Ричард Морган - The Cold Commands

Just standing there.

No weapon.

No way—no fucking way—anything human could have crept up on him like that.

Ringil eased up out of his crouch. He did not relinquish the Ravensfriend. There was a deep pulsing in his chest and something in his hands that should have been trembling but was not, was tighter and sweeter and scared him more because he didn’t know where it might go. The world was changed about him, even the birdsong muffled away by the Presence. His eyes flickered briefly to Eril’s prone form, saw the man’s sleep-softened features and he knew that whatever happened now, his companion would not wake until the stranger was gone.

So .

Like bending an iron poker, he forced his stare back to the newcomer. Met the cold and curious eyes, the waiting in them.

“You’re late,” he said harshly.

The clamped smile loosened a little, showed teeth. “You were expecting me?”

Ringil shook his head, and the tiny motion seemed to give him back a small measure of control. From limestone depths and the memories of Seethlaw, he summoned an awful, precipice calm.

“Not me. Talking about someone I met last night, some marsh dweller kid name of Gerin—he was asking for your help, back by the river. Right before he died, he told me he prayed to the Salt Lord for intercession. Begged for it, I’d guess, the state he was in. So what’s the story, Salt Lord—you don’t hear so good these days? Got to scream our prayers a little louder, do we?”

The eyes held him, attentive and mildly amused, as if he were a Strov street performer with a less than averagely tiresome act.

“Is it really this boy’s unanswered prayers that so upset you, Ringil Eskiath? Or another boy’s, long ago?”

Ringil’s knuckles whitened on the hilt of the Ravensfriend. “You think I’m upset? When I’m upset, Salt Lord, you’ll know all about it.”

“Should I take that as a threat?”

“Take it any fucking way you want.”

Because while one component to that thrumming in his hands and chest and blood was certainly fear, a swooping shadowy terror of what stood before him, the fear was really nothing he had not felt before, and thrumming along with it his blood sang with other things, just as dark, that he had long since learned to welcome in. And while he had never been face-to-face with a denizen of the Dark Court before—had in fact not believed until very recently that they even existed—he had been eye-to-eye with other things that most would count just as soul withering, and the truth was, his soul had not withered very much.

He took a pine-perfumed breath from the forest around him, held it, plumed it out again like fumes from a well-rolled krinzanz smoke. He widened his eyes at Dakovash, and he held the Salt Lord’s gaze.

A quiet like the world waiting to be born.

But Ringil thought that, for just a moment, the mouth below the slouch hat might have bent at one corner. There and gone, the sour trace of amusement, and something else he could not quite name. The sigh that followed sounded, to his Glades-bred ears, a little manufactured.

“Do you really consider that a fit way to talk to your clan deities?”

Ringil shrugged. “If you wanted veneration, you should have shown up while your supplicant was still alive.”

“Has it occurred to you that maybe I heard Gerin Trickfinger’s prayers, heard the forward echoes of them long before they were even said, before he was even born , and that help was sent?”

“I was there. If you sent help, it didn’t show up in time.”

“Well, as you say: You were there.”

Ringil’s eyes narrowed. “And what the fuck is that supposed to mean?”

The figure matched his earlier shrug. “Take it any way you want.”

Which sat in the washed granite-and-gloom space between them for what seemed like a long time. Finally, Ringil bent and lowered the Ravensfriend carefully to the rock under his feet. He straightened up, felt a long shiver run through him as he did. He folded his arms tight across his chest.

“What do you want, Salt Lord?”

“Ah. So your insolence is calculated after all. No risk in disrespecting the Dark Court if it needs something from you, eh?”

Ringil stared back through the creeping chill in his bones. “No gain in respecting a demon lord who cannot be summoned when he’s needed.”

He thought he saw something spark in Dakovash’s eyes.

“Oh very droll,” the voice whispered, suddenly uncomfortably close and intimate, though the figure did not appear to have moved. “But what if you’re wrong, little Gil Eskiath? What if you’re wrong and we don’t need you as much as you think? What then? What if I just cut my losses and take offense and melt your fucking bones down, right now, in your still-living flesh? ”

And like a nightmare made real on waking, Ringil felt it start, a crawling, searing sensation along the edges of his shins and forearms, down his spine and into his guts like a bucket hitting well water, the beginnings of true pain buried deep under his skin, the fleeting premonition of how it would be, how he would dance and flail, and scream without surcease as the fire ate him from the inside out…

“Feel better now, do we?”

He goes to his knees with the sudden force of it. Catches a breath already turning scorched and acrid in his throat—

Is catapulted away, elsewhere .

Smooth, cooling breeze, and a low, silvery gloom that instinct and fumbling recognition tell him are not the Salt Lord’s to command. Breath sobbing in his throat—the pain is gone. He kneels at the heart of a place he knows: an Aldrain stone circle, mist shrouded, the looming impassive half-hewn monoliths scabbed with dark moss patches and lines, and overgrown around the base.

For a moment, something leaps alive in him at the sight.

Seethlaw .

But the circle is empty. Anything that happened here is long over, and if the stones witnessed it, the way he thinks he remembers, then they have nothing to say on the matter now. Ringil gets to his feet out of silence and long grass soaked with dew. The knees of his breeches are damp and cold with moisture. He stands there, aching in the throat once more, and this time it’s nothing anyone has done to him but himself.

He tips back his head to see if that’ll relieve the pain, but it doesn’t.

Overhead, Seethlaw’s dying, pockmarked little sun—the thing he called muhn instead—sits high in a murky sky and scatters its second-rate light. Tatters of ragged cloud whip in from a direction that might be the west, sweep briefly across its feebly glowing face, almost blotting it out as they pass. It’s the wind, he supposes, pushing the cloud that way, that fast, but he feels abruptly as if it’s the muhn scudding past overhead at dizzying speed while the rest of the sky stands rock-solid still.

For one disorienting moment, he tilts with it, and almost falls.

—Seethlaw

He’s been back to the Gray Places more times since Ennishmin than he likes to count, back to the Aldrain realm he first walked in at Seethlaw’s side. He knows you can find the dead there, along with other, less reliable ghosts, the ghosts of what could or should or might have once been, if only . So—like grinding a loose tooth down into the soft bleeding gum of his fear—he goes looking. Sometimes cooked on krinzanz fumes and mad with a generalized grief he no longer knows how to contain, sometimes wakeful straight and possessed of a mind so cold and clear it scares him more than the madness. He goes looking for the dead, and they come to him in droves, just as they did before. They make their cases, present their alternatives to him, the way that, no, look, they certainly have not died, that’s rubbish, he misremembers, they’re as alive as he is, can’t he see that…