The Cold Commands

by Richard K. Morgan

  Just standing there.

  No weapon.

  No way—no fucking way—anything human could have crept up on him like that.

  Ringil eased up out of his crouch. He did not relinquish the Ravensfriend. There was a deep pulsing in his chest and something in his hands that should have been trembling but was not, was tighter and sweeter and scared him more because he didn’t know where it might go. The world was changed about him, even the birdsong muffled away by the Presence. His eyes flickered briefly to Eril’s prone form, saw the man’s sleep-softened features and he knew that whatever happened now, his companion would not wake until the stranger was gone.

  So.

  Like bending an iron poker, he forced his stare back to the newcomer. Met the cold and curious eyes, the waiting in them.

  “You’re late,” he said harshly.

  The clamped smile loosened a little, showed teeth. “You were expecting me?”

  Ringil shook his head, and the tiny motion seemed to give him back a small measure of control. From limestone depths and the memories of Seethlaw, he summoned an awful, precipice calm.

  “Not me. Talking about someone I met last night, some marsh dweller kid name of Gerin—he was asking for your help, back by the river. Right before he died, he told me he prayed to the Salt Lord for intercession. Begged for it, I’d guess, the state he was in. So what’s the story, Salt Lord—you don’t hear so good these days? Got to scream our prayers a little louder, do we?”

  The eyes held him, attentive and mildly amused, as if he were a Strov street performer with a less than averagely tiresome act.

  “Is it really this boy’s unanswered prayers that so upset you, Ringil Eskiath? Or another boy’s, long ago?”

  Ringil’s knuckles whitened on the hilt of the Ravensfriend. “You think I’m upset? When I’m upset, Salt Lord, you’ll know all about it.”

  “Should I take that as a threat?”

  “Take it any fucking way you want.”

  Because while one component to that thrumming in his hands and chest and blood was certainly fear, a swooping shadowy terror of what stood before him, the fear was really nothing he had not felt before, and thrumming along with it his blood sang with other things, just as dark, that he had long since learned to welcome in. And while he had never been face-to-face with a denizen of the Dark Court before—had in fact not believed until very recently that they even existed—he had been eye-to-eye with other things that most would count just as soul withering, and the truth was, his soul had not withered very much.

  He took a pine-perfumed breath from the forest around him, held it, plumed it out again like fumes from a well-rolled krinzanz smoke. He widened his eyes at Dakovash, and he held the Salt Lord’s gaze.

  A quiet like the world waiting to be born.

  But Ringil thought that, for just a moment, the mouth below the slouch hat might have bent at one corner. There and gone, the sour trace of amusement, and something else he could not quite name. The sigh that followed sounded, to his Glades-bred ears, a little manufactured.

  “Do you really consider that a fit way to talk to your clan deities?”

  Ringil shrugged. “If you wanted veneration, you should have shown up while your supplicant was still alive.”

  “Has it occurred to you that maybe I heard Gerin Trickfinger’s prayers, heard the forward echoes of them long before they were even said, before he was even born, and that help was sent?”

  “I was there. If you sent help, it didn’t show up in time.”

  “Well, as you say: You were there.”

  Ringil’s eyes narrowed. “And what the fuck is that supposed to mean?”

  The figure matched his earlier shrug. “Take it any way you want.”

  Which sat in the washed granite-and-gloom space between them for what seemed like a long time. Finally, Ringil bent and lowered the Ravensfriend carefully to the rock under his feet. He straightened up, felt a long shiver 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 o
f 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 tutored mind of yours to all those bullshit hero-with-a-high-destiny legends you people are so fucking fond of telling one another. You really think, in a mudball slaughterhouse of a world like this, where war and privation harden whole populations to inhuman brutality and ignorance, where the ruling classes dedicate their sons to learning the science of killing men the way they consign their daughters to breeding till they crack—you really think the gods of a world like that have got no better thing to do with their time than take some random piece of lowborn trash and spend long years carving him into shape for a cat’s-paw?

  I had—Ringil swallows on an abrupt gut-swooping gust of insolence that licks up in the pit of his belly like flames—no idea that time was so precious a commodity among the denizens of the Immortal Watch.

  Beat of silence among the shrouded stones. Then Dakovash grunts, as if from some old pain returning.

  Not many call us by that name any longer.

  Ringil shrugs. Not many can read. Or care about any past beyond their own fucked-up selective remembrance.

  He thinks the shadowed figure smiles at that.

  You sound bitter, hero.

  Do I? Ringil gestures impatiently against the returning chill in his bones. I’m not the one complaining about a lack of supplicant awe, though, am I? I’m not the one short of time for my immortal designs.

  More quiet. Framed on either side by the silent monoliths, the Salt Lord seems to be studying him as if through the bars of a cage.

  Finally, he says this:

  The march of time is broken, Ringil Eskiath. Something in that softly rasping voice that might be admission, concession, or maybe just a bone-deep weariness. The bounds of possibility come adrift around us, the old certainties are all in their graves. Cats can no longer be considered alive or dead.

  Cats … ?

  The skeins are tangled. Some butterfly shaman up in the north beats his puny fucking wings and the storm gathers before you know it. Chaos gathers, like a bad poet’s verse. We run damage control, but the rules of engagement have changed. You think we’re any happier about it than you? We’ve got our balls to the wall here, hero. We’re fighting half blind, nothing works, not the way it should, not anymore. Which being the case, well … A shrug. Let us just say that in a situation like that, you work with the tools at hand. And speaking of which—

  Like a scything shard of darkness, the Ravensfriend, still in its scabbard, pitches through the gloom from the Salt Lord’s pale grasp, through the gap between the standing stones, and onto the long, wind-matted grass at Ringil’s feet.

  Try not to drop that again. You’re going to need it.

  I—teeth now clenched for a swirl of reasons, fear, anger, the growing cold, that he cannot unpick—am not your fucking cat’s-paw.

  But the space between the two stones, when he looks up from his sword, is empty. Only a faint breeze, wandering through as if following the sword, touching his face with cold.

  It leaves traceries in the mist like the motions of a languid hand in water.

  The Salt Lord is gone.

  EYES OPEN, ON BLINDING BLUE SKY.

  He blinked, vision tearing up from all the sudden brightness. He propped himself up a little and rubbed hard at his eyes. He was back on the flat rock under a declining afternoon sun. The Ravensfriend lay at his side. He rolled over, reached convulsively for the sword. Discovered he was shivering despite the warmth still in the day. More than shivering, actually—a feverish chill rode his bones and racked hi
m with a desire to curl into a ball. He coughed, and found a razor’s edge in his throat.

  Great. And now he remembered the boy sneezing on him the night before. Marsh flu, that’s all I fucking need.

  He levered himself to his feet and stared around. Treetops nodding in the breeze, the thickly wooded slopes and the unattainable road north threading between. Over everything a blue haze of distance that seemed to be thickening.

  Shadows a little longer than they’d been.

  Farther up the rock, Eril snored throatily, one arm cast up to shield his eyes from the sun, but otherwise unmoved since Ringil had last looked at him.

  The hovering hawk was gone. And no sign of Dakovash. It could all have been—yeah, right—a dream.

  Chaos gathers, like a bad poet’s verse.

  He looked westward, frowning.

  Hey now, come on. That’s just stupid …

  Is it? He turned the sudden glimmer of it carefully, panning for some truthful assessment of its value. Got a better plan, do you, Gil? State you’re in?

  He held down a fresh bout of shivering, wrapped his cloak tighter about himself, and crouched beside Eril’s sleeping form. Made a tight hssst he knew would waken the Marsh Brotherhood enforcer without fuss.

  Sure enough, Eril’s eyes slid open at the sound, as wakeful as if he’d only closed them a moment before. His hand was already on his knife hilt.

  “Yeah?”

  “Time to get moving,” Ringil told him.

  Eril got to his feet, staying low, and didn’t argue. He looked about at their unchanged surroundings, then back at Ringil, curiously.

  “Did I miss something?” he asked.

  “No,” said Ringil briskly. “You didn’t miss a thing. But I’ve got an idea how to get us out of here.”

  CHAPTER 12

  t called itself Anasharal.

  Archeth had never seen anything like it. The Helmsmen of her youth came large and semi-visible at best—mostly they were in the walls, or the hulls and bulkheads of the fireships, like helpful rats out of some fairy tale or shelved talking library books. They engaged you in solemn conversation, sometimes they solved your problems for you—or at least told you why they couldn’t—and they could manipulate numerous aspects of the Kiriath domain in ways she’d never been able to think of as anything but magical. As a child, she’d gotten the impression some of them were taking a slightly scary avuncular delight in guiding her, and not always along paths her parents approved.