The Cold Commands (42 page)

Dresh Alannor would not be coming back.

“He is”—one of the men spoke the sailor’s formal valediction between deep-drawn breaths—“at peace. In the Salt Lord’s halls.”

The other man raised his head and shot his companion an incredulous
look. He straightened all the way up, looked right at Quilien and Ringil in the light of raised torches, and then spat into the dragondrift at their feet.

“Drowning’s a filthy fucking death,” he rasped, and took his shirt back from another crew member, and walked away.

LATER, RINGIL STOOD AT THE RAIL AND WATCHED THE LUMINOUS WHITE
splash of waves on the dragondrift as it receded into the dark at the stern. He thought of the man they’d left behind, tangled up and caught fast somewhere ten or fifteen feet down on the submerged wall of the drift, eyes wide and staring out into the black. Or perhaps already carried off into the cool gloom by currents or something more toothed and purposed.

Dresh Alannor. Son of Trelayne, Glades noble, commander of men.

There was a chill across his shoulders like a wet towel.

“I have been thinking about what you said.” Quilien, abruptly at his side in the pallid bandlight, dark hair hanging loose so it obscured her profile. Somehow, he hadn’t heard her approach. “Why the Dark Court might concern itself with the petty affairs aboard one small vessel. With the fate of that small vessel’s captain.”

“Indeed, my lady?”

He wasn’t really listening. Most of his attention was on the crew, as they went sullenly about their tasks around him. The first mate had them on a pretty tight leash, but even so, there was a palpable anger pulsing through the shipboard air. Alannor had been well liked. Ringil thought he might be careful walking the deck at night from now on. He thought he might warn the Lady Quilien to take similar care.

“I—”

“Yes, the mistake would surely be to see such behavior as a single act, unrelated to any larger tapestry of events outside that one fireside tale. But is it not more likely that such a captain might in fact serve as a sacrificial piece on a larger board. A piece in a game that the nobles of the Dark Court like to play.”

It was such a trite piece of coffeehouse pondering that he almost laughed.

“I have heard this suggested before, my lady. Numerous times. It never much impressed me as a thesis. Why would such ancient, powerful beings concern themselves with anything as banal as a game played out among humans?”

She leaned out on the rail then, let the wind take her uncovered hair and blow it away from a smile turned oddly wolfish.

“Well,” she said, without looking at him. “Perhaps the game itself is so ancient that they have forgotten how to do anything else. Perhaps it is webbed into every memory they have, into the fiber of their being, and they cannot unlearn the habit. Perhaps, despite all their age and power, they
have
nothing else.”

She tilted her grin toward him in the dark scuffle of the breeze. Raised her voice a little.

“It must be difficult, after all, to give something up, when you are so very good at it. Don’t you think?”

And he thought, with a tiny, creeping unease, that her gaze as she spoke was directed less at him than at the sword across his back.

he went to see Shanta as soon as the sun was up.

The naval engineer was a creature of habit. She found him exactly where she’d expected at that hour, taking tea under an awning on the upper decks of his palatial houseboat. The mercenary guardsmen at the gangplank nodded her aboard—she was a regular, unmistakable anyway for her skin and the alien distance in her eyes—and a liveried slave escorted her up through the ziggurat levels of the boat. More slaves in attendance in the top gallery—paneled wooden doors were drawn back with much ceremony, and she was ushered out onto the deck. Shanta was seated there under the awning amid carpets and cushions, surrounded by depleted platters of sweetmeats, bread, and oils. There was a tall samovar at his elbow, and a book laid open in his lap. He looked up, smiled when he saw her. She gave it back, thin. Waited to be formally announced, and for the slave to retire.

“My lady Archeth, this is a pleasant surprise.” Shanta gestured her to a cushion near his own. “How wonderful to see you again so soon. Will you take some tea?”

She stalked forward. “What the fuck are you playing at, Mahmal?”

“I?” He seemed genuinely taken aback.

“You see any other doddering morons in the vicinity?” She stood over him, raging. Swept a hand wide to encompass the empty deck. “Oh. I guess not. Then it must be you I’m talking to. Must be you I spent half of last night saving from an upcoming appointment as
a fucking octopod’s dinner
!”

“Ah.” Gravely. “I see.”

“Do you? Do you really?” She kicked the indicated cushion away across the deck. “
Have
you ever seen one of those executions, Mahmal?”

She knew he hadn’t. Akal had always favored the clean sweep of an ax for his enemies; the slaughter boards in the Chamber of Confidences were an invention of Sabal II, reinstituted only now by Jhiral on his father’s death. And since the accession, Shanta had kept pretty much to himself, initially in mourning for his old friend, and when this became untenable as an excuse, pleading age and the pressures of work.

“I fear I am not much at court these days. I have not been fortunate enough to witness the ways in which Yhelteth advances into the modern age.”

She thought she detected the faintest of tremors in the words, but if it was there, it was layered over with bland courtier calm.

And, she thought, it might as easily have been suppressed rage as fear.

She mastered her own anger. Went to the starboard rail and looked out over the water. Across the estuary, a fishing skiff tacked for the ocean, heeling steeply in the buffeting breeze.

Know the feeling
.

She tried for toneless calm.

“It’s not good, Mahmal. Sanagh gave you up under interrogation. You and half the shipwright’s guild, apparently.” She looked back at him. “I mean, when are you people going to get it through your fucking heads? The horse tribes kicked your asses. There isn’t going to
be
a glorious
resurgence of the coastal cultures. It is over. The Burnished Throne is our best shot at civilizing the world now.”

“My quarrel is not with the Burnished Throne.”

The qualifying words hung in the air unspoken. She found herself checking the deck, reflexively, for eavesdroppers.

She came back to where he was seated. Crouched close.

“He’s one man, Mahmal. He’ll live, and he’ll die—just like his father, just like his grandfather. And I remember them all—don’t you forget that. Right back to Sabal the Conqueror, and he was a total fucking bastard. It’s not them. It’s what they build that counts.”

“That’s an admirably Kiriath perspective, my lady.” Shanta closed the book in his lap, leaned across to the samovar, and busied himself refilling his glass. “You’ll forgive me if, as a mere mortal, I am less inclined to take the long view. Bentan Sanagh was a friend.”

“Then you need to choose your friends more carefully,” she snapped.

That sat between them while he finished with the samovar. He laid his book aside with elaborate care, did not meet her eyes. He held the glass of tea cupped delicately in both palms, head bowed over the steaming drink like a soothsayer scrying the future for a tricky client.

“Well,” he said mildly. “I will give your ladyship’s advice due consideration.”

“Yeah—do that. Because I don’t think I’ll be able to pull your chestnuts out of the fire like this if you fuck up again.”

He glanced up. “I am grateful for your intervention, Archeth.”

“Doesn’t sound much like it,” she said grumpily.

“No, I am grateful.” A gathering urgency in his tone now. “But I have taken oaths, Archeth, just like you. When the guild come to me with their complaints and fears, I am sworn to address those concerns. You know how many of us the purges have taken. What would you have me do? Put on a courtier smile and bandage my eyes like Sang? Stand aside as my friends and colleagues are disappeared and tortured to death?”

“And you really think joining your friends on an execution board is going to help matters?” She sighed. Went to get the cushion she’d kicked. Calling back to him as she bent to pick it up. “What would I have you do, Mahmal? I’d have you stay alive. Yhelteth needs men like you and me. The purges will pass, Jhiral will calm down. We have to outlast this phase.”

“I am an old man, Archeth. It’s doubtful I’ll live to see that—even if you do manage to keep me out of tentacled embraces for the duration.”

“So—what?” She came back, settled the cushion back in its place. Seated herself. “You’re looking for a glorious exit? Is that it? A martyr’s death?”

“Hardly.”

“The Citadel is restless, Mahmal—you know that. And Demlarashan is perfect tinder. It won’t take much for Menkarak and his clique to torch it all into a theocratic rising that’ll make Ninth Tribe Remembrance look like a drunken tavern brawl. Is that what you want? Asshole bearded righteousness ranting on every corner, and the blood of unwed mothers running in the streets? Jhiral at least will stand against that.”

Shanta grunted. “You miss the salient point, my lady. Jhiral himself is part of the reason people flock to the invigilators in the first place. If he had not tarnished imperial authority the way he has since accession, no one would give those selfsame bearded assholes the time of day. Akal would never have—”

“Oh,
don’t
feed me that line of shit! I was
there
, Mahmal. Remember? Akal got in bed with the Citadel for manpower, pure and simple. Religious morons to bulk up his armies, Citadel declarations to sanctify his fucking conquests. This is his mess we’re living through just as much as it is Jhiral’s.”

“And so we forgive corruption and imperial tyranny, because it promises to stanch theocratic rage?”

“No. What we do is get a sense of perspective. We tread carefully, and we look for ways to clean out the bilges that don’t involve knocking a big fat fucking hole in the hull.”

The nautical metaphor lifted the ghost of a smile to his lips.

“Got a mop, then?” he asked.

“Think I might, yeah.” She nodded at the samovar. “Pour me a glass of that, and I’ll tell you all about it.”

AFTERWARD, HE SAT SILENT FOR A LONG TIME.

Archeth sipped her cooling tea and gave him the space, gladly. That he was thinking it over could only be a good thing.

Wharf noise drifted up over the port-side rail, softened by the height
of the houseboat’s decks. In keeping with the time of year, Shanta had had the vessel towed downriver from its winter moorings, and docked near the mouth of the estuary, where sea breezes helped keep the summer heat at bay. It also gave him the chance to sweep the harbor with his telescopes and keep up with foreign shipping technology. Only last year he’d been in transports of engineering delight over some gaunt gray square-rigged vessel that showed up from Trelayne sporting a raked bow and narrowed beam.
You’re looking at the future there
, he told her as she squinted through the scope, at a loss to see what all the fuss was about.
Those League sons of whores—always one jump ahead. Do you have any idea how fast that beauty must be, even in heavy seas? She’ll clip through waves like a knife
.

So we go right ahead and build the same way
, she’d assumed.

He shook his head.
Fat chance, the way things are right now. You try convincing anyone down here to make untried changes to something that’s functioned perfectly well for longer than living memory. There’s just no stomach for that kind of innovation anymore. Guild monopoly, vested interests at court, a line of fucking rent-seekers out the palace door and around the block. We’re choking on it, Archeth, and there’s nothing either of us can do. Akal would have …

So forth.

Her tea was stone-cold. She poured it away into the dreg pan, leaned over to the samovar, and turned the spigot for a fresh shot. Shanta looked up at the motion as if he’d forgotten she was there.

“So, you believe what this creature says?”

“Helmsmen don’t generally make things up, Mahmal. They can be obscure, willfully vague, cantankerous at times. But I’ve yet to catch any of them in a lie.”

“A city standing out of the ocean?”

“As at Lake Shaktan, yes.”

“A lake and an ocean are very different things, Archeth. The existence of a city standing in the waters of one does not necessarily prove the possibility of a city built to stand in the other.” But behind the pedantry, she could already hear in his voice that he believed, that he
wanted
it to be true. “Shaktan is shallow compared with the northern ocean. Its weather is mostly clement. But the seas around the Hironish? Just imagine
the stresses such a structure would have to withstand. Imagine what constructions would be required.”

“If Anasharal’s scheme works, we will not need to imagine it, my friend. We’ll be able to see for ourselves.”

“Hmm.” He shot her a shrewd sideways glance. That
my friend
might have been pushing it a little. “Of course, even if this An-Kirilnar does exist, it will most likely be a ruin, just as An-Naranash was.”

“Perhaps.” It hurt more than she’d expected, just to say that much.

“You think a city of your people would have hidden themselves from us all this time? Really?”

She wrestled her feelings down into something approaching rationality. “As the Helmsman tells it, this city moves in and out of what we understand as reality in the same way that the Ghost Isle does. It has a technology to equal the magic of the dwenda at their height. So who knows where it may be grounded when it is not manifest in our world? Maybe, in studying the dwenda, the clan Halkanirinakral found a way to travel back and forth between worlds that did not involve taking to the veins of the Earth again.”

“And chose not to share it with your father’s clan?”