At the time, it sounded to her awed child’s ears like a warning about demons.

“They left you, too,” said the Helmsman finally.

“Yes, they did.”

More silence. Memories swarmed through her in the space it left, adding their weight to the krinzanz crash. She stared at the fleck-lit, dismembered iron monster on the wall, the way it bulked and coiled there, and she tried to find a similar stillness in herself.

“Well, then.” Angfal’s voice broke smoothly back into the quiet, to all appearances as if none of the previous conversation had happened. “What can I do for you, Archeth Indamaninarmal? What is it you wanted to talk to me about?”

CHAPTER 21

They smashed both of Terip Hale’s legs below the knee with the mace, got the whereabouts of the tool shop out of him fairly quickly thereafter, and then let him sink into semiconsciousness where he lay. They got Girsh settled as comfortably as possible against the opposite wall, put a freshly cranked and loaded crossbow in his lap, and went to fetch the manacle cutters.

“Is it true, then?” Eril asked him as they loped rapidly down a darkened corridor on the other side of the courtyard. “That stuff about you killing the dragon?”

“Pretty much. Why?”

“Uhm—but they don’t call you Dragonbane?”

“No.”

Short pause, the other man not wanting to leave it alone, not knowing how to press the point without offense.

“Never seen a dragon,” he said finally.

“Yeah, well, believe me, that’s the way you want to keep it.”

More quiet. They reached the end of the corridor, found stairs downward.

“He, uh, he kept calling you a queer.”

“Yeah.”

“Well, uh . . .” With an audible sigh, Eril gave it up. “Fucking scumbag, right?”

“Indeed.”

At the bottom of the stair, as they’d been told, there was a door sporting a modest padlock. Eril kicked it in with a poise and economy of motion that looked extensively practiced. A couple of shattering blows at the latch with his heel, the door sprang inward on its hinges, and they found themselves in a long underground chamber lined along one wall with cage-fronted cells. Bandglow seeped in from windows set up near the heavy-beamed roof, much the same construction as the joyous longshank chamber and the same effect: There was just enough pale silver light to make out figures huddled to the back of each cell on the floor. Mostly young women, one or two more androgynous forms that might have been boys—the difference, shrouded in any case beneath each clutched-up, moth-eaten gray blanket, tended to drown out in the low light. Hollow, terrified eyes and curled defensive postures created an unsexed uniformity. Each captive cringed visibly as the booted feet went past their cell, clung harder to the blanket as if it might be torn away from them. One or two started to make a tight-racheted keening, but you couldn’t really tell which of them it was—the sound crept out past the bars and filled the whole chamber like the relentless drip of water. It put Ringil’s teeth instantly on edge. He hadn’t heard anything like it since the war.

“Good thing Girsh isn’t here to see this,” Eril murmured. “He’d probably want to let them all out.”

“Yeah.”

They found the tool section at the end of the row, a long alcove set with three workbenches broad enough to take a human body and lined along the back wall with hanging racks for the tools. Ringil scanned the racks, spotted a couple of delicately finished branding irons and some other suggestively shaped implements whose applications he didn’t want to think about; then his eyes fastened thankfully on what they’d come for. Four identical, long-handled manacle cutters dangling side by side. He lifted one off its hook and flexed the scissor motion a couple of times.

“Should do the trick.”

“Right. Let’s get out of here.”

Ringil hesitated. He tossed the cutters across the chamber to Eril, who fielded them one-handed with a knife fighter’s precision.

“You go. I’ll catch you up.”

“What?” Eril looked from the cutters in his hand to Ringil, and then, with dawning realization, down the long line of cells. “Oh, come on. We haven’t got time for th—”

“I said you go. I won’t be long.”

For a moment it looked as if Eril might argue. He held Ringil’s eye, face unreadable, hefted the cutters a couple of times. Finally, he shrugged.

“Your call. But Girsh is in no state to hang about. Soon as I get that bolt out of his leg, we’re leaving. Don’t miss the boat.”

“I won’t.”

Eril nodded, turned, and headed back up the line of cells to the door. He didn’t look at any of them, didn’t turn his head at all.

Admirable focus.

Yeah. What are we doing here, then?

Ringil took another pair of manacle cutters from the rack and went to the first cell in the line. The lock was a simple affair, two bolts and a cowled fastener. It took him less than a minute to mangle it apart with the cutters. He opened the cage door and stepped hesitantly into the space behind. Instantly the girl on the floor recoiled into one back corner of the cell, as hard and as fast as the walls would let her. It was almost as if she’d been thrown there by some external force he was radiating. He saw, even in the low wash of bandlight from the windows, that she was trembling violently.

“You’re free to go,” he said, feeling foolish.

She just stared back up at him, eyes and knuckles and the blanket edge. The awkward way she’d sprawled in the corner revealed one thigh to the hip, a small triangular glimpse of buttock and waist beyond—pale, naked flesh and the small weave-patterned discoloration of a brand on the hip bone. The blanket was her only clothing.

Fuck.

He left her, went mechanically along the row of cells, wrenching the locks apart with a rising fury that made him clumsier each time, made the cutters slip and turn as he used them, as if they had a mind of their own. His teeth gritted tighter, his breath came harder, the locks buckled and tore, hung off each door like mangled body parts, or else they slipped and clanked on the floor at his feet. And he knew, all the time, even as he was doing it, that he was wasting his time.

What are they going to do, Gil? Weary, reasonable voice in his head. They’re naked, traumatized, trapped in the middle of Etterkal. They aren’t going to make it a hundred yards down the street outside before some bunch of fucking urchins blows the whistle on them.

Shut up.

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.