The Cold Commands

by Richard K. Morgan

  Something that had occurred to Egar as well a few times in the last half hour. Not in any worded or well-thought-out form, but still—it had been nagging at him, ever since they found the glirsht statues. A colossal lack of sense, building with every new piece that fell into place. And now he found, oddly, that he had an answer.

  “I think they think they’re angels,” he said slowly.

  “Angels?” Harath spat over the side. “Fucking twats.”

  “Yeah. Tell me about it.”

  CHAPTER 27

  othing in the known world reeks like this.

  Ringil’s seen grown men piss themselves in terror at the smell, seen hardened soldiers turn pale beneath their campaign tans. It is unmistakable. Those who’ve faced it, never forget. Those who haven’t, feed on the handed-down tales, and misrepresent it as a foul stench, which it is not. At sufficient distance, in fact, it’s drowsily pleasant—a sunbaked summertime blend of spice and perfume on the wind, sharp notes of aniseed and cardamom rising through a backdrop of sandalwood and there, right there, the wavering but ever-present hint of scorching …

  Dragon.

  Slammed awake like a cheap tavern door.

  He sat up with the force of it, instant cold sweat, hand groping after a sword hilt nowhere to be found. Breath locked up in his throat, staring around.

  Where the fuck …?

  The shape of his surroundings resolved—he lay in a bunk under a gently tilting ceiling lamp whose flame was turned down low. The fittings of a well-appointed ship’s cabin, painted back and forth with shadows from the tilting lamp. Shelves, a sea chest against one wall, a cramped desk and cushioned chair. The back of the door was hung with a Yhelteth ward against evil, the painted image of some saint or other bordered in tiny significant writings from the Revelation. Above him, he heard the hurrying thud of footfalls across planking, voices calling out. Soft squeaking punt of wood on wood somewhere, a steady rocking.

  He was aboard a vessel, sure, but—

  He hauled himself out of the bunk and sat, elbows on knees, face in hands, memories skipping off the surface of recollection like flung flat stones …

  The fjord. The black-rigged caravel. Rowing out.

  Hjel’s valedictory figure, there on the shore and not. Were there specks of rain in the air? In his eyes?

  The caravel’s cabins had been musty and coffin-cramped. Narrow, unlit spaces supplied only with rough straw mattresses on the floor—retiring to them and trying to sleep was like being buried alive. He’d kept to the decks.

  Crew of cerement-wrapped corpses on deck, all facing into the wind, eloquently silent in his presence. Only the captain speaks to him, and then only to deflect his questions in cold and cryptic monosyllables. What, after all, do the dead have to converse about with the living? He is cargo pure and simple.

  Yeah—cargo to where, Gil?

  A reflexive thought. He reached under the bunk and found his boots, stacked neatly side by side. The Ravensfriend lay scabbarded next to them.

  Who …?

  He was out of the Margins, that much was clear. The cabin around him had that same hard-edged feel he was used to on waking from time in the Gray Places. But …

  More voices from up on deck, shouting. He tipped a glance toward the cabin ceiling as the feet came thumping back the other way. Someone was getting excited up there.

  The reek of dragon washed in stronger. He felt a muscle twitch in his cheek.

  Indistinct instructions called back and forth over his head, and abruptly the whole room tipped. Around the cabin, small items slid and toppled. The lamplight shifted crazily. The Ravensfriend crept out a few inches from under the bunk.

  They were coming about.

  Ringil was dressed and armed and through the door in what seemed like seconds. A broad companionway led up from just beside his cabin. He climbed it at speed, cleared the hatch at the top, spilled out onto the thinly bandlit deck with a little less elegance than he would, on reflection, have liked.

  No one noticed—the rail was lined with crewmen lifting lanterns and staring out into the darkness. Others pressed in behind. Murmured dispute laced the air above their craning heads.

  “… see anything out there anyway?”

  “… smell that?”

  “Could be it’s the Hurrying Dawn. They say this time of year she—”

  “Yeah, like fuck. You and your lizardshit ghost-boat stories.” The skeptical sailor put his head back and yelled into the rigging. “Hoy, Kerish. You got anything up there yet?”

  A laconic negative floated back down to them. Debate resumed.

  “… ever did believe that shit, it’s just not …”

  “… probably a couple of leagues off …”

  “… might be from landward. Like a spice barn or something. We’re pretty far south by now …”

  “… always thought the Hurrying Dawn was—”

  “Look, I’m telling you, my uncle fought at Rajal Beach and he told me himself, that’s what dragons smell like.”

  Ringil took the stage. “He’s right.”

  Heads turned. The boat swayed a couple of times before anyone thought of anything to say. Striped in bandlight through the rigging, Ringil nodded in the direction they’d all been looking.

  “He’s right, that is dragon you can smell. Or, more likely, it’s dragondrift, in which case it’s probably harmless. But I’m still not sure turning us around like this was smart. Who gave the order?”

  The company looked at one another.

  “Fuck’s it to you,” somebody muttered from the rear.

  “Pipe down, Feg, you stupid shit. That’s a paying passenger.”

  “Look at that sword he’s got, man. That’s …”

  “I gave the order.”

  Lightly amused, like footsteps tripping out a dance measure. A voice he knew, but took a moment to place.

  But …

  He turned to face her, aware that he’d been upstaged with exactly the same mannered affect he’d used to make his own entrance. The Lady Quilien of Gris stood a little distance from him, head tilted with inquiry. She had wrapped herself shoulders-to-floor in a smooth gray cloak with a ruff at its neck, her hair was gathered back at the temples in a pair of silver clasps, and she appeared as thoroughly competent now as she had seemed insane in the tavern upper room in Hinerion. She held his eye in the lantern glow, tilted her head the other way with an intent precision that was almost lupine.

  Silence across the deck.

  “It’s good to see you up and about, sir. We were concerned for your health. Tell me, have I committed an error, then, with this change of course?”

  “Not necessarily an error, my lady.” He held her gaze, held down his own unease. “If the ship is yours to command, then it is merely a question of how lucky you feel.”

  Quilien took a couple of paces to one side, still eyeing him up.

  “Would you class yourself an expert in dragons, sir?”

  Ringil shrugged. “Well, I did kill one once.”

  As if someone had just cracked a wasps’ nest onto the deck, the assembled crewmen’s voices rose and buzzed about, jeers and jumbled oaths. The Lady Quilien raised one groomed eyebrow in the midst of it. Ringil opened a hand at her.

  “Not alone. Had a little help.”

  “Such modesty. Perhaps you’d care to—”

  “Reef! Reef to starboard!”

  Bellowed down from the lookout, a panic-stricken edge on it because—Ringil grasping the fact with told-you-so smugness and a nod—this was a reef not marked on any local chart.

  “Reef!”

  The crew boiled about, leapt for the rigging, ran to look for the ship’s officers. Ringil took the opportunity to move up and lean on the vacated rail.

  “It’s not a reef,” he said to no one in particular.

  WHEN THE VAST, FLOATING RAFTS OF PURPLISH BLACK MARINE MUCK first started washing up on western shores in the summer of ’49, no one took it for an invasion.

&
nbsp; It was a shock, sure enough, to see what looked like huge mattresses of tangled, flowering kelp twice taller than a man, piled up along the strand as far as the eye could see. It was problematic for communities who made their living from open access to beaches and coves that were now clogged and covered over, because whatever this stuff was, it didn’t appear you could burn it, harvest it, or eat it. And it was a major inconvenience for shipping, not least when one of these colossal mats drifted into a major harbor mouth or caught in the throat of a useful channel between offshore shoals. The Trelayne sureties funds hiccupped, squabbled over payouts, rewrote their terms. In Yhelteth, by all accounts, the merchant guilds went through something similar. In both the League and the imperial territories, some few dozen affected villages packed up and moved, north or south along the coast, in search of new fishing or rock-pool scavenging grounds. There was a certain amount of small-scale starvation here and there, but not enough to warrant military intervention by either power.

  Up at Strov market, the soothsayers presaged doom—but then they always did.

  And on the abandoned coastal reaches, the purple-black tangled ramparts loomed in trickling quiet, and waited.

  It was almost four months before the first of them hatched out.

  THE LADY QUILIEN OF GRIS LEANED ON THE RAIL AT HIS ELBOW AND watched as they came up on the drift. You could understand the lookout’s error easily enough now. In the darkness, it looked the way any exposed reef would, low-lying in the water, jagged, darkened bulk ripped through with the white of foam where the ocean swells broke across it.

  By now the dragon reek was overpowering.

  “So it was not the Hurrying Dawn after all,” she said conversationally.

  “The Hurrying Dawn is a myth, my lady.” He didn’t look at her. He was busy staring down the memories of the scent. “The usual thing. A doomed Yhelteth spice clipper, driven onto rocks by a master and commander impatient to beat the competition to market in Trelayne. It’s a tale, made up to frighten cabin boys on the midnight watch.”

  “Yes, I believe I’ve heard it. We are not as rural as you might imagine in Gris. The captain called up a sorcerous storm to hurry his passage, did he not? And the Salt Lord drowned him for his presumption, then condemned him to run before the wind with his vessel for all eternity?”

  “Something like that.”

  “And now, by some set of circumstances or other, the same wind is supposed to carry the scent of his lost cargo. It’s a warning to—”

  “It’s a senseless yarn is what it is, my lady. Ignorant chatter to make sense of a world that resists any more robust interpretation.”

  “Chatter that you do not lower yourself to, I take it?” Something like delight trickled into her voice. Dilettante salon sacrilege, he imagined, must be as popular among the upper echelons in Gris as anywhere else. “You reject belief in the Dark Court?”

  Dakovash stalked at the margins of his memory. He held down a shiver.

  “I am, let us say, indifferent to the Dark Court, Lady Quilien. I ask nothing of them, and expect the same courtesy in return. In any case, whether they exist or not, I think it unlikely that such beings would concern themselves with one small cargo vessel and its grubby, spell-chanting captain.” He gestured at the darkened slop of the dragondrift beyond the rail. “And I think that there you are probably looking at the true origin of legends like the Hurrying Dawn.”

  “You’ll not feel it necessary, then”—the delight was still there, rich and thick in her tone—“to offer prayers of thanks to any of the Court? Given your escape from Hinerion before the quarantine came down, I mean.”

  “I’d say that any gratitude I owe belongs to you, my lady.” Gruffly. He didn’t like being in anyone’s debt. “You appear to have been my savior in this. Though I’m at something of loss to understand the exact—”

  “Yes, I know. You must be confused.” Out of the corner of his eye, he thought he saw a small smile playing about her lips. “The last thing you remember, after all, is being aboard a vessel with black sails, crewed by corpses.”

  It jerked him around to face her. Tiny finger of chill at his nape. She looked back at him blandly.

  “At least, you did mutter something along those lines while I watched over you at one point. The ship’s doctor says it must have been delirium. You were running a very high fever when we found you. Some feared it was plague.”

  “As did I. I am doubly indebted to you, then, for bringing me out of Hinerion.”

  “I could hardly leave you as you were—sprawled reeking of cheap alcohol on a pile of trawl nets, alone. You thought perhaps you would drink it away, the plague? Was that the plan?”

  “I thought perhaps I’d try to die drunk.”

  “Such ambition. And this from a dragon-slayer.” The smile was there for certain now, but secret and somehow turned inward around the eyes. “Somewhat misguided as well, since it now seems you did not have the plague after all. Or at least, short of divine intervention, I can see no way for a man to make a full recovery from the disease so rapidly. Can you?”

  “It does seem remarkable,” he said tonelessly.

  Quilien snorted in a very un-lady-like fashion. “No. Remarkable is that when we found you, you’d not already been robbed and stripped naked where you lay. Remarkable is that, despite your apparent lack of interest in your own continued welfare, you were still possessed of that magnificent blade you own.”

  If she was flirting, it was clumsily done, and Ringil could think of no adequate response. Nor did he much like the idea that everything he remembered from the Gray Places had been a fever dream. Recollection would fade anyway, he knew—Seethlaw had speculated that it was the only way humans could cope with the unconstrained probabilities in the Aldrain marches and not go insane—but Ringil still held to a stubborn differentiation between dream and reality. Hjel as a fond but fading memory was something he could live with; Hjel as a figment of his feverish imagination and longings was a lot less palatable. He pushed the thought away. Concerned himself instead with current events.

  “Might I inquire, my lady, where we are bound?”

  “Oh, to Yhelteth.” She gestured at the horizon, as if the lights of the great city might at any moment appear there, painting the sky with pale yellow glimmer. “It suits my eventual purposes well enough to go there, but really, there wasn’t a lot of choice. I arrived at the harbor to see the Marsh Queen’s Favor standing out to sea without me, and half the other vessels along the wharf preparing to cast off. Plague panic everywhere, and me with a sick man in my retinue. This was the first ship, the only ship, in fact, I could persuade to take us aboard. Its destination really was the least of my concerns.”

  Ringil nodded at the approaching drift. “And you’ve time enough for detours.”

  Quilien lounged languidly on the rail, one hip outthrust. She tilted her head and favored him with a sidelong smile. “Well, sir, I confess I am a hopeless addict when it comes to mystery and heroic tales. You and your Black Folk blade, and now, on the same voyage, a floating spice island of the lizard folk? Who could resist seeing something like that?”

  Someone who’s seen it before, he thought about saying. Someone who’s been a little closer to the lizard folk than titillating after-dinner tales.

  Instead, he left her question hanging there, and they watched in silence as the ship maneuvered closer to the drift. Ringil spotted the ragged gashes and hollows in the texture, filled now with seawater that roiled and poured as the matted surface undulated with the sweep of the waves. It was more or less what he’d expected, but he still felt the tension rinse out of him like the last dregs of a hangover.

  Perhaps she did, too. “So this is harmless?”

  “Yes.” He pointed out over the rail, old memories roiling like the water. “You can see where the dragon tore its way out—that long, ragged hollow near the front, the pieces that flap about when the swell hits. The dragon comes first. It’s like a mother bird protecting its brood. The
n there’ll be a couple of hundred smaller hatching gouges farther back where the reptile peons and the higher-caste Scaled Folk came out afterward. Once that happens, the whole raft starts to rot. It loses a lot of its bulk and in the end the currents carry it back out to sea. This has probably been drifting about out here since the early fifties.”

  “You really killed one of these beasts?” She was watching him keenly now, he knew. “With that blade you carry? Now, that is remarkable.”

  “I suppose so. As I said, I did have help.”

  “Even so. Are you not proud?”

  Ringil grimaced. “If you’d seen some of the other things I’ve done with this blade, you’d perhaps be less enamored of my feats.”

  “And perhaps not.”

  Was she rubbing herself against him at the hip? Ringil turned to face her, met her eyes, caught the gleam of saliva on the teeth in her grin.

  “My lady, I don’t quite know how to put this to you gently, so I won’t try. You are wasting your time with me.”

  “Am I?” The grin was still there. “That’s a hasty judgment.”

  Ringil sighed, pressed thumb and forefinger to his eyes. Was he really going to have to fuck this madwoman before they made port?

  “Please don’t consider me ungrateful, my lady. It is simply that I am not made to please your kind.”

  “Perhaps you mistake what my kind is.”

  There was a bite to the words that drew his gaze back to her. She stood a little farther from him now, sober-faced. Had produced a pair of krinzanz twigs from somewhere in the folds of her gray cloak and held them up like an apprentice carpenter offering nails to his master.

  Just what you need, Gil, fresh from your fever.

  He took one anyway, noted that it was expertly rolled, waited for courtesy while she put the other to her lips. A hitherto unsuspected manservant, somewhat hunched, scurried forward from somewhere and offered a low-wick lamp to light each twig. Ringil watched the Lady Quilien tilt her head to the flame, draw deep on the twig until it fired up. There was a curious immobility to her features in the flaring light it made, as if, suddenly, her whole face was a hollow, porcelain mask with nothing behind it but darkness. The servant turned, a twisted black shadow on the margins of the light and offered him the flame. He took it and drew deep.