With Liberalization and the rise of the slavers association in Etterkal, these mannered maneuverings grew secondary. The Watch stood on Blacksail boulevard primarily because Etterkal’s masters wanted them there. Entry into the Salt Warren, especially from a district swarming with who knew what foreign spies and creatures, was subject to tight scrutiny and report. The watchmen would want particulars of where you were going, whom to see, and on what business. Numbers were restricted, note of names was taken. Listed undesirables, heavily armed or otherwise suspicious parties, anyone in fact that the Watch didn’t like the look of, would be summarily turned away.
Tonight you could have rolled an entire army, with siege engines, either way across the Blacksail divide, and no one would have blinked. Fires were burning in Tervinala, some of them clearly visible down the streets that opened onto the boulevard from that side, and any Watch presence there might have been was long gone. It was a repeat of the scene on Caravan Master’s Rise, but with twice the number of abandoned barricades and untended braziers in the rain. Faintly from the diplomatic quarter, he heard the iron clash and yell of fighting.
“We’re crossing into Tervinala now,” he said, for Anasharal’s benefit. “Twenty-two of us. Five seriously injured. No sign of resistance, I reckon we’ll be at the eastern harbor wall in an hour or less.”
“I shall make this known to Commander Nyanar.”
They plunged into the stew of streets on the far side, avoiding the telltale glow of fires. Took quiet, darkened avenues that looked like they’d escaped the rampage. Gil kept a map lit in his head, plotting the twists and turns he was taking, trying to keep them more or less on a direct course for the waterfront. Here, too, he was at home, carried on the combined recall of a dozen or more nights spent skulking after violent inroads into Etterkal and rapid retreats back out. None of it quite matched his current needs; you couldn’t skulk with a score of men at your back the way you could with only two or three, but still …
“This will not … not be forgotten, my lord. Rest assured.”
Menith Tand, there at his side. The slave magnate had upped his pace to get level, was a little out of breath as a result. Ringil grunted.
“Forgotten by whom?”
“Well, of course, by any associates of Findrich, and the Trelayne Chancellery in general.” Tand found the spare energy for a thin smirk. “You have inflicted a quite stunning humiliation on them all. But that’s not what I meant. Quite seriously, my lord Ringil, I am in your debt. We all are.”
Ringil shot him a dubious glance. “I’d have thought you had the leverage to skip out easily enough once the shouting dies down. You of all people, Tand. Circles you move in, professional courtesy and so forth.”
“Not in times of war, I’m afraid. Our treatment as prisoners has in fact been quite heavy-handed. Not what I’d expected at all.”
“Yeah? That what happened to Shendanak?”
The slave merchant pursed his lips. “No, that’s legacy of a disagreement he had with the Dragonbane. Your friend had already put him into a coma by the time the privateers arrived in Ornley. He only woke later, on the voyage south.”
Gil blinked. “Egar did that? Why?”
“I have no clear idea, I’m afraid. I believe it had something to do with a squabble over the local whores.” Tand shrugged. “You are talking about Majak, after all.”
For a moment, the Dragonb ane stood grinning in his mind’s eye. Thuggish, scarred, something of the unkillable about him.
Gone.
Ringil bit down on the loss and the guilt it came with. Put it away.
“You don’t think you would have been ransomed home?” he asked, for something to fill the silence.
The slave magnate shook his head. “Not easily, no. I fear we could well have spent several years of our lives in very unsavory confinement, had you not come for us. We might perhaps even have been executed as spies, if only to placate the rabble when the war took some turn for the worse.”
“Well, that’s wars for you.”
“Oh, indeed.” Tand nodding sagely to himself as they marched. “Not the most intelligent of ventures, even at the best of times.”
“You want to talk to your Emperor about that.”
“Yes.” A pensive, drawn out weight on the words now. “Our beloved Emperor.”
They marched on in silence, and the echoes of what had been said scurried off into the rain and the dark. The thoroughfare they tramped down ended at a five-point crossroads. Screams and harsh wild, laughter in gusts from the street directly opposite, and flames leaping out of first-floor windows along the row. Bodies in the street, figures locked in savage back-and-forth combat, yelling in Naomic and another language whose cadences Ringil recognized but could not understand. Hard to believe, but it looked as if someone had gotten into the Shaktur embassy and was busy putting it to the torch.
He summoned the map in his head. Pain in the arse, but they could detour left past this lot, then cut back up Candleman’s Cleft and get out onto the Dawn Boulevard further along. It was another quarter mile or so, not exactly ideal ground, but—
Three ragged figures came loping up the road from the burning embassy, flicker-lit by the flames at their back. Ringil saw stolen finery pulled on over starveling, bony frames, a couple of cutlasses in hand, a pike. One of the marauding convicts had found himself a big floppy hat, another seemed to be wearing a flaxen wig. They whooped when they spotted Gil and the others hesitating at the crossway—brandished their weaponry and swaggered forward grinning into the open space, to meet these new victims. They didn’t seem to have noticed quite how many men were at Ringil’s back. Perhaps they were drunk, on their freedom and fury if nothing else.
“Will you meet your end tonight, watchman?” the one with the hat crowed, and did a little dance back and forth across the cobbles. There was blood down the front of his stolen breeches. A scant array of broken teeth in his grin. “Is it tonight?”
“No, it’s not,” Ringil said curtly.
He stepped forward, snapped out a loose left hand, made a two-fingered claw. The convict dropped his cutlass, went screaming to his knees with hands cupped to his eyes.
His two companions gaped.
“You have me confused with someone else,” Ringil told them. “Now fuck off.”
They needed no second warning. Both men fled back down the street they’d come from, leaving pike and cutlass and the bloodied flaxen wig strewn across the cobbles beside their writhing, shrilling companion. Ringil made a lateral chopping motion with his clawed hand and the man’s screams and struggle ceased. His body rolled brokenly to a halt.
“This is a scalp,” said Klithren curiously, lifting the bloodied blond hairpiece on the end of his sword for inspection.
Ringil peered. “Yeah, certainly looks like it. This way.”
He led them into the dark on the far side of the crossroads.
A HUNDRED CROOKED YARDS DOWN THE CONFINES OF CANDLEMAN’S CLEFT, and they went single file because the alley-space forced it, picking their way on the cobble-and-pothole surface underfoot. The stretcher bearers struggled not to stumble and tip their charges. Mahmal Shanta was insisting loudly on getting out and walking this bit, but Gil wouldn’t have it. He wanted them out of here as fast as possible and Shanta wouldn’t do well over this terrain in the dark.
It seemed unnaturally warm in the Cleft; not much rain or wind got in from above. Flashlit blue recall of the dark defiles insisted at the borders of his vision, threatened to tip him off the edge of here-and-now, pitch him back into nightmare. He sniffed and stopped it up somewhere inside him, like the pain from any other wound. The inward-leaning, jaggedly piled-up levels of the houses on either side pressed in and down, promised a nightmare toppling. The myriad darkened windows and tiny balconies offered the more prosaic threat of ambush by arbalest or bow, or just some heavy crockery and stones.
Still no sign of Risgillen.
He had Klithren drop back to handle the rearguard
, moved a couple of yards ahead and led on with senses spread like a net, taut for any whisper of life, human or otherwise. But if there were eyes on them above, he felt no sign of their presence. And if anyone cared what he’d done here, what he’d brought screaming down on this city, then they were keeping it to themselves, at least for now.
Near the end, with the glimmer of light at the end of the Cleft, he stumbled over a couple of bodies, throats slit and clothes torn off below the waist. Someone overly shy had evidently been using the alley for privacy, but the perpetrators were long gone. He gathered a glimpse of pale drowned faces in the gloom, the raw black, glittering gashes beneath their chins. Gil thought one was a boy, the other a woman his age, but in the uncertain light it was hard to be sure.
He looked away.
Moments later, they spilled out onto the Dawn boulevard’s lamplit expanse, found more corpses strewn there, properties burning and smoke in the street, but no sign of whoever was responsible. They’d missed the party. He looked up and down the ravaged, deserted thoroughfare. Caught his men watching him in expectant quiet, stopped up the heavy sigh of relief in his throat before it could vent.
“All right?” Klithren asked him, shouldering up from the rear.
“Yeah, why wouldn’t I be? Go on, you take the van. Down that way, keep straight on. Set the pace. We’re almost home.”
He let Klithren lead off, fell in a couple of ranks back, brooding on the images in his head. Menith Tand joined him again, paced along at his side. When Ringil said nothing to him, he walked in silence, too, but he was clearly agitating at something that he’d left unsaid before. In the end, Gil gave up.
“What is it, Tand?”
The slaver cleared his throat
“Yes. I am not unaware, my lord, of what sacrifice these acts represent on your part. I know well enough what it is to own blood on both sides of a bitter divide.”
Ringil snorted. “You’d have to dig back a few generations to find my imperial blood.”
“Nonetheless, it is there, and noble, too. I have read about the Ashnal schism. It was, quite frankly, a farcical business, and a scandalous betrayal of some of the Empire’s finest families. Your ancestors should never have been driven out.”
“But they were.”
“Yes, quite. Which makes your sacrifices here all the more … significant. To throw in your lot with the Empire is one thing; any mercenary of note might do the same.” Tand paused. He seemed to be working through some emotions of his own. “But to choose. And in so spectacular a fashion. To march with fire and steel on the city of your birth, to betray the weightier part of your origins in order to honor your duties under imperial charter. As I said before, this will not be forgotten.”
“I was already an outcast up here, Tand.” Dead iron in his tone—with Rakan, Archeth, and the Dragonbane lost, he was in no mood for plaudits. “You know I tried to burn down the whole Trelayne slave trade last year?”
“Word had reached me of that, yes.”
Ringil looked at him, jolted. “You knew that before we left for the Hironish?”
“Yes, somewhat before. I made inquiries.”
“And you said nothing of it?”
Tand shrugged. “You seemed to have gotten it out of your system.”
“Oh, did I?”
“Well. Let us just say you seemed by then to be existing comfortably enough amid the Empire’s very widespread use of slaves, and without any apparent urges to commit murder or mayhem against those who used or owned them. In fact, indiscretions with our young Throne Eternal captain aside, you were behaving perfectly well.”
Behaving perfectly well. Gil grimaced. “Knew about that, too, huh?”
Another shrug. “It was evident, I believe, for anyone with eyes educated enough to notice. When I invest in a venture, I like to know the men I am entrusting my investment to. But this is by the by—your bedchamber inclinations really were of no interest to me, except as they might affect more important considerations.”
“No?” A bitterness he could not right now quell or ironize away. Hooking out the verse from seared memory. “If a man lie down with another man as with a woman, it is as if he lie down with an animal in filth, it is a gross sin in the sight of the Revelation. That’s by the by, is it?”
“Oh, that.” The slave merchant pulled a face. “Well, yes, the Citadel may rant and proscribe to its rabid heart’s content, but that’s strictly for the rabble. Among the noble classes in Yhelteth, we prefer, let us say, a more nuanced approach. It’s helpful to have the proscription and associated punishments in place, of course, but actual exposure is far too valuable a political tool to be deployed on”—an airy gesture—“vulgar principle.”
“Vulgar principle, huh?” Ringil shook his head, riding down a brief urge to smash in sophisticated, accommodating Menith Tand’s face in with the pommel of his sword. “You know, Tand, if you’d based yourself up here instead of at the Empire end of things, it might have been your warehouses I was burning down. Your merchandise I set free.”
“Yes, but it was not.” The slave merchant offered him an urbane smile. “If anything, I believe I may even have benefited somewhat from your depredations among my Trelayne competitors. You see, my lord Ringil, I am above all a pragmatist.”
“Yeah.”
“And you were, by the time the caravan grapevine carried this news to me, a very significant asset to us all. You whipped our quest fellowship into shape as no one else available could have. You carried command. Men followed you instinctively, looked to you for leadership as a matter of natural course. Under the circumstances, I saw no good reason to trouble the lady Archeth or our other sponsors with what I knew, to set fresh ripples in water we had already spent all winter calming.”
“Hsst!” Klithren’s arm raised, fist clenched. “Hold up.”
They slammed to a halt, on a road surface that had begun to tilt very slightly downward. Charred, collapsed structures on either side of the street, a carpet of shattered glass and crockery stretching ahead, a tavern sign still on its brackets, torn loose and flung flat to the cobbles. Flames still licked and crackled amid the shattered remnants of the building on the right, but the rain was beating out the blaze. Elsewhere, it was smolder and low-drifting acrid smoke. Bodies everywhere, tangled up untidily across the cobbles like bundles of dirty washing, or spread-eagled and staring blindly up into the rain that fell on their faces. The clothes had been torn off at least every one in three.
Ringil cast about for signs of threat or life, saw some few quivering figures huddled into walls or niche spaces. From somewhere came a high, endless keening. Impossible to tell which, if any, of the visible survivors were making the noise.
“Nice one,” said Klithren, loud in the murky air.
The eastern harbor lay before them, devoid of life in the fitful flicker of flames from a dozen different fires across the wharves.
AGAINST THE ODDS, THEY’D BEATEN NYANAR’S PICK UP TO THE MEETING point. Outlander’s wharf was deserted, unless you counted the dozen or so corpses of convicts and harbor Watch strewn along its worn stone length. Most of them still held the weapons they’d died with, which in the case of the convicts didn’t amount to very much—lengths of chain and clubs made of rotten, torn-up deck timber, here and there the odd looted ax or knife. From the pincushion look of the bodies, somebody had panicked, ordered repeated crossbow volleys across the wharf, and taken out almost as many of their own watchmen as they had attackers.
“So where the fuck is our ride?” Klithren wanted to know.
Ringil scanned the burning harbor, looking for— “There.”
He pointed. Motion, low in the water, off to their left. Two longboats, rowers bent-backed at their task, coming in across water speckled with flame in oily patches and spiked with the spars of burned and scuttled ships. Add to that the wind and rain and dark, and he supposed, grudgingly, that it couldn’t have been an easy passage to make.
Klithren squinted through the r
ain.
“Hoiran’s aching cock—two fucking boats? Is that it? We’re going to struggle to get everybody in those and not capsize soon as we hit open water.”
Ringil shrugged, masking similar misgivings. “I told the Helmsman twenty-two men. Nyanar must reckon this is enough. Maybe he’s right.”
“Yeah, and maybe my prick’s a fucking mainmast.” The mercenary scowled. “Well, I just hope you can keep a tight leash on those merroigai horrors of yours. Because we’re going to be riding very fucking low in the water.”
Privately, Gil doubted he could get the merroigai to do anything very much that they didn’t want to. About the only binding magic he’d been able to work on the swimmers, aside from summoning them to his aid in the first place, was an injunction to stay in the water, which, according to Hjel, was where they liked to be anyway. The merroigai speak highly of you, the Creature at the Crossroads had assured him, but he had no idea what that meant. And while Dakovash claimed he’d sent one to save him when Gil let himself be carried too far out to sea at Lanatray in his youth, that was a long time ago and the affection apparently didn’t extend to anybody else, even if they were under his command. Best bet, Hjel says unhelpfully when asked, just stay out of the water and tell anyone you have any affection for to do the same.
Right.
Useless fucking ikinri ‘ska.
“You just let me worry about the merroigai. Flag them in, will you? They haven’t seen us yet.”
He watched the mercenary put hand to mouth and vent a piercing whistle, then cross-wave both arms slowly and steadily over his head. Faint cries went back and forth among the rowers as they spotted the signal. Both boats altered heading by a fraction and arrowed in directly toward them. Ringil peered over the side of the wharf.
The Dark Defiles Page 65