The Cold Commands

CHAPTER 40

Half a mile south and east of the Boulevard of the Ineffable Divine, the Citadel’s nighttime influence was a palpable thing, falling over the dourly named streets as solidly as the sweep of its sundial shadow did by day. There were no brothels, taverns, or pipe houses advertising themselves as such, and carvings of opened scriptural tomes stood in every public space, lit by guttering torches bracketed in black iron. Those few women you saw out of doors were wrapped in muddy, monochrome robes that draped them like tents and covered their faces as if they were corpses. The mood in the street was somber and watchful; you didn’t see much violence or laughter. Surly-looking bearded men went about in pairs with Revelation insignia pinned on their tunics and short wooden clubs swinging from their belts, making sure no one was having a good time.

“All since the war,” Taran Alman muttered, apparently feeling the need to apologize. “Ten years back, you didn’t have any of this.”

He might well have been telling the truth—Noyal Rakan certainly nodded agreement, but then again, ten years ago Rakan would scarcely have been shaving. Ringil really couldn’t say either way, nor did he much care. He’d passed through the southside a few times during the war, on the way back and forth from one deployment or another, or out to visit the Kiriath at An-Monal; but he’d always ridden, had never had occasion to dismount. And on broader furlough in the city, he’d never strayed farther south than Archeth’s place on the Boulevard.

It didn’t look as if he’d missed much.

“Up ahead.” The other King’s man, the local expert, nodded forward to where a pair of Citadel enforcers swaggered in the splashes of light from torches and shop frontages. “Alley on the right, after the chandler’s. Let the prick patrol get well ahead first.”

They dawdled about, affecting interest in an ironmonger’s wares spread out on blankets in the street. Four men in dark, unremarkable garb, faces grimed and stubbled, not rich, not poor, not anything you’d think out of the ordinary unless you were looking for it closely. They’d been on foot since the river—a King’s Reach agent there had taken their horses, provided them with nondescript cloaks, and advised Ringil to wear his over the jut of the Ravensfriend. It gave him the look of an unusually tall hunchback, and if anyone stopped to actually think about it, they’d know well enough what was shrouded under the garment—Rakan, Alman, and the other King’s man all wore visible swords at their hip anyway—but chances were no one would bother. The main thing was to cover the gleaming iridescent Kiriath alloys worked into the Ravensfriend’s scabbard and hilt.

The Citadel men forged ahead of them, glowering about and occasionally accosting startled citizens. They stopped to upbraid a woman carrying water canisters with naked hands and the cuffs of her robe rolled up. Rakan crouched to examine a pair of ornate battle-axes laid out separately from the pots and pans and yard tools that made up most of the ironmonger’s display.

“Blessed weapons, my lord.” The ironmonger moved in, sensing a sale. “Consecrated for the war against the Scaled Folk by Grand Invigilator Envar Menkarak himself. See his sigil, carved here upon the shafts. It gives protection to the wielder against dragon venom, the plague, and arrow shafts dipped in filth. Sold me by a veteran of Shenshenath and Rajal Beach fallen on hard times. And if he survived Rajal, what must that say?”

Ringil, who’d survived Rajal Beach himself, rolled his eyes and touched Rakan lightly on the shoulder. Up the street, the Citadel men had tired of barracking the woman and were making their way into a press of street sellers farther along. Time to move.

Rakan straightened up and murmured some demurral about price.

“But you have yet to make me a price, my lord,” the ironmonger yelped, offended. “What is fair and just? What is the holy shield of the Revelation worth to you?”

Ringil leaned in. “I was at Rajal, my friend. I was there. I saw Akal’s Ninth Holy Scourge meet the dragons at the end breakwater.” He smiled unpleasantly at the man. “They melted. All of them, blessed or not.”

The ironmonger wet his lips, preparing some reply. His eyes darted to the scar on Ringil’s face, the hump of the sword pommel under his cloak.

“I don’t want any trouble, my lord,” he decided.

“No, you don’t.”

“I honor the service you gave to Revelation and Empire. I repeat only what the weapons’ owner told me. And the sigil is genuine, vouched for.”

“Yeah.”

Ringil turned away and followed his companions up the street to the mouth of the alley. The King’s man shot him an irritated glance as they turned the corner.

“Not smart, that. He’ll remember.”

“Remember what?” A harsh sneering in Ringil’s voice—the memories of Rajal Beach had stirred him up more than he realized. “A pissed-off war veteran in a cheap cloak? I doubt that’s much of a freak occurrence around here.”

The King’s man shrugged and turned away. “Suit yourself. In here.”

Along the alley, he made a coded knocking on the narrow wooden door of a silent, darkened frontage. They waited. After a longish moment, the door opened on greased hinges and a burly figure in tunic and butcher’s apron gestured them inside.

“Go on through,” he told them. “Stairs at the back. Eighth and thirteenth are dodgy.”

They went down a long, darkened corridor that stank of blood and grease, and up the rickety wooden stairs, counting. There were rooms beyond, candlelit, with pig carcasses hung and cuts of meat laid out on tables. Men worked away with knives, carefully not looking up as they passed. The King’s man led them through it all to a back room lit only by bandlight falling in through a pair of broad sash windows. Bare boards, a few grain sacks stacked in corners, and a big wooden tub of what looked in the bluish light to be pig’s blood and offal. The King’s man waited until they assembled around him.

“All right, this is it,” he said tensely. “We go out one of these, and drop. I’ll take you across the rooftops until we hit the Citadel curtain wall. After that, you’re on your own. It’s bedrock there, the crag the place is built on. Plenty of handholds, but it’s a long climb. You sure you want to take that bloody great spike you’re carrying up with you?”

“It’s lighter than it looks,” Ringil told him.

The King’s man pursed his lips. “Still going to get in the way going over. There’s a chink in the battlements, old damage from the last time the Drowned Daughters beat the drum. But it’s narrow, and so are the corridors up to the invigilator levels. Blade that long on your back, I don’t know if I’d—”

“I don’t care what you’d do. If this goes bad, I’m not going up against the Citadel’s men-at-arms with nothing longer on me than a sneak blade.”

The King’s man glanced at Taran Alman for a moment. Alman shrugged. Gestured—get on with it. The King’s man grimaced.

“All right, then. Your choice. Now listen carefully. The senior invigilators’ quarters are on the far side of the keep so…”

He knew. He’d studied the floor plans of the place, along with the charcoal sketch of Menkarak’s face—smug-looking fucker was Egar’s passing comment—for a solid couple of hours before he left the cell. He knew the route, the probable exposure points, the few available bolt-hole options. He had it all by heart.

Piece of cake, he’d lied briskly to Archeth and Rakan as they went out to the stables together. I broke into tougher nests than this robbing krinzanz storehouses in harbor end when I was a kid.

Yeah—you didn’t have the dwenda prowling around harbor end, snapped Archeth, not fooled. Whatever stopped Jhiral’s assassins is going to be waiting for you, too. You watch yourself in there, Gil. Don’t you get stupid.

Who, me?

He’d winked at Rakan, but the young captain only looked away, troubled. And then the three of them took their mounts out to the palace gate to meet Taran Alman in shared, somber silence.

“…is your best way out as well,” The King’s man finished up. “This side of the keep is mostly slave quarters and storage, so the watch is pretty light. Handful of men, spread thin. There’s supposed to be a sentry posted near the cracked battlement, but he won’t be on site tonight.”

“Remarkable. And how exactly do you know that?”

The King’s man nodded at the wooden tub. “Because he’s in there. I put him there myself, six hours ago. Your path has been laid, northman. It remains only for you to walk it.”

Ringil spared a fastidious glance for the tub, playing it mostly for Rakan. He would have given a lot for half an hour alone with the Throne Eternal captain right now, preferably in a room without a corpse and a little better furnished than this, but, well, at a pinch, those grain sacks over in the corner, for example…

His mouth quirked. He put the image away.

Peeled his cloak, unslung the Ravensfriend, dressed himself again with the sword and scabbard out in the open. Went to the nearest window and dragged up the sash a solid three feet. It moved as if on well-oiled wheels, no more noise than a gusting wind. The cooking-fire smells of the city blew in, competing with the stink of slaughter already in the room. Ringil peered out.

The nearest roof was a short drop below, backed right up to the wall of the building they stood in. The wider roofscape extended off into darkness, blocks and slopes, and narrow gaps they would evidently have to leap. Barely visible beyond, the Citadel loomed on its crag like some huge, hunched vulture, roosting.

He sighed. “Come on, then. Let’s get on with it.”

FLEET-FOOTED ACROSS THE JUMBLED TOPOGRAPHY OF THE ROOFS, JUST the two of them now, Ringil following the King’s man, close as a second shadow. Flat roof, sloping roof, garden space, gap—the route snaked back and forth, seeking advantage. In and out of shelter against chimneys and stumpy separating walls, pausing crouched while dim figures moved about or voices came and went on other rooftops in the smoky gloom. Leaping up and onward as soon as they were clear.

Once, they heard a young woman’s voice, singing soft and haunting from a window under the eaves, lullaby or lament, Ringil couldn’t tell. And once, huddled against a cooling chimney stack, they heard a fragment of a children’s tale come up the vent from the hearthside below.

… and when the handsome young Emperor heard this, he saw at once, like a blind man given sudden sight, that she had been true all along, and he was ashamed for his anger. Her quiet constancy melted the cold out of his heart, and he went down on one knee to fit the fated ring upon her finger. And her father, the blacksmith, was freed immediately from his bondage, brought to the palace, and honored for his faithful service with a medallion of rank bestowed by the Emperor himself before all the lords and ladies of the court. And everywhere in that great city, there was rejoicing in the justice that a common man and his daughter could…

Pressure on his arm. The King’s man nodded, and they were off again. Leaping four-foot gaps across narrow alleys and the heads of people who never looked up. Balancing along the roof spine of a derelict storehouse, where the slates on either side were either gone to naked rafters, or too degraded to risk walking over. A couple of small fires glowed below in the ruined space, cloaked figures gathered close around; mumble of voices. Smoke coiled up through the rafters, blew in Ringil’s face. He gagged and tried not to cough. They were cooking something pretty awful down there.

Now the Citadel and its crag blocked out the whole sky ahead. They cleared one final alleyway, a little wider than the others, a five-foot leap this time, and landed on a shallow sloping roof, huddled in against the rising crag the Citadel was built on. They went up the slope, crouched low. The King’s man raised his hand, fist clenched. Gil eased to a halt and peered forward. There was a final, treacherous three-foot gap between the top end of the roof and the skirts of the crag. The King’s man perched near the edge, getting his breath back. He nodded over to where a collection of gnarled bushes grew out of the rock.

“You make the jump here,” he said softly. “Grab the bushes. They should hold—”

“Should? Fucking should?”

It got him a quick, involuntary grin. The King’s man leaned a little closer, finger raised close to his lips.

“Will hold,” he amended. “Done it myself a couple of times. There’s a slope beyond, it’s scree and dust, and it’s steep, but you can just about stand on it. The first holds are right above you. And up you go.”

Ringil tipped back his head to take in the bandlit loom of the crag, the way it bellied out just below the battlements over their heads. Looked like about a hundred feet. Mostly flat, then harder work toward the top. He flexed his hands a couple of times.

“You got your signal?” the King’s man asked him.

He nodded. Touched his belt where the Kiriath flare was tied on.

“Remember how to use it?”

“Indelibly.” Archeth had walked him through how you coaxed the thing to life a dozen times or more, ignoring his protests that he’d seen Grashgal and Flaradnam use the devices often enough in the war. “Just keep your eyes peeled.”

“Yeah, we’ll be watching.” The King’s man did something peculiar with his hand at chest height. Only later would Ringil realize it had been a horse-tribe salute. “All right, then. Whenever you’re ready.”

Ringil backed down the roof a few feet, took the run up, and leapt. Momentary flight, the black gap yawning below him, and then the bushes took him in their rough, slapped-face embrace. He screwed up his eyes to protect them against gouging—

Grab!

His hands closed, he got thin twigs and started to slip. Grabbed again, got a decent-sized branch, planted his feet, felt one foot slide out from under, grabbed again, got a second branch, feet again, got purchase—

Hauled himself in.

He hung there for a moment, breathing. Maneuvered himself around the bushes and onto the slope the King’s man had mentioned. Discovered that steep was something of a euphemism.

He spared one accusing glare back to where the other man crouched on the roof watching, but the distance and darkness made it impossible to make out expressions. He gave it up, found the first hold, and swung himself up into the climb.

IT WENT EASILY ENOUGH AT FIRST. WIND AND RAIN DOWN THE NUMBERLESS march of centuries had sculpted baroque cups and folds and ledges into the crag. There was space to brace himself and rest his hands; once or twice there were places he could actually stand on his boot tips, leaning into the wall with his sweaty forehead cooling against the rock and his aching arms at his sides. Small, wiry bushes grew from outcrops and gave him extra purchase. A basin-sized cup presented itself and he was able to get his whole arm in up to the elbow—he leaned jauntily there for a while, one boot jammed in a crack below, the other swinging free. Peered down past his toes and saw how far he’d come.

Piece of piss. Nice quiet little climb.

In his youth, he’d scrambled and clambered around the ornately worked architecture of Trelayne’s noble houses and decaying warehouse districts, with harbor-end toughs and the City Watch in cursing pursuit as often as not. In the war, he’d scaled the cliffs at Demlarashan to escape a reptile peon horde and had run climbed reconnaissance in the mountains of Gergis and the Kiriath wastes with high-caste Scaled Folk hunting him. He was pretty much nerveless when it came to heights and dubious holds. More dangerous things were usually trying to kill him.

Twenty feet below the Citadel battlements, the rock bellied out and the going got suddenly tougher. The cups and ledges shrank to grudging finger-width purchase; the folds became vertical and smooth. He’d expected something like this—it was the same kind of rock as in Demlarashan, so he’d seen it before. But the darkness made it hard to pick a route except by touch, the angle he had to lean back at took an increasing toll on hands already numbed and aching, and his imminent arrival at the battlements meant he could not afford much noise.

He came over the curve of the belly, panting, clinging by fingertips, scrabbling with one boot for a bracing hold, and the other leg hanging heavily down. Sweat in his eyes, fingers slipping by tiny fractions each time he grabbed—he spotted the jagged crack in the battlements, saw he’d come too far over to the left. Between where he was and where he needed to be, the bellied rock of the crag extended smooth and whitened in the bandlight, smugly devoid of decent features. Oh, okay, there was a crack over there in its surface, relic presumably of the same eruption and earthshaking that had split the battlement stone above, but it was a long fucking way off. Fingers slipping now, he lashed about with his foot, stubbed a toe badly on a spur, lashed again and got momentary purchase, pushed and leapt for the crack—Missed.

He saw his fingers brush the lip of the crack, saw them fail to grip, and his mind went blank. Rush of rock past his eyes, the kick of his guts in his throat—

Something dark, something cold—reaching out.

Salt in the wind, said a high, chilly voice somewhere. Out on the marsh.

And later, he’d swear he felt thin, freezing fingers wrap around his wrist, jerk his hand upward to the safety of the hold.

THE CLOUD ACROSS HIS MIND CLEARED, AS IF BLOWN AWAY BY STRONG winds. Deep pulsing in his neck and chest. He was hanging from the crack in the rock by one hand, swung over to the right, both feet jammed awkwardly in below. He had no idea how he’d done it.

Never mind how you did it, Gil. Move!

Hand over hand, up the crack, leaning right, boots stuffed in below at whatever twisted angle he could manage, fighting his body’s attempts to hinge out sideways over the drop. Five feet of climb, and then he could reach up and clamp one hand onto the first of the fractured, dressed stone blocks in the battlement wall. He found a place where an entire block had pulled loose and tumbled downward, leaving a gap-toothed hole in the stonework. Above it, the wall had slumped apart along the line of the fracture. He got a grip with both hands, heaved himself into the gap as far as his chest, then hauled the rest of his body wearily after. He squeezed himself sideways into the space.

“Piece of piss.” He was panting it to himself, cackling quietly. “Nice, quiet. Little climb.”

He wedged his way upward between the fractured ends of the stonework, stopping every other move to free up the Ravensfriend’s sharp end. Finally, he could poke his head over the battlements. Empty triangular courtyard below, a dry fountain in the center, and a cloistered walk on the far side. Memory of the map told him there was a corridor exit off to the left.

As promised, no sentry in sight.

He gave himself a minute or so to regather fighting strength and poise; then he swung bodily over the wall and dropped cat-footed to the courtyard floor. He slipped rapidly to the cloistered wall, and there the shadows swallowed him.