The Cold Commands

CHAPTER 38

It wasn’t red, and it didn’t look particularly joyous. It looked, in fact, like every derelict imperial temple Ringil had ever seen—butter-colored stone buttresses squeezed between the newer buildings on either side, scoured and scarred by centuries of sun and wind and war, and then by the more recent scourges of the city that had grown up around it. Up close, he saw Tethanne graffiti chiseled into the stonework wherever the elements had left the facing intact—names and insults and crudely approximated clan brand marks, fragments of toilet verse. At the entrance, the shadows he stepped into stank of piss.

He looked down at the urchin who’d led him here. “You ever been inside?”

“No, my lord.” The boy knuckled at a snot-crusted nose. “ ’S haunted. The coastlanders’ demons live in there.”

The two of them stood there for a moment, both looking at the door and the thin slice of doorway it was jammed ajar on.

Deeper shadow within.

Ringil looked back at the sunstruck street, where the boy’s elder brother stood watching, holding the reins of his horse and glaring at anyone who passed too close. It was mostly unnecessary. Keelmakers’ Row was a quiet, narrow thoroughfare, not a lot of passersby, and those there were seemed well schooled in neighborly discretion—aside from the odd glance, they studiously ignored the gaunt, black-cloaked figure and his two urchin companions. Ringil shrugged, produced the promised coin, held it up out of reach.

“All right. This is for showing me. You get another three of these when I come out, and you’re still here, and my mount still has all its legs. Got it?”

The boy’s face went almost luminous with joy. “Yes, my lord.”

Ringil leaned down, nose-to-nose with him. “And if you’re not here, or anything bad’s happened to that horse, then the Revelation help your immortal little souls. Because nothing else this side of hell will. Got that as well?”

The urchin drew himself up to his full six- or seven-year-old height. “Course, my lord. Word’s my bond, my lord. Horse’ll be safer with us than if you put it in the Emperor’s harem.”

Questionable kind of safety, that, his hangover grumbled. Wouldn’t trust that fuck Jhiral out of sight with anything much that has an orifice.

But he straightened up and tossed the boy the coin, and the boy took it out of the air like a fish snapping up a fly. Then he stood, urchin hands on hips, and watched for a moment as Ringil pressed splayed fingers against the door, leaned to test its weight, and that was evidently about all he wanted to see. He scurried back out into the sun and to his brother, leaving the scar-faced swordsman alone in the shadows.

The door was heavy caldera oakwood; it took the full weight of Ringil’s shoulder to shift it more than a couple of inches on the uneven, detritus-strewn flagstones. But it gave with an awful grating sound on the second blow, and opened up a couple of feet. Ringil gave it a final, full-bodied kick for more clearance, then slipped through the gap. A scant couple of rays of sunlight followed him inside, touched his cloak at the shoulder, and then let him go.

Inside the temple, it was more worn-down flagstones and slim pillars holding up a cracked and sagging roof. No furnishings or fabrics that he could see, just cool stone silence over everything like a dust sheet. The sun got in here and there, through roof-level latticed skylights or the chinks in the damaged roof—where it touched the dusty ground, it seared small patches so bright they seemed to smolder. Look at them for too long and it made peering for detail in the gloom a lot harder. He stopped doing it. He let his eyes adjust.

A stone altar in the shadows up ahead, long and raised, like a funeral bier. There was an ornately carved stone screen behind it, latticed along the top in echo of the skylight design, but sculpted over most of its solid surface with a line of bas-relief figures. He picked his way toward them, between the falling rays of sunlight from the roof, crunching across the dust and detritus, glad of the noise his footfalls made. In the sharp contrast of blazing light and shadowy gloom, the silence of the place was like a solid presence, filling up his hungover senses. He walked as if in a slight trance, along the raised flagstones of what had clearly once been a central aisle to the altar.

He paused theatrically when he got there, pivoted about to face the way he’d come, and raised his arms cruciform.

“Anybody home?”

The echoes of his voice fell flat, as if trying to scramble out through one of the skylights and failing. He’d really meant to shout louder. He’d meant it as a joke, but the echo wouldn’t carry the irony. He sounded just like the next man, calling for his gods.

He grimaced. Let his arms fall slackly to his sides.

All things will become clear, Gil. Yeah, right.

Footfall crunch at his back.

He whipped about, one hand already up and reaching for the Ravensfriend. The upwelling urge to kill something, hot and instant, there in his guts and the muscles in his limbs. The old dance, driving out the vagueness in his head.

Nothing.

He stuttered to a halt, peering. The gloom around the altar was undisturbed. He was still tangled up in memories of the Queen Consort Gardens. Of Seethlaw and the dwenda, of terrible blue fire, of something dark and formless catching up with him.

He shook his head, tried to shake it all loose.

His eyes settled on the bas-relief stone screen. It was a pretty good match for the one he’d seen on the temple wall in Hinerion—another ranked assembly of the Dark Court, carefully rendered in more human aspect to suit local taste. Only this time, it was Hoiran himself who was missing from the sculpted ranks and the gap he’d seen in Hinerion was filled by…

Filled by…

He felt abruptly light-headed again. He felt the ground give way.

The missing dark courtier at Hinerion had been the Lady Kwelgrish—Kwelgrish the twilight banshee, the dark moan at evening, the mistress of wolves. Kwelgrish, who wore the skins of women and beasts with equal aplomb, who carried an ancient unhealing wound in her head and liked to trade sneering humor with demons before she bested them in shrieking, snarling combat. Kwelgrish who here, in the Temple of Red Joy, stood in bas-relief among her fellow gods with one hand pressing a towel to her bleeding skull and the other shoulder covered by a wolf skin complete with wolf head and jaws, such that the creature appeared to both hang off her and be biting her at one and the same time.

Let us say only that you will owe me a favor, Ringil Eskiath…

The voice bubbled up in his head, whispered at his ear, walked on his spine. Quilien of Gris, somewhere behind the stone screen in the gloom, circling him and the altar he stood at with luminous wolf-eyed intent—

Yelling, from the street.

He jerked a glance backward along the raised stone aisle to where he’d come in. His vision seemed to tilt with the sudden shift in focus, as if he stood in a boat on choppy water. Sunlight crowbarred in where he’d forced the door open, spilled in a distant puddle on the dusty floor there, and it seemed, suddenly, a long, dark way back out of this place.

Yes—run, said another, deeper voice that was not Quilien’s. Run while you still can. Remember who you are. Who you were. Who you will be.

Another footfall in the dust and detritus behind him, and he was running, he was sprinting, down the raised aisle path as if to the closing gates of some abruptly offered salvation.

Later, he would look back and be unable honestly to say if he ran toward the uproar in the street outside or away from what had just stepped out of the shadows at his back. He knew only the motion, the impulse that drove him forward, through each falling arrow of sunlight from the cracked roof—the spots burned on his shoulders like newly minted coins—the slanting tumble of light and gloom, the breath hard in his throat, approaching the doorway, that must, he knew, must slam closed just as he reached it, he could already hear the long, grating shriek it would make—It did not.

He grabbed the oakwood edge, stuffed himself through the gap and out into the sun. The Ravensfriend, caught in the gap for a moment, seemed not to want to leave, then gave as he twisted savagely about, and came out with him.

He stood blinking in the sunlight, trying to understand.

Uniforms and boot clatter and shouting up and down the cobbled street, half a dozen men-at-arms running about and gestures upward, tilted-back, helmeted heads—the sun struck glints from the cheap metal—and there, suddenly, shatter and splinter at a first-floor window in the façade across the street. Glass falling outward in brief, lethal rain, window frame smashed and torn free. Ringil, already tracking the noise, shaded his eyes just in time to catch a glimpse of two men come through the ragged gap, still struggling in midair. One was a uniformed man-at-arms, helmet gone. The other—

The two men hit the street with a solid crump, opposite the temple door. Dust billowed up around them, boiled as they fought. Still some struggle in both, but the man-at-arms had landed on his back and most of the fight seemed to have gone out of him with the fall. As Ringil watched, the other figure got fully astride him, reared up and rammed something long and thin down hard into his opponent’s eye. A shriek floated up, the fight jammed to a halt. The figure snapped off whatever weapon it was using and blundered awkwardly to its feet. Wind caught the dust and whirled it away.

Ringil stared.

“Eg?”

Egar the Dragonbane, dust-plastered and wild-eyed, the sheared-off stump of a fucking flandrijn pipe clenched in one fist, blood streaming from a cut on his face…

“Gil? Ringil?”

“Take him down!”

Ringil swung to the voice, heard the hard edge in it, the custom of command. There, amid the gathering uniforms, a slim figure clad in the black-and-silver livery of the King’s Reach. As Ringil stared, the man’s voice took a rising cadence.

“Bowmen!”

There were three of them, two with bow already cranked and quarrel loaded. At this range, they could hardly miss. The Dragonbane crouched and bared his teeth, pipe shard clutched like a knife in his fist. He might cover the ground to one of them before the order fell, but the other…

Ringil raised his hand and traced the ikinri ’ska symbol in the air.

No thought in it at all—the impulse rose like instinct, like a diver’s first breath on breaking surface. Like the urge to puke or feed.

“Bowmen.” He stole the command from the other man’s voice, took it out of the air, copied it, fed it back to them. “Your weapons are serpents!”

Like a veil falling across the sun, like a sudden chill wind blowing down Keelmakers’ Row. Even the Dragonbane seemed taken aback. The bowmen shrieked and threw their crossbows away. Ringil stalked into the midst of them, like a black wraith, like a shadow detached from the shade in the walls of the temple. His sword was still on his back.

“Spiders,” he said, painting the air about him with three more swift symbols. “Dredge crawlers. Corpsemites.”

And suddenly the men-at-arms were berserk, stamping at the ground, brushing maniacally at themselves, tearing at their mail, moaning and yelping in terror. Only the King’s Reach officer was unmoved, staring in disbelief at his men as Ringil moved through them and took up station ten yards away in the middle of the street.

The man’s sword rang clear of its scabbard.

“Sorcerer!”

Ringil unsheathed a grin. “That’s right.”

But beneath the seething, jagged exultation the ikinri ’ska set loose in him, he had a moment to feel out the limitations of the power. Wise men will not fall, Hjel had told him, somewhere in the confused, dimly remembered whirl of the memories that represented his instruction. Running dogs and thugs, animals and fools, all these the craft will blind and cripple. But a man in command of himself and his intellect is another matter. He read the shrewd intelligence in the face of the man facing him, the cold calculation and the poise of body. This one, he would not be able to put away so simply.

“Want to die?” he called out, in conversational tones.

“I am the King’s Reach,” the man shouted back at him. “I am the hand of Jhiral Khimran and the Burnished Throne, I am the imperial writ made flesh.”

“Ringil Eskiath. Faggot dragonslayer.” Hilarity bubbling up through him with the unleashed power, a black grin plastered across the back of his eyes, and reaching up now, the sword leaping to his hand like a hound rising to take meat its owner dangles—the blade tore sideways through the pliant lips of the scabbard, made a blurred arc around and down off his shoulder, was there at guard in front of him, like steel laughter in the light. “I asked you a question, King’s man. Do you want to die?”

They faced each other for frozen moments in the street while the men-at-arms staggered about screaming or lay twitching and mumbling on the cobblestones. Later, some among those watching from windows along Keelmakers’ Row would say that black and blue flames in the forms of men sprang up and burned around the scene, as if passersby from some street not fully of this world, some street laid over Keelmakers’ Row, had been drawn to the moment and were gathering there to watch what happened next.

“The Dragonbane is wanted for crimes against the imperium,” shouted the King’s man. “You will not stand in the path of imperial justice.”

“I already am. You want the Dragonbane, the only path is through me.”

“Gil!”

He spared a momentary glance back at the call. Egar, striding forward, stooping to scavenge a short-sword from one of the stricken men-at-arms. Limping badly.

Ringil raised a warding hand. “I got this, Eg.”

“Gil, it’s not that simple. The fucking dwenda are here, right here in—”

“I know all about it, Eg. Let’s kill one thing at a time, shall we?”

Twitch of motion at the corner of his eye. The King’s man, readying himself—he was going to do it anyway. Something in Ringil grinned like a skull at the knowledge.

“Wait!”

Dull clink and skitter of a dropped blade on the cobbles. The King’s man’s eyes flinched sideways at the sound. He looked suddenly puzzled.

And then the Dragonbane was at Ringil’s side, turned in to him, pressing one warm, heavy hand on Gil’s chest and shoulder. Face in close enough to brush stubble on Ringil’s cheek.

“Just hold it, Gil,” he muttered. “There’s another way we can do this.”

Ringil shot him a narrow look. “There is?”

Past the bulk of the Dragonbane’s shoulder, he saw the King’s man twitch again. He raised the point of the Ravensfriend, admonishing.

“You. Don’t even fucking think about it.”

Egar turned about and faced the imperial. He raised his empty hands.

“Enough,” he said, in formally enunciated Tethanne whose fluency made Ringil blink. “I submit. You may bring me before your Emperor.”

The King’s man was still staring hard at Ringil, at the cold, lifted finger of the Ravensfriend. An imperial man-at-arms crawled about on the floor, gibbering and clutching at the cobbles as if he might fall off them and into some waiting void. Weeping and bleating cries soaked through the air from the others. The Ravensfriend gleamed.

“Gil!”

Ringil shrugged and lowered his sword.

“All right,” he said. “This, I’ve got to see.”