The Cold Commands

CHAPTER 12

It called itself Anasharal.

Archeth had never seen anything like it. The Helmsmen of her youth came large and semi-visible at best—mostly they were in the walls, or the hulls and bulkheads of the fireships, like helpful rats out of some fairy tale or shelved talking library books. They engaged you in solemn conversation, sometimes they solved your problems for you—or at least told you why they couldn’t—and they could manipulate numerous aspects of the Kiriath domain in ways she’d never been able to think of as anything but magical. As a child, she’d gotten the impression some of them were taking a slightly scary avuncular delight in guiding her, and not always along paths her parents approved.

But one thing they weren’t was mobile.

Later, when the engineers started stripping some of the old fireships preparatory to leaving, she saw why: The component parts came out into the light like giant iron organs and loops of intestine surgically removed. Angfal, once Helmsman for the wrecked flagship—rough translation—Sung Through Lava Like the Petal of an Autumn Rose on the Scorching Late-Summer Breeze, now hung on the walls of her study in Yhelteth, looking discomfortingly like a huge, gross-bodied spider oozing through from the next room. But the impression was fleeting at best—Angfal could no more move unaided than the next fat keg of ale waiting in a tavern cellar.

Anasharal had limbs.

It wasn’t a feature that was immediately apparent. Archeth and the eight men Hald detailed to go down with her came awkwardly across the glassy surface in the bottom half of the crater, aping the motions of wading through cold water on a stony shore, and found themselves staring at something rather like a moldy, half-eaten pie that someone had mistakenly put back in the oven. The heat shimmer rose off a roughly hemispherical knobbed gray carapace cracked neatly apart across the middle. It was the gray crust itself that was smoking, but where the crack ran through, there was a faint white mist that spilled steadily out onto the glassy ground and crawled about there in wisps that gave out a faint, sorcerous chill. Peering into the space the mist was vacating, they saw a nested hollow about four feet across, something like an opened rose with its heart punched out. In the middle, something like a huge egg was rocking back and forth.

The men drew back, doing their best not to step in the puddles of chilly mist. They looked to Archeth for guidance. She shrugged.

“We do not understand how to help you,” she said flatly, to the air in general.

“Yes, just a moment.”

Another loud cracking sound. A couple of the marines jumped visibly. One whole quarter of the broken gray crust fell abruptly aside and lay there like a chunk of abandoned wasps’ nest. From the gap it left, the thing that had rocked back and forth within came scrabbling out like some gigantic crab looking for food.

Oaths laced the air. The soldiers backed up even farther. Archeth tried not to; it wouldn’t have looked good.

The crab-like thing finished extricating itself and dropped to the floor, where it lay for a moment, feebly twitching one or two of its limbs as if exhausted. A pair of halberds swung down off marine shoulders and prodded inward.

“That really won’t be necessary,” said the voice. “Nagarn, Khiran, thank you. You can put those away.”

The named halberdiers gaped at each other. Their weapons drooped in shock. The crab-like thing propped itself up and waddled sideways in the gap, then collapsed again. Archeth crouched to look closer. The new arrival was fully three feet across at the widest point, smooth and featureless gray on top, apart from a scattering of thumb-sized optics glowing softly blue or white. At a glance you could be forgiven for thinking you were looking at some Kiriath-grown metallic giant mushroom—until it moved. But even then, she saw, there was something awkward about the motion. The legs folded out from sculpted recesses in the lower half of the creature, but they seemed to work poorly, as if unused to supporting the thing’s weight.

“It will take three or four of you to pick me up.” Briskly, as if it had heard her thoughts. “I suggest we improvise some kind of sling.”

SHE LEARNED ITS NAME AS THEY CARRIED IT, GRUNTING AND SCUFFLING with the weight, up the slope of the crater. Later, once they’d put together the suggested sling out of horse blankets and two halberd shafts and were on their way back to the river, she also got a vague, lengthy, and rather improbable sketch of its life story told in archaic High Kir, which she soon grew weary of trying to stay focused on. Like most Helmsmen of her acquaintance, Anasharal liked the sound of its own voice and seemed largely immune to modesty.

“…and in return for which services, I was flung up into the heavens by the grateful king, set among the stars to gleam there in guidance for all travelers of good heart forever after.”

“Yeah?” Archeth, riding alongside the sling and its carriers, slouched back in her saddle. “So what are you doing back down here, then?”

There was more snap in her voice than she’d intended. Relentless desert heat and the constant darting glances from the men that wrapped her in with this burbling chunk of sorcery and iron—it all added to her mounting irritability. But more than any of that was the dawning realization that when Manathan had spoken of messengers, she had assumed—rushed to assume—that he meant the Kiriath themselves, returning somehow, in some fairy-tale improbable fashion, from the veins of the Earth into which they had disappeared.

Instead, she had this.

“I really don’t think, daughter of Flaradnam, that you or any of your, uhm, friends here could remotely comprehend the complexity of decision making involved in letting me fall to Earth at this precise moment. Command decisions, I’m talking about, taken in an arena so cold and empty that it would render your body a block of ice in a heartbeat and boil your blood in your veins.”

“I think you mean freeze.”

Anasharal was silent for a moment, motionless in the sag and jog of the horse-blanket sling. Dry, metronome crunch of marching feet on either side—but even the men carrying the sling looked down, surprised at the sudden quiet from their cargo.

“You did say cold.” Archeth, twisting the knife.

“Think what you will.” Like clockwork wound back up—she couldn’t be sure if the voice had turned sulky or was sneering. “It won’t affect anything that matters. Your perspective is as Earthbound as any mortal. I, on the other hand, have seen the rise and fall of kingdoms across the continents and through the ages, witnessed the passing of the Aldrain and the bloody, midwifed renaissance of Men, watched the brief, multitudinous lives of humans spinning by like dandelion seed on the wind, wrestled with the almost—but actually not quite—incalculable mathematics of it all, and I’m telling you not to bother trying to comprehend any of it or me. Just follow my instructions and try to keep up.”

“We are carrying you,” Archeth pointed out.

“Yes, as your horse carries you—but I doubt you’ve tried to teach the beast basic algebra.”

Seemingly satisfied with this retort, Anasharal lapsed again into silence and stayed that way until they reached the boats. There, it seemed to derive a childish satisfaction from startling the marines who crowded around the sling to see what their comrades had brought back. It called various of them by name, asked after their individual circumstances in perfect Tethanne—Ganch, if the reptile peon bite wound in his shoulder still gave him trouble in winter, Hrandan whether he preferred assignment on the river frigate to his previous duties at Khangset, Shalag how he’d found his time in Demlarashan and if things down there were as bad, in his opinion, as they were all saying. It was the most blatant piece of showing off Archeth could ever recall, even from a Helmsman—and like all such tricks, it was spellbinding.

In the end, Senger Hald had to bellow for order over a drawn blade to get his men back about their tasks and everybody onto the small boats.

The good news, though, was that Lal Nyanar had succeeded in re-floating the Sword of Justice Divine. He met them at the hull door as they embarked the horses, rubbing his hands briskly, clearly pleased with himself. Hard sunlight slanted down through the open hatch, caught dust motes dancing in the damp gloom of the belowdeck. Painted a bright stripe across the satisfaction on Nyanar’s face.

“So then. What did you find?”

“They found me,” said Anasharal. “And it took them long enough.”

Nyanar jumped. He stared at the inert chunk of metal the men were carrying onto his ship in its horse-blanket sling. You could see him struggling to make the connection with the irritable voice that had just spoken into his ear.

“It’s like a Helmsman,” Senger Hald told him, stepping off the bobbing small boat and aboard the frigate. “A Helmsman fallen from the heavens, it says.”

“But—so small?”

Hald spread his arms eloquently. Both men looked at Archeth.

Great—like I know any more about this than you do.

She faked a command confidence. “We have no reason to doubt its word. We’ll find out more when we get it back to Yhelteth.”

“Yeah—just—wait a minute.” Nyanar gestured at the men carrying the sling, and they set it down on the planking with evident relief. “We have no reason to trust it, either, whatever it is. This could be a, a trickster demon. An evil spirit enchained in iron.”

“Oh, charming.”

“It needed us to carry it here,” Archeth said shortly. “I really don’t think we’re in any danger.”

“No physical danger, perhaps. But what of our souls?”

“Lal Nyanar—if Mahmal Shanta could only hear you now. What would he think of the man he once named his most promising student. His most promising… collaborator?”

Nyanar’s gaze flickered back to the Helmsman. Now the fear was plain to see—the mention of Shanta had only made matters worse. He faced Archeth with features set.

“This is my vessel, my lady. My command. If I invite something demonic aboard, who knows what power I accord it over us all. I will not allow this.”

The dust motes danced. The frigate’s hull creaked softly around them in the sun-barred gloom. Men waited, stood there in the cool or crouched out on the bobbing small boats in the heat. They were all watching her.

As usual.

Archeth sighed. “All right. Where’s Galat? Let’s get an invigilator’s opinion on this, and then maybe we can all go home.”

SHE’D EXPECTED HIM TO INSIST ON A CLOSETED INQUISITION, A CABIN alone with Anasharal, or maybe even—to cleanse the frigate of any potentially demonic taint—a tented retreat somewhere along the arid shoreline.

But Galat was almost careless of the details. He suggested they bring Anasharal up to the rear command deck, where the spread canvas shades would keep the sun off but let the breeze blow through. More comfortable for everyone, really. And this would allow those men not about their duties elsewhere to hear the deliberations and be assured that their leaders, spiritual and military, acted in their interests as well.

Fuck me, Archeth thought behind an impassive mask of acquiescence. A true believer.

The end result was that the Sword of Justice Divine sat at anchor while Anasharal was placed on a small ceremonial carpet in the shade of the canvas on the command deck, facing Hanesh Galat who knelt formally on a similar carpet with a Citadel scribe cross-legged at his side. Some murmured recitation, call-and-answer style, between the two men, and then the scribe took up his pen and scroll. Nyanar, Hald, Archeth, and a couple of the frigate’s senior officers sat on cushions in a semicircle around. And a small gaggle of sailors and marines with nothing better to do loitered on the main deck below, listening for whatever scraps of the proceedings the breeze would carry down.

Galat began his inquisition with formal introductions of all concerned, and then went straight into a series of labyrinthine clerical pronouncements. Archeth, unable to make herself sit for more than a couple of minutes, prowled about at the shoreside rail, trying to kid herself that the scratching impatience she felt to get home was not krinzanz withdrawal. Images of her bedroom at home kept spilling into her mind—a wooden box of rolled twigs beside the bed, fragrant smoke through the cool night air, the icy rising tide in her head, and Ishgrim, perched prettily on the bench by the window casement as she sometimes did, or sprawled naked and voluptuous and pouting on the disordered divan the way she never had, but some day, some fucking day…

She shrugged it off. Her body had never been subtle in the messages it sent.

But perhaps Manathan was right. There’d be plenty of time in the centuries to come to wean herself off the krin. Right now…

“…so in any real sense you would have to accept that it’s impossible for me to prove to you what I am. Demon is an arbitrary term, not so much a definition as an admission of a gap in a definitional framework, which…”

Right now, this was doing her head in.

Hanesh Galat seemed to be enjoying himself, though.

“But the Revelation clearly states—”

“Yes, your Revelation has textual criteria for defining a demonic entity, of course it does. But only by dint of a so-called deformation of nature, in other words via the acts said demonic entities indulge in and more important via human perception of the unnatural and negative impact of those acts on the human sphere and the physical world. So a demon that did not act in either the human sphere or the physical world, or at least did not give cause to perceive unnatural and negative impacts in those spheres, could not be defined as a demon as such. For that matter, though the textual authority is thinner, one could say the same of a similarly inclined angel.”

Galat blinked. “You mean to say that demons and angels could be mistaken for each other?”

“No, what I’m saying is that, just as with men, demons and angels cannot be effectively defined, in the temporal sphere at least, except by the actions they take in that sphere. That a lack of temporal agency on the part of either one leads to an impossibility of definition until some concrete action is taken and humanly perceived. And then, since this is the origin of definition, it is the act that must be judged, not the enactor.”

“But then, you’re also arguing—implying, anyway—that angels and demons are not immutable spirits!”

Senger Hald rolled his eyes. Lal Nyanar glanced surreptitiously up at the position of the declining sun.

“Well, if you follow that implication to its textual corollary in the Revelation at Hanliahg, yes,” Anasharal said smoothly. “But I ask you, is that such a bold step? I’m not suggesting anything that has not already been given considered debate in the Ashnal verses. The limitations on temporal knowledge are readily acknowledged, as is the imperfection of human senses in perceiving or even imagining a spiritual realm. Spirit is inherently unknowable from the context of the Earthbound soul, and so the Revelation, on its own admission, can only be partial.”

“There is the behavior of nonhuman spectators to consider, though.” Galat enumerated on his fingers. “Indirect intelligence that we achieve by observing the reactions of natural denizens in the animal kingdom. Dogs skulk and howl, spiders and other vermin may be attracted to—”

“Well, I think you’ll find that the horses did not react to me at all.”

“The horses were uncomfortable,” said Hald, patently seizing on something that might move the proceedings along.

“That was the trees.” Archeth, dismissive, moving to lean on the rear rail. Down on the main deck, the gathered men had evidently found other, more engrossing things to do and long ago dispersed to do them. “The burning spooked them. You’d get the same thing if the ship caught fire.”

“Well, burning the trees might be seen as a deformation of nature,” Galat allowed, but you could see that his heart wasn’t really in it.

“Do men not also burn wood for their own, natural purposes?”

“Yes, but the purpose is an intrinsic…”

So it went on until the sun fell below the trailing edge of the canvas shade and started getting in their eyes. Perhaps noticing this, Galat hurried through some concluding formal remarks, cited a verse or two from the Revelation at Shaktur, and then solemnly pronounced the Helmsman welcome among them as a Permitted Being.

The scribe signed off and dabbed the scroll dry.

For the others, it was like a spell breaking. Hald, Nyanar, and the ship’s officers piled to their feet, grimacing as they stretched cramped limbs, and headed down to the main deck. They left Hanesh Galat still seated, staring at Anasharal entranced.

“Fascinating,” he mused. “The implications. Fascinating.”

“I take it we’re in the clear then,” Anasharal asked Archeth in High Kir. “We’ll have no more interference from these idiots?”

Galat glanced up at Archeth when he heard the Black Folk tongue, but any suspicion in his expression was softened by the blatant wonder that still held his face. Archeth made a small, reassuring gesture, then turned her attention to the Helmsman where it sat on the carpet, carapace gleaming dully now in the long rays of the late-afternoon sun. She drew closer. Followed the language shift.

“If you’re talking about the Citadel, then yes, we’re done. This one’s rank permits him to write opinion directly into the Quotidian canon. That’s not the same thing as the Revealed canon, so it’s not set in stone. It can be disputed at Mastery level. But that’s unlikely to arise. They’ve got a few other clerical fish to fry right now.”

“Just as well. Immutable spirits, indeed. Morons.”

It was the first time since the war that she’d seen a Helmsman treat the Citadel with anything other than complete disinterest. Curiosity prickled at her.

“I wouldn’t have thought it would matter that much to you. It’s not as if they can harm you in any way.”

“No, but a certain amount of cooperation will be important.”

“Cooperation in what?”

Long pause. “That’s not important right now, daughter of Flaradnam. The important thing is to get back to Yhelteth with all speed.”

She stood over the iron thing and suffered an overwhelming urge to kick it.

“Yes, you keep saying that. But you don’t explain why.”

“Why?” Abruptly, there was a snap in the Helmsman’s voice. “Because, daughter of Flaradnam, something dark is on its way. That’s why. And it’s nearly here.”