Ричард Морган - The Cold Commands

“You know him long?”

A shrug. “Four, five years. That’s a long time in this business, right? Came down here from Trelayne after the war, chasing some piece of pussy he’d fallen for when he was in uniform.” Klithren crouched to eye level with the dead man. Sighed and pressed his chin to his folded knuckles. “He was an arrogant little fuck sometimes. But you couldn’t ask for a better man at your back in a scrap. Saved my life a couple of times for sure.”

“Guess this means we’re not heading out the Dappled Gate after all.”

“Nah, that was scuppered to fuck anyway. Didn’t you hear?” Klithren looked up at Ringil. “Thought you might have. Thought he might have, maybe that’s how come all this rushing around…”

Ringil felt his pulse pick up slightly. “Heard what?”

“Word just came down from the Keep.” The bounty hunter said it almost absently, like he couldn’t care less. His eyes were fixed on Venj’s wounds. “No one goes outside the city walls until further notice. They’re saying some of the slaves on that caravan got hit yesterday had the plague.”

THE WORLD OPENS UP AND SWALLOWS YOU DOWN.

This is not new. You’ve spent the last decade of your life, at least, wondering how it’ll burn down in the end. Before that, of course, you were too young and alive to really believe in your own death, but the war took all that away.

The war gave you death as a daily commonplace, an immediate possibility behind every badly timed sword stroke or stumbling misstep you made. Death was there at your side in the screaming chaos of battle, cutting down comrades and enemies alike, occasionally turning your way, ready for the least slip or sign that you’d really had enough of this shit and wanted the easy out. Death came to you, pensive quiet and sated in the aftermath, smirking up at you from the rictus grin of the men who’d died hard, hanging about at your back in the waning cries and weeping of the wounded beyond repair. Death was your friend, your confessor, your intimate companion, and though the seduction might be lengthy and sly, you always knew he’d get you in the end.

Just not like this.

Klithren went down behind the blow from the dragon-tooth dagger without a sound. Ringil, stirring from the dimmed moment of the act, saw he had used the weapon’s pommel and that though there was blood in the bounty hunter’s hair Klithren would live to fight another day. Make sense of that if you could.

Harbor. Get to the fucking harbor .

Where the night had by now settled down to seeping bandlight and an illusory, seaward-yearning calm—faint, irregular slap of waves against the pilings, soft stutter and creak of mooring ropes as they stretched with the shift of their tethered vessels on the swell. A trio of quiet drunks huddled like cormorants atop a pile of trawl nets at one end of the quay, mumbling sea chanteys and passing a wine flask back and forth. Ringil went past them at a limping trot, got a tipsy salutation from one, hurriedly shushed by his more circumspect—or just more sober—companions. Farther along, in the puddle of shadow cast by the customhouse wall, he caught the grunts and glottal clicking sounds of some sailor getting a cheap blow job. He thought he saw a queue of figures waiting there in the gloom.

Eril was draped at the rail of the Marsh Queen’s Favor , smoking a krinzanz twig. He straightened when he saw Ringil approaching, pitched the twig into the gap between ship and wharf, and came down the gangplank with a grin. Ringil raised a hand to keep him back. Shook his head.

“Better stay where you are.”

Eril’s smile dropped off his face. He glanced about the darkened wharf, seeking enemies.

“Trouble?” he asked quietly.

“You could say that.” Ringil was fascinated to discover that what he felt most was an obscure embarrassment. “You’d better tell the captain to get his crew together and slip ropes. Time for a smuggler’s exit.”

“And our other passenger?”

“They’re calling a plague quarantine on the city, Eril. You don’t get out of here right now, they’ll lock the whole harbor up and your ride out of here as well.”

“Plague?” For perhaps the second time ever in their acquaintance, Ringil saw genuine fear in Eril’s eyes.

“Yeah. Seems some of the slaves had it.”

The Brotherhood enforcer made the connection. The fear in his expression shifted into something else.

“You…”

“Yeah. Looks like it.”

Silence stretched between them like distance, as if the gangplank were already up and the Marsh Queen’s Favor drifting from the shore. Ringil made himself grin, guessed it must look pretty awful. Eril cleared his throat.

“I had a great-uncle in Parashal, got it back in twenty-eight. They say he lived.”

Ringil nodded. Everybody had an uncle somewhere who’d survived the plague in some other place or time. It was a bedside platitude, cheap comfort you could hand out like some threadbare blanket you weren’t going to miss.

“Sure,” he said. “It can be done.”

In Majak lands, Egar had once told him, you could cheat the plague of its victim if the tribe could find—read, in the constant tribal ruck of the steppes, capture alive in battle—a suitable substitute to sacrifice in place of the original sufferer. Given a man or woman of comparable rank and blood, the hovering plague spirit would take the offered life instead and depart with it. The original sufferer didn’t just recover, they came back stronger than they had ever been before. Often they would rise to become tribal leaders or shamans in their own right. Such recoveries apparently took place overnight—sometimes, if the shaman had the Dwellers’ favor, before the planned sacrifice had even been carried through.

Nice trick if you can pull it .

“My debt…,” Eril began.

“Is hereby canceled. I asked you to help me throw a burning brand into Etterkal, and we did that pretty effectively. I’m all done murdering slavers for now.”

The Brotherhood enforcer could not quite keep the relief from soaking into his features. He made an uncharacteristically awkward gesture.

“I, uh, I sold the horses.”

“Good. Get anything halfway decent for them?”

Eril shook his head, overvehemently. “Got fucked in the arse. Barely three hundred apiece and that’s including the tackle. Fucking landlord’s going to double his money just by sleeping on it. Here.”

He dug a purse out of his coat, took a half step forward on his way to hand it over, and then remembered. He stopped dead on the gangplank. Ringil nodded, lifted one open hand toward him.

“ ’Sokay. I’m not too far gone to catch stuff.”

Eril hesitated, then tossed the purse across the intervening gap. A good, hard throw, to make sure it cleared the edge of the wharf. The weight and impact stung in the cup of Ringil’s palm.

The two of them stood there looking at each other.

“What will you do?” the enforcer asked him finally.

Ringil weighed the purse in his hand. “I don’t know. Get drunk, maybe. Don’t you worry about me, Eril. You need to turn around and put your foot in that captain’s arse. Get some sail hoist while you still can.”

He turned away then, because the temptation of the gangplank’s sea-rotted edge where it rested on the wharf was getting a little too much to resist. Marsh Queen’s Favor sat there, four feet out from the quay, and the urge to cross that symbolic gap to safety was like krinzanz craving. Give himself any longer, and he’d do it, he’d start trying to talk his way into coming aboard regardless, rationalize his way past the obvious fucking shape of this particular truth, tell the tawdry fucking lies to himself that everybody did, Look, this isn’t plague, it’s just a bad cold, be over it in a couple of days with some sea air to clear your head, you’ll…