Ричард Морган - The Cold Commands

On his way out, he saw an owl watching him from a branch in one of the other trees. It didn’t say anything, or flap heavily away into the sky with his good luck in its talons or anything. In fact, it barely did anything at all beyond blink cryptically down at him and plump up its feathers.

That’s because it’s just a fucking owl, Gil. Not an omen, or a psycho-pomp, or a demon familiar from beyond the band .

Now get a fucking grip, will you, and let’s get this done.

He slipped out of the orchard yard, and away down the darkened corridors again.

SOMEWHERE ALONG THE WAY, THE IKINRI ’SKA WOKE UP.

Perhaps he summoned it, perhaps it simply felt it was time. Hjel had told him—somewhere, somewhen, out there on the marsh—that the deeper into the craft you went, the less it became a tool you could use, the more you became the gate and channel for its force. At the end , he said, you are simply wedded to it. You cannot tell where it ends and you begin .

Now he felt it drip through him at the fingertips, radiate out from his heart and lungs, dance behind his eyes, and Hjel’s warning took on a shivery fever-cold significance he’d previously ignored. It was a chilly siren song now, down at the edges of his will, singing in his blood. It was an excited black chittering along his nerves, like too much krinzanz an hour before dawn.

It wasn’t, to be honest, an ideal companion at a time like this.

But it was there in him, manifest, when he stepped into one more courtyard, warmly torchlit this time, and was instantly spotted by a man-at-arms on an overlooking wall.

Their eyes met. The man on the wall reared back from where he’d been leaning in peaceful contemplation of the ground below. He grabbed at his short-sword. The yell was in his throat, halfway formed—

Ringil grabbed, right arm upflung, as if he could reach physically into the man’s mouth and tear out the sound. He made the convulsive locking gesture, Be Still! , with his hand, and the cry strangled before it could take voice. The man-at-arms doubled over, coughing. Ringil shifted posture, breathed in the trembling potential, shook out the fingers of his raised right hand, and wrote the Veil glyph onto the air.

You do not see me .

It hissed out of him like rattlesnakes stirring, syllables in old Myrlic, barely recognizable as his own voice at all. He faded back into the gloom.

“What the fuck’s up with you, Darash?” Another man-at-arms, wandering along the walkway from the other side, yawning. “Stuffing yourself with stolen chicken again.”

The first man stifled his coughing with an effort. From down in shadows at the edge of the courtyard, Ringil could see him frown.

“No, man. Just thought I saw…”

“Saw what?” The second man peered down into the torchlit space below and shrugged. “Nothing down there, mate.”

“Yeah.” Darash shook his head. “Weird fucking thing, though…”

By which time, Ringil was gone, across the courtyard in a twist of unseeing, and into the rising corridors to the senior invigilator’s wing. Torchlight flickered off him, seemed to shun him as he went.

Once into the upper levels of the eastern keep, his briefing from the King’s Reach evaporated in best guesses and theory. They had some sense of where Menkarak should be resident, given his lineage and his recent promotions within the hierarchy. They had rumor and report that might further reduce the possibilities, but could not really be relied upon. They had information that he liked to meet the rising sun with prayers each morning on his balcony, they had gossip that there’d been a major falling-out with another, more moderate senior invigilator who had later, so the story went, choked to death on a piece of gristle at dinner, and Menkarak got his opulent rooms. They had reason to believe that his apartments were relatively modest, and that he shunned most of the luxury available to priests of his rank.

Like that.

It was a dozen possible apartments, however you looked at it. Time to narrow the field.

He stalked the gloom, looking for lights. Eventually, he found another invigilator, a spry, white-haired old man in robes of rank, poring over unscrolled paperwork in a study dimly lit by candles. Ringil watched him for a while from beyond the window, out in the cloister, then, when he was sure the man was working alone, he lifted the latch and walked quietly inside.

The invigilator did not look up from his scrolls and ink.

“If that’s another heretic warrant, Naksen,” he said mildly, quill scratching across parchment, “then it’s going to have to wait until the morning. I already told you that. Added to which”—a meticulously crossed and dotted character—“I have already told his eminence we have our hands full out in the city. We simply do not have the manpower to enforce—”

The dragon-tooth dagger slid in under his chin. A hand pressed against the back of his skull.

“It’s not another heretic warrant,” Ringil told him.

The invigilator went rigid. “What do you want?”

“Good. I’m looking for Pashla Menkarak. Which is his apartment?”

The old man tried to turn. There was a surprising degree of wiry strength in the move. Ringil swapped dagger for forearm across the invigilator’s throat and pulled tight.

“I wouldn’t do that if I were you.”

“Jackal!” It was spat out, despite the choking grip. “So, it has come to this once more! Once again, the palace sends its lickspittle backstabbing faithless against our holiest men.”

“Something like that,” Ringil agreed. “You going to tell me how to find Menkarak, or are you going to die?”

He loosened his grip hopefully. The invigilator placed gnarled hands flat on the scroll-strewn tabletop. Gil caught a couple of lines from the half-written document. For the crime of lascivious seduction and bearing of a child not blessed by the Revelation, the accused is sentenced to… He felt the man’s spine stiffen against the chair back.

“Hear me, scum. I would rather die than betray my brothers in faith. I will go to my God with a joyous cry—”

“You’ll go choking on your own blood. Is that what you want? Where is Menkarak? ”

“Go back to your Emperor, lickspittle!” There was a sneer in the old man’s voice, and a tight hysteria building behind it. No sign of fear at all. “Go back, infidel, and tell the debauched apostate he may rule over half the world, but he cannot have our souls. Demlarashan is but the beginning. We have angels on our side now, we will sweep—”

Ringil sighed and sliced the throat across. Blood gushed out, all over the warrants the man had been writing. He held the invigilator’s head by the hair while he spasmed, waited, waited , then lowered the dead man’s face gently into the mess. He cleaned the dagger on one of the pieces of parchment, and stood for a moment in the candlelight, brooding.

If Naksen does show up with a bundle more warrants, you’re blown. Out like a fucking candle. And that’s without counting the dwenda into the balance .

This is taking too long .

He blew out all the candles before he left, closed the door quietly behind him, and hoped that would be enough to keep Naksen or his pals from investigating further. There was a door-locking glyph somewhere in the ikinri ’ska , but he couldn’t remember how it went, had never, in any case, really mastered it. Not a lot of locking doors to practice on, out on the marsh.

With luck, they’ll assume the old bastard went to bed .

With better luck, they won’t come back at all until morning. Got my back, Kwelgrish?