The Cold Commands (64 page)

“Hey, you bearded fuck,” he said, nodding at the body. “Who’d you hide behind back there? Who took the chop for your sweet, lily-livered cheeks?”

Menkarak bristled. “Let infidel slaughter infidel, if it serve our cause. Hanesh Galat was apostate in the making. He diluted faith with his cheap compassion, he sowed doubt in his flock and his colleagues like a disease. He had congress with infernal workings of the Black Folk, and he came here proud of the fact. Weep for him if you care to, his soul is already in hell.”

The dwenda called Atalmire placed hands on the invigilator’s shoulders and steered him away. “Come, Pashla Menkarak, there is much to do elsewhere. The Talons of the Sun must be sharpened. The gateway blessed. Leave this infidel in our keeping. We will show him to his own prepared place in the depths.”

“Yes.” Menkarak was breathing heavily as he looked back at Ringil. “The Talons of the Sun. This city will burn, infidel, and all who are not purely of the Revelation will burn with it.”

“That’s enough.” Atalmire’s grip tightened and he propelled the invigilator less gently toward the hallway. “There is work to do.”

He spoke to Risgillen, fluid, lilting syllables of a tongue Ringil had last heard when he was with Seethlaw. Then he escorted Menkarak out
of sight into the hall, stepping unceremoniously over the dead fall guy’s body as they went.

“Well,” said Risgillen. “Alone at last.”

Ringil shook his head wearily. “I’m sorry, Risgillen. I don’t think you have any idea how sorry I am. It didn’t end the way I planned.”

For some reason, it seemed to unleash in her a fury previously held in check.

“Sorry?”
She leapt at the chair, grabbed it by the back on either side of his head. Blank black eyeballs, inches from his own. She hissed in his face. “You’re
sorry? You took my brother from me.
”

“You think I’d forgotten?”

She recoiled. Stood staring at Gil as if he was too hot to get near again. “He’s out there, you know that? Seethlaw is out there, in the Gray Places. Lost, I hear him
howling
, I hear … ”

She mastered herself again. Wiped angrily at her eyes with the heel of her hand.

“You still don’t understand what you’ve done,” she whispered. “Do you?”

“I don’t care, Risgillen.” And then his own temper was suddenly out, unsheathed. He leaned hard into the bite of the ropes across his heart. “Don’t you fucking get it? You think I
care
what I’ve done, you think I’d go on living if I did?
Do you really think
what happened to your brother is the
worst
thing I’ve ever done? It doesn’t even come close!”

The ropes scorched and stung him. He leaned harder, breathed in the pain, glared up at her. The chair rocked back and forth. He found the strength to hiss.

“Go back to the Gray Places, Risgillen. Take your playmates with you. You’re not fucking
wanted
here anymore. We have outgrown you.”

Risgillen gestured sharply. Spoke a word. The ropes slithered and tightened, chopped off his breath, killed his voice, snapped him upright against the back of the chair.

“Excellent,” she said softly. “This is better than I had hoped.”

He tried to sag. The ropes would not let him.

“You stupid fucking bitch,” he wheezed.

And screamed weakly as the ropes sprouted long jagged thorns, tearing into his flesh at the arms and legs and across his crushed chest.

Risgillen came back to stand beside the chair. She leaned down and looked into his face from the side. Patted him on the shoulder like a favored pet.

“Do you know how long it’s taken,” she murmured, “for you to finally have something worth taking away?”

She jerked forward, he had a rushed glimpse of lengthening fangs in her mouth, and then she tore a living chunk out of his cheek and cracked the bone beneath.

Agony stormed him, black behind the eyes. He convulsed with the force of it. The ropes held him rigid, crushed the scream out of his chest before it could leave his lungs. He croaked and the agony washed about within him. The thorns writhed and stabbed. Risgillen spat out his flesh. Wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. Leaned close again.

He flinched away. He couldn’t help it.

“Do you know the dealings I’ve had to have with the
Ahn Foi
over you?” Now her voice rose. “The contracts and cajoling it has taken to bring you here, to this moment? To find a life that matters to you, to work the skeins so it is put into your keeping? So it will be lost, on your account? I have
rehearsed
this, Ringil Eskiath, I have lived for this day to come.”

She lunged in again, he saw the teeth again, becoming fangs in the act of baring. Her tongue lashed, speared into his eye socket, exploded his sight. Her jaws fastened again, on bone this time. He heard something crack like the joint on a fowl dinner. Would have screamed if he could. Heard her growling as she worried at him.

Heard her unlatch her jaws with a click, and spit again.

His head hung. Blood dripped thickly into his lap. Vomit burned in his throat. Dimly, he realized he’d pissed himself. The agony spidered back and forth across the left side of his face. She leaned down next to his ear.

Oh no please no …

Her voice came softer than ever.

“In three days, Ringil, we will unleash the Talons of the Sun on this city, and it will burn. The Yhelteth Empire will collapse, and those who crawl from the ruins will be told it was the Black Folk and their knowledge who caused it. Any of that cursed race who remain, they will hunt
down and torture to a slow death. Then, this idiot religion they own will burn all books but their own, and condemn all learning not from that book. They will regress to grubbing about on their knees in their own unworth. They will forget. There will be nothing to challenge the rise of the north, and with the north, we will rise, too. We will carve out a new Aldrain realm, and it will have Seethlaw’s name on it.” He made a noise, like choking.

“But that’s in three days.” She patted him on the shoulder again. He thrashed away from the touch. “First, your friend and great love Egar, slayer of dragons, will wait in vain for you to come back and free him. He will be taken and executed, slowly, in as much agony as your rather limited imaginations can manage. This, I have seen already, in the scrying of days. He will wait for you right to the end, and he will die, screaming, unmanned, knowing you failed him. I will bring you news of it, to season your other suffering.

“And only when that’s done will we unleash the Talons of the Sun.”

Ringil lifted his head. It was like raising a dressed-stone building block with his bare hands. His vision jerked about crazily, shot through with black and red and too much light. Risgillen was a wavering presence, like someone seen from under water. Trembling consumed him.

He thought he managed to snarl at her, but could not really be sure.

“Very good,” she said, from somewhere in a gathering darkness. “Strength. Where you now go, the more you have of strength, the more cursed you will be.”

Then she reached over his head with both arms and took hold of the chair by its back. She rocked it experimentally a couple of times, then shoved hard, so it went over backward with him in it.

He waited for it to crash against the floor, but it never did.

“Seethlaw is waiting” was the last thing he heard her say in the closing, roaring darkness as the Gray Places took him.

He fell then, forever.

ay marched across the slice of sky visible from the cell, way faster than you’d think if you hadn’t been paying attention before. He watched it decay from the cell window after Archeth was gone. The gold-leaf blaze of late-afternoon sun over the estuary, fading to dull and dusty tones of red at sunset, and finally the few molten flecks among darkening cloud like discarded mango peel in gutter mud.

This fucking city
.

Darkness clogged in from the east. He watched that, too, and tried not to wait too hard. He knew Gil was not coming.

Give the faggot a fucking chance, Eg. He’s got three days to get this done
.

But it was two days now.

Archeth had no news. Jhiral had refused her audience, and the King’s Reach were not talking. She sat on one of the beds in the cell and fiddled with the child’s rag doll from the floor.

“He has a flare,” she told him. “Like the ones we used in the war. If he fires it, we’ll see it from anywhere in the city.”

“Yeah, if it works.”

Brought out of some long-forgotten canister at An-Monal along with other curious and frankly not ideal Kiriath tools for the war, the flares had never been all that reliable. Egar remembered Flaradnam yelling desperate abuse at one, battering the business end against the ship’s rail at Rajal when it refused to fire.

“Most of them work,” Archeth said quickly.

He frowned at her. She seemed uncharacteristically focused today, not the moody, scattered woman he’d been used to living with this last year at all.

“It’s daytime, Archeth.” Patiently, reasonably, trying not to let his own sense of gathering doom take hold in his head. “If he’s still in the Citadel, he’s got to spend the next seven or eight hours hiding. And if he’s not in the Citadel, then …”

He shrugged. Looked away.

I have seen my death
, he didn’t tell her. But he remembered thunder prowling at the limits of the steppe sky, the blood of his brothers on the grass around him, the calling that had brought him south once more. He remembered his acceptance then—tried to boil up something similar now. He built a small smile.

“Maybe that’s it,” he offered her. “He’s skulking until nightfall again.”

“At Rajal Beach,” she said carefully, “he lay in his own blood and piss for ten hours playing dead, and the Scaled Folk didn’t find him, even with the reptile peons sniffing for survivors.”

“He told me it was six hours.”

“Whatever. If he survived being hunted by the Scaled Folk, alone, a whole day, then how much trouble can a bunch of invigilators give him?”

“You’re forgetting our blue-fire friends.”

She shrugged it off. “You saw him at Beksanara.
They fall down just like men
, remember?”

“What’s the matter with you, Archidi?” He couldn’t help the growl in his voice. “You getting laid all of sudden or something?”

She looked at the rag doll in her hands. “I don’t believe he’s failed,
that’s all. He came back from Rajal Beach, he came back from the Kiriath wastes and Gallows Gap. He brought us all back from the brink at Beksanara. A few hours of daylight aren’t going to stop him.”

She left shortly after that, ushered out by the jailer who brought the afternoon meal. She promised she’d carry a message to Imrana, but in the end Egar wasn’t very sure what he should tell her to say. He was unreasonably angry with Imrana, an anger that was all the worse for the clear understanding that he was the one who had failed to grasp the ground rules of the game they’d been playing. That he had been deluding himself about what they had.

You can’t crawl back inside what you once had, Eg
. Facing him in the cooling bathwater.
You have to live with now
.

It hadn’t seemed like a warning at the time, but now, too late, he wondered.

Tell her not to worry
, he settled for in the end, and Archeth nodded, carefully noncommittal, and left him alone with his thoughts.

He ate without much enthusiasm, left half of the platter untouched. Limped about the cell a bit, leaned at the window and watched the dark. Used the chamber pot. Scooped up the rag doll from where Archeth had left it—threw it irritably at the wall. Dropped onto the bed he’d taken to thinking of as his own, and watched bandlight paint itself cool and blue-white across the stone ceiling.

You have to live with now
.

Yeah, problem is, Eg—not a lot of now left
.

Come on, Gil. Get your faggot arse in the saddle
. He held the rind of a smile against a thin but rising fear.
Don’t send me to a shit death, man. Not like this
.

They came to take his plate and chamber pot away, which was unusual at this time of night. He propped himself up on the bed and grinned sourly at the jailer.

“No effort spared for His Radiance’s guests, eh?”

The man stared at him. It wasn’t the face he’d gotten used to over the last couple of days, wasn’t in fact—

Oh, no …

He saw it in the other man’s eyes an instant before the knife came out. He came clumsily up off the bed, threw himself aside as the man lunged at him.

“For the blood of clan Ashant!”

It was a triumphant shout—and far too early. The knife missed Egar’s shoulder by inches, buried itself in the mattress. Egar twisted out from under and punched the man savagely in the kidney. He fell to the floor, injured leg trailing, caught under his attacker’s sprawled weight. Saw the second assassin at the door, the downed body of the jailer laid out on the flagstones beyond.

“Two of you,” he spat. “Well, that figures.”

He yanked his foot free, scrabbled backward across the cell on his hands. The second killer came at him, but got tangled up as his comrade tried to get up off the bed at the same time. It gave Egar the split second he needed to get back on his feet. He yelled in their faces, high, steppe nomad shriek, grabbed the desk chair, swung it up and into the air, brought it smashing across both men. It was heavy, he didn’t get anything like the swing he wanted, but it hit with bruising force, upward against arms and faces. He saw the first of his attackers go to his knees again.

The second man just shook himself, growled, and backed up. The way he held the knife, he looked to be Egar’s major problem.
Not a shit death! Not a shit death!

Like a chant, like a pulse through his head. It came up through the soles of his feet and he seized it like a new weapon. Dropped into a crouch, feinted with his empty right hand grabbing. The assassin smiled grimly, floated back unfazed. He knew what he was doing, he had the only knife. Had the time and would make it work for him. He waited for his companion to get up.