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.”
CHAPTER 6
By the time they made camp, a clouded darkness held the sky above the steppe.
The news of the runner attack had reached the tents ahead of them; the night herdsmen who came out to relieve them included a cousin of Runi’s who rode back at speed to tell his other kin. Egar followed on foot, leading his horse with Runi’s body slung over it while Klarn rode at a respectful distance, watchful as a raven. When they reached the Skaranak encampment, there were torches burning everywhere and practically the whole clan gathered with Runi’s family at their head. Even Poltar was there, the gaunt, shaven-skulled shaman and his acolytes standing aloof from the throng, the implements of consecration ready in their hands. There had been a subdued muttering back and forth among those waiting, but it died away to nothing when they saw the blood-soaked form of their clanmaster leading the horse into the glow of the torches.
The steppe ghouls had died hard. Their marks were on the Dragonbane from head to foot.
Egar lowered his eyes so he would not have to look at Narma and Jural. Neither Runi’s mother nor father had wanted their son to ride herd so early, but in council Egar would not forbid it since the boy was of age. Runi had promise, he was an enthusiastic boy, and he’d had a way with the animals since he could walk.
Added to which, anything was preferable to having him slouch around with the other sons of buffalo-wealthy Skaranak, swilling rice wine and yelling unimaginative abuse at passing women. Right, Clanmaster? Better that young Runi pack that in and start making something of himself.
And now Runi was torn apart and already cooling as Egar lifted his roughly bound body from the horse’s back. The Dragonbane shifted his burden, bore it up in both arms, wincing as the weight pressed back against slash wounds on chest and upper arms. He came forward one numb step at a time to present Runi to his parents.
Narma broke down crying and fell on her son’s exposed face, so it was hard for Egar to keep the body in his arms. He tried not to stagger. Jural turned his face away, hid his tears in the darkness so he would not be shamed before the clan.
It was at times like this that the Dragonbane wished heartily he’d never fucking returned from the south or assumed the mantle of clanmaster.
“He died a warrior’s death.”
He intoned the ritual words, cursing inwardly at the idiocy of it all. A sixteen-year-old boy, for fuck’s sake. If he’d had the time to become a warrior, maybe he’d have lived through the raid. “He will be honored with the name of clan defender forever in our hearts.” He hesitated and mumbled, almost inaudibly, “I’m sorry, Narma.”
Her wailing went up a notch. It was that moment that Poltar the shaman chose to assert his own formalized role.
“Woman, be still. Will the Dwellers look with favor on a warrior so beset with female noisemaking? Even now he looks down on you from the Sky Road to his forefathers, and is shamed before them by this hubbub. Get away and light candles for him, as a woman should.”
What happened next was by no means clear in anybody’s mind afterward, least of all Egar’s own. Narma, it seemed, was not going to relinquish her hold on Runi’s corpse. Poltar stepped closer and tried to persuade her by main force. There was a brief scuffle, an escalation of weeping, and the flat cracking sound of a palm against a face. Runi tumbled from Egar’s arms and hit the earth with a dull thud, headfirst. Narma started screaming at the shaman and Poltar hit her openhanded. She collapsed over her son like a badly tied bundle of firewood. Egar pivoted, guilt and undispelled rage surging for release, and decked the shaman with every ounce of strength left in his right arm. Poltar flew fully five feet backward from the end of the Dragonbane’s fist and hit the ground on his back.
There was a breath-choked pause while everyone caught up.
One of the acolytes took a step toward Egar and then thought better of it as he saw the look on the Dragonbane’s bloodied face. The other three hurried to Poltar’s side and helped him to sit up. The crowd murmured uneasily, a word slithering on the edge of being pronounced. The shaman spat blood and said it for them.
“Sacrilege!”
“Oh, give it a rest.” Egar, drawling but a lot less unconcerned than he made out. Because Poltar was about to be a fucking problem.
If there was one force on the steppes that the Majak acknowledged equal to their own general toughness, it was the shifty, lightning-blast power of the Sky Dwellers. The Dwellers were not like the southerners’ God in His meticulous, archive-keeping imperialism. They were jealous, fickle, and unpredictably violent, and had no time for such clerkish, inclusive ways—they sent storms or plagues at random to remind the Majak of their place in the scheme of things, set men against each other for amusement, and then played dice with one another to decide who would live or die. In short, they acted not unlike the leisured and powerful among men, and the shaman was their only empowered messenger under the sky. To offend the shaman was to offend the Dwellers, and those who offended, it was understood, would sooner or later pay a heavy price.
Now the oldest acolyte took it up, brandishing his summoning stick at the assembled Skaranak.
“Sacrilege! Sacrilege has been done! Who will atone?”
“You’ll fucking atone if you don’t shut up.” Egar strode toward the speaker, determined to nip this in the bud. The acolyte stood his ground, eyes wide with fear and insane faith.
“Urann the Gray will—”
Egar grabbed him by the throat. “I said shut up. Where was Urann the Gray when I needed him out there? Where was Urann when this boy needed his help?” He cast a glance around at the frightened faces in the torchlight, and for the first time in his life he felt an overpowering contempt for his own people. His voice rang louder. “Where is fucking Urann every time we need him, heh? Where was he, Garath, when the runners took your brother? When the wolves stole your daughter from her cradle, Inmath? Where was he when the coughing fever came and the smoke from the funeral pyres rose on every horizon from here to Ishlin-ichan. Where was that gray motherfucker when my father died?”
Then Poltar was back on his feet and facing him.
“You speak as a child,” he said in a quiet, deadly voice that nonetheless carried to the whole watching crowd. Consummately staged—it was the man’s profession after all. “Your time in the south has corrupted you to our ways, and now you’d bring
disaster on the Skaranak with your sacrilege. You are no longer fit to govern as clanmaster. The Grey One speaks it with the death of this boy.”
The crowd murmured, but it was a confused sound. There were plenty of them who had little time for Poltar and the leisurely lifestyle his status brought him. Egar wasn’t the only cynic on the steppe, nor the only Skaranak warrior to have gone south and come back with a wider picture of how the world worked. Three or four of the associate herd owners had themselves been mercenary captains for Yhelteth, and one of them, Marnak, had fought beside the Dragonbane at Gallows Gap. He was older than Egar by at least a decade, but still whiplash-swift when it was needed, and his loyalty was forged deeper than anything the shaman could call on. Egar spotted his grim, leathered face there in the torchlight, watchful and ready to skin steel. Marnak caught his clanmaster’s look and nodded, just once. Egar felt gratitude sting at his eyes.
But there were others.
The weak and the stupid, in their dozens, huddled now in among their fellows, afraid of the cold night beyond the firelight and anything in it. Afraid almost as much of anything new that might unseat a vision hemmed in by vast empty skies and the unchanging steppe horizon. Egar saw their faces, knew them for the ones who looked away as he met their eyes.
And behind these faces, feeding and playing on these fears, stood the greedy and the entrenched, whose hatred of change welled up from the more prosaic concern that it might upset the old order, and so their own privileged position within the clan. Those for whom the Dragonbane’s return as a hero had been hailed not with joy but with cool mistrust and a sharp look to herd ownership and hierarchy. Those who—it shamed him to admit the fact—included a couple of his own brothers at least.
For all these people, Poltar the shaman and his stubborn beliefs represented everything that the Majak stood for, and everything that might be lost if the balance shifted. They would not stand with Egar; at best they might only stand by. And others might well do something worse.
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