The Steel Remains lffh-1 Page 6

  “Uhm, his worthiness Master Ringil of Eskiath Fields, licensed knight graduate of Trelayne and—”

  “Yes, yes, Quon, thank you,” Milacar said acidly. “Master Ringil has already announced himself. You may go.”

  “Yes, your honor.” The doorman darted a poisonous glance at Ringil. “Thank you, your honor.”

  “Oh, and Quon. Try to keep up with the uninvited arrivals, if you could. You never know, the next one might be an assassin.”

  “Yes, your honor. I’m truly sorry, your honor. It won’t happen agai—”

  Milacar waved him out. Quon shut up and withdrew, bowing and wringing his hands. Ringil crushed out a quiver of sympathy for the man, stepped on it like a spilled pipe ember. No time for that now. He advanced into the room. The machete boy watched him with glittering eyes.

  “You’re not an assassin, are you, Gil?”

  “Not tonight.”

  “Good. Because you seem to have left that big sword of yours behind somewhere.” Milacar paused delicately. “If, of course, you still have it. That big sword of yours.”

  Ringil reached the table at a point roughly opposite Grace-of-Heaven.

  “Yeah, still got it.” He grinned, made a leg for his host. “Still as big as ever.”

  A couple of outraged gasps from the assembled company. He looked around at the faces.

  “I’m sorry, I’m forgetting my manners. Good evening, gentlemen. Ladies.” Though there were, technically, none of the latter in the room. Every female present had been paid. He surveyed the heaped table, matched gazes with one of the whores at random, spoke specifically to her.

  “So what’s good, my lady?”

  Shocked, gently rocking quiet. The whore opened her purple-painted mouth in disbelief, gaped back at him. Ringil smiled patiently. She looked hopelessly around for guidance from one or another of her outraged clients.

  “It’s all good, Gil.” If the room bristled at Ringil’s subtle insult in addressing a prostitute ahead of the gathered worthies, Milacar at least was unmoved. “That’s why I pay for it. But why don’t you try the cougar heart, there in the yellow bowl. That’s especially good. A Yhelteth marinade. I don’t imagine you’ll have tasted much of that sort of thing in recent years, out there in the sticks.”

  “No, that’s right. Strictly mutton and wolf, down among the peasants.” Ringil leaned in and scooped a chunk of meat from the bowl. His fingers dripped sauce back across the table in a line. He bit in, chewed for a while, and nodded. “That’s pretty good for a bordello spread.”

  More gasps. At his elbow, someone shot to his feet. Bearded face, not much older than forty, and not as overfed as others around the table. Burly beneath the purple-and-gold upriver couture, some muscle on that frame by the look of it. A hand clapped to a court rapier that had not been checked at the door. Ringil spotted a signet ring with the marsh daisy emblem.

  “This is an outrage! You will not insult this company with impunity, Eskiath. I demand—”

  “I’d rather you didn’t call me that,” Ringil told him, still chewing. “Master Ringil will do fine.”

  “You, sir, need a lesson in—”

  “Sit down.”

  Ringil’s voice barely rose, but the flicker of his look was a lash. He locked gazes with his challenger, and the other man flinched. It was the same threat he’d offered the machete boy, given voice this time in case the recipient was drunk or just hadn’t ever stood close enough to a real fight to read Ringil’s look for what it promised.

  The burly man sat.

  “Perhaps you should sit down, too, Gil,” Grace-of-Heaven suggested mildly. “We don’t eat standing up in the Glades. It’s considered rude.”

  Ringil licked his fingers clean.

  “Yeah, I know.” He looked elaborately around the table. “Anyone care to give up their seat?”

  Milacar nodded at the whore nearest to him, one seated guest away from where he held court in the big chair. The woman got to her feet with well-schooled alacrity, and without a word. She backed gracefully off to one of the curtained alcove windows and stood there motionless, hands gathered demurely at one hip, posed slightly to display her muslin-shrouded form for the rest of the room.

  Ringil moved around the table to the vacated seat, inclined his head in the woman’s direction, and lowered himself onto her chair. The velvet plush was warm from her arse, an unwelcome intimacy that seeped up through his breeches. The diners on either side of him looked studiously elsewhere. He held down an urge to shift in his seat.

  You lay frozen in your own piss for six hours at Rajal Beach and played dead while the Scaled Folk nosed up and down the breakwaters with their reptile peons looking for survivors. You can sit still in a whore’s heat for half an hour. You can make polite Glades conversation here with the great and gracious of Trelayne.

  Grace-of-Heaven Milacar cleared his throat, lifted a goblet.

  “A toast, then. To one of our city’s most heroic sons, returned home and not before time.”

  There was a pause, then a sort of grumbling tide of response around the table. The faces all buried themselves hurriedly in their drinks. It was, Ringil thought, a little like watching pigs at a trough. They finished the toast and Milacar leaned across his nearest guest to get his face less than a foot from Ringil’s. His breath was sweet with the wine.

  “So now the theatrics are out of the way,” he said urbanely, “perhaps you’d like to tell me what you’re doing here, Gil.”

  The pale eyes were crinkled at the corners, amused despite themselves. Between the trimmed mustache and goatee, the long, mobile lips were downcurved with humor, taut with anticipatory lust, tips of the teeth just showing. Ringil remembered the look with a jolt under his heart.

  Milacar had gone bald, or nearly so, just like he’d said would happen. And he’d shaved it all down to a stubble, just like he’d always said he would.

  “Came to see you, Grace,” he said, and it was almost the whole truth.

  “CAME TO SEE ME, HUH?” MILACAR MURMURED IT LATER, AS THEY LAY in the big silk-sheeted bed upstairs, spent and stained and curled together, pillowed on each other’s thighs. He raised himself slightly, grabbed Ringil’s hair at the back of his neck, and dragged his face, mock-tough, back toward his flaccid crotch. “The fuck you did. You’re a lying sack of highborn shit, Gil, same as you ever were.” He twisted his fingers, tugging the small hairs, hurtfully. “Same as when you first came to me fifteen fucking years ago, Eskiath youth.”

  “Sixteen years.” Ringil beat the grip on his nape, tangled fingers with Grace, and brought the back of the other man’s hand around to his lips. He kissed it. “I was fifteen, remember. Sixteen fucking years ago, and don’t call me that.”

  “What, youth?”

  “Eskiath. You know I don’t like it.”

  Milacar pulled his hand free and propped himself back a little on his elbows, looking down at the younger man who lay coiled across him. “It’s your mother’s name as well.”

  “She married it.” Ringil stayed with his face bedded in the damp warmth of Milacar’s crotch, staring off into the gloom near the bedchamber door. “Her choice. I didn’t get that much.”

  “I’m not convinced she had much choice herself, Gil. She was, what, twelve when they gave her to Gingren?”

  “Thirteen.”

  Small quiet. The same muffled bandlight from the dining chamber spilled in here unrestrained, an icy flood of it across the carpeted floor from the bedroom’s broad river-facing balcony. The casements were back, the drapes stirred like languid ghosts, and a cool autumn breeze blew in past them, not yet the chill and bite there was in the upland air at Gallows Water, but getting that way. Winter would find him here as well. Ringil shifted, skin caressed to goose bumps, small hairs on his arms pulled erect. He breathed in Grace’s acrid, smoky scent and it carried him back a decade and a half like a drug. Riotous wine and flandrijn nights at Milacar’s house on Replete Cargo Street in the warehouse district; carefully s
teeping himself in the decadence of it all, thrilling at the subtle compulsion of doing Grace-of-Heaven’s will, whether in bed or out. Down to the docks for collections with Milacar’s thuggish wharf soldiers, sneaking the streets of the Glades and upriver for deliveries; occasionally chased by the Watch when someone got caught and squealed, the odd scuffle in a darkened alley or a safe house, the odd few moments of forced swordplay or a knifing somewhere, but all of it, the fights included, too highly colored, too much fucking fun at the time to really seem like the danger it was.

  “So tell me why you’re really here,” Grace said gently.

  Ringil rolled over, rested his head and neck on the other man’s belly. The muscle was still there, firm beneath a modest layer of middle-aged spread. It barely quivered when it took the weight of his sweat-soaked head. Ringil gazed up idly at the painted scenes of debauchery on Milacar’s ceiling. Two stable lads and a serving wench doing something improbable with a centaur. Ringil blew a dispirited breath up at them in their perfect little pastoral world.

  “Got to help out the family,” he said drearily. “Got to find someone. Cousin of mine, got herself into some trouble.”

  “And you think I’ve started moving in the same circles as the Eskiath clan.” The belly Ringil was pillowed on juddered with Milacar’s laughter. “Gil, you have seriously overestimated my place in the scheme of things these days. I’m a criminal, remember.”

  “Yeah, I noticed how you were sticking to your roots. Big fuck-off house in the Glades, dinner with the Marsh Brotherhood and associated worthies.”

  “I still keep the place over on Replete Cargo, if it makes you feel any better. And in case you’ve forgotten, I am from a Brotherhood family.” There was a slight edge in Grace-of-Heaven’s voice now. “My father was a pathfinder captain before the war.”

  “Yeah, and your great-great, great-great, great-and-so-on grandfather founded the whole fucking city of Trel-a-lahayn. I heard it coming in, Grace. And the truth is still, fifteen years ago you wouldn’t have given civil house room to that prick with the dueling cutlery on his hip tonight. And you wouldn’t have been living upriver like this, either.”

  He felt the stomach muscles beneath his head tense a little.

  “Do I disappoint you?” Milacar asked him softly.

  Ringil went on staring up at the ceiling. He shrugged. “It all turned to shit after ’55, we all had to ride it out somehow. Why should you be any different?”

  “You’re too kind.”

  “Yeah.” Ringil hauled himself up into a sitting position, swiveled a little to face Grace-of-Heaven’s sprawl. He got cross-legged, put his hands together in his lap. Shook his hair back off his face. “So. You want to help me find this cousin of mine?”

  Milacar made a no-big-deal face. “Sure. What kind of trouble she in?”

  “The chained-up kind. She went to the auction blocks at Etterkal about four weeks ago as far as I can work out.”

  “Etterkal?” The no-big-deal expression slid right off Milacar’s face. “Was she sold legally?”

  “Yeah, payment for a bad debt. Chancellery clearinghouse 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 recognize, 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 recognized.

  “Lot of things have changed since you went away, Gil.”

  “Yeah, tell me about it.”

  “That includes Etterkal. Salt Warren’s a whole different neighborhood these days, you wouldn’t recognize the place since Liberalization. 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 f
loor 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 makeup 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-colored 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.”