The Cold Commands

CHAPTER 20

In the time before this, the Earth was not the way you see it now.

In the time before this, the Earth was ravaged by endless conflict, fought over by races and beings you now remember only as myth and legend.

Weapons of hideous, unnatural power were unleashed, vast energies raged, horizon to horizon, the sky itself cracked open. The planet shuddered from the tread of the Visitors—enemies and allies too, the latter chosen in desperation from other worlds and places worse than other worlds, to hold the line against invaders who were probably in the end no more alien.

Whole nations and peoples disappeared inside storms that lasted decades.

Great jagged darknesses larger than mountains moved in the night sky, blocking out the stars and casting deathly shadow on those beneath.

Gates opened, in places no earthly passage should ever have been permitted, and the Visitors poured forth, met in battle, coiled and recoiled, worked their alien technologies in causes it is doubtful those who enlisted them could ever truly comprehend. It was a conflict beyond human reckoning, and mere humans found themselves trapped, cornered, hemmed in on all sides by what had been unleashed.

So Humanity fought, hopelessly, generation after generation, endured unimaginable horrors, changed at levels once believed intrinsic, splintered apart and became a dozen disparate races in itself—as if only in dissolution could the race once called human hide sufficiently well from the carnivorous glare of alien eyes.

And then—finally, for reasons no longer well understood—the wars ended, the Earth spun on along its customary course in relative peace.

And those who were left squabbled over what remained.

“NO CHANGE THERE THEN,” JHIRAL MUTTERED, AND ARCHETH GLANCED at him in mute surprise.

A brief and pointed silence, and then Anasharal’s voice resumed, with biting schoolmasterly emphasis:

“Into, this, void…”

INTO THIS VOID, THEN, BURST THE DWENDA, THE ALDRAIN, THE WITCH folk, glittering dark and beautiful, human at least in base form, and claiming a prior heritage, an ownership of Earth predating the conflict—though there were those who argued their memories were faulty, hopelessly distorted by their custom of dwelling for long periods in the realm of the Unrealized Possible; and others who believed that Time itself had been somehow collapsed, folded, or maybe just shredded in the wars, so that the past the dwenda claimed did not even belong, correctly speaking, to this version of the world.

But such arguments were at best academic—the wars had weakened the walls that held such places apart from the unshadowed world, and the Aldrain were not disposed to debate with the existing populations in lands they considered their own by ancestral right.

They took the Earth by storm and built there, summarily, an Empire that lasted seven thousand years. Many, including the humans they dominated, called it glorious.

They brought magic as a way of life, they sprinkled it across the planet like seed.

They stalked the night as absolute monarchs—and created a harsh human oligarchy to serve them wherever and whenever the light of the Realized sun struck too harshly for them to endure. A dynasty of kings, endowed with dark powers, a bloodline of human sorcerers with whom they mated and shared their heritage—to the extent that such heritage could ever be shared with ordinary human stock.

Most of the Dark Kings were insane.

It took the enemies of the dwenda all of those seven thousand years to learn the new rules—to master the new magic, to bend it to their will as the dwenda so long ago already had.

Seven thousand years to bring the Kiriath through the hidden gates in the bowels of the Earth, to summon a science and a people equal to the eldritch folk, to meet them in battle, to throw down their cities into marsh and ruin, to scatter their armies and their human adherents. To bring back a measure of sanity to the world.

To defeat the Last of the Dark Kings.

THE HELMSMAN FELL SILENT.

“I thought—” Archeth began, then shook her head. “Doesn’t matter.”

But the pinched wick of suspicion still smoked in her head. There were a lot of stories about how and why her people had arrived in the world, most of them told by humans ignorant of anything resembling actual facts. Come to that, even the legends the Kiriath themselves told about the Advent were erratic and hard to credit. But Angfal, who hung on her study wall like so much alien iron viscera and bulbous-limbed swelling, had always been scornful.

The Kiriath barely survived the voyage through the quick paths on their way here, he told her one fractious night as she tried to crowbar some useful answers out of him. They did not choose to come here, Archeth, despite anything the Chronicles might claim to the contrary. They were shipwrecked here, and if they stayed it wasn’t because they liked the scenery. It was because they were afraid that the return would break them.

Some of this she put down to bitterness—the resentment Angfal felt at being left behind. But still, she thought Anasharal’s version rang slightly overwrought.

The Emperor had taken a seat on one of the granite benches near the balcony, back to the glare of the sun. His face was in shadow, richly oiled hair hanging forward to screen his features, but she read the impatience in how he was sprawled, the sideways tilt of his head. She wondered if she’d gotten in the way of a visit to the harem—if commanding the executions had left him with the itching need to fuck something.

He brushed invisible dust from his lap.

“You, uh, plan to actually tell us something about this Last Dark King? His name, for instance? Who he was, what he did? How any of this has anything to do with the here-and-now?”

“It is better not to name him,” said the Helmsman somberly. “Better not to utter those syllables here.”

Archeth rolled her eyes.

“Yes—we’re not easily shocked around here,” said Jhiral. “Feel free.”

“Let us call him simply the Ilwrack Changeling, since it was that Aldrain clan who raised him in the Gray Places. Taken from a humble home on the marsh for the dark glimmer the dwenda prize so much in humans, brought up an Aldrain warrior, and ultimately given command of a dwenda legion, he rose to—”

“You know—” Jhiral was showing signs of real irritation now. “I’ve heard this humble-beginnings crap a few times before, Helmsman. Funny how no one can ever actually point to a living example, isn’t it? Funny how in the end they’re all legendary and dead.”

Anasharal paused, delicately. “Oh, the Ilwrack Changeling is not dead, Your Imperial Radiance. Far from it.”

Silence. Maybe it was the slow afternoon cooldown and the breeze blowing in from the river, but Archeth felt a tiny shiver creep across her shoulder blades. She glanced at Jhiral, who sighed heavily and examined his manicure. She read the little display as false. Emperor or not, Jhiral had grown up on this kind of tale like any other kid. His voice, when he spoke, could not quite shroud a tiny, chained tension.

“And… what is that supposed to mean, exactly?”

“Exactly what it says,” the Helmsman said blandly. “When the Kiriath destroyed Hannais M’hen in the last stages of the Twilight war, the Ilwrack Changeling was at the head of the Aldrain forces and their human allies. But he was betrayed—some say by a lover, others claim it was a diplomatic deceit of the Kiriath. Perhaps, in the end, it was both. At any rate, when he discovered the betrayal, it’s said he fell into a paroxysm of rage and grief, and was taken for dead. The dwenda forces fell back without his body, and vanished into the Gray Places.”

“But he wasn’t dead.” Jhiral said, leaning forward a little despite himself.

“No. The dwenda were in disarray, they apparently misunderstood the situation. But a small group of his human supporters carried the body away and entombed him on an islet in the northern ocean.”

“The Hironish isles?”

“Farther west and north than the Hironish. But in any case, the island does not appear on your maps.”

Jhiral grunted. “Convenient.”

“The story goes that the Changeling’s Aldrain lover came later, in secret, to the tomb, but could not wake him. So he—”

“He?” The Emperor’s lip curled. “He?”

“Or she,” Anasharal amended. “The story is not clear on exact identity, only that it was a member of the Ilwrack clan. In any case, this lover cast an enchantment around the whole island, sweeping it up into the margin of the Aldrain marches. But the magic was hurried and incomplete, and it’s said the island emerges from time to time and stands solid again in the ocean, though lit with witch-light and sometimes for only moments at a time.”

“I’ve read about this,” Archeth said slowly. “The Ghost Isle, the Chain’s Last Link.”

Jhiral looked at her. “You have?”

“Yes, it’s a legend of the Hironish peoples, but there are some versions in Trelayne as well. Mariner tales—an uncharted island beyond the last in the Hironish Chain; ships sight it in the midst of storms, witch-lit in blue, there one moment, gone the next.” She gestured helplessly. “It’s a legend, you know. I always assumed…”

“Quite.” The Emperor turned his gaze back to the Helmsman. “Are you trying to tell me we should be expecting a visit from this undead Changeling?”

“You’ve had some trouble with the Aldrain recently, have you not?”

Archeth and the Emperor swapped a look. The dwenda incursion at Ennishmin was a closely guarded secret. Outside of those who’d actually been there, only Jhiral and a tiny cabal of trusted court advisers and men-at-arms had been informed of the events. Two full legions of imperial levy now sat on the borders of the marshland between Pranderghast and Beksanara, ostensibly as a bar to raiding parties from the League territories to the north and west. The commander of the garrison at Khartaghnal had been apprised of what they were really watching for, but beyond that…

Of course, the creep of rumor was unavoidable. Faileh Rakan might have died in the skirmish at Beksanara, but a number of his men did not. The local population was decimated, but not wiped out. And among the survivors, some, even paid off and sworn to secrecy, even threatened with dire penalties—even Throne Eternal veterans—would drink and yarn and recall, and let loose dark hints and drunken fragments of truth.

“The dwenda were driven back,” Archeth said carefully.

“Indeed. But, you see, the legend says that the Ilwrack Changeling will return when his adoptive people’s need is greatest; more exactly, when they have been thrown back in battle from their heart’s ancestral desire, and are once more in disarray. That’s a more or less direct quote from the original Naom legend. See the corollary?”

Jhiral nodded. “Yes. What you think we should do about it is a little less clear, though. A preemptive assault on this sporadically manifesting island, perhaps?”

“That’s clearly not possible.” The Helmsman’s tone was almost prim. “I am charged with offering pragmatic solutions to your difficulties.”

“Not so far.” Archeth found some of her Emperor’s impatience seeping into her own mood. “If the Ghost Isle is inaccessible then—”

“You did not let me finish the tale, daughter of Flaradnam.”

“Well, she’s not stopping you now. Can we get on with this?”

“The Kiriath,” said Anasharal smoothly, “had no way to counter the sorceries of the Ilwrack clan, or at least none that they could bring themselves to deploy. Instead, they built for safety. A city was constructed, standing above the waves south and east of the Ghost Isle. A watch was set.”

“A city in the sea?”

There was a sudden, odd strain in Archeth’s voice. Jhiral glanced at her in mild surprise.

“That is correct, daughter of Flaradnam. Commissioned and built by the clan Halkanirinakral, manned, initially at least, by its scions. The city was named An-Kirilnar—that’s City of Phantom Hunters to you, your majesty—it was designed to shadow the Ghost Isle in and out of the Gray Places. But recently it seems to have returned to the world permanently—”

“It’s still there?”

“Yes, it’s still there, daughter of Flaradnam. Currently it stands in the ocean beyond the Hironish isles, as it has now stood for some weeks.”

“Then we have to go there!”

“Archeth—”

“Yes, I would say that’s an appropriate conclusion to draw.”

“Archeth—”

“Can you… communicate with—”

“Archeth!” The Emperor’s voice cracked like a whip. He got up from the bench and moved toward the balcony. His tone softened to a honeyed irony. “Would you be so good as to attend me within?”

“My lord.” She hurried after him. “My lord, this is an opportunity to—”

“This is an opportunity to calm the fuck down, my lady kir-Archeth.” Jhiral leaned in closer to her. In her tumbled state, she could not read it—menace or a plea for intimate confidence, the Emperor or the boy she’d watched grow up. The words came spaced. “Now walk with me if you will.”

SO SHE WENT WITH HIM.

Out of earshot—though she wasn’t convinced that was meaningful where the Helmsmen were concerned. Angfal never spoke to her outside of the study where he was hung across the walls like a nightmare in iron; Manathan would speak to you anywhere within the An-Monal keep. She didn’t know if ripping Angfal out of the fireship he had once commanded had in some way truncated a broader sense of awareness, or if the Helmsman was hiding its true reach. But she was tolerably sure that Anasharal, a being who could pluck personal details from the heads of the men it spoke to apparently at random, would not have a problem listening to a conversation maintained a few hundred paces away in the shade of the inner garden.

“If there really is a Kiriath city up there, my lord—”

“A city standing in the ocean?”

“An-Naranash in Lake Shaktan stands above the water in exactly the same way.”

“Yes, so they tell me. And is abandoned.”

Their voices were growing heated again. Archeth backed off, seated herself on a tall, arching tree root just off the path. Her pulse was up, her vision dizzied dim. Her thoughts skittered back and forth on the shiny jagged edges of krinzanz lack.

She forced calm.

“My lord, whether the city is abandoned or not is hardly the issue.”

“Is it not, Archeth? Is it not?”

He had her—however hard she tried to crush the knowledge out. “My concern, my lord—”

“Is that you may yet find some of your father’s race who have not abandoned the world.” Jhiral sighed and sat down beside her on the root. His shoulder jolted her. He stared across the path into the foliage opposite. “I don’t blame you, Archeth. Really, I don’t. Who wouldn’t like to call back their parents sometimes? But your need is transparent. Be honest. With me, even if you cannot with yourself. You are supposed to be my most trusted adviser. Can you—honestly—tell me this is about a threat to the Empire?”

She grimaced.

“I carried a warning to you last winter that we came close to ignoring, and look how that turned out.”

“Yes, rub my face in that, why don’t you.”

“The facts remain, my lord.”

“All right, don’t milk it.” Jhiral leaned back and peered upward into the canopy of the tree, as if he might discern a way out among the branches. He frowned. “You said after Ennishmin that the dwenda do not favor harsh light, that they can probably not abide the sun in these latitudes.”

“That’s not what I said, my lord. It’s what the knight Ringil Eskiath said he surmised from his time among them. It’s a supposition, nothing more.”

The young Emperor nodded vigorously. “Yes, but still. Even in Ennishmin, where the sun barely breaks through the clouds, even in the pall of winter, the dwenda chose to fight at night.”

“They could fight at night here, too.”

“That was not what this… Eskiath surmised, though, was it?”

Most of the time I was in the Aldrain marches, it was dark or dim, like twilight. Ringil’s hesitant theorizing rose in her memory. One place we went, there was something like a sun in the sky, but it was almost burned out. Like a hollow shell of itself. If that’s where the dwenda are from originally, it might explain why they can’t tolerate bright light.

“They still came to Khangset,” she said stubbornly. “They ripped the town apart. And if the Helmsman is to be believed, the Ilwrack Changeling is not dwenda at all. He’s an undead human sorcerer, wielding Aldrain powers. How, unaided, would you stop something like that?”

“You believe in this Ilwrack Changeling, then? Tell the truth, Archeth. Have you even heard of him?”

“No, my lord.”

“Then—”

“But the timing is suggestive. Less than a year after our skirmish with the dwenda, and here we are, warned of an escalation in the conflict. Can we afford to ignore this as some kind of coincidence?”

“I’ll tell you what we can’t afford to do, Archeth. We can’t afford to equip a full naval expedition to the middle of the northern ocean in the hope that it’ll stumble on some figment of a mad machine’s imagination. Quite apart from anything else, that’s the other side of League waters. We sail there in force, it’s a major diplomatic incident in the making.”

“We are not at war with the League, my lord.”

“No,” said the Emperor glumly. “Not yet. But piracy is on the increase north of Hinerion. And I have it on good authority from the admiralty’s spies in Trelayne that the League shipmasters’ association is pressing for a renewal of privateer licensing. You know what that means. It always kicks off the same way.”

Except when we kick it off ourselves by marching north in force.

She quelled the thought. She had no great love for the League, had always believed, as her father’s people had—perhaps because her father’s people had—that Yhelteth offered the better way forward.

But:

“Admiral Sang’s… spies… are less than wholly reliable.” She trod warily. “They’ve been known to exaggerate claims before.”

“As has the old bastard himself. Yes, all right, Archeth, I know you don’t like him.” Abruptly, Jhiral was on his feet again, pacing. “But I’ve read the reports, and I don’t think this is Sang beating the drum. We’ve seen this before, after all. Those mercantile little shits up north can’t afford a war right now any more than we can, and they know it. But it won’t stop them farming the unpleasantries out to private shipmasters and then taking a tithe on the booty it brings in. Their coffers fill up with plunder from imperial cargo, their diplomats shake their weasel heads in sorrow and deny all knowledge. And meantime, as if we didn’t have enough to worry about down in Demlarashan and up at Ennishmin, we have to raid the treasury again to build navy pickets, or risk losing our own trade lanes to League competition.”

“Maybe Admiral Sang is just looking for some new warships.”

“I already told you I don’t think it’s that.” Trace of a growl in his voice now.

“Besides which there must be a whole constellation of League trade interests on land who don’t want any kind of war. The slavers to name but one. The League aren’t necessarily bound to listen to what the shipmasters want. They—”

“Archeth, will you stop building castles in the air!”

“I”—before she could stop herself—“trust Sang about as far as I could throw his fat arse. He’s not reliable.”

“Oh, and the fucking Helmsmen are?”

Suddenly he was in her face. Hands clamping down on her shoulders, thumbs hooking in, cabled strength in the arms. She was forcibly reminded that if Prince Jhiral, heir apparent, had never seen anything of the war against the Scaled Folk or his father’s earlier campaigns, had in fact never struck a sword blow in anger his whole life—well, neither then had he missed a day’s combat schooling for anything other than sickness since he was twelve years old. There was a lot of muscle under the ocher-and-black draped shoulders, a lot of trained and channeled power.

But even with the krinzanz jitters, she could have put Bandgleam in his throat faster than he could blink.

Could have…

She met his eyes.

Perhaps he sensed it. He let her go. Straightened up.

“Archeth, you were at An-Naranash. You saw how it went down.” His voice was back to regal, council-chamber calm. He gestured, throwaway, with one open palm. “All that Helmsman burbling, months to cross the desert, all the diplomatic wrangling with the nautocrats in Shaktur, the lake tolls and bribes, and what do we end up with? A mausoleum on stilts, centuries deserted, stripped of anything even remotely valuable.”

She remembered. The slow-dying excitement in her guts as they swung in closer to An-Naranash’s silent, towering bulk, and she saw the extent of the dilapidation. The clenched, sickening disappointment as she boarded at one massive, barnacle-crusted leg, climbed the endless damp-reeking stairwells, and prowled the echoing gloom of spaces as abandoned as anything she knew at An-Monal.

“It cost us half a million elementals to mount that expedition, Archeth. All because the Helmsmen said go. It’s one of the biggest mistakes my father ever made. Do you really expect me to follow in his footsteps? Is that what you want?”

For that, she had no answer.

Because you forced the Shaktur expedition, Archidi, and you know it. It wasn’t the Helmsmen, not really. You squeezed it out of Akal in his dying melancholy and regret, funds and men he could ill afford in the postwar mess, a paid penance, an old man’s attempt to atone—the unspoken bargain that she would no longer torment him with the tales of what she saw at Vanbyr, if he underwrote the expedition and gave her the command. That she would, in some unclear fashion, absolve him.

Strange how you could become a man’s god without noticing.

Akal died before she returned. It was probably just as well—she’d been in no fucking mood for absolution when she got back.

“Archeth, look.” Akal’s son, conciliatory now, leaning back toward the dissolute aristo loucheness he wore so well. “I’m not saying we don’t take this seriously. Go do some reading, by all means. I know how much you love that clerkish shit. Chase up this changeling fairy tale in the Indirath M’nal. Talk to Angfal, if you can drag anything out of him. But for the Prophet’s sake, cool off. Go get drunk, chew some krin—fuck it, get yourself laid, Archeth. Go play with that curvy little Trelayne trollop I gave you last year. Bet you still haven’t touched that, have you?”

In a way, she was almost relieved. It was a side of Jhiral she found far easier to deal with, a role he’d been playing since his early teens, a thrust to which she knew all the smart parries and ripostes because she’d been making them for a decade or more. A decadence you could comfortably despise.

But she wondered, not for the first time, what he armored himself against with it.

Maybe it’s not armor—maybe he just fucking likes it. Revels in it. Ever think of that?

Ishgrim sprang into her head, pale portions of flesh that begged for hands to cup and grasp. Long, smooth limbs to revel among. Bet you still haven’t touched that, have you? The smart bet, my lord. Whatever mannered game Jhiral was playing with her over Ishgrim, he was winning it hands down.

She pushed herself upright off the arched root. Drew a long breath.

“I shall do some reading, my lord,” she said.

“Good. Then we can leave it there, I think. The Helmsman should—”

“If,” Anasharal said, out of the empty green-fragrant air, like any divine visitation. “I might interject.”

Emperor of All Lands and Kiriath half-breed semi-immortal—their gazes snapped together like those of small children called in for dinner by an unfamiliar voice. Even Archeth, elder sister and halfway expecting this…

She built a shrug, elaborately casual.

“You’ve been listening to us?”

“You truly have a talent for stating the obvious, daughter of Flaradnam. Manathan did mention it. He puts it down to your muddied half-breed blood. But oddly enough, you have still not spotted the very obvious solution to the impasse you face.”

“There’s no impasse here,” said Jhiral, mustering some regal disdain.

“I was not talking to you, Jhiral Khimran.”

It was an affront that would have earned any human speaker a swift and probably fatal trip to the palace dungeons. The Helmsmen—well, over the centuries the Khimran dynasty had learned to adjust. You didn’t bite the hand that fed your power, for all it might be taloned and demonic beneath that urbane, avuncular surface.

“Perhaps you’d better explain,” Archeth said hastily. “What impasse?”

“The impasse you will face, daughter of Flaradnam, when you’ve done your reading, and you’ve satisfied yourself that an expedition to find An-Kirilnar is indeed necessary, and you still face the same strictures from this stuttering apology for an Empire’s depleted treasury.”

“Yeah, maybe you can just point us to a handy pot of gold,” sneered Jhiral.

Again, the beat of silence Archeth was learning to interpret as reproach. The icy schoolmaster tone.

“In point of fact, Jhiral Khimran, that is exactly what I am going to do. So once again, it would behoove you to quell your sense of throne room entitlement and listen carefully to what I’m about to say.”