Ричард Морган - The Cold Commands

It was masterfully done. The tension leaked out of the room, grins leaked in. A guffaw came from way back in the tavern gloom.

“Oh, the pain of exile,” jeered someone, none too quietly.

Muzzy from his fever, Ringil jerked a hot-eyed glance toward the voice before he realized it was not meant for him. He caught a flurry of motion at one table; much looking away or hiding of faces in goblets. Ringil detached his gaze carefully again, found himself looking instead into Venj’s mutinous face. The axman stared at him for a couple of moments, then snorted and turned to Klithren.

“Are we done here? Can we please get out of this shit-hole now?”

Klithren shrugged. “Sure. Got what we came for, didn’t we? See you in the morning, Shenshenath. Dappled Gate, right?”

Ringil nodded. “Look for me there at dawn.”

The bounty hunters left. They went in grimly assured quiet, watched fearfully and equally silently by the tavern’s clientele. They shouldered their way out through the standing customers, knocked back the main door so it clunked hard into the wall, and ducked out under the lintel, here and there a man pulling his back-slung weaponry down to stop it snagging.

Ringil and Eril watched them go.

“Got this knack for making friends, don’t you?” the Marsh Brotherhood enforcer said, deadpan.

Ringil peeled him a sour look. The door swung shut on the final broad-shouldered back, and chatter sprouted across the quiet like weeds.

“So,” said Eril. “The harbor?”

“The harbor.”

THE SKIPPER OF THE MARSH QUEEN’S FAVOR POURED THEM RUM FROM A scuffed leather flask and did his best to seem pleased. But he was not a gifted actor.

“Of course, for any Brother of the Bloom in need…”

He gestured vaguely, as if he hoped something in the cabin around them would sufficiently underline his loyalty to the marsh daisy pennants he flew. Following the gesture around, Ringil saw no likely candidate for the task. It was a pretty squalid space they sat in, cramped and rot-smelling, and fairly indicative of what they’d seen of the vessel as a whole so far.

“Good,” said Eril bluntly. He drained his shot glass and put it back on the table. “I’m glad to hear that. So what we’ll need from you is cabin space for the duration, somewhere as far away from prying eyes as possible. And a dawn departure.”

The skipper blinked. “Dawn?”

“Yes. You told us your cargo’s already stowed.”

“Well, yes, the cargo. ” The skipper made a visible effort to regain his shipboard authority. “But I do have other passengers to consider as well.”

Eril leaned forward. “Are you trying to tell me there’s no cabin for us?”

“No, no, far from it, brother. We have four cabins disposable aboard the Queen; it would be my honor to guest you in, uh…”

“Two of them,” prompted Ringil.

The skipper swallowed. “Yes. Two. But one other cabin is nonetheless occupied by a, uh, a lady of the realm, and she does not expect to join us until late tomorrow morning.”

Eril sat back. “A lady of the realm, eh?”

He swapped a glance with Ringil. Ringil shrugged, sniffed at his shot of rum and put it carefully aside untouched.

“I’ll go,” he said.

A little later, trudging up from the harbor with a brace of the Marsh Queen ’s huskier crewmen at his back for porters, he thought maybe he should have drained his cup after all, the same way Eril had. Rough as the liquor was, the shock of it in his throat and belly might have gone some way to anchoring him a little more firmly to the cobbled street underfoot and its attendant reality. Might have stopped this queasy sense of seepage . As it was, he was now dealing with the uneasy sensation that the whole nighttime substance of Hinerion could at any moment shrivel away around him, like so much poorly painted morality-play backdrop canvas tossed onto an end-of-season bonfire; and when that happened, it would leave him drifting alone in a muggy, gray-tinged void with no way back.

It’s the fever , he told himself patiently. Not like you haven’t had one before. Few more days, some sea air to clean your head out, you’ll be sharp-edged and smoking as a harbor-end whore on krin .

Krinzanz . His hand crept automatically to the pocket it was stowed in. Now, there’s an idea .

But it wasn’t really. He’d debated long and hard with himself whether or not to use some of his dwindling supply to beat out the symptoms of whatever he’d caught from the sneezing slave boy. In the end, an iron campaign frugality won out. He was down to his last thumb-sized twist of the krin, and there was no telling when he’d next be able to buy some more. Hugging the coast and allowing for favorable winds, Marsh Queen’s Favor might make harbor at Baldaran in a couple of days, but then Baldaran was an odd town, full of neatly maintained temples and pious little fucks in the magistrature. There’d been a public order ban in force on noxious substances the last time Ringil was there.

After Baldaran, it was Rajal, almost twice the distance again, and a searing, sand-and-spat-blood combat memory for every yard of shoreline once they got there. He wasn’t sure he’d be going ashore at Rajal if he could avoid it.

And after that, well…

After that…

Decision time, Gil .

The street took a bend to the right, and above cheerily lit windows the hanging sign outside the Hero’s Respite Inn came into view—some suspiciously clean-looking knight at restful ease on a carpet of lizard corpses. Lettering above his head in gilt-edged red. So it seemed the skipper was competent to chart a course, on land at least. Seven streets up, the crooked lane to the left and follow the torches until the bend with the temple on the right. The inn stands at the corner opposite. Room Eleven. Ask for the Lady Quilien of Gris .

So far, right on the money.

Ringil checked to see his husky escort were still with him—in fact they’d been dawdling so as not to get ahead of the man who’d given them coin—and realized abruptly just how slow he’d been, climbing the shallow incline of the streets up from the harbor. He nodded curtly at the men, and stood still in the street to catch his breath. The moment tilted alarmingly beneath him. His vision webbed across in gray at the edges; he felt sick and empty.

He covered for it with a measured stare across to the ornate statue-work on the temple’s façade—Hoiran’s customary tusked and fanged ferocity pared down here to something a little more urbane and close-mouthed, perhaps influenced by traffic with the south and its penchant for studiously human religious figures. But for the massively muscled shoulders and an alarming, overly well-toothed grin, the Hoiran depicted here could almost have been a Yhelteth holy man, hands raised in benediction. At his flanks, the other members of the Dark Court ranged out in bas-relief like some hard-bitten mercenary command whose services the Dark King was trying to offer you. They were equally toned-down of aspect but still possessed most of the weapons and items of iconic power accorded them in more northerly tradition. Oddly, there seemed to be a gap in their ranks on Hoiran’s left. Ringil was too jangled to focus and work out who wasn’t there.

In the dim guttering of the street torches, he thought the figure of Dakovash tipped its head a fraction and winked at him.

Did not .

He leveled his breathing, snapped a glance over his shoulder, and caught his escort watching him curiously. They averted their gazes as soon as he looked around, found something apparently fascinating instead about the brightly lit windows of the Hero’s Respite. From the interior of the inn, a suddenly audible wash of laughter. It sounded harmless enough. Ringil looked from one man to the other, cleared his throat, and turned his back on the darkened temple.