Ричард Морган - The Cold Commands

He worked his way higher, as close to silently as he could. Finger-width chunks of the fractured stone gave a little under his grip, made a tiny grating sound. Shit, shit… Sweating palms, powdering stone under the pads of his fingertips. He hurried his hold past the loose section—the haste undid him, one foot slipped out of the crack and he hinged around and out.

Fuck!

He forced one hand fully into the crack, closed it up into a fist, and twisted it sideways. The ragged stone bit into his flesh as the hand-jam took his weight. He hung there, teeth gritted, twelve feet off the ground, and tried to quiet his breathing as the guards walked by underneath.

Which they did. Right on by.

He let them get a decent distance beyond before he moved. Then, working as swiftly as he could without noise, he worked his loose foot back into the crack, loosened off the hand-jam into a more conventional hold, and climbed the rest of the wall without incident. He came over the crenellated top and found Harath seated with his back to the battlement, as relaxed as if he’d come up here to get some sun.

He sank down next to the younger man, breathing hard. Harath glanced sideways at him.

“All right?”

Egar held up his fist in the bandlight and spotted the tiny black trickle of blood. He licked it away, sucked the ragged edges of the torn flesh clean.

“Fine.”

“They see you?”

“Yeah, they saw me. They said they’d give us an hour inside as long as we didn’t break anything. You going to show me this fucking hole in the roof, or what?”

THE INSIDE OF THE TEMPLE HAD A MUSTY, STONE-DUST SMELL THAT reminded Egar of rock tombs he’d ransacked in Dhashara as a younger man. He kept expecting caskets, raised stone biers, or mummified remains racked in the walls. Instead, the spaces were broad and high and empty. Detritus crunched underfoot, but it was the leavings of decades without occupancy—stone and plaster powder fallen from the cracked ceilings, rat turds and grit and the tiny dried corpses of spiders. Somewhere, he could hear the sporadic drip of water falling in from the roof or some damaged cistern in the upper levels. There were a lot of holes up there like the one they roped in through; damage done by the same eruption that had cracked the walls. You could look up as you passed beneath and see the stars in the gaps.

Old, denied gods held up the ceilings.

“Remind you of anybody?” Harath whispered, nodding at one looming figure.

Egar glanced up at the muscled torso, the shoulder weighed down with horse tackle, the short, squared-off blade in the upraised hand, barely a knife at all. The tight-lipped, somber warrior face and beard.

“Yeah, Urann—without the teeth.”

“Should think himself lucky he’s got any face at all. They tore up some of the others in here so bad, you can hardly tell who they were meant to be.”

Egar nodded, mostly to himself. It was pretty much the way of things, wherever the imperial writ ran. The Revelation didn’t like competition.

They slipped past under the empty stone gaze of the statue. Harath gestured left—shallow stone steps, leading up. They took them two at a time, knives drawn for anyone they might happen to meet at the top.

Nothing. Shadows and dust. Tall, wood-paneled doors twice the height of a man, riddled with dry rot, wedged ajar on the gritty, detritus-strewn floor.

“This opens onto a gallery over the central hall,” Harath told him when they got there. “Gallery runs right around. Get a good view from up there.”

Egar nodded. He gripped one of the doors at its edge, decided moving it would make too much noise, and inserted himself sideways in the existing gap.

“Deep breath,” said Harath judiciously.

It took rather more than that. The effort of holding his belly tight made Egar’s eyes water, and he still scraped himself on the door edge, scraped the door open a farther grating inch, before he popped out the other side. He stood statue-still, teeth gritted, blade in hand, waiting to see if they’d been heard.

Harath came sveltely through after him.

The gallery was, as promised, a grand affair, sweeping round the hall fifteen feet up, broad and balustraded. Bandlight seeped in through tall windows long ago boarded up. Egar crept up to the balustrade in a crouch and peered through. Below him, he saw an expanse of the same derelict, debris-speckled stone flooring as in the previous chamber. Some remnant altar up at one end, looked like it hadn’t seen use in a century, couple of squat statues standing around elsewhere, a few long wooden benches and…

He frowned. His gaze went back to one of the figures. He saw now there were five of them, four in a rough ring, the fifth more or less central…

Like something he’d once—

Height of a small woman or a child. Crude stonework, the facial features barely picked out. Stubby arms outspread as if for balance. Like mannequins for arrow practice, but dark and unyielding and dumped to floor height.

The memory cascaded—filtering soil of familiarity, and then the big rocks of recall, falling in his head.

Harsh gray light.

Some kind of beacon for the dwenda . Archeth, the morning following the skirmish, one boot on the tumbled figure lying facedown in the swamp. She was kicking at the thing with her heel, some monotonous residual anger working itself out. The wound across her temple was cleaned and livid in the thin morning light. The marsh dwellers made them, way back when. Forms a link, somehow. Something to do with the kind of stone they used .

He nudged Harath. “Where’d those come from?”

“Where’d what c—” The Ishlinak saw where he was pointing. “Oh. Beats me. They only had two last time I was in here. Pretty cheap shit by the look of it. Worse carving than the Voronak, and that’s saying something.”

“It’s glirsht,” Egar said absently. “Naom stone. They’ve got them set out like… that’s got to be… compass points, right?”

The younger man shrugged, sniffed. “Could be. You want to see where they keep the slaves or not?”

“Yeah, yeah.”

But he followed Harath along the gallery and through another decaying doorway with a lot of backward glances. And even after they left the hall, the squat black stone statues sat in his mind’s eye like evil little dolls.

After a while, the cormorants seem to tire of his company. They hop ungainly off the rock they’ve all been sharing, disappear one by one into the depths below. The last one cocks its head back at him before it dives. Utters a parched croak that might be farewell, and is gone. Ringil raises the flask after them in salute.

Puts it to his lips and finds it empty.

No wonder they left .

For a while, he resists the obvious implication in that. The rock is oddly pliant and comfortable beneath him, there seems no reason to—

Well, apart from that queasy, gray-white patch of radiance seeping through at the sky’s eastern edge.

Something’s on its way, Gil .

Best if you’re not around for it to trip over when it arrives .

He makes the effort and gets to his feet. Swaying a little with the sudden height it gives him. He peers downward after the cormorants, gets nothing for his trouble but a vague gloom and the rising reek of fouled seawater. He shrugs. The fact that they were seabirds and he isn’t doesn’t seem to matter that much in the end. He takes the long step forward and plunges downward after them. Splashes into the—

Not water exactly, it’s too sparse and fleeting for that. But for scant moments he thinks he sees bubbles rising through it, his breath ascending in a milky trail toward a surface stirred silver by his entry above. There’s a brief, chilly prickling, like the splash of cold water thrown in his face, and then something lunges sharkish at him out of the murk.