The slave trader twitched at the sound of his name. He would not look up. Ringil leaned in and took Hale’s skull firmly in his two cupped hands. He tilted it with a lover’s care, until the slaver was forced to meet his eyes.
“You pay attention,” he said quietly. “You tell this to Findrich, or Snarl, or whoever it is you report to in this idiot cabal of yours. You tell them Ringil Eskiath wants his cousin Sherin back. Soon, and unhurt—it’s not negotiable. If I don’t get what I want, I’m coming back to Etterkal to ask again. Believe me, they don’t want that, and neither do you.”
Hale jerked his head out of Ringil’s hands. Outrage at the intimacy, or maybe just the knowledge he was not going to die, seemed to kindle a new fire in him.
“Fucking touch me,” he muttered. “Piece-of-shit queer.”
Silently, Eril handed Ringil the mace. Ringil smiled faintly, beat it very gently in the cup of his palm.
“You’re missing the point, Hale.”
“And you’re fucking insane.” The slave trader managed a shaky laugh. “You do know that, don’t you, Eskiath? Come in here talking like some relic out of the prewar, some gang tough from harbor end. Don’t you get it? Things aren’t like that anymore—we’re
Ringil nodded. “Go on telling yourself that if it helps. Meantime, tell the others I want my cousin back. Sherin Herlirig Mernas. There’ll be records, and I’ll leave you the sketch. You make sure they get the message. Because if I do have to come back to Etterkal and ask again, I promise you it’ll make what happened tonight look like a minor toothache. I’ll kill you and your whole fucking family, and I’ll burn this place to the ground around the corpses. Then I’ll move on to Findrich, and Snarl, and anyone else who gets in my way. I’ll torch the whole fucking neighborhood if I have to. You think things changed after the war, fuckhead?” He reached out and chucked the slave trader hard under the chin. He hefted the mace. “Got news for you. Things just changed back.”
Jhiral let them go home not long after midnight. He appeared to have satisfied himself that everything possible was being done and, perhaps more importantly, that his grip on his advisers was no less secure than it had been before the Khangset pot boiled over. He nodded them out with the minimum of ceremony. Faileh Rakan disappeared into the bowels of the palace without a word beyond the necessary honorifics, and Archeth walked out to the front gates with Mahmal Shanta.
“Seemed to go well enough,” the naval engineer said when they got outside.
She couldn’t tell if there was an edge of irony on his words or not. Krinzanz was good for a lot of things, but it was not a subtle drug. The finer points of human interaction tended to go out the window. She shrugged and yawned, checked the immediate vicinity for nosy minions, habitual caution so ingrained it was reflex.
“Jhiral’s not stupid,” she said. “He knows we’ve got to nip this in the bud. If word gets out the Empire can’t protect its ports, we’re going to have a southern trade crisis on our hands.”
“Which our competitive little city-state friends in the north will be only too pleased to exploit.”
“Wouldn’t you?”
Shanta did his own reflexive sweep of the surroundings. “What I would do, my lady, is not fit conversation for environs such as these. Perhaps some other time, over coffee aboard my barge?”
“Perhaps.”
“Did you mean what you said about the Helmsmen?
“How the fuck would I know?” Wearily now, despite a residual wakefulness. Her eyes felt gritty and smeared open. “The one down in dry dock I was trying to debrief last week talks about as much as a Demlarashan mystic in midfast. Makes about as much fucking sense as well.”
They reached the gates and had to wait in the slightly chilly air while slaves brought Archeth’s horse from the stables, and a carriage was summoned for Shanta. She pulled on her gauntlets and shook off a tiny shiver. Winter was creeping in early this year. It’d be good to get home, peel off her travel-stained clothes, and stand barefoot on heated floors in the cozy warmth of her apartments. Let the last of the krin burn away, give in to sleep. Along the shallow zigzags of the Kiriath-paved approach causeway, pale lamps studded a seductive path down through the darkness the palace mound was sunk in, and into Yhelteth’s carpet of lights at the bottom. The firefly clustering of the city’s illumination spread wide in all directions, split down the center by the dark arm of the estuary. Closer in, Archeth picked out the Boulevard of the Ineffable Divine, lit in bright double rows and straight as a sword blade laid across the more haphazard patterning of the other streets. It seemed almost close enough to touch.
Shanta was watching her keenly.
“They say the ones that stayed are angry,” he murmured. “The Helmsmen, I mean. They feel abandoned, resentful that the Kiriath would not take them.”
