The Cold Commands (38 page)

Ringil nodded, eyes still on the water. “Then get me to my berth.”

He still doesn’t know what a
tide
is, except that it presages change.

But change will be enough for now.

In the dory, watching the wrapped figures bend silently over their oars, he felt it begin—the creeping shift of the Margins, Seethlaw’s Gray Places, call them what you will, the seeping through like cold marsh water, washing away anything fixed that could be told out like a tale, bringing instead the endless expanse of untold possibilities, scuttling like spiders, beckoning for attention, for momentary existence at the corners of his gaze. He turned and looked back to the shore, where Hjel stands—or does not, the strand is empty—on the aged jetty boards.

He sees others, standing there, too.

Three more figures, one slight, one broad and bulky, one gaunt and tall. Flickery and gray, like Hjel, but where the dispossessed prince stands erect and motionless as he fades, these seem to dart about as if tethered and anxious to be free.

The cold legions wrap around you …

The sky is changing overhead, boiling something up—it looks like a storm, but is ominously silent. The rowers ignore it, and their captain makes no comment—Ringil held on for one final moment to the cold, hard certainty he’d had on waking and then he let go and it’s gone, like a fish in the water. He looks up and there’s the sensation of tilting.

The cold legions …

On the jetty, as if at a signal, the three restless, gray-candle-flame figures break suddenly loose and streak out across the water, like the shadows of cloud blowing by overhead. Ringil watches numbly as they chase the boat, as they close on the stern, as they slip aboard and wrap tight around him with a shock like a cold-water bath.

And are gone.

The black-rigged caravel looms; a rope boarding ladder is hanging over the side. There’s a shiver to the whole vessel, as if it, too, has been
wrapped tightly in something that’s now fraying and fluttering in the rising wind.

Ringil stands, takes one last look back at the empty jetty. Then he grabs hold of the ladder, and hauls himself up the sagging, damp-rope rungs to see what’s waiting at the top.

ddly, the only thing Egar felt now was an icy calm.

As if everything around him—the cracked and decaying frame of the temple by night, the desolate, dust-crunch emptiness of the place—had only ever been a mask, and now its nocturnal wearer cupped hand to visage, doffed the disguise, and stood grinning feral in the gloom.

As if he’d been expecting it all along, this dwenda.

It came slowly down the stairs above them, coruscating blue fire moving behind the balustrade, the hinted dimensions of a dark figure at its heart. It seemed to be singing.

At his back, a choked curse from Harath.

Egar’s eyes never left the blue light. He let go of the girl’s hand, shook it loose with a single sharp motion. Measured the angles.

Get this right, Dragonbane
.

“Harath, these things are fast,” he called in Majak. “Get yourself a lance off that wall, and get ready.
Go!
”

He whirled and sprang, to the wall and the two staff lances still leaned there where Harath’s former comrades had never had the chance to grab them. Soft rush of cloth at his side as Harath moved with him—and suddenly he was glad,
so very glad
of the younger man’s speed. He snatched one of the lances. Smooth wood grain across his palm and the rolling weight of the thing—he felt his lips split in a snarl of joy at the feeling. Heft and spin, one-handed, two-handed and round and—

The dwenda stood before him.

—block!

Like a shriek through him as he saw the shadow blade come leaping. The creature had to have vaulted right over the balustrade, hit the ground soft and silent, and straightened up barely a yard away. The impact of sword against staff shivered through him, stung his grasp. He grunted with it, tilted down, levered the blow away.

Harath swung in, yelling, from the right.

The dwenda caught it, swung about, snake-swift. The dark blade dripped an arc of blue fire through the air. Smashed the Ishlinak’s attack away.

“Mother
fucker!
”

Harath’s yell of surprise—he’d not been expecting the strength. Egar had scant time for sympathy. He bellowed and thrust, pike style, low, at the dwenda’s knees. The blue fire was down to tracery now, they were facing a figure made of dark, etched with the flicker of lightnings, but for all that shaped like a man.

And a man, well—you can always kill a man.

The dwenda shrieked at him and leapt the thrust, put its sword blade through the air in a sweeping slice at head height. Egar swayed back, felt the whicker of air past his cheek. He circled out, away from Harath,
try to bracket this fucker
, and the dwenda came down cat-like, soft crunch as it hit the dusty floor. It wore the same smooth, featureless helmet he’d seen at Ennishmin, now swinging back and forth, questing, like some blunt slug’s head detecting a threat. The same one-piece suit of what looked like shining leather but—Egar knew from bloody experience—resisted edged weaponry like mail.

“Bracket the fucker!” bellowed Harath, like he’d just thought of the tactic himself. And launched himself forward.

The dwenda twisted to meet the attack.
Clang
as the shadow sword met the blade on the end of the staff lance, grunt from the Ishlinak as he felt the impact. Still, he looped back, trapped the sword point high. Egar saw the moment, fell off it like a cliff, and rushed in screaming. He didn’t bother with blades, rammed the staff before him at chest height instead. The dwenda must have sensed the attack, but Harath had it overextended. A desperate side-kick flung out to hold Egar back, but he’d put everything he had into the rush, and the dwenda’s aim was off. He took the glancing kick in the belly, nearly puked from the force of it, did not let it stop him. He collided with the dwenda and they both went sprawling. A slim black-clad arm whipped out for his throat—he battered it aside with a lucky swipe of the staff lance. The dwenda shrilled. It was a cry he knew, it was distress, and his heart went black with joy at the sound. He smothered with his weight. A sword pommel hammered him in the kidneys—the world went stumbling around him, little points of light in the gloom, he drew ragged breath and shrieked down at the blunt head under him.

“Oh, you
cunt
!”

Cocked a fist, but as he did Harath stepped in and drove his staff lance down into the thing’s throat. Full-throated berserker bellow behind the stroke, he twisted the blade and leaned his full weight on it. The dwenda shrilled again, shuddered and thrashed like a gaffed fish …

Lay still.

Blood pooled out from under the neck. Egar smelled the spiced alien reek of it as he reeled upright from the corpse.

“Nice one,” he rasped, and nearly fell over again. Harath stuck out an arm to steady him.

“Easy, old man.” Sucking breath. “What the
fuck
was that?”

Egar shook himself, wet-dog-like. “Tell you later. C’mon, there’ll be more of them. Let’s get out of here.”

He cast about for the girl, who had pressed herself up against the wall, the back of one hand jammed to her mouth to stop a scream. To her credit, he reckoned she hadn’t made a sound. It figured, he supposed. You were a slave, you learned fast enough not to raise your voice
or voice what you felt. You learned how little it mattered, how little it would get you outside of pain.

He gathered up the staff lance in one hand, grabbed her by the wrist with the other. Grinning a little crazily, blood still up. She stared back at him above her hand, wide-eyed with a fear too general for him to feel good about. For a sliced moment, he saw himself through her eyes—hulking, grim, the talisman-tangled hair, the bared teeth, the sprawled corpse at his feet.

“Go down just like men, these angels,” he told her briskly, unable to put the grin away. “Nothing to it. Let’s go.”

They went.

But at the second turn of the stairway, a long, low wolf-howl seeped across the air, somewhere away in the heart of the building. It froze them, midstep.

And a second cry, answering.

“Hunt’s on,” Egar snapped. “Back to the rope. Harath, come on!”

But Harath was staring downward, not toward the sound.

“Egar. Look, man!
Look!
”

On the floor at the bottom of the stairs, the felled Ishlinak were twitching and stirring.

Not Elkret. Alnarh, and the other one.

The dead men. Waking up.

Egar took it in with a bleak lack of surprise.

“Run,” he recommended.

BACK ALONG THE GALLERY, DOUBLE-TIMING, AND HE SAW HOW THE
glirsht mannequins below ran and glistened with flickering blue fire, like upjutting teeth in some monstrous jaw, alive with luminescent saliva. He thought he could feel the whole building tightening down around them, the jaws snapping closed, swallowing them. Like back in the rock tomb all over again, and the flaring terror of dying enclosed.

Glance back at Harath, and he saw the feeling mirrored there in the younger man’s eyes. Fear strummed him like a lute chord, hung in the air like a palpable thing.

This is not mine
.

It hit him as they headed down the stairway at the other end—a vague understanding, slippery in his grasp. This was
not his fear
. His blood was up, he’d killed dwenda before, and in tighter straits than these, he could still feel the faint, giddy traces of exhilaration from the fight. The grin was still on his face, still stitching back his cheeks. Fear might come later, as that savage pulsing ebbed, but
this …

Memory arose—a couple of decades back at least, he’d have been barely fifteen. Chilly star-filled night on the steppe, the band like a vast burnished scimitar blade, raised across the sky—watching with the other herdboys as Olgan the shaman muttered and made passes in the air, cast powders and fluids onto the flames and conjured weird, wailing half-human faces there.

The fear gripped him then as it gripped them all, possibly even old Olgan himself—the young Egar saw how the old man’s teeth were gritted tight around his invocations. But as the discordant cries and the strength of the blaze grew higher, when it seemed the faces in the fire would be pretty soon reaching out for him with claws of flame, Olgan suddenly stopped his chanting and told them to step back, look away, and seek the Sky Road with their gaze.

To place their souls on that road.

It was the hardest thing he’d ever done in his young life—like looking away from a coiled and rattling snake you’d just stumbled on in the steppe grass—but he did it. He put his back to the yowling things in the fire. He stared up at the band, found its curving edge and imagined himself poised on that edge, looking down on the wide windy world below.

The fear puddled out of him like water from a dropped flask.

He heard Olgan’s voice behind him.

What you feel is not yours. You need not own it. Creatures like these breed the fear in you as we fatten a buffalo calf, and with similar intent
.

Screeching from the fire—he thought he heard outrage in the half-formed sounds.

Choose your feelings as you would a weapon. This is what it is to be Majak
.

Later, Olgan would teach them to bellow back at the creatures in the flames, to laugh and hurl obscenities at them, to stamp and punch into
the fire. To lose themselves finally in the berserker state, where nothing mattered but the will to do harm.

This is what it is to be Majak
.

They hit the bottom of the stairs, sprinted flat-out. Howling echoed through the hollow environs of the temple behind them. Through slanting falls of bandlight, past the towering, forgotten gods. The statue of defanged Urann seemed to meet his eyes for a moment as they raced toward it. Blank stone gaze—no help there at all. At his side, the girl tripped and nearly went headlong. He clamped tight on her wrist, held her up with sheer force, dragged her back to her feet without stopping. On through the gloom. The howls seemed to have found one another somewhere back there. He felt the dwenda presence on the nape of his neck like a taloned hand, poised to grab. He knew, he
knew
, they could not be that close, but still he had to fight the urge to look back.

Not
his fear.

He shook it off.

“There it is!” Harath, almost yelping with relief.

And the rope—dangling straight in the diffuse rays of bandlight that streamed down from the hole at the top. Relief slammed through him. No sign of guards, human or otherwise. They piled to a halt and Egar let go of the girl’s hand, took the staff lance two-handed again.

“Can you climb that?” he asked her.

And saw the answer in her face.
Not really, no
. But she made the attempt anyway, clung and hauled for all she was worth. Barely got head height above the ground before she started to slip. Soft hands, and softened muscles—the old harem curse. Her head drooped, her panting built up and then turned to tears. Harath snorted, derisive.

And more rolling howls through the gloom.

Egar shook the rope impatiently. She slid down but clung on, keening. Barely audible words through the sound.
Don’t, don’t leave me …

“Stupid fucking bitch …”

“Shut
up
! Give me your lance, get up that fucking rope! We’ll haul her up.”

“Man, we don’t have the—”

“Just fucking do it, will you!”

Angry clatter as Harath tossed the lance aside. He leapt to the rope
and went up it in savage bursts, teeth gritted and muttering. As soon as he was clear, Egar dropped his own lance, looped a broad noose into the bottom end of the rope, tugged the knot tight, and slid it over the weeping girl’s shoulders.

“Sit in—calm
down
. I’m not
going
to leave you—sit in this. Hold the sides.” He got the loop settled under her arse, so she sat on it like a swing. “When he starts pulling you up, just hang on. Got it?”