“All right,” he said finally. “Eril, you take care of the wounded. I’m going to see if we can’t get some answers out of our gracious host over there.”
Girsh grinned savagely, biting down on his pain. “Yeah, now
“You stay put,” Ringil warned him. “I don’t want you moving that bolt about any more than you have to. And I don’t need the help. This isn’t going to be difficult.”
While Eril went around checking bodies and slitting the throats of the injured, Ringil heaved Hale’s semiconscious form off the floor and into a sitting position against the curve of the chamber’s back wall. The slaver was bleeding from where the Ravensfriend’s pommel had smashed into his face earlier, and his right eye was already swelling shut. Blood had splashed down onto his silk robe and into the hair on his chest where it was exposed. Ringil cut a piece out of the garment with his dragon knife, cleaned up Hale’s face, and then started slapping him methodically back to wakefulness. Across the room, someone squalled weakly as Eril pulled back his head by the hair, ready for the knife. It was Janesh the doorman, flopping snap-spined and desperate between the Marsh Brotherhood soldier’s booted feet.
“Hold it.”
Eril paused, looked up at him expectantly.
“Just give me a minute here.” He peered closely at Terip Hale as the slaver started to come around, slapped him a couple of times more to speed the process up. “Figure we could maybe use the leverage.”
“Got it.” Eril lowered Janesh’s head almost gently back to the floor. He settled into a patient crouch above the injured man. Janesh barely moved beyond a couple of twitches in one arm. He’d maybe passed out from the pain of his wound, or just into the realm of quiet delirium.
Terip Hale, meanwhile, woke to a vision of carnage strewn across the joyous longshank chamber, and a small fixed smile on Ringil Eskiath’s face.
“Welcome back. Remember me?”
To his credit, Hale snarled, made fists, and came almost off the wall with rage. There was a lifetime of street fighter’s venom in the twisted lines of his face. His legs flailed free of the robe’s silken folds. But he wasn’t a young man anymore. Ringil shoved him back with a palm heel in the chest.
“You just sit there and behave.”
“No, thank you. But I have got some questions I want answered. It’d really be in your best interests to tell me what I want to know.”
“Yeah, well fuck your questions.” Hale’s voice drawled slower, contemptuous. He gathered his mutilated robe back around him, covered the parts of his body the disarray had exposed. “And fuck you, too, you fucking queer.”
Ringil glanced around at the bodies and the blood. “I think you’re missing the specifics of who won here.”
“You think you’re going to get away with this?”
Ringil tilted his head, put a cupped hand to his ear. “You hear that? On the stairs? That’s the sound of no one coming to stop us, Terip. It is over. You pulled the joyous longshank girls on us, and it didn’t work.”
He nodded at Eril, who yanked Janesh’s head back up. The doorman shrieked as he realized what was happening, woke maybe from a dreamed escape to something better. Eril’s knife dipped in, did its severing and opening—dark crimson gush of blood and Janesh’s face went suddenly idiot-soft and pale. Eril let go of his head, and it hit the floor with an audible bump.
Ringil masked himself in what felt like stone.
“You want to live?” he asked Hale quietly.
Hardened or not, the slave trader had gone almost as pale as his murdered minion. Respectability, or perhaps just age, seemed to have sapped some of his edge. His mouth twitched over words he didn’t appear to know how to voice.
“I’m sorry, you’ll have to speak up.”
“The cabal.” Hale licked his lips. “They won’t let this stand.”
“The cabal.” Ringil nodded. “Okay. Why don’t you scare me with some names? Who are they? Who do they represent?”
“Oh, I think you’ll find that out soon enough.”
“I’m not a patient man, Terip.”
The slave trader scraped together an awful, lopsided grin. “It doesn’t matter what you do to me, if you kill me here or not. They’ll find out about this either way.”
Ringil, out of nowhere—some combination of twanging battle-comedown nerves, general weariness, who knew what besides—took a blind leap.
“Going to stick your head on a tree trunk, are they?”
He saw the jolt go through Terip Hale, almost as if the slaver had been struck by one of his own men’s crossbow bolts. He saw the fear in the one unswollen eye.
“You—”
