But now . . .
And finally, the knowledge crashed in on him, like something tearing a seam. Soft-footed and slim despite the years that had grayed his temples, Murmin Kaad stepped down into the room.
“Good day, Master Ringil.”
Ringil sat rigid.
“Ha! Cat got his tongue.” But Gingren had been—was perhaps still, just about—a warrior, and he knew what the sudden stillness in his son meant. He made a low gesture at Kaad with one hand, a warning to stay back. “Lord Justice Kaad has come here as my invited guest, Ringil. He’d like to talk to you about something.”
Ringil stared very carefully straight ahead.
“So let him talk.”
Brief hesitation. Gingren nodded, and Kaad stepped across to the far side of the table. He made a show of pulling out one of the crude wooden stools, of settling onto it with ironic magnanimity for the lack of ceremony or plush. He rearranged his cloak about him, pulled up closer to the table edge, rested his hands on the scarred surface in a loose clasp. A silver ring chased with gold inlay and the city’s Chancellery crest bulked on one finger.
“It is always good,” he began formally, “to see one of the city’s honored sons so returned.”
Ringil flickered him a glance. “I said talk, not tongue my arse clean. Get on with it, will you.”
“Ringil!”
“No, no, Gingren, it’s all right.” But it clearly wasn’t—Ringil saw the quick stain of anger pass across the other man’s face, just as rapidly wiped away and replaced with a strained diplomatic smile. “Your son and the Committee have not always seen eye-to-eye. Youth. It is, after all, not a crime.”
“It was for Jelim Dasnel.” The old anger fizzled in him, blunted a little with the comedown. “As I recall.”
Another brief pause. Behind Ringil, Gingren made a knotted-up sound, then evidently thought better of releasing it into speech.
Kaad put on the thin smile again. “As I recall, Jelim Dasnel broke the laws of Trelayne and made a mockery of the morality that governs us all. As did you, Ringil, though it grieves me to recall the fact in your family home. One example had to be made.”
The anger found its edge, shed the comedown blur and glinted clean and new. Ringil leaned across his half of the table, fixed Kaad with lover’s eyes.
“Should I be grateful to you?” he whispered.
Kaad held his gaze. “Yes, I would think you should. It could as easily have been two cages at the eastern gate as one.”
“No, not easily. Not for a lickspittle little social aspirant like you, Kaad. Not with a big fat chance to get on the Eskiath tit in the offing.” Ringil manufactured a smile of his own—it felt like an obscenity as it crawled across his face, it felt like a wound. “Haven’t you sucked your fill yet, little man? What do you want now?”
And now he had him. The rage stormed the other man’s face again, and this time it held its ground. The smile evaporated, the patrician mask tightened at mouth and eyes, the groomed, half-bearded cheeks darkened with fury past dissembling. Kaad’s origins were pure harbor-end, and the disdain with which he’d been viewed by the high families as he rose through the legislature had never been concealed. The ring and the badges of rank had come hard, the stiff smiles and party invitations from Glades society clawed forth like blood; wary respect if not acceptance, never acceptance, mined from the lying aristocratic heart of Trelayne with cunning and cold, inching calculation, one shored-up bargain and veiled power play at a time. In Ringil’s sneer, the other man could hear the creak of that shoring, the sudden cold-water chill of knowing how flimsy and man-made it all was, and how at blood-deep levels that had nothing to do with material wealth or rank displayed, nothing had or ever would change. Kaad was still the tolerated but unappreciated guest in the house, the grubby, harbor-end intruder he’d always been.
“How dare you!”
“Oh, I dare.” Ringil let one hand slide up to rub casually at his neck, alongside the upjutting spike of the Ravensfriend’s pommel. “I dare.”
“You owe me your life!”
Ringil slanted a look at his father, calculated more than anything to further infuriate Kaad, to dismiss him as a threat worth keeping his eye on.
“How much more of this do I have to listen to?”
Gingren smouldered to anger. “That’s enough, Ringil!”
“Yeah, I’d say so, too.”
“You tell.” Kaad, getting up now, face still mottled with fury. “Your degenerate, your fucking ungrateful degenerate son, you tell him—”
“What did you call me?”
“Ringil!”
“You tell him where the lines are drawn, Gingren. Right now. Or I leave, and I take my vote with me.”
“His vote?” Ringil stared at his father. “His fucking vote?”
“Shut up!” It was a roar fit for a battlefield, a great tolling bellow in the confines of the kitchen. “Both of you! Just shut up and start acting like a pair of adults. Kaad, sit down. We’re not finished. And Ringil, no matter what you think, you’ll keep a courteous tongue in your head while you’re under my roof. This is not some roadside tavern for you to brawl in.”
Ringil made a small spitting sound. “The roadside taverns of my acquaintance have cleaner clientele. They don’t like torturers much in the uplands.”
“What about the murderers of small children?” Kaad seated himself again, with the same fastidious attention to the drape of his cloak. He shot Ringil a significant look. “How do they react to that?”
Ringil said nothing. The old memory seeped in his mind, a flow he stanched before it got properly started. He placed his hands around the flagon of steaming tea and stared downward. Still too hot to drink. Gingren saw his chance.
“We’re trying to help you, Ringil.”
“Are you really, Father.”
“We know you’ve been sniffing around the Salt Warren,” said Kaad.
Ringil looked up abruptly.
“You’re having me followed?”
Kaad shrugged. Made a small, worldly gesture. In Ringil’s head, recollection of the walk home slipped into focus. Sounds of soft pursuit. The prickle at his neck. Watchers among the trees, scuttling away.
He let the smile that was a gash split his face again.
“You want to be careful, Kaad. You let your Committee thugs creep up too close on me, you’re liable to find yourself fishing them out of the harbor in chunks.”
“I’d advise you against threatening Chancellery staff, Master Ringil.”
“It wasn’t a threat. It’s what’ll happen.”
Gingren made an impatient noise. “Point is, Ringil, we know you’re not getting anywhere with Etterkal. That’s what we can help you with. What Lord Kaad here can help you with.”
Something like a sense of wonder crept up in Ringil. He sensed vaguely the shape of what was before him, felt carefully around its edges.
“You’re going to get me into the Salt Warren?”
Kaad cleared his throat. “Not as such, no. But there are, let us say, more profitable avenues of inquiry that you might pursue.”
“Might I?” asked Ringil tonelessly. “And what avenues are those?”
“You are looking for Sherin Herlirig Mernas, widow of Bilgrest Mernas, sold under the debt guarantors’ charter last month.”
“Yeah. You know where she is?”
“Not at this precise moment. But the resources of the Chancellery might very well be opened to you in a way that they have not yet been.”
Ringil shook his head. “I’m done with the Chancellery. There’s nothing worth knowing up there that I don’t already know.”
Hesitation. Gingren and Kaad swapped glances.
“There is the issue of manpower,” began Kaad. “We could—”
“You could provide me with enough Watch uniforms to turn the Salt Warren upside down. Break some heads and get some answers. How about that?”
Again, the exchange of looks, the grim expressions. Ringil,
for all he’d known what the response would be, coughed out a disbelieving laugh.
“Hoiran’s fucking balls, what is it about Etterkal?” Though, if Milacar was to be believed, he already knew, and was starting to realize it must, after all, be taken seriously. “The place was a fucking slum last time I was here. Now everyone’s too fucking scared to go knock on the gate?”
“Ringil, there is more to this than you understand. More than your mother understood when she called you back.”
“Yeah, that’s becoming very clear.” Ringil stabbed a finger at his father. “You wouldn’t lift a finger to help Sherin when they sold her, but now I’m banging on the Salt Warren gate, it suddenly merits attention. What is it, Dad? You want me to stop? Am I going to upset the wrong people? Am I going to embarrass you again?”
“You take this matter too lightly, Master Ringil. You do not understand what you are about to involve yourself in.”
“He just said that, Kaad. What are you, a fucking parrot?”
“Your father is motivated principally by concern for your well-being.”
“Candidly, I doubt that. But even if it were true, that leaves you. What’s your end of this, you conniving old fuck?”
Fist slammed onto the table, Kaad half risen from his seat.
“You will not speak to me in that way,” he said thickly.
Then he was reeling backward off the stool, falling, both hands up to his face, mashing in the sound of a high shriek and streaming with the heated tea. Ringil got up and tossed the emptied flagon across the table after him, onto the flagstone floor, where it lay, still steaming slightly from the mouth.
“I’ll speak to you exactly how I like, Kaad.” He was oddly cold and calm now, tranquil in the understanding that this and all it implied had been unavoidable from the moment he agreed to come home. “You got a problem with my mouth, I’ll see you on Brillin Hill Fields about it.”
Kaad rocked back and forth on the floor in the puddle of his own cloak. His hands still clutched at his face. He made a mewling sound through the fingers. Gingren stood mute with disbelief, staring from the downed justice to his son. Ringil ignored him.
“If you can get someone to show you which end of a sword you’re supposed to pick it up by, that is.”
“Hoiran damn your fucking soul to hell!”
“If you really believe what you preach, he’s already done that. Alongside all my carnal sins, I don’t think roughing up the local magistrature is going to impress the Dark King all that much. Sorry.”
By now Gingren had gone around the end of the table and was kneeling by Kaad’s side. The justice slapped away his efforts to help. He climbed to his feet, face already turning pink and raw looking across nose and one cheek where the tea had evidently burned worst. He pointed a trembling finger at Ringil.
“On your own head, Eskiath. This will be on your own head.”
“It always is.”
Kaad gathered his robes about him. From somewhere, he mustered a sneer. “No, Master Ringil. Like all your kind, the consequences of what you do are borne by others. From Gallows Gap to the cages at the eastern gate, it is others, always others, who pay the carriage for your acts.”
Ringil twitched forward a quarter inch. Held himself back.
“Now you’d really better get out,” he said quietly.
Kaad went. Perhaps he saw something in Ringil’s eyes, perhaps he just didn’t see any way to salvage value from the situation. He was, after all, a political animal. Gingren hurried after him, one furious backflung glance at his son in lieu of words. Ringil stood still a couple of moments after they’d gone, then slumped under the gathering weight of the comedown. He leaned flat palms on the table in front of him, gazed at the emptied flagon there.
“Wouldn’t have thought it was still that hot,” he murmured, and chuckled a little to himself. He looked around for the serving girl, but she hadn’t reappeared. He squinted down toward the door out to the garden, where the light was now getting bright enough to hurt his krin-stunned pupils. He thought about going to bed, but in the end, he just sat back down at the table and sank his head in his hands instead. A fading trace of the drug whined about in the back of his head.
Gingren found him there, unmoved, what felt like hours later.
“Well, now you’ve done it,” he growled.
Ringil wiped hands down his face and looked up at his father. “I hope so. I don’t want to have to breathe the same air as that fuck again.”
“Oh, Hoiran’s teeth! What is it with you, Ringil? Just for once tell me, what the fuck is wrong with you?”
“What’s wrong with me?” Suddenly Ringil was off the stool, scant inches out of his father’s fighting space. His arm scythed out, pointing eastward. “He sent Jelim to die on a fucking spike!”
“That was fifteen years ago. And anyway, Jelim Dasnal was a degenerate, he—”
“Then so am I, Dad. So am I.”
“—fucking deserved the cage.”
“Then so did I!”
It screamed up out of him, the dark poison pressure of it, the same nagging ache that had driven him up the pass at Gallows Gap, like biting down on a rotten tooth, the pain and the sweet leak of pus behind it, the taste of his own hate in his mouth, and a trembling that now he found he couldn’t stop. Gingren saw it, and wavered in the blast.
“Ringil, it was the law.”
“Oh lizardshit!” But abruptly the force of his rage was no longer there, the krin drop was crushing it out, falling on him harder now with every waking second, bleaching away his focus. He went back to the stool and seated himself again, voice flung dull and disinterested back over his shoulder at Gingren where he stood. “It was a political deal, and you know it. You think they would have hung Jelim up at the eastern gate if his surname had been Eskiath? Or Alannor, or Wrathrill, or any other name with a Glades punch behind it? You think any of those raping sadists up at the Academy are ever going to see the sharp end of a cage?”
“That,” said Gingren stiffly, “is not something we—”
“Oh, fuck off. Just forget it.” Ringil dumped his chin into one cupped hand, defocusing vision of the grain in the table’s wooden surface as the comedown leaned in on him. “I’m not going to do this, Father. I’m not going to argue about the past with you. What’s the point? Look, I’m sorry if I fucked up your negotiations with the Chancellery.”
“Not just mine. Kaad could have helped you.”
“Yeah. Could have, but he wasn’t going to. He just wanted—you both just want—me to stay away from the Salt Warren. The rest is just distraction. It isn’t going to help me find Sherin.”
“And you think thugging your way into Etterkal is?”
Ringil shrugged. “Etterkal took her. That’s where the useful answers are going to be.”
“Hoiran’s teeth, Ringil. Is it really worth it?” Gingren came to the table, leaned on it at his son’s shoulder, leaned over him. His breath was sour with stress and lack of sleep. “I mean, one fucking merchant’s daughter, barren anyway, and too stupid to look to her own welfare in good time? She’s not even a full cousin.”
“I don’t expect you to understand.” Any more than I understand it myself.
“She’ll be soiled goods by now, Ringil. You do know that, don’t you? You know how the slave markets work.”
“Like I said, I don’t expe—”
“Good, because I don’t.” Gingren thumped the table, but with a despairing lack of real force. “I don’t understand how the same man who helped save this whole fucking city from the lizards can stand there and tell me that getting back one raped and brutalized female is more important to him than protecting the stability of the very same city he fought so hard to save.”
Ringil looked up at him. “So it’s about stability now, is it?”
“Yeah. It is.”
“Want to expand on that?”
Gingren looked away. “This is under seal of council. I can’t divulge—”
“Fine.”
“Ringil, I promise you. On the honor of the Eskiath name, I swear it. It may not seem like much, you stirring up trouble in Etterkal, but there’s a threat at the heart of all this and it’s easily the equal of those fucking lizards you threw off the city walls back in ’53.”
Ringil sighed. He rubbed the heels of his palms in his eyes, trying to dislodge the feeling of grit.
“I had a rather minor part in lifting the siege, Father. And to be honest I would have done the same thing for any other city, including Yhelteth, if we’d had to fight there instead. I know we’re not supposed to say that kind of thing these days, seeing as how we’re back to being sworn enemies with the Empire. But it’s the truth, and truth is something I’m kind of partial to. Call it an affectation.”
Gingren drew himself up. “Truth is not an affectation.”
“No?” Ringil summoned energy and stood up to leave. He yawned. “Doesn’t seem any more popular around here than it was when I left, though. Funny, they always said it was one of the things we were fighting for back then. Light, justice, and truth. I distinctly remember being told that.”
They stood looking at each other for a couple of long moments. Gingren drew breath, audibly, as if it hurt to do. The expression he wore shifted.
“You’re still going, then? Into Etterkal. Despite everything you’ve just heard.”
“Yeah, I am.” Ringil tilted his head until his neck gave up its tension with a click. “Tell Kaad not to get in my way, eh.”
Gingren held his gaze. Nodded as if just convinced of something.
“You know, I don’t like him any more than you do, Ringil. I don’t like him any more than the next harbor-end cur. But curs have their uses.”
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