The Steel Remains lffh-1 Page 14

  “Yes, I did. And like I said, you gave a fine account of yourself.”

  It got a smile. “Ah, but you should have seen me at Rajal, sir. They had to drag me onto that evacuation barge.”

  “I’m sure they did.”

  They stood there for a couple of moments. The martial anthem went on, muffled by the tavern walls, but swelling. Darby shouldered the cudgel, thumped his hand to his chest in salute.

  “Right sir, I’ll be going.”

  Ringil dug in his purse again. “Listen.”

  “No, sir. I won’t impose on your kindness any further.” He kept his free hand clenched and at his chest. “Absolutely not.”

  “It’s not much. Just to get yourself, I don’t know, some hot food, a hot bath. A place to stay.”

  “It’s a kind thought, sir. But we both know that’s not what I’d spend it on.”

  “Well.” Ringil gestured helplessly, dug out the coin regardless. “Look, spend it on fucking wine and flandrijn, then. If that’s what you need.”

  The fist came halfway uncurled. Something moved in the veteran’s face, and this time Ringil couldn’t identify what it was. He pressed the handful of money forward.

  “Come on, one old soldier to another. It’s just a favor in hard times. You’d do the same for me.”

  Darby took the coin.

  It was a sudden, convulsive move. His hand was rough with accumulated dirt and grit, and a little hot, as if from fever. He looked away as he stowed the money somewhere in his rags.

  “Much obliged to you, sir, like I already said.”

  But his tone was not the same as before, and he would no longer look Ringil in the eye. And when they’d said their farewell and Darby walked away up the street, there was a slump to his stance that had not been there before. Ringil watched him go, and belatedly he made sense of the change he’d seen in the veteran’s face, could suddenly name the emotion behind it.

  Shame.

  Shame, and a kind of disappointment. In some way Ringil could not pin down, it seemed he’d failed the man after all.

  He stood in the gloom and stared after Darby for a moment more, then shrugged irritably and turned away. Not like he’d just stood by and let the Watch work the guy over, for Hoiran’s sake. Not like he hadn’t tried. He rapped curtly on the shop door at his back for entry, listened while Shalak bustled audibly across from the window and unlatched to let him in.

  “All right?” the shopkeeper asked as he closed the door again.

  “Yeah, sure. Why wouldn’t it be?”

  But later, helping Shalak close up the shop, he looked at his hand by lamplight and saw that Darby had left a grubby smear across the palm.

  It proved surprisingly hard to wash off.

  HE GOT BACK TO THE GLADES LATER THAN HE’D PLANNED, WITH VERY little to show for the day’s excursion beyond a couple of scrapes on his hands and face, and a largely empty purse. The ferryman who brought him upriver had no conversation, which Ringil counted a blessing. He sat in the stern of the boat while the man bent to the oars, huddled against the river damp and brooding over Shalak’s vague hints and pointers.

  They come to us in ghost form, striking snake-swift out of phantasmal mist, and when we strike back they return to mist and they laugh, low and mocking in the wind.

  Great.

  Eskiath House was ablaze with lanterns when he came up the drive, and there was a carriage standing outside the main doors, horses quiescent in the traces, coachman sharing a flask of something with another attendant. Ringil eyed them up and down, didn’t recognize their livery or the crest painted on the sides of the coach. Something colorful, a stylized wave on a background of marsh daisies. He shrugged and went in through the door, which stood slightly ajar as was customary this early in the evening. One of the house’s own attendants met him inside.

  “Who’s the visitor?” Ringil asked, as he handed over cap, Ravensfriend, and cloak.

  “The Lord Administrator of Tidal Watch, sir.” The attendant piled up the sword and clothing in his arms with practiced ease. “He has been waiting in the riverside library for two hours.”

  “Sounds like a fucking sinecure post if I ever heard one,” Ringil said grumpily. “Who’s he waiting for?”

  “For you, my lord.”

  Ringil shot the man a sidelong glance. “Really?”

  “Here he comes now, sir.”

  Ringil followed the direction of the attendant’s nod and saw a richly dressed young man storming toward him out of the library doorway. He had time to take in russet tunic and cream breeches, sea-stained leather boots and a court rapier rigged at one hip, features that looked vaguely familiar under the flush of rage and a neatly trimmed beard.

  “Eskiath,” he bellowed.

  Ringil looked elaborately around the entry hall. “Are you talking to me?”

  The Lord Administrator of Tidal Watch reached him and lashed out with his left hand. The move caught Ringil by surprise; it was unlooked for, there was no weapon apparent, just a pair of gloves. The rough-patterned leather stropped his cheek, and stung.

  “I demand satisfaction, Eskiath.”

  Ringil punched him in the face. The Lord Administrator went reeling backward, hit the floor, and floundered there, bloodied at the nose. He touched his upper lip, looked wonderingly at the blood for a moment, then clapped a hand to his rapier hilt.

  “You show that steel in my house,” Ringil told him grimly. “I’ll take it off you and shove it down your fucking throat.”

  He hadn’t moved forward, but the Lord Administrator let go of the weapon anyway, got rapidly back to his feet instead. It was smoothly done, too, an athletic levering motion that Ringil recognized as blade-salon drilled. He readied himself to step in and block the rapier’s draw if necessary. But the younger man just drew himself up and spat on the floor at Ringil’s feet.

  “What I’d expect from a degenerate like you. Street brawling in place of any real sense of honor.” He wiped at the blood from his nose again, dripped some on the floor. He looked down at it and nodded, smiled hard and tight. “But you won’t avoid the reckoning that way, Eskiath. I call you out. Before witnesses. Brillin Hill Fields, day after tomorrow at dawn. Unarmored, unshielded, light blade standards. We will settle this with clean steel, whether you like it or not.”

  By now a small crowd was gathering in the hall. Nearby servants drawn from their duties by the sound of raised voices, and behind the Lord Administrator another liveried attendant, who now quietly proffered his master a handkerchief.

  “I don’t suppose you’d care to tell me what this is about?” Ringil asked. “Why you’re in such a hurry to get yourself killed, I mean.”

  The Lord Administrator took the handkerchief and pressed it under his injured nose. The attendant tried to help and was shrugged off.

  “Degenerate, and coward, too! You presume to put me off with your insufferable arrogance?”

  Something about the formality of speech twitched at Ringil, some trace of similarity to go with the oddly familiar features. He covered for it with a roll of his eyes and a brief, mannered sigh.

  “If we’re to do this by the book, Lord Administrator, then it is customary in a challenge to announce the origin of your grievance. I haven’t been in this city since the war, at which time you look to have been barely out of your cradle. It’s hard to see how I may have given you offense.”

  The other man sneered. “You offend me by your simple existence, Eskiath. With the corruption and vileness you exude in breathing Trelayne air.”

  “Don’t be fucking ridiculous.”

  “How dare—”

  “There are boy whores at the harbor end for you to vent your righteousness upon, if that’s what you’re looking for. They’re young and destitute and desperate, easily frightened and easily hurt. Should suit you down to the ground.”

  “You laid hands on my father!”

  The shout was agonized, echoing in the hall’s vaulted ceiling. Silence settled after it
like goose down from a ripped pillow drifting to the floor. In the quiet, Ringil saw the Lord Administrator’s face again, as if for the first time. Saw the resemblance, heard the similarity in the overworked speech patterns.

  “I see,” he said, very softly.

  “I am Iscon Kaad,” the Lord Administrator of Tidal Watch said, trembling. “My father’s position on the council does not permit him to seek satisfaction by duel. He is unwilling—”

  “Yes, of course, that’s right.” Ringil put on a slow-burning, derisory smile. “Not your father’s style at all, that—actual risk. He’d much rather cower behind the city walls and his robes of rank, and have others do his killing for him. As he did back in the ’fifties, in fact, while the rest of us were up to our knees in lizard blood in the marshes. Your father was conspicuous by his absence then, just as he is now. Perhaps he was busy in the bedchamber, siring you from some floor-scrubbing wench or other.”

  Iscon Kaad made a strangled sound and launched himself at Ringil. Unfortunately, he never made the gap. The attendant pinioned him and held him back. The Eskiath doorman twitched toward Ringil in preventive echo, but Ringil gave him a hard look and he twitched right back again. Kaad subsided in the attendant’s grasp, then shook himself imperiously free. The attendant let him go. In the interim, the coachman and the other attendant had rushed in from outside, and the Lady Ishil had finally appeared to see what was going on in her hallway. Her face was unreadable.

  Ringil folded his arms and cocked his head.

  “You want me to kill you, Iscon Kaad? Fine, I accept. Brillin Hill Fields, day after tomorrow at dawn. As the challenged party, I believe it’s actually my right to the detail of combat, and not yours.” He lifted his right hand and examined the trim of his nails, a gesture he’d stolen from Ishil while they were still both young. Across the hall, his mother saw it, but her face didn’t change. “But of course, I wouldn’t expect you to know that. Someone with your breeding, I mean. You can’t be expected to have mastered all the finer points, now can you?”

  For a moment he thought the younger Kaad might try him again, but either the man’s rage was temporarily spent or he had it more firmly leashed now that Ringil had given him what he wanted. The Lord Administrator merely peeled his teeth in a gritted smile, and waited.

  Or maybe, Gil, it’s just that Iscon Kaad is nothing like his sire. Ever think of that? Maybe growing up wealthy and secure, the son of a noted and influential city councilor, he just lacks his father’s thin skin for social insult and instead he’s turned out exactly the way you once were—an arrogant, overconfident, overmannered young thug with delusions of knighthood.

  Not quite delusions. You see the way he got up? This one’s been through the Academy, or something similar at least.

  Well, so have you, knight graduate Eskiath. So have you.

  Wonder if he had to take it up the arse from his pledge guardian as well. A lingering glance up and down the Lord Administrator’s slim frame. Wonder if he liked it.

  Stop that.

  Still. Wouldn’t do to underestimate him at Brillin day after tomorrow.

  If it comes to that.

  “Are you finished checking your manicure, degenerate?”

  Ringil looked up at Kaad and had to mask a sudden, unwanted sense of vertigo.

  “Very well,” he said coldly. “We’ll do it your way. No mail, no shields, light blades only. Seconds to attend. Now get out of my fucking house.”

  WHEN KAAD HAD GONE, THE GRAVELED CRUNCH OF HIS CARRIAGE fading down the drive, Ringil crooked a finger at one of the attendants nearest to him, a shrewd-faced lad who couldn’t be much over a dozen years old.

  “What’s your name then?”

  “Deri, sir.”

  “Well, Deri, you know Dray Street in Ekelim, right?”

  “Up from the river? Yes, my lord.”

  “Good. There’s a shop there that sells Aldrain junk, on the corner of Blubber Row. I want you to go there first thing tomorrow morning with a message for the owner.”

  “Yes, my lord. What message?”

  “I’ll write it for you later.” Ringil gave him a coin from the bottom of his depleted purse. “Come and find me in the library after supper.”

  “Gladly, my lord.”

  “Off you go then.”

  “And perhaps now,” the Lady Ishil declaimed icily from the other side of the hall, “everyone would care to get back to the tasks for which they are retained in this household. And someone clean up that blood.”

  It set off a scurry of motion, servants dispersing via the various doorways and the staircase. Ishil trod measured steps across the emptying floor space until she was in front of her son. She leaned in close.

  “Is it your intention,” she hissed, “to offend every male of rank in this city before you are done?”

  Ringil examined his nails again. “They come to me, Mother. They come to me. It wouldn’t do to disappoint them. Or perhaps you’d prefer the name of Eskiath insulted with impunity in your own home? I can’t see Father going for that.”

  “If you had not assaulted Kaad in the first place—”

  “Mother, for your—” He stopped, cranked down the force and exasperation in his own voice. He looked daggers at the two remaining attendants by the door, who both immediately found a pressing need to step outside. When they were gone, he started again, quietly. “For your information, neither Murmin Kaad nor your beloved husband wants me anywhere near Etterkal. I don’t think it has much to do with Sherin, but we’ve stirred up a marsh spider burrow with this line of inquiry. Kaad showing up here yesterday is just a consequence.”

  “You did not need to scald his face. To, to”—Ishil gestured—“half blind the man.”

  “He exaggerates.”

  “Oh, you think so? Gingren bribed one of the Chancellery physicians to talk to him after they examined Kaad. He says he may never regain full sight in that eye.”

  “Mother, it was a flagon of tea.”

  “Well, whatever it was, you’ve caused both your father and me a great deal of embarrassment we could have well done without.”

  “Then perhaps you should not have dragged me back to this shit-hole to do your bidding in places you will not go yourself. You know what they say about summoning up demons.”

  “Oh, for Hoiran’s sake, Ringil. Act your age.”

  Their voices were rising again. Ringil made an effort.

  “Listen Mother, Kaad hates me for what I am. There’s no way to change that. And he’s up to his eyes in whatever’s going on inside Etterkal. Sooner or later, we would have collided. And to be honest with you I’d rather that happened face-to-face than that I had to walk about waiting for a knife in the back instead.”

  “So you say. But this is not helping to find Sherin.”

  “Perhaps you have an alternative strategy?”

  And to that, as he well knew, Ishil had no reply.

  LATER, IN THE LIBRARY, HE WROTE BY CANDLELIGHT, FOLDED AND SEALED the parchment, and addressed it to Shalak. The boy came to find him, stood twitchily in the gloom outside the fall of the candle’s glow. Ringil handed him the letter.

  “I don’t suppose you read, do you?”

  The boy chortled. “No, my lord. That’s for clerks.”

  “Yes, and couriers sometimes.” Ringil sighed. “Very well. You see this? It says Shalak Kalarn. Shalak. You can remember that?”

  “Of course, my lord. Shalak.”

  “He doesn’t open early, but he lives above the shop. There’s a stairway at the back, you reach it through an alley on the right. Go at first light, wake him up if necessary. He’s got to find someone for me, and it may take him the day.”

  “Yes, my lord.”

  Ringil considered the boy. He was a sketch in untried eagerness, sharp-featured and not yet grown into his adolescent’s frame. The arms and shoulders lacked muscle, he stood awkwardly, but you could see he was going to be tall. Ringil supposed that in a couple of years he’d be fetching enough i
n a lanky, street-smart sort of fashion.

  “How old are you, Deri?”

  “Thirteen, sir. Fourteen next spring.”

  “Quite young to be in service in the Glades.”

  “Yes, sir. My father’s a stable manager at Alannor House. I was recommended.” A quick jag of pride. “Youngest retainer on the whole Eskiath estate, sir.”

  Ringil smiled at the boast. “Not quite.”

  “No, I am, my lord. Swear to it.”

  Ringil’s smile leached away. He didn’t like being lied to. “There’s a girl down in the kitchens who’s not much more than half your age, Deri.”

  “No, sir. Can’t be, I’m the youngest.” Still buoyed up on the pride, maybe, Deri grinned. “I know all the kitchen girls, sir. No one that young down there.”

  Ringil sat up abruptly, let his arm drop onto the table. Flat thump of the impact—the inkpot and sealing wax jumped with it. The boy flinched. Shadows from the eddied candle flame scuttled over the walls of books.

  “Deri, you keep this up, you’re going to make me angry. I saw this girl with my own eyes. This morning, early, first thing. She served me tea in the lower kitchen. She was tending the cauldron fires.”

  Silence stiffened in the library gloom. Deri’s lower lip worked, his eyes flickered about like small, trapped animals. Ringil looked at him, knew the truth when he saw it, and suddenly, out of nowhere, he felt a cold hand walk up his spine and into the roots of his hair. His gaze slipped, off the boy’s face and past his shoulder, into the darkened corner of the room where the shadows from the candle seemed to have settled.

  “You don’t know this girl?” he asked quietly.

  Deri hung his head, mumbled something inaudible.

  “Speak up.” The chill put a hard, jumpy edge on his voice.

  “I . . . said I’m sorry, my lord. Didn’t mean to gainsay you, nothing like that. Just, I’ve never seen a girl so young working in this house.” Deri stumbled over words in his haste to get them out. “Maybe it’s, I mean, ’course, you must be right, my lord, and I’m wrong. ’Course. Just never seen her, that’s all. That’s all I meant.”