The Cold Commands (57 page)

The actual tale he told blundered along through all this like a badly injured man, clinging to the complaints like pillars in some hard-to-navigate
colonnaded hospital he’d been told had a bed for him somewhere. The whore sat at his side throughout, too cowed by Ringil’s glittery stare to actually interrupt, but rubbing Harath’s thigh vigorously every so often, murmuring cod-maternal sympathetic sweet nothings to him, and refilling his goblet from the bottle whenever he drained it. Harath nuzzled her in return, lost the thread of what he was saying, occasionally abandoned it altogether in a welter of gruff, growling kisses to neck and throat, while Ringil looked on and set his jaw and worked at keeping his hands to himself.

Under other circumstances …

He held down his temper, mainly because violence would have drawn attention he didn’t want from the rest of the room, but also because he didn’t want to stop Harath’s rambling confessional flow, which did seem, slowly, to be taking on some comprehensible shape, thus:

The Dragonbane shows up at Harath’s door with a blade contract, he knows about some prior falling-out between Harath and another Majak, name of Alnarh,
faithless piece of shit, like I said, wouldn’t believe he was Ishlinak blood
, while they were both working for a high-level invigilator out of the Citadel called Pashla Menkarak—Ringil frowned, the name was vaguely familiar, something Archeth had talked about—who got Harath cut loose from his job for messing about with a temple maiden, slave girl, whatever, something like that, anyway, the Dragonbane has a grudge of his own against the Citadel so they plan a burglary together, some disused temple upriver, Ringil’s never heard of it, but all the time
this Dragonbane, man, he’s like, fucking
obsessed
with this slave girl, but he’s never even fucking
met
her, right
. But coin is coin, and another tour in Demlarashan is just no sane option for anyone who’s seen what’s going on down there,
done two fucking tours, mate, believe me, I know what I’m talking about
, so Harath’s in—they hit the temple by night, mix it up with Harath’s old Ishlinak pals,
which he
said
we wouldn’t fucking get into, right, I mean, I had to kill a brother that night
, and get into some kind of secret harem, where the Dragonbane apparently finds what he’s looking for,
some whining bitch, no, not that one, a different one, don’t ask me why
and then, on the way out, they’re attacked by this angel,
yeah, that’s right, you heard me, a fucking angel
, which glows with blue fire and—

“Stop.”

“I am not fucking making this up,” Harath said heatedly. “It was—”

“I didn’t say you were.” There was a sudden spike of ice down his spine, and his hangover seemed to have acquired a new, cold-clamping focus at his temples and in his guts. Scenes from the fight at Ennishmin danced through his head, flicker-lit in that same unearthly blue.

Here? In Yhelteth?
It was a shuddering, dithering voice in his head.
Can’t be, can’t fucking be …

He saw the figures, emerging from the core of their own radiance.

He saw Seethlaw, smile like a wolf …

“Here—you going to puke or something?”

He blinked at Harath’s voice. Looked up and saw the Ishlinak’s whore watching him with a sneer on her paint- and powder-clogged face. Curled red lip over teeth turning gray, probably with too much bad krinzanz or just—

Memory of the girl on the wharf leapt in. Propped against the barrel, accosting him with the same gray grin.
I have a message for you, Dragonbane …

You are awaited at the Temple of Red Joy. Do not delay. All things will become clear
.

He shook off a shiver. Cleared his throat. “This place you cracked upriver. The temple. Did it have a name?”

Harath shrugged. “Afa’marag, I guess, like the neighborhood. Called it after some water demon, the maraghan or something. That’s what the boatman said, anyway. Though he was a lying little—”

“Not Red Joy? Not the Temple of Red Joy?”

The Ishlinak looked at him blankly. “No. Never heard of that, it’s—”

The whore’s cackle shut him up. Both men looked at her irritably.

“Temple of Red Joy?” She grinned at Ringil, widely now. Leaned in toward him, mock-affectionate, then let her grin freeze out. “I know where that is, scar-face. Question is, what’s it worth to you?”

“I don’t know,” said Ringil mildly. “How about it’s worth I don’t tell the King’s Reach you’re holding out on where I can find the Dragonbane.”

The color fled her face. She tried to shrink back to her side of the table, but his hand whipped out and grabbed her wrist.

“Or would you prefer to talk to them about it directly?”

“Southside.” The words blurted out of her. “It’s on the southside. Across the Span and down into the old ferry quarter. Back of Keelmakers’ Row.”

“Thank you.”

t wasn’t red, and it didn’t look particularly joyous. It looked, in fact, like every derelict imperial temple Ringil had ever seen—butter-colored stone buttresses squeezed between the newer buildings on either side, scoured and scarred by centuries of sun and wind and war, and then by the more recent scourges of the city that had grown up around it. Up close, he saw Tethanne graffiti chiseled into the stonework wherever the elements had left the facing intact—names and insults and crudely approximated clan brand marks, fragments of toilet verse. At the entrance, the shadows he stepped into stank of piss.

He looked down at the urchin who’d led him here. “You ever been inside?”

“No, my lord.” The boy knuckled at a snot-crusted nose. “ ’S haunted. The coastlanders’ demons live in there.”

The two of them stood there for a moment, both looking at the door and the thin slice of doorway it was jammed ajar on.

Deeper shadow within.

Ringil looked back at the sunstruck street, where the boy’s elder brother stood watching, holding the reins of his horse and glaring at anyone who passed too close. It was mostly unnecessary. Keelmakers’ Row was a quiet, narrow thoroughfare, not a lot of passersby, and those there were seemed well schooled in neighborly discretion—aside from the odd glance, they studiously ignored the gaunt, black-cloaked figure and his two urchin companions. Ringil shrugged, produced the promised coin, held it up out of reach.

“All right. This is for showing me. You get another three of these when I come out, and you’re still here, and my mount still has all its legs. Got it?”

The boy’s face went almost luminous with joy. “Yes, my lord.”

Ringil leaned down, nose-to-nose with him. “And if you’re
not
here, or anything bad’s happened to that horse, then the Revelation help your immortal little souls. Because nothing else this side of hell will. Got that as well?”

The urchin drew himself up to his full six- or seven-year-old height. “Course, my lord. Word’s my bond, my lord. Horse’ll be safer with us than if you put it in the Emperor’s harem.”

Questionable kind of safety, that
, his hangover grumbled.
Wouldn’t trust that fuck Jhiral out of sight with anything much that has an orifice
.

But he straightened up and tossed the boy the coin, and the boy took it out of the air like a fish snapping up a fly. Then he stood, urchin hands on hips, and watched for a moment as Ringil pressed splayed fingers against the door, leaned to test its weight, and that was evidently about all he wanted to see. He scurried back out into the sun and to his brother, leaving the scar-faced swordsman alone in the shadows.

The door was heavy caldera oakwood; it took the full weight of Ringil’s shoulder to shift it more than a couple of inches on the uneven, detritus-strewn flagstones. But it gave with an awful grating sound on the second blow, and opened up a couple of feet. Ringil gave it a final, full-bodied kick for more clearance, then slipped through the gap. A scant couple of rays of sunlight followed him inside, touched his cloak at the shoulder, and then let him go.

Inside the temple, it was more worn-down flagstones and slim pillars holding up a cracked and sagging roof. No furnishings or fabrics
that he could see, just cool stone silence over everything like a dust sheet. The sun got in here and there, through roof-level latticed skylights or the chinks in the damaged roof—where it touched the dusty ground, it seared small patches so bright they seemed to smolder. Look at them for too long and it made peering for detail in the gloom a lot harder. He stopped doing it. He let his eyes adjust.

A stone altar in the shadows up ahead, long and raised, like a funeral bier. There was an ornately carved stone screen behind it, latticed along the top in echo of the skylight design, but sculpted over most of its solid surface with a line of bas-relief figures. He picked his way toward them, between the falling rays of sunlight from the roof, crunching across the dust and detritus, glad of the noise his footfalls made. In the sharp contrast of blazing light and shadowy gloom, the silence of the place was like a solid presence, filling up his hungover senses. He walked as if in a slight trance, along the raised flagstones of what had clearly once been a central aisle to the altar.

He paused theatrically when he got there, pivoted about to face the way he’d come, and raised his arms cruciform.

“Anybody
home
?”

The echoes of his voice fell flat, as if trying to scramble out through one of the skylights and failing. He’d really meant to shout louder. He’d meant it as a joke, but the echo wouldn’t carry the irony. He sounded just like the next man, calling for his gods.

He grimaced. Let his arms fall slackly to his sides.

All things will become clear, Gil. Yeah, right
.

Footfall crunch at his back.

He whipped about, one hand already up and reaching for the Ravensfriend. The upwelling urge to kill something, hot and instant, there in his guts and the muscles in his limbs. The old dance, driving out the vagueness in his head.

Nothing.

He stuttered to a halt, peering. The gloom around the altar was undisturbed. He was still tangled up in memories of the Queen Consort Gardens. Of Seethlaw and the dwenda, of terrible blue fire, of something dark and formless catching up with him.

He shook his head, tried to shake it all loose.

His eyes settled on the bas-relief stone screen. It was a pretty good match for the one he’d seen on the temple wall in Hinerion—another ranked assembly of the Dark Court, carefully rendered in more human aspect to suit local taste. Only this time, it was Hoiran himself who was missing from the sculpted ranks and the gap he’d seen in Hinerion was filled by …

Filled by …

He felt abruptly light-headed again. He felt the ground give way.

The missing dark courtier at Hinerion had been the Lady Kwelgrish—Kwelgrish the twilight banshee, the dark moan at evening, the mistress of wolves. Kwelgrish, who wore the skins of women and beasts with equal aplomb, who carried an ancient unhealing wound in her head and liked to trade sneering humor with demons before she bested them in shrieking, snarling combat. Kwelgrish who here, in the Temple of Red Joy, stood in bas-relief among her fellow gods with one hand pressing a towel to her bleeding skull and the other shoulder covered by a wolf skin complete with wolf head and jaws, such that the creature appeared to both hang off her and be biting her at one and the same time.

Let us say only that you will owe me a favor, Ringil Eskiath …

The voice bubbled up in his head, whispered at his ear, walked on his spine. Quilien of Gris, somewhere behind the stone screen in the gloom, circling him and the altar he stood at with luminous wolf-eyed intent—

Yelling, from the street.

He jerked a glance backward along the raised stone aisle to where he’d come in. His vision seemed to tilt with the sudden shift in focus, as if he stood in a boat on choppy water. Sunlight crowbarred in where he’d forced the door open, spilled in a distant puddle on the dusty floor there, and it seemed, suddenly, a long, dark way back out of this place.

Yes—run
, said another, deeper voice that was not Quilien’s.
Run while you still can. Remember who you are. Who you were. Who you will be
.

Another footfall in the dust and detritus behind him, and he
was
running, he was sprinting, down the raised aisle path as if to the closing gates of some abruptly offered salvation.

Later, he would look back and be unable honestly to say if he ran toward the uproar in the street outside or away from what had just stepped out of the shadows at his back. He knew only the motion, the
impulse that drove him forward, through each falling arrow of sunlight from the cracked roof—the spots burned on his shoulders like newly minted coins—the slanting tumble of light and gloom, the breath hard in his throat, approaching the doorway, that must, he knew,
must
slam closed just as he reached it, he could already hear the long, grating shriek it would make—It did not.

He grabbed the oakwood edge, stuffed himself through the gap and out into the sun. The Ravensfriend, caught in the gap for a moment, seemed not to want to leave, then gave as he twisted savagely about, and came out with him.

He stood blinking in the sunlight, trying to understand.

Uniforms and boot clatter and shouting up and down the cobbled street, half a dozen men-at-arms running about and gestures upward, tilted-back, helmeted heads—the sun struck glints from the cheap metal—and there, suddenly, shatter and splinter at a first-floor window in the façade across the street. Glass falling outward in brief, lethal rain, window frame smashed and torn free. Ringil, already tracking the noise, shaded his eyes just in time to catch a glimpse of two men come through the ragged gap, still struggling in midair. One was a uniformed man-at-arms, helmet gone. The other—

The two men hit the street with a solid
crump
, opposite the temple door. Dust billowed up around them, boiled as they fought. Still some struggle in both, but the man-at-arms had landed on his back and most of the fight seemed to have gone out of him with the fall. As Ringil watched, the other figure got fully astride him, reared up and rammed something long and thin down hard into his opponent’s eye. A shriek floated up, the fight jammed to a halt. The figure snapped off whatever weapon it was using and blundered awkwardly to its feet. Wind caught the dust and whirled it away.