He parked scabbard and sword over one shoulder, held his knapsack dangling in the other hand, and wandered back to the dining chamber, where they were clearing away the remains of Ishil’s entourage’s food. The landlord stopped with a tray in each meaty hand and added his gape to the collection.
“What are you doing?” he asked plaintively.
“Change of scenery, Jhesh.” Ringil shifted the knapsack up onto his other shoulder and clapped the man briskly on one apron-swathed flank. It was like patting a side of ham. “I’m taking a couple of months off. Going to winter in Trelayne. Should be back well before the spring.”
“But, but, but . . .” Jhesh scrabbled for purchase and a measure of politeness. “I mean, what about your room?”
“Oh. Rent it. If you can.”
The politeness started to evaporate. “And your tab?”
“Ah yes.” Ringil lifted a finger for a moment’s indulgence and went to the door into the courtyard. “Mother?”
They left Jhesh at the door, counting the money with less enthusiasm than the amount involved should have warranted. Ringil followed Ishil’s regal trail to the carriage and swung himself up into the unaccustomed luxury of the interior. Woven silk paneling on the inside of walls and door, glass in the windows, a small ornate lantern slung from the roof. A profusion of cushions scattered across two facing bench seats broad and long enough to serve as beds, padded footrests tucked underneath. A hamper on the floor in one corner along with flasks and goblets. Ishil leaned herself into one corner and sighed with relief as the last lady-in-waiting scrambled aboard.
“At last! What you see in this place, Ringil, I’ll never understand. I’ll swear none of those people has bathed properly in a week.”
He shrugged. She wasn’t far out. Heated baths were an out-and-out luxury in places like Gallows Water. And this time of year, bathing down at the river was fast becoming an unattractive proposition.
“Well, Mother, it’s the common herd, you know. Since the League implemented the bathhouse tax, they’ve just lost all interest in personal hygiene.”
“Ringil, I’m just saying.”
“Yeah, well, don’t. These people are my friends.” A thought struck him, the meager grain of truth at the center of the lie. He stopped the lady-in-waiting as she tried to close the door. He hooked a hold on the top edge of the door, leaned out and forward, and just managed to prod the coachman’s booted calf. The man jumped and raised a fist clenched around a whip butt as he looked around for the source of the affront. When he saw who’d touched him, the arm dropped as if severed, and he went white.
“Oh, gods, your worthiness, I’m so sorry.” The words choked out of him. “I didn’t mean—that is, I thought—please, I’m so sorry.”
Your worthiness?
That was going to take some getting used to again.
“Right, right. Don’t let it happen again.” Ringil gestured, vague directions with his free hand. “Look, I want you to swing by the graveyard on the way out of town. There’s a blue house there, on the corner. Stop outside.”
“Yes, your worthiness.” The man couldn’t get himself back around to face the horses fast enough. “Right away, sir. Right away.”
Ringil hinged back into the carriage and pulled the door closed. He ignored his mother’s inquiring look. Finally, when they’d clattered out of the courtyard and picked up the street, she had to ask.
“And why are we going to the graveyard exactly?”
“I want to say good-bye to a friend.”
She did one of her little wearied-inhalation tricks, and he was shocked at how completely it translated him back over a decade to his teens. Caught once more creeping into the house through the servants’ quarters at dawn, mingling with the maids. Ishil standing at the top of the kitchen stair in her dressing gown, arms folded, face scrubbed pale and clean of makeup, severe as an angered witch queen.
“Gil, must we be so painfully melodramatic?”
“Not a dead friend, Mother. He lives next to the graveyard.”
She arched one immaculately groomed eyebrow. “Really? How absolutely delightful for him.”
The carriage trundled through the barely waking town.
When they reached Bashka’s house, the storm door was pulled closed across the front entrance, which usually meant the schoolmaster was still in bed. Ringil jumped down and went around the back, through the graveyard. Frost crunched underfoot in the grass and glistened on the stone markers. A solitary mourner stood amid the graves, wrapped in a patched leather cloak, wearing a brimmed hat that shadowed his face. He looked up as Ringil came through from the street, met the swordsman’s eye with bleak lack of care and what might have been a gleam of unforgiving recognition. Ringil ignored him with hungover aplomb. He picked his way between the graves and went to peer in the nearest window of the cottage. On the other side of the grimy glass, the schoolmaster was pottering inefficiently around with pans and kitchen fire and, by the look of his face, dealing with his own modest hangover. Ringil grinned and rapped at the window pane. He had to do it twice before Bashka’s directional sense kicked in and he realized where the noise was coming from. Then the schoolmaster gestured eagerly at him to come around to the front door. He went back to the carriage and leaned in the open door.
“I’m going in for a moment. Want to come?”
His mother stirred restlessly. “Who is this friend of yours?”
“The local schoolmaster.”
“A teacher?” Ishil rolled her eyes. “No, I don’t think so, Ringil. Please be as quick as you can.”
Bashka let him in and led him past the bedroom toward the kitchen. Ringil caught a brief glimpse through the open bedroom door, a sprawled, curved form amid the sheets, long red hair. He vaguely remembered his last sight of the schoolmaster the night before, stumbling down the street between two local whores, bawling at the stars some mangled priestly creed with obscene body parts inserted in place of gods’ names. It had gone pretty much unremarked in the general merriment.
“You got Red Erli in there?” he asked. “She really go home with you?”
Bashka was grinning from ear to ear. “They both, Gil, they both came home with me. Erli and Mara. Best Padrow’s Eve ever.”
“Yeah? So where’s Mara?”
“Ran off after. Stole my purse.” Even this admission didn’t seem enough to knock the grin off Bashka’s earnest face. He shook his head mellowly. “Best Padrow’s ever.”
Ringil frowned. “You want me to go around and get it back for you?”
“No, forget it. Didn’t have a great deal left in there anyway.” He shook his head like a dog shaking off water, made shivering noises. “And I think it’s fair to say the maid earned every minted piece.”
Ringil grimaced at the epithet maid attached to Mara.
“You’re too soft, Bash. Mara never would have pulled something like that with any of her regulars. Not in a town this small. She wouldn’t dare.”
“It doesn’t matter, Gil, really.” Bashka sobered briefly. “I don’t want you to do anything about it. Leave Mara alone.”
“You know, it was probably that little shit Feg put her up to it. I could—”
“Gil.” Bashka looked at him reproachfully. “You’re spoiling my hangover.”
Ringil stopped. Shrugged. “Okay, your call. So, uhm, d’you need some quick cash then. To get you through till the holiday’s over?”
“Yeah.” Bashka snorted. “Like you can really afford to lend it to me, Gil. Come on, I’m fine. Always set a bit aside for Padrow’s, you know that.”
“I’ve got money, Bash. Someone just hired me. Blade contract. Paying gig, you know? I’ve got the cash, if you want it.”
“Well, I don’t want it.”
“All right. I was just asking.”
“Well, stop asking then. I told you, I’m fine.” Bashka hesitated, seemed to sense the real reason for Ringil’s visit. “So, uh, you going away? With this blade contract, I mean?”
“I told you, I’m fine, Gil. Where you going?”
“Trelayne. Points south, maybe.” Suddenly he didn’t feel like explaining it all. “Like I said, be back in a few months. It’s no big thing.”
“Going to miss you, midweek nights.” Bashka mimed moving a chess piece. “I’ll probably have to go play Brunt up at the forge. Can just imagine what those conversations are going to be like.”
“Yeah, I’ll miss—” He stumbled on it, old shards of caution, even here. “Our conversations, too.”
No you won’t.
The realization lit up like a crumpled paper tossed into the fire. Bright lick of flame and a twisting, sparkling away that ached briefly, then was gone. You’re not going to miss your nights of chess and chat with Bashka here, Gil, and you know it. And he did know it, knew that in the upriver districts of Trelayne, company twice as sophisticated as the schoolmaster’s could be had at pretty much any coffeehouse you cared to step into. Knew also that, despite Bashka’s kindness and the few topics of common interest they had, the man was not and never really had been his friend, not in any sense that mattered.
It hit him then, for the first time really, through the stubborn ache in his head, that he really was going back. And not just back to bladework—that was an old quickening, already touched, like checking coin in your purse, and then tamped away again in the pulse of his blood. That wasn’t it. More than that, he was going back to the brawling, bargaining human sprawl of Trelayne and all it meant. Back into the heated womb of his youth, back to the hothouse dilettante climate that had bred and then sickened him. Back to a part of himself he’d thought long rooted out and burned in the charnel days of the war.
Guess not, Gil.
He made his farewells to the schoolmaster, clowned his way out with a wink at the bedroom door, got away as fast as he decently could.
He hauled himself into the carriage, sank into a corner in silence. The eager coachman cracked his horses into motion. They pulled away, through the quiet streets, past the town limits and low wooden watchtowers, up the high road along the foothills below the mountains and Gallows Gap, westward toward the forests and the Naom plain and the sea beyond. Westward to where Trelayne waited for him in shimmering splendor on the shore, sucking at him, now the image was planted in his mind, even from here.
Ringil stared out of the window at the passing scenery.
“So how was he?” Ishil asked at last. “Your teacher friend?”
“Hungover and broke from whoring, why do you ask?”
Ishil sighed with elaborate disdain and turned her face pointedly to stare out of the other side of the carriage. The coach bumped and rattled along. The ladies-in-waiting smirked and glanced and talked among themselves about clothes.
The new knowledge sat beside him like a corpse no one else could see.
He was going back to what he used to be, and the worst of it was that he couldn’t make himself regret it at all.
In fact, now the whole thing was in motion, he could hardly wait.
CHAPTER 4
Bring me Archeth.
The summons went out from the throne room like a circular ripple from the flung stone of the Emperor’s command. Courtiers heard and, each competing for favor, gave hurried orders to their attendants, who sped in turn through the labyrinthine palace in search of the Lady kir-Archeth. The word passed from attendants to servants, and from servants to slaves, as the entire pyramid of authority turned its attention to this sudden diversion from the day-to-day drudgery of palace life. Serpent rumor coiled outward alongside the bare instruction, placing the tone in the Emperor’s voice somewhere between irritation and anger, a vocal spectrum that everyone at court, including even quite senior invigilators, had learned in recent years to treat with acute alarm. Best for all concerned, then, that Archeth present herself at speed.
Unfortunately, as was so often the case these days, the Lady Archeth was nowhere to be found. Since the Shaktur expedition, it was whispered, she had grown moody and taciturn and ever more unpredictable in situations where considered diplomacy really should have been the order of the day. She was given to prowling the corridors of the palace and the streets of the city at odd hours, or disappearing into the eastern desert alone for weeks on end, equipped, they muttered, with rations of food and water that verged on the suicidal. In the daily round at the palace, she was equally insensitive to lethal risk; she neglected her duties and heard rebukes with an impassivity that verged on insolence. Her days at court, it was said, were numbered.
Bring me Archeth.
The unfulfilled command echoed and lapped at the palace walls where they surrounded the outermost of the imperial gardens. Several among the courtiers began to panic. They cast the summons outward from the walls and down into the city itself, this time in the hands of imperial messengers, the so-called King’s Reach, famously skilled at finding and retrieving people anywhere within the far-flung borders of the Empire. Liveried in black and silver, these men spread out through the streets in groups, threading beneath the painted cupolas and domes of the city’s heart—the architecture that Ringil had once rather unkindly described as looking like a party of prostitute snails—knocking on the doors of likely pipe houses and taverns, slapping known associates about with casual brutality. It was a stupendous misuse of resources, a battleax to chop onions, but it was the Emperor’s command and no one wanted to be found lacking in response. There’d been too many examples made since the accession.
It took those of the Reach with the best luck about an hour to find out from tradesmen on the Boulevard of the Ineffable Divine that Archeth had last been seen strolling down toward the imperial shipyards, a long-hafted engineer’s hammer gripped purposefully in one hand and a krinzanz pipe in the other. From there it was a simple matter for these half a dozen messengers to trace the route, enter the yards, and pick a way among the skeletal keels of vessels under construction, asking after Archeth at every turn. It was an even simpler matter for the yard workers to turn and eloquently point.
At one end of the shipyard, a battered and stained Kiriath fireship stood isolated from its more conventional wooden neighbors on dry-dock props that appeared over time to have rusted solid with the hull. It was one of the last to be brought in from the desert while Akal the Great still sat on the throne and would countenance the expense, and an aura hung about it, of abandonment and black iron malice. The Reachmen, handpicked and known for their great courage in straitened circumstance, eyed the vessel without enthusiasm. Kiriath works were everywhere in the city, had been for centuries, but these contraptions set a shiver at the spine; bulge-bodied and looming, like some freak sea creature hauled up from the depths in an unlucky trawler’s nets; set about with unfamiliar gills, feelers, and eyes, all suited more to a living entity than any built device, skin scarred and blistered from repeated entry into a realm where human flesh and bone would melt to nothing in a single searing instant, where only demons might dwell, and carrying who knew what enduring underworldly taint from the places it had been.
And from within the closed iron cylinder, more precisely from the mouth of one downthrown open hatch in a row of five that were set into the underside of the hull, came the furious, repeated clang of metal pounding on metal. The sound, it seemed, of something trying to escape.
Glances went back and forth; hands dropped to the hilts of well-worn weapons. The Emperor’s messengers drew closer at a pace that declined with every step they took into the shadow of the fireship’s propped bulk. Finally, they piled to a halt just inside the circumference of the dry-dock framework that supported the vessel, and a good dozen paces back from the hatch, all of them careful not to step on any of the drooping feelers that trailed from the hull and lay flopped in the shipyard dust like so many discarded carriage whips. No telling when something like that, no ma
tter the intervening years of disuse, might twist and snap to sudden, murderous life, coil about an unwary limb, and jerk its owner off his feet and screaming into the air, to be lashed back and forth or slammed to pulp against the grimy iron flank of the ship.
“Syphilitic son of an uncleansed, camel-fucking CUNT!”
A massive metallic crash fringed the final word, but could not drown it out. The messengers flinched. In places, blades came a few inches clear of their sheaths. Hard on the echoes of the impact, before anyone could move, the voice started up again, no cleaner of expression, no less rabidly furious, no less punctuated by the clangor of whatever arcane conflict was raging in the confines of the hull. The messengers stood frozen, faces sweat-beaded from the fierce heat of a near-noon sun, while recollected witch rumors crept coldly up and down their bones.
“Is it an exorcism?”
“It’s krinzanz,” reckoned a more pragmatic member of the party. “She’s off her fucking head.”
Another of the messengers cleared his throat.
“Ah, Mistress Archeth . . .”
“. . . motherfucking closemouth me, will you, you fucking . . .”
“Mistress Archeth!” The Reachman went up to a full-scale shout. “The Emperor wills your presence!”
The cursing stopped abruptly. The metallic cacophony died. For a long moment, the open hatch yawned and oozed a silence no less unnerving than the noise that had gone before. Then Archeth’s voice emerged, a little hoarse.
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