Ричард Морган - The Cold Commands

Jhiral was watching her.

She forced herself not to look away—the spray of blood, the up-and-down flail of tentacles like thick black whips, the soft, mobbing purple-black shapes hanging off the wood and flesh, crawling across it. Her gaze snagged on a wild, wide-open human eye and a screaming mouth, briefly blocked by a thick crawling tentacle, then uncovered again to shriek to shriek, to shriek…

She turned to meet Jhiral’s gaze. Locked herself to the casual poise it took to do it. Slowly, Archidi, slowly . Held his eyes, held the moment like a knife blade, loose for the throw. Warrior trick—funnel the noises away, to the edges of your attention, like the pain from minor wounds when the battle demands you gather yourself.

Jhiral gestured impatiently.

“So?”

“We have found a new Helmsman, my lord. It talks of threats to the city, to the Empire.”

“A new Helmsman?” Jhiral’s brows kicked up. “A new one?”

“Just so, my lord.”

Jhiral glanced back at the last condemned man, the frantic scrabblings he made against his captors as, finally, they managed to get him to the board. The Emperor seemed to be pondering something. Then he looked back at her again.

“Archeth—you would not by any chance be trying to avert punishment for your old pal Sanagh here, would you?”

So .

The bloodied, screaming features—the memory popped into place like a brutally relocated shoulder joint. Bentan Sanagh. They’d hacked his hair off in the dungeons, of course, and he was haggard with suffering. And anyway, pal was not really accurate—she knew Sanagh only casually, through Mahmal Shanta and the shipwright’s guild. A loudmouthed idealist, quite brilliant in his way, which was probably what had kept him alive during Akal’s reign, but he’d always lacked Shanta’s instinct for self-preservation. Archeth had liked him well enough, shared some conversations, a banquet party or two. But she judged him doomed from way back, and kept her distance accordingly.

“Because Prophet knows,” Jhiral went on with a long-suffering sigh, “his good lady wife’s been writing to every worthy at court he ever shared a bribe with, trying to get his sentence commuted. We’re all up to our ears in tearstained parchment. I imagine you’re on the list as well, somewhere.”

She was not. Perhaps her own habitual standoffishness had been noted. Doesn’t pay to get attached to humans , her father told her bitterly, drunkenly, one night a few months after her mother died, they only fucking die on you . Or perhaps it was her black skin and her eyes and her volcanic origins.

Or maybe you missed the letter, Archidi. Maybe you were fucked up on krinzanz or brooding out at An-Monal or hiding in the desert .

“I was not aware of Bentan Sanagh’s conviction, my lord,” she said evenly.

“No?” Jhiral stared at her, she thought, almost resentfully. “No?”

“No, my lord.”

Shrieking. Shrieking . Abruptly, the Emperor of All Lands rolled his eyes.

“Oh, just cut his fucking throat ,” he snapped.

The executioners froze. Exchanged glances. One of Sanagh’s arms flailed almost free.

“My lord… ?” ventured one of the braver men.

“You heard me. Stop wasting my time trying to get him pinned and floated. Just slit his throat, I’ll witness it and we can all go and do something less… noisy.”

More glances. Helpless shrugs. Sanagh had frozen as well, fallen silent against the backdrop of his fellow convicts’ screams. It was hard to tell what expression his features held.

“Well? Get on with it!”

“Yes, my lord!” The sergeant executioner snapped to attention. He cleared his mercy blade, came forward and knelt at Sanagh’s head while the others held arms and legs down to the board. Archeth caught one last glance of the blood-streaked face, the unreadable eyes, and then the sergeant’s solid arm blocked her view. She never saw the blade slice through Sanagh’s flesh. But a gout of blood leapt out across the gray wood, and it splattered on the copper-veined marble almost at her feet.

Jhiral looked around at the assembled company and nodded.

“Good. Well done.” Out across the water, the shrieking went on, bouncing crazily off the sculpted marble walls, filling the air, seeking the ears like swarms of stinging insects. Jhiral still had to pitch his voice above it. “That’s it, then—we can all get out of here. Thank you, everybody, you are dismissed. Khernshal, have somebody clean up this mess, would you.”

The named courtier bowed gravely. Jhiral was already turning away. “Well, then, Archeth. Let’s go and have a look at this Helmsman of yours, shall we?”

“Yes, my lord. Thank you.”

“Oh, don’t mention it,” said the Emperor of All Lands sourly. “The pleasure is entirely mine.”

The shrieking followed them out.

ON ARCHETH’S INSTRUCTIONS, THEY’D PUT ANASHARAL IN THE QUEEN Consort Gardens. It was an extension to the upper levels of the palace that hadn’t seen much use since Akal’s beloved third wife died in childbirth eleven years ago—a quiet, largely forgotten space, dusty colonnades and wind-rattled palms, here and there a haunting white-stone statue in the Salak style. The interior sections felt shadowed and secret, like long-abandoned ruins, scarcely part of any built architecture at all. The paths through the foliage were unswept, littered with fallen leaves, shaded into patchwork gloom by the spread of the largest trees overhead. A good place for meetings you didn’t want noticed. No one came here if they could help it—some said the veiled ghost of the queen consort could still be seen on certain nights, prowling the gardens with her stillborn child gauze-wrapped and bloody in her arms.

But at the far side of all this, the gardens opened out onto an area of sunstruck white-stone paving, and balustrades festooned with pink-flowering creeper. There were broad granite benches, more statues, and a long balcony view. From here, you could look out westward across the city and the blaze of sun on broad waters at the estuary mouth.

The Helmsman had been placed on a central bench under the balustrade of the middle balcony. A squad of Throne Eternal stood uncertainly at guard beside it. They stiffened up as soon as they saw who was coming. Their commander came forward.

“My lord, I—”

“Relax, Rakan, it’s only us. No need to stand on ceremony.”

“Yes, my lord.” Noyal Rakan, wound overly tight these days, it seemed to Archeth, wearing his recent promotion to his brother’s rank like a helm and uniform cut a little too large. She felt sporadically sorry for the kid. He wasn’t long out of his teens; his grief was still fresh and boyish. But he’d served in the Emperor’s personal guard for the last seven years, and regimental custom for the Throne Eternal was clear, running a tight line back to horse-tribe family tradition.

“So this is our new metal friend, hmm?” Jhiral walked a circle around the Helmsman, looked it over with sidelong curiosity. “Doesn’t look like much, I have to say.”

“Do not despise the beggar, grizzled and crippled at the corner,” Anasharal quoted tartly. “For who can tell what households or kingdoms he may once have called his own. Life is a long dream whose end we cannot see, and he is perhaps but a premonition, a lucky warning you may yet take.”

“Oh, it knows scripture, too.” An imperial shrug. “But then they all seem to, don’t they? Well, Helmsman—I’m told you have a warning for me?”

“It isn’t for you personally, Jhiral Khimran. It is for your people.”

A long silence. Rakan and the other Throne Eternal looked elaborately elsewhere. Archeth clamped down on a creeping grin.