The Cold Commands (24 page)

Ringil felt a brief quiver of something, made it for pity, and fell back on his original verdict—here was some touched-in-the-head scion of a rural House too embarrassed to keep her at home or consign her to one of the newfangled asylums pioneered in Parashal since the war. A House wealthy enough to pay instead for an endless round of pilgrimages to shrines of reputed healing somewhere far from Gris.

Wherever that was.

“Are you quite sure that—”

“You are very kind, nameless knight. But I assure you that anything I need for travel will be in my cabin when I arrive.”

So perhaps she had porters of her own. Or imagined she had. Or—

Whatever. Feeling increasingly like a man in the wrong place, Ringil contented himself with a courteous nod.

“At dawn,” he reminded her.

“Yes. At dawn.” Almost absently—her interest in him seemed to have abruptly waned. She was looking past his shoulder and slightly downward. “And now, since I see there are men waiting for you, perhaps you should go to them. It was nice meeting you.”

Her arm was out again, hand held up, but oddly, as if it were something she thought might belong to him rather than her. When he took the hand and raised it to his lips, she looked at him with blank surprise, as if she’d had no idea her limb had moved from her side.

Ringil fixed on a courtier’s smile, let go of the arm, and made a bow. Got himself hurriedly back out of the room and into the passageway. Surprised to find the breath tight in his throat.

It wasn’t that madness bothered him much anymore—Hoiran knew he’d seen enough of it during the war to become accustomed.

And in the Gray Places, it was practically the key to survival.

But somewhere, elsewhere, in whichever rural backwater shit-hole it counted itself lord over, Quilien of Gris’s family ate and drank and slept without her under their roof, knowing she was tipped out into the world and groping about with her scrambled sense of self to make whatever poor tapestry of day-to-day living she could. They knew that, and they had let it happen, and they lived with it daily in complicit, well-heeled tranquility. Perhaps they spoke of her sometimes, in strained and distracted tones, their oceanic complacency driven back every so often by storms to reveal the reefs of memory and care. Or perhaps, on some patriarch’s orders, they did not name her at all except in whispers.

In any case, they had abandoned her; had counted it their best strategy.

At least she’s got the dog
.

Funny, he’d forgotten all about the dog.

is Imperial Radiance Jhiral Khimran II was executing traitors in the Chamber of Confidences when they got back.

Archeth had Anasharal brought up to the palace anyway. She’d known the Emperor since he was a child, had watched his ascension to the throne—apparently with a few less illusions than the rest of the court, because she seemed to be the only one not shocked when the purges started—and she knew he was going to demand to see the Helmsman as soon as he heard about it.

He might even put the executions on hold.

So she went, unenthusiastically, along the sculpted marble corridors in the Salak wing of the palace. Went deeper and deeper, toward the screaming, while krinzanz need scraped at her nerves like knives. The smooth-walled architecture gleamed and curved and swept, palely voluptuous around her, mostly tones of muted jade and amber, but veined
through in places with stark copper or black, and studded at intervals with conquest pieces—artwork and sculpture dragged here from every corner of the Empire and jammed into alcoves or nailed onto walls that didn’t really suit the purpose.

And the shrieks and pleas for mercy echoed off the polished stone, chased one another down the corridors, ambushed her around corners, like the ghosts of the conquered dead, somehow trapped in the marble heart of the imperium that had vanquished them.

THE SALAK STONEMASONS AND ARCHITECTS WHO BUILT THE CHAMBER
of Confidences—so the story went—committed quiet suicide when they learned what had been done with their work. Archeth was a child at the time, and would never know for sure. As she grew up she suspected a more pragmatic truth behind the tale: that his Imperial Radiance Sabal Khimran I had had the craftsmen murdered to ensure they never spilled what they knew about the various architectural tricks and secrets they’d so lovingly created.

Certainly had it in him, the evil-eyed old fuck
.

Sabal the Conqueror, first of the Khimrans to really deserve the term
Emperor
. He’d died before she hit her teens, putting down some rebellion or other out on the fringes of the eastern desert. But she still remembered how he’d lifted her up as a small child, the secret look on his hawkish face, as if she were some incredibly precious vase he entertained notions of smashing apart on the floor, one swift and brutal stroke, while no one was looking.

She’d asked her father about that, many years later, when grief at her mother’s death trawled the memory to the surface. But Flaradnam was deep in grieving of his own and disinclined to discuss Sabal, or indeed anything much else, beyond bitter monosyllables.
He would not have dared
, was about all she could extract.
He needed us—they all did back then—as they still do now. Whole fucking dynasty leans on us like a crutch. And Sabal knew I would have ripped his motherfucking mortal heart out if he’d harmed a hair on your head
.

Flaradnam lived through his grief and eventually put it aside—or at least learned to ignore it for extended periods—but they never really
discussed Sabal again. The early excesses of Empire seemed to be bound inextricably in his mind with Nantara’s death, and he skirted them in conversation as soon as they arose. And then, there was that
whole fucking dynasty
angle to worry about—Archeth was old enough now to be admitted to the Council of Captains, to take on her own role in the subtle steering of Yhelteth affairs that served the Kiriath for a mission, or a means to other ends, or maybe just a hobby. There was, her father told her repeatedly, important work to be done.

So forget Sabal the Conqueror, because his son was on the throne now—Jhiral I, a diffident, gentle boy Archeth had grown up playing tag with through the gardens and corridors of An-Monal and the palace in Yhelteth—and the succession was far from assured. Flaradnam and Grashgal spent quite a lot of the next few decades quashing usurpers, safeguarding borders and laws, hammering and tempering the newly minted Empire into something resembling a permanent tool of policy for the region.

And after Jhiral, there was Sabal II, seemingly a solid reincarnation of his grandfather’s brutality and cunning and military prowess. At An-Monal, they all breathed a collective sigh of relief, and stood back to give him sword-room.

And then Akal the Great, perhaps the best of them so far.

And now Jhiral II. Hers to handle alone, for her sins. She sometimes wondered—she was wondering now—why she fucking bothered.

But old habits die hard.

She cleared a final twist in the milky, veined stone corridor—the shrieking hit her full in the face, she did her best not to flinch—and went under the heavy marble cowl of the entry arch, out onto the Honor promontory.

The execution party didn’t pick up on her arrival at once—all attention was focused inward on the business of the day, and anyway with the noise the condemned were making, she could probably have ridden in on a warhorse in full armor and still not have been noticed. She counted about twenty men in all—executioners and apprentices in the somber gray and plum of their guild, a couple of robed judges, there to see sentence carried out, and then a scattering of whichever strong-stomached nobles felt they needed to curry a bit of imperial favor right now.

The Chamber of Confidences.

Under other circumstances, it was a radiant, beautifully rendered space. The Honor promontory was one of three blunt marble tongues—Honor, Sacrifice, Courage, the old Yhelteth horse-tribe trinity—extending at regularly spaced intervals from the otherwise circular walled circumference of a closed ornamental pool fifty yards across. Sunlight fell in through cunningly angled vents in the high dome of the ceiling—the marble blazed and shone where it took the rays directly. Elsewhere, reflection off the water put cool, rippling patterns of light and shade on the walls. A tented raft of rare woods and silks was ordinarily anchored in the center of the pool, a private retreat for the Emperor you could reach only by poled coracle, because you certainly wouldn’t survive the swim.

But the raft was currently moored tight to the Sacrifice promontory, well out of the way.
Well, you wouldn’t want to get blood on that silk. Take forever to get the stains out
. And four of the convicted traitors—three men and a woman—were already afloat, shoved out a safe distance from the promontory on their execution boards and drifting farther away.

Archeth tried not to look at what was happening to them.

She focused on Jhiral’s back, the sumptuous imperial ocher and black of his cloak among the clustering matte palette of the executioners’ garb. She held down a shudder—swore she’d never again try to quit the krin cold.

“My lord.”

Hopeless—the shrieking drowned her out. The fifth man was thrashing and flailing as they dragged him to the manacles on the last remaining board. She thought, with a sudden freezing through her veins, that she might know him. Though beneath the marks of lash and heated irons, the distorting terror in the features, it was hard to tell for sure.

She cleared her throat—something seemed to be sticking in it—and tried again, louder.

“My lord!”

He turned. Heavy silken sweep of the cloak across the marble flooring, handsome features a little clouded, brow furrowed like a man struggling with accountancy he had no real taste for. His voice carried effortlessly. He was used to this.

“Ah, Archeth, there you are. They said you were on your way. But—as you’ll see—I’m a little busy right now.”

“Yes, sire. I see that.”

The last execution board was an old one, gray wood swollen and split from repeated immersions, manacle screw plates spotted with lichen-orange rust. The board looked, she thought, not for the first time, like a generous wedge cut from some huge mold-coated cheese. Broad at the top end so the victim’s head stayed a good couple of feet above the waterline, tapering to a narrow end at the bottom so tortured and manacled feet would lie submerged, leaking slow tendrils of blood into the water.

The pool dwellers were smart—Mahmal Shanta swore he’d once seen them using lure tactics to entice seal pups off beaches in the Hanliahg Scatter—and they knew well enough the sound of the underwater gongs lowered into the pool when there was to be an execution. They’d have squeezed in through the submarine vents in the base of the chamber that morning, would have been waiting below the surface ever since.

They’d be ravenous by the time the first board hit the water.

And then she could no longer beat the perverse urge, she could not keep her eyes away. Her gaze slid out to the water, to the four boards already floating there with their dreadful, shrieking, red-slippery writhing cargo.

In the wild, a Hanliahg black octopus would have wrapped tentacles around surface prey this large and dragged it deep, where it could be drowned and dealt with at leisure. Defeated by the bobbing wood and the manacles, the creatures settled for swarming the boards, tearing at the chained bodies with frenzied, suckered force, biting awkwardly with their beaks. So skin came off wholesale, gobbets and chunks of flesh came with it, finally down to the bone. Blood vessels tore—in the case of a lucky few, fatally. And occasionally, a victim might smother to death with tentacles or body mass across the face. But for most, it was a long, slow death by haphazard flaying and flensing. None of the creatures was bigger than a court-bred hound—they could not otherwise have squeezed in through the chamber’s vents—and even their combined efforts were rarely enough to make a merciful end of things.

Jhiral was watching her.

She forced herself not to look away—the spray of blood, the
up-and-down flail of tentacles like thick black whips, the soft, mobbing purple-black shapes hanging off the wood and flesh, crawling across it. Her gaze snagged on a wild, wide-open human eye and a screaming mouth, briefly blocked by a thick crawling tentacle, then uncovered again to shriek to shriek, to
shriek …

She turned to meet Jhiral’s gaze. Locked herself to the casual poise it took to do it.
Slowly, Archidi, slowly
. Held his eyes, held the moment like a knife blade, loose for the throw. Warrior trick—funnel the noises away, to the edges of your attention, like the pain from minor wounds when the battle demands you gather yourself.

Jhiral gestured impatiently.

“So?”

“We have found a new Helmsman, my lord. It talks of threats to the city, to the Empire.”

“A
new
Helmsman?” Jhiral’s brows kicked up. “A
new
one?”

“Just so, my lord.”

Jhiral glanced back at the last condemned man, the frantic scrabblings he made against his captors as, finally, they managed to get him to the board. The Emperor seemed to be pondering something. Then he looked back at her again.

“Archeth—you would not by any chance be trying to avert punishment for your old pal Sanagh here, would you?”

So
.

The bloodied, screaming features—the memory popped into place like a brutally relocated shoulder joint. Bentan Sanagh. They’d hacked his hair off in the dungeons, of course, and he was haggard with suffering. And anyway,
pal
was not really accurate—she knew Sanagh only casually, through Mahmal Shanta and the shipwright’s guild. A loudmouthed idealist, quite brilliant in his way, which was probably what had kept him alive during Akal’s reign, but he’d always lacked Shanta’s instinct for self-preservation. Archeth had liked him well enough, shared some conversations, a banquet party or two. But she judged him doomed from way back, and kept her distance accordingly.