Страница 15 из 103
“You got any krin?” he asked quietly.
Milacar nodded across the room at his dressing table. “Sure. Top left drawer there, couple of twigs already made up. Help yourself.”
Ringil crossed to the dresser and opened the drawer. Three yellowing leaf cylinders rolled about in the bottom of the little wooden compartment. He lifted one out, went to the lamp at the bedside, and bent to light up from the wick. The krinzanz flakes inside the cylinder crackled as the flame caught; the acid odor prickled at his nostrils. He drew hard, pulled the old familiar taste down into his lungs. Scorching bite, chill moving outward. The krin came on like an icy fire in his head. He looked back out to the balcony, sighed and walked out there, still naked, trailing smoke.
After a couple of moments, Grace-of-Heaven went after him.
Outside, it was a rooftop view across the Glades to the water. The lights of sister mansions to Milacar’s place glimmered amid the trees in their gardens and the lamp-dotted, twisting streets between, streets that centuries ago had been footpaths through the marsh. The estuary curved in from the west, the old dock buildings on the other bank swept away now to make space for ornamental gardens and expensive thanksgiving shrines to the gods of Naom.
Ringil leaned on the balcony balustrade, held back a sneer, and struggled to be honest with himself about the changes. There’d been money in the Glades from the very begi
Ringil plumed acrid smoke at it all. Sensed without looking around that Milacar had followed him out onto the balcony.
“That ceiling’s going to get you arrested, Grace,” he said distantly.
“Not in this part of town it’s not.” Milacar joined him at the balustrade, breathed in the Glades night air like perfume. “The Committee doesn’t do house calls around here. You should know that.”
“So some things haven’t changed, then.”
“No. The salients remain.”
“Yeah, saw the cages coming in.” A sudden, chilly recollection that he didn’t need, one he had in fact thought was safely buried until day before yesterday when his mother’s carriage rattled across the causeway bridge at the eastern gate. “Is Kaad still ru
“That aspect of things, yes. And looking younger on it every day. Have you ever noticed that? How power seems to nourish some men and suck others dry? Well, Murmin Kaad is definitely in the former camp.”
In the Hearings Chamber, they uncuff and pinion Jelim, haul him twisting bodily from the chair. He’s panting with disbelief, coughing up deep, gabbled screams of denial at the sentence passed, a skein of pleadings that puts gooseflesh on skin among the watchers in the gallery, brings sweat to palms and drives shard-like needles of chill deep under the flesh of warmly clothed arms and legs.
Between Gingren and Ishil, Ringil sits transfixed.
And as the condemned boy’s eyes flare and wallow like those of a panicking horse, as his gaze claws along the faces of the assembled worthies above him as if in search of some fairy-tale salvation that might somehow have fought its way in here, suddenly he sees Ringil instead. Their eyes meet and Ringil feels it as if he’s been stabbed. Against all probability, Jelim flails an arm free and jabs upward in accusation, and screams: It was him, please, take him, I didn’t mean it, it was him, IT WAS HIM, TAKE HIM, IT WAS HIM, HIM, NOT ME . . .
And they drag him out that way, on a dreadful, trailing shriek that everyone assembled knows is only the begi
Below in the chamber, on the raised dais of the justices, Murmin Kaad, until now watching the proceedings with impassive calm, looks up and meets Ringil’s gaze as well.
And smiles.
“Motherfucker.” A tremor in the matter-of-fact tone he was trying for. He drew on the twig for sustenance. “Should have had him killed back in ’53 when I had the chance.”
He glanced sideways, caught the way Grace-of-Heaven was looking at him.
“What?”
“Oh beautiful youth,” Milacar said gently. “Do you really think it would have been that easy?”
“Why not? It was chaos that summer, the whole place was packed with soldiery and loose blades. Who would have known?”
“Gil, they just would have replaced him with someone else. Maybe someone worse.”
“Worse? Fucking worse?”
Ringil thought about the cages, how in the end he’d been unable to look out of the carriage window at them as they passed. The scrutiny in Ishil’s face as he turned back to the interior of the carriage, the impossibility of meeting her eyes. The warm flush of gratitude he felt that the rumble and rattle of the carriage’s passage drowned out whatever other noises might otherwise have reached his ears. He was wrong, he knew then. His time away from the city, time buried in the shadow of Gallows Gap and its memories, had not kept him hardened as he’d hoped. Instead, it had left him as soft and unready as he’d ever been, as the belly he’d grown.
At his side, Milacar sighed. “The Committee for Public Morals is not dependent on Kaad for its venom, nor was it ever. There’s a general hate in the hearts of men. You went to war, Gil, you should know that better than anyone. It’s like the heat of the sun. Men like Kaad are just the focal figures, like lenses to gather the sun’s rays on kindling. You can smash a lens, but that won’t put out the sun.”
“No. Makes it a lot harder to start the next fire, though.”
“For a little while, yes. Until the next lens, or the next hard summer, and then the fires begin again.”
“Getting a bit fucking fatalistic in your old age, aren’t you?” Ringil nodded out over the mansion lights. “Or does that just come with the move upriver?”
“No, it comes with living long enough to appreciate the value of the time you’ve got left. Long enough to recognize the fallacy of a crusade when you’re called to one. Hoiran’s teeth, Gil, you’re the last person I should need to be telling this to. Have you forgotten what they did with your victory?”
Ringil smiled, felt how it leaked across his face like spilled blood. Reflex, tightening up against the old pain.
“This isn’t a crusade, Grace. It’s just some scum-fuck slavers who’ve gone off with the wrong girl. All I need is a list of names, likely brokers in Etterkal I can lean on until something gives.”
“And the dwenda?” Milacar’s voice jabbed angrily. “The sorcery?”
“I’ve seen sorcery before. It never stopped me killing anything that got in my way.”
“You haven’t seen this.”
“Well, that’s what keeps life interesting, isn’t it. New experience.” Ringil drew hard on the krinzanz twig. Glow from the flaring ember lit the planes of his face and put glitter into his eyes. He let the smoke up, glanced across at Grace-of-Heaven again. “Anyway, have you seen this creature?”
Milacar swallowed. “No. I haven’t, personally. They say he keeps to himself, even within the Warren. But there are those who have had audience with him, yes.”
“Or so they claim.”
“These are men whose word I trust.”
“And what do these trustworthy men have to say about our Aldrain friend? That his eyes are black pits? That his ears are those of a beast? That he flickers with lightning as he walks?”
“No. What they say is . . .” Another hesitation. Milacar’s voice had grown quiet. “He’s beautiful, Gil. That’s what they say. That he’s beautiful beyond words.”