The Cold Commands

CHAPTER 21

Some unmeasured time later, still alone, but roughly on the bearing the ghost claiming to be his mother gave him, he stumbles across a paved track through the marsh.

It’s not much to look at—scuffed and worn white stone, muddied black in the grain, a couple of feet wide at best, almost covered over by the marsh grass growing back in from margins long untrimmed and up between the cobbles. He shoves back a tuft with one boot, examines the paving curiously. It looks a lot like the paths through the Glades district in Trelayne, the paths leading among other places to the gates of his home—or at least the way they’ll probably look a thousand years hence.

Without Ishil’s guidance, it would have been easy to miss this.

He looks left and right, shrugs, and picks the direction that seems to lead closer to the scribble of firelight on the sky ahead. Almost unnoticed, some tiny increment of satisfaction thaws and drips inside him. The going is easier now, no more soggy give with each step. The stone sounds firm under his heels, pushes back solidly as he walks, and though the cobwebs sweep in sometimes on either side, they never touch or cross the track.

Instead, eventually, he finds skulls.

Scores of them, maybe hundreds, dotted grinning out across the marsh on either side of the path. Each skull sits perfectly upright, atop a low tree stump whose wood has gone gray and cracked with age. A hundred and more leveled pairs of eye sockets, rinsed through with the cold wind, surveying the marsh horizon. But for that perfect sentinel rigor in every hollow gaze, these might be inventive cairns, built to the dead of some battlefield long forgotten, the fallen warriors of some race that preferred not to pile cold stones on the face of their loved ones in death.

But they are not cairns.

Ringil slows reluctantly to a halt where one of the skulls sits a couple of paces off to the left of the path. It still has hair, a fall of long dead gray strands plastered across the skull and over one eye, like magically straightened cobweb. He squats and brushes the hair aside, touches the bone behind, pushes gently against one yellowed temple. There is no give. The skull is cemented to the stump, just as its owner’s still-living head once was. He’s seen it before; it’s Aldrain sorcery, a favorite terror tactic of the Vanishing Folk wherever humans tried to defy them. Seethlaw once told him that the heads would live indefinitely provided the stump roots drew water.

Which makes this the result of either some long-ago drought or a passage of time so colossal Ringil’s sanity reels away from the edge of contemplating it.

Or Seethlaw lied to you.

He straightens up with a grimace. It’s a hypothesis he prefers not to entertain. Seethlaw as Aldrain warlord, murderous, cruel and proud, walking amid flickering lightnings, the epitome of the dwenda out of myth, striking down all before him with dispassionate unconcern—that, all that, Ringil can live with. But Seethlaw the dwenda, dishonest and manipulative as any sweet-lipped harbor-end whore…

Well, then. An immense gulf of time instead, time for even the sorcery of the Aldrain to finally weaken and lose its grip on the forces of decay.

Here, perhaps, is rationale, and an escape at last. A letting go he can allow himself.

Perhaps he’s been unable to find Seethlaw in the Gray Places because some vast… tilting… mechanism, something like the long orbits of comets that Grashgal once tried to explain to him on the sleepless eve of battle at Rajal, or wait, wait, simpler, look, some… gargantuan windmill arm in time has swung back up and taken the Vanishing Folk away once more; has opened a gap many hundreds of thousands of years wide and left the Aldrain and all their arts, in some irrevocable fashion, on the far side.

What would you give to really believe that, Gil?

What would you give to deny it?

Oi, Eskiath. You going to stand around here moping forever?

Ringil jerks around, disbelieving. The stone circle flickers around him like granite lightning, like drilled reflex—once, twice, to the beat of his suddenly elevated pulse.

Eg?

It certainly seems so. The familiar barrel-chested bulk is there, the bits of talismanic iron strung in the gray-straggled, tangled hair. The seamed and weathered face, split in a grin. The staff lance jutting up behind his shoulder like a tall and gaunt old friend peering over. From somewhere, this Egar has acquired one steel-capped tooth and a scar across the chin that Ringil doesn’t remember him having, but for the rest, it’s the Dragonbane, large as life and stood there on the path at Ringil’s back, as seemingly solid as the stones that flicker in and out of being between the two of them.

Egar?

The figure snorts. You know someone else shows up whenever you’ve got yourself neck-deep in shit and digs you out?

Weak gesture around. I’m not…

No? Egar steps forward and grabs him by the shoulders. Fingers dig into his muscles with bruising steppe nomad force. Well, you sure look like shit, Gil. Want to know the truth? You look like a pony on ten days’ gallop and no decent forage. Whoever’s riding you needs to give it a rest.

Fast thoughts of Dakovash, as swiftly put away. Gone, honest—look.

No one’s fucking riding me, he drawls.

That’d be a first, then. The Dragonbane draws him close, crushes him in a bear hug the Egar he knows back in the world would not have allowed himself. Ringil coughs for exaggerated effect, and Egar lets him go. Sets him back at a more accustomed arm’s length and grins. Good to see you again, Gil.

Yeah, you, too. As with Shend, as with Ishil, he knows he shouldn’t engage but he can’t help it. He’s tired of the detachment, tired of standing aloof. So what if his friends are phantoms now. What you doing here, man?

The Dragonbane shrugs. Just come to walk with you awhile.

It’s throwaway, but for just a moment, Ringil sees the seamed brow crease, sees this version of his old friend searching for the memories the Gray Places will not let him have. How did I get here, where is this place, what came before? Ringil curses his own lack of restraint and seeks rapid distraction for them both. He notices a thin silver chain draped over the Dragonbane’s chest, some flattened object swaying gently from the impact of their embrace.

What’s this, then? Reaching and scooping the object up into his palm. Never had you down for a medallion man.

Well, you gave it to me, mate.

Ringil blinks. The flattened disk is a three-elemental piece, struck with the face of Akal the Great and worn dull with age. The ends of the chain are welded into it, and the coin itself looks to have melted badly in the process. During his time in Yhelteth, coins like this would have passed through his hands as often as water for washing. But he can’t remember ever having given one to Egar.

C’mon, Gil. You know better than this. Doesn’t pay to focus on detail in the Gray Places. Doesn’t pay to question your companions too closely. To wonder what they might really be.

Or where it’s all leading you.

He drops his hand, lets the coin swing back against the Dragonbane’s chest. It’s as if the other man’s bulk were suddenly darker and harder, more gnarled oak tree trunk than human flesh. More animate statue than man.

He staves off a shiver. Manufactures a small, tight smile. Claps the perhaps of Egar on one troll-solid shoulder.

Want to walk with me, huh? Walk this way, then.

Yeah, if I could walk that way, I’d be making a living in Madam Ajana’s floor show.

The old, stupid jokes—always the best. But hearing it drove a spike in behind Ringil’s eyes, and he turned quickly away, blinking and gesturing wide.

Seen the skulls?

Yeah. Fucking dwenda, huh?

Seethlaw flickers through his recollection, cool to the touch and gorgeous, eyes deep with knowing you could drown in.

Yeah, he agrees. Fucking dwenda.

OF COURSE, HE LOSES EGAR, JUST LIKE ALL THE OTHERS, BEFORE THEY’VE gone more than a couple of miles. It’s a slower bleed this time, the Dragonbane fading and flickering like a candle in a bad draft, as if there’s some larger storm blowing outside this tented gray sky, and short spiteful gusts can occasionally get in. It lasts for a while, the steppe nomad gone, then abruptly back, as if he’s suddenly thought of some last thing he needs to say, as if he can’t quite make up his mind whether it’s safe now to leave Ringil on his own in this place.

Here—you still got that dragon-tooth dagger I gave you?

Ringil pats his sleeve where the weapon rests.

You want to hang on to that, it’s a good knife.

I know.

Ringil rolls with it, because, well, it’s the Gray Places, what else is he going to do? He keeps up a façade of studied calm and normal conversation, pausing when he’s left suddenly alone, picking up the thread again when Egar reappears.

Poltar the Shaman, yeah, you said.

The old fuck has it coming, Gil. I mean, if I don’t go back there and gut him for what he did, who will?

Maybe they’ll get sick of him. When he can’t deliver on the spring rains, or the steppe ghouls show up again despite all his stick-shaking.

Nobody shakes sticks up there, Gil. That’s a bunch of lizardshit romance some asshole writer at court came up with for one of those Noble-Savages-of-the-Steppe pieces they pack the theaters with down there. Seriously, I am so tired of seeing a bunch of little inkspurts who never built a campfire in their life pontificate about the trials and tribulations of iron-thewed warriors and—

And gone.

Bleak marsh to the horizon and the wind for company.

He walks on.

And back again. The Dragonbane mid-stride, brow furrowed in the struggle to recall.

So what was I saying?

Shaking sticks. Look, I’ve seen—in Ishlin-ichan that time—I saw a shaman shaking a stick over a sick child. About yea long, with bone rattles at the end.

Yeah, that’s fucking Ishlin-ichan. They do it for effect there, for coins from imperial tourists they think it’ll impress. It’s no different than Strov market in Trelayne. You can’t take that shit seriously. Voice growing suddenly faint, as if a door somewhere has closed between them. Take it from me, no self-respecting Skaranak shaman worth a…

And gone again.

Until finally the gaps between, grown increasingly long and lonely, become an unbroken absence and Ringil stops on the path, as if to acknowledge the Dragonbane’s passing. He squats again, sighs, and stares at the dirt-ingrained stones underfoot.

It’s a while before he feels like going on.

But as he straightens up, his gaze catches on something. He narrows his eyes and sees, not too distant, a canted set of angles silhouetted black against the sky. The last remaining corner frame of some wooden dwelling, perhaps, long ago eaten down by fire, gnawed and blackened bones now standing forlorn on the marsh.

He shrugs. It’s a target like any other. Something to walk toward.

It’s not more than a few hundred paces. But as he draws closer, he sees his error. It’s not a dwelling, destroyed or otherwise.

It’s a signpost.

A signpost made from some hammered dark alloy he doesn’t recognize, four fingers forked away from one another at right angles. The whole assembly is canted slightly downward out of true and stands behind a small mound in the tufted marsh grass terrain. The inscription on the pointers is illegible, scoured down by salt-sea winds and time, but he thinks the lettering looks like old Myrlic.

There’s a gauzy wrap of cobwebs spun down from the top and outward like some diaphanous triangle of sail run up the signpost’s mast. Marsh spiders hang in the gray midst of it, fist-sized and smaller, motionless, tending the strands with long poised forelegs. Ringil feels a sympathetic stab in his belly where the wound is…

It won’t kill you, hero.

Clicking, crow-rasp, indrawn breath of a voice.

Another stab in the belly as he realizes that what he’s taken for a mound is in fact something sat at the base of the signpost, something cowled and swathed in dark rags and so hunched and bent over that he can’t believe it just spoke.

Then it lifts its head and looks at him.

Later, he will be unable to remember exactly what it looked like under the cowl. He’ll recall only the way he steels up and looks back into the—what color were they? what shape? how many of them?—unblinking eyes.

Who told you I’m a hero?

The thing in the rags grunts. Nothing but heroes in this dump. The whole place stinks of them. Like fish heads on a midden heap.

That doesn’t make me one of them.

Does it not? Some rattling sound that might be a chuckle, might equally be a sigh. The rags move, as if at the rearranging of lengthy, arthritic limbs beneath. Let’s see, shall we. Face scarred in betrayal, broadsword gifted by a race now gone from the world, a trail of corpses and dark eddies behind you like bread crumbs off a baker’s wagon. Who do you think you’re kidding, sunshine?

Very good. Aristo disdain cloaking his unease at the sensation that there are far more than two arms working beneath the restless shift of those rags. Am I supposed to be impressed? I’ve seen better readings than that from the crones at Strov market. Will you scry a hero’s future for me now as well?

As you wish.

And out of the rags, suddenly, there’s a big leather-bound tome cracked open, and clawed, bony fingers—or maybe just claws?—turning the vellum sheets within. The cowl dips, the gaze pores over pages, the taloned fingers leaf.

Here you are. The voice grows mockingly sonorous. Ringil of the cursed blade Ravensfriend, exiled and troubled scion of the northern house Eskiath, reached out and made the clasp with the Rightful Emperor of All Lands. There was blood on the exile’s face and in his hair, the marks of battle all over his body, but his grip was still strong and the Emperor grinned to feel that strength. My royal brother, he laughed. Well met. Well—

Ringil must have snorted. The beady gaze flickers up at him. No?

Doesn’t sound very likely.

Very well. The parched scratch of a page turning. Try this, then. Ringil Angel Eyes rode in sunlit triumph under the high arch of the eastern gate, where he had caused the punishment cages to be cast down and broken apart. At his back marched a double file of the Vanishing Folk, wondrous to behold, and the people of Trelayne fell to their knees in—

The Vanishing Folk? In sunlight?

The cowled head cocked. You’re right. That’s a transcription error. Ringil Angel Eyes rode in bandlit triumph under—

That’s enough. Voice harsh now, because a sudden unlooked-for ache has crept up into his throat.

It is a happy ending.

I don’t fucking care. The Vanishing Folk wouldn’t follow me anywhere except to slit my throat. I betrayed them, I betrayed—

He shuts his mouth with a snap.

Silence.

The cold sift of the wind, stirring his hair. He finds, abruptly, that it hurts him to swallow. The creature at the base of the signpost makes a throat-clearing sound. Turns the page.

All right. Ringil Angel Eyes, the farmboy who had now risen to become both master mage and king—

Farmboy? Fucking farmboy?

Ringil finds his anger and the hilt of the dragon-tooth dagger simultaneously. Or maybe it’s not rage, maybe it’s just a vast impatience, finally, with this place and all it implies. He drops into a crouch before the ragged figure, jabs the yellowed blade in under what might—or might not—be a chin.

Suppose you turn the page and just tell me the fastest way I can get out of here.

The mound of rags shifts, writhes, and here come the arms, oh yes, another six of them besides the two that hold the book, taloned at the ends, flexing up and out like some obscene unfolding puppetry, he feels two of them settle on his back just below the shoulder blades, pressing in and up like hooks. Another two, tickling in under the ribs at the meat of his waist. One of the remaining spares pats him companionably on the shoulder. The other creeps around under his chin and lifts it slightly on one cold, hooked talon.

I should hate to tear you asunder, the voice says sibilantly. You show a lot of promise.

The stone circle flickers into existence, but it will not serve—the creature he’s crouched eye-to-eye with is already well inside that space. Ringil can smell it now, a mingling of odors like damp stone and parchment and thick, fresh ink. An odor that might belong to the book as much as the taloned thing that holds it.

Ringil purses his lips, mouth dry. He considers the dragon-tooth blade for a moment.

Lowers it.

The hooks at his shoulder blades ease their touch; the ticklish pressure at his waist withdraws. Limbs folding down, and away. But the talon at his chin remains.

Ringil Eskiath, the voice resumes. Came down the gangplank of the Famous Victory None Foresaw and joined the bright, brawling chaos on the wharf. Sunlight shattered across the water, slammed glints into his narrowed eyes. The Black Folk Span held the sky to the south like a massive slice of shadow dropped across the estuary. It was better than a mile upriver from where he’d disembarked, but you could sense the cool of its shade from here, beckoning you on.

Does that suffice?

Ringil nods gingerly. His voice comes hoarse and dry. Sounds good, yeah.

The talon comes out from under his jaw, trails lightly up his cheek, and then lifts away. Ringil tries to rise from his crouch, but another swift tap on his shoulder stops him. He waits again. The creature makes another throat-clearing sound, though from what Ringil has now seen, he’s not convinced it has a throat to clear.

Well, the merroigai speak highly of you. And I should not like you, at this crossroads, to think ill of me. It is that way.

One bone-pale arm scissors out across his vision, gestures to the right.

What is?

What you seek, hero. Brief comfort, and a way out.

HE’S FORGOTTEN THE FIRELIGHT FLICKER ON THE SKY.

Now, as if freshly unveiled, it shows up as a solid glow along the path to his right. He’d swear it was not that close before. Or maybe the sky, for cycles and reasons of weather he cannot begin to fathom, is actually darkening now toward some kind of night.

He walks an increasingly defined road, paving broad enough for a farmer’s cart, and he can see the ancient runnels where generations of such traffic have worn their mark. His boot heels tock solidly, send odd echoes scurrying away across the marsh, and he feels a faint prickling at his nape, as if at any moment he’ll hear other, stilted-scuttling steps mingled with his own, the creature at the crossroads rushing to catch up, to rise behind him, mouthparts splitting apart, talons unfolding once more, suddenly unforgiving of Ringil’s prior discourtesy and dragon-knife nerves…

Instead, the broad path takes him in amid the ruins of a city; windswept terraces of broken stone, the snapped stumps of pillars, huge tilted mausoleum blocks carved with rows of symbols he can’t read but whose chiseled march makes him shiver more than spider-bite fever and the gray marsh weather would rightly explain. And now there are steps on the left, broad, shallow ledges of them, worn wax-smooth and uneven with age, dripping down to the level of the road he’s on. He looks up their sweep and the fireglow jumps and gutters at the top, strong against a sky now undoubtedly darkening. He hears the pluck of a stringed instrument, human voices raised in laughter and undisciplined efforts at song.

He picks his way up toward the sounds, balancing relief against an odd sense of loss for the haunted road he’s leaving below. And when he reaches the top, stands on a plateau of cracked white-stone paving that looks as if it might once have been the floor of some columned temple or market space, when he sees the wagons gathered in the center, the cheery reach of the bonfire and the motley-clad men and women gathered around it, he finds himself unaccountably pinned in the shadows at the edge of the plaza, not quite able to move forward.

It’s a woman who spots him first. Carrying a wine flask on one hip around the fire and back to one of the wagons, shrugging off ribald commentary from men who grab after her with halfhearted, hilarious ineptitude as she passes, she turns away from the fire for a moment, and there he is. In the instant their eyes meet, he sees himself as she must: gaunt, black-cloaked, and silent, sword pommel at his back.

He thinks she’ll shriek, but she doesn’t.

Hjel, she calls instead. We have visitors.

Ringil hears the name as it floats across the campfire air to its owner, hears the archaic marsh dialect of Naomic the woman uses, and there’s a sudden twitch in his groin, and a wonder in his head. There, at the fire’s edge, the slumped, brim-hatted figure with the long-necked mandolin across his lap…

Ringil narrows his gaze. Couldn’t be—could it?

The mandolin’s plucked chime stops, the last chords skitter off in the dark. The murmur of conversation around the fire dries up. The player lets long, supple hands lie on the instrument for a moment. Beneath the brim of the hat, he tilts his head slowly up. Glitter of eyes as they throw back the fire’s cheer.

It’s him. No question.

Visitors. Well. Hjel props himself elegantly upright and hands the mandolin off to a woman seated at his side. He speaks the same tongue, just as he did before, marsh Naomic with its ornate traceries of old Myrlic. He stands, and stares across the hot sparks and wavering air above the fire. And a warrior to boot, by the look of it. Come forward, sir. We don’t stand on ceremony at the court of Hjel the Dispossessed.

Lightning-flash image: Under canvas-lit parchment yellow with the firelight outside, Hjel curls those long supple fingers around Gil’s cock and runs the tip of his tongue… That much I know. Do you not recognize me, Ragged Prince?

Hjel sets hands on hips and tilts his head a little at the familiar title. Recognize you? To do that, I would need to see you in the light.

A score of eyes on him around the fire—those on this side have scooted sideways to look. Ringil obliges them with a couple of paces forward, keeps his hands clearly visible for courtesy. The temptation to do a pirouette is an overwhelming itch in his—now oddly painless—stomach. Suddenly, out of nowhere, he’s on the edge of laughter.

The mandolin player comes around the fire, picks his way among the seated company with slim-hipped, long-legged grace. There’s stubble on his face, and there, that tiny scar on his chin he rubs at when he’s curious. He strolls up and makes a half circle at Ringil’s side, carefully out of blade range. Folds his arms across his lower chest as if hugging himself.

Lifts a hand and rubs the scar.

Shakes his head.

No. I’d remember that face. That big sword. I don’t know you, friend.

Ringil smiles. But I know you.

Well, washed up as we are at the gray margins of the world, any chilled wraith hoping for a place at the fire might say the same thing. But the eyes beneath the hat brim are dancing with all the curiosity and wild mischief Ringil remembers. Convince me.

Ringil raises a hand, crooks thumb and little finger as he has been taught. Words from the ikinri ’ska bubble behind his lips. He lets a few break free—harsh, whispered syllables that seem to leave little pockets of chilled air in their wake. At the fireside, one of the hounds pricks up its ears and looks at him strangely. Later, some will swear they saw a dark ripple step across the ancient, crack-stoned plaza. And shadows bicker at the edges of the fire.

The smile falls off Hjel’s face.

Who taught you that?

You did.

Now Hjel’s disquiet is spreading to the men and women around the fire. Perhaps they sense, at some animal level, the same touch that the hound did. Or perhaps it’s only the way their captain has grown so abruptly serious.

The ikinri ’ska is not a set of tricks for cheap conjuring, Hjel says quietly. I would not have taught it to a charlatan.

You asked to be convinced.

I am not convinced.

Very well. In your tent, you keep a white-marble figurine of a woman with a crack through its head. About this size, very beautiful, apparently very old. You found it on the marsh as a boy. You’d wandered away from your uncle’s caravan and lost yourself. A strange, pale wolf seemed to be stalking you, but when you—

Enough. Hjel swallowed. You walk out of my future to recite my past. You drag dark echoes behind you like a trawl net. What are you really?

What I am is hungry. And cold. Your hospitality wasn’t so circumspect the last time, Prince in Rags.

So you say.

Any chilled wraith hoping for a place at the fire might say the same. Yes. Ringil shrugs. You’re a sorcerer, you once told me. A master of the ikinri ’ska. So. My name is Ringil Eskiath. Look in my eyes and tell me if you see a wraith there.

He waits.

It takes a moment, and before Hjel meets his gaze, the sorcerer’s eyes flicker off to right and left as if Ringil has come with an honor guard at his back. But finally he looks, and whatever he does or does not see in his visitor’s eyes, he chooses not to comment on it. He nods slightly instead, like a man accepting bad news he has long expected.

Be welcome at my hearth, then, Ringil Eskiath. Hjel gestures toward the fire, some of his earlier elegant poise regained in the motion. I place us both in bonds of guest and host.

Then he jerks a thumb back over his shoulder, artfully casual, as if it’s an afterthought.

But your friends back there stay out in the dark.

RINGIL DOESN’T LOOK BACK. IF HJEL THE SCAVENGER PRINCE AND SORCERER can play this game, so can he.

But as the new chill walks its way up his spine, he knows beyond doubt what he’ll see if he does turn. He knows because he’s seen it before, falling off the feverish edge of consciousness as he lay on the cobbled streets of Hinerion and heard the screams of Venj’s men dying.

A gaunt figure, a scarred face, a sword blade swinging like a scythe.

A blunt, powerful form, fists gripped around a heavy smith’s hammer and long-handled manacle cutters.

A young boy, mouth open, snarling through bloodied teeth, a quarrel sprouting from under his sternum like some alien iron appendage.

They stand at his back in the cold—he can feel them there now—like new gods. Like a fresh pantheon, waiting to be born.

IT WAS WARM, BY THE FIRE.