The Cold Commands (7 page)

“ERROR OF TRANSLATION OR NOT,” SAID LAL NYANAR. “WE ARE STILL
waiting for this signal the Helmsman promised us, and it has not come. That alone ought to give us pause.”

“We
are
paused.” Archeth gestured through the window at the iron quay and the glimmer of campfires built there on the dock. Impatience bubbling up in her now—time to wrap this up. “No one is suggesting we break camp and head upriver right now. Tomorrow morning will be quite soon enough, and that gives us time to lay sensible plans.”

“If—”

“Charts for instance.” Breaking smoothly into Nyanar’s continued objection before it could build any more steam. “I understand perfectly, Captain, if you’re concerned about our ability to navigate safely in the upper river at this time of year. But presumably we have summer charts aboard for just such an eventuality?”

The captain bristled visibly.

“I have no fears about navigation, my lady, but—”

“Excellent. Then we need to focus on available landing points along
the southern bank in the area Manathan has indicated. Can I leave that in your capable hands?”

She let silence do the rest. Nyanar glanced around the table for support he had no hope of enlisting, then subsided. Even Hald wasn’t going to directly gainsay an officer of the court with her mind so obviously made up.

“I am”—head slowly inclined—“yours to command, my lady.”

“Good. Commander Hald, then. I believe we shou—”

Lightning raged.

Out of the east, flickering, harsh and brilliant, so furious it seemed the broad stern window must shatter inward with its force. It drenched the room, drove out every shadow with silent, blue-white glare. It washed their faces clean of the hesitant, yellowish, document-poring lamplight within. It lit them frozen in place.

And faded.

From outside, she heard the yells of Hald’s men and the crew. Saw figures leap to their feet around the campfires, saw the detail of everything on the quay laid out dim in the wake of the glare. Feet thundered on planking overhead. Babbling confusion as the sudden brilliance inked out and left them all blinking at each other in the gloom.

“The
fuck
?” Hald, courtly manners forgotten for a moment, blown back to more soldierly roots by the shock.

“What
was that
?” asked someone else in a shaking voice.

Archeth didn’t answer. She already knew; she didn’t need to hear it said. So it was left to young Hanesh Galat, displaying an ironic composure and humor she would not previously have credited him with, to lean forward and state the obvious.

“That,” he said, looking across the table at her, “was what I believe you’d call
a sign
. It would appear that Manathan’s messenger has arrived.”

Thunder rolled in behind his words.

he hunt went on into the night.

At first, it was raw panic and confusion, yelling and the excited bark of hounds still chained up back at the camp. Crash of fleeing bodies through the underbrush around them as those who’d gotten free trampled and flogged their way up the wooded slope. Fading glint of firelight behind them amid the thickening picket of the trees. Gerin seared his throat with panting, felt himself stung bloody across the face with the backswing of unseen lowered branches as he came through them in the blacksmith’s wake. He blundered on, terror of the hounds driving him like a lash.

He’d seen them on the march: great gray shaggy-coated wolf-killers with long heads and mouths that seemed to grin sideways at the slaves as they paced restlessly about on their leashes. The fear they aroused was primal. Once, out on the marsh as a child, he’d seen a man brought
down by dogs like these, a convict of marsh dweller family escaped from one of the prison hulks in the estuary and floundering desperately homeward in some blind hope of sanctuary. Gerin had been little more than four or five years old at the time, and the noises the man made as the hounds pulled him down stuck in his head at a depth reserved for horrors more basic than he had language for.

But the memory brought with it conscious thought.

He snatched at the blacksmith’s shirt, dragged on his staggering bulk, caught another branch in the face for his trouble. He spat out pine needles, wiped his running nose, and groped after words.

“Wait—stop,
stop
!”

Panting to a halt, the two of them, in some dry ravine declivity fenced around with saplings and thick-foliaged undergrowth. They stood and propped each other up, grabbing after breath. Off to the right, someone crashed on through the trees, too separated from them to make out in the dense brush and moving away, galloping, tramping sounds receding. The cool, resin-smelling quiet of the pines came and wrapped them. Abruptly, the knotted mess of stew in Gerin’s stomach kicked, crammed hotly up into his throat. He doubled over and vomited. The blacksmith just stared.

“Fuck you stop me for?” Though he didn’t move.

“No good.” Gerin still bent over, hands on knees, coughing and retching. Threads of snot and drool, silver in the faint light, voice a thin thread itself. “Running, like this. No good. Got hounds.”

“I fucking
hear
the hounds, kid. What you think we’re running for?”

Gerin shook his lowered head, still breathing harshly. “No,
listen
. We’ve got to find—” He spat, gestured. “—water, a stream or something. Got to lose the scent.”

The blacksmith shook his head. “What is this? Now you’re an expert on being chased by dogs as well?”

“Yeah.” Gerin got shakily back upright. “I am. Been losing the Trelayne Watch and their mutts out on the marsh most of my life. I’m telling you. We have got to find some water.”

The blacksmith snorted, muttered something inaudible. But when Gerin cast about, picked a direction, and started forcing his way through the tangled foliage again, the man followed him, wordless. Perhaps it
was credit given for the way the foam-and-fit trick had worked, perhaps just a more general faith. There was a wealth of lore talked about marsh dwellers in the city: That they could scent water on the breeze and lead you to it was a common enough conceit. Gerin took a fresh grip on his fear and tried to believe the myth as much as his city-bred companion seemed to.

Surreptitiously, he squeezed blood from a small cut on his face, mingled it with spit on the ball of his thumb, and blew softly on the resulting mix. Under his breath, he muttered the swift prayer to Dakovash he had learned at his mother’s knee:

 … salt lord, master of shadow and shifting winds, out of the wind’s cold quarter and the west, hear me now and put forth your crooked hand for me …

And maybe it was simply the custom of childhood, the simpler sense of self it brought around, or the fleeting memory of a mother’s warmth, but now the undergrowth seemed to give a little more easily before him, the branches and brambles to scrape his abraded skin a little less, and the ground underfoot to firm up and guide his steps.

The forest opened and breathed them in.

THEY STUMBLED ON THE STREAM ABOUT AN HOUR LATER, FAINT CHORTLE
of running water and a ribbon of broken, bandlit gleam in the base of a shallow valley. The sounds of pursuit seemed to have ebbed away to the north, and they paused on the saddle of land overlooking the little river. Time to peer and grin at each other before they went loping down between the trees, breathing more easily now for the more considered paths they’d taken. It was a little like waking from a nightmare. Heads less stuffed with fear, room for thoughts other than just staying ahead of the hounds, room enough that Gerin was starting to feel the raw weals the march in manacles had left on his ankles and wrists. The feverish tremor in his limbs, the parched rasp in his throat as he breathed.

They hit the water’s edge, dropped to their knees, and drank in sucking gulps.

“You knew this was going to be here?” the blacksmith asked him when he finally came up for air. “You could really smell it like you said?”

Gerin shook his head, because in all honesty he wasn’t sure anymore.
Something
had been driving him, that was all he knew. He dragged muddied hands through his sopping hair and over his face. Winced as the water stung his manacle sores.

“We need to get off the bank,” he said. “Stay in the center and head downstream or up. Dogs can’t follow that.”

“How long for? This water’s fucking freezing.”

“A while.” Gerin already wading in, up to his calves. “They’ll run the dogs along both banks looking for scent, but it takes time to do that. And they have to pick a direction. That gives us a coin-spin chance either way. And I know some other tricks when we get farther along. Now come on.”

The blacksmith grumbled to his feet. He joined Gerin in the middle of the stream, picking his way awkwardly over the stones on the bottom.

“All right, marsh boy,” he said. “You’ve done pretty well by us so far, I guess. Can’t hurt to see what else you—”

He choked to a halt. His expression splintered in shards of disbelief and pain. He made a helpless noise, lifted one hand toward Gerin, then back to his own chest where the iron head of a crossbow bolt stood an impossible six inches clear of his suddenly bloodied jerkin.

“Stand where you are!”

The cry came from the downstream bend of the river. Gerin’s head jerked to the sound. Bandlight showed him three march-masters floundering upstream in thigh-deep water near the far bank, a pair of dogs held slavering at the short end of chain leashes. Black and silver, the bulk of the men and the dogs, the splash of water around them. The man with the crossbow stood apart, had his discharged weapon down, braced on a flattish boulder at the bank, cranking up awkwardly for another shot.

Blood bubbled out of the blacksmith’s mouth. His eyes locked on Gerin’s.

“Better run,” he said throatily, and fell facedown in the water.

“Stand, slave, or we shoot you down!”

Gerin saw the blood smoke muddily out from under the blacksmith’s floating body, the soaked folds of the man’s jerkin and the crossbow bolt sprouting stiffly from his back. He saw, down at the river bend, the
crossbowman still struggling with his weapon. He felt the moment tilt under him like a skiff’s deck in choppy water. He whirled and fled.

Upstream, six frantic, plunging steps and out, onto boulders at the bank, wet print slap across stone on hands and slipping feet, scrabbling up to the yielding earthen forest slope above and into the trees. Behind and below, he heard the dogs let slip, the sound of the men cursing and splashing. He tore off time for one final panic-eyed look over his shoulder, saw the blacksmith’s spread-eagled floating form cradled in the river’s arms, the dogs surfing about in the water near the boulders, barking furiously up at him, but seemingly unable to climb out.

He fell back into the grip of the nightmare.

The slope was steep; he kept having to drop to hands and knees to stop himself from tumbling back down. The resin scent of the pines clogged in his throat as he scrambled upward. The march-masters were big, burly men for the most part; it came with the territory of what they did for a living. Amid the trees, he could probably stay ahead of them. But the dogs …

Only a matter of minutes before they found a way up.

The climb began to shallow out, the trees thinned. The slope became a broad, saddle-backed ridge, edged with eroded stone bluffs on the river side. A cool wind hooted off over the rocks, cut through his soaked clothing, chilled him to the bone. Gerin got properly to his feet, sagged into a staggering run along the top.

Something dark stood waiting in his path.

Gerin’s heart was already thundering in his chest, but it seemed to ice over as he saw the gathered black form ahead. For a single second it seemed he was looking at something blown together out of twisted remnants of bark and trees limbs charred to death. The figure was a sharp aberration in the smooth, bandlit open ground on the ridgetop. He slammed to an involuntary halt at the sight, and it was only then he understood he was looking at a man, a tall, cloak-wrapped warrior with the jagged rise of a broadsword pommel over his left shoulder, the stab of the scabbard out from his right-hand flank, the arms folded.

Overseer!

But it was not, and somehow, somewhere in his panicking brain,
he knew that much already. He stared up into a gaunt face that might have been handsome once but was now clamp-mouthed and hollow-eyed and scrawled along one side of the jaw with a thin, snaking scar like the ones they gave to disobedient whores in the city. He met a gaze that offered no more passion than a fisherman watching his motionless line.

“Dakovash?” he husked. “Is it you?”

The figure stirred, gave him a curious, sidelong look.

“No,” it said, in a surprisingly gentle voice. “And I haven’t seen him up here, either. Were you expecting the Dark Court?”

“I …” Gerin shivered. A sneeze came and racked him, loud and sudden as surf bursting on the rocks at Melchiar Point. “I prayed for the Salt Lord’s intercession.”

The figure wiped fastidiously at its doublet with one hand. “Are you from the marshes, then?”

“Y-yes. I was—”

Behind him, the scrabbling of claws over rock and the full-throated whoop of the dogs as they saw their quarry. Gerin thrashed soggily around, saw the first of the pack hammering toward him, all teeth and grayish bunch-muscled sprint, felt a scream clog up in his throat—

At his shoulder, he heard the swordsman say something in a language he didn’t know. Saw, out of the corner of his eye, an arm lifted, a brief sign sketched on the air.

The hound yelped.

Skidded to a snarling halt a dozen yards off. It snapped and snarled again, but would not come closer. The swordsman with the scarred face took a step forward, made another sign, and spoke again. A finger wagged, gestured at the edge of the nearest bluff. The dog got up and limped hurriedly to the edge, looked down, looked back once at the cloaked figure, and then threw itself off into space. A long howl floated up, a crash of tree boughs breaking, and then silence.