The Cold Commands

CHAPTER 9

They were still raping Poppy Snarl when the red edge of the sun cleared the scrubland horizon to the east.

Ringil sat on a rise near the overseers’ tents and listened, staring into the early sunlight as if it were the wind. He was out of meaningful distractions; he’d cleaned the Ravensfriend with lengthy care, put it to rest in the scabbard on his back; he’d watched Eril’s ragtag mercenary crew check on the bodies of the march-masters and the imperials, slitting the odd throat where necessary but mostly just looting pockets; he’d searched Snarl’s tents for anything remotely useful, upending boxes and ripping the seals off parchment rolls, perusing ornately written documents that were either numbingly banal or in impenetrable cipher.

Pointless, all of it—the sounds of the rape stalked him whatever he did, Snarl’s screams winding down to sobbing and finally a low, infrequent moaning; the men’s grunting hilarity chasing an oddly similar decline, as if the less resistance there was, the less they were comfortable with what they were doing.

It was the sound of the war, all over again.

Eril came and joined him, squatted at his side. Ringil nodded his acknowledgment, didn’t really look at him.

“How’d we do?”

“Pretty good all around. We lost seven men in the fight here, plus another four still unaccounted for, might have gotten lost in the forest. Couple of wounded. Pargil, the big fat guy? He got his arm hacked up pretty bad, probably going to lose it when we get him to a surgeon. But he can walk for now. The other’s gutted, we’ll have to carry him. No one else got worse than gashes.”

Ringil ran the count in his head.

“That leaves eighteen.”

“Nineteen. There’s that old guy we took on at Hreshim’s Landing last week.”

“Right. Forgot all about him.”

Quiet—and seeping into it the small, muffled noises that Poppy Snarl still made. The grunting of the men. Eril seemed to read something in Ringil’s face as they listened. He cleared his throat.

“You want me to stop that?”

Ringil switched a glance at him, saw how the Marsh Brotherhood man flinched from it. He looked away again, into the sun.

“I mean.” Eril hesitated. “You said, you didn’t want her to…”

“Die?” The word ghosted out of him. He made an effort, pulled himself back in from the gray margins of his own thoughts. “Poppy Snarl came up in harbor end. She was running with the Brides of Silt before she was ten years old. Bossing them by the time she hit fifteen. It takes more than a gang rape to kill someone like that.”

Eril thought he heard a reluctant admiration behind the words. He shifted on his haunches, cleared his throat again.

“Okay, but… these men, you know, they’re not exactly… well, with the purse we had, how fast we had to do the hiring, they’re not going to be the most—”

“Soldiers rape,” Ringil said harshly. “Regardless of what they’re paid. It’s what they do. You think this is the first time I’ve had to listen to…”

His jaw tightened. He came to his feet abruptly, as if levered there by some mechanism Eril couldn’t see.

“Fuck this shit,” he whispered.

He stalked down the rise to where the latest in a short, scruffy queue of men was heaving himself up and down on Snarl’s spread-eagled naked form. The man had his breeches down to his boots, his unbuckled sword belt, sword, and sheath cast aside in a hasty tangle. He made a throaty gasping sound each time he thrust into the woman under him.

Ringil grabbed him by the unkempt hair and pulled him off. Got a strangled yelp from the man, dumped him sideways across his discarded belt and sword.

“That’s enough.”

The interrupted man scrabbled halfway to his feet, one hand cupping down to cover his still-erect and throbbing prick, the other fumbling for the hilt of his sword. His face was a mask of slit-eyed fury. His voice came out choking.

“You. Fucking…”

Fingers found and fastened on the sword hilt.

“Do it,” Ringil told him. “Give me a reason.”

He held the stare. Hoped for the two heartbeats it took that the man wouldn’t back down. Because this one—he could feel it trembling through him now—this one, he’d do with his bare hands.

The man’s prick shrank and shriveled, hung like the neck on a plucked and slaughtered hen. His fingers slipped free of the sword hilt. He looked away, dribbled out a feeble, halfway laugh.

“Yeah, all right. Whatever.” He got awkwardly to his feet, tugged his breeches up his legs as he rose. “No fucking loss anyway. Had better up against a wharf post in Baldaran.”

Ringil thinned his lips, found the serrated edges of his front teeth with the tip of his tongue. He still wanted to kill this man.

“Get your gear back on,” he said tightly. He jerked a thumb over his shoulder, brushing the hilt of the Ravensfriend with his loosely curled knuckles. “Go do what you’ve been paid for. Get down there and start cutting the shackles off these people.”

The man hesitated, licked his lips. Something cheering seemed to occur to him, and the frown cleared off his face. He buckled his breeches closed, bent, and picked up his sword. As he straightened up, Ringil stepped in close and grabbed him by the shoulder. Got in his face and nailed him with another stare.

“And you leave the women alone. You’ve had all the fun you’re going to today. I catch you trying this with anybody else, I’ll hamstring you and leave you out here for the hyenas. Got that?”

Stiff silence, and the death-house reek of the man’s breath in his face. Ringil’s free hand curled into a fist at his side.

“I said: Have you got that?”

The man swallowed, then dropped his gaze. He tugged sullenly free of Ringil’s grasp, stepped back.

“Yeah, man, I got it, I fucking got it—all right? Just leave me the fuck alone. What did I do, huh? What did I fucking do?”

He slouched away down the slope, jerking angrily at his sword belt where it had settled too high on his waist. Ringil turned to watch, and his gaze swept across the line of men still waiting there.

“You too. Fun’s over. We set these people free, we see that they’re fed. Jengthir, you make sure that’s what happens.”

The men looked at one another doubtfully. Jengthir cleared his throat.

“My lord, it’s uh… that’s going to take a long time. We’re not—”

“Do I look like I want your fucking advice?”

Jengthir flinched. He turned and muttered something to the men, gestured down the slope. They went, but not particularly fast, and with resentful glances cast back across their shoulders every second step. Ringil caught each glance and stared it back down. He could feel the command begin to unravel around him. Could not make himself much care.

At his feet, weak, coughing laughter.

He looked down. Poppy Snarl had propped herself up on one shaky elbow, was working to fold her legs back under her. Her mouth was broken and bruising fast across one corner; blood had run and crusted there. One eye was swollen almost closed, and there were bites everywhere on her exposed flesh.

“Lost the taste for your vengeance, have you, Eskiath?” She folded her arms across herself. She was starting to tremble, but still she stared up at him defiantly. “Fucking rich kids, you’re all the same. No guts when it comes to the crunch. Spoiled stupid little Glades-blood queer. Findrich and the rest are so fucking wrong about you. You’re soft as pox pus.”

“It isn’t my vengeance,” he told her distantly.

“Oh, yes.” She bared her teeth, spat at his feet. “Poor little Sherin. Is this what she wanted done, then?”

“No. She just asked me to kill you.” Ringil took the dragon-tooth blade from his sleeve. He crouched to Snarl’s height. “She didn’t say anything about protecting your honor until I did it, though.”

“Honor.” An awful bubbling laugh came up out of Poppy Snarl’s throat. “Oh, but how the other half live. Honor? You think, you really think this is the first time I’ve been raped? You think it’s the tenth time, maybe? The twentieth?”

“I don’t care, Poppy.”

“Fuck you, Eskiath. You think I would have lived past fourteen fucking years old in harbor end if I’d broken as easily as your little bitch cousin? You tell them back at House Eskiath I was a dozen times the woman Sherin ever was, and before I was half her fucking age. You tell them I said that.”

“No, I won’t,” Ringil said quietly. “I’ll tell them you died screaming and begging for mercy.”

“Well, you always were a fucking liar.” She jerked her chin up at him, bared her throat, and sneered. “So what are you waiting for, you mincing aristo cunt? Get it done, why don’t you.”

AFTERWARD, HE LEFT HER BODY WHERE IT LAY AND WENT DOWN TO stand among the coffles she had owned. Around him, the mercenaries went about with manacle cutters and much bad grace, setting free the slaves and throwing stale bread at their feet. None who passed him would meet his eye.

The men under your command may well hate you, he’d once written, in a treatise on modern warfare that never saw publication. And who can blame them? They see you dine on fine wine and meat while they subsist on gruel. They sleep under canvas and you under silk. They make do with rusting hand-me-down mail while you gleam in personally tailored plate. And where battle is joined against known and human foes, they know that if captured, you will likely as not be feted by noble commanders on the opposing side and ransomed safely home, while they will likely be tortured, mutilated, or killed.

Who, without the careful massaging of illusory tribal pride or the promise of rape and pillage, would not hate their commander under such circumstances?

Of course, the Scaled Folk had come along and changed a lot of that. They didn’t differentiate—grunt-level soldiery or noble flesh, apparently it all tasted pretty much the same to them. Stumbling on the barbecue pits and cracked and blackened human bones the lizards habitually left behind at their camps, the League’s soldiers acquired a sudden, icy understanding of their common humanity and what it stood against. They were no longer fighting to plant a flag somewhere pointless, to avenge this or that slight to honor in the endless squabbling negotiations of the various noble families and city fathers who owned every fucking thing the eye could see.

They were fighting not to be eaten.

The clean, cold clarity of it washed over the young Ringil Eskiath—at the time a sinecure-posted junior liaison officer with Trelayne’s Majak mercenary units—like bathing at the Falls of Treligal. Where other men, other commanders from the noble families of the League, recoiled in horror before the change, Ringil embraced it like the tight-muscled torso of an unexpected back-alley lover.

It carried him through the war. It sent him up against the lizards at Gallows Gap fully expecting to die, and it made a hero of him instead.

And then, in the sick-to-the-stomach, hungover morning light of their victory over the Scaled Folk, like so many of those tight muscled back-alley lovers over the years, the promise of change melted from his side, and was gone.

At the time, it took him a while to understand what had happened. He was still young back then; he really had believed in the change. But as the norms shifted again, back to what had been before or near as fuck, his enduring belief started to get in the way. Later, it came close to killing him. Came closer in fact than the Scaled Folk had ever managed—toward the end, it had taken Archeth’s intervention to save him, to wake him to the fact that they’d saved humanity from the lizards so that said humanity could go right back to wallowing in the same pit of ignorance and oppression it had seemed so comfortable with before.

He walked away.

Away from the honors and the offers, away from the collapsing unity between League and Empire, away from the thousand petty squabbles and land grabs the war had degenerated into. He spat out what he could of the taste the war had left in his throat, and among many other pointless exercises sat down to write his treatise.

Hate, then. Since it’s so fucking popular again.

But hate, he reminded his putative audience of young, up-and-coming noble commanders, is a curious emotion, often akin to love, in fact resembling love much as your image in the distorting mirror of a penny shriek-house resembles you. And even more curious—in the white heat of combat, the shriek-house of men killing and dying for causes undefined, passage across that mirror surface is sometimes possible. Make that transition, step through somehow, and their hate for you may transform, as well, into a pure, consuming love for which they may well follow you and give their lives.

It was, he’d readily admit, weird beyond belief, but he’d seen it happen that way, more than once, in the raging chaos of the war, like quicksilver magic, like so much else that happened to him in those years. Twisted, and wonderful, and strange.

But that was the war and that was then.

Here and now, on the scrub-plain borderlands outside Hinerion, with a ragged band of the cheapest mercenary castoffs his depleted purse could buy, there would be no transformations. There would be no wonder.

He was trapped behind the mirror, and he knew it.

So he watched the freeing of the slaves, and tried not to feel, as his men evidently already did, that it was all a colossal waste of time.

Tried not to feel at all.

The slaves themselves seemed for the most part to have reached a similar state of numbness. Some few scrambled to their feet as soon as the chains came off, grabbed the bread they were thrown, and hurried away toward the fringes of the forest in ones and twos, glancing back over their shoulders all the way; others, mostly the women, grabbed at the hands of their liberators and tried to kiss them or wept. And got startled curses and shruggings-off for their efforts. But these were the minority. Most just took the food and gnawed at it where they sat, staring into some hollow distance they’d excavated for themselves during their captivity. Perhaps they didn’t believe what was happening; perhaps they thought it was a trick. Or perhaps they no longer cared one way or the other. Certainly, if they grasped the fact they were free, it didn’t seem worth very much to them.

Ringil—who’d seen a lot of what freedom this world had to offer, and still somehow found himself standing here empty with a raped woman’s blood on his hands—had to wonder how far wrong they actually were.

The sun climbed in the east, chased out the last of the night’s cool. The events of the dawn seemed to recede with the change, as if the butchered corpses of Snarl and the legate and their men were detritus left by some battle in a ghost realm just parallel to the real world. Ringil shook off a shiver at the thought, at memories attached to it, and tried to soak up some of the new sun’s warmth. There was a tiny personal drumming in his ears, more felt than heard, and his vision seemed abruptly darker. Another shiver. He wondered glumly if he might be coming down with a cold.

Swift running footfalls, crunching across the ground behind him.

He whipped about, one hand reaching up for the pommel of the Ravensfriend. Saw Eril sprinting down from the top of the rise to meet him, one hand flung out, chopping the air westward.

“Riders to the west!”

Jagged awareness, like waking in terror from a flandrijn pipe dream. The distant drumming fell out of his head and into the morning quiet, resolved into what it was: a sound he knew from half a hundred battlefields past—the tremor through the ground of an armored cavalry detachment at the gallop.

Eril was bellowing now.

“ ’Ware riders!”

Around Ringil, the mercenaries heard, too, and took up the cry—

“ ’Ware riders!”

“Riders!”

“Fucking heavy horse!”

Bawled warnings, chaining together like lightning before the storm, and then, suddenly, the random crisscross of sprinting men, leaping and kicking their way through the huddled slaves, heading for the tree line, for horses maybe, ultimately for anything the horizon might offer. Ringil tried to grab one of them as he pelted past, was spun around by the man’s momentum and left grabbing after a fistful of empty air. The man ran on, still bawling.

Heavy horse!

Ringil had seen it put more seasoned men than these to flight. Armored cavalry—for anyone who’d ever had to face some, it held an ingrained terror worse than any sorcery. Back before the rise of the Yhelteth imperium and the foundation of the League to stand against it, heavy horse was the deciding factor time and again in the endless squabbling wars between the Naom city-states. It smashed through defensive formations; it shattered morale. Even the Majak had been known to break under armored cavalry assault. Expecting this bunch of castoffs to hold together, well… he gave it up as pointless, hurried up the slope to meet Eril instead. Turned about to stare westward as Eril pointed again.

“There. Left of the bluff, where the tree line breaks.”

No detail yet, but Ringil saw the pale boiling of the dust cloud. No doubt about it.

“Hinerion,” he said grimly. “Word got through, then.”

“Yeah, looks that way.” Eril eyed the dust, and the wooded terrain that separated them from where it was rising. “Heavy horse won’t cut through those trees, they’re too dense. They’ll have to keep to the road.”

Ringil nodded. “Gives us about time to saddle a horse.”

“Already saddled. Up behind the tents. Come on, I’ve got the old man watching them.”

They went up the slope at a run. Found the old man from Hreshim’s Landing stood between the heads of two shaggy-maned mares, face tilted down under a grubby skirmish ranger’s cap. He wasn’t holding the reins, but he had one hand pressed lightly to the side of each animal’s head and he was crooning to them, some garbled gibberish that put Ringil’s teeth on edge. He looked up as his commander approached, and the sunlight gleamed red off one eye.

“So it’s not to be a stand, sire?”

“No it’s not,” Ringil told him shortly.

“A pity. An old man might imagine himself dying well, fighting at the right hand of the hero of Gallows Gap.”

Ringil stopped, peered suspiciously into the old man’s weather-tanned features. As far as he remembered, neither he nor Eril had mentioned his true identity to any of the mercenaries they’d recruited over the previous weeks. But the old man just looked innocently back at him, face devoid of apparent mockery or deceit.

Got no time for this shit, Gil.

“This isn’t Gallows Gap, old man.” Voice tight with memory. “And the war is over. We’ve done what we came here to do. We’re leaving.”

The old man’s head lowered in deference. “Very good, my lord. And your mounts are ready for you, as you see. The best two I could secure.”

Past the old man and the two animals, Ringil caught sight of something on the ground. He stepped sideways around the right-hand horse for a better look. Saw three tumbled corpses—by their mismatched weapons and ragged apparel, members of his own mercenary troop. The other horses had moved back against their tether lines to give the dead men as wide a berth as possible, and now they blew and whinnied and shifted nervously about, in marked contrast with the two the old man had selected. Ringil stared at the corpses, then at the old man’s sword, still sheathed across his back in echo of the way Ringil wore the Ravensfriend. He frowned.

“And your own mount?” he asked.

The old man offered him a crooked grin. “Oh, I shall not require a horse to evade capture, my lord. I have other and better means.”

“Yeah? Such as?”

—no fucking time for this, Gil—

But the old man only grinned again, and touched the brim of his skirmish ranger’s cap in silence, as if that were answer enough. Ringil shrugged and took the reins of the horse on the left, ushered her about for space, and swung up into the saddle. He doubted the old man would easily evade capture, ranger training or no—not if Hinerion’s border watch had been roused as it seemed. But he was in no mood to argue the point. He had his own escape to think about.

“Well, I’m obliged to you then.” Ringil raised a hand to his brow in salute. “Good luck.”

“And to you, my lord.”

The old man put a sweeping bow behind his words, and once again Ringil could not be sure if he was being mocked or not. He looked across at Eril, now also in the saddle, but the Marsh Brotherhood man gave no sign he saw anything amiss. Ringil shook it off—whatever it was—and urged his horse forward.

“Look to your own safety, old man,” he said gruffly. “While you still can.”

He passed the corpses, glanced down at one of them and then wished he hadn’t. He jerked his gaze back to the tree line, scanning for the broken pine tree and the hidden defile it marked out, the path that had brought them to the encampment from the river. It was a goatherd’s track, not made for riding, but with a little care and good horsemanship they should pass.

Yeah, we’d better. Ringil’s mouth twisted sourly. Don’t like the alternatives much.

The distant drum of the approaching cavalry was distant no longer, and as he looked north to where the road emerged from the thinning woodland, Ringil thought he spotted the flash of desert sunlight on armor through the foliage. He kicked his horse into a canter.

The old man stood and watched them go. Smiling faintly.

Down on the flat ground, the slaves who had not run earlier were milling about in a listless simulacrum of the panic among those who had freed them. Ringil and Eril cantered through the mess, heading for the marker pine. Mostly, those on the ground got out of their way, but one young mercenary—Ringil recognized him from the queue for Snarl—stood his ground, brandishing a battle-ax without much sense that he really knew how to use it. There was a cheap helm askew on his head, and his face was white with fear. He stepped in, yelling.

“Don’t you fucking leave us, you fatherless piece of—”

Ringil nudged his horse left, booted the mercenary full in the chest as he passed him, and rode on.

At the tree line, Eril reined about and stared back. He shook his head.

“Armored cavalry’s going to make mincemeat out of those guys.”

“Yeah, well they’ve been paid,” Ringil growled, and ducked his head as his horse picked up the start of the path.

But as the trees closed around them, he thought back to the corpses around the old man, and he shivered. One of the mercenaries had fallen faceup, neck lolling to the side, throat tugged stickily open on the long, neat slash that had bled him out. No different from a hundred other sneak killings Ringil had seen over the years. But the man’s eyes were frozen wide open in the grime of his face, and his expression…

In over a decade of soldiering, Ringil had never seen horror so clearly printed onto a set of human features.

A low-hanging tree bough brushed his shoulder. Sunlight speared between the branches, dappled the ground. Somewhere in the quiet of the forest, a bird called to its mate.

Ringil shivered again.

Shook it off. Sneezed.

Coming down with something. Definitely.