The Cold Commands (65 page)

“Come on then,” Egar snarled at them. “Want to see what a Majak soul costs? Fucking
pussies
!”

He went for the chair again, but the smarter assassin read the move and leapt in to block it. A tangled moment—Egar lashed out with his injured leg, grunted as he felt stitches tear and the wound reopen. The man danced clear, Eg punched at him, got a burly shoulder and no real effect, felt the hot lick of the knife blade across his ribs in trade. He recoiled sideways. For a brief moment, he thought he might make the open cell door, but the other killer—Eg saw now he was younger, barely out of his teens—scrambled shakily to block it.

“That’s it, lad.” The older one grinned tightly. “Keep him penned.”

The three of them stood panting for a moment. The more experienced assassin raised his blade at Egar, almost like a toast.

“Kadral told me to make this last,” he said, mastering his breathing. “Fatal but slow, he’s asked for. You got pain coming, steppe scum.”

“You,” Egar grabbed breath of his own, “talk too much for a killer.”

Have to get to the boy
.

He saw how it might be done.

“Two on one, with knives.” He spat on the floor. “And you’ve brought a fucking child with you.”

The boy surged forward, flushed with fury.

“My clan is Ashant!” he cried. “Bright is the name! For my cous—” Egar darted in, bent-kneed. He scooped the doll from the floor in his left hand, grabbed at the boy’s knife. The boy misread it, thought he was going for the wrist. Egar’s fist closed over rag doll and blade alike, and snapped tight.

Not a shit death!

The steel was keen—he felt it go deep into his palm, even through the rags. He roared in the boy’s face, gripped harder, wrenched. The boy recoiled, the knife slipped free. Stuck deep in the flesh of his clenched fist, no time to use it. He hooked the boy in the face with an elbow, spun about, grinning at the pain.

Not a—

The senior assassin was there. He snagged Egar’s unharmed right arm, twisted it away. He stepped in, his blade slugged home. They stood close as lovers.

“For Saril Ashant,” the man hissed in his face. “Bright is the name!”

Egar tottered backward, suddenly stupid. The killer let him go. He looked down at his wound, tried to let go of the knife in his left hand, but his fingers refused to open. He pressed with his right hand at the sudden spike of fire in his belly. Turned his palm up and saw the blood. Looked at the man who’d done the damage.

“Oh, that’s not fatal,” the assassin assured him. He raised the knife. “That’s for pain. When I promise slow, slow is what you get.”

Egar summoned strength. Fell backward onto the bed instead. The back of his head thumped the wall and he bit his tongue.

Oddly, it hurt worse than the wound in his belly.

“Yeah, you have a seat. This is going to take a little while.”

The killer advanced on him slowly, grinning. Egar floundered, could not get off the bed.

“Better come and watch this, Jadge,” the assassin told the boy. “Get your knife back as well. We won’t talk about how you fucked that one up,

eh?”

The boy made an unhealthy, strangled noise in his throat. The killer rolled his eyes.

“Oh, come
on
. Don’t get sick on me now. This is your fucking jo—”

“This is
treason
, boys.”

Egar’s head snapped up at the voice. The assassin whirled away from him, turning to the door. Staggered backward with a weird, high scream, pawing at something in his eye.

Egar stared, trying to make sense.

Archeth—at the open cell door—still holding up the boy for cover, while his slashed throat bled out over the left forearm she had hugged across his chest. Her face was cuddled up close to his, her right arm was still out from the throw. There was another knife held, blade sideways, in her left hand.

Her eyes were wide in the lamplight, glittering with krinzanz fire. Egar thought vaguely that he’d never seen a more beautiful woman in his life.

SHE LET GO OF THE BOY, AND HE CRUMPLED BONELESSLY.

She stepped across his body, knelt and cut the other assassin’s throat just to be certain, though from the way he lay twitching on the stone floor, it looked to be unnecessary. She retrieved her knife from his eye socket and glanced up at the Dragonbane.

“I heard
painful, not fatal
?”

Egar grimaced and moved a little, testing. “Yeah, he got that much right. Motherfucker. You want to get this out of my hand?”

She stared at his clenched left fist, the bloodied rags and the protruding knife.

“How the … ?” She shook her head. “Never mind. Come here.” She cupped his hand with her own, applied pressure, took hold of
the knife’s hilt and pulled the blade out of his flesh. Egar gritted his teeth and yelped. She threw the weapon away, across the room, to where its crumpled owner lay. It skittered off the stone floor, slid and landed in front of the boy’s empty, staring eyes.

“Right, we’d better get you fixed up. Can you walk?”

“Out that door? Just fucking watch me.” He tried to rise, just about managed it by propping himself against the wall with one arm. He grimaced as fresh pain spiked through his belly. “So where’d you come from all of sudden?”

“Sheer dumb superstitious luck,” Archeth said grimly, cleaning her knives one by one on the dead man’s breeches. “Blame my mother’s blood. I was out trying to score, last-minute thing, you know. Everywhere’s closed. Got some mystic old fuck with a beard down by the river. Tells me to go check on my friends, while I still can. For some reason, I did. Go figure.”

Egar swayed a little on his feet. “Nice of him.”

“Yeah, well he charged me enough for the krin.” Archeth stowed her knives and stood up. Took a look around at the mess. “You know—Jhiral is going to have a fucking fit when he hears about this. I really wouldn’t want to be part of clan Ashant right now.”

“Right.” Egar got his swaying under control, let his throbbing left hand hang and pressed his right to the hole in his belly. “And Gil?”

Archeth looked away, wordless.

Shook her head.

e stumbles for a long time across a desolate marsh plain strewn with the living heads of dwenda victims, and into a bitter wind. Men, women, children, even some dogs—all cemented to tree stumps around him, all alive to some degree, though few are probably sane anymore. There are tens of thousands of them. Their voices tangle around his knees like marsh mist, come mumbling and weeping and sometimes screaming up to his ears. Sometimes what they say is intelligible. He tries not to hear them.

 … Mummy I don’t like it I don’t
like
it Mummy make it stop, I don’t like it make …

She’s about five or six. Long rat’s tails of muddy hair plastered on her face. Voice a thin, hopeless moan. If the mother she’s calling for is with her, she has long since stopped talking back to her daughter in anything but screams or gibbering.

He marches doggedly on, waiting for her voice to fade out like the others. There is nothing he can do. There is nothing he can do for any of these people. The marsh stretches to the horizon in all directions. There is water underfoot, everywhere. And as long as there is water, the roots will draw sustenance, and as long as the roots draw sustenance, the lives spiked atop them will endure.

Seethlaw told him this.

Is it any worse
, Seethlaw asked him at Ennishmin,
than the cages at the eastern gate in Trelayne, where your transgressors hang in agony for days at a time as an example to the masses?

He seemed genuinely not to understand Ringil’s horror.

Seethlaw is out there somewhere now. Ringil can hear him from time to time, howling from the horizon, keeping pace.

He shivers, with cold and the traceries of memory. He puts one foot in front of the other and does not fall down. He stares at the horizon ahead. His wounded eye and face seemed to have healed, but into what he is not sure. He remembers putting his hand to the wound, some measureless time before, but cannot recall what his fingers touched. And now, whenever his hand twitches upward again, something in him will not let it rise.

He is weaponless, he is cold.

But the cold drives him on.

NOT FOR THE FIRST TIME, HE SAGS TO AN EXHAUSTED HALT. HE DROPS TO
his knees in the shallow muddy water and the squelching marsh grass.

Time.

It’s coming again, Risgillen’s revenge. Last time, he screamed at the leaden sky. It didn’t do any good. Now he just stares dully at the nearest heads, defocuses his gaze, tries not to meet their eyes.

Seethlaw’s howling circles closer. He knows he won’t see him yet, but—

He collapses on his side, sobbing like a child. He sees the standing stones as they emerge around him, towering sentinels against the gray sky.

He curls up and awaits his old lover.
rrrrrrRingilllllllll …

He flinches from the sound. But it’s too late, too late. He sees a blurred, pale form, bounding inward through the gap between the stones, and Seethlaw, or whatever’s left of him, is on him like a rabid dog. Ringil fends him off weakly, punching, kicking, yelling from a ragged throat. Glimpses of the dwenda’s face, hideous, hacked apart, jaws agape in the mess, one eye gone. He snarls and tears at Ringil’s legs, severs hamstrings. He bites off Ringil’s fingers in knuckled chunks, then what’s left of his flailing, mutilated hands. Blood gouts from the ragged-boned stumps, but Ringil has already learned he can’t pass out, not yet. He draws into himself, bloodied and cringing, like a fetus torn from a womb ahead of time.

Seethlaw capers and snaps and snarls around him, sometimes on two legs, sometimes on four. The dwenda has lost the power of articulate speech, he’s an animate husk, an empty shell of alien rage and hunger and hate.

Eventually, when Gil has nothing left to resist with, no more screaming to give, he circles in and begins to tear at Ringil’s groin and belly. Buries his misshapen head in Ringil’s entrails and worries at his rib cage from within, tearing and snorting.

Raises a bloodied snout and goes, at last, for Ringil’s throat.

Frenzied worrying, a single, merciful crunch.

The pain goes out like lamplight dying, gray sky above, fading to black.

BUT BEYOND DEATH, THERE IS NO RESPITE. RINGIL WAKES, FALLING
through thick gray wool, the color of the sky.

Falls, once more, reborn and flailing, into the marsh.

And so it begins again.

HE TWITCHES. HE QUIVERS, CLUTCHING AT DREADFUL WOUNDS HE NO
longer has, whimpering. It costs him everything he has just to unfold from his fetal ball.

There’s a distant sound, like a glass fairy falling down a ladder miles away.

Familiar
sound.

He stops whimpering and listens.

There again—tumbling, chiming. Coming closer.

Chords off a long-necked mandolin
.

Ringil struggles to his hands and knees, heart in his throat at the sound of the music. He crabs about in the marsh mud, staring for its source.

There!

Moving among the stump-mounted heads, moving closer. A slim, brim-hatted figure, taking slow, careful strides in the marsh mud, mandolin held high across his body like some kind of shield. Notes cascade from the instrument, and as the figure gets closer, so the weeping and moaning of the dwenda victims quietens. Ringil, scrabbling into a huddled sitting position and staring, sees how they all close their eyes and their mouths stop moving, as if the figure has laid a comforting hand on each brow as he passes.

Closer yet, the mandolin song reaches out, and Ringil feels tears squirt in his own eyes. The figure comes to a halt in front of him, and stops playing. He crouches to Ringil’s level.

Hjel the Dispossessed.

Beneath the hat brim, the eyes are older, and he thinks he sees more lines in the weather-tanned face, gray in the stubbled beard. But the mischief is still there, the ragged young prince endures. Hjel is still somewhat young.

“Ringil, what the fuck are you doing out here?”

From depths he’d forgotten he owned, Ringil dredges up the corner of a bleak smile. But his voice is a cracked husk.

“Paying a debt, I think.”

“You …” Hjel plucks a single note off the mandolin’s fretboard and it startles away across the marsh. “Oh, ye gods, Gil. Gil! Don’t you—Haven’t you understood? Did I really not teach you well enough?”

Ringil shivers miserably in the wind. “Doesn’t look like it. Not yet, anyway.”

“Gil.” He sets the mandolin on his knee, puts out a hand and touches Ringil’s face. Gil flinches, he can’t help it. “You’re not alone here. You’re not powerless. Didn’t I tell you that?
You don’t have to be here.
”

“Tell Seethlaw that,” says Ringil, and gags on recollection, eyes skittering out toward the horizon. “He’ll be back soon enough.”

“And if he is?” Hjel stood up. “I told you, Gil: The cold legions wrap around you already—
and they are yours to command.
”

“Don’t see any fucking legions, Hjel.” Ringil shivers again. “There’s just—”

He stares at the unending ranks of living heads, the thousands he’s stumbled past, the tens of thousands more to the horizon … “No,” he says numbly. “Yes, Gil. Yes. Now
get up.
”

Hjel’s long hand offered—he grabs it and pulls himself to his feet. The two of them stand together, close. The wind is cold across his face, but the dispossessed prince is blocking some of its force. He smiles grimly at Gil. Clasps his shoulder with his free hand.

“
Now
do you understand?”

“No.” Shaking his head as if in a trance. “No.”

“You’ve
passed
through the Dark Gate, Gil. It’s already done. The Aldrain do not know, Kwelgrish and Dakovash buried it deep, but it’s done, it’s paid for.”

Flicker of shadow at the corners of his vision. He saw them again, standing on the jetty beside a previous Hjel. Saw them streaking out toward him like cloud shadow across the ruffled water. Saw them ooze from the street gloom in Hinerion.