The Cold Commands (23 page)

After Baldaran, it was Rajal, almost twice the distance again, and a searing, sand-and-spat-blood combat memory for every yard of shoreline once they got there. He wasn’t sure he’d be going ashore at Rajal if he could avoid it.

And after that, well …

After that …

Decision time, Gil
.

The street took a bend to the right, and above cheerily lit windows the hanging sign outside the Hero’s Respite Inn came into view—some suspiciously clean-looking knight at restful ease on a carpet of lizard corpses. Lettering above his head in gilt-edged red. So it seemed the skipper was competent to chart a course, on land at least.
Seven streets
up, the crooked lane to the left and follow the torches until the bend with the temple on the right. The inn stands at the corner opposite. Room Eleven. Ask for the Lady Quilien of Gris
.

So far, right on the money.

Ringil checked to see his husky escort were still with him—in fact they’d been dawdling so as not to get ahead of the man who’d given them coin—and realized abruptly just how slow he’d been, climbing the shallow incline of the streets up from the harbor. He nodded curtly at the men, and stood still in the street to catch his breath. The moment tilted alarmingly beneath him. His vision webbed across in gray at the edges; he felt sick and empty.

He covered for it with a measured stare across to the ornate statue-work on the temple’s façade—Hoiran’s customary tusked and fanged ferocity pared down here to something a little more urbane and close-mouthed, perhaps influenced by traffic with the south and its penchant for studiously human religious figures. But for the massively muscled shoulders and an alarming, overly well-toothed grin, the Hoiran depicted here could almost have been a Yhelteth holy man, hands raised in benediction. At his flanks, the other members of the Dark Court ranged out in bas-relief like some hard-bitten mercenary command whose services the Dark King was trying to offer you. They were equally toned-down of aspect but still possessed most of the weapons and items of iconic power accorded them in more northerly tradition. Oddly, there seemed to be a gap in their ranks on Hoiran’s left. Ringil was too jangled to focus and work out who wasn’t there.

In the dim guttering of the street torches, he thought the figure of Dakovash tipped its head a fraction and winked at him.

Did not
.

He leveled his breathing, snapped a glance over his shoulder, and caught his escort watching him curiously. They averted their gazes as soon as he looked around, found something apparently fascinating instead about the brightly lit windows of the Hero’s Respite. From the interior of the inn, a suddenly audible wash of laughter. It sounded harmless enough. Ringil looked from one man to the other, cleared his throat, and turned his back on the darkened temple.

“Let’s get on with this,” he muttered sourly. “Shall we?”

He stalked up to the door of the inn and thumped it open. Stood on the threshold. A startling waft of chatter and the tangled aromas of roasting meat and coffee washed out to meet him. Warm yellow light escaped through his legs like a cat, spilled out onto the cobbled street behind. Ringil stood and peered inside like some visitor from another, chillier world.

Under bright lamps and hanging candelabras, a crowd of rosy-cheeked, well-dressed diners sat at cloth-covered tables, eating with the leisurely self-assurance of men and women who had never gone hungry. Staff in cheery scarlet livery waited on the tables, and more somberly uniformed hired muscle stood around near the bar, riot batons looped casually on their belts. The floor was freshened with sawdust, not straw, and
stringed music
, for Hoiran’s sake, lilted from a screened dais at the far end of the room.

Ringil saw faces glance up unhurriedly from their platters as he came in, register his arrival, and then go back to dining with as little concern. Small smiles and shrugs, a disinterested comment back and forth. If the sword on his back was noticed, it excited none of the anxiety Ringil had seen in the other tavern when Klithren and his men came calling. In fact, at one table a satin-clad young woman turned and eyed him with open and rather predatory interest, before her friends’ chorus of shocked mirth and expostulation brought her back around to face her food.

Ringil let a thin smile flicker across his face in response. He crossed to the bar.

“I’m looking for the Lady Quilien of Gris? I understand she’s lodged here.”

The bartender wiped a cloth across the bar-top. He surveyed Ringil and his companions, shot a sidelong glance at the closest of the hired muscle. He sucked at his teeth. “Is she expecting you?”

“No. But if she still plans to take passage on the
Marsh Queen’s Favor
tomorrow morning, she’ll need to see me.” Ringil nodded upward to the stairs and landing over the bar. “Room Eleven, isn’t it?”

The bartender put down his cloth.

“Wait here,” he said. He moved down the bar and leaned over to mutter in the ear of one of the uniformed men. The man looked at Ringil, clearly wasn’t much impressed by what he saw, but shrugged and pushed off the bar, then made his way to the stairs and up. His footfalls
clomped overhead on the landing gallery, then faded. Ringil waited and watched the diners. The bold woman in satin sent him a couple more arch glances and whispered to her friends. He looked about idly for some male attention in the same vein, but could not find it.

“Get you something while you’re waiting?”

Ringil was about to say no, then recalled his abandoned glass aboard the
Marsh Queen’s Favor
and the ensuing regret through the climbing streets, the tilting gray vagueness that would not leave him alone. The sense that he was not anchored enough in things outside his own feverish head.

Yeah, like getting drunk is going to help
that.

Fuck it. Battlefield tonic, right?
He remembered Flaradnam after the battle at Rajal Beach. Iron hip flask raised, seamed black face grim and gashed with something you couldn’t really call a smile.
Kill or cure, Gil
.

“Rum,” he said, and indicated his porters. “For them, too.”

The bartender raised an eyebrow at that, but he set up the glasses and poured accordingly. Ringil tossed a couple of coins onto the bar-top, glanced up at the sound of clomping footfalls on the landing overhead. The uniformed muscle, coming back downstairs with a bemused expression on his beefy face.

“You can go right up.” He apparently couldn’t believe it.

Ringil grunted as if he expected no less. He knocked back his rum—this one wasn’t bad—and upended the empty glass on the bar.

“Stay here,” he told his escort.

Upstairs, the landing gallery cornered right, into a narrow passageway with doors on either side and small candelabras in the ceiling every ten feet or so. The receding dimensions of the passage seemed to sway very slightly in the guttering light the candles gave, as if the inn were a ship that had already put to sea. Ringil resisted the temptation to put bracing hands against the walls as he walked.

The door to Room Eleven was ajar.

He stopped dead when he saw it. Something black and whisper-edged ghosting up through the layers of flu and alcohol, right hand flexing at his side, left reaching across to loosen the sleeve he kept the dragon knife in. The corridor was far too narrow for the Ravensfriend to be useful—any fighting done here would be close and sweat-palm desperate.

Just what you need right now
.

Ringil eased closer to the far wall to get an angle of vision on the cracked door. Silence battened down in the corridor, stuffed itself into his ears like black water. He watched with fatalistic calm as the gap between door and jamb thickened, as the door hinged slowly and soundlessly back on itself and opened the room beyond to view.

A dog stood in the gap, looking steadily up at him. Pricked ears and slanted amber eyes in the gloom. Long gray muzzle, and a ruff at its throat as thick and glossy as one of his mother’s winter mufflers.

Dog? That’s a fucking
wolf,
Gil
.

Ringil stared back into the amber eyes. Had he been less fuddled with fever, he might have reached for the
ikinri ’ska
, the words and gestures he’d used against the dogs at the river, the marsh dweller lore learned from—

—Hjel
, leapt into his head,
tight-limbed, hot-eyed young scavenger prince in rags, who seems, despite evasive conversational maneuvers to the contrary, to somehow already know you as he tilts wine from a leather skin, catches your eye in that way you recognize, invites you to stay and admits yes, he’s heard of Trel-a-lahayne all right, his forebears were its rulers, but it’s a dead legend now, man, fallen to an unknown evil out of the south a thousand years ago—and then he leads you to tumbled white ruins on the marsh to prove his point—

The Gray Places were full of that shit, full of the wreckage of what you thought you knew about the world, full of people and places that could or should not be, and aching absences where what you expected was suddenly
not
. But with time you learned, you handled the ache, you let the current carry you, and you took what it offered you along the way; you lay down, for example, beneath damp marsh dweller canvas like some childhood fantasy of escape, lay down with hot-eyed scavenger princes who smelled faintly of wet earth and wood smoke, and owned all manner of useful tricks of sorcery with plants and animals.

And when you woke, some uncounted series of days and nights later, and your companion was gone with his tent and wagon and the rest of his grubby clan, and the Gray Places as often had faded with them, burned back to the hard-varnished texture of whatever portion of the real world you’d washed up in with your dreams—then, still, the scents of your fucking lingered on your flesh, and the
ikinri ’ska
, in your own
reality no more than myth and marsh dweller superstition, was harsh in your head, and real as a blade …

The wolf, or dog, perhaps bored with all this, twitched an ear at him and turned its long gray head away. It yawned, exposing slick white fangs as if for inspection, closed up its muzzle again with a hollow snap, and walked away from him, back into the room. Ringil, beginning to suspect that the rum had been a bad idea after all, went after the animal, one wary step at a time.

At the back of the room was a section for washing and dressing, screened off by an opened iron concertina frame hung with thick muslin curtains. The dog crossed to the leading edge of the screen, peered in, and then seemed to leap up onto some high platform behind the drapes. A poorly defined shadow moved across the muslin, and a woman’s voice drifted languidly out to him.

“You wished to see me?”

Ringil cleared his throat. “I’ve come from the
Marsh Queen’s Favor
. Our departure has been brought forward.”

“Really?” A sudden edge on the urbane tones now. “And there I was, given to understand we need not depart until I chose to present myself aboard tomorrow morning. Your captain is a fickle man when his purse is filled.”

“He is not my captain.”

“But fickle nonetheless.”

“Possibly so, my lady. I really wouldn’t know.” Some ghost of court-bred manners past struggling to assert itself as he spoke. It was a part of himself he took out from time to time, like some age-worn keepsake of youth, and was always surprised to find how much he missed it. “But though it grieve me to carry the message, I am very much afraid that your ladyship will need to present herself aboard before dawn, or the ship will sail without you. I have brought men to ease the transport of your effects.”

A slight pause.

“Well. They send me a knight errant. And I have, I suppose, been less than courtly with you.”

Motion across the muslin again. The Lady Quilien of Gris stepped out from behind the screen and paced toward him, toweling riotous
dark hair dry with one hand as she came. Apart from the scarlet flannel towel she was using, she was completely naked. She offered her free hand in a—

Naked?

She’d done it with such aplomb, such utter lack of care or self-consciousness, that it took him those first few paces and the outstretched hand before he realized the fact. He supposed that a man with more conventional appetites might have spotted it faster—youthful breasts, belly, thighs, all on open display—but even there, he wondered how many such men would be prepared for the complete lack of acknowledgment this creature offered for her state of undress. Ringil had known his share of successful sluts, numerous of them among the nobility, and there were quite a few he remembered who’d have no problem pulling a trick like this if it were for the right visitor to their rooms. But in all of those women, at the heart of all their artifice and display, there was always the arch stare, the tilted head, the intimate signal that this was a game of stakes. They deployed their bodies and their availability exactly the way you’d deploy a regiment across a battlefield, with every bit as much ceremony and command.

This woman was not deploying herself.

The Lady Quilien of Gris wore her pale and shapely body as if it were some cheap garment she’d borrowed from a friend and just that moment thrown on.

“You wished to see me,” she said simply. “Now you do.”

“I, uh …” Ringil took the offered hand and pressed it to his lips, something mechanical to do while he got his head together. The Lady Quilien of Gris was clearly insane. “Thank you, my lady. But might I suggest that you are not as, uhm, open, when my porters come to collect your luggage.”

“Oh, I won’t need
them.
” Quilien took back her hand, brought it to her face. It seemed, for a moment, she was about to sniff or lick at her knuckles, but then she suddenly remembered herself and dropped her arm to her side instead. “I travel very light, you see.”

She was still holding the red flannel towel to her head in her other hand, as if to stanch the flow of blood from some recently acquired scalp wound. She smiled brilliantly at him from under the cloth and the damp
mass of her hair, but there was something vacant in the way she did it, as if smiling were something she’d only recently learned to do. She tipped her head, but it was a jerky, inelegant motion, and he heard her neck click as she did it. In the uncertain light, he had the sudden sensation that the color of towel might indeed be blood-soak, and the off-key gestures the sign of a brain damaged by some brutal blow to the skull. The wide, empty smile stayed and stayed. Saliva gleamed on the points of the teeth. Her eyes seemed to stare through him at something else.