And even if they do make it to Tervinala or the river, even if they can find some way back to the homes they came from, even if they don’t get raped and murdered or abducted all over again by whatever scum they’ll find prowling the streets at this time of night, uniformed or not—
I said shut up.
—even if their families haven’t also been sold, or thrown into the street, or hounded out of the city by their creditors, even if they are still clinging on somehow, who’s to say they’ll want or be able to take them back.
Shut up, shut up.
Thing is, Gil, they’ve been legally sold. Times have changed, remember. Everybody says so, Hale, even your old saddlemate Grace. It’s a brave new age. They go back to their families, the debt reengages. The Watch comes for them all over again. Back to the Chancellery, back up for auction, all over again. With compensation demanded, no doubt, by the brokers, and paid for out of the skins of the family.
I said—
Yeah, all told, it should make for some really beautiful family reunions, Gil—if any of them ever make it that far in the first place.
“SHUT THE FUCK UP!”
The words jumped him, out of his head and suddenly echoing off the walls of the chamber as he yelled. Metallic clang, he’d wrenched the last lock apart and hurled the cutters back down the row. The slaves flinched and moaned and huddled in the cells. None of them had ventured even as far as the broken-open doors.
See, you’re up against the system here, Gil. The reasonable voice again, it could almost have been Archeth, back in Ennishmin, talking him out of putting his dagger through the throat of an imperial commander. It’s pretty much an endless supply of enemies, something you’ll never finish as long as you live. You burn Hale, you’ve got to pretty much burn down the whole of Etterkal. And these scum-fucks are legal now. You burn down Etterkal, you’ve got to take on the Chancellery, the Watch, and Kaad’s fucking Committee, probably most of the upriver clans as well.
Hell, Gil, in the end, you’ll probably have to burn the whole of Trelayne into the fucking marshes.
For one fleeting moment, it was what he wanted to do. All he wanted to do. He could taste it, like old iron in the back of his mouth. He could smell the smoke.
“You all stay here,” he heard himself say. “I’m going to find clothes for you.”
He retreated from the cells, up the stairs and along the corridor, no clear idea how he was going to do this. The voice in his head jeering at him now . . .
And crossing the courtyard, he heard Girsh scream.
Terror and pain, loud enough to carry up out of the joyous longshank chamber, eldritch enough to raise the small hairs at the back of his neck. Not the sound of Eril’s make-haste surgery in progress, not anything remotely so prosaic.
Plans, considerations, the complications he faced all evaporated like river mist before the morning sun. His acceptance wiped every other consideration away. It was like seeing an old friend, like picking up an old, much-loved weapon. It was easy. Simplicity itself, the old, clean, steel call to death, or something very like.
His hands rose and unslung the Ravensfriend from his back once more. He paced across what remained of the courtyard space.
He found he was grinning in the cold.
