The Cold Commands (32 page)

What would you give to really believe that, Gil?

What would you give to deny it?

Oi, Eskiath. You going to stand around here moping forever?

Ringil jerks around, disbelieving. The stone circle flickers around him like granite lightning, like drilled reflex—once, twice, to the beat of his suddenly elevated pulse.

Eg?

It certainly seems so. The familiar barrel-chested bulk is there, the bits of talismanic iron strung in the gray-straggled, tangled hair. The seamed and weathered face, split in a grin. The staff lance jutting up behind his shoulder like a tall and gaunt old friend peering over. From somewhere, this Egar has acquired one steel-capped tooth and a scar across the chin that Ringil doesn’t remember him having, but for the rest, it’s the Dragonbane, large as life and stood there on the path at Ringil’s back, as seemingly solid as the stones that flicker in and out of being between the two of them.

Egar?

The figure snorts.
You know someone
else
shows up whenever you’ve got yourself neck-deep in shit and digs you out?

Weak gesture around.
I’m not …

No?
Egar steps forward and grabs him by the shoulders. Fingers dig into his muscles with bruising steppe nomad force.
Well, you sure
look
like shit, Gil. Want to know the truth? You look like a pony on ten days’ gallop and no decent forage. Whoever’s riding you needs to give it a rest
.

Fast thoughts of Dakovash, as swiftly put away. Gone, honest—look.

No one’s fucking riding me
, he drawls.

That’d be a first, then
. The Dragonbane draws him close, crushes him
in a bear hug the Egar he knows back in the world would not have allowed himself. Ringil coughs for exaggerated effect, and Egar lets him go. Sets him back at a more accustomed arm’s length and grins.
Good to see you again, Gil
.

Yeah, you, too
. As with Shend, as with Ishil, he knows he shouldn’t engage but he can’t help it. He’s tired of the detachment, tired of standing aloof. So what if his friends are phantoms now.
What you doing here, man?

The Dragonbane shrugs.
Just come to walk with you awhile
.

It’s throwaway, but for just a moment, Ringil sees the seamed brow crease, sees this version of his old friend searching for the memories the Gray Places will not let him have.
How did I get here, where is this place, what came before?
Ringil curses his own lack of restraint and seeks rapid distraction for them both. He notices a thin silver chain draped over the Dragonbane’s chest, some flattened object swaying gently from the impact of their embrace.

What’s this, then?
Reaching and scooping the object up into his palm.
Never had you down for a medallion man
.

Well
, you
gave it to me, mate
.

Ringil blinks. The flattened disk is a three-elemental piece, struck with the face of Akal the Great and worn dull with age. The ends of the chain are welded into it, and the coin itself looks to have melted badly in the process. During his time in Yhelteth, coins like this would have passed through his hands as often as water for washing. But he can’t remember ever having given one to Egar.

C’mon, Gil. You know better than this. Doesn’t pay to focus on detail in the Gray Places. Doesn’t pay to question your companions too closely. To wonder what they might really be
.

Or where it’s all leading you
.

He drops his hand, lets the coin swing back against the Dragonbane’s chest. It’s as if the other man’s bulk were suddenly darker and harder, more gnarled oak tree trunk than human flesh. More animate statue than man.

He staves off a shiver. Manufactures a small, tight smile. Claps the
perhaps
of Egar on one troll-solid shoulder.

Want to walk with me, huh? Walk this way, then
.

Yeah, if I could walk that way, I’d be making a living in Madam Ajana’s floor show
.

The old, stupid jokes—always the best. But hearing it drove a spike in behind Ringil’s eyes, and he turned quickly away, blinking and gesturing wide.

Seen the skulls?

Yeah. Fucking dwenda, huh?

Seethlaw flickers through his recollection, cool to the touch and gorgeous, eyes deep with knowing you could drown in.

Yeah
, he agrees.
Fucking dwenda
.

OF COURSE, HE LOSES EGAR, JUST LIKE ALL THE OTHERS, BEFORE THEY’VE
gone more than a couple of miles. It’s a slower bleed this time, the Dragonbane fading and flickering like a candle in a bad draft, as if there’s some larger storm blowing outside this tented gray sky, and short spiteful gusts can occasionally get in. It lasts for a while, the steppe nomad gone, then abruptly back, as if he’s suddenly thought of some last thing he needs to say, as if he can’t quite make up his mind whether it’s safe now to leave Ringil on his own in this place.

Here—you still got that dragon-tooth dagger I gave you?

Ringil pats his sleeve where the weapon rests.

You want to hang on to that, it’s a good knife
.

I know
.

Ringil rolls with it, because, well, it’s the Gray Places, what else is he going to do? He keeps up a façade of studied calm and normal conversation, pausing when he’s left suddenly alone, picking up the thread again when Egar reappears.

Poltar the Shaman, yeah, you said
.

The old fuck has it coming, Gil. I mean, if I don’t go back there and gut him for what he did, who will?

Maybe they’ll get sick of him. When he can’t deliver on the spring rains, or the steppe ghouls show up again despite all his stick-shaking
.

Nobody
shakes sticks
up there, Gil. That’s a bunch of lizardshit romance some asshole writer at court came up with for one of those Noble-Savages-of-the-Steppe pieces they pack the theaters with down there
.
Seriously, I am so tired of seeing a bunch of little inkspurts who never built a campfire in their life pontificate about the trials and tribulations of iron-thewed warriors and—

And gone.

Bleak marsh to the horizon and the wind for company.

He walks on.

And back again. The Dragonbane mid-stride, brow furrowed in the struggle to recall.

So what was I saying?

Shaking sticks. Look, I’ve
seen—
in Ishlin-ichan that time—I
saw
a shaman shaking a stick over a sick child. About yea long, with bone rattles at the end
.

Yeah, that’s fucking Ishlin-ichan. They do it for effect there, for coins from imperial tourists they think it’ll impress. It’s no different than Strov market in Trelayne. You can’t take that shit seriously
. Voice growing suddenly faint, as if a door somewhere has closed between them.
Take it from me, no self-respecting Skaranak shaman worth a …

And gone again.

Until finally the gaps between, grown increasingly long and lonely, become an unbroken absence and Ringil stops on the path, as if to acknowledge the Dragonbane’s passing. He squats again, sighs, and stares at the dirt-ingrained stones underfoot.

It’s a while before he feels like going on.

But as he straightens up, his gaze catches on something. He narrows his eyes and sees, not too distant, a canted set of angles silhouetted black against the sky. The last remaining corner frame of some wooden dwelling, perhaps, long ago eaten down by fire, gnawed and blackened bones now standing forlorn on the marsh.

He shrugs. It’s a target like any other. Something to walk toward.

It’s not more than a few hundred paces. But as he draws closer, he sees his error. It’s not a dwelling, destroyed or otherwise.

It’s a signpost.

A signpost made from some hammered dark alloy he doesn’t recognize, four fingers forked away from one another at right angles. The whole assembly is canted slightly downward out of true and stands behind a small mound in the tufted marsh grass terrain. The inscription
on the pointers is illegible, scoured down by salt-sea winds and time, but he thinks the lettering looks like old Myrlic.

There’s a gauzy wrap of cobwebs spun down from the top and outward like some diaphanous triangle of sail run up the signpost’s mast. Marsh spiders hang in the gray midst of it, fist-sized and smaller, motionless, tending the strands with long poised forelegs. Ringil feels a sympathetic stab in his belly where the wound is …

It won’t kill you, hero
.

Clicking, crow-rasp, indrawn breath of a voice.

Another stab in the belly as he realizes that what he’s taken for a mound is in fact something sat at the base of the signpost, something cowled and swathed in dark rags and so hunched and bent over that he can’t believe it just spoke.

Then it lifts its head and looks at him.

Later, he will be unable to remember exactly what it looked like under the cowl. He’ll recall only the way he steels up and looks back into the
—what color were they? what shape? how
many
of them
?—unblinking eyes.

Who told you I’m a hero?

The thing in the rags grunts.
Nothing
but
heroes in this dump. The whole place stinks of them. Like fish heads on a midden heap
.

That doesn’t make me one of them
.

Does it not?
Some rattling sound that might be a chuckle, might equally be a sigh. The rags move, as if at the rearranging of lengthy, arthritic limbs beneath.
Let’s see, shall we. Face scarred in betrayal, broadsword gifted by a race now gone from the world, a trail of corpses and dark eddies behind you like bread crumbs off a baker’s wagon. Who do you think you’re kidding, sunshine?

Very good
. Aristo disdain cloaking his unease at the sensation that there are far more than two arms working beneath the restless shift of those rags.
Am I supposed to be impressed? I’ve seen better readings than that from the crones at Strov market. Will you scry a hero’s future for me now as well?

As you wish
.

And out of the rags, suddenly, there’s a big leather-bound tome cracked open, and clawed, bony fingers—or maybe just claws?—turning
the vellum sheets within. The cowl dips, the gaze pores over pages, the taloned fingers leaf.

Here you are
. The voice grows mockingly sonorous.
Ringil of the cursed blade Ravensfriend, exiled and troubled scion of the northern house Eskiath, reached out and made the clasp with the Rightful Emperor of All Lands. There was blood on the exile’s face and in his hair, the marks of battle all over his body, but his grip was still strong and the Emperor grinned to feel that strength. My royal brother, he laughed. Well met. Well—

Ringil must have snorted. The beady gaze flickers up at him.
No?

Doesn’t sound very likely
.

Very well
. The parched scratch of a page turning.
Try this, then. Ringil Angel Eyes rode in sunlit triumph under the high arch of the eastern gate, where he had caused the punishment cages to be cast down and broken apart. At his back marched a double file of the Vanishing Folk, wondrous to behold, and the people of Trelayne fell to their knees in—

The Vanishing Folk? In sunlight?

The cowled head cocked.
You’re right. That’s a transcription error. Ringil Angel Eyes rode in
band
lit triumph under—

That’s enough
. Voice harsh now, because a sudden unlooked-for ache has crept up into his throat.

It is a happy ending
.

I don’t fucking care. The Vanishing Folk wouldn’t follow me anywhere except to slit my throat. I betrayed them, I betrayed—

He shuts his mouth with a snap.

Silence.

The cold sift of the wind, stirring his hair. He finds, abruptly, that it hurts him to swallow. The creature at the base of the signpost makes a throat-clearing sound. Turns the page.

All right. Ringil Angel Eyes, the farmboy who had now risen to become both master mage and king—

Farmboy? Fucking
farmboy?

Ringil finds his anger and the hilt of the dragon-tooth dagger simultaneously. Or maybe it’s not rage, maybe it’s just a vast impatience, finally, with this place and all it implies. He drops into a crouch before the ragged figure, jabs the yellowed blade in under what might—or might not—be a chin.

Suppose you turn the page and just tell me the fastest way I can get out of here
.

The mound of rags shifts, writhes, and here come the arms, oh yes, another six of them besides the two that hold the book, taloned at the ends, flexing up and out like some obscene unfolding puppetry, he feels two of them settle on his back just below the shoulder blades, pressing in and up like hooks. Another two, tickling in under the ribs at the meat of his waist. One of the remaining spares pats him companionably on the shoulder. The other creeps around under his chin and lifts it slightly on one cold, hooked talon.

I should hate to tear you asunder
, the voice says sibilantly.
You show a lot of promise
.

The stone circle flickers into existence, but it will not serve—the creature he’s crouched eye-to-eye with is already well inside
that
space. Ringil can smell it now, a mingling of odors like damp stone and parchment and thick, fresh ink. An odor that might belong to the book as much as the taloned thing that holds it.

Ringil purses his lips, mouth dry. He considers the dragon-tooth blade for a moment.

Lowers it.

The hooks at his shoulder blades ease their touch; the ticklish pressure at his waist withdraws. Limbs folding down, and away. But the talon at his chin remains.

Ringil Eskiath
, the voice resumes.
Came down the gangplank of the
Famous Victory None Foresaw
and joined the bright, brawling chaos on the wharf. Sunlight shattered across the water, slammed glints into his narrowed eyes. The Black Folk Span held the sky to the south like a massive slice of shadow dropped across the estuary. It was better than a mile upriver from where he’d disembarked, but you could sense the cool of its shade from here, beckoning you on
.