Ричард Морган - The Cold Commands

Fuck!

He catches fragments of a glimpse—a circular mouth, dilated wide enough to swallow his head whole, the unbroken ring of a single taut lip rolled back and concentric rings of teeth erect in the throat beyond. It’s the akyia, the thing that Seethlaw and Risgillen called the merroigai. Behind the nightmare head, the hint of a lithe, approximately human body bisecting into long, coiling limbs fronded with fins. A sleekly muscled arm, darting out, one clawed hand grasping for him, perhaps to save him from the fall—but he shrinks from it like a child from the clutch of the Marsh Wraith, and the fall takes him on.

Deeper yet.

If there was ever a surface above him, it’s long gone now. The darkness presses around like some giant constricting serpent out of legend. Breathing is an effort, forcing him to shallow intake through trembling lips. His eyes ache from peering into the black, but something will not allow them to close. The sense that something is coming has not left him—he feels it plummeting down behind him, vast, shadowy, jaws agape. And he’s pinned , less falling than hanging from some constructed torture table whose shape and extent he cannot yet see.

Pale and luminous, something else looms up out of the depths.

For a couple of shivery moments, he thinks it might be a jellyfish, one of the giant ones that wash up on the shores at Lanatray when the summers have been stormy. He remembers abruptly—himself at eight years old, alone, as he increasingly was, walking dazedly on rain-damp sand among humped and shivery-translucent mounds that rose almost as high as he was tall. For a few eerie moments in that early-morning light, before a fast-growing hardheaded pragmatism set in, he believed—wanted to believe—these might be the quivering, fled souls of whales taken by the harpoon off the Hironish isles.

They were not.

And this, now—he shakes himself back to the moment—is not a jellyfish.

It’s a stone.

It seems to settle with this recognition, bobbing about at his feet with dog-like attachment. It wants to be friends. A softly gleaming chunk of masonry the size of a big man’s chest, inscribed across the top of one facing with letters in old Myrlic script. Ringil tilts his head a little and deciphers the lettering:

… and the Keys of a City greater than…

Like something you’d see on the walls of some ruined temple in the older, marsh end of town, some eerie once-isolated shrine now drowned in a sea of modern housing as Trelayne’s burgeoning outer districts spread—some of the stonework there is very old, it predates the Naomic ascendancy by centuries.

… the Keys of a City…

The stone startles upward, as if hauled on a ship’s cable by weary men. Knee height, a hesitant bob or two, and then rising again, a hound called off by its real master after some case of mistaken identity. Perhaps, he thinks with blurry imprecision, the words are not intended for him to read at all, and this conjunction of man and building block is just some mis-stroke of destiny or demonic intent, a sword skating off a shield it’s supposed to cleave, an axman’s sure-footed brace slipping on mud, and down he goes on his arse before the cut can land. A life spared where no mercy should be looking down, a city sacked where it should stand against the besieging horde—an error in the Book of Days, some shit like that.

In his mind, he builds a suitably dismissive shrug, but finds he’s shivering too much to give it physical form. His body is ceasing to feel like anything he owns or has much control over.

This time, it occurs to him, he might really be dying.

The chunk of masonry comes level with his head, and wobbles there a moment. Blind impulse—as realization catches up, he finds he’s grabbed it. Is now hugging the worn-smooth contours of the lettered stone. He travels upward through the black, with a force that tugs and aches in his shoulder joints. The stonework is chilly against his face, the carved characters print their patterns into his flesh, he feels his body and legs rise devoid of weight until he hangs horizontally out from the stone like a windblown pennant at the mast.

The black around him is graying out.

A bruise-colored sky billows into being overhead, spreads itself to the horizon like a briskly snapped-out blanket.

He falls out of it.

Catches the sudden reek of salt water on the way down, the scent of fresh-cut kitchen herbs out of childhood memory…

He hits a surface that gives soggily under his weight. Water presses up from the ground and soaks through his clothes. He blows some of it, bitter and black-tasting, out of his mouth. Turns his head a little so he can breathe. Understanding catches up with the sense impressions of before.

He lies full length in a marsh, cold and clinging to a solitary chunk of stone.

Oh well…

Something stalks over his head like the fingers of a hand. He knows at once what it is, flails out with instinctive revulsion and flings the soft body away from him. Insistent squirming under his own body now, somewhere below his ribs, floundering panic— fuck! fuck! —and then the hot scissoring of jaws through his shirt and into his flesh as he rolls too late. A gossamer nuzzling at his neck, more soft, exploratory fingers. He swipes the touch away, comes frantically up on his knees. Cobwebs everywhere, plastering his arms, thick on the marsh grass around him like yards and yards of rotted gray muslin, he’s in the burrow, he’s landed right on top of the fucking thing .

He staggers to his feet, casts about, panting.

Rips loose sword, scabbard, cloak. Flings them away.

Brushes himself down with brutal strokes. Marsh spiders are communal, fiercely territorial, grow to a foot across if you’re unlucky. A couple of bites from a big one is usually enough to finish a grown man. Ringil turns a taut full circle about, airheaded and struggling for balance as his feet shift and sink in the slippery springy turf and the ooze. The bite in his belly stings like scalding. He feels the slow, hot creep of the poison under the skin. He peers hard in the poor light, wishing he had a torch. Thinks he sees movement amid the coarse cobweb coatings and the marsh grass, but can’t be sure.

He gets his breath back with an effort.

At his feet, the spider that bit him lies half crushed by his weight and flexing feebly. It’s the size of a man’s head. He stares numbly at it for a couple of seconds, then stamps down with convulsive anger until it dies.

It’s all the energy he can summon. He stands swaying. The poison creeps some more in his belly, seems to be spreading. He rubs reflexively at the wound, then wishes he hadn’t. Searing acid bites under the skin.

The marsh stretches featureless to the horizon. Thickly cobwebbed marsh grass in every direction, and an icy winter wind, knifing at his ears.

Great. Just fucking great .

He picks his way carefully over to his fallen sword and cloak, picks each item up in cautious turn and looks it over. He shakes three more fist-sized spiders out of the cloak’s folds, finds another crawling on the scabbard and flicks it off. Stands a moment to make sure they all scuttle away. Then he fits the cloak across his shoulders—fighting the wind for possession—and fastens it there, hangs the Ravensfriend on his back once more, and stares defiantly around.

He reckons the cobwebs look somewhat thinner off to his left.

He starts walking.

Behind him, the abandoned chunk of masonry sits ringed in black water and offers its words to the empty sky.

… the Keys of a City greater than…

IT MIGHT BE THE POISON, MIGHT NOT. IN THE GRAY PLACES, WHO can tell?

He begins to hear a voice shouting down from the clouds, hoarse with anger but somehow soft as fine wool on his fingertips at the same time.