The Cold Commands (v5.0) (html)

by Richard K Morgan - [A Land Fit for Heroes 02]

  Torch glow at the far end of the wall.

  Egar hooked both hands into the crack, jammed his feet in below, made a braced sideways V with his body, and hauled himself up the crack. Sharp pinch of the stonework against his toes—the soft-sole boots he’d worn for the occasion were thin, and he had to angle his feet downward almost vertically to fit the confines of the crack. The torches rounded the corner and the two watchmen came ambling along the wall in companionable quiet. Apparently they’d run out of banter. And he was still less than ten feet off the ground. If either of them took the trouble to glance upward …

  He worked his way higher, as close to silently as he could. Finger-width chunks of the fractured stone gave a little under his grip, made a tiny grating sound. Shit, shit … Sweating palms, powdering stone under the pads of his fingertips. He hurried his hold past the loose section—the haste undid him, one foot slipped out of the crack and he hinged around and out.

  Fuck!

  He forced one hand fully into the crack, closed it up into a fist, and twisted it sideways. The ragged stone bit into his flesh as the hand-jam took his weight. He hung there, teeth gritted, twelve feet off the ground, and tried to quiet his breathing as the guards walked by underneath.

  Which they did. Right on by.

  He let them get a decent distance beyond before he moved. Then, working as swiftly as he could without noise, he worked his loose foot back into the crack, loosened off the hand-jam into a more conventional hold, and climbed the rest of the wall without incident. He came over the crenellated top and found Harath seated with his back to the battlement, as relaxed as if he’d come up here to get some sun.

  He sank down next to the younger man, breathing hard. Harath glanced sideways at him.

  “All right?”

  Egar held up his fist in the bandlight and spotted the tiny black trickle of blood. He licked it away, sucked the ragged edges of the torn flesh clean.

  “Fine.”

  “They see you?”

  “Yeah, they saw me. They said they’d give us an hour inside as long as we didn’t break anything. You going to show me this fucking hole in the roof, or what?”

  THE INSIDE OF THE TEMPLE HAD A MUSTY, STONE-DUST SMELL THAT reminded Egar of rock tombs he’d ransacked in Dhashara as a younger man. He kept expecting caskets, raised stone biers, or mummified remains racked in the walls. Instead, the spaces were broad and high and empty. Detritus crunched underfoot, but it was the leavings of decades without occupancy—stone and plaster powder fallen from the cracked ceilings, rat turds and grit and the tiny dried corpses of spiders. Somewhere, he could hear the sporadic drip of water falling in from the roof or some damaged cistern in the upper levels. There were a lot of holes up there like the one they roped in through; damage done by the same eruption that had cracked the walls. You could look up as you passed beneath and see the stars in the gaps.

  Old, denied gods held up the ceilings.

  “Remind you of anybody?” Harath whispered, nodding at one looming figure.

  Egar glanced up at the muscled torso, the shoulder weighed down with horse tackle, the short, squared-off blade in the upraised hand, barely a knife at all. The tight-lipped, somber warrior face and beard.

  “Yeah, Urann—without the teeth.”

  “Should think himself lucky he’s got any face at all. They tore up some of the others in here so bad, you can hardly tell who they were meant to be.”

  Egar nodded, mostly to himself. It was pretty much the way of things, wherever the imperial writ ran. The Revelation didn’t like competition.

  They slipped past under the empty stone gaze of the statue. Harath gestured left—shallow stone steps, leading up. They took them two at a time, knives drawn for anyone they might happen to meet at the top.

  Nothing. Shadows and dust. Tall, wood-paneled doors twice the height of a man, riddled with dry rot, wedged ajar on the gritty, detritus-strewn floor.

  “This opens onto a gallery over the central hall,” Harath told him when they got there. “Gallery runs right around. Get a good view from up there.”

  Egar nodded. He gripped one of the doors at its edge, decided moving it would make too much noise, and inserted himself sideways in the existing gap.

  “Deep breath,” said Harath judiciously.

  It took rather more than that. The effort of holding his belly tight made Egar’s eyes water, and he still scraped himself on the door edge, scraped the door open a farther grating inch, before he popped out the other side. He stood statue-still, teeth gritted, blade in hand, waiting to see if they’d been heard.

  Harath came sveltely through after him.

  The gallery was, as promised, a grand affair, sweeping round the hall fifteen feet up, broad and balustraded. Bandlight seeped in through tall windows long ago boarded up. Egar crept up to the balustrade in a crouch and peered through. Below him, he saw an expanse of the same derelict, debris-speckled stone flooring as in the previous chamber. Some remnant altar up at one end, looked like it hadn’t seen use in a century, couple of squat statues standing around elsewhere, a few long wooden benches and …

  He frowned. His gaze went back to one of the figures. He saw now there were five of them, four in a rough ring, the fifth more or less central …

  Like something he’d once—

  Height of a small woman or a child. Crude stonework, the facial features barely picked out. Stubby arms outspread as if for balance. Like mannequins for arrow practice, but dark and unyielding and dumped to floor height.

  The memory cascaded—filtering soil of familiarity, and then the big rocks of recall, falling in his head.

  Harsh gray light.

  Some kind of beacon for the dwenda. Archeth, the morning following the skirmish, one boot on the tumbled figure lying facedown in the swamp. She was kicking at the thing with her heel, some monotonous residual anger working itself out. The wound across her temple was cleaned and livid in the thin morning light. The marsh dwellers made them, way back when. Forms a link, somehow. Something to do with the kind of stone they used.

  He nudged Harath. “Where’d those come from?”

  “Where’d what c—” The Ishlinak saw where he was pointing. “Oh. Beats me. They only had two last time I was in here. Pretty cheap shit by the look of it. Worse carving than the Voronak, and that’s saying something.”

  “It’s glirsht,” Egar said absently. “Naom stone. They’ve got them set out like … that’s got to be … compass points, right?”

  The younger man shrugged, sniffed. “Could be. You want to see where they keep the slaves or not?”

  “Yeah, yeah.”

  But he followed Harath along the gallery and through another decaying doorway with a lot of backward glances. And even after they left the hall, the squat black stone statues sat in his mind’s eye like evil little dolls.

  CHAPTER 19

  fter a while, the cormorants seem to tire of his company. They hop ungainly off the rock they’ve all been sharing, disappear one by one into the depths below. The last one cocks its head back at him before it dives. Utters a parched croak that might be farewell, and is gone. Ringil raises the flask after them in salute.

  Puts it to his lips and finds it empty.

  No wonder they left.

  For a while, he resists the obvious implication in that. The rock is oddly pliant and comfortable beneath him, there seems no reason to—

  Well, apart from that queasy, gray-white patch of radiance seeping through at the sky’s eastern edge.

  Something’s on its way, Gil.

  Best if you’re not around for it to trip over when it arrives.

  He makes the effort and gets to his feet. Swaying a little with the sudden height it gives him. He peers downward after the cormorants, gets nothing for his trouble but a vague gloom and the rising reek of fouled seawater. He shrugs. The fact that they were seabirds and he isn’t doesn’t seem to matter that much in the end. He takes the long step forward and plunges downward after the
m. Splashes into the—

  Not water exactly, it’s too sparse and fleeting for that. But for scant moments he thinks he sees bubbles rising through it, his breath ascending in a milky trail toward a surface stirred silver by his entry above. There’s a brief, chilly prickling, like the splash of cold water thrown in his face, and then something lunges sharkish at him out of the murk.

  Fuck!

  He catches fragments of a glimpse—a circular mouth, dilated wide enough to swallow his head whole, the unbroken ring of a single taut lip rolled back and concentric rings of teeth erect in the throat beyond. It’s the akyia, the thing that Seethlaw and Risgillen called the merroigai. Behind the nightmare head, the hint of a lithe, approximately human body bisecting into long, coiling limbs fronded with fins. A sleekly muscled arm, darting out, one clawed hand grasping for him, perhaps to save him from the fall—but he shrinks from it like a child from the clutch of the Marsh Wraith, and the fall takes him on.

  Deeper yet.

  If there was ever a surface above him, it’s long gone now. The darkness presses around like some giant constricting serpent out of legend. Breathing is an effort, forcing him to shallow intake through trembling lips. His eyes ache from peering into the black, but something will not allow them to close. The sense that something is coming has not left him—he feels it plummeting down behind him, vast, shadowy, jaws agape. And he’s pinned, less falling than hanging from some constructed torture table whose shape and extent he cannot yet see.

  Pale and luminous, something else looms up out of the depths.

  For a couple of shivery moments, he thinks it might be a jellyfish, one of the giant ones that wash up on the shores at Lanatray when the summers have been stormy. He remembers abruptly—himself at eight years old, alone, as he increasingly was, walking dazedly on rain-damp sand among humped and shivery-translucent mounds that rose almost as high as he was tall. For a few eerie moments in that early-morning light, before a fast-growing hardheaded pragmatism set in, he believed—wanted to believe—these might be the quivering, fled souls of whales taken by the harpoon off the Hironish isles.

  They were not.

  And this, now—he shakes himself back to the moment—is not a jellyfish.

  It’s a stone.

  It seems to settle with this recognition, bobbing about at his feet with dog-like attachment. It wants to be friends. A softly gleaming chunk of masonry the size of a big man’s chest, inscribed across the top of one facing with letters in old Myrlic script. Ringil tilts his head a little and deciphers the lettering:

  … and the Keys of a City greater than …

  Like something you’d see on the walls of some ruined temple in the older, marsh end of town, some eerie once-isolated shrine now drowned in a sea of modern housing as Trelayne’s burgeoning outer districts spread—some of the stonework there is very old, it predates the Naomic ascendancy by centuries.

  … the Keys of a City …

  The stone startles upward, as if hauled on a ship’s cable by weary men. Knee height, a hesitant bob or two, and then rising again, a hound called off by its real master after some case of mistaken identity. Perhaps, he thinks with blurry imprecision, the words are not intended for him to read at all, and this conjunction of man and building block is just some mis-stroke of destiny or demonic intent, a sword skating off a shield it’s supposed to cleave, an axman’s sure-footed brace slipping on mud, and down he goes on his arse before the cut can land. A life spared where no mercy should be looking down, a city sacked where it should stand against the besieging horde—an error in the Book of Days, some shit like that.

  In his mind, he builds a suitably dismissive shrug, but finds he’s shivering too much to give it physical form. His body is ceasing to feel like anything he owns or has much control over.

  This time, it occurs to him, he might really be dying.

  The chunk of masonry comes level with his head, and wobbles there a moment. Blind impulse—as realization catches up, he finds he’s grabbed it. Is now hugging the worn-smooth contours of the lettered stone. He travels upward through the black, with a force that tugs and aches in his shoulder joints. The stonework is chilly against his face, the carved characters print their patterns into his flesh, he feels his body and legs rise devoid of weight until he hangs horizontally out from the stone like a windblown pennant at the mast.

  The black around him is graying out.

  A bruise-colored sky billows into being overhead, spreads itself to the horizon like a briskly snapped-out blanket.

  He falls out of it.

  Catches the sudden reek of salt water on the way down, the scent of fresh-cut kitchen herbs out of childhood memory …

  He hits a surface that gives soggily under his weight. Water presses up from the ground and soaks through his clothes. He blows some of it, bitter and black-tasting, out of his mouth. Turns his head a little so he can breathe. Understanding catches up with the sense impressions of before.

  He lies full length in a marsh, cold and clinging to a solitary chunk of stone.

  Oh well …

  Something stalks over his head like the fingers of a hand. He knows at once what it is, flails out with instinctive revulsion and flings the soft body away from him. Insistent squirming under his own body now, somewhere below his ribs, floundering panic—fuck! fuck!—and then the hot scissoring of jaws through his shirt and into his flesh as he rolls too late. A gossamer nuzzling at his neck, more soft, exploratory fingers. He swipes the touch away, comes frantically up on his knees. Cobwebs everywhere, plastering his arms, thick on the marsh grass around him like yards and yards of rotted gray muslin, he’s in the burrow, he’s landed right on top of the fucking thing.

  He staggers to his feet, casts about, panting.

  Rips loose sword, scabbard, cloak. Flings them away.

  Brushes himself down with brutal strokes. Marsh spiders are communal, fiercely territorial, grow to a foot across if you’re unlucky. A couple of bites from a big one is usually enough to finish a grown man. Ringil turns a taut full circle about, airheaded and struggling for balance as his feet shift and sink in the slippery springy turf and the ooze. The bite in his belly stings like scalding. He feels the slow, hot creep of the poison under the skin. He peers hard in the poor light, wishing he had a torch. Thinks he sees movement amid the coarse cobweb coatings and the marsh grass, but can’t be sure.

  He gets his breath back with an effort.

  At his feet, the spider that bit him lies half crushed by his weight and flexing feebly. It’s the size of a man’s head. He stares numbly at it for a couple of seconds, then stamps down with convulsive anger until it dies.

  It’s all the energy he can summon. He stands swaying. The poison creeps some more in his belly, seems to be spreading. He rubs reflexively at the wound, then wishes he hadn’t. Searing acid bites under the skin.

  The marsh stretches featureless to the horizon. Thickly cobwebbed marsh grass in every direction, and an icy winter wind, knifing at his ears.

  Great. Just fucking great.

  He picks his way carefully over to his fallen sword and cloak, picks each item up in cautious turn and looks it over. He shakes three more fist-sized spiders out of the cloak’s folds, finds another crawling on the scabbard and flicks it off. Stands a moment to make sure they all scuttle away. Then he fits the cloak across his shoulders—fighting the wind for possession—and fastens it there, hangs the Ravensfriend on his back once more, and stares defiantly around.

  He reckons the cobwebs look somewhat thinner off to his left.

  He starts walking.

  Behind him, the abandoned chunk of masonry sits ringed in black water and offers its words to the empty sky.

  … the Keys of a City greater than …

  IT MIGHT BE THE POISON, MIGHT NOT. IN THE GRAY PLACES, WHO can tell?

  He begins to hear a voice shouting down from the clouds, hoarse with anger but somehow soft as fine wool on his fingertips at the same time.

  Just l
ook at him down there …

  Just look at him down there …

  A female voice, or maybe something that knows how to imitate one, more or less. Faintly, eerily familiar. It comes and goes with the wind, seems to rush past him in sudden gusts, and then rush back. Ringil spins tiredly about, trying to face it.

  … look at him …

  The standing stones begin to flicker in and out of being around him, huge misshapen bars on some jail cell built for trolls, a circular prison that keeps pace with him as he walks. They chop the marsh horizon in segments for him, stand for a couple of soggy heartbeats, rising solidly out of the cobwebbed marsh grass, then vanish as he lurches toward them. After a while he learns to ignore the effect, much as you have to with so much else in the Gray Places.