The Cold Commands (v5.0) (html)

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

  “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. Then 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.

  “You are …” Tightly, holding the breath in. “Too kind.”

  She shook her head, wreathed in exhaled smoke. “It’s your supply. I found it in your things.”

  She met his gaze in silence for a single beat, widened her eyes around pupils already stretched black and broad. Then she burst out laughing.

  The ship butted solidly up against the dragondrift. Ringil heard the eerie scrape of its fronds against the timbers. Crewmen mobbed past, lining the rail again, craning over to look down at what they’d found. Someone yelled for boathooks—voices sounding a little distant now, as the krin came on in his head like cold fire.

  “Ah, Cap
tain.” Quilien gestured with her twig at a tall, richly attired figure approaching across the deck. The smoke ribboned off the motion into the dark. “There you are. And as you can see, our convalescent man of mystery is awake and well. Lacking only for a formal introduction, in fact.”

  The captain bowed, somewhat curtly.

  “Dresh Alannor, master and commander of the Famous Victory None Foresaw.”

  “Uhm, yes.” Alannor. Glades shipping nobility. Fuck. The krinzanz stepped up, greased his response, put a lightened version of the stock Yhelteth accent on his lips. “Laraninthal of Shenshenath, imperial levy, retired.”

  “Indeed?” Dresh Alannor either didn’t believe him or didn’t much care for imperials. But his manners held. “Then we’re honored to have you aboard, sir. I’m glad to see you’re feeling better. My lady, is it your intention to walk the drift?”

  Quilien plumed smoke and looked at Dresh Alannor through it. Something seemed to be amusing her.

  “I’m not a thrill-seeker, Captain. I wished merely to take a few samples.”

  “I think there’ll be no shortage of samples.” Alannor nodded sardonically along the rail, to where the more adventurous of his crew were already lowering a rope ladder. “You can sell dragondrift cuttings for a handsome price in port. We’ll be here awhile.”

  “Then I may as well descend and investigate with your men.”

  “The drift is awash, my lady. And not stable in the water.”

  Quilien took a last drag on her krinzanz twig and pitched it over the side. “Captain, you appear to have misunderstood me. I may not be a thrill-seeker, but neither am I entirely feeble. I have boots, I have a sense of balance. And of course, I would invite you to accompany me.”

  Which neatly took care of any ribald tendencies the crew might have down there. Alannor looked glum, but in the end he was dealing with a wealthy, paying passenger. He sketched another bow.

  “Of course, my lady. Nothing would give me greater pleasure.”

  Ringil watched them go, feeling a wry twist of sympathy for the other man. Bad enough the Alannor family fortunes were such that they still depended on actual seafaring from their scions—but catering to the minor whims of other nobles with paid passage, worse still rural nobles with paid passage …

  Along the ship’s side, Alannor handed his passenger down the rope ladder with schooled grace. He shot a last speculative glance back at Gil, then climbed down after.

  Ringil masked his disquiet behind the ember of the krin twig, drew deep, and leaned impassive on the rail to study the reactions below. There was some catcalling down on the drift when the crewmen saw the Lady Quilien swaying down the ropes—but it damped down fast enough when Alannor stepped onto the ladder after her.

  The Famous Victory was a tight ship, it seemed.

  He didn’t think Dresh Alannor had made him—he certainly couldn’t recall ever meeting the man face-to-face—but memory was an odd thing, and Ringil’s fame in the war years had been pretty widespread. Not to mention his now newly kindled notoriety as the Butcher of Etterkal. And there was no way to know how many days the Famous Victory lacked for journey’s end. With favorable winds, a fast ship might make the run from Hinerion to Yhelteth in less than two weeks, but he didn’t know if this was a fast ship, how long ago it had set sail, or for that matter how its course was being plotted. They might be on a leisurely stopping cruise for all he knew. And given a long enough voyage, who could tell what Alannor might recall.

  Ringil allowed himself a grimace. It was not exactly a recipe for restful convalescence.

  Patience, hero. It was like another voice speaking in his head. One thing at a time.

  He took the advice, whoever it might be from. He smoked slowly, staring down at the sluggish ripple of the drift. The odors swarmed him. The krinzanz performed its customary trick, like some heavy parchment missive unsealed and unfolding in the space behind his eyes.

  Got any suggestions how we do this, then?

  Egar, bellowing between cupped hands as they rode headlong neck-and-neck along the clifftop at Demlarashan, trampling the scattering lines of reptile peons. The relief of the wind on his face, finally chasing out the murderous heat, as he yelled back.

  It was your fucking idea!

  And the awful, sun-burnished gleaming bulk of the dragon as it became aware of them and twisted sinuously about to face the new threat. His heart jammed up into his throat as he understood that this, finally, might be it for Ringil Eskiath, called Angeleyes.

  He never truly deciphered the component grammar of his fears that day—but he came to understand that beyond the terror of dying, and the terror of the scalding, searing dragon’s breath and what it might do short of killing him, there was something else entirely, something far darker, which did not like to be looked at in the light. Something he found inside himself that day, something that would come thereafter when he called for it, but was not often so easy to put away again.

  It was there at Gallows Gap, screaming from his mouth as they charged the reptile advance in the pass. It was there at the siege of Trelayne, screaming inside, filling him, when they threw the Scaled Folk back from the walls.

  Screaming, inside and out. Screaming hard enough that he sometimes thought it must tear him open and let the inside out.

  And sometimes, in his darkest moments, he believed it never stopped screaming. That he had only found some dungeon space deep inside himself to keep it, where it went on screaming forever, into walls that muffled the sound.

  Screaming.

  He blinked, back to the present. There was screaming, a cacophony of desperate yells down there on the dragondrift, jittering torchlight converged at a single point beside the hull. Combat nerves spiked through him, his hand already halfway to the Ravensfriend. He craned over the rail, tried to see down to where the crewmen were gathered in a tight, yelling knot.

  After all this time? Can’t be. Cannot be.

  At some level, he’d already dismissed it. An unhatched peon or higher-caste lizard, somehow still alive in the waterlogged slop of the decaying drift, and conveniently set to wake just as human feet walked over it. It was something out of a fireside scare story, things like that just didn’t happen …

  And besides, Gil, you don’t gather in a witless knot when you see a lizard come snarling up out of the drift. These men would be fleeing in all directions—those who hadn’t been slashed apart before they could unlock muscles from the disbelieving shock.

  He saw Quilien in the glow the torches cast, standing apart, one hand up to her mouth. She seemed to feel his gaze from the rail. She looked up.

  Somehow, without transition, he found himself on the rope ladder. He jumped the last four rungs and hit the dragondrift at the bottom with a soggy splash. Slogged up to the gathered men and their torches. One of them turned, and seemingly found something to cling to in Ringil’s face. His eyes pleaded.

  “It’s the captain!” he bawled. “He’s gone down in the gap!”

  “Get a boathook down here,” someone was yelling, over and over. “Get a boathook!”

  Forget it.

  But Ringil forced his way into the knot of men anyway, pushed and shouldered through until he saw the closed-up gap between the bristling fringe of the dragondrift and the rising wooden wall of the ship’s hull. It was all he could do not to nod in confirmation.

  Not a chance.

  “Someone get over to the other rail,” he said, for something to say. “Maybe he swam down, under the hull, made it across.”

  But even as the call went out, he knew it was futile. The mat went down, at a guess, about fifteen or twenty feet, tangled with half-rotted nooses and spines of drift weed. The draft of the vessel would not be a lot less. A man falling into the momentary gap between, mashed back against the unyielding hull as the gap closed up again, stunned by the blow, tangled in the fronds …

  Not a chance.

  He stood aside and let a couple of muscular crew members strain mightily at the
Famous Victory’s hull. The rest of the men piled on. They managed, finally, to open a useless, foot-wide gap for a few moments, and then whichever currents held the ship close slammed her back against the drift. Cries floated across from up on deck, said there was nothing to be seen on the other side. Ringil heard the splash of a couple of sailors going in for a closer look.

  Good luck with that.

  The Lady Quilien of Gris was abruptly beside him, stumbling slightly in the rolling squelch of the drift. She fell against him; he caught her upright, set her back on her feet. Mingled band- and torchlight flickered across the mask of her face.

  “It was horrible,” she said, though he was hard put to hear any trace of horror in her tone. “The gap just opened up right beside us. He slipped and he was gone. Do you think he’s dead?”

  And for just a moment, there and gone in the uncertain light as she leaned against him, he had the overwhelming impression that the words were mouthed, like some ceremonial hymn she had memorized in a language she did not know.