The Cold Commands

CHAPTER 44

He stumbles for a long time across a desolate marsh plain strewn with the living heads of dwenda victims, and into a bitter wind. Men, women, children, even some dogs—all cemented to tree stumps around him, all alive to some degree, though few are probably sane anymore. There are tens of thousands of them. Their voices tangle around his knees like marsh mist, come mumbling and weeping and sometimes screaming up to his ears. Sometimes what they say is intelligible. He tries not to hear them.

…Mummy I don’t like it I don’t like it Mummy make it stop, I don’t like it make…

She’s about five or six. Long rat’s tails of muddy hair plastered on her face. Voice a thin, hopeless moan. If the mother she’s calling for is with her, she has long since stopped talking back to her daughter in anything but screams or gibbering.

He marches doggedly on, waiting for her voice to fade out like the others. There is nothing he can do. There is nothing he can do for any of these people. The marsh stretches to the horizon in all directions. There is water underfoot, everywhere. And as long as there is water, the roots will draw sustenance, and as long as the roots draw sustenance, the lives spiked atop them will endure.

Seethlaw told him this.

Is it any worse, Seethlaw asked him at Ennishmin, than the cages at the eastern gate in Trelayne, where your transgressors hang in agony for days at a time as an example to the masses?

He seemed genuinely not to understand Ringil’s horror.

Seethlaw is out there somewhere now. Ringil can hear him from time to time, howling from the horizon, keeping pace.

He shivers, with cold and the traceries of memory. He puts one foot in front of the other and does not fall down. He stares at the horizon ahead. His wounded eye and face seemed to have healed, but into what he is not sure. He remembers putting his hand to the wound, some measureless time before, but cannot recall what his fingers touched. And now, whenever his hand twitches upward again, something in him will not let it rise.

He is weaponless, he is cold.

But the cold drives him on.

NOT FOR THE FIRST TIME, HE SAGS TO AN EXHAUSTED HALT. HE DROPS TO his knees in the shallow muddy water and the squelching marsh grass.

Time.

It’s coming again, Risgillen’s revenge. Last time, he screamed at the leaden sky. It didn’t do any good. Now he just stares dully at the nearest heads, defocuses his gaze, tries not to meet their eyes.

Seethlaw’s howling circles closer. He knows he won’t see him yet, but—

He collapses on his side, sobbing like a child. He sees the standing stones as they emerge around him, towering sentinels against the gray sky.

He curls up and awaits his old lover. rrrrrrRingilllllllll…

He flinches from the sound. But it’s too late, too late. He sees a blurred, pale form, bounding inward through the gap between the stones, and Seethlaw, or whatever’s left of him, is on him like a rabid dog. Ringil fends him off weakly, punching, kicking, yelling from a ragged throat. Glimpses of the dwenda’s face, hideous, hacked apart, jaws agape in the mess, one eye gone. He snarls and tears at Ringil’s legs, severs hamstrings. He bites off Ringil’s fingers in knuckled chunks, then what’s left of his flailing, mutilated hands. Blood gouts from the ragged-boned stumps, but Ringil has already learned he can’t pass out, not yet. He draws into himself, bloodied and cringing, like a fetus torn from a womb ahead of time.

Seethlaw capers and snaps and snarls around him, sometimes on two legs, sometimes on four. The dwenda has lost the power of articulate speech, he’s an animate husk, an empty shell of alien rage and hunger and hate.

Eventually, when Gil has nothing left to resist with, no more screaming to give, he circles in and begins to tear at Ringil’s groin and belly. Buries his misshapen head in Ringil’s entrails and worries at his rib cage from within, tearing and snorting.

Raises a bloodied snout and goes, at last, for Ringil’s throat.

Frenzied worrying, a single, merciful crunch.

The pain goes out like lamplight dying, gray sky above, fading to black.

BUT BEYOND DEATH, THERE IS NO RESPITE. RINGIL WAKES, FALLING through thick gray wool, the color of the sky.

Falls, once more, reborn and flailing, into the marsh.

And so it begins again.

HE TWITCHES. HE QUIVERS, CLUTCHING AT DREADFUL WOUNDS HE NO longer has, whimpering. It costs him everything he has just to unfold from his fetal ball.

There’s a distant sound, like a glass fairy falling down a ladder miles away.

Familiar sound.

He stops whimpering and listens.

There again—tumbling, chiming. Coming closer.

Chords off a long-necked mandolin.

Ringil struggles to his hands and knees, heart in his throat at the sound of the music. He crabs about in the marsh mud, staring for its source.

There!

Moving among the stump-mounted heads, moving closer. A slim, brim-hatted figure, taking slow, careful strides in the marsh mud, mandolin held high across his body like some kind of shield. Notes cascade from the instrument, and as the figure gets closer, so the weeping and moaning of the dwenda victims quietens. Ringil, scrabbling into a huddled sitting position and staring, sees how they all close their eyes and their mouths stop moving, as if the figure has laid a comforting hand on each brow as he passes.

Closer yet, the mandolin song reaches out, and Ringil feels tears squirt in his own eyes. The figure comes to a halt in front of him, and stops playing. He crouches to Ringil’s level.

Hjel the Dispossessed.

Beneath the hat brim, the eyes are older, and he thinks he sees more lines in the weather-tanned face, gray in the stubbled beard. But the mischief is still there, the ragged young prince endures. Hjel is still somewhat young.

“Ringil, what the fuck are you doing out here?”

From depths he’d forgotten he owned, Ringil dredges up the corner of a bleak smile. But his voice is a cracked husk.

“Paying a debt, I think.”

“You…” Hjel plucks a single note off the mandolin’s fretboard and it startles away across the marsh. “Oh, ye gods, Gil. Gil! Don’t you—Haven’t you understood? Did I really not teach you well enough?”

Ringil shivers miserably in the wind. “Doesn’t look like it. Not yet, anyway.”

“Gil.” He sets the mandolin on his knee, puts out a hand and touches Ringil’s face. Gil flinches, he can’t help it. “You’re not alone here. You’re not powerless. Didn’t I tell you that? You don’t have to be here.”

“Tell Seethlaw that,” says Ringil, and gags on recollection, eyes skittering out toward the horizon. “He’ll be back soon enough.”

“And if he is?” Hjel stood up. “I told you, Gil: The cold legions wrap around you already—and they are yours to command.”

“Don’t see any fucking legions, Hjel.” Ringil shivers again. “There’s just—”

He stares at the unending ranks of living heads, the thousands he’s stumbled past, the tens of thousands more to the horizon… “No,” he says numbly. “Yes, Gil. Yes. Now get up.”

Hjel’s long hand offered—he grabs it and pulls himself to his feet. The two of them stand together, close. The wind is cold across his face, but the dispossessed prince is blocking some of its force. He smiles grimly at Gil. Clasps his shoulder with his free hand.

“Now do you understand?”

“No.” Shaking his head as if in a trance. “No.”

“You’ve passed through the Dark Gate, Gil. It’s already done. The Aldrain do not know, Kwelgrish and Dakovash buried it deep, but it’s done, it’s paid for.”

Flicker of shadow at the corners of his vision. He saw them again, standing on the jetty beside a previous Hjel. Saw them streaking out toward him like cloud shadow across the ruffled water. Saw them ooze from the street gloom in Hinerion.

Out on the marsh, says the first voice, the boy. Salt in the wind.

He feels a fresh pulse beating in his throat. He stares about him, at the sacrificed and the weeping abandoned, gathered in their tens of thousands.

You’d better run, says the second voice, but he knows, with sudden warm assurance, that the warning is not for him. He can feel a strength growing in his hands like iron tools and the cold is burning off him now, replaced by furnace glow within. He looks at Hjel and sees, in the shadow of the hat brim, the tight grin still on the scavenger prince’s face.

Very distantly, he thinks he hears Seethlaw howl.

His lip curls off his teeth, as if in answer.

Do I look like a fucking slave to you? the third voice asks.

Ringil’s face twists. A muscle in his cheek jumps. He breathes in deeply, out again, and a fresh wind seems to pick up across the plain of weeping, screaming souls. When he speaks, his voice still husks, but there’s a rasp in it now, an ugly edge of purpose.

“Where’s my sword?”

HJEL OPENS THE MARSH WITH THE MANDOLIN, A LONG, SCRAPING chord played out, and the ground seems to funnel away at their feet, a cleft opening, white limestone buttresses backing aside, and a pale path downward. Hjel makes it happen with the same casual gesture and lack of ceremony of a man drawing back a curtain to let in the morning light.

“This way,” he says, gesturing for Ringil to go first.

The path winds down the cleft, water snaking and trickling on the pallid stone on either side, soaking into moss along the cracks and into the clumped grass that lines the base of the rock. There’s a cool, damp scent on the air, but it’s not unpleasant, and the ground under Ringil’s feet is dry; it crunches with every step taken. He is getting somewhere. Hjel is at his back in grim escort, and the walls of the cleft are opening out. A cycle has been broken, somehow, inside him as much as out, and now he walks clear of its shards.

The path emerges in gloom at the bottom of a long, luminous cliff that stretches out of sight to left and right. Ringil has already noticed that for the last few yards of the cleft path, the fissured blocks of limestone on either side have been carved with line upon densely packed line of characters in an alphabet he cannot read, but whose form is hauntingly familiar. Now he tips his head back and sees that the entire vast face of the cliff above him and on either side is worked in the same tireless, angular scrawl, over every inch of its surface.

Hjel stands at his shoulder as he stares upward.

“The ikinri ’ska,” he says simply. “All of it. Preserved, by the Originators, by those who first wrote it down, for all and any who can find their way here, and still have the will to learn. You go that way.”

He nods ahead. The path leads out from the cliff to a broad, cold-looking tarn. Light scuff of a breeze across the silvered surface and through the reeds that fringe its shore, but otherwise the water looks dead. Gil hesitates. This is a lot like one of the places Seethlaw walked him through before things went bad. He looks in vain for a way to cross.

“So how am I supposed to do this?”

Hjel points past him at the water. “You wanted your sword. Call for it.”

“Call for it?”

“Yes.”

Ringil looks at him for a moment, sees the ragged prince is in earnest. He shrugs.

“All right.”

He walks down to the edge of the water. Tiny waves lap on mud at the toes of his boots. He stares out at the tarn, baffled.

“Call for it!” Hjel calls to him. He has not moved from the cleft in the cliff. He stands, slim and dark against the vast luminous array of the carved ikinri ’ska.

Ringil shrugs again, feeling stupid. “Ravensfriend?”

“Louder!”

Gil lifts his hands theatrically. Pitches his voice out across the tarn. “I’ve come for the Ravensfriend!”

A dozen yards offshore, the water boils and then explodes. A wet, webbed hand is extended and in it is the sword, gripped firmly about the blade. Ringil stares at it, then looks back at Hjel. The scavenger prince gestures.

“Well, go on then. You want it? Go and get it.”

He wades into the water, finds himself waist-deep surprisingly fast. The mud on the bottom sucks at his boots, stirs up thick and smoky brown from each step he takes. When he gets to where the sword is held up, he looks down and he can see the akyia lying beneath the surface, like some nightmare odalisque reclining on a harem couch. Its long, fin-fronded limbs coil idly about, keeping station; its breasts float full and buoyant on the big, smoothly muscled body. The huge lamprey mouth irises open and shut in the boneless lower face, tasting the muddied swirl his passage has made. He can see the serried ranks of spines within raise up and then lie down again in the throat. In the wrenched bone structure of the upper face, the fist-sized eyes gaze blankly up at him, no more life-like than those of some sunken statue.

After all he’s been through, it’s like seeing an old, much-loved friend. He’d reach down to stroke the creature if he thought it wouldn’t take his hand off at the wrist.

He reaches out instead, takes the sword in both hands. The akyia lets go of the blade and rolls over, shows him one thick muscled flank and then sinks again, coils once rapidly about his legs, and is gone in a thrashing of fins and an explosion of spray that drenches him.

He wades back to shore, dripping and clutching the Ravensfriend to him in both hands, as if he’s forgotten what it’s for.

But he hasn’t.

And Hjel is gone.

Only the towering edifice of the ikinri ’ska remains.