Archeth got to her feet, rituals at the ready.
‘I speed to do your will.’
‘Oh, please, Archeth. Just get out of my sight, will you?’
On the way out, she passed the pale-skinned slave girl where she sat between the inner and outer curtains, awaiting the imperial summons. She’d lifted her veil and Archeth saw that she was, perhaps unsurprisingly, quite beautiful. Their eyes met for a brief moment, and then the girl looked quickly away. A scarlet flush spread down over her face and breasts.
From within came the sound of Jhiral clearing his throat.
The girl scrambled back to her hands and knees and crawled towards the gap in the curtains. Her breasts swung heavily with the motion. Archeth placed one hand on her shoulder, felt a flinch go through the smooth flesh where she touched. The girl looked up.
‘Your veil,’ Archeth mouthed, in Naomic.
Parted lips, a soft, panicked sound. The girl began to tremble visibly. Archeth gestured calm with both hands, crouched beside her and settled the veil carefully in place, reached up inside the muslin to tuck away a loose fall of candlewax-coloured hair.
On the other side of the inner curtains, Jhiral cleared his throat again, louder. The girl lowered her head and began once more to crawl, under the curtain and into his imperial radiance’s presence. Archeth watched her go, lips pressed tight to cover for the gritted teeth beneath. Her nostrils flared, the breath that came through them was audible. For a single insane moment, she stood there and strained towards the inner curtain.
Get the fuck out of here, Archidi. Right now.
Just another slave, that’s all. It flitted through her head, faster than she could catch at it. She wasn’t sure who the thought was referring to.
She turned and left.
Went obediently about her Emperor’s business.
CHAPTER FIVE
Where the broad westward flow of the River Trel split and spread in tributaries, and wore itself into the soft cushioned loam of the Naom coastal plain like the lines etched across a man’s palm, where the sea spent its force across acres of mudflat and marsh and could not easily threaten man-made structure, one of Grace-of-Heaven Milacar’s distant ancestors had once spotted a less than obvious strategic truth - to wit, that a city surrounded by such a maze of mingled land and water would in effect be a kind of fortress. Well, being by nature a modest as well as an inventive man, this root patriarch of the Milacar line not only went ahead and founded an ingenious settlement you could only reach with local guides through the marsh, he also renounced the right to name the city after himself and called it instead Trel-a-lahayn, from the old Myrlic lahaynir - blessed refuge. Out of this vision, and the eventual laziness of men’s tongues, Trelayne was born. And over time, as stone replaced wood, and cobbles covered mud streets, as blocks and then towers rose gracefully over the plain to become the city we all know and love, as the lights, the very lights of that subtle fortress came to be visible to caravanserai and ship captains a full day and night before they reached it, so the origins of the city were lost, and the clan name Milacar, sadly, came to be valued no more than any other ...
At least, that was Grace-of-Heaven’s end of the tale, backed up now as always with consistent narrative passion if not actual evidence. There weren’t many who would have had the nerve to call him a liar to his face, far less interrupt him with the accusation at his own dinner table.
Ringil stood in the brocade-hung entryway and grinned.
‘Not this horseshit again,’ he drawled loudly. ‘Haven’t you got any new stories, Grace?’
Conversation drained out of the candle-lit dining chamber like the last of the sand from an hourglass. Bandlight seeped coldly into the quiet from window drapes along the far wall. Gazes flickered about, on and off the newcomer, in amongst the gathered company. Some at the broad oval table looked around, arms in richly tailored cloth braced on chair backs - squeak of shifting chair legs and the soft brush of heavy robes in motion across the floor. Well-fed and contented faces turned, some of them still chewing their last mouthful, momentarily robbed of their self-assurance. Mouths open, eyes wide. The machete boy crouched at Milacar’s right hip blinked, and his hand tightened on the hilt of the ugly eighteen-inch chopping blade at his belt.
Ringil caught the boy’s eye. Held it a moment, no longer grinning.
Milacar made a tiny clucking sound, tongue behind his top teeth. It sounded like a kiss. The boy let go of the machete hilt.
‘Hello Gil. I heard you were back.’
‘You heard right, then.’ Ringil switched his gaze from boy to master. ‘Seems you’re as well informed as ever.’
Milacar - always rather less svelte than he would probably have liked, rather less tall than his claim to ancestral Naom blood suggested he should be. But if these elements had not changed, then neither had the stocky, muscular energy that smoked off him even when he sat, the sense that it wouldn’t take much to have him come up out of the chair, big cabled arms falling to a street-fighter’s guard, fists rolled up and ready to beat the unceremonious shit out of anyone who was asking for it.
For now, he settled for a pained frown, and rubbed at his chin with the pads of his index and middle finger. His eyes creased and crinkled with a smile that stayed just off his lips. Deep, gorgeous blue, like the sun-struck ocean off the headland at Lanatray, dancing alive in the light from the candles. He held Ringil’s look and his mouth moved, something inaudible, something for Ringil alone.
The moment broke.
Milacar’s doorman, who Ringil had left encumbered and struggling to hang his cloak and the Ravensfriend, arrived red faced and cringing in his wake. He wasn’t a young man and he was puffed from sprinting up the stairs and down the corridor after his escaped charge.
‘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 honour.’ The doorman darted a poisonous glance at Ringil. ‘Thank you, your honour.’
‘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 honour. I’m truly sorry, your honour. 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 other 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 their 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 on to 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 moustache and goatee, the long, mobile lips were downcurved with humour, 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 towards his flaccid crotch. ‘The fuck you did. You’re a lying sack of high-born 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 round 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 goosebumps, 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 steeping 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 coloured, 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-age 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 over-estimated 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 duelling 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, swivelled 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.’
The Steel Remains (Gollancz) Page 6
