The Steel Remains

chapter 19

Ringil tried, just the once, on fading hope, for the outrage of imperial nobility.

“Just what is the meaning of this? You intend to rob me, like common criminals? My father will have you—”

Terip Hale shook his head. “Let it go, friend. I don’t imagine that accent is any more real than the rest of this charade, so drop it, why don’t you. This is going to be painful enough for you as it is. Now, like I asked you before, who the f*ck are you? What are you doing here, asking after barren marsh dwellers?”

Ah.

“All right,” Ringil said, because he guessed he had perhaps another half a minute, at most, before Hale did the obvious thing and had them all disarmed.

Yeah, and after that, it’s down to whatever disciplinary facilities Hale keeps around here for recalcitrant slaves. Where we’ll be put to the question repeatedly, until Hale gets what he wants to hear from us, and then, if we’re lucky, they might put us out of our scorched and mutilated misery with a quick slit throat.

Nice going, Gil.

Ringil measured the possibilities. Eril and Girsh had both frozen when the trap was sprung, arms well out from their bodies so as not to invite a crossbow bolt for twitching a hand the wrong way, faces taut with concentrated tension. They looked like men wading belly-high across an icy river, like adults caught out midstep in a children’s game of closer-closer-statue. They would have already assessed the odds. Now they watched for Ringil’s lead.

There were three crossbows leveled at them, as far as he could see. The rest was hand-to-hand cutlery.

“All right what?” grated Hale.

“All right, you win. I’m not Laraninthal of Shenshenath, and I’m not an imperial. My name’s Ringil Eskiath.”

Hale blinked. “The Ringil Eskiath? Yeah, right.”

But Ringil had seen how that same taken-aback flinch ran around the armed men in the alcoves. He felt the way their casual thug focus gave way to curious stares. He saw a couple of them mutter to each other. The siege of Trelayne was eight years in the past, the triumph at Gallows Gap a year older than that. The war itself had been over now for more than half a decade. But the stories lingered on, attenuated maybe, yet still there in the city’s consciousness.

“Eskiath died at Ennishmin,” someone sneered. “Fighting imperials.”

Ringil forced a calm he didn’t feel.

“Heard that one before a couple of times,” he said lightly. “And it’s almost true. Still got the scars. But it takes more than three Yhelteth sneak assassins to put me away.”

Another of the men voiced a faint cheer. His companion elbowed him savagely to shut up. Ringil pushed as hard as it would go. He raised a cautious thumb, well out from his body so it wouldn’t be misinterpreted, gesturing up at his left shoulder.

“This is the Ravensfriend,” he said loudly. “Kiriath steel. Forged at An-Monal for the clan Indamaninarmal, gifted to me by Grashgal the Wanderer. Rinsed in lizard blood at Rajal Beach and Gallows Gap and the siege of Trelayne. I am Ringil of the Glades house of Eskiath.”

Another voice from one of the alcoves. “He does look kind of—”

“Yeah?” Terip Hale wasn’t having this. “Well, you know what I heard? I heard Ringil Eskiath was a f*cking queer. That true as well?”

Ringil bent him a smile. “Would I have come to you looking for slave girls if it were?”

“I don’t know why you’re here.” Hale nodded at the muscle with the flail. “But we are going to find out.

Varid.”

The big man moved across to Ringil, stepped in close enough to block any attempt to bring the Ravensfriend out of its scabbard, far enough off to beat a grapple move. It was done with sober professional care—no grin like the doorman’s, no jeering. Just a custom-hardened watchfulness in the eyes. Chances were that Varid had been a soldier once.

He nodded at the sword pommel. “Unstrap that. Make it slow.”

A tiny breeze got in from somewhere and made the lantern flames flicker behind their metal mesh.

Shadows danced and shivered across the floor.

Ringil dropped the dragon knife from his sleeve. He took one rapid step left.

The Majak had made them, in the last years of the war, once the tide had turned. Mostly they were ceremonial, a statement of the victory to come, not ideal for fighting, even close in. Egar had given him his in a drunken fit of affection one campfire night on the Anarsh plain. F*cking useless thing, he’d mumbled, looking away. You might as well have it. It was basically an infant dragon fang, triangular in section, serrated up the two back edges, razor-sharp and smooth at the front. The artist, whoever he was, had carved a serviceable hilt into the base, weave-patterned it on both sides for grip. The whole thing was barely nine inches long—small enough to conceal, long enough to prick the life out of a man’s heart. It shone a dirty amber in the lanternlight as it came clear.

Ringil pivoted from the hip, rammed the knife home under Varid’s chin.

“Nooooooooooooooo!”

Someone bellowing with hysterical fury. It certainly wasn’t Varid—his tongue was nailed to his palate on the fang, his mouth was jammed shut. The best he could manage was a strangling agonized grunt, and his eyes were already turning up in their sockets as the rest of the dragon knife ripped his brain in half from below. Blood burst through his locked teeth in a gurgling crimson spray. Ringil held him up, stayed close in to his bulk, blinking the blood from his eyes, made the yell for Hale’s—no one else could have seen quite what was going on yet, probably no one else would be giving orders . . .

“Shoot, f*cking shoot, will you!”

What Ringil had hoped for happened. He heard the flesh-cringing twang-clatter as the crossbows went off at close range. All three—skirmish-schooled, he counted them off and knew. Varid jolted with the impact. A quarrel head tore through the big man’s shoulder and nearly clipped Ringil’s nose off. The other two went somewhere else, Ringil couldn’t tell where. Crossbows—now, there’s a f*cking useless weapon for you. He grinned—quick, pulse-jumping relief. Sensed rather than saw Hale’s men come storming out of their alcoves. Bolts shot, the advantage thrown away—it was down to the steel. He shoved Varid’s corpse away, left the dragon knife where it was. Gained a scant few necessary feet of space as they rushed him. The combat moments seemed to float loose of each other, spun out and unreal

. . .

Freed hands both rising for the pommel now, so natural, so smooth, it was like Kiriath machinery, as if he were machinery, a cunningly crafted clockwork Kiriath mannequin, built to complement the steel.

He felt the accustomed kiss of the grip on his palms, felt the grin on his face turn into a snarl.

Cold chime as the scabbard gave up its embrace.

And the Ravensfriend came out.

YOU WANT TO KNOW HOW IT ENDS, GIL? GRASHGAL, CRYPTIC AND rambling and more than a little drunk one evening at An-Monal, holding up the newly forged Ravensfriend in scarred black hands and squinting critically down the runnel. Fireglow from the big room’s hearth seemed to drip molten off the edges of the steel. The carved beam-end gargoyles leered down from the gloom in the roof space above. I’ve seen how it ends. Someday, in a city where the people rise through the air with no more effort than it takes to breathe, where they give their blood to strangers as a gift, instead of stealing it with edged iron and rage the way we do, someday, in a place like that, this motherf*cker is going to hang up behind glass for small children to stare at. Grashgal hefted the Ravensfriend one-handed, made a couple of idle strokes through the air, and the sword whispered to itself in the firelit gloom. I’ve seen it, Gil. They look at this thing through the glass it’s kept behind, they put their noses up so close to that glass their breath fogs it, and you can see the small, slow-fading print of their hands in the condensation after they’ve run off to look at something else. And it doesn’t mean a thing to them. You want to know why that is?

Ringil gestured amenably from the depths of the armchair he was sprawled in. He wasn’t hugely sober himself.

No. I mean, yeah. Can’t guess, I mean. You tell me.

No one in that city understands, Gil, because it doesn’t matter to them anymore. They’ve never learned to fear the steel and the men who carry it, and none of them ever will, because they don’t have to. Because in this place I’ve seen, men like that don’t exist anymore. We don’t exist anymore.

Sounds like a beautiful f*cking place. How do I get there? Ringil grinned fiercely up at the Kiriath clan captain. Oh wait—you’re going to tell me the rents are sky-high, right? And how am I going to earn a living if they keep their swords in a museum?

Grashgal looked back down at him for what seemed like a long time. Finally, he smiled.

You don’t get to go, I’m afraid, Gil. Too far off, and the quick paths are too twisted for humans to follow. And on the straight road, you and I will be dust and half-remembered tales before they even start to build that city. But it will come, and when it does, this sword will still be there to see it. Kiriath steel—built to harm, built to last. When all the damage it’s done and the grief it’s caused have been forgotten, even by the gods, when the Kiriath themselves have passed into discredited myth, this murderous f*cking . . . thing . . . will hang unused, and harmless, and gaped at by children. That’s how it ends, Gil. With no one to remember, or care, or understand what this thing could do when you set it free.

Ringil met the first of Hale’s men in a blur of eager motion and the blue sweeping arc of the blade. The man was hacking down with a hand ax, and Ringil already had the Ravensfriend at high guard. He blocked, two-handed, hard, angled not for the hatchet but the arm that held it up. The Kiriath blade took the man’s hand off cleanly at the wrist. Blood gouted from the stump, rained on him, and something savage in Ringil’s heart shrilled with joy. The arm completed its downward arc, still spurting, painting them both, and the hatchet hit the ground with a thud. Its owner gaped dumbly at his own hand still gripping the haft, the yell dried up in his throat. Ringil chopped down at the juncture of shoulder and neck, severed artery and sinew, finished it.

The next man was close behind, short-sword in one hand, mace in the other. Ringil feinted high and right, let his opponent raise both weapons to the misdirection, dropped the Ravensfriend low and almost horizontal, swung in for the belly. No broadsword made of human steel would have allowed the abrupt shift of vector; the Kiriath alloy not only allowed it—it sang. The stroke opened the other man up from side to side and carved a notch off the base of his spine before the blade tugged clear.

F*ck.

Sudden cold sweat—it was sloppy bladework, and against better men it might have gotten him killed.

He’d been off the battlefield too long.

But these were not better men, and the edge on the Kiriath steel was forgiving of such errors. Ringil got clear, stepped past. The gutted man wallowed in his wake, not yet fully aware of what had been done to him, tried muzzily to turn and follow as his attacker slipped away, and then his intestines and the contents of his bisected stomach fell out on the rug, and he tangled in it all and went down screaming like a child.

Ringil’s third attacker flinched back, hampered by his gutted comrade. He had an ax and a club, but didn’t seem to know quite what to do with either. He was young, no older than seventeen or eighteen, and he looked sick with the sudden fear of combat. Ringil darted forward, boot on the dying man’s chest to close the gap, put a straight thrust into the youth’s throat and watched his face contort as he tried to cope with the pain. The blood rushed out, drenched his clothes dark from neck to waist. Then, as if the weight of all that soaking cloth was pulling him down, he sank gracefully to the floor. He was still clutching the weapons he had never gotten around to using. His gaze clawed upward after Ringil’s face, his mouth worked for words.

Ringil was already turning away.

It was the breathing space, the first moment he’d had to assess the field. Taste of the blood he’d spilled metallic warm on his tongue, the paint of it on his face. Discordant yelling all around, the fight in its various splintered, snapping pieces. He saw Eril backed to a wall, a knife in each hand, fending off two attackers with kicks and slashes. A third lay bleeding on the floor at his feet. A short distance away, Girsh was down, a crossbow bolt through the thigh. A bulky figure stood above him, sword raised. Girsh rolled away as the blade came down, slammed his mace backhand into his opponent’s shin. The man howled and staggered, wagged his sword about ineffectually. Girsh belted the blade aside, propped himself up on an elbow, and chopped sideways into his attacker’s knee. The swordsman collapsed in a heap beside him, still howling. Girsh rolled again, came up on top, and started smashing in his attacker’s face and forehead with the mace.

Peripheral flicker from the right—Ringil swung and saw Terip Hale stabbing at him with what looked like a f*cking fruit knife, for Hoiran’s sake. Bad angle, no time. He jerked aside, let go of the Ravensfriend with his left hand, and fended off the blow with a Yhelteth empty-hand chop. He hit Hale in the face with the pommel of the Ravensfriend at the same time. The slaver yelped and fell down. Ringil left him there, turned back just in time to block a looping mace attack from Janesh the doorman. He caught the mace on the edge of his blade, turned the attack crossways on its own momentum, and kicked Janesh’s feet out from under him as he swayed. The doorman hit the floor, rolling desperately to get away. Ringil followed impatiently, hacked down and severed his spine. He looked back to see how Girsh was doing, saw instead two more of the joyous longshank crew rushing him at once.

He bared his teeth and yelled in their faces, grabbed the momentary gap it gave him to dance sideways, across the chamber toward Girsh, and drag the fight’s center of gravity with him. The two men came around, squared up to him again, but you could see in their faces they’d lost a lot of their initial bloodlust to that one feral snarl.

“Come on then,” Ringil spat. “Don’t you want to know what Kiriath steel feels like in your vitals? Do I have to bring it to you, you f*cking pansies?”

They came on then, flushed and angry at the insult, but far too late. The momentary flash of fear had already tripped them, sapped their commitment to killing this blood-splattered sneering maybe-hero with the blurring blue Kiriath blade in his hands. They came in clumsy and shaken, brandishing their weapons without strategy, and Ringil took them apart. One sweeping circular block sent the man on the left stumbling into his comrade’s path. Ringil followed through on the spin, slammed into the man, hip and shoulder, sent him sprawling. It put the other fighter almost in front of him with his back turned, and by the time the man worked out where Ringil had gone, Ringil had the Ravens-friend up and through his neck in a shallow-angled slash from the side. The man tried to turn, as if to find out what the f*ck had happened that hurt so much, and his head flopped almost off with the motion. He was dead before he hit the floor.

Ringil cast about, found the first man gamely getting back to his feet; he kicked him in the face with the instep of his boot, then again with the toe. Solid crunch of the jaw breaking on the second blow. There wasn’t time for more—a couple of feet away, Girsh was about to get brained by some giant with a spiked club. Ringil stepped closer, hacked low and hamstrung the man, watched as he fell—

And abruptly, before he could consciously register it, the fight was done.

Ringil stared around as his senses caught up. It really was over. Eril was off the wall, driving back a single opponent. On the ground, Girsh was killing the hamstrung giant with his mace. The rest was blood-painted carnage and crawling forms and moans. Between them, they’d accounted for a dozen men, at least. He became vaguely aware that he was panting.

Right.

He strode heavily up behind Eril’s opponent, swung tiredly at the man’s sword arm, and stopped the fight. The man screamed, dropped his weapon, and spun about, mouth gaping wide in shock and betrayal. Then Eril stepped in like a dance partner, hooked him with one arm, and buried his long knife upward under the sternum. The man gagged and thrashed and Eril hugged him close, twisting and gouging with the knife, finishing it. Over the dying man’s shoulder, teeth gritted, half his attention still on the killing, he nodded at Ringil.

“Thanks, man. Thought I’d never f*cking get an opening with this one.”

Ringil waved it off and went to take care of Girsh.

THE CROSSBOW BOLT HAD GONE IN THROUGH THE FLESHY PART OF THE thigh at a downward angle and stuck there. It showed a clear two inches of blood-streaked shaft behind the blunt octagon of the quarrel where it protruded out the other side. To Ringil’s battle-schooled eye, it suggested that either the weapon had misfired or the owner hadn’t racked up the tension enough—at that range, it should by rights have gone straight through an unarmored limb, ripped a hole the width of the brutal iron fletching on the thing. Instead, the damage seemed to be quite limited. The entry and exit wounds were messy, sopping and treacly with blood, but there was none of the telltale heavy-duty welling-up that would have signified major blood vessels torn apart.

“Looks like you got lucky.”

“Yeah,” gritted Girsh. “F*cking feels like it.”

Ringil went and retrieved his dragon knife from Varid’s chin—a glutinous, messy business in itself—and set about using the serrated edges to cut cloth from the dead man’s shirt for a tourniquet. Eril went upstairs to the door into the courtyard and listened for signs that the fight had been heard by anyone who cared to do anything about it. He came back looking satisfied.

“All quiet up there. Looks like we got the lot of them. I guess that joyous longshank number means all hands to the killing chamber. Cute.”

Ringil grunted, preoccupied with knotting the tourniquet tight on Girsh’s thigh. The Marsh Brotherhood man bit back a groan. Eril came over to watch.

“We need to get that out of his leg,” he said soberly. “If there’s rust on it—”

“I know. But if you pull it back as it is, we’re going to rip up the wound and maybe open a major blood vessel. We need something to cut the quarrel off.”

Eril nodded. “Okay, then. It’s a slave house. They’ve got to have ironwork tools around here somewhere. Manacle cutters, something like that.”

“I can walk,” Girsh rasped. Attempting to push himself upright and prove it. He turned white with what it cost him, sagged back to the horizontal again.

“Not far, you can’t,” Ringil told him.

He sat back on his heels and looked around. Thought about time remaining and what they’d come here to do. Despite the subsiding pulse in his veins, the relative quiet of the aftermath, they were not even close to done with Hale and his household. He wasn’t much looking forward to the next part.

He stifled the waking qualm like an infant in the crib.

“All right,” he said finally. “Eril, you take care of the wounded. I’m going to see if we can’t get some answers out of our gracious host over there.”

Girsh grinned savagely, biting down on his pain. “Yeah, now that I’m going to f*cking enjoy.”

“You stay put,” Ringil warned him. “I don’t want you moving that bolt about any more than you have to.

And I don’t need the help. This isn’t going to be difficult.”

Right, Gil. Hardened Etterkal people trafficker, lifetime criminal success before he got legal.

Should be a pushover.

While Eril went around checking bodies and slitting the throats of the injured, Ringil heaved Hale’s semiconscious form off the floor and into a sitting position against the curve of the chamber’s back wall.

The slaver was bleeding from where the Ravensfriend’s pommel had smashed into his face earlier, and his right eye was already swelling shut. Blood had splashed down onto his silk robe and into the hair on his chest where it was exposed. Ringil cut a piece out of the garment with his dragon knife, cleaned up Hale’s face, and then started slapping him methodically back to wakefulness. Across the room, someone squalled weakly as Eril pulled back his head by the hair, ready for the knife. It was Janesh the doorman, flopping snap-spined and desperate between the Marsh Brotherhood soldier’s booted feet.

You did that, Gil, some perpetually unsoiled, disbelieving part of him whispered. That was you.

“Hold it.”

Eril paused, looked up at him expectantly.

“Just give me a minute here.” He peered closely at Terip Hale as the slaver started to come around, slapped him a couple of times more to speed the process up. “Figure we could maybe use the leverage.”

“Got it.” Eril lowered Janesh’s head almost gently back to the floor. He settled into a patient crouch above the injured man. Janesh barely moved beyond a couple of twitches in one arm. He’d maybe passed out from the pain of his wound, or just into the realm of quiet delirium.

Terip Hale, meanwhile, woke to a vision of carnage strewn across the joyous longshank chamber, and a small fixed smile on Ringil Eskiath’s face.

“Welcome back. Remember me?”

To his credit, Hale snarled, made fists, and came almost off the wall with rage. There was a lifetime of street fighter’s venom in the twisted lines of his face. His legs flailed free of the robe’s silken folds. But he wasn’t a young man anymore. Ringil shoved him back with a palm heel in the chest.

“You just sit there and behave.”

“F*ck you!”

“No, thank you. But I have got some questions I want answered. It’d really be in your best interests to tell me what I want to know.”

“Yeah, well f*ck your questions.” Hale’s voice drawled slower, contemptuous. He gathered his mutilated robe back around him, covered the parts of his body the disarray had exposed. “And f*ck you, too, you f*cking queer.”

Ringil glanced around at the bodies and the blood. “I think you’re missing the specifics of who won here.”

“You think you’re going to get away with this?”

Ringil tilted his head, put a cupped hand to his ear. “You hear that? On the stairs? That’s the sound of no one coming to stop us, Terip. It is over. You pulled the joyous longshank girls on us, and it didn’t work.”

He nodded at Eril, who yanked Janesh’s head back up. The doorman shrieked as he realized what was happening, woke maybe from a dreamed escape to something better. Eril’s knife dipped in, did its severing and opening—dark crimson gush of blood and Janesh’s face went suddenly idiot-soft and pale.

Eril let go of his head, and it hit the floor with an audible bump.

Ringil masked himself in what felt like stone.

“You want to live?” he asked Hale quietly.

Hardened or not, the slave trader had gone almost as pale as his murdered minion. Respectability, or perhaps just age, seemed to have sapped some of his edge. His mouth twitched over words he didn’t appear to know how to voice.

“I’m sorry, you’ll have to speak up.”

“The cabal.” Hale licked his lips. “They won’t let this stand.”

“The cabal.” Ringil nodded. “Okay. Why don’t you scare me with some names? Who are they? Who do they represent?”

“Oh, I think you’ll find that out soon enough.”

“I’m not a patient man, Terip.”

The slave trader scraped together an awful, lopsided grin. “It doesn’t matter what you do to me, if you kill me here or not. They’ll find out about this either way.”

Ringil, out of nowhere—some combination of twanging battle-comedown nerves, general weariness, who knew what besides—took a blind leap.

“Going to stick your head on a tree trunk, are they?”

He saw the jolt go through Terip Hale, almost as if the slaver had been struck by one of his own men’s crossbow bolts. He saw the fear in the one unswollen eye.

“You—”

“Yeah.” Grab the advantage, run with it. “I know all about it. That’s why they sent me. See, Terip—I used to kill lizards for a living. One time in Demlarashan, I helped take down a whole f*cking dragon, me and just one other guy. So I got no problem putting away your pet dwenda if he gets in my way. Now, you tell me—what’s so f*cking special about Sherin Herlirig Mernas that you’ve got to try to kill me when I ask after her?”

“Who?”

“You heard.”

“I don’t know that name.”

“No?” Ringil produced the dragon knife and held it up in front of Hale’s good eye. He breathed deep.

“You remember well enough that she’s barren, that she comes from marsh dweller stock, but you don’t know her name? That’s lizardshit. Now where the f*ck is she? ”

And something seemed to break in Hale. Maybe the talk of sorcery, maybe Janesh’s murder, or maybe he just wasn’t as tough as he used to be. He flinched back from the tip of the fang.

“Don’t . . . wait, listen to me. I can’t—”

Ringil tapped his eyelid with the knife. “Yeah, you can.”

“I don’t f*cking know, all right.” Hale seemed to see an opening, to grab at it. The desperation in his voice scaled down a little. “Look. This marsh bitch you’re looking for, how long ago was she sold?”

“About a month.”

“A month?” A harsh, high-pitched laugh—the slaver’s bravado was seeping back in. “A f*cking month?

Are you insane? You got any idea how much cunt comes through this place every month? You think I got nothing better to stuff my head with than their f*cking names? Forget it. Give it up, man.”

Ringil slammed his palm against Hale’s forehead for purchase, dragged the dragon knife tip down the man’s cheek, and tore the skin open to the bone. Blood spritzed everywhere. Hale shrieked and flailed.

Ringil let him go, as if he were hot to the touch. He felt his own face twitch, felt a deep pounding start somewhere in his chest. The moment was an unbroken Yhelteth horse, bucking under him, taking him away, body and soul. With shaking hands, he fumbled in his pocket, found the charcoal sketch of Sherin and rolled it open in both hands, still holding the dragon knife at the top edge of the parchment like some ornate scroll end. He tried to get his breathing back.

“You are going to tell me,” he said tightly. “One way or the other. Now. Let’s try again. This girl. You bought her, right?”

Hale cupped a hand at his wounded cheek, staring.

“You know she’s barren.” Ringil was shouting now, somehow couldn’t stop himself. Could barely stop himself, in fact, from going back to work on Hale with the knife right now. “You know she’s got dweller blood. You give her to me, or so help me Hoiran, I’ll take your guts out hand-over-hand right here and now.”

“It’s not her.”

Ringil seized him by the throat. The sketch of Sherin fluttered away. “You f*cking piece of shit, that’s it—”

“No, no.” Babbling, working weakly at Ringil’s grip with both hands, voice gone almost sleepy with terror. “Don’t, don’t—it’s not her.”

“What’s not her?”

“It’s not . . . I didn’t think you . . . not one girl—it’s all of them, f*cking all of them he wants. He takes them all. ”

Something portcullis-heavy seemed to clank down behind Ringil’s eyes. Abruptly the rage drained out of him and he felt the shiver of an apprehension he couldn’t name in its place. He let go of Hale’s throat.

“He? You’re talking about the dwenda?”

Hale nodded brokenly, still trying to edge away from Ringil along the curve of the wall. Ringil took a handful of silk robe and dragged him back. He leaned close.

“Talk to me.” Voice trembling from the sudden collapse of the fury. Blood singing in the depths of his hearing like the sea. “You want to live, you talk to me. You tell me about this dwenda.”

“They’ll kill me if I do.”

“And I will kill you if you don’t, right here and now. Make a choice, Terip. The dwenda. What’s he doing here?”

“I don’t know.” The slave trader made a peculiarly morose gesture. “He talks to the cabal, not me.

Word came down. Any marsh cunt, anything looks like it might have the blood, make sure the warlocks check it out. If it can’t breed, you set it aside. Count it as a tithe.”

“Right. And anyone comes asking after a woman like that, you show them the joyous longshank girls.

Right?”

Hale stared downward, would not meet Ringil’s eye. The silence stretched. Blood dripped off the slaver’s face and into his soiled silk lap.

Eril came over and crouched at Ringil’s side. “We’re done here,” he murmured. “No one breathing left.

You want me to do him, too?”

Ringil shook his head. “Get me that mace over there. We need a messenger. I don’t want to leave Findrich and the rest in any doubt about what happened here.” He raised his voice. “You hear that, Terip?”

The slave trader twitched at the sound of his name. He would not look up. Ringil leaned in and took Hale’s skull firmly in his two cupped hands. He tilted it with a lover’s care, until the slaver was forced to meet his eyes.

“You pay attention,” he said quietly. “You tell this to Findrich, or Snarl, or whoever it is you report to in this idiot cabal of yours. You tell them Ringil Eskiath wants his cousin Sherin back. Soon, and unhurt—it’s not negotiable. If I don’t get what I want, I’m coming back to Etterkal to ask again. Believe me, they don’t want that, and neither do you.”

Hale jerked his head out of Ringil’s hands. Outrage at the intimacy, or maybe just the knowledge he was not going to die, seemed to kindle a new fire in him.

“F*cking touch me,” he muttered. “Piece-of-shit queer.”

Silently, Eril handed Ringil the mace. Ringil smiled faintly, beat it very gently in the cup of his palm.

“You’re missing the point, Hale.”

“And you’re f*cking insane.” The slave trader managed a shaky laugh. “You do know that, don’t you, Eskiath? Come in here talking like some relic out of the prewar, some gang tough from harbor end. Don’t you get it? Things aren’t like that anymore—we’re legal now. You can’t come around here acting like this. You can’t touch us.”

Ringil nodded. “Go on telling yourself that if it helps. Meantime, tell the others I want my cousin back.

Sherin Herlirig Mernas. There’ll be records, and I’ll leave you the sketch. You make sure they get the message. Because if I do have to come back to Etterkal and ask again, I promise you it’ll make what happened tonight look like a minor toothache. I’ll kill you and your whole f*cking family, and I’ll burn this place to the ground around the corpses. Then I’ll move on to Findrich, and Snarl, and anyone else who gets in my way. I’ll torch the whole f*cking neighborhood if I have to. You think things changed after the war, f*ckhead?” He reached out and chucked the slave trader hard under the chin. He hefted the mace.

“Got news for you. Things just changed back.”