The Steel Remains

CHAPTER 11

It took the best part of an hour to fix everything up. As with any aftermath, the trick was in the momentum.

You keep everyone moving, Flaradnam had told him that day, from his stretcher in the surgeon’s tent. Hoarse breath, face knotted with the pain he was swamped in. Summer rain hissed down on the other side of the canvas. Outside, the slanted ground would be turning muddy and treacherous underfoot. Don’t give them time to think, don’t give them time to bitch and moan. They want orders and certainty from you, nothing more. You find that certainty, Gil, fake it if you have to. But you get them out of here. You get them moving.

He did not survive the surgeon’s table.

And out across the mountain’s flank, the broken remnants of the expeditionary force huddled miserably against the rain, mail and once gaily colored uniforms like a variegated mold on the landscape. Framed in the tent flap, listening to the gritted shrieks and grating kitchen sounds of surgery at his back, Ringil stared out through the downpour with no earthly clue how to get done what Flaradnam wanted. The Kiriath war machines were lost, abandoned in the rout. The injured and dying numbered in the hundreds, the lizards were coming.

Gallows Water was two days’ hard march, south and east over steep, exposed mountain terrain.

You keep everyone moving.

So. Nothing ever changes, huh ’Nam?

Get the injured watchmen back to their senses and their feet, downplay the obviously quite serious harm Darby’s assault had done them. Cold water from Shalak’s yard pump, and some judicious slaps. Ferry the whole squad—amid a sudden crowd of well-wishers, backslappers, and general hangers-on—across into the tavern. Get the wine flowing and paid for in quantity enough to keep everyone clustered there. Call for music. Sip at the god-awful vintages the tavern had to offer, keep the smile pinned on your face. Watch the whores move sinuously in on the company, like cats after scraps. Play the role of gracious-noble-with-the-common-touch until memory and rancor for the fight fogged out and faded in the general merriment.

Leave.

Ringil slipped away as the singing took hold, got out to where a soft blue dusk was stealing up the street from the river. Overhead, the band was out in all its shimmering glory. The thoroughfare had more or less emptied now, only a handful of people hurrying home and the lantern-jacks with their ladders to disturb the evening. Compared with the raucous heat of the tavern, it was very cool and quiet. Ringil crossed the street back to Shalak’s shop, saw that Darby was sitting huddled on the doorstep. On the way across to the veteran, he scooped up an abandoned day-club from the cobbles and twirled it through the air with absentminded dexterity.

“Souvenir?” he asked, holding out the club.

Darby shook his head, patted the cudgel that was propped between his knees and cuddled into his shoulder like a sleeping child. “I’ll stick with Old Lurlin here. She’s seen me right enough times.”

“Fair enough.”

“I’m much obliged to your worthiness. For the intervention, I mean. I think they had the best of me there.” A hand rose to touch his bruised and bloodied face. The fingers came away clotted with gore. Darby grimaced. “Yep. Caught me a good one here, and I’d say the ribs are cracked again.”

“Can you walk?”

“Oh yes, Darby can always move on, sir. Be out of your sight directly. Only stayed to thank you.”

“That’s not what I meant.” Ringil reached for his depleted purse, dug out a fresh handful of coin. “Look, I want you—”

The veteran shook his head emphatically.

“No, sir. Wouldn’t hear of it. The kindness you done me already, that’s more than most would dare these days. Those pretty bend-over boy clerks and their sodomite fucking lawyers, they’ve got this whole city by the balls. Means nothing to any of them that a man once fought the lizards for them all.”

“I know,” Ringil said quietly.

“Yes, sir, I know you do, sir.” The look on Darby’s damaged face changed. It took Ringil a couple of seconds to nail the new expression for what it was—shyness. “Saw you at Rajal, sir. I was fighting in the surf not twenty feet from you when the dragons came. Took me some time to place your face this time, my memory’s not what it once was, sir. But I’d know that blade on your back anywhere.”

Ringil sighed. “Hard to miss, huh?”

“That it is, sir.”

The evening gloom closed in on them. Across the street a lantern-jack burned his fingers and cursed in the quiet. Ringil prodded at a loose cobble with the day-club. He was finding it easier to ignore Darby’s unwashed stink now he was used to it. He’d reeked that way himself often enough during the war.

“I’m afraid I don’t remember you from Rajal at all,” he said.

“No reason why you should, sir. No reason at all. There was a lot of us that day. Only wish I’d been there with you at Gallows Gap.”

Now it was Ringil’s turn to grimace. “Careful what you wish for. We lost a lot more men there than we did at Rajal. Chances are you’d be pushing up daisies now if you’d been in that fight.”

“Yes, sir. But we won at Gallows Gap.”

From the tavern, suddenly, explosive laughter and a new song. A war song, one of the classics. “Lizard Blood Like Water to Wash In.” Stomping martial rhythm, it sounded as if they were pounding on the tables in there. Darby levered himself to his feet, wincing a little as he did.

“Best be off then,” he said, voice tight with his pain. A knowing nod toward the noise, a crooked grin. “Wouldn’t want to still be on hand when the old patriotic fervor gets beyond feeling up the whores and drinking. They’ll be out looking for blood soon enough, someone to take it out on.”

Ringil glanced at Shalak’s windows, thought that he’d better get in there and help the shopkeeper douse the lights.

“You’re probably right,” he said.

“Probably am, sir.” Darby squared his shoulders. “Well, I’ll be going then. It was a real pleasure talking to someone who understands. Only sorry you find me in such straitened circumstances. I wasn’t always this way, sir.”

“No, I don’t suppose you were.”

“It’s just the memories, sir. Things I saw, things I had to do. Feels like they’re branded in my head, sir. Hard to let it go sometimes. The drinking helps, and the flandrijn, when I can get it.” He fiddled awkwardly with his cudgel, wouldn’t meet Ringil’s eye. “I’m not what I once was, sir, that’s the plain truth of it.”

“We’re none of us what we once were.” Ringil staved off his own brooding with an effort, looked for something good to say. Something Flaradnam might have approved. “Seems to me you gave a pretty good account of yourself, all things considered. One of those watchmen has smashed ribs for sure, and the other one can’t focus on anything. I’d say you gave him a solid brain fuck with Lurlin there.”

The veteran looked up again. “Well, I’m sorry for that, sir. They’re not bad men, I had an uncle in the Watch myself years ago. It’s a tough job. But they meant to have me, sir. You saw that.”

“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 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.