‘Etterkal ?’ The no-big-deal expression slid right off Milacar’s face. ‘Was she sold legally?’
‘Yeah, payment for a bad debt. Chancellery clearing house 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 recognise, 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 recognised.
‘Lot of things have changed since you went away, Gil.’
‘Yeah, tell me about it.’
‘That includes Etterkal. Salt Warren’s a whole different neighbourhood these days, you wouldn’t recognise the place since Liberalisation. 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 make-up 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-coloured 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 recognises 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 was 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 odour 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 amidst 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 round that Milacar had followed him out on to 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, and 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 fairytale 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 recognise 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 night-time garden below and stared after the ember.
The Steel Remains (Gollancz) Page 7