The Cold Commands

CHAPTER 28

She went to see Shanta as soon as the sun was up.

The naval engineer was a creature of habit. She found him exactly where she’d expected at that hour, taking tea under an awning on the upper decks of his palatial houseboat. The mercenary guardsmen at the gangplank nodded her aboard—she was a regular, unmistakable anyway for her skin and the alien distance in her eyes—and a liveried slave escorted her up through the ziggurat levels of the boat. More slaves in attendance in the top gallery—paneled wooden doors were drawn back with much ceremony, and she was ushered out onto the deck. Shanta was seated there under the awning amid carpets and cushions, surrounded by depleted platters of sweetmeats, bread, and oils. There was a tall samovar at his elbow, and a book laid open in his lap. He looked up, smiled when he saw her. She gave it back, thin. Waited to be formally announced, and for the slave to retire.

“My lady Archeth, this is a pleasant surprise.” Shanta gestured her to a cushion near his own. “How wonderful to see you again so soon. Will you take some tea?”

She stalked forward. “What the fuck are you playing at, Mahmal?”

“I?” He seemed genuinely taken aback.

“You see any other doddering morons in the vicinity?” She stood over him, raging. Swept a hand wide to encompass the empty deck. “Oh. I guess not. Then it must be you I’m talking to. Must be you I spent half of last night saving from an upcoming appointment as a fucking octopod’s dinner!”

“Ah.” Gravely. “I see.”

“Do you? Do you really?” She kicked the indicated cushion away across the deck. “Have you ever seen one of those executions, Mahmal?”

She knew he hadn’t. Akal had always favored the clean sweep of an ax for his enemies; the slaughter boards in the Chamber of Confidences were an invention of Sabal II, reinstituted only now by Jhiral on his father’s death. And since the accession, Shanta had kept pretty much to himself, initially in mourning for his old friend, and when this became untenable as an excuse, pleading age and the pressures of work.

“I fear I am not much at court these days. I have not been fortunate enough to witness the ways in which Yhelteth advances into the modern age.”

She thought she detected the faintest of tremors in the words, but if it was there, it was layered over with bland courtier calm.

And, she thought, it might as easily have been suppressed rage as fear.

She mastered her own anger. Went to the starboard rail and looked out over the water. Across the estuary, a fishing skiff tacked for the ocean, heeling steeply in the buffeting breeze.

Know the feeling.

She tried for toneless calm.

“It’s not good, Mahmal. Sanagh gave you up under interrogation. You and half the shipwright’s guild, apparently.” She looked back at him. “I mean, when are you people going to get it through your fucking heads? The horse tribes kicked your asses. There isn’t going to be a glorious resurgence of the coastal cultures. It is over. The Burnished Throne is our best shot at civilizing the world now.”

“My quarrel is not with the Burnished Throne.”

The qualifying words hung in the air unspoken. She found herself checking the deck, reflexively, for eavesdroppers.

She came back to where he was seated. Crouched close.

“He’s one man, Mahmal. He’ll live, and he’ll die—just like his father, just like his grandfather. And I remember them all—don’t you forget that. Right back to Sabal the Conqueror, and he was a total fucking bastard. It’s not them. It’s what they build that counts.”

“That’s an admirably Kiriath perspective, my lady.” Shanta closed the book in his lap, leaned across to the samovar, and busied himself refilling his glass. “You’ll forgive me if, as a mere mortal, I am less inclined to take the long view. Bentan Sanagh was a friend.”

“Then you need to choose your friends more carefully,” she snapped.

That sat between them while he finished with the samovar. He laid his book aside with elaborate care, did not meet her eyes. He held the glass of tea cupped delicately in both palms, head bowed over the steaming drink like a soothsayer scrying the future for a tricky client.

“Well,” he said mildly. “I will give your ladyship’s advice due consideration.”

“Yeah—do that. Because I don’t think I’ll be able to pull your chestnuts out of the fire like this if you fuck up again.”

He glanced up. “I am grateful for your intervention, Archeth.”

“Doesn’t sound much like it,” she said grumpily.

“No, I am grateful.” A gathering urgency in his tone now. “But I have taken oaths, Archeth, just like you. When the guild come to me with their complaints and fears, I am sworn to address those concerns. You know how many of us the purges have taken. What would you have me do? Put on a courtier smile and bandage my eyes like Sang? Stand aside as my friends and colleagues are disappeared and tortured to death?”

“And you really think joining your friends on an execution board is going to help matters?” She sighed. Went to get the cushion she’d kicked. Calling back to him as she bent to pick it up. “What would I have you do, Mahmal? I’d have you stay alive. Yhelteth needs men like you and me. The purges will pass, Jhiral will calm down. We have to outlast this phase.”

“I am an old man, Archeth. It’s doubtful I’ll live to see that—even if you do manage to keep me out of tentacled embraces for the duration.”

“So—what?” She came back, settled the cushion back in its place. Seated herself. “You’re looking for a glorious exit? Is that it? A martyr’s death?”

“Hardly.”

“The Citadel is restless, Mahmal—you know that. And Demlarashan is perfect tinder. It won’t take much for Menkarak and his clique to torch it all into a theocratic rising that’ll make Ninth Tribe Remembrance look like a drunken tavern brawl. Is that what you want? Asshole bearded righteousness ranting on every corner, and the blood of unwed mothers running in the streets? Jhiral at least will stand against that.”

Shanta grunted. “You miss the salient point, my lady. Jhiral himself is part of the reason people flock to the invigilators in the first place. If he had not tarnished imperial authority the way he has since accession, no one would give those selfsame bearded assholes the time of day. Akal would never have—”

“Oh, don’t feed me that line of shit! I was there, Mahmal. Remember? Akal got in bed with the Citadel for manpower, pure and simple. Religious morons to bulk up his armies, Citadel declarations to sanctify his fucking conquests. This is his mess we’re living through just as much as it is Jhiral’s.”

“And so we forgive corruption and imperial tyranny, because it promises to stanch theocratic rage?”

“No. What we do is get a sense of perspective. We tread carefully, and we look for ways to clean out the bilges that don’t involve knocking a big fat fucking hole in the hull.”

The nautical metaphor lifted the ghost of a smile to his lips.

“Got a mop, then?” he asked.

“Think I might, yeah.” She nodded at the samovar. “Pour me a glass of that, and I’ll tell you all about it.”

AFTERWARD, HE SAT SILENT FOR A LONG TIME.

Archeth sipped her cooling tea and gave him the space, gladly. That he was thinking it over could only be a good thing.

Wharf noise drifted up over the port-side rail, softened by the height of the houseboat’s decks. In keeping with the time of year, Shanta had had the vessel towed downriver from its winter moorings, and docked near the mouth of the estuary, where sea breezes helped keep the summer heat at bay. It also gave him the chance to sweep the harbor with his telescopes and keep up with foreign shipping technology. Only last year he’d been in transports of engineering delight over some gaunt gray square-rigged vessel that showed up from Trelayne sporting a raked bow and narrowed beam. You’re looking at the future there, he told her as she squinted through the scope, at a loss to see what all the fuss was about. Those League sons of whores—always one jump ahead. Do you have any idea how fast that beauty must be, even in heavy seas? She’ll clip through waves like a knife.

So we go right ahead and build the same way, she’d assumed.

He shook his head. Fat chance, the way things are right now. You try convincing anyone down here to make untried changes to something that’s functioned perfectly well for longer than living memory. There’s just no stomach for that kind of innovation anymore. Guild monopoly, vested interests at court, a line of fucking rent-seekers out the palace door and around the block. We’re choking on it, Archeth, and there’s nothing either of us can do. Akal would have…

So forth.

Her tea was stone-cold. She poured it away into the dreg pan, leaned over to the samovar, and turned the spigot for a fresh shot. Shanta looked up at the motion as if he’d forgotten she was there.

“So, you believe what this creature says?”

“Helmsmen don’t generally make things up, Mahmal. They can be obscure, willfully vague, cantankerous at times. But I’ve yet to catch any of them in a lie.”

“A city standing out of the ocean?”

“As at Lake Shaktan, yes.”

“A lake and an ocean are very different things, Archeth. The existence of a city standing in the waters of one does not necessarily prove the possibility of a city built to stand in the other.” But behind the pedantry, she could already hear in his voice that he believed, that he wanted it to be true. “Shaktan is shallow compared with the northern ocean. Its weather is mostly clement. But the seas around the Hironish? Just imagine the stresses such a structure would have to withstand. Imagine what constructions would be required.”

“If Anasharal’s scheme works, we will not need to imagine it, my friend. We’ll be able to see for ourselves.”

“Hmm.” He shot her a shrewd sideways glance. That my friend might have been pushing it a little. “Of course, even if this An-Kirilnar does exist, it will most likely be a ruin, just as An-Naranash was.”

“Perhaps.” It hurt more than she’d expected, just to say that much.

“You think a city of your people would have hidden themselves from us all this time? Really?”

She wrestled her feelings down into something approaching rationality. “As the Helmsman tells it, this city moves in and out of what we understand as reality in the same way that the Ghost Isle does. It has a technology to equal the magic of the dwenda at their height. So who knows where it may be grounded when it is not manifest in our world? Maybe, in studying the dwenda, the clan Halkanirinakral found a way to travel back and forth between worlds that did not involve taking to the veins of the Earth again.”

“And chose not to share it with your father’s clan?”

She shrugged. “Contact was cut off between An-Monal and An-Naranash for centuries, as far as I can ascertain. The Helmsmen are vague on the why. We still don’t know where the Lake Shaktan Kiriath actually went when they abandoned their city. Who’s to say that the same or worse did not occur with An-Kirilnar?”

It got her another crooked look, another musing murmur, but he said nothing to dispute. Nothing to stamp out the bright small flame kindled in her belly.

“Look, Mahmal, even if there are no actual Kiriath left in this city, Anasharal says the place materialized some weeks ago and has been there ever since. That suggests working machinery. And there’s no one to come plundering, the way there was in Shaktur. The Hironish isles are barely inhabited—you’ve got a scattering of fishing villages and whaling outposts up there at most. No cities, no learned men or wealthy shipowners. If anyone’s seen this place, they’ll be hexing like crazy and staying well away.”

Shanta smiled. “I think you underestimate the toughness of fishermen, Archeth. The ocean is a hard mistress at the best of times, and up there she is cold as well. Anyone who pulls a living from those waters won’t scare easily. And as I understand it, the whalers run back and forth to Trelayne quite regularly. Word will inevitably reach learned men and wealthy shipowners, if it hasn’t already.”

“Then all the more reason to go there ourselves, fast, before the League can make its move.”

“Hmm.”

He got up, a little stiffly, and made his way to the port-side rail, as if drawn by the muffled tumult below. She watched him for a moment, then followed.

They leaned side by side for a while in easy silence, gazing down at the tangle of activity along the wharf below. Porters and mules, couriers and freight agents, cargo marshals and their slaves, all mixed up and rubbing one another the wrong way in the bright morning heat. A couple of gesticulating shipmasters in altercation with liveried customs officials, a noble’s carriage jammed in place amid the bustle. Soldiers, sailors, and beggars claiming loudly once to have been both or either. Bangled, painted whores, sleeves pushed up, hair and shoulders defiantly on display, one foot set daintily on a crate or mooring iron, arms akimbo and turning sinuously to and fro at the waist so the bangles chimed. The obvious, sidling pickpockets and pimps.

“Have you approached any of the others yet?” he asked her.

“No, not yet. Was up all night saving your scrawny neck.”

A slight exaggeration. She’d gotten away from the palace not long after nightfall. Ate at home, with Kefanin and Ishgrim for company. Kef had been dressing the girl up again, lots of floaty satin and lace, hair washed and plumped up, netted and beribboned. It made Archeth feel like a dead, lightning-blasted tree when she stood next to her. She made an attempt to be gay, nonetheless, tried hard not to stare down the northern girl’s cleavage too much, deflected questions about what had gone on at An-Monal. That last part proved easiest of all. Conversation was largely taken up with a breathless narration of the Dragonbane’s run-in with the Citadel picket outside the front gate while she was away. The way Kef and Ishgrim told it struck Archeth as overly dramatic. On cross-examination, she discovered neither had actually seen the fight, and were depending on the gate guard for the detail. But since the Dragonbane wasn’t around to answer for himself, she had to take their word for the tale.

In fact, it transpired, no one had seen Egar for a couple of days now. Kefanin had fed him the morning after the punch-up, but that was the last time he’d been home. The Prophet only knew what chaotic shit he was up to in the meantime.

Might wander up to see Imrana this afternoon, see if he’s camped out there. About time he started getting laid again.

Let’s hope he is.

Truth was, she should have seen the trouble coming. Egar had been in a foul mood ever since Knight Commander Saril Ashant got back into town and started claiming his marital rights. Abruptly deprived of Imrana’s attentions, the Dragonbane had been spoiling for a fight, any kind of fight, with anyone. Natural consequence of a pair of unmilked balls and a lifetime killing other men for a living. Sure, you should have seen it coming, Archidi. But in the end it’s an invigilator, a fucking priest and his bully boys. So do you really give a shit?

She knew, of course, that the ripples from what the Dragonbane had done would end up rocking her boat sooner or later. The usual diplomatic outrage, the gibbering representations about offended faith, the wearying declamatory statements from prayer towers and pulpits. Still, she couldn’t make herself angry with him.

Mostly, she just wished she’d been there to see it.

“Something amusing you, my lady?”

She put her smile away. “Old news. Something I heard last night.”

“Hmm. Yes, well, I can tell you right now this isn’t going to be the jaunt you evidently expect it to be.”

He’s in. He’s hooked. The smile tried to leak out past the corners of her mouth again. She faked a yawn.

“I don’t doubt there will be difficulties along the way.”

Shanta snorted. “There’ll be difficulties right here in Yhelteth. Just putting Tand and Shendanak in the same room is going to be trouble, for starters. Have you thought about who’s going to ride herd on this lot?”

“His majesty has assigned me a squad of Throne Eternal under Noyal Rakan.”

A grunt. “Young. Very young to be pushing rich old men around.”

“He’s a good man, they say.”

“A lot of that is his elder brother’s reputation rubbing off. Seen it happen before. I don’t know much about his war record, so I wouldn’t want to jump to conclusions. But I’m not convinced he’s the ideal choice.”

“He isn’t,” she said bluntly. “He barely saw service in the war. But Jhiral wants this kept among as few people as possible, and Rakan’s squad have already had sight of the Helmsman.”

“So, presumably, have Senger Hald’s marines.”

“Yeah, they’re coming, too.”

Shanta raised an eyebrow. “Throne Eternal telling marines what to do. That’s going to be interesting. Anyone else been invited to this party that I ought to know about?”

“Lal Nyanar and his crew. Hanesh Galat, the invigilator.”

“Nyanar?”

“Yeah. What’s wrong with that? Nice stroke of luck, seeing as how his father’s on the list anyway.”

“Nyanar’s a riverboat captain, Archeth. I doubt he’s been out of sight of land more than half a dozen times in his whole career. He certainly never saw combat at sea—old Shab made sure of that much.”

“I’m sure he’ll make an acceptable first officer.”

“That’s your considered nautical opinion, is it?” But he was grinning at her behind the growl. “Archeth, this is a bag of live eels you’ve trawled yourself here. We’re going to need at least a couple of ships to do this, probably three or four. Now, I will gladly take squadron command, but Nyanar will still have to captain his own vessel, and that means he’s going to have to convince actual seamen he knows what he’s talking about. Good luck with that. Then you’ve got the military side of things. Leave aside for a moment the question of whether Rakan can get Hald’s marines to take him seriously—what’s more important is that at least a couple of the rich men on that list of yours are going to want to come along for the ride. They won’t put up the money otherwise. And you can bet they’ll want to bring their own hired swords with them.”

“You’re talking about Shendanak?”

“And Kaptal. Probably Tand as well, if he sees that Shendanak’s going. No love lost among any of those three, from what I hear. And Shendanak is in the habit of hiring his thugs right off the steppe. They’re mostly cousins and blood-oath bondsmen, and half of them probably don’t even speak Tethanne. So you’ve got the prospect of those guys rubbing up against the marines, plus whatever mob of slave enforcers Tand wants to bring in to balance the odds—”

“If he chooses to come along at all, that is.”

“I’d advise you not to start getting optimistic this early in the game, my lady.”

“Better than getting cold feet, isn’t it?” Sour tone only half in jest, because abruptly the lack of krinzanz was getting to her again, and she really didn’t want to think about what it was going to be like—trying to wield some kind of authority over this whole shabby, patchwork, freebooter scramble after loot. “What’s the matter, my lord Shanta, you turning old man on me all of a sudden? Just want your cup of spiced tea and your slippers?”

“Doddering old man, wasn’t it?”

“Doddering moron, I said. Not the same thing at all.”

“Well, it’s hard to keep up with you immortals, you see.” A sudden edge on his humor now as well, the momentarily unguarded tinge of jealousy she was accustomed to with the humans who didn’t just hate her outright. Shanta heard it, too, hurried past it, sought safe ground again. “Perhaps it’s just, oh, that having had my life saved so recently, I value it all the more.”

The northern ocean is hardly a safe place at the best of times. Who’s to say what may happen there.

Her words to Jhiral the night before came back to her. For one nightmarish instant, she saw herself doing it.

“You’re welcome,” she said gruffly.

Another sideways slanted look, another smile. “You know I wouldn’t miss this—any of it—for the world, right?”

Her own lips quirked. “I guessed.”

“I’m coming with you, Archeth. You know I am. I’ll build your ships for you, I’ll sail them up around Gergis and beyond. I’ll draw the charts and plot the routes, I’ll put in what money you need. I’ll even sit quiet in council with idiots like Shendanak and Tand.” He shook his head, still smiling, perhaps at this recklessness, at his age. “But I’m telling you. You’re going to need more than the likes of Noyal Rakan to wield the whip and keep this lot in line.”

Which was of course when, staring down into the hubbub on the wharf, she spotted the gaunt, black-wrapped figure forcing its way through the crowd.

And for just that moment—like sudden sickness, like krinzanz coming on—it was as if she could feel the vast, ancient machinery of the universe as it turned. As if, through some ragged tear in the tawdry fairground paneling and painted cloth of the seeming world, the oiled mechanisms of fate now stood revealed in all their cog-toothed, malevolent intent.

And for just that moment, she was afraid.