Ричард Морган - The Cold Commands

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.