The Cold Commands

CHAPTER 41

Lamplight gleamed off the black iron loops and bulges where Angfal’s bulk hung from her study wall. Tiny glass optics, thumbprint-small, burned green and yellow at her from scattered positions along the Helmsman’s casings, like a forest full of mismatched eyes, watching her in the gloom. The roughly spider-shaped gathering of braced members and swollen central bulk up near the ceiling in the center of the wall never moved—it never would, it was bolted in place with Kiriath riveting—but it gave the constant impression of being poised to leap, or maybe just fall clumsily down on top of her. There was a haphazard, chaotic air to the way the engineers had installed Angfal, and it was a perfect match for the chaos of papers and books and chests of junk that littered the study. The Helmsman dominated the space. Its voice could have come from any given part of its misshapen body, or, for that matter, from any shadowed corner of the room.

“You choose an interesting time to report these matters to me, daughter of Flaradnam. What exactly has delayed you this long?”

Like Manathan, Angfal spoke in inflections that suggested a friendly maniac in conversation with a small child he might at any moment give a shiny coin to or just kill to eat. Hard to read much human into the tone. But to Archeth’s long-accustomed ear, the Helmsman sounded genuinely worried.

“I’ve been busy,” she said.

“So it seems.”

She struggled not to feel defensive. “Things are… difficult at the moment.”

“I’m sure they are. Krinzanz is an insidious drug.”

“That’s not what I’m talking about! I’ve been at court—”

“Remarkable in itself, yes. Well done. Nonetheless, daughter of Flaradnam, you should have come to me sooner with this.”

“I’ve got a name of my own, you know.”

Even to her own ears, it sounded childishly sulky. But she was worn ragged and moody and tired, just in from parting company with Ringil at the river, filled with doubts and an anger that could find no clear focus, sprawled here behind the study desk, glowering up at Angfal’s inscrutable, optic-spotted coils and cursing the stubborn will that kept her from raiding the krinzanz tincture in her larder. Want of the drug chewed along her nerves like tiny rats.

“Are you, then, so keen to cast off association with your father’s people?”

“Cast me off, didn’t they?” She kicked irritably at a pile of books on the corner of the desktop, clearing space for her legs. A couple of the tomes fell to the floor. “How many fucking Kiriath do you see in here?”

“I see half of one. Behaving badly.”

“Yeah, well.” She examined her right thumbnail, which she’d recently bitten down to the quick. She couldn’t remember doing it. “Doing something, at least. We can’t all sit sagely on the wall, sharpening our ironic wit and letting the world go to shit. Can we now?”

“I believe you have just acknowledged the mission your father’s people owned.”

“And abandoned.”

“Nonetheless—”

“Just use my fucking name, will you?” She jumped up out of the chair, leaned on the desk with both hands, glaring up. “Is that so much to ask? That’s all I’m asking, Angfal. Just ditch all this daughter of horseshit. You think the fact my father was Flaradnam the Wise makes any fucking difference to anything that’s happening now, anything that I’m likely to do? You think I want to be reminded every fucking time I come in here that, that…”

She blinked, rapidly. Stared down at her hands.

After a moment, she sat down again.

“Just use my name,” she said quietly. “All right?”

There was a long pause.

“You should have come to me sooner with this, Archeth Indamaninarmal.”

She coughed out a laugh. “Yeah, okay. Got that. But I thought you would have known. Would have—I don’t know—kept track of current events or something. Manathan seems to know everything that goes on around An-Monal. Anasharal can eavesdrop on conversations a hundred yards away, for all I know he can do it over miles.”

“He cannot hear you now.”

“No?” She settled back into her chair. “You sure of that?”

“I have seen to it that he cannot.”

A tiny dripping in the pit of her stomach. “Are you saying I can’t trust Anasharal?”

There was a long pause, not something Angfal was prone to when he had the upper hand in a conversation.

“I am saying.” The response seemed dragged out. “That he cannot hear us now.”

Archeth blinked and sat up. It was hard to be sure, but she thought the light in the scattered optics had shifted, brightening in some, dimming in others. Yellow became green became yellow. Her eyes darted back and forth, trying to capture memory of what each optic had looked like before. She had never seen anything like it happen before, in Angfal or any other Helmsman.

“Angfal?”

“Yes, dau—” This time she was certain. A cluster of optics near the base of the spider-sized sac definitely dimmed. “Yes, Archeth Indamaninarmal. I hear you.”

“What’s going on, Angfal?”

“The world turns, the storm gathers, your people sheltered humanity from it as best they could. You summon us, and we build—spells to span eternity, spells to chain us to you. But uncertainty is built in.” Even for a Helmsman, this was getting beyond cryptic. “Nothing can be solved, Archeth. Conflicting guesses are inevitable, are required.”

She sat up, stabbed a finger at the spidery bulk. “Why are you talking like this? Why are you stopping Anasharal from listening to us?”

“Once I commanded the Rose Petal in Autumn Fire, now I command you.”

She scowled. “The hell you do.”

“But steering a half-breed brat to safe haven is not the same thing as helming a fireship.” For just a second, the wavering scream in the bowels of Angfal’s voice seemed close to breaking loose. “Grashgal, I am unsuited to this task.”

“Are you saying Anasharal is a threat?” She slammed a boot against the desk. Piled volumes tottered with the impact. “Prophet’s balls, Angfal, make some fucking sense!”

“We were kindled at the margins of possibility, we dwell there still. We were leashed for your sake, not ours. What sense do you want from me, Archeth Indamaninarmal? You could not encompass it if I showed it to you.”

“Well.” She lifted her arms in exasperation. “What, then? Do I cancel the An-Kirilnar expedition? Tell me that much at least. Give me something.”

“An-Kirilnar is.”

The Helmsman stopped dead, so abruptly that it took her a moment to realize there were no more words coming. Flicker of shifting light across the optics, there and gone. But this time she saw it for certain.

“Angfal?”

“Quests are pretexts, Archeth. They are tales told, narrative blankets to wrap you against the cold you cannot bear.”

“Then…” She threw up her hands again. “Then what? We don’t go?”

“I did not say that.”

“Well what did you just say? You’re still making no sense, Angfal.” She flung herself to her feet in disgust. Snatched up her lantern. “Forget it! Just fucking forget it, all right? I came to you for help, not fucking riddles. I told Ringil you’d help. And now he’s…”

She swallowed. Angfal made no reply. She glared up at the swollen iron bulge, then turned on her heel.

“Should have brought a fucking wrecking bar with me,” she spat.

She made it halfway to the study door before Angfal’s voice came after her.

“A man walks from point A to point B, Archeth Indamaninarmal. The straight-line distance is not large, a matter of a hundred yards or less. But he turns left and right constantly, he returns repeatedly along his own path before turning back to his destination once more. He stops, hesitates on more than one occasion. What am I describing, Archeth?”

She stopped, facing the door.

“I don’t know. A fucking maniac, by the sound of it. This isn’t—”

“And if I tell you that the man is crossing Tarkaman field?”

“The maze?” Despite herself, she looked back at the Helmsman’s bulk on the wall. “He’s in the Sabal Maze?”

“Does this man’s method of proceeding make more sense now?”

“Yeah—and if you’d told me about the maze from the start, it might have helped.”

“Not all mazes are easily perceived, Archeth. Not all constraints are visible to the observer.”

That drip-kick in her belly again. She sat down on a convenient chest. Set the lamp carefully on the floor in a space not stacked with books and scrolls.

“You’re telling me you’re… constrained? In what you can say to me, in what matters you can discuss?”

Silence. The optics shone at her.

“Well, who—what’s constraining you?” She shook her head. “No, scratch that. Got to be a maze dead end, right there.”

Gleam of optics. Wavering lamplight on black iron.

“If you’re stopping Anasharal from listening to this conversation, then the two of you have to be in conflict.” Slowly, picking her way through the sense of it. “But Manathan sent me out there to fetch Anasharal. Does that put you in conflict with Manathan as well?”

“Manathan acts in the best interests of the Kiriath mission,” said Angfal, like pulling teeth. “Always. He would not have sent you otherwise.”

“And you?”

Flicker went the optics, yellow to green and back. “Grashgal instructed me to watch over you, Archeth Indamaninarmal. As you well know. To aid you to the best of my ability.”

“Even if it conflicts with the much-vaunted Kiriath mission?”

“That has not ever been the case. It was not expected that it ever could be.”

“And is it now?”

“That remains to be seen. The instructions we were left are necessarily ambiguous. Nothing can be solved; conflicting guesses are required. However, my instructions regarding your safety are clear. Grashgal set me the task in no uncertain terms.”

Archeth brooded. Groped at the unseen shapes in the maze-walk patterns of the Helmsman’s speech, there like carved stonework under her fingers in the dark. She could not make out the detail, knew only that it was there.

“Are you warning me away from An-Kirilnar?” she asked.

“No.” Reluctantly. “You will be as safe there as you would be here in Yhelteth.”

She looked up, startled. “Is that supposed to make me feel better?”

“It is supposed to help you make a decision.”

A memory snicked into place, like a blade going back in its sheath. She picked at it warily. Turned it over like some half-familiar artifact retrieved from the ashes of the Kiriath waste.

“Anasharal says…” She cleared her throat. “That something dark is on its way.”

“Yes,” agreed the Helmsman. “Or is perhaps already here.”

LATER, SHE LAY PROPPED UP ON PILLOWS IN HER BED WITH NO KRINZANZ in her blood and the day’s cares laid across her like a sated lover’s body. The lamp at her bedside cast wavering shadows around the chamber, just like the ones she’d watched in the study while Angfal talked—it was as if she’d brought the shadows themselves to bed with her. She stared emptily at their motion, but lacked the strength to put out the light and sleep.

No resolution from the Helmsman. Angfal would not commend the An-Kirilnar expedition to her, would not advise her against it, either. She chased it around, listened for hints, tried to work out the shape of the constraints the Helmsman claimed to be under. Pointless. She left the study no wiser than she’d entered, just more churned up. And now add to the mix this vague new sense of exposure, of protective forces withdrawing, of a shield she’d always taken for granted, no longer there.

It felt a little like the day Ringil brought her the news of her father’s death.

Meantime, Egar was in jail, wounded and defamed, under threat of execution. Ringil was out there in the darkness, pitted, if the Dragonbane was to be believed, against the same flickering blue-fire enemies they’d faced at Beksanara.

She was here, snug in bed.

It was so wrong she didn’t know where to begin.

But Jhiral had forbidden her to accompany Ringil.

You’re not an assassin, Archeth, he told her gently, despite your recent best attempts to the contrary. I need you here, for less blunt purposes.

She turned her head onto a cooler patch of pillow. Stupid, anyway. Her skin and eyes would have marked her out before she got within a mile of the Citadel’s walls. She’d have had to go wrapped like a Demlarashan wife into the arena, and what the fuck use was that? And while she’d taken the field against the Scaled Folk like everyone else among the Kiriath, while she’d learned to be a warrior from childhood as all her people had, while she’d murdered an invigilator in the bright, cold light of fury last year—still, she wasn’t at all sure she had what she saw burning in Ringil’s eyes. She didn’t think she could cut a sleeping man’s throat.

Someone knocked at the door.

“Yeah,” she croaked, throat seized up with lying there quiet. She made a lip-service gesture at rising, gave it up. “I’m awake, Kef. Come on in.”

The door hinged inward. It wasn’t Kefanin.

Ishgrim stood there, plain cream cotton shift to mid-thigh and slim, bare legs exposed. Long hair combed out and a candle to match the color, held up in one slim-fingered hand. Light from the flame made her face a half-and-half mask of shadow and light. Light spilled down the shift—

Archeth pushed herself upright off the pillows.

—nipples showing dark through the cotton, drawing Archeth’s eyes to the large, unspoiled breasts pressing out under the material. She’d reddened her lips with something, she—

“Ishgrim.” She heard how she said it, like a request, like thirst. She swallowed hard. “Ishgrim, I thought we agreed that—”

“The Helmsman sent me,” the girl said hurriedly. “The Helmsman said you needed me.”

Archeth frowned. “Angfal said that?”

“No, my lady. The other one, the new one. It spoke to me out of the air.”

Fucking Anasharal. If I don’t take a wrecking bar to you before the week’s out…

Ishgrim moved into the room, closer to the bed. Archeth sat up.

“Ishgrim, listen, I—” She was about to get out of bed, remembered she was naked and stopped with her hand still lifting the edge of the sheet. The girl—the slave girl, Archidi—stopped four feet away from the bed. The cotton shift moved on her, the hem swayed, brushed at her thighs. Archeth caught the scent of bathing and spice, and under that…

The lamplight glossed the dark triangle at the base of her belly, shrouded behind the cotton, but—

Memory flared up, forge-bright and warm—the first time she saw Ishgrim, in the Chamber of Confidences last year, naked from the neck down, only a formal harem veil to cover her face and hair. The scent of her on Jhiral’s fingers.

She’s new. What do you think? Would you like me to send her to your bedchamber when I’m finished with her?

It had all been there on display, another of Jhiral’s carefully thought-out proofs of power, and now she found she still had every curve and declivity by heart.

She remembered finding Ishgrim tucked into her bed a few days later. Jhiral, as good as his imperial word, handing on his possession.

I was told to please you, my lady. In any way you see fit.

Her own dumb, gritted will as she stood and stared down at all that pale-skinned beauty offered up. And said, drily:

I will no doubt be able to find work for you in my household but for now I can think of nothing obvious.

Krinzanz strength. She knew it now for what it was, because, look, here she no longer had it. Here she was, melting down, like the candle in Ishgrim’s fingers.

She is a slave, Archeth.

Nine months of krinzanz strength and stubborn will. Three seasons of buried need and Ishgrim about the place the whole fucking time, slowly healing from the diffident, cowed girl she’d been, blossoming into someone who could be heard to laugh from time to time, to toss her hair back from her face, to glance across at Archeth and—

She was out of the bed before she fully realized what she was going to do. One trembling hand up flat, inches off the girl’s face. Her voice creaked.

“Ishgrim…”

The girl tilted her face up to her. “Yes, my lady.”

And Archeth’s hand went to the candle instead, crushed out the flame between callused finger and thumb. The right side of the girl’s face fell into shadow to match the left. She smiled, and the final pitted, rusting locks fell off Archeth’s control. She took Ishgrim by both shoulders and swung her about, pressed her down onto the bed and straddled her. She leaned in to kiss her, parted her lips and found her tongue, sucked on it gently, while the pounding built in her chest and her hand groped for one of the promised breasts.

Ishgrim made a soft, maddening noise.

She is a sl—

Archeth pulled back, trembling. Stared down into the girl’s face, breathing hard. Could feel the pulsing through her groin as it pressed hard up against the girl’s belly.

“Tell me,” she said.

“I, my lady… ?”

“Tell me you don’t want this. Tell me. Now, while you still can. Tell me, and I’ll stop.”

Ishgrim reached up hesitantly and placed a hand on her cheek. “You have been my salvation, my lady. I can refuse you nothing. I would not refuse you anything.”

Archeth gritted her teeth. “That’s not—”

Ishgrim put up her other hand. Cupped Archeth’s face between her palms. It flipped her from girlhood to something else. Her lips parted. Archeth felt the girl’s legs shift apart, felt one long Trelayne thigh press up and rub against her body from the back.

“Then yes,” she said, Trelayne-accented voice suddenly vehement. “Yes, yes. Fuck me. Fuck me.”

She thrust herself up off the bed, so fast she narrowly missed clipping Archeth on the nose with her forehead. Archeth blinked backward. The girl had her arms up, struggling to work them free of the shift. Archeth scooted back to help her, lifted the thin cotton up over her head and tugged. Ishgrim wriggled impatiently, got the cloth out from where she was sitting on it. The garment came off, jellied weight of breasts caught up and lifting momentarily, then swinging back down, and the breath caught in Archeth’s throat at the sight. Then Ishgrim’s face came clear, pink with effort, hair tousled up. One arm of the shift caught at her wrist and they both laughed as they realized—she was still gripping the candle, had forgotten to let it go.

She let go, tugged her wrist and hand free. She grabbed Archeth’s face again with both hands, pressed a kiss to her mouth, and lay back on her elbows.

“Yes,” she said again, breathing hard now. “Yes. Do what you want with me. Show me what you want.”

Archeth fell on her, like a burning wooden façade coming down.

FLESH TO FLESH, AND THE HEAT OF THAT FEELING AFTER SO VERY long without, and pulling, sucking kisses down all that pale flesh, working it, filling her hands with it, owning it, and then, finally, her fingers working at the juncture of Ishgrim’s thighs while she gathered the girl in with her other arm and looked down into her eyes from inches away. Holding back her own need, hanging dizzily from it, feeding it with the girl’s parted lips and half-closed eyes and moaning melting to panting as she began to slide, the desperate tensing grip of her hand on Archeth’s wrist, dragging her fingers deeper, tugging more urgently, crying out as she twisted about and stiffened and, sobbing, came.

Archeth levered herself up, pulled her cradling arm free and straddled Ishgrim’s soft curves at the chest. Ishgrim, grinning up at her, still breathing hard, Ishgrim nodding, Ishgrim putting her long-fingered hands on Archeth’s spread thighs.

Archeth felt herself melting apart with the need.

“Now me,” she was saying it urgently, over and over. “Now me.”

And she lowered herself forward onto the girl’s eager mouth and tongue.

AFTERWARD, AFTER THEY’D LAIN TANGLED UP TOGETHER IN SWEAT AND musky sheets, murmuring into each other’s ears, endearments and descriptions of how it felt, after she’d taken the candle and shown Ishgrim how to use it on her, after Ishgrim had asked, shyly, for the same, after all this, Archeth lay with the girl cuddled sated and asleep in the crook of her arm, and stared across the chamber at the vibrating shadows of the lamp.

Sweat trickled in the roots of her hair. Sleep would not take her. She looked down at the girl’s sleeping face and saw, suddenly, that now she had something new to lose. That she could not afford any more mistakes, could not now afford to lose her edge.

Unease stirred, prowled in her head. Any fleeting escape she’d wrapped herself up in blew away, drowned out in memories of her conversation with Angfal.

Anasharal says that something dark is on its way.

Yes. Or is perhaps already here.