The Steel Remains lffh-1 Read online

  “Yeah, I don’t mean lizard pups. I mean humans. Kids, like those ones back there watching us.”

  Ringil looked at him curiously. He supposed it wasn’t Girsh’s fault. It was a common enough conceit in Trelayne that the war had been a straightforward battle for the human race—with a little technical support from the Kiriath—against an implacably evil and alien foe. And Girsh, for all his quiet enforcer’s competence, wouldn’t be any better informed or educated than the next street thug; in all probability, he’d never been outside the borders of the League in his life. Possibly, he’d never even been out of the sight of Trelayne itself. And quite clearly, he had never been within a hundred miles of Naral, or Ennishmin, or any of the other half a dozen fucked-up little border disputes the war had degenerated into at the end. Because if he had—

  No point in getting into that now. Let it go, Archeth had urged him last time they met, and he’d tried. Really tried.

  Was still trying.

  “I won’t have any problem, if it comes to it,” he said quietly.

  Girsh nodded and left it alone.

  Others were less compliant.

  No, you never really did have a problem, did you, whispered something that might have been Jelim Dasnel’s ghost. Not when it came to it.

  He shook it off. Tried letting go of that as well.

  In doorways, from windows and the lowest of the rooftops, and from a few dozen furtive steps behind them in the street, the urchins kept track.

  As if they knew.

  Ah, come on. Stop that shit.

  He focused on the street, moored himself back to its realities. They wouldn’t have to kill anybody tonight, adult or otherwise, if they just kept it together. Etterkal, despite Milacar’s ghost stories, was no more alarming than any other run-down city neighborhood he’d walked through at night. The streets were narrow and infrequently lit compared with the boulevards in Tervinala or some of the upriver districts, but they weren’t badly paved for the most part, and you could navigate easily enough by the lights in windows and the handful of shop frontages still open at this hour. For the rest, it was just the darkness and its usual denizens—the garish, inevitable whores, breasts out and skirts raised, faces so worn and blunted that even heavy makeup and shadow could not disguise the damage they contained; the guardian pimps, hovering and gliding in doorways and alley mouths like half-summoned dark spirits; the occasional sharkish presence that could have been a pimp but was not, emerging from convenient gloom to cast a speculative eye over the passersby, sinking just as rapidly back when the nature of Ringil and his companions became apparent; the broken, piss-perfumed figures slumped low against walls, too drunk, drugged, or derelict to go anywhere else, among them no doubt a fair few corpses—Ringil spotted a couple of the more obvious ones—for whom all concerns of commerce, livelihood, shelter, or chemical escape had finally ceased to matter.

  They came to the first address on Grace-of-Heaven’s list.

  For a slave emporium, it didn’t look like much. A long, rambling frontage, three stories of decaying, badly shuttered windows, lights gleaming through here and there, but most of it in darkness. The plaster walls were stained and wounded back to the brick in patches, the roof sloped down like a lowered brow. There were a couple of doors at ground level, each caged shut behind solid barred gates, and a large carriage entry stood snugly closed up with heavy, iron-studded double doors that looked fit to stand against siege engines.

  Back before the crummy little fishing harbors at the mouth of the Trel were dredged to any serious depth, Etterkal had been a warehouse district for the landward merchant caravans, and this was a pretty standard example of that heritage.

  Over time, the increasing commerce by sea had stomped all over the caravan trade, and Etterkal fell apart. Poverty came and ate the district; crime snapped and snarled over the remaining scraps. It wasn’t anything Ringil had direct experience of—the process was well and truly ingrained by the time he was born, the corpse of Etterkal already rotted through. But he knew the dynamic. Where municipal authorities in Yhelteth had a textually delineated religious obligation to maintain any town or neighborhood with a majority population of the Faithful, the great and the good of Trelayne were more in favor of benign neglect. No point nor profit in swimming against the tide of commerce, they argued, and in Etterkal that tide was ebbing fast. The money went looking for somewhere else to live, and all those who could went with it.

  But the warehouse blocks remained, big and brooding and impossible to rent. Some were carved up into lousy accommodations for labor overspill from the newly burgeoning shipyards—not a strategy that ever really worked out; some were demolished to clear out the vagrant bands they were found to be housing. A few burned down, for reasons no one was clear on, or cared very much about. With the war, the low-rent space became briefly useful again, for billeting and the marshaling of matériel, but the area saw no long-term benefit from it. The war ended, the soldiers went home. No one who wasn’t ordered to was going to move into Etterkal.

  That left slaves, and those who traded in them.

  Girsh found a small hatch cut into the body of the carriage entry door, and commenced banging on it with a compact, well-worn mace he produced from his burglar’s clothes like a conjuring trick. Ringil stood by and affected an aristocratic disdain for the proceedings, in case anyone was watching from one of the casements above. It took a good five minutes of repeated pounding, but finally there was the clanking sound of bolts being drawn, and the hatch hinged inward. A disgruntled, scar-faced doorman stepped out into the street, short-sword drawn.

  “What the fuck do you think you’re doing?” he barked.

  Eril had taken the lead. He turned toward Ringil and reeled off a string of numbers in Tethanne. Ringil inclined his head and pretended to consider, then spoke back a couple of random sentences. Eril turned back to the doorman.

  “This is my Lord Laraninthal of Shenshenath,” he said. “He’s here on recommendation, to examine your wares.”

  The doorman let a sneer creep across his face. He put up his sword.

  “Yes, well, my master doesn’t do business at this hour,” he told them. “You’ll have to come back.”

  Stone-faced, Eril punched him in the stomach.

  “And my master,” he informed the downed minion as he curled up on the floor whooping for breath, “does not like to be told to come and go like a common stevedore. Especially not by harbor-end curs like you.”

  The doorman made gagging sounds and groped around on the cobbles for his sword. Girsh kicked it casually out of his reach. Eril crouched down and grasped the man by his collar and balls.

  “We know,” he said conversationally, “that your master deals in the exotic end of things. And we know that he likes to conduct that business at exotic hours, if the price is right. Get up.”

  The doorman really had very little choice in this last instruction. Eril dumped him onto to his feet and shoved him back against the iron-studded wood of the gate.

  “My Lord Laraninthal is in the market for your stock in trade, and he’s impatient. The price he’s prepared to pay is substantial. So go and fetch your master, and tell him he’s missing a very special opportunity.”

  The doorman groaned and cupped at his groin. “What opportunity?”

  “The opportunity not to have his business burned down around his ears,” said Girsh, deadpan. “Now fuck off in there and tell him. No, leave the door. We’ll come in and wait.”

  The doorman abandoned his halfhearted attempt to close the hatch on them, and they followed him through into a long, well-lit archway with a courtyard beyond. A side door was open in the wall of the arch, and the doorman disappeared into it, limping and muttering to himself. The three of them stood in the flickering torchlight after he’d gone, eyeing up the surroundings with identical professional interest.

  “Think they’ll kick?” Ringil asked.

  Eril shrugged. “They’re trying to make a living, just like ev
erybody else. No percentage in bloodshed if you can deal instead.”

  Girsh slapped the head of his mace into his palm a couple of times. “Let them kick. I’ve got a couple of cousins lost family to the debtors’ block since Liberalization. I won’t mind.”

  Ringil cleared his throat. “Let’s not get carried away here. I need information from these people, not broken skulls.”

  “Everyone’s got cousins seen family auctioned,” Eril said quietly. “It’s the times, Girsh. Nothing you can do about it.”

  They waited in silence after that.

  The doorman came back, accompanied by a larger and uglier colleague who wore a knotted leather flail at his belt and a long knife at his boot. He didn’t look as if he’d need either in a fight.

  “My master will see you now,” the doorman said sullenly.

  IT SEEMED THEY’D GOTTEN TERIP HALE OUT OF BED.

  The slave trader sat behind his dark oak desk in a silk robe, slippers on his naked feet, graying hair tangled and matted from the pillow. Lamplight gave his skin a yellowish tone. Ringil didn’t know him, but he fitted Grace-of-Heaven’s thumbnail sketch well enough. Greasy old fuck, got eyes like a dead snake. It was true, he did. Once a small-time trafficker working various illicit trades through little-known marsh routes in and out of the city, Hale had apparently done well under Liberalization. Legacy of his prior success as a supply-and-demand criminal, he knew men’s appetites inside and out. A shrewd buyer’s sense at the auction blocks gave him his initial edge, it seemed, and a tightly maintained web of onward contacts in other cities of the League kept him out ahead of the pack. He was dangerous in his way, Milacar reckoned, but he wasn’t an unreasonable man.

  He fixed the expressionless black eyes on Ringil.

  “This had better be good,” he said mildly.

  “I thank you, honored sire, for the—”

  For the sake of appearances, Ringil had begun in Tethanne. Now he coughed diffidently and switched to Naomic, stamping it through with a guttural edge common to imperials who’d learned the Trelayne tongue but never lived in League territory. He spotted the doorman and the flail-equipped muscle smirking at each other as he spoke.

  “Honored sire, I thank you, for seeing me at this late hour.” He shuffled his feet, playing up a timidity of stance and tone he’d sometimes liked to put on in games with Grace-of-Heaven. Silk-skinned kidnapped Yhelteth youth begs his captor—in vain, of course—not to corrupt him. “I, uhm, would not have come so late, you see, but this visit is not one my father would countenance if he knew of it. I am Laraninthal, eldest son of Krenalinam of Shenshenath, attached—uhm, we both are—to the Yhelteth trade mission in Tervinala and recently arrived in your gracious city, which I must say—”

  “Yes, yes.” Hale waved it away as if swatting an insect. “What exactly is it that your father would not countenance about your visit?”

  Ringil hesitated for a calculated couple of seconds. “Its purpose, sire.”

  Hale rolled his eyes and made a signal to the doorman, who slipped out of the room without a word. The slave trader bridged his hands.

  “Yes. Let’s talk about this purpose, shall we?”

  “Gladly.”

  Another pause. Hale visibly repressed a sigh.

  “So what is it? Your purpose? What do you want, Laraninthal of Shenshenath?”

  “I desire.” Ringil cleared his throat and looked about the room. “A bedmate. A woman, for my use here in Trelayne.”

  A small smile leaked out of the corner of Hale’s mouth.

  “I see. And your father wouldn’t approve of this?”

  “My father is a conservative man. He would not wish me to spill my seed among women not of the tribes.”

  “Well, fathers can be difficult like that, can’t they?” Hale nodded sagely. “Of course, at a price, I could probably provide you with a Yhelteth girl. Perhaps even of your specific tribe. You’d be surprised how easy—”

  Ringil held up a hand. “I am not . . . drawn . . . to women of the south. I want pale skin, paler than mine. I want . . .”

  He gestured graphically. Terip Hale grinned.

  “Indeed. That’s something the girls up here are usually good for, isn’t it? Not the first time I’ve heard one of your countrymen remark on the matter, either. Difference is the spice, I always say.” A small sound from the door. “Ah, speaking of which, here we are.”

  The doorman came back in the company of a girl carrying a gaudily painted wooden tray laden with goblets and a flagon. She wore not much more than three fistfuls of cloth and a couple of thin cords holding it all together, and she walked to accentuate what was on display. She was too young for the makeup she wore, and there was a worried crease around her eyes like someone trying to remember the right way to perform a complex task, but she conformed more or less to the specifics they’d just been discussing. Ringil made his eyes stick to her curves in an appropriate fashion as she crossed the room. Hale saw, and smiled.

  “So. You like?”

  “Yes. This would be, uhm, suitable, but—”

  “Oh, I’m sure it would.” Hale, dreamily, watching as the girl laid out flagon and goblets on the desk. “Unfortunately, Nilit here isn’t for sale. I’ve taken a bit of shine to her. But really, she’s nothing special, and she has sisters.”

  He glanced up.

  “I mean that quite literally. Sisters, two of them. All sold together. But the others are still in training. That can take awhile, especially if the girl is . . . spirited.”

  Nilit’s hand knocked the flagon against one of the goblets she’d already set down. The cup toppled and rolled off the edge of the desk, clattered hollowly on the floor. Hale’s lips pressed together in exasperation. Nilit scrambled to retrieve the still-rolling goblet, and her eyes flashed on Ringil’s. The worry was gone, wiped out by a more immediate terror. She set the goblet back in place, hung her head, and mumbled something inaudible to Hale. He raised a finger at her and she shut up instantly.

  “Just get out,” he snapped.

  The girl hurried away, her wagging display-walk forgotten. Hale poured from the flagon, two goblets only. He beckoned Ringil forward.

  “Please, be my guest. Choose a cup. This is one of the best wines the League territories have to offer. Before one becomes a customer of Terip Hale, one becomes an honored guest in his house. How else will we bind trust in our dealings?”

  Ringil selected one of the goblets and held it up. Hale matched the gesture for a moment, drank first, as host ritual required. Ringil followed suit, swallowed a mouthful, and made an appreciative face.

  “Fine vintage, eh?” purred Hale.

  In fact, it wasn’t all that impressive. A dark Jith-Urnetil grape, late-harvest pressing of course, you couldn’t mistake that taste; but really a little too sweet for Ringil’s palate, and cloying on the aftertaste. He’d never been a big fan of the coastal range vintages anyway, and this one lacked far too many middle notes. But it would certainly have been expensive, and that counted for a lot with men like Hale.

  “Well, then.” The slave trader finished his drink and put down the goblet. There was an anticipatory gleam in his eye. “I’d say that since it’s fairly clear what your requirements are, maybe we should just go down to the stable together and see if something doesn’t catch your—”

  Ringil put in a mannered cough. “There is another matter.”

  “Oh?” A politely raised eyebrow. “And what would that be?”

  Ringil cradled his goblet and peered into it. Put on a sheepish expression. “I have mentioned already how my father feels about these things, about my . . . preferences. This uh, this behavior . . . of mine.”

  “Yes.” Hale could not quite keep the weariness out of his voice. “Yes, I believe we’ve covered that. Go on.”

  “Well, there is one thing I need to be certain of before I buy from you—there must be no issue from this woman. She must be barren.”

  And something drained abruptly out of the room
.

  It was bizarre. Ringil felt the change the way he usually felt the prelude to combat; slight pressure at his lower back, the faintest of crawling across his shoulder blades. Somehow, it seemed, he’d said the wrong thing. In the sudden quiet that had opened behind his words, he looked up from his drink and saw that something indefinable had shifted in Terip Hale’s demeanor.

  The slaver picked up his emptied goblet again, studied it as if he’d never seen it before and couldn’t imagine how it had gotten into the room with him.

  “That is a very . . . specific requirement,” he said softly. He looked up and met Ringil’s eyes. The anticipatory gleam was gone. “You know, my Lord Laraninthal, I’m really not sure we shall be able to accommodate you so easily after all.”

  Ringil blinked. This was unlooked for. The way he’d put the Laraninthal character across—wealthy but diffident, recently arrived in Trelayne, uncomfortable in his desires, and fearful for his father’s good opinion—he was offering Terip Hale an irresistible opportunity. First off, if Laraninthal was new to the city, he’d have no real sense of the market here, and thus no clear idea of what his pale, well-endowed sex slave ought to cost him. The fact that he was embarrassed about wanting her in the first place would only compound the matter. Hale could overcharge him to the mast tips. And that was just the start—do the deal right, and the slave trader was opening the lid of a whole treasure chest in genteel blackmail. You see, my lord, it appears there are rumors. We wouldn’t want your father hearing them, would we? Now, don’t worry, I’m sure we can stanch the chatter—but it will cost a little something, these arrangements always do . . .

  And so forth. For the duration of his stay in Trelayne, this Laraninthal could be discreetly bled for whatever he was worth.

  It was a lot to pass up.

  Yeah, but looks like old Terip here is getting ready to throw it away with both hands. And throw you out, too, Gil, you don’t get a grip on things pretty fucking fast.

  “If this—” His accent had slipped with the surprise—he tugged it back into place, cleared his throat, and improvised off a tone of insulted pique. “If this is some trick to increase your price, then I am not—”