The Steel Remains (19 page)

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 in 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.”

“So maybe she's just new, and you've missed meeting her.”

Deri swallowed. “That's it, my lord. Exactly. Must have.”

The look in his eyes denied every word.

Ringil nodded, firm and a little exaggerated, as if to a suddenly acquired audience beyond the ring of candlelight.

“All right, Deri. You can go. First light to Ekelim, remember.”

“Yes, my lord.” The boy shot out of the door, as if tugged on string.

Ringil gave it another moment, then looked elaborately around the shadowed chamber and settled himself back into his chair.

“I could use another flagon of tea,” he said loudly, into the empty air.

No response. But memory of the conversation with his mother in the kitchens draped itself over the nape of his neck like folds of cold, damp linen.

Not in front of the servants, eh?

What's that supposed to mean?

And the girl, no longer there. Materializing once more, only when Ishil was gone and he was alone.

Could you not creep up on me like that, please.

He waited, frowning and watching the almost imperceptible tremor of shadows across the spines of books on the shelves around him. Then, finally, he mastered the crawling sensation on the nape of his neck, leaned swiftly forward, and blew out the candle. He sat in the parchment- odored darkness, and listened to himself breathe.

“I'm waiting,” he said.

But the girl, if she was listening, did not come.

Nor, at this juncture, did anything else.

aileh Rakan's find:

A tangled muss of graying chestnut hair, face lined with hardship more than age, and frightened eyes that tracked the Throne Eternal uniforms as they prowled about her or stood and examined their weapons as if they might soon need use. Her hands were scabbed and scraped and still bled in a couple of places, coarse contrast with a worked gold band on one of her fingers. Her lips had cracked during her privation; now they trembled with half- voiced mutterings, and she cradled her own right arm in the left as if it were a nursing infant. Her clothing stank.

“She's not injured,” said Rakan bluntly. “It's some kind of shock.”

“You don't say.”

They had her draped in a horse blanket and seated on a double-folded tent groundsheet in the angle of two shattered low stone walls,
pretty much all that was left of a harbor storage shed smashed apart by whatever energies had gotten loose during the attack. The timbers remaining at the least wrecked corner were charred back to angled, black stumps above the woman's head— Archeth thought involuntarily of a gallows. The ghost- reek of burning still hung in the air. She glanced around reflexively

“Where's the invigilator?”

“His holiness has retired to camp,” Rakan said tonelessly He nodded up the slope of emptied buildings and rubble piles. “In the main market square with the rest of the men. He left before we found her, said it was important that he go to pray for us. It
is
getting dark, of course.”

It was elaborately done, in true Yhelteth fashion. The captain's dark, crop- bearded face stayed inexpressive as tanned leather. There was just the hint of creasing in the lines around the jet eyes to match the momentary contempt in the last few syllables he'd spoken.

Archeth took it and ran with it, met Rakan's eyes and nodded. “Then let's keep him up there. No sense in disturbing his prayers for something like this, right? I can ask any questions we need answering right here.”

“We've already tried questioning her, milady.” The captain leaned in closer, as if to demonstrate something, and the ragged woman flinched back. “Not getting any sense out of her at all. Tried to feed her, too, but she'll only take water. I guess we could—”

“Thank you, Captain. I think I'll take it from here.”

Rakan shrugged. “Suit yourself, milady. I need to get a picket organized for the camp, just in case we have visitors tonight. I'll leave you a couple of men. Bring her up to camp when you're done, we'll try to feed her again.” He nodded up past the charred timberwork at the sky. “Best if you don't take too long. Like the invigilator said, going to be dark soon.”

He made brief obeisance, turned and gestured three soldiers to stay. The rest followed him away up the street. Shanta stayed, hovering on the far side of the broken- down wall like a hesitant buyer outside a shop. Archeth crouched to the woman's eye level.

“Can I get you anything?” she asked gently.

The woman gaped at her, fixed, Archeth supposed, on the intensely black skin.

“Kiriath,” she mumbled. “Look at your walls, Kiriath. Look what they did. Get between a swamp dog and its dinner, look what it gets you.”

“Yes.” Archeth had no idea what a swamp dog was. The woman's accent was not local; she had a way of eliding the Tethanne sibilants that suggested it was not her cradle tongue. “Can you tell me your name?”

The woman looked away. “How's that going to help?”

“As you wish. I am Archeth Indamaninarmal, special envoy of his imperial radiance Jhiral Khimran the Second.” She made the Teth horseman's gathering gesture, formally ornate, right- handed across her body to the shoulder. “Sworn in service to all peoples of the Revelation.”