Ричард Морган - The Cold Commands

Like a scything shard of darkness, the Ravensfriend, still in its scabbard, pitches through the gloom from the Salt Lord’s pale grasp, through the gap between the standing stones, and onto the long, wind-matted grass at Ringil’s feet.

Try not to drop that again. You’re going to need it .

I —teeth now clenched for a swirl of reasons, fear, anger, the growing cold, that he cannot unpick— am not your fucking cat’s-paw .

But the space between the two stones, when he looks up from his sword, is empty. Only a faint breeze, wandering through as if following the sword, touching his face with cold.

It leaves traceries in the mist like the motions of a languid hand in water.

The Salt Lord is gone.

EYES OPEN, ON BLINDING BLUE SKY.

He blinked, vision tearing up from all the sudden brightness. He propped himself up a little and rubbed hard at his eyes. He was back on the flat rock under a declining afternoon sun. The Ravensfriend lay at his side. He rolled over, reached convulsively for the sword. Discovered he was shivering despite the warmth still in the day. More than shivering, actually—a feverish chill rode his bones and racked him with a desire to curl into a ball. He coughed, and found a razor’s edge in his throat.

Great . And now he remembered the boy sneezing on him the night before. Marsh flu, that’s all I fucking need .

He levered himself to his feet and stared around. Treetops nodding in the breeze, the thickly wooded slopes and the unattainable road north threading between. Over everything a blue haze of distance that seemed to be thickening.

Shadows a little longer than they’d been.

Farther up the rock, Eril snored throatily, one arm cast up to shield his eyes from the sun, but otherwise unmoved since Ringil had last looked at him.

The hovering hawk was gone. And no sign of Dakovash. It could all have been —yeah, right— a dream.

Chaos gathers, like a bad poet’s verse .

He looked westward, frowning.

Hey now, come on. That’s just stupid…

Is it? He turned the sudden glimmer of it carefully, panning for some truthful assessment of its value. Got a better plan, do you, Gil? State you’re in?

He held down a fresh bout of shivering, wrapped his cloak tighter about himself, and crouched beside Eril’s sleeping form. Made a tight hssst he knew would waken the Marsh Brotherhood enforcer without fuss.

Sure enough, Eril’s eyes slid open at the sound, as wakeful as if he’d only closed them a moment before. His hand was already on his knife hilt.

“Yeah?”

“Time to get moving,” Ringil told him.

Eril got to his feet, staying low, and didn’t argue. He looked about at their unchanged surroundings, then back at Ringil, curiously.

“Did I miss something?” he asked.

“No,” said Ringil briskly. “You didn’t miss a thing. But I’ve got an idea how to get us out of here.”

It called itself Anasharal.

Archeth had never seen anything like it. The Helmsmen of her youth came large and semi-visible at best—mostly they were in the walls, or the hulls and bulkheads of the fireships, like helpful rats out of some fairy tale or shelved talking library books. They engaged you in solemn conversation, sometimes they solved your problems for you—or at least told you why they couldn’t—and they could manipulate numerous aspects of the Kiriath domain in ways she’d never been able to think of as anything but magical. As a child, she’d gotten the impression some of them were taking a slightly scary avuncular delight in guiding her, and not always along paths her parents approved.

But one thing they weren’t was mobile.

Later, when the engineers started stripping some of the old fireships preparatory to leaving, she saw why: The component parts came out into the light like giant iron organs and loops of intestine surgically removed. Angfal, once Helmsman for the wrecked flagship—rough translation— Sung Through Lava Like the Petal of an Autumn Rose on the Scorching Late-Summer Breeze , now hung on the walls of her study in Yhelteth, looking discomfortingly like a huge, gross-bodied spider oozing through from the next room. But the impression was fleeting at best—Angfal could no more move unaided than the next fat keg of ale waiting in a tavern cellar.

Anasharal had limbs.

It wasn’t a feature that was immediately apparent. Archeth and the eight men Hald detailed to go down with her came awkwardly across the glassy surface in the bottom half of the crater, aping the motions of wading through cold water on a stony shore, and found themselves staring at something rather like a moldy, half-eaten pie that someone had mistakenly put back in the oven. The heat shimmer rose off a roughly hemispherical knobbed gray carapace cracked neatly apart across the middle. It was the gray crust itself that was smoking, but where the crack ran through, there was a faint white mist that spilled steadily out onto the glassy ground and crawled about there in wisps that gave out a faint, sorcerous chill. Peering into the space the mist was vacating, they saw a nested hollow about four feet across, something like an opened rose with its heart punched out. In the middle, something like a huge egg was rocking back and forth.

The men drew back, doing their best not to step in the puddles of chilly mist. They looked to Archeth for guidance. She shrugged.

“We do not understand how to help you,” she said flatly, to the air in general.

“Yes, just a moment.”

Another loud cracking sound. A couple of the marines jumped visibly. One whole quarter of the broken gray crust fell abruptly aside and lay there like a chunk of abandoned wasps’ nest. From the gap it left, the thing that had rocked back and forth within came scrabbling out like some gigantic crab looking for food.

Oaths laced the air. The soldiers backed up even farther. Archeth tried not to; it wouldn’t have looked good.

The crab-like thing finished extricating itself and dropped to the floor, where it lay for a moment, feebly twitching one or two of its limbs as if exhausted. A pair of halberds swung down off marine shoulders and prodded inward.

“That really won’t be necessary,” said the voice. “Nagarn, Khiran, thank you. You can put those away.”

The named halberdiers gaped at each other. Their weapons drooped in shock. The crab-like thing propped itself up and waddled sideways in the gap, then collapsed again. Archeth crouched to look closer. The new arrival was fully three feet across at the widest point, smooth and featureless gray on top, apart from a scattering of thumb-sized optics glowing softly blue or white. At a glance you could be forgiven for thinking you were looking at some Kiriath-grown metallic giant mushroom—until it moved. But even then, she saw, there was something awkward about the motion. The legs folded out from sculpted recesses in the lower half of the creature, but they seemed to work poorly, as if unused to supporting the thing’s weight.

“It will take three or four of you to pick me up.” Briskly, as if it had heard her thoughts. “I suggest we improvise some kind of sling.”

SHE LEARNED ITS NAME AS THEY CARRIED IT, GRUNTING AND SCUFFLING with the weight, up the slope of the crater. Later, once they’d put together the suggested sling out of horse blankets and two halberd shafts and were on their way back to the river, she also got a vague, lengthy, and rather improbable sketch of its life story told in archaic High Kir, which she soon grew weary of trying to stay focused on. Like most Helmsmen of her acquaintance, Anasharal liked the sound of its own voice and seemed largely immune to modesty.