The Cold Commands

CHAPTER 22

The slave quarters were guarded.

Harath sank back into cover with a clenched curse. Four flights of stairs below the landing they crouched on, a pair of tall doors like those they’d passed through to get to the gallery. Heavy chain through the handles, and three burly figures sat in a circle on low stools in front. A couple of lanterns stood on the ground nearby and threw long, fitful flickers across the floor. Low mutter of Majak, the odd explosion of good-natured cursing—the three men were playing dice in the dust. Three staff lances were propped casually against the side of the door, thin, bony shadows slanting down the wall in the lantern glow.

“This is new,” Harath whispered. “They never used to bother.”

“What happens when your hired help starts mauling the merchandise,” Egar hissed back.

Harath grinned sheepishly, and Egar felt like choking him. There was a thin, restless anger rising in him now. Thanks to this Ishlinak punk, he was going to have to do it after all. Majak blood on his hands once again, and for no better reason than…

Than what, Dragonbane? Than bare, bored-out-of-your-mind curiosity? Than random scouting of the enemy’s ramparts in service to Archeth, who’s out of town anyway?

Or—oh, wait—is it that itch you can’t scratch with Ishgrim, maybe, and the thought that some other willowy Naom slave gash might be grateful enough if you—

He chopped the thoughts irritably away. The restless anger slopped higher in him, seeking outlet.

Fucking punk kids.

In his day, no Majak who’d taken coin to guard slaves would have dreamed of touching the goods or—

That’s right, Dragonbane. And brothers always stood together, the buffalo came when they were called, the grass grew taller and greener, and it never fucking rained.

Get a grip, old man.

He crushed out the brooding with a grimace. Drew one of his knives. Crouched and listened to the voices float up through the gloomy air. The twang of the Ishlinak dialect.

Harath dipped his head closer.

“I thought you said we weren’t going to get into it with these guys.”

“I thought you said the slave quarters weren’t guarded, and we’d get in with a bent pin.”

Half the sheepish grin again. “Yeah, but—”

Egar spared two fingers from the grip on his knife, snagged Harath by the collar, and jerked him close. Eyes like slits, teeth tight. Voice a snake-strike hiss.

“You’ve been paid, Majak.”

Harath jerked loose. But he looked away and wet his lips.

“Look—I reckon that’s Alnarh down there,” he murmured.

“Good. That should make it easy for you. Some payback for all his shit? You can take him, I’ll do the other two.”

The younger man nodded hesitantly. Egar could not quite repress a savage twinge of satisfaction. Bit of fucking consequence for your acts and the coin you take, eh, kid? He gestured with one knife-filled hand, and they ghosted down the stairs together in the shadow of the balustrades. Got to the final landing, and the last corner of usable cover. Harath hovered. Wet his lips again.

Egar widened his eyes at him, jerked his chin. Fucking get on with it.

Harath stood. Went down the final flight of stairs toward the dice players with no attempt at quiet.

Scrabble of action as they saw him and came to their feet, grabbing weapons.

“Hold it right the fuck there!”

“Not another step, asshole!”

Harath snorted. “Oh my, what big fucking blades you have, boys.”

Stunned silence. Peering through the balustrade, Egar made out short-swords, maybe an ax. But their staff lances still stood against the wall. The murderous seven-foot, double-bladed Majak standby—but still not in play.

One of the Ishlinak halfway lowered his sword.

“Harath—that you, buddy?”

“Shut up, Elkret. He’s outcast. What the fuck are you doing here, Harath? Who let you in?”

Harath made it to the bottom of the stairs, hands well away from his sides. He seemed, finally, to have started enjoying himself.

“Hey, Alnarh. How’s it hanging? Getting any Revelation-approved pussy?”

Alnarh twitched toward the staff lance where it leaned against the wall. “I said who let you in?”

“Let me in? You stupid fucking twat, you think I need letting into this place? I already told you, Alnarh. You couldn’t set up a guard duty to save your fucking—”

And time.

Egar vaulted the landing rail, came down ten feet like a catapult stone and cut loose with his knives. He landed just off Elkret’s shoulder, swung and slashed, sent him sprawling with a yell. Alnarh whirled at the sound. Had just enough time to yell—

“ ’Ware raiders!”

—before Egar reached the third, unnamed Ishlinak. The other man got in a lucky block with the haft of his hand ax—Egar took it on the forearm with a grunt, shoved back and swept the guard aside, stabbed in roundhouse beneath. The knife blade found flesh somewhere above the man’s hip, slugged home to the hilt. The Ishlinak quivered and shrieked. Peripheral glimpse—off to Egar’s right, Alnarh reached his staff lance, just had time to grab it away from the wall and turn as Harath rushed him. The lance swung, Alnarh got it crossways to block, and the two men met in a whirl of limbs and spat curses. Egar twisted his own blade and pulled it out—blood splattered out on his hand, so hot it seemed almost to burn. The Ishlinak he’d stabbed went down with a pleading look on his face, clutching at Egar’s sleeve. Gazes locked—instinct telling them both the truth of what had been done.

Elkret—behind him.

He whipped about. Elkret had a long-knife raised in his left hand, but he was slow—was hurt—must have hit lucky, that first slash. Egar couldn’t see the wound he’d made, but he could have dodged this attack in his sleep. He stepped sideways from the thrust of the knife, snagged the arm behind it at the wrist, pulled and locked it out. Right hand raised, tightening to a fist around his knife—he slammed down at the locked elbow joint, broke the arm. The hollow snap echoed in the lantern flicker, chased away with the choked scream it wrung out of Elkret. The long-knife flew loose. Egar got in close, dragged back the Ishlinak’s head, exposed the throat—

“No—wait!”

Harath’s hoarse shout. Egar broke his stroke with an effort. He dragged Elkret around so he could see where the shout had come from. Nestled the knife up against the Ishlinak’s neck.

“Don’t you move,” he murmured, and felt Elkret stiffen away from the touch of the steel.

“Don’t—don’t kill him.” Harath, stumbling upright from Alnarh’s limp form, panting from the fight. “Come on, man. You don’t have to do that.”

“I think we do, actually.”

But he could already feel the resolve slipping away. The fight had come and gone too fast to arouse the berserker battle fury in him, and now it felt grubby and pointless.

Harath took a step forward, hands out, mastering his breathing. “Come on, brother. He’s a friend.”

“He’s not my fucking friend.” Egar sighed and shoved Elkret away from him, practically into Harath’s arms. “Fine, brother. It’s your face he’s seen. Do what you like.”

Harath fumbled the catch, let Elkret slip past him. The injured Ishlinak dropped to his knees, hale arm hanging as slack as the wrecked one. He stared down at Alnarh’s body.

“The fuck’ve you done, man,” he mumbled. “What the fuck have you done?”

It wasn’t immediately clear who he was talking to. But Alnarh at least would not be answering—Harath had crushed his old comrade’s throat in with the staff lance, and the shaft still lay across the corpse’s neck. Eyes and distended tongue bulged outward. In the lantern flicker, it gave the Ishlinak’s face the comic-hideous look of a Shaktur devil mask.

“We’d better get out of here,” Harath muttered.

“Oh, no. We came here for a reason.” Egar nodded at the door. “Get that open. One of them has to have keys.”

“Harath, what the fuck have you done?”

“Look, we made a lot of noise. They—”

“That’s the second time I got to remind you who’s paying the piper here? Look for the fucking key.”

Harath flinched. But he started pawing over Alnarh’s corpse. Egar watched him for a moment, then went to check on the man he’d stabbed to death.

The Ishlinak had bled out all over the dusty floor. The leakage looked like some stagnant midnight road puddle the dead man had fallen into from an unruly horse. Egar crouched to search clothing for the keys, saw the vague bulk and motion of his head and shoulders reflected up in the blood as he leaned over. For one slightly dizzying moment, it was as if there was something murky down there in the puddle, staring back up at him.

“…the fuck have you done, Harath…”

“Look, just shut it.” Harath’s hissed tones, cooking frustration and guilt toward anger. “You’re fucking alive, aren’t you? That’s a fucking Dragonbane over there. You know how close he was to slitting your fucking throat like you were livestock? Found it! Here’s the fucking key!”

Egar stirred from staring down at his blood-sunk other self. Got up away from the black pool with something weirdly approaching relief. Turned back to the others.

Elkret was still kneeling where they’d left him, like one of those half-wit penitents you sometimes saw out by the Saffron gate. Harath stood near him, holding up an ornate iron key. He still looked a little sick around the gills, but he was grinning haggardly with it.

“ ’Kay?”

“So open it up.”

Elkret looked up at the Dragonbane’s voice. His face was a shocked blank.

“You’d better get out of here,” he said quietly. “Before they come.”

Egar felt an unreasonable creeping at the back of his neck. He glanced around at the shadowed architecture. “Before who come?”

“The angels.”

“Got no angels following me, son. I’m not a convert.”

“Doesn’t matter,” Elkret told him. “They’re watching from on high. Touch what’s theirs and they’ll come. This was promised. We are all marked as their servants, our suffering will be redeemed.”

It rang like scripture, the same shit everyone down here could reel off by the yard, seemingly to gild any given situation the day had to offer. Egar had asked Imrana once if there was a verse to cover shitting correctly, and she’d replied soberly that yes, of course there was, there were correct rituals to ablutions as to anything else. He was never very sure whether she was winding him up or not.

Coming out of a Majak’s mouth like this, it sounded oddly twisted.

“Hey, fuck that shit!” Harath, harsh-toned and apparently sharing Egar’s distaste. “This fucking city’s rotted your brains, Elkret. We’re Majak—the Sky Dwellers are watching over us. That’s good enough for me, brother.”

“The Dwellers won’t stop them. It’s a light no one can stand against. I’ve seen it.”

Egar nodded, gave him a tight smile, and hit him. Hook punch, in from the side, palm like a blade, thumb joint into the temple. The old horse-thief standby, knockout in a single unguarded moment—the Ishlinak crumpled without a sound.

“Right, let’s make this fast, shall we?”

Harath stared down at Elkret. “You didn’t have to do that.”

“Yeah, I did. Now let’s go. This place is starting to give me the creeps.”

ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THE DOOR, THE SLAVE QUARTERS WERE BETTER appointed than some harems Egar had broken into in his time. There was space—because in an empty temple, what else are you going to have—and an endless retreat of rooms opening off one another left and right like feints from some effete knife fighter falling back. From what they could see in the lantern light, some attempt had been made to clean the place up. There was furniture of sorts scattered at random through the rooms; colored shawls and other makeshift drapery hung at windows, twitching in the night breeze. The ghost scents of cheap soap and cooked food hung in the air.

The slaves were scattered few and far between, much like the furniture. They slept on thin mattresses on the floors or on carved stone benches and alcoves set into the walls. As far as Egar could see beneath the blankets they used to cover themselves, most were young and female, with a few boys leavened into the mix. All were of northern complexion, faces making pale smudges in the gloom. Some of them raised their heads as the two Majak went by, the way hounds will when their master walks past the hearth. But they said nothing, only watched with wary, light-sleeper eyes.

Egar marched Harath back and forth until he had the plan of the place more or less sorted out. The rooms looked to be knotted figure-of-eight style about a pair of narrow courtyards roofed in with stone trelliswork. The sensation of infinite recess was cunningly provided by smaller chambers off to the sides here and there. He guessed they might once have been monk’s cells or something…

They drifted to a halt, under the eaves in a corner of one of the courtyards.

“See her?” he asked Harath.

“No, man.” Irritable, throwaway tone. “She’s not here. How long are we going to—”

Egar looked balefully at him and he raised placatory hands.

“Yeah, okay, brother, okay. I’m paid. I know. But they change the guard at midnight. What are we doing here? What’s the plan?”

He had a point.

Whatever you came here to do, Dragonbane, better work out what it was, and then get on and do it.

“Come with me.”

Egar ducked back inside, approached a young girl in an alcove who’d propped herself up to look as they passed. Soft-featured, snub nose and small, frightened eyes, he reckoned her not much older than fifteen or sixteen. He set down the lantern, crouched before her to make himself smaller to her terrified gaze. He jerked a thumb back at Harath, spoke soothingly low in Tethanne.

“Listen, do you know him?”

The girl shrank back into the alcove’s limited depths. Face lowered, shaking her head repeatedly.

“You sure? He had a thing with one of the girls here, a few weeks back.”

“Couple of months,” corrected Harath.

The dry-trickle thread of a voice. “I don’t—we’re not supposed to—it’s forbidden, please—”

Egar held up his hands, aping the gesture he’d squeezed out of Harath in the courtyard a few moments ago. “Listen, I don’t want to hurt you, I’m not going to even touch you. I just want you to tell me about the other girl.”

“But she’s gone.” Eyes pleading.

“We fucking know that, bitch. Where’s she gone?”

Egar bounced up, spun on Harath.

“You want to shut up for a minute?” he hissed. Fighting yet again a strong desire to punch the Ishlinak out. “Do something useful. Get out there again, see if there’s some way to climb up to that trelliswork and break through onto the roof. Go on. Fuck off. I’ve got this.”

Harath looked hurt, but he went. Egar crouched in front of the girl again. She was backed so hard into the stonework of the alcove now, her muscles were straining at the push. She had the blanket up almost over her face, as if she could wrap herself in it like the girl in the fairy tale, and disappear.

“Don’t worry about him. Just tell me anything you know about this girl. Did you know her name?”

The eyes looked back at him over the drawn-up blanket hem. “He told her he’d take her away. He promised her. All that week, she was waiting for him to come back.”

Egar sighed. “Yeah, what can I tell you? Like they say, never trust a fucking Ishlinak farther than you can throw-rope him. So what happened to her?”

A tight gulp. “They came.”

“They?”

“The priests, the invigilators. They dragged her out, they were asking her questions, slapping her, screaming at her. They were so angry. We have to be pure. Untouched.”

Egar frowned. It was the same crap they handed daughters the world over, he supposed. But slaves? And some of the women he’d seen didn’t look to be much under thirty summers. If Menkarak thought he was holding a crop of virgins here, he had to be more fucked in the head than even Archeth reckoned he was.

“Why untouched?” he asked.

A visible shudder ran through her. “The angels have chosen us. When it’s their time to walk here, they’ll come for us.”

“Angels.” He was getting tired of this.

“You don’t believe me,” she whispered. Her gaze wilted downward, her knuckles pressed through the blanket against her mouth as if she was trying not to be sick. Voice mumbling almost too low to catch the words. “You’re from the north, farther north even than me. Why would you believe? Men like you.”

And then, as if these last words had woken something in her, the girl’s eyes snapped up again. Fixed on his.

“Get me out of here.” It jerked out of her. “Please, get me out.”

“Uhm, look…”

“Please. I’ll do anything, anything. I’m good, I was in a Parashal training stable before this, I can, you can.” She swallowed. “Anything. But you have to take me with you, right now.”

“Listen…”

“You don’t understand.” Taut desperation now, snapping her jaw tight on the words. “I’ve seen them. I’ve seen the fucking angels for myself. Just like they said. They came and I was judged. Blue fire. Blue fire and voices like beasts at play.”

Blue fire…

He sat back as if she’d slapped him.

Abruptly, he was back in the mist-tangled marshes of Ennishmin, crouched among hardened artifact scavengers, watching the faint flicker of blue in the distance.

Swamp wraith, murmured one of the men, and the others made gestures at the various charms they wore. We don’t go this way.

And later, at the tavern with Ringil, he saw the way a decrepit old man melted before his eyes, leaking that same blue radiance as he went down. Saw what rose instead to replace the illusion of humanity…

Ringil always argued they couldn’t come here, to Yhelteth. Wouldn’t come here, where the sun was a withering white blast across the sky…

The squat black glirsht statues in the altar chamber.

Some kind of beacon for the dwenda.

He almost turned to look, over his shoulder, back the way they’d come. To what might now be blocking their way out.

Once, barely twenty years old, deep in the Dhashara pass, he’d gotten into a tomb alone, only to find it was now a scree panther lair. The sarcophagus was tumbled, lid broken in huge fragments across the earthen floor. Bones strewn everywhere, and the piles of panther spore, the marks of iron-hard claws through the dust, the paw-pad traces.

The cave exit was thirty yards of chilled and twisting raw rock tunnel back the way he’d come. He shuffled bent-backed along every darkened foot of it expecting to hear the scrape of claws ahead and the low yowl of the panther returning. Prayers in his throat to the Dwellers, begging—he’d go to his death gladly, whenever, wherever they chose, if it could only be under open skies.

When he made it out into the hot mountain sunlight, it was like being born again.

“No fucking way.” Harath, grumbling back from the courtyard. “Stone’s solid as the day they carved it. Take a week to chisel through.”

“Right. Back the way we came then. Get the lantern. We’re leaving.”

“Thank Vavada’s tits for that.”

Egar reached out his hand to the girl. “You want out, girl? This is it. Let’s go.”

The slave girl gaped disbelief, then grabbed at his hand as if coming up from drowning. Harath guffawed. Egar made a mighty effort and didn’t smack him. He pulled the girl to her feet instead. Thin cotton shift under the blanket; the garment was practically translucent, barely made it to her shins. Her breasts molded to it, showed dark nipples through the cloth. Harath made an appreciative noise deep in his throat and reached to grope one of the soft mounds. Egar slapped him away.

“We’re in a hurry,” he said gruffly.

“You’re a sad old man, Dragonbane.” The Ishlinak gave him a filthy grin. “I fucking told you, if you wanted—”

Egar peeled him a look and he shut up.

“And I told you we’re in a hurry. Now pick up that fucking lamp.”

Perhaps it was there in his voice, a trace of tight-roped tension that closed the Ishlinak down. Or maybe Harath could feel the same thing Egar did not want to admit he felt. The creeping sensation that now breathed from every darkened alcove and doorway around them, that stalked the rooms behind them like the ghost of vengeance for brothers slain.

Something on its way.

They loped back through the endless rooms, knives out and carried low. Ignoring the blanket-bundled bodies to left and right, whether they woke and watched them go or not. Skirmish party pace—soft, rapid crunch of their footfalls, the hurrying puddle of the lantern, and behind it all, a yawning prescient quiet. The girl, stumbling as she struggled to keep up on bare feet.

They cleared the main door to the slave quarters, found the bodies undisturbed. The other lanterns and the stretched-hideous flickering shadows that capered out from their bases. The staircase back up, the way they’d come, and there at the top—

Egar slammed to a halt.

The girl saw. Moaned low in her throat.

Blue fire.