the ember.

“Well, I’ve seen beauty, too,” he said somberly. “And that never stopped me killing anything that got in my way, either.”