The Steel Remains

CHAPTER 17

Grace-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.

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 everybody 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—”

“We have not discussed price yet,” observed Hale, still in a tone like silk. But Ringil’s feigned outrage seemed to have had the desired effect. A little of the tension went out of the slaver. He set the goblet down and steepled his fingers. “In any case, it isn’t that which concerns me. It’s merely that I don’t see why you should be so concerned with the wench in question’s breeding capacity. It really is neither here nor there. If she swells with child, we can soon find you a replacement, well before she becomes unsightly. And meanwhile, by law you will own the offspring if it survives. You can sell it, along with the mother if she no longer pleases you, or separately, if that improves your price. The market is flexible in these matters.”

“I, uh, I would not know how to go about—”

“Oh, you may be assured of my diligence in such a case. I’ll gladly pledge you any assistance you require.”

Yeah, I’ll bet—for a small consideration. But at least Hale seemed to be tipping back in the right direction. Ringil put in another diffident clearing of the throat.

“You see, in imperial law, slave offspring cannot be—”

“Yes, I’m sure.” A faint impatience curled into the slaver’s tone now. “But you’re not in the Empire now, my lord. We have League law here, and I assure you, I know it to the letter where my business is concerned.”

“Well, then.” Grudgingly. “I suppose that—”

“Excellent.” Hale clapped his hands. “Well, I think what we’ll do is, instead of talking all night, we’ll go down and see some flesh right now. That’ll give you something to sleep on, eh, my lord.”

A lewd wink. Ringil tried hard to look enthusiastic.

“Oh, and perhaps before we do that, my Lord Laraninthal could give me any other specifics he has in mind. The stable we hold is extensive, and it may save time if we can narrow the field. Is there perhaps a particular hair color that draws you? Height? I understand your women in the south are quite small-boned.”

Ringil called Sherin to mind, his own faded childhood memories and what Ishil had told him about her lineage. He had the charcoal line sketch of what she looked like in his pocket, but better right now to play it looser than that. He didn’t want to tip his hand too early.

“You have in this city, I’m told, a race who live out on the marsh. Is it so?”

“Yes.” Hale was watching him warily. “That’s so. What of it?”

Ringil cleared his throat. “Numerous countrymen of mine have told me that the marsh women behave uhm, well . . . differently in bed. You know. That they, uhm, abandon themselves to the act. Utterly. Like animals.”

It was flat-out fabrication—the marsh dwellers had no such reputation in Yhelteth, in fact most untraveled imperials would have no knowledge that they existed at all as a discrete group. As far as the Empire was concerned, the whole of the Trelayne territory was filled with backward, marsh-grubbing peasants. Only the very well informed knew enough to make distinctions. But no matter—it would play well enough. You could hear the same basic whisper of abandoned sexuality about women from any brutalized or excluded race under the band. Ringil had sat and listened to soldiers repeat it around campfires in every disputed piece of territory he’d fought in after the war with the Scaled Folk was done. It was a basic justification for rape.

He sometimes thought they would have said it about the lizard females as well, if the Scaled Folk had not been so unremittingly alien.

Well, I wouldn’t rule that out, either, Archeth once told him, huddled against the coastal wind in Gergis, watching the camp below them. These men would fuck mud if it was warmed to a decent temperature.

She was talking about her own command.

“Marsh dwellers, eh?” Terip Hale rolled out a slow smile. “Well, I’ve not heard that one before, exactly. But of course, if that’s your preference. Janesh.”

The doorman took a step forward. “My lord.”

“We’ll be paying a visit to the joyous longshank girls. Go down ahead of us and see that everything’s opened up. So to speak.”

The doorman’s face split in a fierce grin. “Yes, sir.”

Hale watched him go with a sober expression at odds with the joke. He seemed to be working through something in his head.

“We don’t deal that much in full-blood dwellers,” he said reflectively. “Though if what you tell me is true, perhaps we should. But it’s problematic, you see. Their families are mostly very tightly knit, and as a people they’re a stubborn, unthinking lot. I’ve seen cases where a man on the marsh would rather starve than sell his children. I mean, what can you do with people like that?”

Ringil hid his face in his goblet.

“Fortunately, though, marsh dweller blood isn’t quite as uncommon among our ordinary citizens”—Hale permitted himself a thin smile—“as those same citizens would have you believe. It’s been known to leak into even the noblest of Trelayne families. Don’t worry yourself, Laraninthal of Shenshenath, I’m quite sure we’ll be able to find you a girl with suitable blood.”

They made small talk after that, while Ringil finished his wine, played the diffident imperial fop, and kept his feelings masked. Inwardly, a cautious optimism was rising through him. He didn’t really expect to find Sherin here—even if she had passed through Hale’s stable, and not one of the others that specialized in concubinage, that was a month ago. Despite the slave trader’s comments about the difficulties of training spirited girls, Ringil didn’t think it would require that long to break a young woman who probably already considered herself worthless for her lack of childbearing ability; who had already been shunned by her whole family and then, finally, betrayed by the man who’d taken her away from them.

But if she had been here, there’d be traces. Memories among the other girls, among servants and handlers. There’d be documents of sale, somewhere. It was a legal trade now, all above board. Part of the brave new world they’d all been fighting for. If this was the place, the door was halfway levered open, and Ringil could do the rest in easy stages—even if that meant taking Terip Hale somewhere secluded and getting what he needed out of him with hot coals and iron.

If this was not the place, well, he had the other names on Milacar’s list. He could start all over again.

“Shall we go down?” Hale asked him.

He smiled and nodded in eager, foppish assent.

IT SEEMED THE JOYOUS LONGSHANK GIRLS WERE KEPT ON THE OTHER side of the building. Ringil followed Hale down to ground level and out to the courtyard. Eril and Girsh brought up the rear, along with Hale’s flail-equipped muscle. Everybody watched everybody else with hardened calm. The night had turned clear and cold while they were inside—they crossed the courtyard in silence under sharp stars and the long cool arc of the band. Ringil saw his breath puff ice white in the air.

If the cold bothered Hale, in his silk dressing gown and slippers, he gave no sign. He led them through another side door in the courtyard wall, down three sets of stone steps and into a semicircular basement chamber with five curtained alcoves along its curving wall. Janesh the doorman was already there, the grin still plastered across his face—apparently he’d been enjoying his work. Bandlight spilled in from small barred windows near the roof, but most of the illumination came from two lanterns set down in the center of the room. There were Majak rugs on the floor, lewd murals etched into the curving wall—though rather prim of content compared with Grace-of-Heaven’s ceiling—and a vast black iron candelabra hanging from the vaulted roof.

Terip Hale turned to face them.

“Allow me to present,” he said gravely. “The joyous longshank girls.”

The curtains whisked aside in their alcoves. Armed men stood there grinning. Short-swords and hatchets, maces and clubs. Two men to an alcove, at least. Ringil saw at least one crossbow, raised and cocked.

The doorman caught his eye and winked.

“Now,” said Hale. “Perhaps, Laraninthal of Shenshenath, you’d like to tell me who exactly the fuck you really are.”