run through him as he did. He folded his arms tight across his chest.
What do you want, Salt Lord?
Ah. So your insolence is calculated after all. No risk in disrespecting the Dark Court if it needs something from you, eh?
Ringil stared back through the creeping chill in his bones.
No gain in respecting a demon lord who cannot be summoned when he s needed.
He thought he saw something spark in Dakovash s eyes.
Oh very droll, the voice whispered, suddenly uncomfortably close and intimate, though the figure did not appear to have moved. But what if you re wrong, little Gil Eskiath? What if you re wrong and we don t need you as much as you think? What then? What if I just cut my losses and take offense and melt your fucking bones down, right now, in your still-living flesh?
And like a nightmare made real on waking, Ringil felt it start, a crawling, searing sensation along the edges of his shins and forearms, down his spine and into his guts like a bucket hitting well water, the beginnings of true pain buried deep under his skin, the fleeting premonition of how it would be, how he would dance and flail, and scream without surcease as the fire ate him from the inside out
Feel better now, do we?
He goes to his knees with the sudden force of it. Catches a breath already turning scorched and acrid in his throat
Is catapulted away, elsewhere.
Smooth, cooling breeze, and a low, silvery gloom that instinct and fumbling recognition tell him are not the Salt Lord s to command. Breath sobbing in his throat the pain is gone. He kneels at the heart of a place he knows: an Aldrain stone circle, mist shrouded, the looming impassive half-hewn monoliths scabbed with dark moss patches and lines, and overgrown around the base.
For a moment, something leaps alive in him at the sight.
Seethlaw.
But the circle is empty. Anything that happened here is long over, and if the stones witnessed it, the way he thinks he remembers, then they have nothing to say on the matter now. Ringil gets to his feet out of silence and long grass soaked with dew. The knees of his breeches are damp and cold with moisture. He stands there, aching in the throat once more, and this time it s nothing anyone has done to him but himself.
He tips back his head to see if that ll relieve the pain, but it doesn t.
Overhead, Seethlaw s dying, pockmarked little sun the thing he called muhn instead sits high in a murky sky and scatters its second-rate light. Tatters of ragged cloud whip in from a direction that might be the west, sweep briefly across its feebly glowing face, almost blotting it out as they pass. It s the wind, he supposes, pushing the cloud that way, that fast, but he feels abruptly as if it s the muhn scudding past overhead at dizzying speed while the rest of the sky stands rock-solid still.
For one disorienting moment, he tilts with it, and almost falls.
Seethlaw
He s been back to the Gray Places more times since Ennishmin than he likes to count, back to the Aldrain realm he first walked in at Seethlaw s side. He knows you can find the dead there, along with other, less reliable ghosts, the ghosts of what could or should or might have once been, if only. So like grinding a loose tooth down into the soft bleeding gum of his fear he goes looking. Sometimes cooked on krinzanz fumes and mad with a generalized grief he no longer knows how to contain, sometimes wakeful straight and possessed of a mind so cold and clear it scares him more than the madness. He goes looking for the dead, and they come to him in droves, just as they did before. They make their cases, present their alternatives to him, the way that, no, look, they certainly have not died, that s rubbish, he misremembers, they re as alive as he is, can t he see that
You don t argue with the dead. He learned that early on. Argue and they grow angry, build vortices of rage and denial in the webbing of whatever holds the Gray Places together; if you aren t careful, they drag you in there with them, and damage whatever delicate mechanisms of sanity keep you centered in your own version and understanding of what s real. Better by far to let them have their way, and you go yours. There s a state of mind you need for it, something like the slightly fogged and thoughtless competence you find underlying your hangover the morning after a night lit up with krinzanz and cheap tavern wine. You cope, you move on.
You keep looking.
He never found Seethlaw. He doesn t know why, doesn t for that matter know what he would do or say if he ever did find him. It s not as if they parted on good terms at the end.
But the search is a compulsion, a deep insistent tug with no more governed sense to it than the deep salt pull of the currents that flow past the point at Lanatray where his mother keeps her summer residence. More than once, as a boy, he swam out too far and got caught up in the implacable grip of that flow. More than once, he saw the shore swept away to a flat charcoal line on the horizon, and wondered if he d ever make it back to land alive.
Once, after Jelim s death, he let the tow take him and didn t care much one way or the other what happened next.
What happened next, as near as he recalls, was that the water bore him up despite his best efforts to drown, as if wet muscular hands were gathered under his neck and chest and thighs, and somehow, as the sun declined and the light above the swell thickened toward dark, he found the shore creeping in closer once more. It seemed the ocean didn t want him. The current spat him out miles down the coastal sweep of the beaches, he came in staggering and exhausted in the surf, and the waves cuffed him brutally ashore like blows from his father s sword-grip-callused hand.
Yes, and I don t suppose it ever occurred to you to wonder about those helpful hands, now, did it? Sardonic voice at his ear he whirls violently about to face it, sees a shadowy form slip between two of the standing stones, trailing edge of a cloak and gone before he can fix on it. The voice drifts behind in its stead. Never occurred to you to wonder what exactly it was that was holding you up in the water all that time?
A chill wraps the back of his neck, stealthy, prehensile. The damp division of webbed fingers, pressing firmly up.
He shudders at the touch. Shakes it off. Cannot now recall if the memory is real or if Dakovash has reached back and placed it there.
Oh yes, that s right. I m just making all this up. The merroigai were never there, you swam in to shore all by yourself, of course you did. Beyond the stones, the Salt Lord s voice prowls, not quite in step with the flitting shadow of his form. There s an angry agitation to both, like the flicker and spit of an oil lamp flame dying down. Fucking mortals. You know, it s I am so sick of this shit. Where s the respect? Where s the supplicant awe? I thought you, Ringil Eskiath, you of all people
A long pause, the figure stops between two monoliths and faces Ringil with one pale hand pressed claw-like to its chest. The face beneath the hat is all shadow and gleaming teeth and eyes like a wolf. The voice rasps out again.
Look at me, Eskiath, fucking look at me. If you can t manage respect, then at least grow a sense of self- preservation, why don t you? I am a lord of the Dark Court. I m a fucking demon god. Do you have any idea what I ve done to the flesh and souls of men a thousand times as powerful as you ll ever be, for no other reason than they spoke back to me the way you do, as if you had the fucking right? Look at me. I am Dakovash. I stole when I was still young when this whole fucking world was still young I stole fire from the High Gods, and forged it into a new weapon against them. I commanded angels in battle, brought bat-winged demons out of the dark to overthrow the old order, I crossed the void as a fucking song so that the old order would fall. I broke those fuckers in battle over the arch of this world when none could or would do it but me. And you think you re going to judge me? Judge me on some fifteen-year-old marsh brat that couldn t lift a fucking broadsword to save his life? What am I supposed to do with that? Train him? The Salt Lord throws out one arm, rakes crooked fingers through the darkened air in some paroxysm of exasperated disbelief. Somewhere behind him, thunder rumbles through the Gray Places. What find some fucking monastery on a mountain someplace and pay his board and lodging for a decade among kindly warrior monks, all so he can grow into his ascendant power, fulfill his destiny, and become The One? Give me a fucking break, Eskiath. You really think that s how it works?
I wouldn t know how it works, Ringil says flatly. You re the demon lord here, not me.
The Salt Lord s hand drops to his side. Well, then try giving it some thought, why don t you? Apply that finely
