The Steel Remains (27 page)

What would happen to Jhiral Khimran, Emperor of All Lands then?

Her own sudden ambivalence mugged her, jumped in her veins and belly like a fresh intake of krin. Unnerved, struggling with the jagged new thoughts, she forced recall of the shattered rib cage of a child, buried beneath charred and fallen timbers. Forced herself to remember that
these fucking humans
had once included her own mother.

It helped— but not as much as it should have.

race- of- Heaven had two soldiers for him— sun- darkened, sinewy men of indeterminate age who stood around in the upper room at the tavern with arms folded and a latent threat of violence oozing from them like slow smoke. Ringil made them for Marsh Brotherhood muscle, on loan to Milacar no doubt as some kind of lodge- approved favor. Neither was visibly armed, but their loose black burglar's garb could and probably did hide an assortment of close- quarters weaponry. They spared a couple of surprised glances for the Ravensfriend when Ringil first came in wearing it, but neither man passed comment. Thereafter they were closemouthed and watchful in the lamplit gloom, respectful enough to both Ringil and Grace, but without overdoing it. There was no discussion of payment and, interestingly, no mention of the
dwenda.

“Your main problem,” Milacar warned them, “is going to be getting past the urchins.”

Which wasn't a surprise, for Ringil at least. He'd had the realities of the landscape laid out for him that first night at Milacar's place. Grace-of- Heaven, staring off the balcony with him, voice discouraged and faintly tinged, perhaps, with envy.
Anywhere else, you'd only have the Watch to worry about, and they can be bought for a harbor- end blow job. Since the Liberalization, that's all changed. The slave lobby had the Watch run out of Etterkal altogether, paid them all off at Chancellery level.

Ringil grinned.
That's a lot of blow jobs.

Yeah, well.
Sourly.
What I hear, it was Snarl that did the deals, so maybe she's found her level. Anyway, the Watch get to mount nominal guard at the quarter boundaries, especially over by Tervinala, basically because that's where the Empire merchants and diplomats hang out, and right now, despite all this mob xenophobia and shipbuilding, we
are
still supposed to be looking after them as valued mercantile partners. Meanwhile, Findrich and a couple of others I don't know handed the streets of Etterkal over to the urchin gangs; they're all on a retainer for news of anything out of the ordinary, and some fairly hefty beatings for failure to report. You wander into the Salt Warren alone with that chunk of Kiriath steel strapped to your back, the first street brat that sees you is going straight to Findrich, and you'll have an honor guard taking you to see him shortly thereafter.

I'll talk to Findrich, if that's what it takes.

Yeah— you will if talk's what he wants out of you. And what I hear, Findrich isn't any more into conversation these days than he ever was. More likely he'll just have them chop your fucking head off and give it to the dwenda.
A long sigh.
Look, Gil, why don't you make life a little easier for us all and stay out of Etterkal for another couple of days, give me some time instead. I'll get you your list.

Fair enough.
He kept it carefully casual.
But I'm still going in there, Grace. You know that, right? One way or the other, sooner or later, with or without your help.

Milacar rolled his eyes.
Yeah, I know. One way or the other, last stand at Gallows Gap, all that. Look, just leave it with me, Gil. I'll see what I can do.

What Grace could do, it turned out, was supply high- end clothing
and even a few forged documents identifying Ringil as a Yhelteth spice merchant, domiciled in Tervinala for the winter, and in the market for something to sweeten his stay. It was a pretty good cover. With his mother's blood and the years of rural living in Gallows Water, Ringil was dark- skinned enough to pass. And Yhelteth merchants of any means would hire local enforcers to accompany them through the streets as a matter of course, so Milacar's on- loan muscle wouldn't look out of place, either.

“And neither, fortunately, will that ridiculous sword of yours. Practically every imperial in Tervinala is wandering around with some kind of Kiriath knockoff on their belt these days, and most people can't tell the difference from the real thing. Common as muck. Half the time, they're selling them to pay off their gambling debts or clear the rent till spring. You've got one somewhere haven't you, Girsh?”

The bulkier- built of Milacar's two soldiers inclined his head. “Took it off some guy's bodyguard in a fight. Piece- of- shit court sword, you couldn't chop an onion with it. Not even half the weight of good steel.”

Grace- of- Heaven chuckled. “The demands of fashion, eh. Girsh here isn't very impressed with the imperials.”

Ringil shrugged. “Well, merchant class, you know. Shouldn't judge the whole Empire by them.”

“Watch it, Eskiath. You're talking to a merchant, remember.”

“Thought I was talking to a city founder.”

The other soldier stirred, addressed himself to Ringil. “Do you speak Tethanne?”

Ringil nodded. “Well enough to get by. You?”

“A bit. I can do the numbers.”

Girsh glanced across at his companion, apparently surprised. “You know Tethanne numbers, Eril?”

“Yeah. How else you going to take money off these people at cards?”

“Well, you shouldn't need it anyway,” was Milacar's opinion. “The clothes and the blade should be enough, unless you run into some fellow imperials, and this time of night, that part of town, it isn't likely.”

“You think the Watch are going to let us through? This time of night?”

Eril made a significant gesture with one open hand, thumb rubbed across fingers. “If we treat them right. Sure. They'll be amenable.”

Ringil thought briefly of his scuffle on Dray Street, the way his purse had cleared up what his fighting skills could not. He nodded.

“Nothing ever changes in this town, huh?”

Which proved accurate. At one of the makeshift street barricades on Black Sail Boulevard, where Tervinala nominally ceased and the Salt Warren began, a squad of six watchmen stood about in war- surplus hauberks and open- face helmets, yawning and looking so amenable they practically had their hands out. Their barricade was cobbled together out of old furniture; its most useful function seemed to be as a place to lean and pick your teeth. Street glow from the lamps on the Tervinala side picked out the dents on the men's superannuated helms, and painted their faces faintly yellowish. They mostly wore short skirmish swords, though one or two had pikes, and to a man they were all visibly sick of the duty. Not a shield between them. Ringil, whose calculus for these things was reflexive, reckoned he could probably have taken the whole group in close- quarters combat and suffered not much more than scratches.

Eril approached the sergeant in charge and coins changed hands, subtly enough that Ringil almost missed it. Most of him was focused on the gloom on the other side of Black Sail Boulevard, where there were no lamps and the ancient torch brackets were either empty or held torches long since burned down to a blackened wick. The Watch had set up a couple of braziers beside the barricade, presumably more to ward off the gathering autumn chill than to throw light; the light they gave barely stretched across the paved street. The houses beyond were sunk in shadow. Vague shapes moved about in windows at the second and third floors, in all probability urchin gang lookouts, but the darkness and the distance painted them shifty and unhuman, all hunched posture, sharp features, and oddly angled bones.

Well, here are your dwenda already then, Gil. And all it took to see them was an overworked imagination.

But his smile faded as soon as it touched his lips. He could not shake the memory of Milacar's fear. The story of the amputated, living heads.

The Watch sergeant called out orders to a couple of his men. Eril turned and beckoned to Ringil and Girsh. The sergeant gestured to one side of the barricade, where one of the pike bearers stood aside to let them through. For show, Ringil muttered a string of ornate thanks in Tethanne, then, turning to Eril, the first couple of lines of a Yhelteth nursery rhyme.

“Eleven, six, twenty- eight,” replied Eril with a straight face, and they were on their way, moving across to the darkened side of the boulevard.

Behind them, perhaps trying to be helpful, a watchman stabbed vigorously at one of the braziers with his sword, stirring up the dull glowing coals. But all it did was set long shadows dancing past their feet and up the brickwork ahead.

“YOU EVER KILL A CHILD?”

Girsh asked it idly as they passed under a narrow covered bridge— the third or fourth so far— over whose unglassed stone gallery ledges urchins hung their arms and chins and stared down with unblinking calculation.

But he wasn't joking.

Ringil remembered the eastern gate.

“I was in the war, remember,” he evaded.

“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.