The Cold Commands (31 page)

She grimaced.

“I carried a warning to you last winter that we came close to ignoring, and look how that turned out.”

“Yes, rub my face in that, why don’t you.”

“The facts remain, my lord.”

“All right, don’t milk it.” Jhiral leaned back and peered upward into
the canopy of the tree, as if he might discern a way out among the branches. He frowned. “You said after Ennishmin that the dwenda do not favor harsh light, that they can probably not abide the sun in these latitudes.”

“That’s not what I said, my lord. It’s what the knight Ringil Eskiath said he
surmised
from his time among them. It’s a supposition, nothing more.”

The young Emperor nodded vigorously. “Yes, but still. Even in Ennishmin, where the sun barely breaks through the clouds, even in the pall of winter, the dwenda chose to fight at night.”

“They could fight at night here, too.”

“That was not what this … Eskiath
surmised
, though, was it?”

Most of the time I was in the Aldrain marches, it was dark or dim, like twilight
. Ringil’s hesitant theorizing rose in her memory.
One place we went, there was something like a sun in the sky, but it was almost burned out. Like a hollow shell of itself. If that’s where the dwenda are from originally, it might explain why they can’t tolerate bright light
.

“They still came to Khangset,” she said stubbornly. “They ripped the town apart. And if the Helmsman is to be believed, the Ilwrack Changeling is not dwenda at all. He’s an undead human sorcerer, wielding Aldrain powers. How, unaided, would you stop something like that?”

“You believe in this Ilwrack Changeling, then? Tell the truth, Archeth. Have you even heard of him?”

“No, my lord.”

“Then—”

“But the timing is suggestive. Less than a year after our skirmish with the dwenda, and here we are, warned of an escalation in the conflict. Can we afford to ignore this as some kind of coincidence?”

“I’ll tell you what we can’t afford to do, Archeth. We can’t afford to equip a full naval expedition to the middle of the northern ocean in the hope that it’ll stumble on some figment of a mad machine’s imagination. Quite apart from anything else, that’s the other side of League waters. We sail there in force, it’s a major diplomatic incident in the making.”

“We are not at war with the League, my lord.”

“No,” said the Emperor glumly. “Not yet. But piracy is on the increase
north of Hinerion. And I have it on good authority from the admiralty’s spies in Trelayne that the League shipmasters’ association is pressing for a renewal of privateer licensing. You know what that means. It always kicks off the same way.”

Except when we kick it off ourselves by marching north in force
.

She quelled the thought. She had no great love for the League, had always believed, as her father’s people had—perhaps
because
her father’s people had—that Yhelteth offered the better way forward.

But:

“Admiral Sang’s … spies … are less than wholly reliable.” She trod warily. “They’ve been known to exaggerate claims before.”

“As has the old bastard himself. Yes, all right, Archeth, I know you don’t like him.” Abruptly, Jhiral was on his feet again, pacing. “But I’ve read the reports, and I don’t think this is Sang beating the drum. We’ve seen this before, after all. Those mercantile little shits up north can’t afford a war right now any more than we can, and they know it. But it won’t stop them farming the unpleasantries out to private shipmasters and then taking a tithe on the booty it brings in. Their coffers fill up with plunder from imperial cargo, their diplomats shake their weasel heads in sorrow and deny all knowledge. And meantime, as if we didn’t have enough to worry about down in Demlarashan and up at Ennishmin, we have to raid the treasury again to build navy pickets, or risk losing our own trade lanes to League competition.”

“Maybe Admiral Sang is just looking for some new warships.”

“I already told you I don’t think it’s that.” Trace of a growl in his voice now.

“Besides which there must be a whole constellation of League trade interests on land who don’t want any kind of war. The slavers to name but one. The League aren’t necessarily bound to listen to what the shipmasters want. They—”

“Archeth, will you stop building castles in the air!”

“I”—before she could stop herself—“trust Sang about as far as I could throw his fat arse. He’s not reliable.”

“Oh, and the fucking Helmsmen are?”

Suddenly he was in her face. Hands clamping down on her shoulders, thumbs hooking in, cabled strength in the arms. She was forcibly
reminded that if Prince Jhiral, heir apparent, had never seen anything of the war against the Scaled Folk or his father’s earlier campaigns, had in fact never struck a sword blow in anger his whole life—well, neither then had he missed a day’s combat schooling for anything other than sickness since he was twelve years old. There was a lot of muscle under the ocher-and-black draped shoulders, a lot of trained and channeled power.

But even with the krinzanz jitters, she could have put Bandgleam in his throat faster than he could blink.

Could have …

She met his eyes.

Perhaps he sensed it. He let her go. Straightened up.

“Archeth, you were at An-Naranash. You saw how it went down.” His voice was back to regal, council-chamber calm. He gestured, throwaway, with one open palm. “All that Helmsman burbling, months to cross the desert, all the diplomatic wrangling with the nautocrats in Shaktur, the lake tolls and bribes, and what do we end up with? A mausoleum on stilts, centuries deserted, stripped of anything even remotely valuable.”

She remembered. The slow-dying excitement in her guts as they swung in closer to An-Naranash’s silent, towering bulk, and she saw the extent of the dilapidation. The clenched, sickening disappointment as she boarded at one massive, barnacle-crusted leg, climbed the endless damp-reeking stairwells, and prowled the echoing gloom of spaces as abandoned as anything she knew at An-Monal.

“It cost us half a million elementals to mount that expedition, Archeth. All because the Helmsmen said go. It’s one of the biggest mistakes my father ever made. Do you really expect me to follow in his footsteps? Is that what you want?”

For that, she had no answer.

Because you forced the Shaktur expedition, Archidi, and you know it. It wasn’t the Helmsmen, not really. You squeezed it out of Akal in his dying melancholy and regret, funds and men he could ill afford in the postwar mess, a paid penance, an old man’s attempt to atone
—the unspoken bargain that she would no longer torment him with the tales of what she saw at Vanbyr, if he underwrote the expedition and gave her the command. That she would, in some unclear fashion, absolve him.

Strange how you could become a man’s god without noticing.

Akal died before she returned. It was probably just as well—she’d been in no fucking mood for absolution when she got back.

“Archeth, look.” Akal’s son, conciliatory now, leaning back toward the dissolute aristo loucheness he wore so well. “I’m not saying we don’t take this seriously. Go do some reading, by all means. I know how much you love that clerkish shit. Chase up this changeling fairy tale in the Indirath M’nal. Talk to Angfal, if you can drag anything out of him. But for the Prophet’s sake, cool off. Go get drunk, chew some krin—fuck it, get yourself laid, Archeth. Go play with that curvy little Trelayne trollop I gave you last year. Bet you still haven’t touched that, have you?”

In a way, she was almost relieved. It was a side of Jhiral she found far easier to deal with, a role he’d been playing since his early teens, a thrust to which she knew all the smart parries and ripostes because she’d been making them for a decade or more. A decadence you could comfortably despise.

But she wondered, not for the first time, what he armored himself against with it.

Maybe it’s not armor—maybe he just fucking likes it. Revels in it. Ever think of that?

Ishgrim sprang into her head, pale portions of flesh that begged for hands to cup and grasp. Long, smooth limbs to revel among.
Bet you still haven’t touched that, have you?
The smart bet, my lord. Whatever mannered game Jhiral was playing with her over Ishgrim, he was winning it hands down.

She pushed herself upright off the arched root. Drew a long breath.

“I shall do some reading, my lord,” she said.

“Good. Then we can leave it there, I think. The Helmsman should—”

“If,” Anasharal said, out of the empty green-fragrant air, like any divine visitation. “I might interject.”

Emperor of All Lands and Kiriath half-breed semi-immortal—their gazes snapped together like those of small children called in for dinner by an unfamiliar voice. Even Archeth, elder sister and halfway expecting this …

She built a shrug, elaborately casual.

“You’ve been listening to us?”

“You truly have a talent for stating the obvious, daughter of Flaradnam. Manathan did mention it. He puts it down to your muddied half-breed blood. But oddly enough, you have still not spotted the very obvious solution to the impasse you face.”

“There’s no impasse here,” said Jhiral, mustering some regal disdain.

“I was not talking to you, Jhiral Khimran.”

It was an affront that would have earned any human speaker a swift and probably fatal trip to the palace dungeons. The Helmsmen—well, over the centuries the Khimran dynasty had learned to adjust. You didn’t bite the hand that fed your power, for all it might be taloned and demonic beneath that urbane, avuncular surface.

“Perhaps you’d better explain,” Archeth said hastily. “What impasse?”

“The impasse you will face, daughter of Flaradnam, when you’ve done your reading, and you’ve satisfied yourself that an expedition to find An-Kirilnar is indeed necessary, and you still face the same strictures from this stuttering apology for an Empire’s depleted treasury.”

“Yeah, maybe you can just point us to a handy pot of gold,” sneered Jhiral.

Again, the beat of silence Archeth was learning to interpret as reproach. The icy schoolmaster tone.

“In point of fact, Jhiral Khimran, that is exactly what I am going to do. So once again, it would behoove you to quell your sense of throne room entitlement and listen carefully to what I’m about to say.”

ome unmeasured time later, still alone, but roughly on the bearing the ghost claiming to be his mother gave him, he stumbles across a paved track through the marsh.

It’s not much to look at—scuffed and worn white stone, muddied black in the grain, a couple of feet wide at best, almost covered over by the marsh grass growing back in from margins long untrimmed and up between the cobbles. He shoves back a tuft with one boot, examines the paving curiously. It looks a lot like the paths through the Glades district in Trelayne, the paths leading among other places to the gates of his home—or at least the way they’ll probably look a thousand years hence.

Without Ishil’s guidance, it would have been easy to miss this.

He looks left and right, shrugs, and picks the direction that seems to lead closer to the scribble of firelight on the sky ahead. Almost unnoticed, some tiny increment of satisfaction thaws and drips inside him.
The going is easier now, no more soggy give with each step. The stone sounds firm under his heels, pushes back solidly as he walks, and though the cobwebs sweep in sometimes on either side, they never touch or cross the track.

Instead, eventually, he finds skulls.

Scores of them, maybe hundreds, dotted grinning out across the marsh on either side of the path. Each skull sits perfectly upright, atop a low tree stump whose wood has gone gray and cracked with age. A hundred and more leveled pairs of eye sockets, rinsed through with the cold wind, surveying the marsh horizon. But for that perfect sentinel rigor in every hollow gaze, these might be inventive cairns, built to the dead of some battlefield long forgotten, the fallen warriors of some race that preferred not to pile cold stones on the face of their loved ones in death.

But they are not cairns.

Ringil slows reluctantly to a halt where one of the skulls sits a couple of paces off to the left of the path. It still has hair, a fall of long dead gray strands plastered across the skull and over one eye, like magically straightened cobweb. He squats and brushes the hair aside, touches the bone behind, pushes gently against one yellowed temple. There is no give. The skull is cemented to the stump, just as its owner’s still-living head once was. He’s seen it before; it’s Aldrain sorcery, a favorite terror tactic of the Vanishing Folk wherever humans tried to defy them. Seethlaw once told him that the heads would live indefinitely provided the stump roots drew water.

Which makes this the result of either some long-ago drought or a passage of time so colossal Ringil’s sanity reels away from the edge of contemplating it.

Or Seethlaw lied to you
.

He straightens up with a grimace. It’s a hypothesis he prefers not to entertain. Seethlaw as Aldrain warlord, murderous, cruel and proud, walking amid flickering lightnings, the epitome of the dwenda out of myth, striking down all before him with dispassionate unconcern—that, all that, Ringil can live with. But Seethlaw the dwenda, dishonest and manipulative as any sweet-lipped harbor-end whore …

Well, then. An immense gulf of time instead, time for even the sorcery of the Aldrain to finally weaken and lose its grip on the forces of decay.

Here, perhaps, is rationale, and an escape at last. A letting go he can allow himself.

Perhaps he’s been unable to find Seethlaw in the Gray Places because some vast … tilting … 
mechanism
, something like the long orbits of comets that Grashgal once tried to explain to him on the sleepless eve of battle at Rajal, or wait, wait, simpler, look, some … gargantuan windmill arm in time has swung back up and taken the Vanishing Folk away once more; has opened a gap many hundreds of thousands of years wide and left the Aldrain and all their arts, in some irrevocable fashion, on the far side.