The Cold Commands (11 page)

He grabbed up the legate’s left hand.

“Yep, the ring, too.” He let the legate’s arm drop in disgust. “This is the last fucking time I trust Brotherhood spies to get my intelligence for me.”

Eril looked embarrassed. In the months they’d been harrying Trelayne’s
slavers, he’d pulled Marsh Brotherhood favors for Ringil where he could, but the Brotherhood itself hadn’t been particularly cooperative about it. In the end, sworn-sons-of-the-free-city bullshit aside, they were criminals trying to buy their way into upriver respectability, and Ringil’s terrorism wasn’t any more comfortable for them than it was for the slavers. And Eril, blood debt notwithstanding, was a mid-ranking enforcer, acting alone and out on a limb, with very limited pull.

Surprised it’s lasted even this long, really
.

Well—you did save his life
.

Ringil sighed and cast a brooding glance around. Daylight already strengthening in the east, washing the first faint color into the tree line and the sandy terrain below. The night gone to bleaching shreds of darkness in the west, and all around the thousand eyes of the slaves and their new saviors, all seemingly resting on him.

An imperial legate. Great.

“Perhaps now,” the legate stormed. “You realize the gravity of your error.”

“There’s no error here,” Ringil told him.

They hauled Poppy Snarl to her feet and held her pinioned for Ringil’s inspection. There was some jeering and groping along the way—Snarl had aged well on the proceeds of Liberalization and the new trade. She still had a bright sheen to hair and eyes, a harsh-boned beauty in the face and curves in all the right places. Hands pawed and squeezed at the more obvious options. She flailed and spat, her clothing tore. Someone—it was hard to keep track of the men Eril hired, Banthir, was it? Or Hengis?—retrieved Ringil’s dragon-tooth dagger from the dirt and brought it to him, wiped carefully clean. The man bowed for respect and handed the weapon over. Ringil nodded absent thanks, tucked it away.

Snarl head-butted one of her captors, sent him stumbling. Raucous laughter from the others.

“Got a temper on her, this one.”

“Soon sort that out. Just needs a good splitting is all.”

“Get in the fucking queue, man. You don’t—”

They quieted as Ringil approached. He still held the Ravensfriend unsheathed in his hand. Snarl bared her teeth at him.

“What the fuck do you think you’re doing, Gil?”

He considered her for a moment. “I’m just the messenger. Does the name Sherin mean anything to you?”

“Oh, for Hoiran’s
sake
! Slab said you were …” Snarl bucked again between the men who held her pinioned. “This is really about some whining idiot second cousin of yours? You know, when Findrich told me that, I didn’t believe him. I said you were too fucking smart for that shit.
Had
to be something else. What the fuck happened to you, Gil? You used to be a
player
.”

Ringil backhanded her across the face. Someone among his men voiced a low, hooting cheer. He started to feel vaguely sick.

“I asked you a question, Poppy.”

By then she could see it coming, knew her hand was played out. A blank, street-tempered defiance hardened her features. She spat at him, spittle threaded with blood from where the blow must have cut the inside of her mouth. She put on a dreadful, death’s-head smile.

“What do
you
think, hero? You think I keep count of every piece-of-shit slave I buy, every bad-debt auction knockdown that falls in the net?”

“This particular piece-of-shit slave was my cousin.”

“So fucking what? You want to believe I was there personally when they broke her? Grow the fuck up, Gil. This is a business. You think I
care
?”

Ringil remembered where and how he’d finally found Sherin. Remembered what had been done to her.

He looked into Poppy Snarl’s eyes. Saw nothing there he could defeat.

“Take her away,” he said woodenly. “Do what you will. But leave her alive.”

Mob roar of approval from the men. Ringil held himself immobile and watched as they started to drag her back, started tearing at her clothing again where it was already ripped. She growled deep in her throat and thrashed against them. A breast spilled free, was grabbed and bitten into like fruit. Snarl yelled in pure fury. Someone levered her legs open, grasped brutally between. Another yell, sobbing this time, another chorus of whooping as the men heard, and saw. Then they lifted her bodily away, and closed around her like rats on rotting meat.

He stood. He stood and watched.

“Hengis.” Sudden shudder—he came to life and grabbed Hengis by the arm as the man drifted to join the rape.
“Hengis.”

“Jengthir, my lord.”

“Jengthir.” He nodded jerkily. “I mean it. If she dies, so does the man who caused it.”

“Course, my lord, no worries. I’ll see to it. Got a tender touch, I have.”

Jengthir grinned at him, tugged free, and was gone.

Ringil turned away from the boiling thrash of men, now collapsing to the ground, and the woman he’d given to them. He wanted to wipe a hand across his face, but dare not risk the gesture. He caught the legate staring bulge-eyed.

“Fuck are you looking at?” he snarled.

“You cannot do this.” The imperial was whispering it in Tethanne, maybe unaware he was speaking at all. “The Emperor will—”

“Will
what
?” Ringil followed the language shift, strode up to the legate, and smashed him in the mouth with the pommel of the Ravensfriend. The imperial went over backward with the force of it, and Ringil stood over him. Voice shouting to drown out the noises behind him. “The Emperor will
what
?
Tell me what your fucking Emperor will do!
”

The legate put a hand to his broken mouth, brought it away bloody, stared disbelieving at the wet red dripping off his fingers. Ringil dropped to a crouch beside him, forced his voice down to a corrosive, conversational rasp.

“If I know that fuck Jhiral Khimran, the only thing he’ll do when he hears about this is have it turned into some piece of harem fantasy theater, and then sit back and watch until he gets it up enough to join in. But I wouldn’t worry about it, your excellency, it isn’t going to be your problem.”

Behind them, Poppy Snarl shrieked and sobbed, and the men raping her roared with ribald delight. The legate heard, gaped at Ringil as if he were something summoned out of a crack in the Earth’s crust. He was trying to crawl backward, away from the gaunt, scarred face and what he saw in it, but his cloak was under him and he got no purchase. His boot heels slipped and slid on silk.

“What do you …” He was mumbling, numb with terror. “What do you think you’re—you’re doing?”

Ringil set aside the Ravensfriend, shook the dragon-tooth dagger from his sleeve. He grasped the legate firmly by the hair with his free hand, pulled his head back hard. He leaned in close, near enough to smell the man’s terror-soured breath, near enough to bestow a kiss.

“I’m abolishing slavery,” he said.

And opened the imperial’s throat.

hey cast off mooring from the iron quays an hour after dawn—a leisurely enough start by military standards, but Archeth wanted plenty of light in the sky to reassure the men. She stood at the starboard rail and watched as the
Sword of Justice Divine
drifted out on the swirl of the river, started to turn in the current, and then stiffened and quivered as the oars dug in along her flanks. The stroke drum boomed belowdecks, the pulse of it throbbing up through the planking under Archeth’s feet, and she heard the caller start the cadence:

And so on.

She let it wash over her, faint smile of recognition and then the words rinsing out in their own familiarity. Not a bad choice of chantey—the brutal shore-leave bravado in the lyrics might serve to bolster some nerve in men who’d gone to their bedrolls the night before amid mutterings of sorcery and demonic visitation.

And hadn’t woken up much better.

The frigate slugged its way upriver to the beat of the drum, the sky to the southeast now flushed deeper with the glare of a sunrise still hidden behind the long shoulder of An-Monal. Archeth leaned on the rail, eyes screwed up against the light, staring at the distant smoke.

It hadn’t changed since daybreak—a single, thin column in rising charcoal, like some craftsman’s sketch line drawn on the brightening blue tile of the sky. She’d woken at dawn to the sounds of the men as they spotted it. Graying light from the east outside her cabin window, and excited calls back and forth, building to a small storm of debate and disconcerted oaths, until Senger Hald came down the gangplank and bellowed them into quiet.

If he had misgivings of his own, he hid them well. Tasks were reaffirmed, the camp along the quays was struck, the frigate loaded for the off. The marines went about their work efficiently enough, but she heard their voices as they passed muttering back and forth below her cabin on the quay. They were mostly devout men, in their own rough fashion, and this was just too close a match for some of the more lurid prophesying rants in the chapters of the Revelation dealing with the Last Battle for the Divine. Demonic fire by night, and now something was burning in the east. Draw your own conclusions.

The sun slid up over the slope of the volcano like an incandescent coin, unstuck itself from the skyline, and started to rise. Archeth yawned and thought she might need more coffee. She hadn’t slept well in her stateroom. Had, in fact, rolled back and forth the whole night, tugged in and out of dreams, as if the frigate were plowing through heavy seas.
Chalk up another delight to quitting the krinzanz. She didn’t remember the detail of the dreams, except that her father walked in them, and was not well, and warned her constantly of something whose impending form and nature she had not yet learned enough to grasp.

You must try
, she thought she recalled him pleading.
You must keep trying
.

Big, blunt hands braced forward and wide apart on the table of scattered charts, eyes that glittered in the gloom, and a thin moaning outside the window that might have been someone in pain, or some Kiriath machine she did not understand, or possibly both.

If you do not try now, who will? Who is left, Archidi?

And then she knew, with the abrupt certainty of dreams, that he was dead, and she was next, and the thin moaning could only come closer, pressing up to the glass, peering in and she was—

Awake. Like the snap of a twig underfoot.

Staring across the cabin into empty gloom.

And so on, again and again, as the night wore slowly down on the hard-edged grind of her thoughts. Until dawn seeped in at the window like some pallid, halfhearted salvation, and gifted her with temporary purpose.

A second yawn swamped her. She blinked in the sunlight, took the hint, and went down to the galley. On her way back up, hands cradled around the warm ceramic mug, she ran into Hanesh Galat.

“Good morning, my lady.”

“Yeah.” She was already past him on the companionway, heading up. Trying not to hear as he called after her.

“Might I, uhm, join you?”

She made an indistinct noise, which he apparently took for assent. He trailed her to the rail, leaned there a diplomatic distance off her right elbow.

“A beautiful morning,” he said, awkwardly.

She stared down at the wash of orange-gold on the rippling water, the glistening churn of the oars.
Krinzanz, krinzanz—my soul for a quarter ounce
. She held herself down to a stark civility. “I guess.”

“Well, uh …” Galat hesitated. It made him seem oddly boyish. “You see, I’m from the north, originally. Vanbyr, near enough. We aren’t so lucky with the sun up there.”

Or anything else, lately
, she just stopped herself from saying.

But scenes from the rout of the Vanbyr uprising marched by in her head like a column of leering trolls. Shrieks and smoke, the hovels burning in the countryside, the choking, pleading figures thrust back inside at pike-point when they tried to stumble out. Severed heads kicked like footballs in the cobbled city streets, infants thrown from upper windows and spitted on swords for sport while their mothers wept and howled and were raped to provide more conventional recreation for the imperial soldiery.

It was the Emperor’s command, and it was carried out to the letter. Akal the Great wanted an example made, a lesson given in what happens when an imperial border province gets ideas about independence. And all who were at Vanbyr agreed that the lesson had been given with magisterial force—though detail was of course decorously reworked to suit the court’s finer sensibilities. As for the man himself—aging and increasingly infirm from the toll of the injuries he’d sustained during the war, Akal was unable to ride with his army to Vanbyr, and so did not see the various ways in which his forces covered themselves in glory.

Archeth, as attached court observer for the action, had been only too viciously glad to bridge the gap, to bear accurate tidings home to her ailing Emperor, and recount them to him in careful, repeated detail, while he lay on his sickbed and muttered about necessity and would not meet her eyes.

After the succession, when the court murmurs against Jhiral started, she surprised herself with the withering tide of contempt she felt for those who murmured and the selective memories of the father they apparently retained.

And she was almost glad when Jhiral’s reprisals began.

Almost.

“You came to the capital while you were young?” she asked Galat, for want of something to chase out the memories.

“Before the uprising, yes.” Maybe he’d seen the shadow pass across her face. He cleared his throat. “I was selected for the Mastery at nine. It was a great honor for my family.”