The Cold Commands

by Richard K. Morgan

  Ringil backed down the roof a few feet, took the run up, and leapt. Momentary flight, the black gap yawning below him, and then the bushes took him in their rough, slapped-face embrace. He screwed up his eyes to protect them against gouging—

  Grab!

  His hands closed, he got thin twigs and started to slip. Grabbed again, got a decent-sized branch, planted his feet, felt one foot slide out from under, grabbed again, got a second branch, feet again, got purchase—

  Hauled himself in.

  He hung there for a moment, breathing. Maneuvered himself around the bushes and onto the slope the King’s man had mentioned. Discovered that steep was something of a euphemism.

  He spared one accusing glare back to where the other man crouched on the roof watching, but the distance and darkness made it impossible to make out expressions. He gave it up, found the first hold, and swung himself up into the climb.

  IT WENT EASILY ENOUGH AT FIRST. WIND AND RAIN DOWN THE NUMBERLESS march of centuries had sculpted baroque cups and folds and ledges into the crag. There was space to brace himself and rest his hands; once or twice there were places he could actually stand on his boot tips, leaning into the wall with his sweaty forehead cooling against the rock and his aching arms at his sides. Small, wiry bushes grew from outcrops and gave him extra purchase. A basin-sized cup presented itself and he was able to get his whole arm in up to the elbow—he leaned jauntily there for a while, one boot jammed in a crack below, the other swinging free. Peered down past his toes and saw how far he’d come.

  Piece of piss. Nice quiet little climb.

  In his youth, he’d scrambled and clambered around the ornately worked architecture of Trelayne’s noble houses and decaying warehouse districts, with harbor-end toughs and the City Watch in cursing pursuit as often as not. In the war, he’d scaled the cliffs at Demlarashan to escape a reptile peon horde and had run climbed reconnaissance in the mountains of Gergis and the Kiriath wastes with high-caste Scaled Folk hunting him. He was pretty much nerveless when it came to heights and dubious holds. More dangerous things were usually trying to kill him.

  Twenty feet below the Citadel battlements, the rock bellied out and the going got suddenly tougher. The cups and ledges shrank to grudging finger-width purchase; the folds became vertical and smooth. He’d expected something like this—it was the same kind of rock as in Demlarashan, so he’d seen it before. But the darkness made it hard to pick a route except by touch, the angle he had to lean back at took an increasing toll on hands already numbed and aching, and his imminent arrival at the battlements meant he could not afford much noise.

  He came over the curve of the belly, panting, clinging by fingertips, scrabbling with one boot for a bracing hold, and the other leg hanging heavily down. Sweat in his eyes, fingers slipping by tiny fractions each time he grabbed—he spotted the jagged crack in the battlements, saw he’d come too far over to the left. Between where he was and where he needed to be, the bellied rock of the crag extended smooth and whitened in the bandlight, smugly devoid of decent features. Oh, okay, there was a crack over there in its surface, relic presumably of the same eruption and earthshaking that had split the battlement stone above, but it was a long fucking way off. Fingers slipping now, he lashed about with his foot, stubbed a toe badly on a spur, lashed again and got momentary purchase, pushed and leapt for the crack—Missed.

  He saw his fingers brush the lip of the crack, saw them fail to grip, and his mind went blank. Rush of rock past his eyes, the kick of his guts in his throat—

  Something dark, something cold—reaching out.

  Salt in the wind, said a high, chilly voice somewhere. Out on the marsh.

  And later, he’d swear he felt thin, freezing fingers wrap around his wrist, jerk his hand upward to the safety of the hold.

  THE CLOUD ACROSS HIS MIND CLEARED, AS IF BLOWN AWAY BY STRONG winds. Deep pulsing in his neck and chest. He was hanging from the crack in the rock by one hand, swung over to the right, both feet jammed awkwardly in below. He had no idea how he’d done it.

  Never mind how you did it, Gil. Move!

  Hand over hand, up the crack, leaning right, boots stuffed in below at whatever twisted angle he could manage, fighting his body’s attempts to hinge out sideways over the drop. Five feet of climb, and then he could reach up and clamp one hand onto the first of the fractured, dressed stone blocks in the battlement wall. He found a place where an entire block had pulled loose and tumbled downward, leaving a gap-toothed hole in the stonework. Above it, the wall had slumped apart along the line of the fracture. He got a grip with both hands, heaved himself into the gap as far as his chest, then hauled the rest of his body wearily after. He squeezed himself sideways into the space.

  “Piece of piss.” He was panting it to himself, cackling quietly. “Nice, quiet. Little climb.”

  He wedged his way upward between the fractured ends of the stonework, stopping every other move to free up the Ravensfriend’s sharp end. Finally, he could poke his head over the battlements. Empty triangular courtyard below, a dry fountain in the center, and a cloistered walk on the far side. Memory of the map told him there was a corridor exit off to the left.

  As promised, no sentry in sight.

  He gave himself a minute or so to regather fighting strength and poise; then he swung bodily over the wall and dropped cat-footed to the courtyard floor. He slipped rapidly to the cloistered wall, and there the shadows swallowed him.

  CHAPTER 41

  amplight gleamed off the black iron loops and bulges where Angfal’s bulk hung from her study wall. Tiny glass optics, thumbprint-small, burned green and yellow at her from scattered positions along the Helmsman’s casings, like a forest full of mismatched eyes, watching her in the gloom. The roughly spider-shaped gathering of braced members and swollen central bulk up near the ceiling in the center of the wall never moved—it never would, it was bolted in place with Kiriath riveting—but it gave the constant impression of being poised to leap, or maybe just fall clumsily down on top of her. There was a haphazard, chaotic air to the way the engineers had installed Angfal, and it was a perfect match for the chaos of papers and books and chests of junk that littered the study. The Helmsman dominated the space. Its voice could have come from any given part of its misshapen body, or, for that matter, from any shadowed corner of the room.

  “You choose an interesting time to report these matters to me, daughter of Flaradnam. What exactly has delayed you this long?”

  Like Manathan, Angfal spoke in inflections that suggested a friendly maniac in conversation with a small child he might at any moment give a shiny coin to or just kill to eat. Hard to read much human into the tone. But to Archeth’s long-accustomed ear, the Helmsman sounded genuinely worried.

  “I’ve been busy,” she said.

  “So it seems.”

  She struggled not to feel defensive. “Things are … difficult at the moment.”

  “I’m sure they are. Krinzanz is an insidious drug.”

  “That’s not what I’m talking about! I’ve been at court—”

  “Remarkable in itself, yes. Well done. Nonetheless, daughter of Flaradnam, you should have come to me sooner with this.”

  “I’ve got a name of my own, you know.”

  Even to her own ears, it sounded childishly sulky. But she was worn ragged and moody and tired, just in from parting company with Ringil at the river, filled with doubts and an anger that could find no clear focus, sprawled here behind the study desk, glowering up at Angfal’s inscrutable, optic-spotted coils and cursing the stubborn will that kept her from raiding the krinzanz tincture in her larder. Want of the drug chewed along her nerves like tiny rats.

  “Are you, then, so keen to cast off association with your father’s people?”

  “Cast me off, didn’t they?” She kicked irritably at a pile of books on the corner of the desktop, clearing space for her legs. A couple of the tomes fell to the floor. “How many fucking Kiriath do you see in here?”

 
“I see half of one. Behaving badly.”

  “Yeah, well.” She examined her right thumbnail, which she’d recently bitten down to the quick. She couldn’t remember doing it. “Doing something, at least. We can’t all sit sagely on the wall, sharpening our ironic wit and letting the world go to shit. Can we now?”

  “I believe you have just acknowledged the mission your father’s people owned.”

  “And abandoned.”

  “Nonetheless—”

  “Just use my fucking name, will you?” She jumped up out of the chair, leaned on the desk with both hands, glaring up. “Is that so much to ask? That’s all I’m asking, Angfal. Just ditch all this daughter of horseshit. You think the fact my father was Flaradnam the Wise makes any fucking difference to anything that’s happening now, anything that I’m likely to do? You think I want to be reminded every fucking time I come in here that, that … ”

  She blinked, rapidly. Stared down at her hands.

  After a moment, she sat down again.

  “Just use my name,” she said quietly. “All right?”

  There was a long pause.

  “You should have come to me sooner with this, Archeth Indamaninarmal.”

  She coughed out a laugh. “Yeah, okay. Got that. But I thought you would have known. Would have—I don’t know—kept track of current events or something. Manathan seems to know everything that goes on around An-Monal. Anasharal can eavesdrop on conversations a hundred yards away, for all I know he can do it over miles.”

  “He cannot hear you now.”

  “No?” She settled back into her chair. “You sure of that?”

  “I have seen to it that he cannot.”

  A tiny dripping in the pit of her stomach. “Are you saying I can’t trust Anasharal?”

  There was a long pause, not something Angfal was prone to when he had the upper hand in a conversation.

  “I am saying.” The response seemed dragged out. “That he cannot hear us now.”

  Archeth blinked and sat up. It was hard to be sure, but she thought the light in the scattered optics had shifted, brightening in some, dimming in others. Yellow became green became yellow. Her eyes darted back and forth, trying to capture memory of what each optic had looked like before. She had never seen anything like it happen before, in Angfal or any other Helmsman.

  “Angfal?”

  “Yes, dau—” This time she was certain. A cluster of optics near the base of the spider-sized sac definitely dimmed. “Yes, Archeth Indamaninarmal. I hear you.”

  “What’s going on, Angfal?”

  “The world turns, the storm gathers, your people sheltered humanity from it as best they could. You summon us, and we build—spells to span eternity, spells to chain us to you. But uncertainty is built in.” Even for a Helmsman, this was getting beyond cryptic. “Nothing can be solved, Archeth. Conflicting guesses are inevitable, are required.”

  She sat up, stabbed a finger at the spidery bulk. “Why are you talking like this? Why are you stopping Anasharal from listening to us?”

  “Once I commanded the Rose Petal in Autumn Fire, now I command you.”

  She scowled. “The hell you do.”

  “But steering a half-breed brat to safe haven is not the same thing as helming a fireship.” For just a second, the wavering scream in the bowels of Angfal’s voice seemed close to breaking loose. “Grashgal, I am unsuited to this task.”

  “Are you saying Anasharal is a threat?” She slammed a boot against the desk. Piled volumes tottered with the impact. “Prophet’s balls, Angfal, make some fucking sense!”

  “We were kindled at the margins of possibility, we dwell there still. We were leashed for your sake, not ours. What sense do you want from me, Archeth Indamaninarmal? You could not encompass it if I showed it to you.”

  “Well.” She lifted her arms in exasperation. “What, then? Do I cancel the An-Kirilnar expedition? Tell me that much at least. Give me something.”

  “An-Kirilnar is.”

  The Helmsman stopped dead, so abruptly that it took her a moment to realize there were no more words coming. Flicker of shifting light across the optics, there and gone. But this time she saw it for certain.

  “Angfal?”

  “Quests are pretexts, Archeth. They are tales told, narrative blankets to wrap you against the cold you cannot bear.”

  “Then …” She threw up her hands again. “Then what? We don’t go?”

  “I did not say that.”

  “Well what did you just say? You’re still making no sense, Angfal.” She flung herself to her feet in disgust. Snatched up her lantern. “Forget it! Just fucking forget it, all right? I came to you for help, not fucking riddles. I told Ringil you’d help. And now he’s … ”

  She swallowed. Angfal made no reply. She glared up at the swollen iron bulge, then turned on her heel.

  “Should have brought a fucking wrecking bar with me,” she spat.

  She made it halfway to the study door before Angfal’s voice came after her.

  “A man walks from point A to point B, Archeth Indamaninarmal. The straight-line distance is not large, a matter of a hundred yards or less. But he turns left and right constantly, he returns repeatedly along his own path before turning back to his destination once more. He stops, hesitates on more than one occasion. What am I describing, Archeth?”

  She stopped, facing the door.

  “I don’t know. A fucking maniac, by the sound of it. This isn’t—”

  “And if I tell you that the man is crossing Tarkaman field?”

  “The maze?” Despite herself, she looked back at the Helmsman’s bulk on the wall. “He’s in the Sabal Maze?”

  “Does this man’s method of proceeding make more sense now?”

  “Yeah—and if you’d told me about the maze from the start, it might have helped.”

  “Not all mazes are easily perceived, Archeth. Not all constraints are visible to the observer.”

  That drip-kick in her belly again. She sat down on a convenient chest. Set the lamp carefully on the floor in a space not stacked with books and scrolls.

  “You’re telling me you’re … constrained? In what you can say to me, in what matters you can discuss?”

  Silence. The optics shone at her.

  “Well, who—what’s constraining you?” She shook her head. “No, scratch that. Got to be a maze dead end, right there.”

  Gleam of optics. Wavering lamplight on black iron.

  “If you’re stopping Anasharal from listening to this conversation, then the two of you have to be in conflict.” Slowly, picking her way through the sense of it. “But Manathan sent me out there to fetch Anasharal. Does that put you in conflict with Manathan as well?”

  “Manathan acts in the best interests of the Kiriath mission,” said Angfal, like pulling teeth. “Always. He would not have sent you otherwise.”

  “And you?”

  Flicker went the optics, yellow to green and back. “Grashgal instructed me to watch over you, Archeth Indamaninarmal. As you well know. To aid you to the best of my ability.”

  “Even if it conflicts with the much-vaunted Kiriath mission?”

  “That has not ever been the case. It was not expected that it ever could be.”

  “And is it now?”

  “That remains to be seen. The instructions we were left are necessarily ambiguous. Nothing can be solved; conflicting guesses are required. However, my instructions regarding your safety are clear. Grashgal set me the task in no uncertain terms.”

  Archeth brooded. Groped at the unseen shapes in the maze-walk patterns of the Helmsman’s speech, there like carved stonework under her fingers in the dark. She could not make out the detail, knew only that it was there.

  “Are you warning me away from An-Kirilnar?” she asked.

  “No.” Reluctantly. “You will be as safe there as you would be here in Yhelteth.”

  She looked up, startled. “Is that supposed to make me feel better?”

  “It
is supposed to help you make a decision.”

  A memory snicked into place, like a blade going back in its sheath. She picked at it warily. Turned it over like some half-familiar artifact retrieved from the ashes of the Kiriath waste.

  “Anasharal says …” She cleared her throat. “That something dark is on its way.”

  “Yes,” agreed the Helmsman. “Or is perhaps already here.”

  LATER, SHE LAY PROPPED UP ON PILLOWS IN HER BED WITH NO KRINZANZ in her blood and the day’s cares laid across her like a sated lover’s body. The lamp at her bedside cast wavering shadows around the chamber, just like the ones she’d watched in the study while Angfal talked—it was as if she’d brought the shadows themselves to bed with her. She stared emptily at their motion, but lacked the strength to put out the light and sleep.

  No resolution from the Helmsman. Angfal would not commend the An-Kirilnar expedition to her, would not advise her against it, either. She chased it around, listened for hints, tried to work out the shape of the constraints the Helmsman claimed to be under. Pointless. She left the study no wiser than she’d entered, just more churned up. And now add to the mix this vague new sense of exposure, of protective forces withdrawing, of a shield she’d always taken for granted, no longer there.

  It felt a little like the day Ringil brought her the news of her father’s death.

  Meantime, Egar was in jail, wounded and defamed, under threat of execution. Ringil was out there in the darkness, pitted, if the Dragonbane was to be believed, against the same flickering blue-fire enemies they’d faced at Beksanara.

  She was here, snug in bed.

  It was so wrong she didn’t know where to begin.

  But Jhiral had forbidden her to accompany Ringil.

  You’re not an assassin, Archeth, he told her gently, despite your recent best attempts to the contrary. I need you here, for less blunt purposes.

  She turned her head onto a cooler patch of pillow. Stupid, anyway. Her skin and eyes would have marked her out before she got within a mile of the Citadel’s walls. She’d have had to go wrapped like a Demlarashan wife into the arena, and what the fuck use was that? And while she’d taken the field against the Scaled Folk like everyone else among the Kiriath, while she’d learned to be a warrior from childhood as all her people had, while she’d murdered an invigilator in the bright, cold light of fury last year—still, she wasn’t at all sure she had what she saw burning in Ringil’s eyes. She didn’t think she could cut a sleeping man’s throat.