The Cold Commands

CHAPTER 19

After a while, the cormorants seem to tire of his company. They hop ungainly off the rock they’ve all been sharing, disappear one by one into the depths below. The last one cocks its head back at him before it dives. Utters a parched croak that might be farewell, and is gone. Ringil raises the flask after them in salute.

Puts it to his lips and finds it empty.

No wonder they left.

For a while, he resists the obvious implication in that. The rock is oddly pliant and comfortable beneath him, there seems no reason to—

Well, apart from that queasy, gray-white patch of radiance seeping through at the sky’s eastern edge.

Something’s on its way, Gil.

Best if you’re not around for it to trip over when it arrives.

He makes the effort and gets to his feet. Swaying a little with the sudden height it gives him. He peers downward after the cormorants, gets nothing for his trouble but a vague gloom and the rising reek of fouled seawater. He shrugs. The fact that they were seabirds and he isn’t doesn’t seem to matter that much in the end. He takes the long step forward and plunges downward after them. Splashes into the—

Not water exactly, it’s too sparse and fleeting for that. But for scant moments he thinks he sees bubbles rising through it, his breath ascending in a milky trail toward a surface stirred silver by his entry above. There’s a brief, chilly prickling, like the splash of cold water thrown in his face, and then something lunges sharkish at him out of the murk.

Fuck!

He catches fragments of a glimpse—a circular mouth, dilated wide enough to swallow his head whole, the unbroken ring of a single taut lip rolled back and concentric rings of teeth erect in the throat beyond. It’s the akyia, the thing that Seethlaw and Risgillen called the merroigai. Behind the nightmare head, the hint of a lithe, approximately human body bisecting into long, coiling limbs fronded with fins. A sleekly muscled arm, darting out, one clawed hand grasping for him, perhaps to save him from the fall—but he shrinks from it like a child from the clutch of the Marsh Wraith, and the fall takes him on.

Deeper yet.

If there was ever a surface above him, it’s long gone now. The darkness presses around like some giant constricting serpent out of legend. Breathing is an effort, forcing him to shallow intake through trembling lips. His eyes ache from peering into the black, but something will not allow them to close. The sense that something is coming has not left him—he feels it plummeting down behind him, vast, shadowy, jaws agape. And he’s pinned, less falling than hanging from some constructed torture table whose shape and extent he cannot yet see.

Pale and luminous, something else looms up out of the depths.

For a couple of shivery moments, he thinks it might be a jellyfish, one of the giant ones that wash up on the shores at Lanatray when the summers have been stormy. He remembers abruptly—himself at eight years old, alone, as he increasingly was, walking dazedly on rain-damp sand among humped and shivery-translucent mounds that rose almost as high as he was tall. For a few eerie moments in that early-morning light, before a fast-growing hardheaded pragmatism set in, he believed—wanted to believe—these might be the quivering, fled souls of whales taken by the harpoon off the Hironish isles.

They were not.

And this, now—he shakes himself back to the moment—is not a jellyfish.

It’s a stone.

It seems to settle with this recognition, bobbing about at his feet with dog-like attachment. It wants to be friends. A softly gleaming chunk of masonry the size of a big man’s chest, inscribed across the top of one facing with letters in old Myrlic script. Ringil tilts his head a little and deciphers the lettering:

… and the Keys of a City greater than…

Like something you’d see on the walls of some ruined temple in the older, marsh end of town, some eerie once-isolated shrine now drowned in a sea of modern housing as Trelayne’s burgeoning outer districts spread—some of the stonework there is very old, it predates the Naomic ascendancy by centuries.

… the Keys of a City…

The stone startles upward, as if hauled on a ship’s cable by weary men. Knee height, a hesitant bob or two, and then rising again, a hound called off by its real master after some case of mistaken identity. Perhaps, he thinks with blurry imprecision, the words are not intended for him to read at all, and this conjunction of man and building block is just some mis-stroke of destiny or demonic intent, a sword skating off a shield it’s supposed to cleave, an axman’s sure-footed brace slipping on mud, and down he goes on his arse before the cut can land. A life spared where no mercy should be looking down, a city sacked where it should stand against the besieging horde—an error in the Book of Days, some shit like that.

In his mind, he builds a suitably dismissive shrug, but finds he’s shivering too much to give it physical form. His body is ceasing to feel like anything he owns or has much control over.

This time, it occurs to him, he might really be dying.

The chunk of masonry comes level with his head, and wobbles there a moment. Blind impulse—as realization catches up, he finds he’s grabbed it. Is now hugging the worn-smooth contours of the lettered stone. He travels upward through the black, with a force that tugs and aches in his shoulder joints. The stonework is chilly against his face, the carved characters print their patterns into his flesh, he feels his body and legs rise devoid of weight until he hangs horizontally out from the stone like a windblown pennant at the mast.

The black around him is graying out.

A bruise-colored sky billows into being overhead, spreads itself to the horizon like a briskly snapped-out blanket.

He falls out of it.

Catches the sudden reek of salt water on the way down, the scent of fresh-cut kitchen herbs out of childhood memory…

He hits a surface that gives soggily under his weight. Water presses up from the ground and soaks through his clothes. He blows some of it, bitter and black-tasting, out of his mouth. Turns his head a little so he can breathe. Understanding catches up with the sense impressions of before.

He lies full length in a marsh, cold and clinging to a solitary chunk of stone.

Oh well…

Something stalks over his head like the fingers of a hand. He knows at once what it is, flails out with instinctive revulsion and flings the soft body away from him. Insistent squirming under his own body now, somewhere below his ribs, floundering panic—fuck! fuck!—and then the hot scissoring of jaws through his shirt and into his flesh as he rolls too late. A gossamer nuzzling at his neck, more soft, exploratory fingers. He swipes the touch away, comes frantically up on his knees. Cobwebs everywhere, plastering his arms, thick on the marsh grass around him like yards and yards of rotted gray muslin, he’s in the burrow, he’s landed right on top of the fucking thing.

He staggers to his feet, casts about, panting.

Rips loose sword, scabbard, cloak. Flings them away.

Brushes himself down with brutal strokes. Marsh spiders are communal, fiercely territorial, grow to a foot across if you’re unlucky. A couple of bites from a big one is usually enough to finish a grown man. Ringil turns a taut full circle about, airheaded and struggling for balance as his feet shift and sink in the slippery springy turf and the ooze. The bite in his belly stings like scalding. He feels the slow, hot creep of the poison under the skin. He peers hard in the poor light, wishing he had a torch. Thinks he sees movement amid the coarse cobweb coatings and the marsh grass, but can’t be sure.

He gets his breath back with an effort.

At his feet, the spider that bit him lies half crushed by his weight and flexing feebly. It’s the size of a man’s head. He stares numbly at it for a couple of seconds, then stamps down with convulsive anger until it dies.

It’s all the energy he can summon. He stands swaying. The poison creeps some more in his belly, seems to be spreading. He rubs reflexively at the wound, then wishes he hadn’t. Searing acid bites under the skin.

The marsh stretches featureless to the horizon. Thickly cobwebbed marsh grass in every direction, and an icy winter wind, knifing at his ears.

Great. Just fucking great.

He picks his way carefully over to his fallen sword and cloak, picks each item up in cautious turn and looks it over. He shakes three more fist-sized spiders out of the cloak’s folds, finds another crawling on the scabbard and flicks it off. Stands a moment to make sure they all scuttle away. Then he fits the cloak across his shoulders—fighting the wind for possession—and fastens it there, hangs the Ravensfriend on his back once more, and stares defiantly around.

He reckons the cobwebs look somewhat thinner off to his left.

He starts walking.

Behind him, the abandoned chunk of masonry sits ringed in black water and offers its words to the empty sky.

… the Keys of a City greater than…

IT MIGHT BE THE POISON, MIGHT NOT. IN THE GRAY PLACES, WHO can tell?

He begins to hear a voice shouting down from the clouds, hoarse with anger but somehow soft as fine wool on his fingertips at the same time.

Just look at him down there…

Just look at him down there…

A female voice, or maybe something that knows how to imitate one, more or less. Faintly, eerily familiar. It comes and goes with the wind, seems to rush past him in sudden gusts, and then rush back. Ringil spins tiredly about, trying to face it.

… look at him…

The standing stones begin to flicker in and out of being around him, huge misshapen bars on some jail cell built for trolls, a circular prison that keeps pace with him as he walks. They chop the marsh horizon in segments for him, stand for a couple of soggy heartbeats, rising solidly out of the cobwebbed marsh grass, then vanish as he lurches toward them. After a while he learns to ignore the effect, much as you have to with so much else in the Gray Places.

He stumbles on, feeling steadily sicker with each pace.

… look at him…

Tilting vision of gray on gray, stone on emptiness, there and gone, there and gone…

Just look at—

He sags to a halt, feels the world go on a few steps without him as he stops. The voice goes abruptly silent, as if in interest at what he’ll do next. He breathes in a couple of times. The wind jostles cold and blustering at his back. It’s trying to shove him onward.

He lifts both arms. Calls out hoarsely.

Yeah, look at me. Risgillen, is it? Go on and look: Ringil Eskiath, brought low. Is this what you wanted? You can’t have wanted it any more than I did.

No response. If Risgillen is out there, she isn’t in the mood for a chat.

Can you blame her?

He can’t really.

The ghost of the stone circle, painted like sunset shadows onto the backs of his eyes. The fleeting memories of Seethlaw—snarling, wrestling passion, cool flesh under his hands, the taste of the dwenda’s come in his mouth like juice from some salt-sweet bursting berry on his tongue. The deep, clenching thrusts as he hauled and molded himself against Seethlaw’s ivory-hard buttocks. The noises the dwenda made with each stroke.

And then the collapsing to the dew-soaked grass, the shuddering release, the laughter on the edge of weeping. The letting go, and all that came after.

He remembers suddenly how the stones kept Dakovash out, how the Salt Lord prowled beyond them but would not step through. How he threw the Ravensfriend in to Ringil like a man feeding meat to a beast whose cage he dares not enter.

Try not to drop that again. You’re going to need it.

I am not your fucking cat’s-paw.

Out of nowhere, a laugh coughs its way up into his mouth.

There’s not much to it, certainly not much humor. But the smile it stamps onto Ringil’s lips is down-curved and ugly with sudden strength.

He looks back the way he’s come. The low-growing marsh vegetation is broken in a wavering line where he’s passed. It seems he’s walked out of the marsh spiders’ territory without noticing. The cobwebs are gone. The smell of salt seems stronger now.

He rubs at his wound again, and this time when the pain sears, he breathes it in like a perfume from fond memory.

He casts about and thinks he sees the bright spark of a fire on the gray horizon.

He stares toward it for a long moment, waiting for it to vanish, the way every other fucking thing does around here.

When it doesn’t, when it holds and beckons to him off the surface of the cold gray sky, he grunts and sets off in that direction. The cold wind at his back, hustling him on.

Well. What else you going to do now, Gil—stop?

From time to time, the stone circle flickers in and out around him as he walks. But it feels less like a prison now, and more like armor.

WHEN HIS GHOSTS START TO SHOW UP, HE’S ALMOST PLEASED TO SEE them. This, at least, is something he’s used to.

Yeah, it’s all right for you. Skimil Shend plods gloomily along beside him in cracked leather boots, poorly patched breeches and a white court blouse that has seen far better days. You’re not stuck in some stinking garret back in that miserable feces-reeking apology for a city. You’re not an exile.

Actually—Ringil pushes the pace as hard as the soggy ground and his shaky legs will let him—I am.

Oh, you call that exile? Chartered ambassador to the Majak plains, a sinecure purse and the writ of the city to cover your extravagances? That’s not an exile, that’s a license to plunder horny-handed horse-breeder arse. All those iron-thighed young things. Some punishment that’s going to be. I—Shend thumps his chest with bombastic self-pity—I suffered for my art.

Oh, shut up.

But he has to wonder, just briefly and for all he’s trained himself against such things, what shape his life must have taken in the world this alternative Shend belongs to. A Shend who never got to go home after all, and a Ringil who…

The aspect storm is a warp in the fabric of every possible outcome the universe will allow, Seethlaw once told him, camped out in the Gray Places with the aplomb of a Glades noble at a picnic. It gathers in the alternatives like a bride gathering in her gown. For a mortal, those alternatives are mostly paths they’ll never take, things they’ll never do.

He makes the aspect storm, he knows, every time he walks in the Gray Places. It blows around him in barely visible cobweb vortices, and the fragments of those alternatives swirl to him like storm waters pouring down into a drain.

You’d be living inside a million different possibilities at once. The—slightly drunken—opinion of a scholar in dwenda lore he knows back in Trelayne. Imagine the will it would take to survive that. Your average peasant human is just going to go screaming insane.

It certainly sounds like insanity: a Ringil not disowned, a Ringil cherished enough by family—yeah, or maybe just soft enough to bend to family will—that his transgressions meet with no worse sanction than an iffy diplomatic posting. He sees himself hurried urbanely out of that other Trelayne with face-saving rank, appointment, entourage. Sent in genteel disgrace a thousand miles northeast to the steppes, a place where his appetites can no longer bring the name of House Eskiath into disrepute because no one in Trelayne will know or care what he does there.

He wonders vaguely if he’d meet some alternative Egar out under those aching, open skies. An Egar who’s perhaps not quite so resolutely and exclusively dedicated to pussy.

There’s a feeling in his chest now, dangerously close to longing.

What if…

He stamps down on it.

You don’t do that shit, Gil. There are no alternatives. You live with what is.

And you don’t let your ghosts rent room in your head.

But he glances sideways at Shend anyway, can’t quite repress the impulse, and it’s not a pretty sight. The poet’s once-fine features have sagged and bloated with his years away, and his hair is stringy with lack of care. His nails are bitten down to the quick, his belly hangs like a money changer’s apron at his waist. That he woke up one morning in exile and just gave up is written into his flesh like branding.

Pouched eyes give Ringil back his stare. What you looking at? See something you like?

Look, Hinerion’s not that bad, Ringil says uncomfortably.

Really? Then why are you leaving?

I’m not… leaving. Some unlooked for puzzlement in his voice at this. I’m…

Sudden, crushing image of a black sail on the horizon.

… dying… ?

Shend sniffs. Looks like leaving to me. And in such exalted company.

Ringil staves off a shiver.

I just don’t see what the big thing is about life in Trelayne, he tells the poet. You were broke more than half the time back home, always borrowing money off Grace of Heaven or the Silk House boys, then scrabbling to find the payback. How’s that worse than pensioned exile in Hinerion?

Shend stares morosely off across the marshland.

I don’t expect you to understand. Why would you? You always did like to immerse yourself in the filth. I imagine you’re quite as comfortable rubbing hips with our dusky southern neighbors as you are with any other riffraff.

Well, yeah. I fucked you, didn’t I?

Oh! Oh! The Shend that Ringil remembers was more articulate. Not as shrill. So it’s come to that, has it? Well, I’m not the one with refugee blood running in my veins. I’m not the one with skin that tans in the sun like a marsh peasant’s. I mean, how dare you! You’re practically straight out of the fucking desert on your mother’s side.

Which, aside from shrill, is also inaccurate enough to be termed open slander and see steel drawn, at least in Ringil’s version of the world. The southern refugee connections lie a good several generations back—Yhelteth merchants, driven out in some religious schism or other as the fledgling Empire convulsed yet again over clerkish points of doctrine—and by the time Ringil’s mother was born, the lineage had been mingling pretty freely with the local blood for a while. In fact, rather too freely, some maintained, pointing to a number of unfortunate outlying branches on the family tree where marsh dweller ancestry was, let’s say, hard to deny.

But Shend isn’t likely to call that one out—like a lot of the petty nobility in Trelayne, the Shend clan itself has more than a few points of lineage with the whiff of the marsh about them. The trace physiognomy is there for all to see. Ringil chooses his riposte with cruel care.

You know, you shouldn’t knock southern blood, Skim. Maybe if your mother’d come from the south, she could have arranged for you to have some cheekbones.

And you should just—just fuck off and die!

… die, die, die!

The last word seems to echo, inside Ringil’s head or across the sky, he isn’t entirely sure which. He grimaces.

Perhaps I will.

Raw silence, pressing in his ears, and the soft squelch of his steps in the marsh. Ringil looks around and sees that the poet, perhaps in some terminal paroxysm of offense, is gone, faded out with the echo of his parting words.

That scrap of fire-glow at the skyline doesn’t seem to be getting any closer, either.

LATER, AS IF SHE’S SOMEHOW HEARD AND BEEN DRAWN BY SHEND’S slurs on her lineage, Ishil Eskiath puts in an appearance. Carefully skirting the fringes of another marsh spider infestation at the time, Ringil’s surprised by how hard this is to take. He can’t tell how far removed this woman is from the mother he knows back in the real world, but she seems genuinely happy, which to his mind suggests some considerable distance.

Lanatray, she insists brightly. You always loved it there.

I nearly drowned there, Mother.

He can’t help it, the snap in his voice. Out of the corner of his eye, he sees her pull a face, but she says nothing. Another switch—the Ishil Eskiath he knows would never let him have the last word, least of all when he’s just hurt her.

He sighs. Look, I’m sorry. But you don’t know me, Mother. You think you do, but you don’t.

Oh, Ringil, don’t you suppose that’s what every boy thinks about his mother?

She lays a hand on his. He flinches a little from the contact—there’s something cool and not quite human about it. The ghosts in the Gray Places seem to lack the normal warmth of living things, and he supposes they must draw off some of his heat to keep going as they circle him. Perhaps that’s what draws them, like moths to a lantern spark across the marshland gray. But—

I’ve known you longer than you’ve known yourself, she says.

He stares at the dull, thickly glistening swatches of cobweb across the marsh grass ahead of him. Tell me what I’m thinking, then.

Oh, the usual. Ishil’s tone turns abruptly gemstone-hard and glinting. He feels a chill gust through him—suddenly, she’s a perfect match for the mother he knows. You wonder how I manage to live with the daily truth of marriage to your father and not just open my veins some sunlit afternoon in my bathwater.

Well…

She laughs. Some of the hardness leaches back out of her voice. You’re such an old romantic, Gil. Just try to imagine for a moment you’d been born female. Breeding or brothel stock, these are your options. We just don’t get to carry a blade and carve out our own uncompromising path through the world like the boys.

He’s known women who did, across the old warehouse district and down at harbor end. Admittedly not many of them made it out of their teens alive. He supposed not many had ever expected to.

Women know the price of things, Gil. We learn it hard and fast at our mother’s knee, helping and caring and fetching and carrying, while our brothers are still playing at knights and foes without a care in the world. The world falls on us early.

You seem to be bearing up, he says sourly. What’s the secret?

Children, she tells him with sudden warmth. Bringing them into the world. Seeing them through it. You know that.

He can’t face the way she looks at him as she says it. He turns away, eyes pricked through, half blinded. He wonders, with an odd, quiet desperation, how many times the Ishil he knows might have looked at him like that without him ever seeing or knowing.

Is that why you’re here? To see me through?

She laughs again, voice utterly unfettered this time. I’m here to ask you about the wedding arrangements, Gil. The vow circlets for you and Selys, gold or silver? Red rose petals or white for her bridal path?

What? he asks faintly.

And the invitations, the list? Will you really insist on snubbing the Kaads, or shall we let bygones be bygones? Come on, Gil, don’t spoil your mother’s proudest hour. I’m so happy for you both. Is that so strange?

It’s so fucking strange he doesn’t even want to think about it. He gestures at the cobwebs to buy time. Listen, I’m not getting married to anyone unless we find a way through this first.

Why don’t you try over there?

To his annoyance, it proves a good call. There are patches where the webs are frayed and old, clogged with the sucked-dry corpses of insect life and small marsh animals. No sign of any stealthy, articulated motion within. He unsheathes the Ravensfriend just in case, prods about dubiously for a bit, then resigns himself to Ishil being right.

This way, then?

This way, she agrees. Keep right on like that, it’s your best path out of here. Now, what about the Kaads? Seriously. Your father thinks they should be there.

I bet he does. Smashing grimly through the old web and the grass, the tiny, dried hanging corpses that swing and spindle about as he passes. Chancellery politics never sleeps, does it?

Oh, don’t start, Gil.

So he doesn’t. He lets her talk instead. And though he doesn’t like to admit it, her voice, trailing at his shoulder, is oddly comforting.

What you don’t appreciate, Gil, is that for all your father’s cruelties and indiscretions, he has been a great shield through difficult times. You don’t know what it was like back in the twenties. We didn’t have the Scaled Folk to unite us all back then. Yhelteth was a despised enemy—

Yeah—heading that way again these days.

But she doesn’t seem to hear him. The raiding went back and forth at the borders for years, Gil, news every other week of towns burned and populations marched away in chains. And we were marked. No matter that we were merchants in good faith, wealth in our coffers and a generation of judicious marriage alliances. Still we had the red daub on our door, still we were barred from the Chancellery. Stones thrown at us in the street, spat upon with impunity by urchins. Southern scum, southern scum. In the school we attended, the priests beat my brothers at every opportunity. One of them struck Eldrin to the floor once, called him Yhelteth whelp, kicked him from his desk to the door and out into the corridor. He was five. He came home black and blue, and my father, shamed, could do nothing. My mother went begging to the priests instead, and the beatings stopped for a while, but she never spoke of that visit afterward as long as she lived. Do you know how relieved my parents looked the day I married Gingren Eskiath? Do you know how happy I was for them?

Were they happy for you?

No reply.

He looks back and sees that she, too, has left him.