The Cold Commands

by Richard K. Morgan

  Ringil found drawers and breeches, contorted himself and pulled them on. Twitched aside the tent flap and peered out. Members of the wandering court went back and forth; someone had built up the fire and was feeding it. The odor of fried bacon and beans came and wiped itself across his face. He struggled upright and out into the day, blinking in the light.

  “Morning.” A bright, slightly arch tone. A woman, face vaguely familiar from the night before, grinning as she passed him on her way to the fire. “Want some breakfast?”

  He followed her, tucking in his shirt, not bothering with his boots. A couple of other familiar faces at the fire looked up from their plates and nodded affably. He remembered this from the last time with Hjel’s people, the palpable shock of it—no whispers behind hands, no scandalized tones or accusing glances, no real interest, in fact, beyond a basic curiosity about his arrival in their midst. Nobody cared. They were too full of their own lives to pass much judgment on others. It was an otherness, a magic as staggering in its way as the ikinri ’ska.

  Ringil seated himself at the fire and was handed a heaped plate of his own. He soaked bread in the beans, chewed and realized abruptly how hungry he was.

  “Good to be out, eh?”

  It was the man seated on his right—Ringil recognized him now as Cortin, last male to the bedrolls the night before.

  “Sorry?”

  “Out of the Margins. Good to have the world feel solid again, right?”

  Ringil chewed and swallowed, nodded.

  “Never get used to it, myself. All those voices, calling you away.” Cortin set aside his plate and sprawled back, reflective on his full stomach. “Course, it’s easier when you’re in company, wouldn’t get me out there any other way. Going solo, now—that’s, like they say, strictly for princes and fools. No offense—I’m guessing by that broadsword you’re the former.”

  “Was a gift,” said Ringil around a wad of bread and bacon.

  “Oh.” Hurriedly: “Yeah, but still. Man of breeding, am I right? I mean the Black Sail gang don’t come all the way up the fjord for just anyone.”

  Someone coughed on the other side of the fire. The woman who’d served Ringil shot Cortin a shut-the-fuck-up glance.

  Ringil chewed steadily for a couple of moments. Swallowed and wiped the corners of his mouth with care.

  “Black Sail gang, eh?”

  “Yeah, Hjel’s down there talking to them now …”

  Cortin’s voice ebbed to a halt as he finally caught the looks the others were throwing at him. An awkward quiet set in around the fire.

  Ringil put together a smile, put down his plate, and brushed his fingers vigorously together, knife-sharpening style, to clean off the grease.

  “Well,” he said. “Better go down and see them myself, I guess. Wouldn’t want to keep them waiting.”

  Which was actually a lot less like bravado than he initially feared. Along with the cold, scrubbed feel of things this morning, he’d woken, he now discovered, with a fresh sense of momentum, a will to take the next step that didn’t need much prompting. Boots and cloak on, the Ravensfriend slung across his shoulders once more, he let the pulse in his veins and the weight of the killing steel on his back carry him forward. The same woman who’d served him breakfast gave him gestured directions. He went down off the ruined plaza, through the scattering of tumbled walls and columns to where a steeply sloping path wound down the side of a promontory that hadn’t been there the night before. A clean ocean wind came in and ruffled the long grass, hooted around rock outcrops and scudded off the silvery gray glint of the fjord below. He narrowed his eyes against the brightness. Made out some kind of jetty down there, and a black-rigged caravel at anchor fifty yards out.

  All right, then.

  He made his way steadily downward, curiously at peace. The landscape was a pretty close match for parts of the Gergis Peninsula he knew, and while he wasn’t kidding himself he was in any way home, the half familiarity was cheering, like knowledge of an opponent’s fighting style prior to a duel. He saw figures standing about on the jetty as he got lower, and a dory moored there. Reflexive combat instinct made the count—six or seven, including Hjel. They had spotted him, it seemed, and were watching him make his way down toward them.

  Even at this distance, there was something odd about their attire, about the stiff, upright way they held themselves.

  Hjel hurried up and met him, a few yards along the path from the jetty’s age-bleached planks. Tight smile, an offered clasp. “You’re awake.”

  “Very much so.” Looking past the young sorcerer’s shoulder at the others. He didn’t take the offered hand. “These friends of yours?”

  They were corpses—the corpses of large men, wrapped head-to-foot in grave swaddling, no inch of flesh visible. Tiny loose lengths of the bandaging fluttered gaily from their bodies in the wind. It was as if a small cemetery had been exhumed and its inhabitants pinned about with mottled gray-and-cream pennants.

  Hjel cleared his throat. “They are … agents. I’ve had dealings with them in the past. They can be trusted.”

  “Well, if you say so.”

  The dispossessed prince took his hand urgently. “They’ll take you where you need to go, Gil. Believe me, I sailed with them once myself. There’s nothing to fear.”

  “You trying to get rid of me?” Ringil worked up a small grin. “Was it so bad last night?”

  Hjel’s grip tightened. “I would keep you with us if I could. You must know that. But there are forces unsheathed here that I have no power to command.”

  “Unsheathed, yes. Rather like my sword this morning—the steel one, I’m talking about now. See anything you liked, did you?”

  Hjel let go of his hand. Took a step back. “I am not your enemy.”

  “You aren’t behaving very much like my friend.”

  “Gil, you haven’t understood. Something brought you here. I can see it, it breathes through you. The cold legions wrap around you already. There is power engraved and tempered in the blade you carry. I can’t read what’s written there, but—”

  “I am Welcomed in the Home of Ravens and Other Scavengers in the Wake of Warriors,” Ringil recited for him, hollowly. “I am Friend to Carrion Crows and Wolves. I am Carry Me and Kill with Me, and Die with Me Where the Road Ends. I am not the Honeyed Promise of Length of Life in Years to Come, I am the Iron Promise of Never Being a Slave.”

  It was a rough, clunky translation, according to Archeth, and clunkier still here and now, glossed across into the archaic marsh Naomic so that Hjel would understand. But still the words awoke a faint chill in Ringil’s veins as he spoke them.

  He guessed from Hjel’s face that the sorcerer prince was having a similar reaction.

  “That’s its dedication?”

  “That’s its name,” Ringil told him flatly.

  Hjel swallowed. “You must go. I can’t help you here. I will help you, that’s coming, I see it clearly enough. But not here. Not now. It’s too much. If the Black Sail has come in like this, then the storm is building, and it’s all we can do to ride it out. I can no more refuse this than a gull can fly in the face of a hurricane.”

  Behind him, one of the cerement-wrapped figures moved silently up onto the path, closing in. Hjel either caught the flicker of Ringil’s gaze or sensed the motion at some other level. He half turned, turned back, took Gil’s hand in both of his, raised it to his lips.

  “You will come back. We will have time. I’ll teach you the ikinri ’ska.”

  “I know you will.”

  The wrapped corpse was at Hjel’s shoulder now, looming. The breeze picked at its windings, set up rippling patterns in the loose cloth tongues. Ringil thought he saw the mica glint of eyes somewhere deep in the gap between bandages across the face, but he could have been mistaken. Where the mouth should have been, a single gauze binding was pulled broad and tight, and something flickered behind it as the thing speaks.

  “Is this going to take long?”

&nb
sp; Impossible to say what the voice sounds like. It cuts across the wind with iron force, but there are hinted textures to it as well—amusement seems uppermost, and a certain weary patience, but Ringil knows his grip on those salients will slip away just as his image of the creature at the crossroads is already dream-dim and fading. He will be left with the same fumbling sense of detail lost.

  “We’re done,” he said curtly, freeing his hand from Hjel’s. “We can go.”

  “Gil, I’ll be waiting for you.”

  “Good.”

  He looks away along the wind-plucked fjord waters. He held down a spike of unreasonable jealousy. That what was for him a dead memory, Hjel had yet to look forward to.

  The grave-clad thing makes a diplomatic noise in its throat. “There is a tide to catch.”

  Ringil nodded, eyes still on the water. “Then get me to my berth.”

  He still doesn’t know what a tide is, except that it presages change.

  But change will be enough for now.

  In the dory, watching the wrapped figures bend silently over their oars, he felt it begin—the creeping shift of the Margins, Seethlaw’s Gray Places, call them what you will, the seeping through like cold marsh water, washing away anything fixed that could be told out like a tale, bringing instead the endless expanse of untold possibilities, scuttling like spiders, beckoning for attention, for momentary existence at the corners of his gaze. He turned and looked back to the shore, where Hjel stands—or does not, the strand is empty—on the aged jetty boards.

  He sees others, standing there, too.

  Three more figures, one slight, one broad and bulky, one gaunt and tall. Flickery and gray, like Hjel, but where the dispossessed prince stands erect and motionless as he fades, these seem to dart about as if tethered and anxious to be free.

  The cold legions wrap around you …

  The sky is changing overhead, boiling something up—it looks like a storm, but is ominously silent. The rowers ignore it, and their captain makes no comment—Ringil held on for one final moment to the cold, hard certainty he’d had on waking and then he let go and it’s gone, like a fish in the water. He looks up and there’s the sensation of tilting.

  The cold legions …

  On the jetty, as if at a signal, the three restless, gray-candle-flame figures break suddenly loose and streak out across the water, like the shadows of cloud blowing by overhead. Ringil watches numbly as they chase the boat, as they close on the stern, as they slip aboard and wrap tight around him with a shock like a cold-water bath.

  And are gone.

  The black-rigged caravel looms; a rope boarding ladder is hanging over the side. There’s a shiver to the whole vessel, as if it, too, has been wrapped tightly in something that’s now fraying and fluttering in the rising wind.

  Ringil stands, takes one last look back at the empty jetty. Then he grabs hold of the ladder, and hauls himself up the sagging, damp-rope rungs to see what’s waiting at the top.

  CHAPTER 26

  ddly, the only thing Egar felt now was an icy calm.

  As if everything around him—the cracked and decaying frame of the temple by night, the desolate, dust-crunch emptiness of the place—had only ever been a mask, and now its nocturnal wearer cupped hand to visage, doffed the disguise, and stood grinning feral in the gloom.

  As if he’d been expecting it all along, this dwenda.

  It came slowly down the stairs above them, coruscating blue fire moving behind the balustrade, the hinted dimensions of a dark figure at its heart. It seemed to be singing.

  At his back, a choked curse from Harath.

  Egar’s eyes never left the blue light. He let go of the girl’s hand, shook it loose with a single sharp motion. Measured the angles.

  Get this right, Dragonbane.

  “Harath, these things are fast,” he called in Majak. “Get yourself a lance off that wall, and get ready. Go!”

  He whirled and sprang, to the wall and the two staff lances still leaned there where Harath’s former comrades had never had the chance to grab them. Soft rush of cloth at his side as Harath moved with him—and suddenly he was glad, so very glad of the younger man’s speed. He snatched one of the lances. Smooth wood grain across his palm and the rolling weight of the thing—he felt his lips split in a snarl of joy at the feeling. Heft and spin, one-handed, two-handed and round and—

  The dwenda stood before him.

  —block!

  Like a shriek through him as he saw the shadow blade come leaping. The creature had to have vaulted right over the balustrade, hit the ground soft and silent, and straightened up barely a yard away. The impact of sword against staff shivered through him, stung his grasp. He grunted with it, tilted down, levered the blow away.

  Harath swung in, yelling, from the right.

  The dwenda caught it, swung about, snake-swift. The dark blade dripped an arc of blue fire through the air. Smashed the Ishlinak’s attack away.

  “Motherfucker!”

  Harath’s yell of surprise—he’d not been expecting the strength. Egar had scant time for sympathy. He bellowed and thrust, pike style, low, at the dwenda’s knees. The blue fire was down to tracery now, they were facing a figure made of dark, etched with the flicker of lightnings, but for all that shaped like a man.

  And a man, well—you can always kill a man.

  The dwenda shrieked at him and leapt the thrust, put its sword blade through the air in a sweeping slice at head height. Egar swayed back, felt the whicker of air past his cheek. He circled out, away from Harath, try to bracket this fucker, and the dwenda came down cat-like, soft crunch as it hit the dusty floor. It wore the same smooth, featureless helmet he’d seen at Ennishmin, now swinging back and forth, questing, like some blunt slug’s head detecting a threat. The same one-piece suit of what looked like shining leather but—Egar knew from bloody experience—resisted edged weaponry like mail.

  “Bracket the fucker!” bellowed Harath, like he’d just thought of the tactic himself. And launched himself forward.

  The dwenda twisted to meet the attack. Clang as the shadow sword met the blade on the end of the staff lance, grunt from the Ishlinak as he felt the impact. Still, he looped back, trapped the sword point high. Egar saw the moment, fell off it like a cliff, and rushed in screaming. He didn’t bother with blades, rammed the staff before him at chest height instead. The dwenda must have sensed the attack, but Harath had it overextended. A desperate side-kick flung out to hold Egar back, but he’d put everything he had into the rush, and the dwenda’s aim was off. He took the glancing kick in the belly, nearly puked from the force of it, did not let it stop him. He collided with the dwenda and they both went sprawling. A slim black-clad arm whipped out for his throat—he battered it aside with a lucky swipe of the staff lance. The dwenda shrilled. It was a cry he knew, it was distress, and his heart went black with joy at the sound. He smothered with his weight. A sword pommel hammered him in the kidneys—the world went stumbling around him, little points of light in the gloom, he drew ragged breath and shrieked down at the blunt head under him.

  “Oh, you cunt!”

  Cocked a fist, but as he did Harath stepped in and drove his staff lance down into the thing’s throat. Full-throated berserker bellow behind the stroke, he twisted the blade and leaned his full weight on it. The dwenda shrilled again, shuddered and thrashed like a gaffed fish …

  Lay still.

  Blood pooled out from under the neck. Egar smelled the spiced alien reek of it as he reeled upright from the corpse.

  “Nice one,” he rasped, and nearly fell over again. Harath stuck out an arm to steady him.

  “Easy, old man.” Sucking breath. “What the fuck was that?”

  Egar shook himself, wet-dog-like. “Tell you later. C’mon, there’ll be more of them. Let’s get out of here.”

  He cast about for the girl, who had pressed herself up against the wall, the back of one hand jammed to her mouth to stop a scream. To her credit, he reckoned she hadn’t mad
e a sound. It figured, he supposed. You were a slave, you learned fast enough not to raise your voice or voice what you felt. You learned how little it mattered, how little it would get you outside of pain.

  He gathered up the staff lance in one hand, grabbed her by the wrist with the other. Grinning a little crazily, blood still up. She stared back at him above her hand, wide-eyed with a fear too general for him to feel good about. For a sliced moment, he saw himself through her eyes—hulking, grim, the talisman-tangled hair, the bared teeth, the sprawled corpse at his feet.

  “Go down just like men, these angels,” he told her briskly, unable to put the grin away. “Nothing to it. Let’s go.”

  They went.

  But at the second turn of the stairway, a long, low wolf-howl seeped across the air, somewhere away in the heart of the building. It froze them, midstep.

  And a second cry, answering.

  “Hunt’s on,” Egar snapped. “Back to the rope. Harath, come on!”

  But Harath was staring downward, not toward the sound.

  “Egar. Look, man! Look!”

  On the floor at the bottom of the stairs, the felled Ishlinak were twitching and stirring.

  Not Elkret. Alnarh, and the other one.

  The dead men. Waking up.

  Egar took it in with a bleak lack of surprise.

  “Run,” he recommended.

  BACK ALONG THE GALLERY, DOUBLE-TIMING, AND HE SAW HOW THE glirsht mannequins below ran and glistened with flickering blue fire, like upjutting teeth in some monstrous jaw, alive with luminescent saliva. He thought he could feel the whole building tightening down around them, the jaws snapping closed, swallowing them. Like back in the rock tomb all over again, and the flaring terror of dying enclosed.

  Glance back at Harath, and he saw the feeling mirrored there in the younger man’s eyes. Fear strummed him like a lute chord, hung in the air like a palpable thing.

  This is not mine.

  It hit him as they headed down the stairway at the other end—a vague understanding, slippery in his grasp. This was not his fear. His blood was up, he’d killed dwenda before, and in tighter straits than these, he could still feel the faint, giddy traces of exhilaration from the fight. The grin was still on his face, still stitching back his cheeks. Fear might come later, as that savage pulsing ebbed, but this …