The Steel Remains

By now a small crowd was gathering in the hall. Nearby servants drawn from their duties by the sound of raised voices, and behind the Lord Administrator another liveried attendant, who now quietly proffered his master a handkerchief.

“I don’t suppose you’d care to tell me what this is about?” Ringil asked. “Why you’re in such a hurry to get yourself killed, I mean.”

The Lord Administrator took the handkerchief and pressed it under his injured nose. The attendant tried to help and was shrugged off.

“Degenerate, and coward, too! You presume to put me off with your insufferable arrogance?”

Something about the formality of speech twitched at Ringil, some trace of similarity to go with the oddly familiar features. He covered for it with a roll of his eyes and a brief, mannered sigh.

“If we’re to do this by the book, Lord Administrator, then it is customary in a challenge to announce the origin of your grievance. I haven’t been in this city since the war, at which time you look to have been barely out of your cradle. It’s hard to see how I may have given you offense.”

The other man sneered. “You offend me by your simple existence, Eskiath. With the corruption and vileness you exude in breathing Trelayne air.”

“Don’t be fucking ridiculous.”

“How dare—”

“There are boy whores at the harbor end for you to vent your righteousness upon, if that’s what you’re looking for. They’re young and destitute and desperate, easily frightened and easily hurt. Should suit you down to the ground.”

“You laid hands on my father!”

The shout was agonized, echoing in the hall’s vaulted ceiling. Silence settled after it like goose down from a ripped pillow drifting to the floor. In the quiet, Ringil saw the Lord Administrator’s face again, as if for the first time. Saw the resemblance, heard the similarity in the overworked speech patterns.

“I see,” he said, very softly.

“I am Iscon Kaad,” the Lord Administrator of Tidal Watch said, trembling. “My father’s position on the council does not permit him to seek satisfaction by duel. He is unwilling—”

“Yes, of course, that’s right.” Ringil put on a slow-burning, derisory smile. “Not your father’s style at all, that—actual risk. He’d much rather cower behind the city walls and his robes of rank, and have others do his killing for him. As he did back in the ’fifties, in fact, while the rest of us were up to our knees in lizard blood in the marshes. Your father was conspicuous by his absence then, just as he is now. Perhaps he was busy in the bedchamber, siring you from some floor-scrubbing wench or other.”

Iscon Kaad made a strangled sound and launched himself at Ringil. Unfortunately, he never made the gap. The attendant pinioned him and held him back. The Eskiath doorman twitched toward Ringil in preventive echo, but Ringil gave him a hard look and he twitched right back again. Kaad subsided in the attendant’s grasp, then shook himself imperiously free. The attendant let him go. In the interim, the coachman and the other attendant had rushed in from outside, and the Lady Ishil had finally appeared to see what was going on in her hallway. Her face was unreadable.

Ringil folded his arms and cocked his head.

“You want me to kill you, Iscon Kaad? Fine, I accept. Brillin Hill Fields, day after tomorrow at dawn. As the challenged party, I believe it’s actually my right to the detail of combat, and not yours.” He lifted his right hand and examined the trim of his nails, a gesture he’d stolen from Ishil while they were still both young. Across the hall, his mother saw it, but her face didn’t change. “But of course, I wouldn’t expect you to know that. Someone with your breeding, I mean. You can’t be expected to have mastered all the finer points, now can you?”

For a moment he thought the younger Kaad might try him again, but either the man’s rage was temporarily spent or he had it more firmly leashed now that Ringil had given him what he wanted. The Lord Administrator merely peeled his teeth in a gritted smile, and waited.

Or maybe, Gil, it’s just that Iscon Kaad is nothing like his sire. Ever think of that? Maybe growing up wealthy and secure, the son of a noted and influential city councilor, he just lacks his father’s thin skin for social insult and instead he’s turned out exactly the way you once were—an arrogant, overconfident, overmannered young thug with delusions of knighthood.

Not quite delusions. You see the way he got up? This one’s been through the Academy, or something similar at least.