Ричард Морган - The Cold Commands

You don’t argue with the dead. He learned that early on. Argue and they grow angry, build vortices of rage and denial in the webbing of whatever holds the Gray Places together; if you aren’t careful, they drag you in there with them, and damage whatever delicate mechanisms of sanity keep you centered in your own version and understanding of what’s real. Better by far to let them have their way, and you go yours. There’s a state of mind you need for it, something like the slightly fogged and thoughtless competence you find underlying your hangover the morning after a night lit up with krinzanz and cheap tavern wine. You cope, you move on.

You keep looking.

He never found Seethlaw. He doesn’t know why, doesn’t for that matter know what he would do or say if he ever did find him. It’s not as if they parted on good terms at the end.

But the search is a compulsion, a deep insistent tug with no more governed sense to it than the deep salt pull of the currents that flow past the point at Lanatray where his mother keeps her summer residence. More than once, as a boy, he swam out too far and got caught up in the implacable grip of that flow. More than once, he saw the shore swept away to a flat charcoal line on the horizon, and wondered if he’d ever make it back to land alive.

Once, after Jelim’s death, he let the tow take him and didn’t care much one way or the other what happened next.

What happened next, as near as he recalls, was that the water bore him up despite his best efforts to drown, as if wet muscular hands were gathered under his neck and chest and thighs, and somehow, as the sun declined and the light above the swell thickened toward dark, he found the shore creeping in closer once more. It seemed the ocean didn’t want him. The current spat him out miles down the coastal sweep of the beaches, he came in staggering and exhausted in the surf, and the waves cuffed him brutally ashore like blows from his father’s sword-grip-callused hand.

Yes, and I don’t suppose it ever occurred to you to wonder about those helpful hands, now, did it? Sardonic voice at his ear—he whirls violently about to face it, sees a shadowy form slip between two of the standing stones, trailing edge of a cloak and gone before he can fix on it. The voice drifts behind in its stead. Never occurred to you to wonder what exactly it was that was holding you up in the water all that time?

A chill wraps the back of his neck, stealthy, prehensile. The damp division of webbed fingers, pressing firmly up.

He shudders at the touch. Shakes it off. Cannot now recall if the memory is real or if Dakovash has reached back and placed it there.

Oh yes, that’s right. I’m just making all this up. The merroigai were never there, you swam in to shore all by yourself, of course you did . Beyond the stones, the Salt Lord’s voice prowls, not quite in step with the flitting shadow of his form. There’s an angry agitation to both, like the flicker and spit of an oil lamp flame dying down. Fucking mortals. You know, it’s—I am so sick of this shit. Where’s the respect? Where’s the supplicant awe? I thought you, Ringil Eskiath, you of all people…

A long pause, the figure stops between two monoliths and faces Ringil with one pale hand pressed claw-like to its chest. The face beneath the hat is all shadow and gleaming teeth and eyes like a wolf. The voice rasps out again.

Look at me, Eskiath, fucking look at me. If you can’t manage respect , then at least grow a sense of self-preservation, why don’t you? I am a lord of the Dark Court. I’m a fucking demon god. Do you have any idea what I’ve done to the flesh and souls of men a thousand times as powerful as you’ll ever be, for no other reason than they spoke back to me the way you do, as if you had the fucking right? Look at me . I am Dakovash. I stole—when I was still young—when this whole fucking world was still young—I stole fire from the High Gods, and forged it into a new weapon against them. I commanded angels in battle, brought bat-winged demons out of the dark to overthrow the old order, I crossed the void as a fucking song so that the old order would fall. I broke those fuckers in battle over the arch of this world when none could or would do it but me. And you think you’re going to judge me? Judge me on some fifteen-year-old marsh brat that couldn’t lift a fucking broadsword to save his life? What am I supposed to do with that? Train him? The Salt Lord throws out one arm, rakes crooked fingers through the darkened air in some paroxysm of exasperated disbelief. Somewhere behind him, thunder rumbles through the Gray Places. What—find some fucking monastery on a mountain someplace and pay his board and lodging for a decade among kindly warrior monks, all so he can grow into his ascendant power, fulfill his destiny, and become The One? Give me a fucking break, Eskiath. You really think that’s how it works?

I wouldn’t know how it works , Ringil says flatly. You’re the demon lord here, not me .

The Salt Lord’s hand drops to his side. Well, then try giving it some thought, why don’t you? Apply that finely tutored mind of yours to all those bullshit hero-with-a-high-destiny legends you people are so fucking fond of telling one another. You really think, in a mudball slaughterhouse of a world like this, where war and privation harden whole populations to inhuman brutality and ignorance, where the ruling classes dedicate their sons to learning the science of killing men the way they consign their daughters to breeding till they crack—you really think the gods of a world like that have got no better thing to do with their time than take some random piece of lowborn trash and spend long years carving him into shape for a cat’s-paw?

I had —Ringil swallows on an abrupt gut-swooping gust of insolence that licks up in the pit of his belly like flames— no idea that time was so precious a commodity among the denizens of the Immortal Watch .

Beat of silence among the shrouded stones. Then Dakovash grunts, as if from some old pain returning.

Not many call us by that name any longer .

Ringil shrugs. Not many can read. Or care about any past beyond their own fucked-up selective remembrance .

He thinks the shadowed figure smiles at that.

You sound bitter, hero .

Do I? Ringil gestures impatiently against the returning chill in his bones. I’m not the one complaining about a lack of supplicant awe, though, am I? I’m not the one short of time for my immortal designs .

More quiet. Framed on either side by the silent monoliths, the Salt Lord seems to be studying him as if through the bars of a cage.

Finally, he says this:

The march of time is broken, Ringil Eskiath . Something in that softly rasping voice that might be admission, concession, or maybe just a bone-deep weariness. The bounds of possibility come adrift around us, the old certainties are all in their graves. Cats can no longer be considered alive or dead .

Cats… ?

The skeins are tangled. Some butterfly shaman up in the north beats his puny fucking wings and the storm gathers before you know it. Chaos gathers, like a bad poet’s verse. We run damage control, but the rules of engagement have changed. You think we’re any happier about it than you? We’ve got our balls to the wall here, hero. We’re fighting half blind , nothing works, not the way it should, not anymore. Which being the case, well… A shrug. Let us just say that in a situation like that, you work with the tools at hand. And speaking of which—