The Cold Commands

by Richard K. Morgan

  “Stand where you are!”

  The cry came from the downstream bend of the river. Gerin’s head jerked to the sound. Bandlight showed him three march-masters floundering upstream in thigh-deep water near the far bank, a pair of dogs held slavering at the short end of chain leashes. Black and silver, the bulk of the men and the dogs, the splash of water around them. The man with the crossbow stood apart, had his discharged weapon down, braced on a flattish boulder at the bank, cranking up awkwardly for another shot.

  Blood bubbled out of the blacksmith’s mouth. His eyes locked on Gerin’s.

  “Better run,” he said throatily, and fell facedown in the water.

  “Stand, slave, or we shoot you down!”

  Gerin saw the blood smoke muddily out from under the blacksmith’s floating body, the soaked folds of the man’s jerkin and the crossbow bolt sprouting stiffly from his back. He saw, down at the river bend, the crossbowman still struggling with his weapon. He felt the moment tilt under him like a skiff’s deck in choppy water. He whirled and fled.

  Upstream, six frantic, plunging steps and out, onto boulders at the bank, wet print slap across stone on hands and slipping feet, scrabbling up to the yielding earthen forest slope above and into the trees. Behind and below, he heard the dogs let slip, the sound of the men cursing and splashing. He tore off time for one final panic-eyed look over his shoulder, saw the blacksmith’s spread-eagled floating form cradled in the river’s arms, the dogs surfing about in the water near the boulders, barking furiously up at him, but seemingly unable to climb out.

  He fell back into the grip of the nightmare.

  The slope was steep; he kept having to drop to hands and knees to stop himself from tumbling back down. The resin scent of the pines clogged in his throat as he scrambled upward. The march-masters were big, burly men for the most part; it came with the territory of what they did for a living. Amid the trees, he could probably stay ahead of them. But the dogs …

  Only a matter of minutes before they found a way up.

  The climb began to shallow out, the trees thinned. The slope became a broad, saddle-backed ridge, edged with eroded stone bluffs on the river side. A cool wind hooted off over the rocks, cut through his soaked clothing, chilled him to the bone. Gerin got properly to his feet, sagged into a staggering run along the top.

  Something dark stood waiting in his path.

  Gerin’s heart was already thundering in his chest, but it seemed to ice over as he saw the gathered black form ahead. For a single second it seemed he was looking at something blown together out of twisted remnants of bark and trees limbs charred to death. The figure was a sharp aberration in the smooth, bandlit open ground on the ridgetop. He slammed to an involuntary halt at the sight, and it was only then he understood he was looking at a man, a tall, cloak-wrapped warrior with the jagged rise of a broadsword pommel over his left shoulder, the stab of the scabbard out from his right-hand flank, the arms folded.

  Overseer!

  But it was not, and somehow, somewhere in his panicking brain, he knew that much already. He stared up into a gaunt face that might have been handsome once but was now clamp-mouthed and hollow-eyed and scrawled along one side of the jaw with a thin, snaking scar like the ones they gave to disobedient whores in the city. He met a gaze that offered no more passion than a fisherman watching his motionless line.

  “Dakovash?” he husked. “Is it you?”

  The figure stirred, gave him a curious, sidelong look.

  “No,” it said, in a surprisingly gentle voice. “And I haven’t seen him up here, either. Were you expecting the Dark Court?”

  “I …” Gerin shivered. A sneeze came and racked him, loud and sudden as surf bursting on the rocks at Melchiar Point. “I prayed for the Salt Lord’s intercession.”

  The figure wiped fastidiously at its doublet with one hand. “Are you from the marshes, then?”

  “Y-yes. I was—”

  Behind him, the scrabbling of claws over rock and the full-throated whoop of the dogs as they saw their quarry. Gerin thrashed soggily around, saw the first of the pack hammering toward him, all teeth and grayish bunch-muscled sprint, felt a scream clog up in his throat—

  At his shoulder, he heard the swordsman say something in a language he didn’t know. Saw, out of the corner of his eye, an arm lifted, a brief sign sketched on the air.

  The hound yelped.

  Skidded to a snarling halt a dozen yards off. It snapped and snarled again, but would not come closer. The swordsman with the scarred face took a step forward, made another sign, and spoke again. A finger wagged, gestured at the edge of the nearest bluff. The dog got up and limped hurriedly to the edge, looked down, looked back once at the cloaked figure, and then threw itself off into space. A long howl floated up, a crash of tree boughs breaking, and then silence.

  The rest of the pack howled in unison with their fallen leader, but would not come ahead. They slunk back and forth on their bellies at the fringe of the trees until the swordsman took two more impatient steps toward them, spoke and signed again, and then they crawled whimpering away into the sanctuary of the forest, and fled.

  “Now,” the newcomer said in his gentle voice. “Perhaps you’d like to tell me your name, lad?”

  “Gerin,” Gerin managed, still shivering. “They call me Trickfinger, it’s because when I was still a boy I could—”

  The figure twisted about, gestured impatiently. “Yes, I’m sure it’s a fascinating tale. You can tell me all about it later. You’re from the slave caravan?”

  “Yes. We escaped. But they’re right behind m—”

  “Don’t concern yourself with that. Your luck has just changed, Gerin Trickfinger. I am—”

  The pain came and hit him a colossal blow in the side. Gerin blinked. For a moment, he thought the swordsman had stabbed him. He stumbled and sat down clumsily on the blufftop, legs out like a child’s. He looked down dully, and saw the quarrel sticking out under his ribs, the blood leaking out around it. He looked up at his new companion, met his eyes in wondering fear and something that felt ridiculously like embarrassment. He felt treacle-slow and stupid. He made a hesitant smile.

  “Shit, they—”

  And now, in the eyes that had been as dead as stones, he saw something flare up. The figure made a tight, harsh, sobbing sound and swung around, one pale hand already up and tugging at the broadsword pommel. The blade came up and around and out—some trick scabbard, Gerin thought muzzily, must be open all along one side—and it glimmered in the bandlight.

  Two of the march-masters had made it to the top. The crossbowman was already cranking for his next shot; the other held his sword two-handed, covering his comrade, breathing heavily but ready to scrap.

  “Escaped slave,” he panted. “No need for you to involve yourself, good sir.”

  “But I am involved,” said Gerin’s new companion in an awful, shaking voice. “I’m a son of the free cities, and so is this boy. And this doesn’t look very much like freedom to me.”

  The man with the crossbow finished his crank, crammed a new bolt into the channel, and got his weapon lifted with obvious relief.

  “I won’t babble politics with you, sir,” the other march-master said, more steadily now. “I don’t make the laws, I’m just doing my job. Now if you don’t want the same breakfast as this slave just got, you’ll let us collect the scalp and be on our way. Just be a good citizen and stand back.”

  “But you have no weapons to make me.”

  It was like a thunderbolt cracking across the space between them. Gerin, watching it all unravel, saw the crossbowman drop his charged bow as if it were hot, gawp down at his empty, open hands in disbelief. The other march-master held up his sword in a loose-fingered grip and the weight of the weapon tugged it away, let it tumble to the stony ground.

  The cloaked figure reached them in less time than it took Gerin to draw his next agonized breath. It was as if the space around the newcomer had folded up like a picture on a page, h
ad let him step across the crumpled edges between. The blued-steel blade cut about, chopped the crossbowman’s belly open from the side, licked back up to take the other man through the throat. Blood splashed black in the bandlight, and the two men went down in choking, screaming ruin.

  Movement in the shadows beneath the trees. The third march-master came flogging to the top of the slope, short-sword in hand. His voice was hoarse with effort, and furious.

  “Guys, what the fuck did you do to my hounds? They’ve gone completely—”

  He jarred to a halt, words as well as steps, as he saw the bodies of his comrades and what stood over them. His voice went up a full octave, came out shrill.

  “Who the fuck are—”

  “You’re just in time,” the figure rasped, and the blue blade flashed. The third march-master had time to blink at the glimmer of metallic light in his face, then he saw his view tip and tumble and spin, pine trees and cloud and patches of bandlit sky rushing by—he had that single moment to think he’d been pushed over the edge of the bluff—and then a painful thud, vision unaccountably dimming out now, taste of dirt in his gaping mouth, and his eyes came to rest on a final, closing glimpse of something he might or might not have had time to recognize as his own collapsing, blood-gouting headless corpse …

  The swordsman watched the body fall, then turned back to Gerin, who still sat splay-legged on the ground, head drooping forward now. The cloaked figure crouched in front of the boy, touched the wound gently around the quarrel, and grimaced. He put down his blade and lifted the boy’s sagging chin. Gerin looked back at him blankly for a moment; then a child-like smile touched the corners of his bloodied mouth.

  “Doesn’t hurt anymore,” he mumbled. “Did we get away?”

  The figure cleared its throat. “After a fashion, yes. Yes, you did.”

  “That’s good then.”

  They looked at each other for a little longer. Blood ran out of one smiling corner of Gerin’s mouth. The figure saw it and let go of his chin, put one hand cupped against the boy’s lacerated, muddy cheek instead.

  “Is there anything I can do for you, lad?”

  “Out on the marsh,” the boy said indistinctly. “Salt in the wind … ”

  “Yeah?”

  “Mother says … ”

  “Yes … Gerin, right? What does she say, Gerin?”

  “… says don’t … get too close to …”

  The swordsman put a single knee to the ground. Waited. After a moment, tears ran out of the boy’s eyes and blotched on his lap.

  “Fuck them,” he wept. “Fuck them all.”

  He did not lift his head again.

  Ringil Eskiath kept his hand cupped at Gerin’s cheek until he was quite sure the boy was dead. Then he picked up his sword, and got quietly to his feet. He looked down at the small body for a while, and then away across the top of the rock bluffs, toward the distant, dotted fires of the slave caravan’s camp.

  “That I think I can do for you,” he said meditatively.

  CHAPTER 6

  e had Kefanin wake him before dawn. He stumbled downstairs for a breakfast his stomach didn’t really want, and stepped out into the courtyard under a sky fading dark blue from black. The sun was still a good hour under the horizon, and a crisp desert chill held the air. He filled his lungs with it, and was surprised to find, as he crossed the yard, a cheerful energy in his stride that hadn’t been there the day before.

  Purpose.

  It was the first time in weeks he could remember having any.

  He made good time on the boulevard; traffic was minimal compared with the brawling chaos that would claim the streets later. A handful of tradesmen with their barrows, some slaves carrying bundled wood for kitchen fires, the odd merchant setting out on horseback for somewhere requiring an early start. Once, a short column of soldiers passed him, marching to a muster somewhere. Egar heard the cadence as they over-hauled him, made them for Upland Free Marauders, and grinned in recognition. He’d fought alongside the Upland Free a couple of times, had liked them for their hill-tribe manners and disdain for all things urban. More than any other imperial soldiers, they’d reminded him of his own people, back when that wasn’t such a bad thing.

  They tramped on, double-timing it behind a mounted captain, and left him behind in the graying light. The chant faded out on the morning air.

  Egar split from the boulevard a few hundred yards farther on, crossed the river at the Gray Mane bridge and then took the long, winding incline of Immortal Glory Rise. He reached the top just as the sun poked its new-forged glowing edge above the eastern skyline. A pause to get his breath back—really must start some kind of serious training again soon, the most exercise he’d had for months now was Imrana—then he turned and surveyed the long blank walls of the building behind him.

  The Combined Irregulars barracks—rows of slit windows along the upper levels, sliced view of the parade ground quadrangle beyond the tall iron gates. Figures already moved there in the shielded gloom, pairs of them in stylized, repetitive combat motions while a drill instructor’s voice bellowed exasperated abuse.

  Egar grinned at the sound, and went to announce himself.

  The five halberdiers on the gate were Imperial Sons of the Desert, scarified southerners to a man, slim and almost desert-dark enough that you might have mistaken them for Kiriath until you looked in their eyes. Egar met their young, ordinary stares one by one as he rolled up, identified the squad sergeant by his sash, and gave the man a friendly nod.

  “Here to see Commander Darhan,” he said breezily. “Tell him it’s the Dragonbane.”

  It got him startled glances, and exactly the response he wanted. The sergeant made an almost involuntary bow and gestured at one of his men to carry the word. Watching, Egar wondered idly what these particular desert sons made of the whole Demlarashan mess. The ritual scars on their cheeks were a good sign—it was a practice frowned upon by the Citadel—and they all seemed comfortable enough in their brand-new rig, which was certainly not what he’d been led to expect. The court gossip Imrana had fed him recently was laced with references to the renamed regiment—the previous Holy Sons of the Desert was now deemed a little too ambiguous in its implications for loyalty—and tales were rife of devout officers refusing to wear or subtly defacing the newly ordered colors.

  Yeah, well. Court gossip. Like fucking old women around a campfire.

  “Eg?” A delighted bellow from the gate. “Eg the fucking dragon spanker? Get in here, man! Where you been? Thought you were off working bouncer for some cut-rate whorehouse or something, found your level at last.”

  Darhan the Hammer, corpulent but still imposing in his padded black instructor’s gear, beard trimmed down to something approaching a groomed appearance, graying hair bound back in a ponytail. He propped the gate open with one hand, held a wooden staff casually in the other. Egar moved through the loose cordon of the halberdiers and raised a fist in greeting. Darhan bumped it with his own, and Egar saw his knuckles on that hand were torn up and bleeding. He nodded at the damage as he went in.

  “Nice job. What’s the matter, old man? Recruits getting too fast for you?”

  Darhan snorted. “Yeah, little fuck thought he was. He’s lying down now, reconsidering. Little lesson in pain management.”

  “Majak?”

  “Yeah, and worse yet, he’s a runty little Skaranak just like you were.” Behind the calculated tribal slur, the fierce old grin. “What do they do to you Eastland herdboys up there, Eg? Barely dropped out between their mother’s legs, they all think they got a map to the whole fucking world and everything in it.”

  “Called pride, Darh. Course, I wouldn’t expect a soft, city-dwelling Ishlinak twat like you to understand that.”

  “Oh, city dwelling, is it?” The Majak instructor dropped his staff with a clatter, put up fists in a mock-guard. “Old twat is it?”

  “Well you call that pile of hovels down by the river a city, but … ”

  “Mouthy f
ucking whelp!” Darhan threw a joke-slow punch at Egar’s head. Egar blocked and grabbed, and the two of them clinched and wrestled about in the gateway like a couple of young buffalo bulls in mating season. The southern guardsmen looked on with a uniformly sober lack of expression—they didn’t get it at all. Why would they? You had to be Majak to understand. Back on the steppes, Ishlinak-to-Skaranak, you couldn’t talk like this without blades coming out. But the first thing Darhan the Hammer bashed into your thick steppe nomad skull when you got to training with him was that down here there is no Skaranak, Voronak, Ishlinak, you’re all just ignorant mothers’ sons from the same featureless shit-hole stretch of buffalo pasture, and your gracious, imperial employers have exactly the same amount of contempt for you all. And you know what, they’re right, so leave your tribal horseshit at the door and let’s get on with turning you into soldiers, shall we? Stop fucking nodding, you, that’s what we around here call a rhetorical question.

  Darhan broke the clinch—Egar let him—and clapped a violent arm around the Dragonbane’s shoulders.

  “It’s fucking great to see you, Eg. Just come and have a look at these idiots we’re working on, see if it brings back memories.”

  IT DID.

  Across the training yard in the strengthening morning light, the paired young men went back and forth with yells and the volleyed knock of staff on staff. Darhan stood by the south wall with a mug of hot stock cupped in his injured hand and gestured at his charges.

  “ ’Bout a month,” he said reflectively. “I reckon that’s the most I’ve got before the palace comes calling and packs them all off to Demlarashan. They’re emptying the barracks as fast as I can train them up. You think these ones’ll be ready?”

  Egar squatted with his back to the wall, his own mug drained and set aside. He watched the exercise with narrowed eyes. In among the lines, someone fumbled and dropped his staff. His opponent stumbled into him as he bent to pick it up. Another pair of trainees stopped what they were doing to laugh at the mess. A trainer rushed in, bawling.