The Cold Commands

CHAPTER 4

There was an iron alloy tree in one corner of the courtyard, gleaming where the late-afternoon sunlight played off features in the gnarled metal bark. Sharp black shadow ran out from the trunk like spilled ink, then split into branching rivulets that spread out across the stone paving, as if in search of something. Archeth sat well out of reach on the courtyard floor opposite—booted legs propped up in front of her, warmth of the sun-drenched courtyard wall at her back—and watched the rivulet shadows creep toward her. She bit into an apple she’d plucked from another tree in another courtyard, one that humans might have been a little more comfortable with.

Nothing grows at An-Monal, the superstitions whispered across Yhelteth like the wind. Nothing lives there.

Like most things humans believed, it was missing the point. The iron alloy tree was not alive in any conventional sense, true, but every year the blue-black leaves it lifted against the sky would rust through as winter approached, speckling and staining first to a purplish red, then to pale orange, and then finally to a stark silvery white that crumbled and turned to glinting ash in the breeze. And then, every spring, the leaves slid back out of the alloy bark like tiny blades unsheathing, like a winning hand of cards spread out on the table before your eyes.

The quiet metallic process had been going on for as long as Archeth could remember, which was coming up on a couple of centuries now; and—despite a slew of idiot prophecies about such things ceasing when the Kiriath abandoned the world—when the last of her people’s fireships did finally submerge in the An-Monal crater and something seemed to tear for good in Archeth’s heart, the tree never missed a beat.

She wasn’t really surprised, could have told the prophesying priests it was a stupid idea from the start. Her father’s people prided themselves on creating processes and artifacts that did not need them to officiate over.

We are what we build, Grashgal once told her cryptically, in the brief months between the end of the war and the Departure. Forces older and darker than knowing forced knowing upon us and long ago locked us out of paradise. There is no way back. The only victory against those forces is to build. To build well enough that, when we look back along the path of exile we have engineered, the view is bearable.

If there’s no way back, she begged him, then why are you leaving?

But by then it was a rancid argument. Grashgal could no more sway the Council of Captains than she could herself. The aftermath of the war had broken something in the Kiriath, had horrified them in some way that was still mostly obscure to her. They wanted out. After thousands of years of settled inertia, they were making plans again, drawing charts and asking their machines for counsel their own delicately damaged minds could not provide. Down in the workshops at An-Monal, the welding torches raged blue-white again, and sparks cascaded vermilion and gold down the curved iron flanks of the fireships in dry dock. The Helmsmen stirred in their brooding, mothballed darkness, and pondered the questions put to them, and said it could be done.

Involuntarily, she glanced left across the courtyard, toward the arched entrance and the paths that wound down to the workshops beyond. Ghost memories of the clangor faded out as she came back to the present; sharp acid taste of apple on her tongue and the warmth of the sun on her skin. She’d been down to the workshops that morning, had wandered the deserted iron gantries and crane platforms, leaned there and stared at the few fireships left behind in the cobweb gloom, until the familiar tears, the ones she’d been biting back for months now, came welling up and spilled burning down her face like some Kiriath etching chemical she’d been careless with.

And left her emptied out, but feeling no cleaner inside.

It’s the krinzanz, Archidi. She’d quite consciously not packed any when she left the city this time. Two days away, three at worst—how bad could it be? Now she had her answer. If you will go on these wildly optimistic cold quit jags.

She cleared her throat. Took another bite at the apple and shaded her eyes against the lowering sun. The tree branched low, not much over head height for a human, and spread intricately tangled limbs upward and out—a dispersal derived not, Archeth knew, from any sculptor’s observation or skill, but from certain mathematical musings her father’s people had incubated in the hearts of their machines like song. She remembered swinging from those branches as a child, plucking at the emerging leaf blades one spring and being shocked to discover that they were burning hot to the touch.

She ran wailing to her mother at the time, got her burned fingers salved and bandaged, and when she asked questions, got the usual human explanation for these things.

It’s magic, her mother said tranquilly. The tree is magic.

Her father let her get well into her teens before he disabused her of that notion. Maybe because he didn’t want to hurt his wife’s feelings, maybe just because he found it easier to discipline Archeth—who was growing up tough and scrappy—as long as she believed he really was a necromancer burned black by his passage through the veins of the Earth. Though, truth be told, it hadn’t taken Archeth long to see through that one—if, for example, Flaradnam’s journey through the twisted places really had burned him black, then how did you explain her ebony skin when she’d never been allowed closer than a hundred feet to a lava flow or the crater’s edge at An-Monal? It made no sense, and sense was something that she clung to from an early age.

Then again, from that same early age, Archeth could also see there was something going on beneath the surface of her parents’ relationship, something that reminded her of the stealthy bubble and churn of the magma in the eye of An-Monal. The sporadic eruptions it occasioned scared her, and she knew that magic was one of the subjects that would invariably cause the tension to bubble over.

I have explained it to you, she heard him shouting one evening when she should have been in bed, but had crept out to read by the radiant globe on the staircase wall. No magic, no miracles, no angels or demons lying in wait for unwary human sinners. You will not fill her head with this ignorant dross. You will not chain her this way.

But the invigilators say—

The invigilators say, the invigilators say! Crash of something crystal flung at a wall. The invigilators lie, Nantara, they lie to you all. Just look around you at this piece-of-shit torture chamber of a world. Does it look to you like something ruled by a benign lord of all creation? Does it look as if someone’s up there watching out for you all?

The Revelation teaches us to live so that the world will become a better place.

Yeah? Tell that to the Ninth Tribe.

Oh. Will you blame me for that now, too? Her mother’s own not inconsiderable temper rising to the fight. You, who helped Sabal the Conqueror fall on them, who planned the campaign and rode at the head of our armies with him to see it done? Who came home splattered head-to-foot with the blood of infants?

I killed no fucking children! We did not want—

You knew. The black acid tones of mirthless laughter in her voice now—Archeth, eight or nine and used to various degrees of being told off, knew the small, frightening smile that would be playing about her mother’s lips, the kindled fury it signaled. Oh, you knew. You talk of lies, you knew what he would do. You dream about it still.

You weren’t there, Nantara. We had no choice. You can’t build an empire without—

Murdered children—

Civilization doesn’t just grow, Nantara. You have to—

You lecture me about ignorance and lies. Take one clean fucking look at yourself, ’Nam, and tell me who’s lying.

And so forth.

So, tough common sense notwithstanding, Archeth learned early to stay away from the topic of magic, to just let it slide, and subsequently that habit proved tough to unlearn. When she started receiving her—characteristically patchy and distracted—tutoring in Kiriath matters from Flaradnam and Grashgal, the mark of those first fifteen or so years was on her. Magic still looked pretty much like magic to her, even when it apparently wasn’t. And there was something deeply buried in her, something human maybe, inherited from her mother’s side, that wanted to just accept the magic, just leave it at that rather than go through all the awkward detail of understanding. Many decades on, long after her mother had lived out her human life span and died, Archeth could sometimes still feel herself looking at Kiriath technology through Nantara’s eyes. In nearly two centuries, she had never quite managed to shake the eerie sense of unnatural power it radiated.

“Are you brooding, child? Or simply coping badly without your drugs?”

Dark, sardonic voice without origin, snaking through the sun-split air to her ears. As if the deep-rooted stones of the An-Monal keep itself were talking to her.

She closed her eyes. “Manathan.”

“A safe bet, wouldn’t you say?” As ever, the Helmsman’s tones rang almost human—avuncular and reassuring but for the tiny slide at the end of each syllable, the caught-breath slippage that seemed like the rising edge of a suppressed scream. As if the voice might at any given moment suddenly shift mid-sentence from intelligible sound into the shriek of steel being driven against the grindstone. “Or have you started believing in angelic presence and divine revelatory grace? Are the locals getting to you, daughter of Flaradnam?”

“I have a name of my own,” she snapped. “You want to try using it occasionally?”

“Archeth,” said the Helmsman smoothly. “Would you be so good as to join me in your father’s study?”

The door was set in the wall at her back, almost beside the place she had chosen to sit. She rolled her head sideways to look at its black, rivet-studded bulk. Faced front and studied the declining sun for a while instead. She bit into the apple again.

“If that’s intended as defiance, daughter of Flaradnam, it’s a pretty poor fist you’re making of it. Perhaps you should abandon abstinence as a strategy for the time being. It doesn’t seem to do much for you. And you are still young enough to take the damage.”

She chewed down the mouthful of apple. “What do you want, Manathan? It’s getting late.”

“And your entourage at the river will not wait? That seems unlikely, my lady kir-Archeth.”

Irony dripped off the title, or at least seemed to—with the Helmsmen you could never quite tell. But the rest of Manathan’s sentence was unquestionably the understatement of the day. Unlikely wasn’t in it—the imperial river frigate Sword of Justice Divine would hold station until Lady kir-Archeth of the clan Indamaninarmal chose to come back down from communing with her past at An-Monal, no matter what hour of the day or night that might be. The captain of the vessel and the commander in charge of the marine detachment aboard had both been charged by the Emperor himself to protect her life as if it were his own, and while the Holy Invigilator attached might not in theory be bound by such secular authority, this one was young and fresh to his post and quite evidently overawed by her presence. Which wasn’t an uncommon stance. The Kiriath might be long gone, but their status and mystique clung to Archeth like a courtier’s perfume. She’d wear the rank it bought her for human generations to come.

Occasionally, she wondered how it would be when those generations had finally passed, when all those who actually remembered the Kiriath and the Departure were in their graves, and only the tomes in the imperial library spoke of her people anymore.

She wondered if she’d still be sane by then.

The shadow of the iron tree reached out, touched her finally at the toe of one boot.

“Daughter of Flaradnam,” said Manathan sharply.

“Yeah, yeah.” She levered herself up off the wall and to her feet. Tossed the core of her apple away across the courtyard. “I hear you.”

THE RIVER FRIGATE HAD BEEN BUILT FOR THE OCCASIONAL USE OF none other than his majesty Akal Khimran the Great—whose original idea for the ship’s name, before politics intruded, had been Crocfucker—and its master’s suite staterooms were better appointed than some local lordlings’ mansions Archeth had guested in on her travels. And while Akal’s son Jhiral, now Jhiral Khimran II, probably hadn’t set foot aboard the vessel more than twice since his father died, neither had he ordered it decommissioned or struck from its original purpose. The fixtures and fittings endured, then, in all their regal splendor. There was a full-wall library in the lounge, a dedicated map room alcove off to one side, and a table fit to feast a dozen men set beside the broad stern window. Ornate astrolabes and telescopes stood sentinel at the corners of the room, and the walls were hung with portraits of venerable historical figures from the Khimran imperial line.

That the earliest of these were little more than sheep rustlers and mountain bandits had been tacitly ignored by the court artist, and all wore some kind of anachronistic circlet or crown to confer retrospective gravitas. With the cabin lamps lit, they formed a solemn, shadowy backdrop to the meeting Archeth called.

Similarly serious, the faces that looked back at her from around the table. Maybe it was the portraiture exerting its intended influence, maybe just the proximity to An-Monal and all that the volcano’s haunted bulk implied. Senger Hald, the marine commander, sat grim and watchful where he could see the door, seat set back a little from the table as if, even here, he couldn’t be wholly sure that they would not be burst in upon and attacked. Lal Nyanar, the frigate’s captain, was a little less obviously tense. But holding his vessel at the eerie iron quays of An-Monal’s abandoned harbor was clearly making him uncomfortable, and it was a demeanor that soaked into the other ship’s officers present. And Hanesh Galat, appointed Holy Invigilator to the ship, knowing approximately how well liked he wasn’t by the secular officers of the crew, just looked jumpy and upset. It didn’t help that the Citadel was fast coming around to the doctrinal position that the Kiriath Helmsmen were demonic presences imprisoned in iron to prevent them tempting or otherwise misleading the sons of the Revelation.

Not that I uh, actually accept that tenet, Galat had hastened to assure Archeth one afternoon at the rail, as the frigate forged its way upriver toward An-Monal. The Revelation is subject to such revision of course, through the wisdom of learned debate and prayer. But I see no reason to adopt every position proposed in the Mastery, simply because it is proposed. And I uhm, you know, actually I cherish the part your people have played in Yhelteth’s rise to its holy destiny.

How very enlightened of you. Archeth had promised the Emperor she would be polite. I’ll be sure to keep that quiet when we get back. Wouldn’t want you getting in trouble with your superiors.

He flushed, and left her largely alone after that.

Which was what she wanted, but now she wondered if antagonizing him had been wise. She doubted he could derail the intentions of Nyanar and Hald if they chose to back her—an invigilator’s so-called supreme moral authority was actually a pretty tenuous thing when it butted up against the blunt pragmatism of the Empire’s career military officers—but he could certainly pour some cold ecclesiastical water on any enthusiasm she managed to generate in men who, to be honest, were already looking decidedly dubious about the turn events had taken.

“We are a small force,” Hald pointed out. “And we don’t really know what it is we’re dealing with. Would it not make more sense to carry this news back to Yhelteth and organize a fully equipped expedition?”

It would—except for the fact that, under current circumstances, Jhiral wasn’t about to spare such a fully equipped force for anything that didn’t involve securing the northern borders or holding the line against rioting religious idiots in Demlarashan. And while the young Emperor had no time for the warmed-over superstitions muttering out of the Citadel these days as dogma, he didn’t have much time for the Helmsmen, either. Certainly, he wouldn’t trust one any farther than you would a steppe nomad with your wife. And in this he was, for once, representative of the people he governed. An-Monal stood empty and decaying for a reason.

So no, she fucking couldn’t go back to Jhiral with this one, and Hald probably knew it. She paced her words for conciliatory aplomb.

“I do not believe, Commander, that this is an operation requiring much military force. Certainly nothing that your men could not handle. Manathan was vague, but—”

“Vague indeed,” rumbled Nyanar. “A messenger in need of escort. Quote, unquote. That’s not much to go on.”

“And not much out there.” The frigate’s second officer nodded soberly at the map they’d spread across the table. Pinned out between a pair of heavy silver paperweights carved like slain dragons, the thick yellow parchment showed the full extent of the Y’hela River as it reached back from Yhelteth and the coast, past the huge bulk of the volcano where An-Monal was built, and then on into the interior. The land around it was largely arid and featureless. No cities marked. “If this is a messenger, then where’s he come from?”

“Shaktur, perhaps?” Someone trying to be helpful.

“They are already represented at court,” Hald said. “And anyway, if this messenger’s come all the way from the Great Lake, why does he suddenly need an escort now? We’re deep inside imperial territory here. No barbarian incursions, no banditry to speak of. Compared with the eastern marches, this is a pleasure park.”

“From the south, then?”

Nyanar shrugged. “Same applies. Anyone coming up from the desert has to pass through rougher terrain than this. They made it this far, they don’t need our help with the last leg.”

“Unless they’re in trouble,” Hanesh Galat offered unexpectedly.

Everyone looked at him. He blushed, seemingly as surprised as anyone else that he’d spoken up.

“That is,” he pressed on, voice gaining a little force as he spoke. “Perhaps in coming this far, the messenger and his party have suffered privations that mean they can go no farther without our help. In which case, it would actually be our bound duty under the Revelation to bring aid to them.”

Archeth shut her mouth. Cleared her throat.

“Well, quite,” she said.

An uncomfortable silence settled around the table. It was an instinctive reaction where matters of doctrine were concerned. No one who valued their position in Yhelteth society would ever willingly be seen to call the tenets of the Revelation into question, least of all where those tenets had just been subject to interpretation by an accredited invigilator. However…

“My concern,” said Hald carefully, “is that this may be a trick. Maybe even an ambush of some kind. The Helmsman has said that this messenger is waiting for us. Is that not so, my lady?”

“Will be waiting for us, yes.”

The marine commander gestured. “Yes. Will be waiting for us, or is already. In either case, my lady, and outside of sorcery, how is that possible?”

“I don’t know,” Archeth had to admit. “High Kiriath is a complicated tongue at the best of times, and the Helmsmen frequently speak it in arcane inflections. Maybe I’m just not translating very well.”

Yeah, Archidi, and maybe that’s lizardshit. Maybe you’ve told these humans exactly as much as you want them to know, because anything else is going to make their support even harder to enlist. Maybe there are details and questions you’d really rather they left alone, not least so you can do the same and just concentrate on this bright new thing the Helmsman has brought you.

This bright new thing…

“DAUGHTER OF FLARADNAM.” MANATHAN’S TIGHT-EDGED TONES FELL somber in the cold air of her father’s study. Shadows across the walls, broad fading angles of light from the high windows as the afternoon closed down outside. “There is a message for you.”

“What message?” Not yet paying much attention, working with her tongue at a shred of apple peel caught in her teeth, looking absently around at the room instead, wondering as always where exactly in all this architecture the Helmsman was actually located. It was something she’d never managed to persuade Flaradnam to tell her.

“Well, a message of some importance, I imagine.” Impossible to read if the Helmsman’s voice was edged with exasperation or not. “Since the messenger is coming all this way to deliver it to you in person. Speaking of which, he will be here, more or less. And”—she thought she caught some subtle amusement in the voice—“he will wait for you.”

A twist of reddish light kindled at one corner of the room, unwrapped into a floating map of the local region. She wandered over, made out An-Monal, the volcano’s cone, and the city itself on the western slope. The road down to the harbor, the flex of the river as it skirted the volcano and backed off into the eastern hinterlands. Symbols she could not understand flared yellow across that portion, some kind of path laid out in an arc across the desert, and finally a pulsing marker, some fifty or sixty miles upriver.

“Here?” She shook her head. “But there’s nothing out there.”

“Well, then you’d better hurry up and collect him, hadn’t you? Wouldn’t want him to go hungry.”

Archeth passed her hand through the phantom fire, not quite able to suppress the shiver of wonder it always engendered when the contact did not burn. She’d grown up with these things, but where some aspects of her father’s heritage had worn smooth with use over the years, others were still a jagged shock every time they manifested. She rubbed at her hand anyway, instinctively.

“And you say this messenger has come for me?”

“You might say that, yes. Of course you might also say he’s come for the whole human race—plus a few offshoots that don’t really fit the description anymore. In these times of transition, it’s hard to know how to phrase these things. Let us just say that your heritage fits you best for the role of message recipient.”

Archeth stood back from the bright glare of the map. Unease stirred through her.

“And you cannot simply give me this message yourself?”

“No, I simply cannot.”

Unease stoking now, sitting in the base of her belly like some coiled thing. It wasn’t often you heard the Helmsmen admit to limitations—most of the time they were sulkily self-assured in their superiority, and even when Archeth thought she might have detected some boundary of word or deed they weren’t prepared to cross, the block was usually shrouded in evasive gibberish of one sort or other.

“Cannot or will not?”

“Where you are concerned, daughter of Flaradnam, I don’t see that there is any practical difference between the two.”

“No? What about the difference of me not going to meet this messenger because I don’t think you’re being honest with me.”

“Well, it’s your message.” As if the great stone shoulders of An-Monal itself shrugged at her. “Suit yourself.”

Quiet gathered, like the cobwebbed shadows in the corners of the room. The map burned in the gloom.

“Look,” she said finally. “That’s a lot of arid wasteland out there. We could spend days searching an area that size.”

“There will be a sign,” said the Helmsman succinctly. “Look to the east for guidance.”

Which, for all it sounded like some faintly mocking parody of revelatory text, was also Manathan’s last word on the matter. Attempts to get clarification were rebutted with the mild admonition not to waste time, daughter of Flaradnam. Archeth, who’d seen the Helmsman behave like this before, gave up and slammed her way back out to the courtyard to saddle her horse. It was a fair few hours’ ride down to the harbor, and she wanted to get there before it was fully dark.

But on the road down, jolting tiredly in the saddle, she noticed the feeling in her belly that she’d mistaken for unease, and realized that it was nothing of the sort. Noticed in fact that it had warmed and spread, had become a faint pitter-patter of excitement throughout the web of her veins, and a slowly building, suffocating eagerness in her chest.

She clucked her horse into a trot.

“ERROR OF TRANSLATION OR NOT,” SAID LAL NYANAR. “WE ARE STILL waiting for this signal the Helmsman promised us, and it has not come. That alone ought to give us pause.”

“We are paused.” Archeth gestured through the window at the iron quay and the glimmer of campfires built there on the dock. Impatience bubbling up in her now—time to wrap this up. “No one is suggesting we break camp and head upriver right now. Tomorrow morning will be quite soon enough, and that gives us time to lay sensible plans.”

“If—”

“Charts for instance.” Breaking smoothly into Nyanar’s continued objection before it could build any more steam. “I understand perfectly, Captain, if you’re concerned about our ability to navigate safely in the upper river at this time of year. But presumably we have summer charts aboard for just such an eventuality?”

The captain bristled visibly.

“I have no fears about navigation, my lady, but—”

“Excellent. Then we need to focus on available landing points along the southern bank in the area Manathan has indicated. Can I leave that in your capable hands?”

She let silence do the rest. Nyanar glanced around the table for support he had no hope of enlisting, then subsided. Even Hald wasn’t going to directly gainsay an officer of the court with her mind so obviously made up.

“I am”—head slowly inclined—“yours to command, my lady.”

“Good. Commander Hald, then. I believe we shou—”

Lightning raged.

Out of the east, flickering, harsh and brilliant, so furious it seemed the broad stern window must shatter inward with its force. It drenched the room, drove out every shadow with silent, blue-white glare. It washed their faces clean of the hesitant, yellowish, document-poring lamplight within. It lit them frozen in place.

And faded.

From outside, she heard the yells of Hald’s men and the crew. Saw figures leap to their feet around the campfires, saw the detail of everything on the quay laid out dim in the wake of the glare. Feet thundered on planking overhead. Babbling confusion as the sudden brilliance inked out and left them all blinking at each other in the gloom.

“The fuck?” Hald, courtly manners forgotten for a moment, blown back to more soldierly roots by the shock.

“What was that?” asked someone else in a shaking voice.

Archeth didn’t answer. She already knew; she didn’t need to hear it said. So it was left to young Hanesh Galat, displaying an ironic composure and humor she would not previously have credited him with, to lean forward and state the obvious.

“That,” he said, looking across the table at her, “was what I believe you’d call a sign. It would appear that Manathan’s messenger has arrived.”

Thunder rolled in behind his words.