The Cold Commands

CHAPTER 17

Downstairs in the bar, he bought the two crewmen another drink and then told them to head back to the ship. There would be no heavy lifting. Neither of them looked too unhappy about it. They drained their glasses, wiped their mouths, and slipped away with laconic sailor nods. Ringil let his own drink stand, leaned an elbow on the bar, and tried to get the room to stop its sporadic blurring in and out of focus around him. For a while, he watched the well-fed diners and tried to work up a modicum of dislike for them, but his heart was not in it. Mostly, he just wanted to lie down and sleep.

Yeah, well. Arse in the saddle then, Gil.

He propped himself up off the bar—it seemed harder to do than you’d expect for so simple a motion—paid for the drinks, and navigated his way to the door. Got himself out into the street, stood in the fitful torchlight for a while. Across the way on the temple façade, Hoiran grinned at him toothily. Ringil peeled him a sour return sneer, breathed in hard, and shook his head like a wet dog shedding water. The street tipped and teetered downward in response, inviting a fall. Ringil kept his balance with an effort, waited until everything settled again, and then started down the sloping cobbles, one jolting, jelly-legged pace at a time.

Get to the harbor. Get aboard the Marsh Queen’s Favor.

By now, Eril would have been back to the tavern they were lodged at, would have seen to the selling of the horses, for whatever price could be had at such short notice and time of night. And by the time the sun came up and they were missed at the Dappled Gate, Marsh Queen’s Favor would be standing well out to sea, beyond pursuit and the need for any more fugitive planning.

A cabin, a bunk, departure at dawn while he slept.

It was like a beacon, pulling at him.

“Ringil Eskiath!”

He lurched around. Realized too late the trap the name implied.

Stupid, stupid, stupid fucking…

“Well, well, well.” Venj the axman, there on the corner of a cross-street alley, teeth bared in a savage grin. Bulky figures at his back, half a dozen or more. “Thought that was a dodgy fucking Yhelteth accent, if ever I heard one. Thought I knew the face from somewhere.”

The war, the war, the fucking war. Was he ever going to run out of people who knew his face from some blood-soaked skirmish or other?

“Look,” he fumbled.

“Look nothing.” Venj spat on the ground. “I got family in Trelayne still, I hear the stories. Ringil Eskiath turned black mage, turned on his own family. Price on his head, for loosing slaves and killing merchants. And now there’s some northern swordsman sorcerer down here raiding slave caravans. Doesn’t take a lot of brain to put that together.”

“Lucky for you then,” Ringil said faintly.

He thought it got a couple of guffaws from the men at Venj’s back. Didn’t think it would help much, come the crunch. He held himself upright, tried to look like some kind of credible threat.

“You sure you want to do this, skirmish ranger?”

Sudden flinch in the axman’s eyes. “That was a long time ago.”

“Wasn’t it just. I can let this go, Venj, and so can you. Just walk away.”

“Walk away.” The axman’s tone was light, mock-reasonable, as if he were seriously considering the idea. Ringil felt something plummet in his guts at the sound. “Yeah, we could do that, couldn’t we, boys? Just walk away—from a twenty-five-thousand florin reward. Yeah, why not?”

“It’s fifteen.”

Venj grinned. “Either fucking way, it’ll do us.”

Growl of approval at his back like surf. No way out, then. Ringil flexed his right hand at his side. Reckoned angles, but groggily—hopelessly numb. Recall of the fight at Snarl’s encampment only that morning, now faded like some impossible dream of speed and power, some old soldier’s tale of a youth and glory that never was. He’d have to get the Ravensfriend drawn; the dragon dagger wouldn’t cut it against men like these. Not this many, not this type. But they were in so fucking close…

Venj watched it all going through his head and nodded.

“So, you going to come quietly, or do we have to hamstring and drag you?”

Fuck that. Make them kill you.

But he knew they wouldn’t have to. Not in his current state, not with these numbers. And with the promise of a reward that high, Venj’s men would take whatever risks and gashes they needed to bring him down alive. They’d bracket him, they’d crowd him, and sooner or later—

He went for the Ravensfriend.

Fevered flash grab—as fast as he could make his body do it.

Knew instantly he’d fucked it up.

It was there in the fumbled grip he got on the pommel, the jagged, grudging tug as he tried to clear the blade. Weary—inelegant—the motions of a man who did not want to fight. Venj must have seen it all, spotted the move even as it bloomed. He leapt in with a yell, grabbing for Ringil’s sword-arm before it could swing down. Ringil twisted awkwardly aside, lashed out with a boot and felt it connect. The axman yelped and went over, sprawling and tangled. He lay in a cursing heap on the cobbles as his men rushed in. Their weapons glinted in the gloom.

Ringil got the Ravensfriend around in a soggy arc, managed to block the first opposing blade of the night. Chime of steel, but he staggered from the impact. Turned it into a backward lurch, tried for some fighting space. No fucking chance—they pressed in on him like excited dogs. He swept his blade low, trying to scare them back, but they were a hard-bitten crew and they just grinned, and skipped the feint, and surged back in. Ringil parried as best he could. Behind the mob, Venj was back on his feet, ax drawn, bawling encouragement.

Something steel got through, he never saw what or how—the flat of it clouted him across the left knee with numbing force. His leg buckled, he could not brace it up. The Ravensfriend wavered. He saw a face full of scars, leering. Hands grappled and grasped, someone got to his wrist and bore it up; someone else ducked in and punched him hard and fast—once! twice!—under the chest. He might have ridden the first one out, but the second dropped him to his knees like a slingshot buck. He swayed there a moment, had time to notice he’d lost the Ravensfriend, and then he keeled over on his side, breath creaking in his starved lungs. Someone kicked him in the head for good measure; someone else laughed and spat on the cobbles near his face. He heard Venj’s voice again, distantly, berating them about something or other.

Do I look like a fucking slave to you?

No, that wasn’t Venj. It was hollow and toneless, and it seemed to come out of the air right beside Ringil’s ear. He twisted his head up. Saw nothing. But he thought the others had heard it, too, because the excited surf of their voices rolled suddenly back into quiet.

“The fuck… ?” said someone.

Do I look like a fucking slave to you?

Something moved in the gloom of the nearest side alley. Ringil, still struggling to breathe, could not get enough of an angle to see clearly.

“Oi!” Venj trod forward. Ringil got a worm’s-eye view of his boots. “This ain’t your fucking business, chum, so put that blade up, and clear off while you still can.”

Do I look like a fucking slave to y—

“Stop fucking saying that!”

Better run, said another voice, from the other side of the street. Ringil felt a chill smoking off him as he heard the words, though in his fuddled state he could not work out why. Better run.

“Right, that’s it,” said Venj grimly. “You were fucking warned.”

Out on the marsh, said a third voice, as cold and empty as the other two. Salt in the wind.

Footfalls, impossible to tell from where. The swish of a sword blade making passes in the night air. One of Venj’s men jerked out a string of curses, but there was a waking terror in his voice. Ringil twisted his head frantically, trying to see something, anything. Thought he made out a solid black figure standing in the shadows to his left.

Fuck them all, said the third voice, and Ringil remembered, with a sudden, gut-deep jolt, where he’d heard those words before.

Venj roared. “Come on then, you motherfucking—”

Dark rush of motion. Something like a whirlwind, closing from three corners.

Wrenched screams. Venj’s bellow, turned suddenly castrated.

And a hot, wet pattering through the air, like a rainy-season downpour back home in Trelayne. As it fell on his face and the cobbles around him, he realized vaguely that it was blood.

RINGIL CAME ROUND WITH THE STENCH OF SOMEONE’S VOIDED BOWELS clogging his throat. He coughed and turned over on the cobblestones, rolled up against the familiar bulk of a still-warm corpse. His knee throbbed painfully and, somewhere not far off, he heard the sea. For a couple of moments he was confused, tangled in old memories, thought he was still lying hidden among the slain at Rajal Beach. Panic-stricken, he froze the cough in his throat. His pulse pounded. If the Scaled Folk were still prowling the breakwaters, looking for survivors…

The leaning bulk of a corner building, the cobblestones under him. Faint glow of street torches. He blinked. Memory swam up to him in all its ugly glory.

No Scaled Folk anymore, Gil. We slaughtered them all, remember?

He heaved himself into a sitting position. The cough jumped him, would not be held down any longer. He gave in and let it rack his chest, had to prop himself up on the corpse until the spasms passed. When it finally stopped, there was a sour, acid taste in his throat. He hawked and spat, wiped his mouth and stared around.

Well, it wasn’t Rajal Beach, right enough, but whoever had been at work here could have given the Scaled Folk lessons in savagery. Venj’s followers were scattered across the slant of the street in butchered pieces and broad pools of blood. The corpse Ringil was leaning on lacked both legs below the knee and one arm. Others were worse. He spotted a body ripped in two somewhere below the rib cage, another reduced to chunks of meat no larger or better defined than you’d see on a butcher’s slab. Venj himself sprawled back against a wall, throat torn out, staring down with sightless eyes at his own opened guts. His ax was still gripped firmly in both hands. Other weapons lay about for the taking, one or two with their owner’s disembodied hands still clinging.

A faint odor of scorched flesh and metal hung over everything. The slave market stink of branding.

“Interesting,” Ringil mumbled, mostly to keep from thinking too hard about what he’d seen of his saviors. He patted the corpse on its intact shoulder, leaned hard on it, and used the leverage to get back on his feet. “And very handy. I think—”

“Hoy!”

Klithren hung there at a panting halt—he’d come up the rise at a jog. Naked disbelief slapped across his face like cheap paint as he stared at the slaughter in front of him. He grabbed at the sword in his belt. For one drop-stomached moment, Ringil thought it was all over, that Klithren would kill him now before he could even find his sword, let alone put up a guard with it. He met the bounty hunter’s gaze, felt himself shaking his head numbly.

No more, no more.

“Hoiran’s fucking balls, Shenshenath. Who did this?”

“I uh, I—” Then, abruptly, he was tumbling forward and Klithren let go of his sword hilt and darted in just in time to catch him and hold him up. His boot heels dug and scrubbed about on the cobbles; he tried to get purchase, but his legs were like marsh grass stalks. The bounty hunter made a hushing noise.

“Hey, hey. Easy, Shenshenath, easy. I got you.”

He lowered Ringil gently to the ground. Put hands on him, checking for wounds. Ringil pushed him away.

“I’m fine—just gashes. Got hit in the head with something.”

The bounty hunter nodded, took back his hands with an oddly propitiatory gesture. He crouched there in front of Ringil, still taking in the carnage.

“You see who did this?”

“They jumped us. No time.” Ringil felt another cough coming on, rolled with it, played it up for all it was worth. He nodded weakly to one side. “Out of that alley. Like fucking demons.”

“But…” Klithren’s brow furrowed. “Must have been a lot of them, right?”

“Didn’t see. No time.” He kept his voice faint, tightened up the Yhelteth accent. “Couldn’t tell.”

The bounty hunter stared around. As his eyes fell on Venj, Ringil thought his mouth grew clamped. Thought his eyes suddenly gleamed.

“He found you, then? Venj. He tell you what he wanted?”

Ringil felt a chilly caution settle over him. He shook his head, feeling his way by inches. “Found me, yeah, in a tavern up there. Never told me what it was about. Something important, he said, but they hit us before he could say.”

“Well, where the fuck were you all going?”

Another groggy headshake—work the act. “Dunno. Back to the square, I think. Bounty office. He seemed… excited.”

Klithren sat back on his haunches. “Just doesn’t make any fucking sense. He left me a note at the boardinghouse. Gone back to see you at the tavern, something important, he said. Supposed to meet him there. I get there, he’s gone to the harbor, left word for me to follow. I get to the harbor, no one fucking there, either, and some wharf rat drunk tells me he saw men head up the street this way. Heard the fight, but by the time I got up here…”

Ringil nodded. At night, the sound of steel clash and dying would carry half a mile at least. He started to get up, found his legs a little stronger this time.

“Over quicker than you can piss,” he said truthfully. And then, with mental apologies to Egar, “Thought I saw staff lances. And howling. You hear it?”

“Steppe thugs?” Klithren looked doubtful. “You think? Looks savage enough, yeah, but I haven’t heard of a Majak company in these parts since the war wrapped up. Haven’t seen any about town, either.”

“So maybe I imagined it. Got hit in the head, like I said.” Ringil cast about for the Ravensfriend, found it in a pool of blood. He wiped it down as best he could with rags from one of the slaughtered men, slotted it clumsily back in the scabbard on his back. Checked his sleeve for the dragon knife, settled it a little looser. Looked up and down the street for witnesses.

“Ah fuck, Venj. Look at you.”

Klithren had wandered over to stare at the axman’s corpse. Ringil came up on his shoulder, got a reflexive, flinching glance from the other man, the skirmish habit of years, and then the bounty hunter went back to brooding on his fallen comrade. Neck bent forward, the nape offered. Ringil felt himself hesitate.

“You know him long?”

A shrug. “Four, five years. That’s a long time in this business, right? Came down here from Trelayne after the war, chasing some piece of pussy he’d fallen for when he was in uniform.” Klithren crouched to eye level with the dead man. Sighed and pressed his chin to his folded knuckles. “He was an arrogant little fuck sometimes. But you couldn’t ask for a better man at your back in a scrap. Saved my life a couple of times for sure.”

“Guess this means we’re not heading out the Dappled Gate after all.”

“Nah, that was scuppered to fuck anyway. Didn’t you hear?” Klithren looked up at Ringil. “Thought you might have. Thought he might have, maybe that’s how come all this rushing around…”

Ringil felt his pulse pick up slightly. “Heard what?”

“Word just came down from the Keep.” The bounty hunter said it almost absently, like he couldn’t care less. His eyes were fixed on Venj’s wounds. “No one goes outside the city walls until further notice. They’re saying some of the slaves on that caravan got hit yesterday had the plague.”

THE WORLD OPENS UP AND SWALLOWS YOU DOWN.

This is not new. You’ve spent the last decade of your life, at least, wondering how it’ll burn down in the end. Before that, of course, you were too young and alive to really believe in your own death, but the war took all that away.

The war gave you death as a daily commonplace, an immediate possibility behind every badly timed sword stroke or stumbling misstep you made. Death was there at your side in the screaming chaos of battle, cutting down comrades and enemies alike, occasionally turning your way, ready for the least slip or sign that you’d really had enough of this shit and wanted the easy out. Death came to you, pensive quiet and sated in the aftermath, smirking up at you from the rictus grin of the men who’d died hard, hanging about at your back in the waning cries and weeping of the wounded beyond repair. Death was your friend, your confessor, your intimate companion, and though the seduction might be lengthy and sly, you always knew he’d get you in the end.

Just not like this.

Klithren went down behind the blow from the dragon-tooth dagger without a sound. Ringil, stirring from the dimmed moment of the act, saw he had used the weapon’s pommel and that though there was blood in the bounty hunter’s hair Klithren would live to fight another day. Make sense of that if you could.

Harbor. Get to the fucking harbor.

Where the night had by now settled down to seeping bandlight and an illusory, seaward-yearning calm—faint, irregular slap of waves against the pilings, soft stutter and creak of mooring ropes as they stretched with the shift of their tethered vessels on the swell. A trio of quiet drunks huddled like cormorants atop a pile of trawl nets at one end of the quay, mumbling sea chanteys and passing a wine flask back and forth. Ringil went past them at a limping trot, got a tipsy salutation from one, hurriedly shushed by his more circumspect—or just more sober—companions. Farther along, in the puddle of shadow cast by the customhouse wall, he caught the grunts and glottal clicking sounds of some sailor getting a cheap blow job. He thought he saw a queue of figures waiting there in the gloom.

Eril was draped at the rail of the Marsh Queen’s Favor, smoking a krinzanz twig. He straightened when he saw Ringil approaching, pitched the twig into the gap between ship and wharf, and came down the gangplank with a grin. Ringil raised a hand to keep him back. Shook his head.

“Better stay where you are.”

Eril’s smile dropped off his face. He glanced about the darkened wharf, seeking enemies.

“Trouble?” he asked quietly.

“You could say that.” Ringil was fascinated to discover that what he felt most was an obscure embarrassment. “You’d better tell the captain to get his crew together and slip ropes. Time for a smuggler’s exit.”

“And our other passenger?”

“They’re calling a plague quarantine on the city, Eril. You don’t get out of here right now, they’ll lock the whole harbor up and your ride out of here as well.”

“Plague?” For perhaps the second time ever in their acquaintance, Ringil saw genuine fear in Eril’s eyes.

“Yeah. Seems some of the slaves had it.”

The Brotherhood enforcer made the connection. The fear in his expression shifted into something else.

“You…”

“Yeah. Looks like it.”

Silence stretched between them like distance, as if the gangplank were already up and the Marsh Queen’s Favor drifting from the shore. Ringil made himself grin, guessed it must look pretty awful. Eril cleared his throat.

“I had a great-uncle in Parashal, got it back in twenty-eight. They say he lived.”

Ringil nodded. Everybody had an uncle somewhere who’d survived the plague in some other place or time. It was a bedside platitude, cheap comfort you could hand out like some threadbare blanket you weren’t going to miss.

“Sure,” he said. “It can be done.”

In Majak lands, Egar had once told him, you could cheat the plague of its victim if the tribe could find—read, in the constant tribal ruck of the steppes, capture alive in battle—a suitable substitute to sacrifice in place of the original sufferer. Given a man or woman of comparable rank and blood, the hovering plague spirit would take the offered life instead and depart with it. The original sufferer didn’t just recover, they came back stronger than they had ever been before. Often they would rise to become tribal leaders or shamans in their own right. Such recoveries apparently took place overnight—sometimes, if the shaman had the Dwellers’ favor, before the planned sacrifice had even been carried through.

Nice trick if you can pull it.

“My debt…,” Eril began.

“Is hereby canceled. I asked you to help me throw a burning brand into Etterkal, and we did that pretty effectively. I’m all done murdering slavers for now.”

The Brotherhood enforcer could not quite keep the relief from soaking into his features. He made an uncharacteristically awkward gesture.

“I, uh, I sold the horses.”

“Good. Get anything halfway decent for them?”

Eril shook his head, overvehemently. “Got fucked in the arse. Barely three hundred apiece and that’s including the tackle. Fucking landlord’s going to double his money just by sleeping on it. Here.”

He dug a purse out of his coat, took a half step forward on his way to hand it over, and then remembered. He stopped dead on the gangplank. Ringil nodded, lifted one open hand toward him.

“ ’Sokay. I’m not too far gone to catch stuff.”

Eril hesitated, then tossed the purse across the intervening gap. A good, hard throw, to make sure it cleared the edge of the wharf. The weight and impact stung in the cup of Ringil’s palm.

The two of them stood there looking at each other.

“What will you do?” the enforcer asked him finally.

Ringil weighed the purse in his hand. “I don’t know. Get drunk, maybe. Don’t you worry about me, Eril. You need to turn around and put your foot in that captain’s arse. Get some sail hoist while you still can.”

He turned away then, because the temptation of the gangplank’s sea-rotted edge where it rested on the wharf was getting a little too much to resist. Marsh Queen’s Favor sat there, four feet out from the quay, and the urge to cross that symbolic gap to safety was like krinzanz craving. Give himself any longer, and he’d do it, he’d start trying to talk his way into coming aboard regardless, rationalize his way past the obvious fucking shape of this particular truth, tell the tawdry fucking lies to himself that everybody did, Look, this isn’t plague, it’s just a bad cold, be over it in a couple of days with some sea air to clear your head, you’ll…

Like that.

He grimaced. You could already hear the pleading tone of it all.

He walked away.

Got about three paces before Eril called after him.

“Sire?”

He stopped. Blinked at the honorific. In the best part of eight months, he’d never heard Eril use it to anyone. He turned back.

“Yeah?”

“I, uh, wanted to say. All that shit they say about you? The corruptor-of-youth stuff, the queer thing. Just wanted to say. I always knew they were a bunch of lying fucks. Knew it wasn’t true. You’re no faggot.” He swallowed. “Sire.”

Ringil remembered the times he’d caught himself staring with something worse than longing at Eril’s exposed arse and shanks when they bathed in rivers on the way south. The hollow ache that stalked behind the lust.

He found the smile once more. Put it on.

“You neither, Eril. You neither. We’re true men, the both of us. Now get out of here while you can. Go home. Fare well.”

He put the gangplank and the Marsh Queen’s Favor at his back again, and this time he kept walking.