And abruptly, before he could consciously register it, the fight was done.

Ringil stared around as his senses caught up. It really was over. Eril was off the wall, driving back a single opponent. On the ground, Girsh was killing the hamstrung giant with his mace. The rest was blood-painted carnage and crawling forms and moans. Between them, they’d accounted for a dozen men, at least. He became vaguely aware that he was panting.

Right.

He strode heavily up behind Eril’s opponent, swung tiredly at the man’s sword arm, and stopped the fight. The man screamed, dropped his weapon, and spun about, mouth gaping wide in shock and betrayal. Then Eril stepped in like a dance partner, hooked him with one arm, and buried his long knife upward under the sternum. The man gagged and thrashed and Eril hugged him close, twisting and gouging with the knife, finishing it. Over the dying man’s shoulder, teeth gritted, half his attention still on the killing, he nodded at Ringil.

“Thanks, man. Thought I’d never fucking get an opening with this one.”

Ringil waved it off and went to take care of Girsh.

THE CROSSBOW BOLT HAD GONE IN THROUGH THE FLESHY PART OF THE thigh at a downward angle and stuck there. It showed a clear two inches of blood-streaked shaft behind the blunt octagon of the quarrel where it protruded out the other side. To Ringil’s battle-schooled eye, it suggested that either the weapon had misfired or the owner hadn’t racked up the tension enough—at that range, it should by rights have gone straight through an unarmored limb, ripped a hole the width of the brutal iron fletching on the thing. Instead, the damage seemed to be quite limited. The entry and exit wounds were messy, sopping and treacly with blood, but there was none of the telltale heavy-duty welling-up that would have signified major blood vessels torn apart.

“Looks like you got lucky.”

“Yeah,” gritted Girsh. “Fucking feels like it.”

Ringil went and retrieved his dragon knife from Varid’s chin—a glutinous, messy business in itself—and set about using the serrated edges to cut cloth from the dead man’s shirt for a tourniquet. Eril went upstairs to the door into the courtyard and listened for signs that the fight had been heard by anyone who cared to do anything about it. He came back looking satisfied.

“All quiet up there. Looks like we got the lot of them. I guess that joyous longshank number means all hands to the killing chamber. Cute.”

Ringil grunted, preoccupied with knotting the tourniquet tight on Girsh’s thigh. The Marsh Brotherhood man bit back a groan. Eril came over to watch.

“We need to get that out of his leg,” he said soberly. “If there’s rust on it—”

“I know. But if you pull it back as it is, we’re going to rip up the wound and maybe open a major blood vessel. We need something to cut the quarrel off.”

Eril nodded. “Okay, then. It’s a slave house. They’ve got to have ironwork tools around here somewhere. Manacle cutters, something like that.”

“I can walk,” Girsh rasped. Attempting to push himself upright and prove it. He turned white with what it cost him, sagged back to the horizontal again.

“Not far, you can’t,” Ringil told him.

He sat back on his heels and looked around. Thought about time remaining and what they’d come here to do. Despite the subsiding pulse in his veins, the relative quiet of the aftermath, they were not even close to done with Hale and his household. He wasn’t much looking forward to the next part.

He stifled the waking qualm like an infant in the crib.

“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 that I’m going to fucking enjoy.”

“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.”

Right, Gil. Hardened Etterkal people trafficker, lifetime criminal success before he got legal. Should be a pushover.

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.

You did that, Gil, some perpetually unsoiled, disbelieving part of him whispered. That was you.

“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.”

“Fuck you!”

“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?”