The Cold Commands

by Richard K. Morgan

  “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, Captain.” 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 no
t 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.

  “Yes, I think he’s dead,” he said flatly.

  They poked about in the water for a while nonetheless, finally got the Famous Victory turned about and away from the drift, sent a pair of wiry, somber-faced divers down to take a look. The selected men stripped purposefully to their breeches, drew sailor’s knives and dropped smoothly enough into the ocean swell, but in the dark it was a pointless enterprise, a defiance of truths they all already understood. The two men hauled themselves out a dozen dives later, stood bent over on the dragondrift, hands braced on knees, dripping and panting—nothing to report.

  Dresh Alannor would not be coming back.

  “He is”—one of the men spoke the sailor’s formal valediction between deep-drawn breaths—“at peace. In the Salt Lord’s halls.”

  The other man raised his head and shot his companion an incredulous look. He straightened all the way up, looked right at Quilien and Ringil in the light of raised torches, and then spat into the dragondrift at their feet.

  “Drowning’s a filthy fucking death,” he rasped, and took his shirt back from another crew member, and walked away.

  LATER, RINGIL STOOD AT THE RAIL AND WATCHED THE LUMINOUS WHITE splash of waves on the dragondrift as it receded into the dark at the stern. He thought of the man they’d left behind, tangled up and caught fast somewhere ten or fifteen feet down on the submerged wall of the drift, eyes wide and staring out into the black. Or perhaps already carried off into the cool gloom by currents or something more toothed and purposed.

  Dresh Alannor. Son of Trelayne, Glades noble, commander of men.

  There was a chill across his shoulders like a wet towel.

  “I have been thinking about what you said.” Quilien, abruptly at his side in the pallid bandlight, dark hair hanging loose so it obscured her profile. Somehow, he hadn’t heard her approach. “Why the Dark Court might concern itself with the petty affairs aboard one small vessel. With the fate of that small vessel’s captain.”

  “Indeed, my lady?”

  He wasn’t really listening. Most of his attention was on the crew, as they went sullenly about their tasks around him. The first mate had them on a pretty tight leash, but even so, there was a palpable anger pulsing through the shipboard air. Alannor had been well liked. Ringil thought he might be careful walking the deck at night from now on. He thought he might warn the Lady Quilien to take similar care.

  “I—”

  “Yes, the mistake would surely be to see such behavior as a single act, unrelated to any larger tapestry of events outside that one fireside tale. But is it not more likely that such a captain might in fact serve as a sacrificial piece on a larger board. A piece in a game that the nobles of the Dark Court like to play.”

  It was such a trite piece of coffeehouse pondering that he almost laughed.

  “I have heard this suggested before, my lady. Numerous times. It never much impressed me as a thesis. Why would such ancient, powerful beings concern themselves with anything as banal as a game played out among humans?”

  She leaned out on the rail then, let the wind take her uncovered hair and blow it away from a smile turned oddly wolfish.

  “Well,” she said, without looking at him. “Perhaps the game itself is so ancient that they have forgotten how to do anything else. Perhaps it is webbed into every memory they have, into the fiber of their being, and they cannot unlearn the habit. Perhaps, despite all their age and power, they have nothing else.”

  She tilted her grin toward him in the dark scuffle of the breeze. Raised her voice a little.

  “It must be difficult, after all, to give something up, when you are so very good at it. Don’t you think?”

  And he thought, with a tiny, creeping unease, that her gaze as she spoke was directed less at him than at the sword across his back.

  CHAPTER 28

  he went to see Shanta as soon as the sun was up.

  The naval engineer was a creature of habit. She found him exactly where she’d expected at that hour, taking tea under an awning on the upper decks of his palatial houseboat. The mercenary guardsmen at the gangplank nodded her aboard—she was a regular, unmistakable anyway for her skin and the alien distance in her eyes—and a liveried slave escorted her up through the ziggurat levels of the boat. More slaves in attendance in the top gallery—paneled wooden doors were drawn back with much ceremony, and she was ushered out onto the deck. Shanta was seated there under the awning amid carpets and cushions, surrounded by depleted platters of sweetmeats, bread, and oils. There was a tall samovar at his elbow, and a book laid open in his lap. He looked up, smiled when he saw her. She gave it back, thin. Waited to be formally announced, and for the slave to retire.

  “My lady Archeth, this is a pleasant surprise.” Shanta gestured her to a cushion near his own. “How wonderful to see you again so soon. Will you take some tea?”

  She stalked forward. “What the fuck are you playing at, Mahmal?”

  “I?” He seemed genuinely taken aback.

  “You see any other doddering morons in the vicinity?” She stood over him, raging. Swept a hand wide to encompass the empty deck. “Oh. I guess not. Then it must be you I’m talking to. Must be you I spent half of last night saving from an upcoming appointment as a fucking octopod’s dinner!”

  “Ah.” Gravely. “I see.”

  “Do you? Do you really?” She kicked the indicated cushion away across the deck. “Have you ever seen one of those executions, Mahmal?”

  She knew he hadn’t. Akal had always favored the clean sweep of an ax for his enemies; the slaughter boards in the Chamber of Confidences were an invention of Sabal II, reinstituted only now by Jhiral on his father’s death. And since the accession, Shanta had kept pretty much to himself, initially in mourning for his old friend, and when this became untenable as an excuse, pleading age and the pressures of work.

  “I fear I am not much at court these days. I have not been fortunate enough to witness the ways in which Yhelteth advances into the modern age.”

  She thought she detected the faintest of tremors in the words, but if it was there, it was layered over with bland courtier calm.

  And, she thought, it might as easily have been suppressed rage as fear.

  She mastered her own anger. Went to the starboard rail and looked out over the water. Across the est
uary, a fishing skiff tacked for the ocean, heeling steeply in the buffeting breeze.

  Know the feeling.

  She tried for toneless calm.

  “It’s not good, Mahmal. Sanagh gave you up under interrogation. You and half the shipwright’s guild, apparently.” She looked back at him. “I mean, when are you people going to get it through your fucking heads? The horse tribes kicked your asses. There isn’t going to be a glorious resurgence of the coastal cultures. It is over. The Burnished Throne is our best shot at civilizing the world now.”

  “My quarrel is not with the Burnished Throne.”

  The qualifying words hung in the air unspoken. She found herself checking the deck, reflexively, for eavesdroppers.

  She came back to where he was seated. Crouched close.

  “He’s one man, Mahmal. He’ll live, and he’ll die—just like his father, just like his grandfather. And I remember them all—don’t you forget that. Right back to Sabal the Conqueror, and he was a total fucking bastard. It’s not them. It’s what they build that counts.”

  “That’s an admirably Kiriath perspective, my lady.” Shanta closed the book in his lap, leaned across to the samovar, and busied himself refilling his glass. “You’ll forgive me if, as a mere mortal, I am less inclined to take the long view. Bentan Sanagh was a friend.”

  “Then you need to choose your friends more carefully,” she snapped.

  That sat between them while he finished with the samovar. He laid his book aside with elaborate care, did not meet her eyes. He held the glass of tea cupped delicately in both palms, head bowed over the steaming drink like a soothsayer scrying the future for a tricky client.

  “Well,” he said mildly. “I will give your ladyship’s advice due consideration.”

  “Yeah—do that. Because I don’t think I’ll be able to pull your chestnuts out of the fire like this if you fuck up again.”