The Cold Commands (37 page)

“Oh,
don’t
look at me like that, Archeth. I’m not a
monster
. I put Sanagh out of his misery for you, didn’t I?”

She left that one well alone, worked instead at keeping her pulse even. She steepled her fingers over the parchment, as if affording the names there some arcane protection.

“My lord.” Flat calm. “Much of this expedition, if not all of it, will be made by sea. And Mahmal Shanta is, whatever his diplomatic failings, the foremost naval engineer in the Empire. That alone would commend him to the list. But consider also that he is not a man to entrust important matters to underlings. He personally oversees every keel laid in his family’s boatyards, and since the war he takes most of them out on their maiden voyage as well.”

“Yes, well, it’s not his fidelity to shipbuilding that I’m concerned about.”

“No, my lord.” She paused. Let him see it for himself.

Jhiral leaned on the back of the chair he’d been using. Not quite ready yet to sit down. “Yes, all right, I’m not stupid. The expedition gets him out of town, draws the fangs on any other little extracurricular activities he’s got brewing.”

“It’s more than that, my lord. I know Shanta. He will insist on accompanying us, yes, but this is not all. He will want to plot our route and resupply points around the Gergis cape. He will want to review the charts and expeditionary records for the northern ocean and the Hironish. He will insist on designing and building the vessels we use.”

“Yeah,” the Emperor jeered. “Nice little earner for the Shanta yards.”

She shrugged. “Or, if we don’t build from scratch, he will want to dry-dock the vessels we acquire and refurbish them stem to stern. Either way, it will consume his energies for months. It will draw in those from the guild he considers his friends. It is late summer, my lord. The expedition cannot make ready before the seasons turn on us; we will have to wait for the spring. Involve Shanta in this, and you occupy him throughout autumn and winter, and
then
he leaves the city for who knows how many months.”

“And escapes any redress for his treason.”

She steeled herself for the step. “If you like. Though the northern ocean is hardly a safe place at the best of times. Who’s to say what may happen there?”

The words floated down into quiet. Outside, the nighttime city glimmered. Jhiral tilted his head and cocked a brow at her.

“Are you … saying what I think you’re saying, Archeth?”

“I am saying only that there is more than one way to remove a political opponent, my lord. You need not always feed them to the ocean in the confines of your own palace.”

A faint breeze through the tower windows. Flicker of lamplight, caper of shadows.

“Interesting.” Jhiral straightened up from the chair back. “Of course, I don’t believe for a moment you’d do it.”

“My loyalty is as it has always been, my lord, as my people’s loyalty has always been, to the Burnished Throne and the spread of Yhelteth civilization. I will do what I have to in order to defend those allegiances.”

“Well, that’s very noble, Archeth.” But she saw through the lightness
of tone. Caught the tiny scratch at the back of his voice. “Perhaps we can find a way to stop short of having you murder your friends, though.”

She inclined her head. Tried not to hold her breath. Jhiral watched her for a couple of moments, then came around the side of the chair and sat back down.

“Very well. For now, Shanta is your problem. Keep him in line, and I’ll see to it that this goes no further.”

“Thank you, my lord.”

He put his boot back up against the side of the desk. She felt how the heavy wood creaked and shifted. He jabbed a finger at her. “
But
if I hear any more unhealthy rumors coming out of the shipwright’s guild, I’m not going to wait until next spring to find out if you’ve got it in you to push him over the rail for me. He’ll be meeting our tentacled friends from Hanliahg just like anybody else. That clear?”

“As crystal, my lord.”

Jhiral grunted. “Shanta’s a lucky man. Might be worth making sure he realizes that.”

“I will speak to him tomorrow, my lord. I am anxious to get started as soon as possible. Spring will be upon us soon enough.”

“Yes.” The Emperor slumped deeper into the arms of the chair. He seemed to be staring right through her and into some other place. “Let’s just hope we all make it through the winter without anything else breaking loose in this miserable fucking city.”

hen he woke again, it was to pale parchment light straining down through the tent over his head, and the dull strop of wind outside on the canvas.

Hjel was gone.

Like every other fucker around here
.

But the thought felt facile, no rooted truth to it this time. There was a cold immediacy to everything around him that didn’t feel like the Gray Places. Ringil shifted a mound of blankets aside, caught the other man’s acrid scent on the bed linen beneath, and a fading trace of warmth. He paddled about in the confined space, looking for his underwear. His gaze caught on the Ravensfriend, laid carefully to one side where the canvas came close to the ground.

The blade was pulled a handbreadth out of the scabbard, as if someone had gone to draw the weapon, then thought better of it.

Voices from outside. Sounded as if they were striking the camp.

Ringil found drawers and breeches, contorted himself and pulled them on. Twitched aside the tent flap and peered out. Members of the wandering court went back and forth; someone had built up the fire and was feeding it. The odor of fried bacon and beans came and wiped itself across his face. He struggled upright and out into the day, blinking in the light.

“Morning.” A bright, slightly arch tone. A woman, face vaguely familiar from the night before, grinning as she passed him on her way to the fire. “Want some breakfast?”

He followed her, tucking in his shirt, not bothering with his boots. A couple of other familiar faces at the fire looked up from their plates and nodded affably. He remembered this from the last time with Hjel’s people, the palpable shock of it—no whispers behind hands, no scandalized tones or accusing glances, no real interest, in fact, beyond a basic curiosity about his arrival in their midst. Nobody cared. They were too full of their own lives to pass much judgment on others. It was an otherness, a magic as staggering in its way as the
ikinri ’ska
.

Ringil seated himself at the fire and was handed a heaped plate of his own. He soaked bread in the beans, chewed and realized abruptly how hungry he was.

“Good to be out, eh?”

It was the man seated on his right—Ringil recognized him now as Cortin, last male to the bedrolls the night before.

“Sorry?”

“Out of the Margins. Good to have the world feel solid again, right?”

Ringil chewed and swallowed, nodded.

“Never get used to it, myself. All those voices, calling you away.” Cortin set aside his plate and sprawled back, reflective on his full stomach. “Course, it’s easier when you’re in company, wouldn’t get me out there any other way. Going solo, now—that’s, like they say, strictly for princes and fools. No offense—I’m guessing by that broadsword you’re the former.”

“Was a gift,” said Ringil around a wad of bread and bacon.

“Oh.” Hurriedly: “Yeah, but still. Man of breeding, am I right? I mean the Black Sail gang don’t come all the way up the fjord for just anyone.”

Someone coughed on the other side of the fire. The woman who’d served Ringil shot Cortin a
shut-the-fuck-up
glance.

Ringil chewed steadily for a couple of moments. Swallowed and wiped the corners of his mouth with care.

“Black Sail gang, eh?”

“Yeah, Hjel’s down there talking to them now …”

Cortin’s voice ebbed to a halt as he finally caught the looks the others were throwing at him. An awkward quiet set in around the fire.

Ringil put together a smile, put down his plate, and brushed his fingers vigorously together, knife-sharpening style, to clean off the grease.

“Well,” he said. “Better go down and see them myself, I guess. Wouldn’t want to keep them waiting.”

Which was actually a lot less like bravado than he initially feared. Along with the cold, scrubbed feel of things this morning, he’d woken, he now discovered, with a fresh sense of momentum, a will to take the next step that didn’t need much prompting. Boots and cloak on, the Ravensfriend slung across his shoulders once more, he let the pulse in his veins and the weight of the killing steel on his back carry him forward. The same woman who’d served him breakfast gave him gestured directions. He went down off the ruined plaza, through the scattering of tumbled walls and columns to where a steeply sloping path wound down the side of a promontory that hadn’t been there the night before. A clean ocean wind came in and ruffled the long grass, hooted around rock outcrops and scudded off the silvery gray glint of the fjord below. He narrowed his eyes against the brightness. Made out some kind of jetty down there, and a black-rigged caravel at anchor fifty yards out.

All right, then
.

He made his way steadily downward, curiously at peace. The landscape was a pretty close match for parts of the Gergis Peninsula he knew, and while he wasn’t kidding himself he was in any way home, the half familiarity was cheering, like knowledge of an opponent’s fighting style prior to a duel. He saw figures standing about on the jetty as he got lower, and a dory moored there. Reflexive combat instinct made the count—six or seven, including Hjel. They had spotted him, it seemed, and were watching him make his way down toward them.

Even at this distance, there was something odd about their attire, about the stiff, upright way they held themselves.

Hjel hurried up and met him, a few yards along the path from the jetty’s age-bleached planks. Tight smile, an offered clasp. “You’re awake.”

“Very much so.” Looking past the young sorcerer’s shoulder at the others. He didn’t take the offered hand. “These friends of yours?”

They were corpses—the corpses of large men, wrapped head-to-foot in grave swaddling, no inch of flesh visible. Tiny loose lengths of the bandaging fluttered gaily from their bodies in the wind. It was as if a small cemetery had been exhumed and its inhabitants pinned about with mottled gray-and-cream pennants.

Hjel cleared his throat. “They are … agents. I’ve had dealings with them in the past. They can be trusted.”

“Well, if you say so.”

The dispossessed prince took his hand urgently. “They’ll take you where you need to go, Gil. Believe me, I sailed with them once myself. There’s nothing to fear.”

“You trying to get rid of me?” Ringil worked up a small grin. “Was it so bad last night?”

Hjel’s grip tightened. “I would keep you with us if I could. You must know that. But there are forces unsheathed here that I have no power to command.”

“Unsheathed, yes. Rather like my sword this morning—the steel one, I’m talking about now. See anything you liked, did you?”

Hjel let go of his hand. Took a step back. “I am not your enemy.”

“You aren’t behaving very much like my friend.”

“Gil, you haven’t
understood
. Something brought you here. I can see it, it breathes through you. The cold legions wrap around you already. There is power engraved and tempered in the blade you carry. I can’t read what’s written there, but—”

“I am Welcomed in the Home of Ravens and Other Scavengers in the Wake of Warriors,”
Ringil recited for him, hollowly.
“I am Friend to Carrion Crows and Wolves. I am Carry Me and Kill with Me, and Die with Me Where the Road Ends. I am not the Honeyed Promise of Length of Life in Years to Come, I am the Iron Promise of Never Being a Slave.”

It was a rough, clunky translation, according to Archeth, and clunkier
still here and now, glossed across into the archaic marsh Naomic so that Hjel would understand. But still the words awoke a faint chill in Ringil’s veins as he spoke them.

He guessed from Hjel’s face that the sorcerer prince was having a similar reaction.

“That’s its dedication?”

“That’s its name,” Ringil told him flatly.

Hjel swallowed. “You must go. I can’t help you here. I
will
help you, that’s coming, I see it clearly enough. But not here. Not now. It’s too much. If the Black Sail has come in like this, then the storm is building, and it’s all we can do to ride it out. I can no more refuse this than a gull can fly in the face of a hurricane.”

Behind him, one of the cerement-wrapped figures moved silently up onto the path, closing in. Hjel either caught the flicker of Ringil’s gaze or sensed the motion at some other level. He half turned, turned back, took Gil’s hand in both of his, raised it to his lips.

“You will come back. We will have time. I’ll teach you the
ikinri ’ska.
”

“I know you will.”

The wrapped corpse was at Hjel’s shoulder now, looming. The breeze picked at its windings, set up rippling patterns in the loose cloth tongues. Ringil thought he saw the mica glint of eyes somewhere deep in the gap between bandages across the face, but he could have been mistaken. Where the mouth should have been, a single gauze binding was pulled broad and tight, and something flickered behind it as the thing speaks.

“Is this going to take long?”

Impossible to say what the voice sounds like. It cuts across the wind with iron force, but there are hinted textures to it as well—amusement seems uppermost, and a certain weary patience, but Ringil knows his grip on those salients will slip away just as his image of the creature at the crossroads is already dream-dim and fading. He will be left with the same fumbling sense of detail lost.

“We’re done,” he said curtly, freeing his hand from Hjel’s. “We can go.”

“Gil, I’ll be waiting for you.”

“Good.”

He looks away along the wind-plucked fjord waters. He held down a spike of unreasonable jealousy. That what was for him a dead memory, Hjel had yet to look forward to.

The grave-clad thing makes a diplomatic noise in its throat. “There is a tide to catch.”