The Cold Commands (29 page)

Actually
—Ringil pushes the pace as hard as the soggy ground and his shaky legs will let him
—I am
.

Oh, you call that exile? Chartered ambassador to the Majak plains, a sinecure purse and the writ of the city to cover your extravagances? That’s not an exile, that’s a license to plunder horny-handed horse-breeder arse. All those iron-thighed young things. Some punishment
that’s
going to be. I
—Shend thumps his chest with bombastic self-pity—
I
suffered
for my art
.

Oh, shut up
.

But he has to wonder, just briefly and for all he’s trained himself against such things, what shape his life must have taken in the world this alternative Shend belongs to. A Shend who never got to go home after all, and a Ringil who …

The aspect storm is a warp in the fabric of every possible outcome the universe will allow
, Seethlaw once told him, camped out in the Gray Places with the aplomb of a Glades noble at a picnic.
It gathers in the alternatives like a bride gathering in her gown. For a mortal, those alternatives are mostly paths they’ll never take, things they’ll never do
.

He makes the aspect storm, he knows, every time he walks in the Gray Places. It blows around him in barely visible cobweb vortices, and the fragments of those alternatives swirl to him like storm waters pouring down into a drain.

You’d be living inside a million different possibilities at once
. The—slightly drunken—opinion of a scholar in dwenda lore he knows back in Trelayne.
Imagine the will it would take to survive that. Your average peasant human is just going to go screaming insane
.

It certainly sounds like insanity: a Ringil not disowned, a Ringil cherished enough by family
—yeah, or maybe just soft enough to bend to family will
—that his transgressions meet with no worse sanction than an iffy diplomatic posting. He sees himself hurried urbanely out of that other Trelayne with face-saving rank, appointment, entourage. Sent in genteel disgrace a thousand miles northeast to the steppes, a place where his appetites can no longer bring the name of House Eskiath into disrepute because no one in Trelayne will know or care what he does there.

He wonders vaguely if he’d meet some alternative Egar out under those aching, open skies. An Egar who’s perhaps not quite so resolutely and exclusively dedicated to pussy.

There’s a feeling in his chest now, dangerously close to longing.

What if …

He stamps down on it.

You don’t do that shit, Gil. There are no alternatives. You live with what is
.

And you don’t let your ghosts rent room in your head
.

But he glances sideways at Shend anyway, can’t quite repress the impulse, and it’s not a pretty sight. The poet’s once-fine features have sagged and bloated with his years away, and his hair is stringy with lack of care. His nails are bitten down to the quick, his belly hangs like a money changer’s apron at his waist. That he woke up one morning in exile and just
gave up
is written into his flesh like branding.

Pouched eyes give Ringil back his stare.
What you looking at? See something you like?

Look, Hinerion’s not that bad
, Ringil says uncomfortably.

Really? Then why are you leaving?

I’m not … leaving
. Some unlooked for puzzlement in his voice at this.
I’m …

Sudden, crushing image of a black sail on the horizon.

 … dying … ?

Shend sniffs.
Looks like leaving to me. And in
such
exalted company
.

Ringil staves off a shiver.

I just don’t see what the big thing is about life in Trelayne
, he tells the poet.
You were broke more than half the time back home, always borrowing money off Grace of Heaven or the Silk House boys, then scrabbling to find the payback. How’s that worse than pensioned exile in Hinerion?

Shend stares morosely off across the marshland.

I don’t expect you to understand. Why would you? You always did like to immerse yourself in the filth. I imagine you’re quite as comfortable rubbing hips with our dusky southern neighbors as you are with any other riffraff
.

Well, yeah. I fucked you, didn’t I?

Oh! Oh!
The Shend that Ringil remembers was more articulate. Not as shrill.
So it’s come to that, has it? Well
, I’m
not the one with
refugee blood
running in my veins
. I’m
not the one with skin that tans in the sun like a marsh peasant’s. I mean, how
dare
you! You’re practically straight out of the fucking desert on your mother’s side
.

Which, aside from shrill, is also inaccurate enough to be termed open slander and see steel drawn, at least in Ringil’s version of the world. The southern refugee connections lie a good several generations back—Yhelteth merchants, driven out in some religious schism or other as the fledgling Empire convulsed yet again over clerkish points of doctrine—and by the time Ringil’s mother was born, the lineage had been mingling pretty freely with the local blood for a while. In fact, rather too freely, some maintained, pointing to a number of unfortunate outlying branches on the family tree where marsh dweller ancestry was, let’s say, hard to deny.

But Shend isn’t likely to call that one out—like a lot of the petty nobility in Trelayne, the Shend clan itself has more than a few points of lineage with the whiff of the marsh about them. The trace physiognomy is there for all to see. Ringil chooses his riposte with cruel care.

You know, you shouldn’t knock southern blood, Skim. Maybe if your mother’d come from the south, she could have arranged for you to have some cheekbones
.

And you should just—just fuck off and
die!

 … die, die, die!

The last word seems to echo, inside Ringil’s head or across the sky, he isn’t entirely sure which. He grimaces.

Perhaps I will
.

Raw silence, pressing in his ears, and the soft squelch of his steps in the marsh. Ringil looks around and sees that the poet, perhaps in some terminal paroxysm of offense, is gone, faded out with the echo of his parting words.

That scrap of fire-glow at the skyline doesn’t seem to be getting any closer, either.

LATER, AS IF SHE’S SOMEHOW HEARD AND BEEN DRAWN BY SHEND’S
slurs on her lineage, Ishil Eskiath puts in an appearance. Carefully skirting the fringes of another marsh spider infestation at the time, Ringil’s surprised by how hard this is to take. He can’t tell how far removed this woman is from the mother he knows back in the real world, but she seems genuinely happy, which to his mind suggests some considerable distance.

Lanatray
, she insists brightly.
You always loved it there
.

I nearly drowned there, Mother
.

He can’t help it, the snap in his voice. Out of the corner of his eye, he sees her pull a face, but she says nothing. Another switch—the Ishil Eskiath he knows would never let him have the last word, least of all when he’s just hurt her.

He sighs.
Look, I’m sorry. But you don’t know me, Mother. You think you do, but you don’t
.

Oh, Ringil, don’t you suppose that’s what every boy thinks about his mother?

She lays a hand on his. He flinches a little from the contact—there’s something cool and not quite human about it. The ghosts in the Gray Places seem to lack the normal warmth of living things, and he supposes they must draw off some of his heat to keep going as they circle him. Perhaps that’s what draws them, like moths to a lantern spark across the marshland gray. But—

I’ve known you longer than you’ve known yourself
, she says.

He stares at the dull, thickly glistening swatches of cobweb across the marsh grass ahead of him.
Tell me what I’m thinking, then
.

Oh, the usual
. Ishil’s tone turns abruptly gemstone-hard and glinting. He feels a chill gust through him—suddenly, she’s a perfect match for the mother he knows.
You wonder how I manage to live with the daily truth of marriage to your father and not just open my veins some sunlit afternoon in my bathwater
.

Well …

She laughs. Some of the hardness leaches back out of her voice.
You’re such an old romantic, Gil. Just try to imagine for a moment you’d been born female. Breeding or brothel stock, these are your options. We just don’t get to carry a blade and carve out our own uncompromising path through the world like the boys
.

He’s known women who did, across the old warehouse district and down at harbor end. Admittedly not many of them made it out of their teens alive. He supposed not many had ever expected to.

Women know the price of things, Gil. We learn it hard and fast at our mother’s knee, helping and caring and fetching and carrying, while our brothers are still playing at knights and foes without a care in the world. The world falls on us early
.

You seem to be bearing up
, he says sourly.
What’s the secret?

Children
, she tells him with sudden warmth.
Bringing them into the world. Seeing them through it. You know that
.

He can’t face the way she looks at him as she says it. He turns away, eyes pricked through, half blinded. He wonders, with an odd, quiet desperation, how many times the Ishil he knows might have looked at him like that without him ever seeing or knowing.

Is that why you’re here? To see me through?

She laughs again, voice utterly unfettered this time.
I’m here to ask you about the wedding arrangements, Gil. The vow circlets for you and Selys, gold or silver? Red rose petals or white for her bridal path?

What?
he asks faintly.

And the invitations, the list? Will you really insist on snubbing the Kaads, or shall we let bygones be bygones? Come on, Gil, don’t spoil your mother’s proudest hour. I’m so happy for you both. Is that so strange?

It’s so fucking strange he doesn’t even want to think about it. He gestures at the cobwebs to buy time.
Listen, I’m not getting married to anyone unless we find a way through this first
.

Why don’t you try over there?

To his annoyance, it proves a good call. There are patches where the webs are frayed and old, clogged with the sucked-dry corpses of insect life and small marsh animals. No sign of any stealthy, articulated motion within. He unsheathes the Ravensfriend just in case, prods about dubiously for a bit, then resigns himself to Ishil being right.

This way, then?

This way
, she agrees.
Keep right on like that, it’s your best path out of here. Now, what about the Kaads? Seriously. Your father thinks they should be there
.

I bet he does
. Smashing grimly through the old web and the grass, the tiny, dried hanging corpses that swing and spindle about as he passes.
Chancellery politics never sleeps, does it?

Oh, don’t start, Gil
.

So he doesn’t. He lets her talk instead. And though he doesn’t like to admit it, her voice, trailing at his shoulder, is oddly comforting.

What you don’t appreciate, Gil, is that for all your father’s cruelties and indiscretions, he has been a great shield through difficult times. You don’t
know what it was like back in the twenties. We didn’t have the Scaled Folk to unite us all back then. Yhelteth was a despised enemy—

Yeah—heading that way again these days
.

But she doesn’t seem to hear him.
The raiding went back and forth at the borders for
years,
Gil, news every other week of towns burned and populations marched away in chains. And we were marked. No matter that we were merchants in good faith, wealth in our coffers and a generation of judicious marriage alliances. Still we had the red daub on our door, still we were barred from the Chancellery. Stones thrown at us in the street, spat upon with impunity by urchins. Southern scum, southern scum. In the school we attended, the priests beat my brothers at every opportunity. One of them struck Eldrin to the floor once, called him Yhelteth whelp, kicked him from his desk to the door and out into the corridor. He was five. He came home black and blue, and my father, shamed, could do nothing. My mother went begging to the priests instead, and the beatings stopped for a while, but she never spoke of that visit afterward as long as she lived. Do you know how relieved my parents looked the day I married Gingren Eskiath? Do you know how happy I was for them?

Were they happy for you?

No reply.

He looks back and sees that she, too, has left him.

n the time before this, the Earth was not the way you see it now
.

In the time before this, the Earth was ravaged by endless conflict, fought over by races and beings you now remember only as myth and legend
.

Weapons of hideous, unnatural power were unleashed, vast energies raged, horizon to horizon, the sky itself cracked open. The planet shuddered from the tread of the Visitors—enemies and allies too, the latter chosen in desperation from other worlds and places worse than other worlds, to hold the line against invaders who were probably in the end no more alien
.

Whole nations and peoples disappeared inside storms that lasted decades
.

Great jagged darknesses larger than mountains moved in the night sky, blocking out the stars and casting deathly shadow on those beneath
.

Gates opened, in places no earthly passage should ever have been permitted
,
and the Visitors poured forth, met in battle, coiled and recoiled, worked their alien technologies in causes it is doubtful those who enlisted them could ever truly comprehend. It was a conflict beyond human reckoning, and mere humans found themselves trapped, cornered, hemmed in on all sides by what had been unleashed
.