The Cold Commands (26 page)

Out on the marsh
, said a third voice, as cold and empty as the other two.
Salt in the wind
.

Footfalls, impossible to tell from where. The swish of a sword blade making passes in the night air. One of Venj’s men jerked out a string of curses, but there was a waking terror in his voice. Ringil twisted his head frantically, trying to see something, anything. Thought he made out a solid black figure standing in the shadows to his left.

Fuck them all
, said the third voice, and Ringil remembered, with a sudden, gut-deep jolt, where he’d heard those words before.

Venj roared. “Come on then, you motherfucking—”

Dark rush of motion. Something like a whirlwind, closing from three corners.

Wrenched screams. Venj’s bellow, turned suddenly castrated.

And a hot, wet pattering through the air, like a rainy-season downpour back home in Trelayne. As it fell on his face and the cobbles around him, he realized vaguely that it was blood.

RINGIL CAME ROUND WITH THE STENCH OF SOMEONE’S VOIDED BOWELS
clogging his throat. He coughed and turned over on the cobblestones, rolled up against the familiar bulk of a still-warm corpse. His knee throbbed painfully and, somewhere not far off, he heard the sea. For a couple of moments he was confused, tangled in old memories, thought he was still lying hidden among the slain at Rajal Beach. Panic-stricken, he froze the cough in his throat. His pulse pounded. If the Scaled Folk were still prowling the breakwaters, looking for survivors …

The leaning bulk of a corner building, the cobblestones under him. Faint glow of street torches. He blinked. Memory swam up to him in all its ugly glory.

No Scaled Folk anymore, Gil. We slaughtered them all, remember?

He heaved himself into a sitting position. The cough jumped him, would not be held down any longer. He gave in and let it rack his chest, had to prop himself up on the corpse until the spasms passed. When it finally stopped, there was a sour, acid taste in his throat. He hawked and spat, wiped his mouth and stared around.

Well, it wasn’t Rajal Beach, right enough, but whoever had been at work here could have given the Scaled Folk lessons in savagery. Venj’s followers were scattered across the slant of the street in butchered pieces
and broad pools of blood. The corpse Ringil was leaning on lacked both legs below the knee and one arm. Others were worse. He spotted a body ripped in two somewhere below the rib cage, another reduced to chunks of meat no larger or better defined than you’d see on a butcher’s slab. Venj himself sprawled back against a wall, throat torn out, staring down with sightless eyes at his own opened guts. His ax was still gripped firmly in both hands. Other weapons lay about for the taking, one or two with their owner’s disembodied hands still clinging.

A faint odor of scorched flesh and metal hung over everything. The slave market stink of branding.

“Interesting,” Ringil mumbled, mostly to keep from thinking too hard about what he’d seen of his saviors. He patted the corpse on its intact shoulder, leaned hard on it, and used the leverage to get back on his feet. “And very handy. I think—”

“Hoy!”

Klithren hung there at a panting halt—he’d come up the rise at a jog. Naked disbelief slapped across his face like cheap paint as he stared at the slaughter in front of him. He grabbed at the sword in his belt. For one drop-stomached moment, Ringil thought it was all over, that Klithren would kill him now before he could even find his sword, let alone put up a guard with it. He met the bounty hunter’s gaze, felt himself shaking his head numbly.

No more, no more
.

“Hoiran’s fucking balls, Shenshenath. Who did this?”

“I uh, I—” Then, abruptly, he was tumbling forward and Klithren let go of his sword hilt and darted in just in time to catch him and hold him up. His boot heels dug and scrubbed about on the cobbles; he tried to get purchase, but his legs were like marsh grass stalks. The bounty hunter made a hushing noise.

“Hey, hey. Easy, Shenshenath, easy. I got you.”

He lowered Ringil gently to the ground. Put hands on him, checking for wounds. Ringil pushed him away.

“I’m fine—just gashes. Got hit in the head with something.”

The bounty hunter nodded, took back his hands with an oddly propitiatory gesture. He crouched there in front of Ringil, still taking in the carnage.

“You see who did this?”

“They jumped us. No time.” Ringil felt another cough coming on, rolled with it, played it up for all it was worth. He nodded weakly to one side. “Out of that alley. Like fucking demons.”

“But …” Klithren’s brow furrowed. “Must have been a lot of them, right?”

“Didn’t see. No time.” He kept his voice faint, tightened up the Yhelteth accent. “Couldn’t tell.”

The bounty hunter stared around. As his eyes fell on Venj, Ringil thought his mouth grew clamped. Thought his eyes suddenly gleamed.

“He found you, then? Venj. He tell you what he wanted?”

Ringil felt a chilly caution settle over him. He shook his head, feeling his way by inches. “Found me, yeah, in a tavern up there. Never told me what it was about. Something important, he said, but they hit us before he could say.”

“Well, where the fuck were you all going?”

Another groggy headshake—work the act. “Dunno. Back to the square, I think. Bounty office. He seemed … excited.”

Klithren sat back on his haunches. “Just doesn’t make any fucking sense. He left me a note at the boardinghouse. Gone back to see you at the tavern, something important, he said. Supposed to meet him there. I get there, he’s gone to the
harbor
, left word for me to follow. I get to the harbor, no one fucking there, either, and some wharf rat drunk tells me he saw men head up the street this way.
Heard
the fight, but by the time I got up here … ”

Ringil nodded. At night, the sound of steel clash and dying would carry half a mile at least. He started to get up, found his legs a little stronger this time.

“Over quicker than you can piss,” he said truthfully. And then, with mental apologies to Egar, “Thought I saw staff lances. And howling. You hear it?”

“Steppe thugs?” Klithren looked doubtful. “You think? Looks savage enough, yeah, but I haven’t heard of a Majak company in these parts since the war wrapped up. Haven’t seen any about town, either.”

“So maybe I imagined it. Got hit in the head, like I said.” Ringil cast about for the Ravensfriend, found it in a pool of blood. He wiped it
down as best he could with rags from one of the slaughtered men, slotted it clumsily back in the scabbard on his back. Checked his sleeve for the dragon knife, settled it a little looser. Looked up and down the street for witnesses.

“Ah fuck, Venj. Look at you.”

Klithren had wandered over to stare at the axman’s corpse. Ringil came up on his shoulder, got a reflexive, flinching glance from the other man, the skirmish habit of years, and then the bounty hunter went back to brooding on his fallen comrade. Neck bent forward, the nape offered. Ringil felt himself hesitate.

“You know him long?”

A shrug. “Four, five years. That’s a long time in this business, right? Came down here from Trelayne after the war, chasing some piece of pussy he’d fallen for when he was in uniform.” Klithren crouched to eye level with the dead man. Sighed and pressed his chin to his folded knuckles. “He was an arrogant little fuck sometimes. But you couldn’t ask for a better man at your back in a scrap. Saved my life a couple of times for sure.”

“Guess this means we’re not heading out the Dappled Gate after all.”

“Nah, that was scuppered to fuck anyway. Didn’t you hear?” Klithren looked up at Ringil. “Thought you might have. Thought
he
might have, maybe that’s how come all this rushing around … ”

Ringil felt his pulse pick up slightly. “Heard what?”

“Word just came down from the Keep.” The bounty hunter said it almost absently, like he couldn’t care less. His eyes were fixed on Venj’s wounds. “No one goes outside the city walls until further notice. They’re saying some of the slaves on that caravan got hit yesterday had the plague.”

THE WORLD OPENS UP AND SWALLOWS YOU DOWN.

This is not new. You’ve spent the last decade of your life, at least, wondering how it’ll burn down in the end. Before that, of course, you were too young and alive to really believe in your own death, but the war took all that away.

The war gave you death as a daily commonplace, an immediate possibility
behind every badly timed sword stroke or stumbling misstep you made. Death was there at your side in the screaming chaos of battle, cutting down comrades and enemies alike, occasionally turning your way, ready for the least slip or sign that you’d
really had enough of this shit
and wanted the easy out. Death came to you, pensive quiet and sated in the aftermath, smirking up at you from the rictus grin of the men who’d died hard, hanging about at your back in the waning cries and weeping of the wounded beyond repair. Death was your friend, your confessor, your intimate companion, and though the seduction might be lengthy and sly, you always knew he’d get you in the end.

Just not like this.

Klithren went down behind the blow from the dragon-tooth dagger without a sound. Ringil, stirring from the dimmed moment of the act, saw he had used the weapon’s pommel and that though there was blood in the bounty hunter’s hair Klithren would live to fight another day. Make sense of that if you could.

Harbor. Get to the fucking
harbor
.

Where the night had by now settled down to seeping bandlight and an illusory, seaward-yearning calm—faint, irregular slap of waves against the pilings, soft stutter and creak of mooring ropes as they stretched with the shift of their tethered vessels on the swell. A trio of quiet drunks huddled like cormorants atop a pile of trawl nets at one end of the quay, mumbling sea chanteys and passing a wine flask back and forth. Ringil went past them at a limping trot, got a tipsy salutation from one, hurriedly shushed by his more circumspect—or just more sober—companions. Farther along, in the puddle of shadow cast by the customhouse wall, he caught the grunts and glottal clicking sounds of some sailor getting a cheap blow job. He thought he saw a queue of figures waiting there in the gloom.

Eril was draped at the rail of the
Marsh Queen’s Favor
, smoking a krinzanz twig. He straightened when he saw Ringil approaching, pitched the twig into the gap between ship and wharf, and came down the gangplank with a grin. Ringil raised a hand to keep him back. Shook his head.

“Better stay where you are.”

Eril’s smile dropped off his face. He glanced about the darkened wharf, seeking enemies.

“Trouble?” he asked quietly.

“You could say that.” Ringil was fascinated to discover that what he felt most was an obscure embarrassment. “You’d better tell the captain to get his crew together and slip ropes. Time for a smuggler’s exit.”

“And our other passenger?”

“They’re calling a plague quarantine on the city, Eril. You don’t get out of here right now, they’ll lock the whole harbor up and your ride out of here as well.”

“Plague?”
For perhaps the second time ever in their acquaintance, Ringil saw genuine fear in Eril’s eyes.

“Yeah. Seems some of the slaves had it.”

The Brotherhood enforcer made the connection. The fear in his expression shifted into something else.

“You … ”

“Yeah. Looks like it.”

Silence stretched between them like distance, as if the gangplank were already up and the
Marsh Queen’s Favor
drifting from the shore. Ringil made himself grin, guessed it must look pretty awful. Eril cleared his throat.

“I had a great-uncle in Parashal, got it back in twenty-eight. They say he lived.”

Ringil nodded. Everybody had an uncle somewhere who’d survived the plague in some other place or time. It was a bedside platitude, cheap comfort you could hand out like some threadbare blanket you weren’t going to miss.

“Sure,” he said. “It can be done.”

In Majak lands, Egar had once told him, you could cheat the plague of its victim if the tribe could find—read, in the constant tribal ruck of the steppes, capture alive in battle—a suitable substitute to sacrifice in place of the original sufferer. Given a man or woman of comparable rank and blood, the hovering plague spirit would take the offered life instead and depart with it. The original sufferer didn’t just recover, they came back stronger than they had ever been before. Often they would rise to become tribal leaders or shamans in their own right. Such recoveries apparently took place overnight—sometimes, if the shaman had the Dwellers’ favor, before the planned sacrifice had even been carried through.

Nice trick if you can pull it
.

“My debt …,” Eril began.

“Is hereby canceled. I asked you to help me throw a burning brand into Etterkal, and we did that pretty effectively. I’m all done murdering slavers for now.”

The Brotherhood enforcer could not quite keep the relief from soaking into his features. He made an uncharacteristically awkward gesture.

“I, uh, I sold the horses.”

“Good. Get anything halfway decent for them?”

Eril shook his head, overvehemently. “Got fucked in the arse. Barely three hundred apiece and that’s including the tackle. Fucking landlord’s going to double his money just by sleeping on it. Here.”

He dug a purse out of his coat, took a half step forward on his way to hand it over, and then remembered. He stopped dead on the gangplank. Ringil nodded, lifted one open hand toward him.

“ ’Sokay. I’m not too far gone to catch stuff.”

Eril hesitated, then tossed the purse across the intervening gap. A good, hard throw, to make sure it cleared the edge of the wharf. The weight and impact stung in the cup of Ringil’s palm.

The two of them stood there looking at each other.

“What will you do?” the enforcer asked him finally.

Ringil weighed the purse in his hand. “I don’t know. Get drunk, maybe. Don’t you worry about me, Eril. You need to turn around and put your foot in that captain’s arse. Get some sail hoist while you still can.”