The Cold Commands (v5.0) (html)

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

  “Then yes,” she said, Trelayne-accented voice suddenly vehement. “Yes, yes. Fuck me. Fuck me.”

  She thrust herself up off the bed, so fast she narrowly missed clipping Archeth on the nose with her forehead. Archeth blinked backward. The girl had her arms up, struggling to work them free of the shift. Archeth scooted back to help her, lifted the thin cotton up over her head and tugged. Ishgrim wriggled impatiently, got the cloth out from where she was sitting on it. The garment came off, jellied weight of breasts caught up and lifting momentarily, then swinging back down, and the breath caught in Archeth’s throat at the sight. Then Ishgrim’s face came clear, pink with effort, hair tousled up. One arm of the shift caught at her wrist and they both laughed as they realized—she was still gripping the candle, had forgotten to let it go.

  She let go, tugged her wrist and hand free. She grabbed Archeth’s face again with both hands, pressed a kiss to her mouth, and lay back on her elbows.

  “Yes,” she said again, breathing hard now. “Yes. Do what you want with me. Show me what you want.”

  Archeth fell on her, like a burning wooden façade coming down.

  FLESH TO FLESH, AND THE HEAT OF THAT FEELING AFTER SO VERY long without, and pulling, sucking kisses down all that pale flesh, working it, filling her hands with it, owning it, and then, finally, her fingers working at the juncture of Ishgrim’s thighs while she gathered the girl in with her other arm and looked down into her eyes from inches away. Holding back her own need, hanging dizzily from it, feeding it with the girl’s parted lips and half-closed eyes and moaning melting to panting as she began to slide, the desperate tensing grip of her hand on Archeth’s wrist, dragging her fingers deeper, tugging more urgently, crying out as she twisted about and stiffened and, sobbing, came.

  Archeth levered herself up, pulled her cradling arm free and straddled Ishgrim’s soft curves at the chest. Ishgrim, grinning up at her, still breathing hard, Ishgrim nodding, Ishgrim putting her long-fingered hands on Archeth’s spread thighs.

  Archeth felt herself melting apart with the need.

  “Now me,” she was saying it urgently, over and over. “Now me.”

  And she lowered herself forward onto the girl’s eager mouth and tongue.

  AFTERWARD, AFTER THEY’D LAIN TANGLED UP TOGETHER IN SWEAT AND musky sheets, murmuring into each other’s ears, endearments and descriptions of how it felt, after she’d taken the candle and shown Ishgrim how to use it on her, after Ishgrim had asked, shyly, for the same, after all this, Archeth lay with the girl cuddled sated and asleep in the crook of her arm, and stared across the chamber at the vibrating shadows of the lamp.

  Sweat trickled in the roots of her hair. Sleep would not take her. She looked down at the girl’s sleeping face and saw, suddenly, that now she had something new to lose. That she could not afford any more mistakes, could not now afford to lose her edge.

  Unease stirred, prowled in her head. Any fleeting escape she’d wrapped herself up in blew away, drowned out in memories of her conversation with Angfal.

  Anasharal says that something dark is on its way.

  Yes. Or is perhaps already here.

  CHAPTER 42

  t took him an hour and three deaths to reach Menkarak’s apartments. The first death was sheer bad luck. Scuttling along a narrow corridor somewhere under the south wall, he came around a corner and ran straight into a hurrying young invigilator. They collided, bounced apart, and neither of them quite fell down. The other man gaped for a fatal second in the dim light, then opened his mouth to yell.

  Ringil was already on him.

  Dragon-tooth dagger rising in his hand, cloak flaring out like ragged wings. He slammed his free hand over the man’s open mouth, muffled the yell, and bore him to the ground, dagger upraised. The invigilator thrashed, eyes wide, head-shaking desperate denial and muffled blurting against Gil’s palm. Ringil hooked his thumb under the man’s chin, jerked his head sideways and up, cut his throat. He whipped his knife-hand clear to avoid the upwelling blood, watched intently as the invigilator’s face went slack.

  Drew a deep breath and got himself upright. Shit, fuck.

  He stared down at his handiwork. The invigilator’s blood spread out across the stone flagging, black in the gloomy light. The man’s eyes stared blankly at the ceiling. Ringil scanned the corridor in both directions, peeked around the corner. No one else around, but neither was there anywhere obvious to hide the body. He summoned the Citadel map to memory, placed himself on it. There was an ornamental orchard planted out in a small courtyard a level above him and back the way he’d come. Though the amount of blood he was going to get on himself carrying the body that far …

  Getting a bit prissy in our old age, aren’t we, Gil?

  He stooped and gathered the soggy weight of the dead man under the arms, dragged it to the corridor wall. Then he hauled the body up and over his right shoulder, straightened up with an effort—well fucking fed, these invigilators—and tottered off in search of the stairs. He’d left broad swipings of blood on the stone-flagged floor, but there wasn’t much to be done about that. There were no torches in this stretch of the corridor, and he had hopes anyone walking there would miss the stains in the dark. With luck no one else would even come down this way until the new day dawned.

  With luck, yeah. Leaning a bit hard on your luck lately.

  He grimaced in the dark, under the deadweight of his burden.

  Come on, Dakovash. I take it all back. I’ll be your dog.

  Kwelgrish. You saved me from the plague for something, right? Talk to the Lady Firfirdar, will you. Get the bitch to blow me a little bit of black assassin’s luck.

  What are gods for, after all?

  He got to the orchard without meeting anyone else, with or without the Dark Court’s help, hard to say. Went through the apple-scented air and dumped the invigilator’s body unceremoniously behind a tree near the back wall. He settled the corpse upright against the trunk on the far side from the courtyard’s main entrance. Leaned for a moment against the trunk over the dead man’s head, getting some breath back. He wiped the sweat off his brow with a sleeve, checked his cloak for blood—there was a lot—and rolled his eyes. Great—and we’re not even into the senior invigilators’ wing yet. He drew a deep breath, tapped a saluting finger to his temple at the dead man, and left.

  On his way out, he saw an owl watching him from a branch in one of the other trees. It didn’t say anything, or flap heavily away into the sky with his good luck in its talons or anything. In fact, it barely did anything at all beyond blink cryptically down at him and plump up its feathers.

  That’s because it’s just a fucking owl, Gil. Not an omen, or a psycho-pomp, or a demon familiar from beyond the band.

  Now get a fucking grip, will you, and let’s get this done.

  He slipped out of the orchard yard, and away down the darkened corridors again.

  SOMEWHERE ALONG THE WAY, THE IKINRI ’SKA WOKE UP.

  Perhaps he summoned it, perhaps it simply felt it was time. Hjel had told him—somewhere, somewhen, out there on the marsh—that the deeper into the craft you went, the less it became a tool you could use, the more you became the gate and channel for its force. At the end, he said, you are simply wedded to it. You cannot tell where it ends and you begin.

  Now he felt it drip through him at the fingertips, radiate out from his heart and lungs, dance behind his eyes, and Hjel’s warning took on a shivery fever-cold significance he’d previously ignored. It was a chilly siren song now, down at the edges of his will, singing in his blood. It was an excited black chittering along his nerves, like too much krinzanz an hour before dawn.

  It wasn’t, to be honest, an ideal companion at a time like this.

  But it was there in him, manifest, when he stepped into one more courtyard, warmly torchlit this time, and was instantly spotted by a man-at-arms on an overlooking wall.

  Their eyes met. The man on the wall reared back from where he’d been leaning in peaceful contemp
lation of the ground below. He grabbed at his short-sword. The yell was in his throat, halfway formed—

  Ringil grabbed, right arm upflung, as if he could reach physically into the man’s mouth and tear out the sound. He made the convulsive locking gesture, Be Still!, with his hand, and the cry strangled before it could take voice. The man-at-arms doubled over, coughing. Ringil shifted posture, breathed in the trembling potential, shook out the fingers of his raised right hand, and wrote the Veil glyph onto the air.

  You do not see me.

  It hissed out of him like rattlesnakes stirring, syllables in old Myrlic, barely recognizable as his own voice at all. He faded back into the gloom.

  “What the fuck’s up with you, Darash?” Another man-at-arms, wandering along the walkway from the other side, yawning. “Stuffing yourself with stolen chicken again.”

  The first man stifled his coughing with an effort. From down in shadows at the edge of the courtyard, Ringil could see him frown.

  “No, man. Just thought I saw … ”

  “Saw what?” The second man peered down into the torchlit space below and shrugged. “Nothing down there, mate.”

  “Yeah.” Darash shook his head. “Weird fucking thing, though … ”

  By which time, Ringil was gone, across the courtyard in a twist of unseeing, and into the rising corridors to the senior invigilator’s wing. Torchlight flickered off him, seemed to shun him as he went.

  Once into the upper levels of the eastern keep, his briefing from the King’s Reach evaporated in best guesses and theory. They had some sense of where Menkarak should be resident, given his lineage and his recent promotions within the hierarchy. They had rumor and report that might further reduce the possibilities, but could not really be relied upon. They had information that he liked to meet the rising sun with prayers each morning on his balcony, they had gossip that there’d been a major falling-out with another, more moderate senior invigilator who had later, so the story went, choked to death on a piece of gristle at dinner, and Menkarak got his opulent rooms. They had reason to believe that his apartments were relatively modest, and that he shunned most of the luxury available to priests of his rank.

  Like that.

  It was a dozen possible apartments, however you looked at it. Time to narrow the field.

  He stalked the gloom, looking for lights. Eventually, he found another invigilator, a spry, white-haired old man in robes of rank, poring over unscrolled paperwork in a study dimly lit by candles. Ringil watched him for a while from beyond the window, out in the cloister, then, when he was sure the man was working alone, he lifted the latch and walked quietly inside.

  The invigilator did not look up from his scrolls and ink.

  “If that’s another heretic warrant, Naksen,” he said mildly, quill scratching across parchment, “then it’s going to have to wait until the morning. I already told you that. Added to which”—a meticulously crossed and dotted character—“I have already told his eminence we have our hands full out in the city. We simply do not have the manpower to enforce—”

  The dragon-tooth dagger slid in under his chin. A hand pressed against the back of his skull.

  “It’s not another heretic warrant,” Ringil told him.

  The invigilator went rigid. “What do you want?”

  “Good. I’m looking for Pashla Menkarak. Which is his apartment?”

  The old man tried to turn. There was a surprising degree of wiry strength in the move. Ringil swapped dagger for forearm across the invigilator’s throat and pulled tight.

  “I wouldn’t do that if I were you.”

  “Jackal!” It was spat out, despite the choking grip. “So, it has come to this once more! Once again, the palace sends its lickspittle backstabbing faithless against our holiest men.”

  “Something like that,” Ringil agreed. “You going to tell me how to find Menkarak, or are you going to die?”

  He loosened his grip hopefully. The invigilator placed gnarled hands flat on the scroll-strewn tabletop. Gil caught a couple of lines from the half-written document. For the crime of lascivious seduction and bearing of a child not blessed by the Revelation, the accused is sentenced to … He felt the man’s spine stiffen against the chair back.

  “Hear me, scum. I would rather die than betray my brothers in faith. I will go to my God with a joyous cry—”

  “You’ll go choking on your own blood. Is that what you want? Where is Menkarak?”

  “Go back to your Emperor, lickspittle!” There was a sneer in the old man’s voice, and a tight hysteria building behind it. No sign of fear at all. “Go back, infidel, and tell the debauched apostate he may rule over half the world, but he cannot have our souls. Demlarashan is but the beginning. We have angels on our side now, we will sweep—”

  Ringil sighed and sliced the throat across. Blood gushed out, all over the warrants the man had been writing. He held the invigilator’s head by the hair while he spasmed, waited, waited, then lowered the dead man’s face gently into the mess. He cleaned the dagger on one of the pieces of parchment, and stood for a moment in the candlelight, brooding.

  If Naksen does show up with a bundle more warrants, you’re blown. Out like a fucking candle. And that’s without counting the dwenda into the balance.

  This is taking too long.

  He blew out all the candles before he left, closed the door quietly behind him, and hoped that would be enough to keep Naksen or his pals from investigating further. There was a door-locking glyph somewhere in the ikinri ’ska, but he couldn’t remember how it went, had never, in any case, really mastered it. Not a lot of locking doors to practice on, out on the marsh.

  With luck, they’ll assume the old bastard went to bed.

  With better luck, they won’t come back at all until morning. Got my back, Kwelgrish?

  Let’s hope so.

  He prowled about the upper levels, listening for voices, looking for lights. It took him another half an hour to find what he wanted. Passing an apartment door, he heard farewells traded within. He skulked back into the gloom of an alcove. Shortly after, the apartment door unlatched and a man in invigilator’s robes came out. He was, Ringil noted, considerably younger than the old man in the study, he had a fair belly on him and a neatly barbered beard, and he walked with a self-important poise that looked promising. Gil trailed him through corridors and a stairway to a lower-level apartment door where the invigilator produced a key from his robes and slotted it into the lock. Ringil crept forward an inch at a time. The key turned with an iron clunk.

  The door swung open. Ringil leapt out of the shadows and grabbed the man from behind. He shoved him through the doorway and threw him to the floor, stepped inside, caught the swinging edge of the door and slammed it closed behind him. His gaze flickered about—broad entryway, unlit, leading to a well-appointed lounging area beyond. A window let in bandlight enough to see by.

  The invigilator had gone sprawled to hands and knees on a fine silk carpet laid out between the two spaces. Ringil checked that the door was firmly closed, kicked the man hard in his prodigious belly, and scooped up the fallen key. He turned it in the lock and left it there, listened for any sound of occupancy and judged the apartment empty.

  “Who the holy blue fuck do you think—”

  Ringil grabbed him again, hauled him to his feet and slung him against the nearest wall. He hit him in the face a couple of times, broad backhand slaps that didn’t do any real damage but would hurt like hell. The invigilator reeled and stumbled, tried to fall down. Gil got in close and held him up against the wall, put the dragon-tooth dagger to his face.

  “I’m in a hurry,” he said.

  “But, but—” The invigilator had gone abruptly still when he saw the knife, or maybe it was just Ringil’s eyes. “What do you want? I’m not—”

  “I’m looking for Pashla Menkarak. You’re going to tell me where his apartment is, or you’re going to die. Your choice.”

  “You—” The man wet his lips. “You�
�re from the palace?”

  “Does it matter?”

  “I, but I—I took a holy oath. Holy orders. I am bound by …” Ringil looked at him.

  “The end apartment on the level above,” whispered the invigilator, eyes bulging wide in the dim light. “The door is—you will see it—it has the mark of the book and scepter.”

  “And is he in?”

  “Yes. He retires early, always. He will be at last prayer.”

  Ringil leaned closer. “You know I’m going to come back here if you’re lying.”

  “I’m not, I’m not,” the man was babbling now. “His faith is iron. He is at prayer. The whole Citadel knows it.”

  “Excellent.” Gil stepped back and clapped the invigilator on the shoulder with his left hand.