The Cold Commands (v5.0) (html)

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

  But:

  “Admiral Sang’s … spies … are less than wholly reliable.” She trod warily. “They’ve been known to exaggerate claims before.”

  “As has the old bastard himself. Yes, all right, Archeth, I know you don’t like him.” Abruptly, Jhiral was on his feet again, pacing. “But I’ve read the reports, and I don’t think this is Sang beating the drum. We’ve seen this before, after all. Those mercantile little shits up north can’t afford a war right now any more than we can, and they know it. But it won’t stop them farming the unpleasantries out to private shipmasters and then taking a tithe on the booty it brings in. Their coffers fill up with plunder from imperial cargo, their diplomats shake their weasel heads in sorrow and deny all knowledge. And meantime, as if we didn’t have enough to worry about down in Demlarashan and up at Ennishmin, we have to raid the treasury again to build navy pickets, or risk losing our own trade lanes to League competition.”

  “Maybe Admiral Sang is just looking for some new warships.”

  “I already told you I don’t think it’s that.” Trace of a growl in his voice now.

  “Besides which there must be a whole constellation of League trade interests on land who don’t want any kind of war. The slavers to name but one. The League aren’t necessarily bound to listen to what the shipmasters want. They—”

  “Archeth, will you stop building castles in the air!”

  “I”—before she could stop herself—“trust Sang about as far as I could throw his fat arse. He’s not reliable.”

  “Oh, and the fucking Helmsmen are?”

  Suddenly he was in her face. Hands clamping down on her shoulders, thumbs hooking in, cabled strength in the arms. She was forcibly reminded that if Prince Jhiral, heir apparent, had never seen anything of the war against the Scaled Folk or his father’s earlier campaigns, had in fact never struck a sword blow in anger his whole life—well, neither then had he missed a day’s combat schooling for anything other than sickness since he was twelve years old. There was a lot of muscle under the ocher-and-black draped shoulders, a lot of trained and channeled power.

  But even with the krinzanz jitters, she could have put Bandgleam in his throat faster than he could blink.

  Could have …

  She met his eyes.

  Perhaps he sensed it. He let her go. Straightened up.

  “Archeth, you were at An-Naranash. You saw how it went down.” His voice was back to regal, council-chamber calm. He gestured, throwaway, with one open palm. “All that Helmsman burbling, months to cross the desert, all the diplomatic wrangling with the nautocrats in Shaktur, the lake tolls and bribes, and what do we end up with? A mausoleum on stilts, centuries deserted, stripped of anything even remotely valuable.”

  She remembered. The slow-dying excitement in her guts as they swung in closer to An-Naranash’s silent, towering bulk, and she saw the extent of the dilapidation. The clenched, sickening disappointment as she boarded at one massive, barnacle-crusted leg, climbed the endless damp-reeking stairwells, and prowled the echoing gloom of spaces as abandoned as anything she knew at An-Monal.

  “It cost us half a million elementals to mount that expedition, Archeth. All because the Helmsmen said go. It’s one of the biggest mistakes my father ever made. Do you really expect me to follow in his footsteps? Is that what you want?”

  For that, she had no answer.

  Because you forced the Shaktur expedition, Archidi, and you know it. It wasn’t the Helmsmen, not really. You squeezed it out of Akal in his dying melancholy and regret, funds and men he could ill afford in the postwar mess, a paid penance, an old man’s attempt to atone—the unspoken bargain that she would no longer torment him with the tales of what she saw at Vanbyr, if he underwrote the expedition and gave her the command. That she would, in some unclear fashion, absolve him.

  Strange how you could become a man’s god without noticing.

  Akal died before she returned. It was probably just as well—she’d been in no fucking mood for absolution when she got back.

  “Archeth, look.” Akal’s son, conciliatory now, leaning back toward the dissolute aristo loucheness he wore so well. “I’m not saying we don’t take this seriously. Go do some reading, by all means. I know how much you love that clerkish shit. Chase up this changeling fairy tale in the Indirath M’nal. Talk to Angfal, if you can drag anything out of him. But for the Prophet’s sake, cool off. Go get drunk, chew some krin—fuck it, get yourself laid, Archeth. Go play with that curvy little Trelayne trollop I gave you last year. Bet you still haven’t touched that, have you?”

  In a way, she was almost relieved. It was a side of Jhiral she found far easier to deal with, a role he’d been playing since his early teens, a thrust to which she knew all the smart parries and ripostes because she’d been making them for a decade or more. A decadence you could comfortably despise.

  But she wondered, not for the first time, what he armored himself against with it.

  Maybe it’s not armor—maybe he just fucking likes it. Revels in it. Ever think of that?

  Ishgrim sprang into her head, pale portions of flesh that begged for hands to cup and grasp. Long, smooth limbs to revel among. Bet you still haven’t touched that, have you? The smart bet, my lord. Whatever mannered game Jhiral was playing with her over Ishgrim, he was winning it hands down.

  She pushed herself upright off the arched root. Drew a long breath.

  “I shall do some reading, my lord,” she said.

  “Good. Then we can leave it there, I think. The Helmsman should—”

  “If,” Anasharal said, out of the empty green-fragrant air, like any divine visitation. “I might interject.”

  Emperor of All Lands and Kiriath half-breed semi-immortal—their gazes snapped together like those of small children called in for dinner by an unfamiliar voice. Even Archeth, elder sister and halfway expecting this …

  She built a shrug, elaborately casual.

  “You’ve been listening to us?”

  “You truly have a talent for stating the obvious, daughter of Flaradnam. Manathan did mention it. He puts it down to your muddied half-breed blood. But oddly enough, you have still not spotted the very obvious solution to the impasse you face.”

  “There’s no impasse here,” said Jhiral, mustering some regal disdain.

  “I was not talking to you, Jhiral Khimran.”

  It was an affront that would have earned any human speaker a swift and probably fatal trip to the palace dungeons. The Helmsmen—well, over the centuries the Khimran dynasty had learned to adjust. You didn’t bite the hand that fed your power, for all it might be taloned and demonic beneath that urbane, avuncular surface.

  “Perhaps you’d better explain,” Archeth said hastily. “What impasse?”

  “The impasse you will face, daughter of Flaradnam, when you’ve done your reading, and you’ve satisfied yourself that an expedition to find An-Kirilnar is indeed necessary, and you still face the same strictures from this stuttering apology for an Empire’s depleted treasury.”

  “Yeah, maybe you can just point us to a handy pot of gold,” sneered Jhiral.

  Again, the beat of silence Archeth was learning to interpret as reproach. The icy schoolmaster tone.

  “In point of fact, Jhiral Khimran, that is exactly what I am going to do. So once again, it would behoove you to quell your sense of throne room entitlement and listen carefully to what I’m about to say.”

  CHAPTER 21

  ome unmeasured time later, still alone, but roughly on the bearing the ghost claiming to be his mother gave him, he stumbles across a paved track through the marsh.

  It’s not much to look at—scuffed and worn white stone, muddied black in the grain, a couple of feet wide at best, almost covered over by the marsh grass growing back in from margins long untrimmed and up between the cobbles. He shoves back a tuft with one boot, examines the paving curiously. It looks a lot like the paths through the Glades district in Trelayne, the paths leading among other pl
aces to the gates of his home—or at least the way they’ll probably look a thousand years hence.

  Without Ishil’s guidance, it would have been easy to miss this.

  He looks left and right, shrugs, and picks the direction that seems to lead closer to the scribble of firelight on the sky ahead. Almost unnoticed, some tiny increment of satisfaction thaws and drips inside him. The going is easier now, no more soggy give with each step. The stone sounds firm under his heels, pushes back solidly as he walks, and though the cobwebs sweep in sometimes on either side, they never touch or cross the track.

  Instead, eventually, he finds skulls.

  Scores of them, maybe hundreds, dotted grinning out across the marsh on either side of the path. Each skull sits perfectly upright, atop a low tree stump whose wood has gone gray and cracked with age. A hundred and more leveled pairs of eye sockets, rinsed through with the cold wind, surveying the marsh horizon. But for that perfect sentinel rigor in every hollow gaze, these might be inventive cairns, built to the dead of some battlefield long forgotten, the fallen warriors of some race that preferred not to pile cold stones on the face of their loved ones in death.

  But they are not cairns.

  Ringil slows reluctantly to a halt where one of the skulls sits a couple of paces off to the left of the path. It still has hair, a fall of long dead gray strands plastered across the skull and over one eye, like magically straightened cobweb. He squats and brushes the hair aside, touches the bone behind, pushes gently against one yellowed temple. There is no give. The skull is cemented to the stump, just as its owner’s still-living head once was. He’s seen it before; it’s Aldrain sorcery, a favorite terror tactic of the Vanishing Folk wherever humans tried to defy them. Seethlaw once told him that the heads would live indefinitely provided the stump roots drew water.

  Which makes this the result of either some long-ago drought or a passage of time so colossal Ringil’s sanity reels away from the edge of contemplating it.

  Or Seethlaw lied to you.

  He straightens up with a grimace. It’s a hypothesis he prefers not to entertain. Seethlaw as Aldrain warlord, murderous, cruel and proud, walking amid flickering lightnings, the epitome of the dwenda out of myth, striking down all before him with dispassionate unconcern—that, all that, Ringil can live with. But Seethlaw the dwenda, dishonest and manipulative as any sweet-lipped harbor-end whore …

  Well, then. An immense gulf of time instead, time for even the sorcery of the Aldrain to finally weaken and lose its grip on the forces of decay.

  Here, perhaps, is rationale, and an escape at last. A letting go he can allow himself.

  Perhaps he’s been unable to find Seethlaw in the Gray Places because some vast … tilting … mechanism, something like the long orbits of comets that Grashgal once tried to explain to him on the sleepless eve of battle at Rajal, or wait, wait, simpler, look, some … gargantuan windmill arm in time has swung back up and taken the Vanishing Folk away once more; has opened a gap many hundreds of thousands of years wide and left the Aldrain and all their arts, in some irrevocable fashion, on the far side.

  What would you give to really believe that, Gil?

  What would you give to deny it?

  Oi, Eskiath. You going to stand around here moping forever?

  Ringil jerks around, disbelieving. The stone circle flickers around him like granite lightning, like drilled reflex—once, twice, to the beat of his suddenly elevated pulse.

  Eg?

  It certainly seems so. The familiar barrel-chested bulk is there, the bits of talismanic iron strung in the gray-straggled, tangled hair. The seamed and weathered face, split in a grin. The staff lance jutting up behind his shoulder like a tall and gaunt old friend peering over. From somewhere, this Egar has acquired one steel-capped tooth and a scar across the chin that Ringil doesn’t remember him having, but for the rest, it’s the Dragonbane, large as life and stood there on the path at Ringil’s back, as seemingly solid as the stones that flicker in and out of being between the two of them.

  Egar?

  The figure snorts. You know someone else shows up whenever you’ve got yourself neck-deep in shit and digs you out?

  Weak gesture around. I’m not …

  No? Egar steps forward and grabs him by the shoulders. Fingers dig into his muscles with bruising steppe nomad force. Well, you sure look like shit, Gil. Want to know the truth? You look like a pony on ten days’ gallop and no decent forage. Whoever’s riding you needs to give it a rest.

  Fast thoughts of Dakovash, as swiftly put away. Gone, honest—look.

  No one’s fucking riding me, he drawls.

  That’d be a first, then. The Dragonbane draws him close, crushes him in a bear hug the Egar he knows back in the world would not have allowed himself. Ringil coughs for exaggerated effect, and Egar lets him go. Sets him back at a more accustomed arm’s length and grins. Good to see you again, Gil.

  Yeah, you, too. As with Shend, as with Ishil, he knows he shouldn’t engage but he can’t help it. He’s tired of the detachment, tired of standing aloof. So what if his friends are phantoms now. What you doing here, man?

  The Dragonbane shrugs. Just come to walk with you awhile.

  It’s throwaway, but for just a moment, Ringil sees the seamed brow crease, sees this version of his old friend searching for the memories the Gray Places will not let him have. How did I get here, where is this place, what came before? Ringil curses his own lack of restraint and seeks rapid distraction for them both. He notices a thin silver chain draped over the Dragonbane’s chest, some flattened object swaying gently from the impact of their embrace.

  What’s this, then? Reaching and scooping the object up into his palm. Never had you down for a medallion man.

  Well, you gave it to me, mate.

  Ringil blinks. The flattened disk is a three-elemental piece, struck with the face of Akal the Great and worn dull with age. The ends of the chain are welded into it, and the coin itself looks to have melted badly in the process. During his time in Yhelteth, coins like this would have passed through his hands as often as water for washing. But he can’t remember ever having given one to Egar.

  C’mon, Gil. You know better than this. Doesn’t pay to focus on detail in the Gray Places. Doesn’t pay to question your companions too closely. To wonder what they might really be.

  Or where it’s all leading you.

  He drops his hand, lets the coin swing back against the Dragonbane’s chest. It’s as if the other man’s bulk were suddenly darker and harder, more gnarled oak tree trunk than human flesh. More animate statue than man.

  He staves off a shiver. Manufactures a small, tight smile. Claps the perhaps of Egar on one troll-solid shoulder.

  Want to walk with me, huh? Walk this way, then.

  Yeah, if I could walk that way, I’d be making a living in Madam Ajana’s floor show.

  The old, stupid jokes—always the best. But hearing it drove a spike in behind Ringil’s eyes, and he turned quickly away, blinking and gesturing wide.

  Seen the skulls?

  Yeah. Fucking dwenda, huh?

  Seethlaw flickers through his recollection, cool to the touch and gorgeous, eyes deep with knowing you could drown in.

  Yeah, he agrees. Fucking dwenda.

  OF COURSE, HE LOSES EGAR, JUST LIKE ALL THE OTHERS, BEFORE THEY’VE gone more than a couple of miles. It’s a slower bleed this time, the Dragonbane fading and flickering like a candle in a bad draft, as if there’s some larger storm blowing outside this tented gray sky, and short spiteful gusts can occasionally get in. It lasts for a while, the steppe nomad gone, then abruptly back, as if he’s suddenly thought of some last thing he needs to say, as if he can’t quite make up his mind whether it’s safe now to leave Ringil on his own in this place.

  Here—you still got that dragon-tooth dagger I gave you?

  Ringil pats his sleeve where the weapon rests.

  You want to hang on to that, it’s a good knife.

  I know.


  Ringil rolls with it, because, well, it’s the Gray Places, what else is he going to do? He keeps up a façade of studied calm and normal conversation, pausing when he’s left suddenly alone, picking up the thread again when Egar reappears.

  Poltar the Shaman, yeah, you said.

  The old fuck has it coming, Gil. I mean, if I don’t go back there and gut him for what he did, who will?

  Maybe they’ll get sick of him. When he can’t deliver on the spring rains, or the steppe ghouls show up again despite all his stick-shaking.

  Nobody shakes sticks up there, Gil. That’s a bunch of lizardshit romance some asshole writer at court came up with for one of those Noble-Savages-of-the-Steppe pieces they pack the theaters with down there. Seriously, I am so tired of seeing a bunch of little inkspurts who never built a campfire in their life pontificate about the trials and tribulations of iron-thewed warriors and—