The Cold Commands (67 page)

She crushed out the tremor. No time for further attempts at sorcery, but Atalmire’s men were at her back, armored and grim. And she had her hatred, she hugged it close. Howled out Seethlaw’s name, once, for family and for honor.

Rushed in, swinging the blue-fire arc of her blade.

RINGIL MET HER IN A SPLINTERING CLASH OF STEEL AND BLUE SPARKS.
The Ravensfriend turned the dwenda’s stroke, sent Risgillen staggering aside. He grunted with the effort it took. Risgillen spun back in, snake-swift, hissing. Kiriath steel blocked her again—it felt less like his handiwork than the sword’s. Risgillen snarled and fell back. Something tugged his attention around; he swung, met the helmeted dwenda warrior on his flank, and chopped down the attacking blade so it rang off the stone floor. The dwenda, committed, lurched forward
and Ringil kicked it savagely in the knee. It tumbled, threw out a guarding arm …

The Ravensfriend glittered down.

The arm went, like wheat under the scythe, chopped through just behind the wrist. Dwenda blood splattered everywhere, spiced alien reek of it like a spike through the chilly temple air—

“No!”

Risgillen, screaming it. Ringil had no time to look at her, combat senses told him the third dwenda was closer, no time to finish the one he’d maimed. He whipped about, stumbled unaccountably, put up his blade and met his attacker head-on. Swipe and slam of blades, he got in close, swung a shoulder into his opponent and sent him staggering. Risgillen rushed him from the side, swung low and chopped at his legs. He went a foot into the air above the blade, came down behind the stroke and sliced at her unprotected back. The Ravensfriend chopped a gash into her shoulder. She shrieked and reeled away, fell over from the shock. He went after her, but the third dwenda leapt in and blocked him, jabbed out and tagged him across the ribs. He stumbled again, leaned back, got the dwenda’s blade out of the way.

The ground was—

The dwenda came in swinging. He met and parried, both blades locked up and straining against each other. Risgillen crawled to her feet, circled round to bracket him.

—shaking.

His eyes darted to the support pillars under the gallery. Something gray crawled there, something writhed and lashed and—

He shook off the dwenda, fell back, blocked Risgillen’s limping attack from the side. Energy coursed through him, it felt like an eighth of purest krinzanz chewed down, swallowed, residue rubbed into his gums. It numbed him and fired him in equal measure, it came screaming up from inside, this thing he’d dredged with him from the fields of the weeping sacrificed out on the cold marsh plain …

I see what the akyia saw, Gil. I see what you could become if you’d only let yourself
.

Up on the altar, the boy had gotten himself to a sitting position, held out his blood-slick, slashed-open arms in mute entreaty. He met
Ringil’s eyes for a split second. Then he collapsed sideways as another tremor shook the building. He rolled off the altar, he fell on his face in the dust.

Something jagged and black split Ringil’s skull apart from within.

Fuck, them, all
.

He tipped back his head and howled.

He felt the cold legion sweep up and through him and out—it was like sinking at the heart of a roaring maelstrom. He reached out without knowing how, laid hands that were not his own on the temple around him. He cracked stone and mortar apart, splintered and levered, breathed in destruction like the fumes of fine wine. He tore out the pillars from under Atalmire and Menkarak’s feet on the gallery, dropped them yelling to the floor below. He catapulted the blood-drenched altar up and back with enough force to shatter it against the rear wall. He tore dressed-stone blocks from the ceiling like a dentist pulling rotten teeth—let them fall, shattering, to the temple floor. He—

The third dwenda swung at him again in the chaos.

He screamed in its face, tore its blade from its hand, hurled the weapon gleaming end over end across the hall. The Ravensfriend came up, leapt in from the side. Ringil hacked through the dwenda’s flailing, fending hand as if it were not there, took head from shoulders in a single bellowing stroke. Blood gouted from the severed neck—he raised his head in the brief fountain it made, he raised his arms, as the temple tore itself apart around him.

Blood rained down.

Blood splattered his face. Blood trickled in the gritted teeth of his grin. He howled at the shattering ceiling, worse than any sound Seethlaw had ever made.

He lowered his head and looked for Risgillen.

Found her struggling to stay on her feet, sword held sagging in both hands before her. There was blood on her bone-white Aldrain face, a jagged gash in her brow he didn’t remember putting there. Behind her, Atalmire crawled from where he’d fallen, dragging a leg snapped the wrong way at the knee. Menkarak lay beyond, half trapped under rubble. Ringil raised the Ravensfriend. He screamed at them, over the sound of cracking, crumbling stone.

The two dwenda stared at him from where they lay on the floor, like small children facing a drunken father’s fury.

“This city,”
he raged, scarcely aware of what he was saying, “is
mine. I
stand watch here.
I
am the gate.
To take this city you will have to come through me.
”

“You
cannot
!” Risgillen screamed back at him. “This is not your
right
! You have not passed through the Dark Gate!”

“Have I not?” He tilted his head, felt something in his neck click. He leaned in and looked at her. Saw her shudder away. “Have I not, Risgillen?”

And suddenly he felt something slip away inside him. Suddenly he was emptied out.

The hands he had laid on the temple stones loosened their grip, folded away, began to fade. The cold legion collapsed inward again, wrapped around him like an icy wind, high whistling, weeping note of loss, and then even that was gone.

A single block of masonry dropped out of the ceiling and shattered apart on his left. Stone shards stung his cheek.

He lowered the Ravensfriend.

“Get out of here,” he said tiredly. “Go on, fuck off, both of you. Before the whole place comes down.”

Somewhere, masonry groaned and powder spilled down in the gloom. The dwenda gaped at him, unmoving. He felt his temper spark and sputter like a damp taper.

“I said
go
!” No triumph in his tone, only a dead and grinding rage. “Go back to the Gray Places and mourn your brother, Risgillen. I won’t tell you again. You are not wanted in this world. You are not missed. Spread the fucking word.
The next time I see a dwenda, I rip its motherfucking heart out and eat it still beating.
”

The echoes of his voice fell away. He walked past the dwenda to where Menkarak lay trapped. Risgillen made no move to stop him. Atalmire looked to be in shock from his shattered leg. The invigilator’s eyes widened as he saw Ringil’s figure loom over him. He shoved weakly at the block of stone across his chest, coughed up a lot of blood.

“Look at it this way,” Ringil told him in Tethanne. “You’re dying anyway. Might as well make yourself useful.”

He hacked off the invigilator’s head. It took a couple of strokes; the angle was awkward. When it was done, and the gush of blood spent in the dust, he knelt and gathered up the head by its greasy hair. Slung the Ravensfriend across his shoulder. Turned back to look at the dwenda.

“Need this,” he said vaguely, hefting the head by way of farewell.

He didn’t look back again, but he felt their empty black eyes watching him, all the way out of the hall.

t took him a while to find his way out. The temple was big and poorly lit, and some of the architecture was confusing, especially the massive chunks of it that had fallen in. He thought, from the quality of the light seeping through holes in the roof, that dawn must not be too far off. But down at floor level, it was still mostly dark. Seeing was work; trying to think was worse. His head was a torn-up mess, a match for the rubble he walked through—

Did
I
do all this?

He kept moving—dogged instinctive motion and honed years of skirmisher caution, tangled up with flash-lit memories he would mostly rather not look at.

The temple’s structure creaked ominously about him.

Vague recollection of the story Egar had told him gave things an eerie familiarity, but it provided no useful guidance. He’d worked out he
must be at Afa’marag from the glirsht figures and the gallery in the main altar hall, but he was still slightly shaken when he passed a huge statue holding up the roof, a southern representation of Hoiran with horse tackle slung across one shoulder, and realized it was where the Dragonbane had faced the dwenda before. He stopped and looked up at the looming, bearded face under the ceiling, the raised right arm, now missing its hand. It was not quite the harsh tusked and fanged majesty of Hoiran as the north knew him, but you could see the similarities.

The shattered fragments of the hand lay not far off. He remembered Egar telling him how it fell and stopped the fight in its tracks. He peered at the masonry and caught the dark gleam of something atop one massive chunk of pointing index finger.

A Kiriath flare.

It stood upright, as if just that moment placed there, curved metal casing of the flask picking up the thin light in the place and throwing it back. There was even a leather loop for tying it onto your belt, already attached. If it wasn’t the flare he’d lost to Risgillen in the Citadel, it was a pretty perfect copy.

He stared at it for a while, then lifted his eyes to the huge, bearded face looming overhead. A shiver ran through him. He grimaced and set down Menkarak’s head for a moment. Swiped up the flare, tied it onto his belt where there had been one before.

“Don’t suppose you’ve got my dragon knife, too?” he asked the empty gloom.

There was no reply.

He wasn’t very sure he wanted one.

FARTHER ON THROUGH THE DARKENED CHAMBERS OF THE TEMPLE, HE
ran into a panicked-looking pair of men-at-arms sharing a single torch. They fetched up short, gaping at him.

“So how do I get out of this place?” he asked them.

Their gazes sidled down to the head he carried in his left hand, now dust-caked around the chopped neck wound and the mouth.

“Don’t look at him,” Ringil barked. “Just tell me how the fuck I get out of here.”

“But, you, that’s Pash—” The more talkative of the two swallowed, hard. Pointed with the torch he held. “Back that way. Through the arch and take the staircase on the left, then the corridor with the bas-relief walls. Main atrium, and out. But, there’s uh, the Blessed Watch are at the doors.”

“I’ll talk to them.”

The other man shook his head dazedly. “We heard, uh, there was … What
happened
in there?”

“Black powers,” said Ringil briskly. “Demonic forces. The old gods have broken through, and the ceiling’s coming down. If I were you, I wouldn’t hang around too long.”

“But what about the slaves?” blurted the man.

“The slaves, yes.” He remembered more fragments of the Dragonbane’s tale. Cursed under his breath. “Well you’d better go and let them all out, hadn’t you?”

The man who’d spoken first wrinkled his nose. “Fuck that shit. They’re all northerners anyway. Let the fucking roof come down on them for all I care.”

Ringil lifted the Ravensfriend from his shoulder and pointed it at the man. It felt oddly effortless—the Ravensfriend was light, but not
that
light. He emptied his face of all expression, poured the command into his voice.

“You’ll both go and let the slaves out of here before you do anything else.
Right
now. I’m going to be standing outside at the front door and if I see either of your faces come through it before those slaves, then you’ll be joining my friend Pashla here in a bounty bag. Got it?”

From their faces, he judged that they did.

He watched them scurry away into the gloom, waited until the glow of the torch disappeared, then pressed onward. The directions they’d given him were accurate. He found the main doors cracked open a cautious couple of yards and letting in the dawn. The Blessed Watchmen clustered about the sides, weapons drawn, peering nervously into the gloom. They jumped when he appeared, and there were some halfhearted challenges, but in the end they gave him no more trouble than their colleagues inside. He told them the same story he’d told before and advised them to stay clear. They let him through. If any of them recognized
Menkarak’s face swinging at his knee, none of them wanted to get into it with him.

True to his word, he stood at the doors in the crisp morning air until the slaves started to dribble out in ones and twos. Young men and women wrapped hastily in blankets and thin clothes, feet mostly bare, faces numbed beyond any expression you could read. Northern faces, every one. He watched them emerge, blinking and shivering in the early light, and he tried experimentally to feel some kind of kinship for them.

Felt nothing at all that he could name.

You have not passed through the Dark Gate
.

Have I not?

Still, he broke up a couple of attempts by the watchmen to manhandle some of the more comely females, the more delicate among the boys, and told everybody they were now wards of the palace, someone would be along shortly to take charge,
so leave them the fuck alone
. The watchmen looked at him blankly. The phrase
wards of the palace
clearly didn’t mean anything to them, but they weren’t going to argue with this gaunt, blood-spattered mercenary with the obvious command manners and the bloody great Kiriath blade naked in his hand. Not getting paid half enough for that shit …

He saw the two men-at-arms he’d sent in emerge, and nodded at them. They winced from his eyes and slunk away.

Sunrise crept along the river behind him, spilled over the dark bulk of the lock gates and stained the sky above in streaks of pale pink and gray. The air started to gather heat. He waited out the brief exodus, then put the temple at his back and wandered down to the water’s edge to fire the Kiriath flare.