The Cold Commands, Page 4

  The march-master staggered sideways, face torn open from the blow, one eye gone, socket caved in. The torch flew away in a splatter of sparks. The march-master made a broken howling sound, dropped his sword, and sagged to his knees. The veteran was already turning on his companion. The second man got the reverse swing of the cutters across his face as well. He fell back in fright, blood oozing from the gouges, sword clutched upright like some kind of magical ward against demons. In the fitful glow from the dropped torch, the veteran came on, snarling.

  “Orders,” he said to the uncomprehending march-master, and hacked him in the head with the cutters, once, twice, until he went down. “They made us leave them.”

  For a moment, he stood like a statue between his two felled adversaries. He looked around in the fitful torchlight as if just waking up.

  The second of the armed march-masters was on his back, head twisted to one side, skull a ruined cup. The first was propped on his knees and one trembling arm, trying to hold his shattered face together with the other hand. Weeping, gibbering. The veteran spotted the man’s fallen sword, grunted, and let the bolt cutters fall. He took up the sword, hefted it a couple of times, then settled into a two-handed grip, whipped around and heaved it down on the injured march-master’s neck. Passable executioner’s stroke—the blade sliced spine and most of the neck, dropped the man flat to the ground. The veteran flexed, cleared the blade with drilled precision, looked down for a moment at the damage he’d done.

  “We heard them screaming after us for fucking miles,” he told the man’s corpse.

  More cries, the rush of something through the night air, a savage, incoherent yell. The veteran pitched about, saw the next march-master in mid-heave behind the downward slice of a morning-star mace and chain. The veteran seemed to just drift out of the way of the flail blow as if in a trance, let it come down and snag in the grassy ground. He stepped in close, like a newlywed to his bride, and swung the sword at belly height as the march-master struggled to get the morning star’s spikes back out of the ground.

  “Some of them cursed us,” he grunted on the stroke.

  The march-master screamed as the steel bit through leather jerkin and into the unprotected flesh beneath. The veteran hauled and sliced through, cleared the blade out under the man’s ribs at the back.

  “Some,” he said conversationally, “just wept.”

  Beyond the collapsing ruins of the man he’d just gutted, he faced three more torch-and-steel-equipped figures. They were holding back now, aware of the corpses of their comrades littering the ground, aware that something serious was happening here. They huddled shoulder-to-shoulder and stared.

  But behind them, others were coming.

  The veteran settled his grip on the sword, angled it toward the gathering march-masters, and jerked his head for them to come ahead. Torchlight painted him massive and flicker-shadowed behind the blade.

  He made them a grin from his scarred and ravaged features.

  “Do I look like a fucking slave to you?” he asked them.

  And though, finally, they would bring him down with sheer weight of numbers, none who heard him ask that question lived to see the dawn.

  CHAPTER 4

  here 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 h
urt 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 li
t, 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.