Ричард Морган - The Cold Commands

Just look at him down there…

Just look at him down there…

A female voice, or maybe something that knows how to imitate one, more or less. Faintly, eerily familiar. It comes and goes with the wind, seems to rush past him in sudden gusts, and then rush back. Ringil spins tiredly about, trying to face it.

… look at him…

The standing stones begin to flicker in and out of being around him, huge misshapen bars on some jail cell built for trolls, a circular prison that keeps pace with him as he walks. They chop the marsh horizon in segments for him, stand for a couple of soggy heartbeats, rising solidly out of the cobwebbed marsh grass, then vanish as he lurches toward them. After a while he learns to ignore the effect, much as you have to with so much else in the Gray Places.

He stumbles on, feeling steadily sicker with each pace.

… look at him…

Tilting vision of gray on gray, stone on emptiness, there and gone, there and gone…

Just look at—

He sags to a halt, feels the world go on a few steps without him as he stops. The voice goes abruptly silent, as if in interest at what he’ll do next. He breathes in a couple of times. The wind jostles cold and blustering at his back. It’s trying to shove him onward.

He lifts both arms. Calls out hoarsely.

Yeah , look at me. Risgillen, is it? Go on and look: Ringil Eskiath, brought low. Is this what you wanted? You can’t have wanted it any more than I did .

No response. If Risgillen is out there, she isn’t in the mood for a chat.

Can you blame her?

He can’t really.

The ghost of the stone circle, painted like sunset shadows onto the backs of his eyes. The fleeting memories of Seethlaw—snarling, wrestling passion, cool flesh under his hands, the taste of the dwenda’s come in his mouth like juice from some salt-sweet bursting berry on his tongue. The deep, clenching thrusts as he hauled and molded himself against Seethlaw’s ivory-hard buttocks. The noises the dwenda made with each stroke.

And then the collapsing to the dew-soaked grass, the shuddering release, the laughter on the edge of weeping. The letting go, and all that came after.

He remembers suddenly how the stones kept Dakovash out, how the Salt Lord prowled beyond them but would not step through. How he threw the Ravensfriend in to Ringil like a man feeding meat to a beast whose cage he dares not enter.

Try not to drop that again. You’re going to need it .

I am not your fucking cat’s-paw .

Out of nowhere, a laugh coughs its way up into his mouth.

There’s not much to it, certainly not much humor. But the smile it stamps onto Ringil’s lips is down-curved and ugly with sudden strength.

He looks back the way he’s come. The low-growing marsh vegetation is broken in a wavering line where he’s passed. It seems he’s walked out of the marsh spiders’ territory without noticing. The cobwebs are gone. The smell of salt seems stronger now.

He rubs at his wound again, and this time when the pain sears, he breathes it in like a perfume from fond memory.

He casts about and thinks he sees the bright spark of a fire on the gray horizon.

He stares toward it for a long moment, waiting for it to vanish, the way every other fucking thing does around here.

When it doesn’t, when it holds and beckons to him off the surface of the cold gray sky, he grunts and sets off in that direction. The cold wind at his back, hustling him on.

Well. What else you going to do now, Gil—stop?

From time to time, the stone circle flickers in and out around him as he walks. But it feels less like a prison now, and more like armor.

WHEN HIS GHOSTS START TO SHOW UP, HE’S ALMOST PLEASED TO SEE them. This, at least, is something he’s used to.

Yeah, it’s all right for you . Skimil Shend plods gloomily along beside him in cracked leather boots, poorly patched breeches and a white court blouse that has seen far better days. You’re not stuck in some stinking garret back in that miserable feces-reeking apology for a city. You’re not an exile .

Actually —Ringil pushes the pace as hard as the soggy ground and his shaky legs will let him —I am .

Oh, you call that exile? Chartered ambassador to the Majak plains, a sinecure purse and the writ of the city to cover your extravagances? That’s not an exile, that’s a license to plunder horny-handed horse-breeder arse. All those iron-thighed young things. Some punishment that’s going to be. I —Shend thumps his chest with bombastic self-pity— I suffered for my art .

Oh, shut up .

But he has to wonder, just briefly and for all he’s trained himself against such things, what shape his life must have taken in the world this alternative Shend belongs to. A Shend who never got to go home after all, and a Ringil who…

The aspect storm is a warp in the fabric of every possible outcome the universe will allow , Seethlaw once told him, camped out in the Gray Places with the aplomb of a Glades noble at a picnic. It gathers in the alternatives like a bride gathering in her gown. For a mortal, those alternatives are mostly paths they’ll never take, things they’ll never do .

He makes the aspect storm, he knows, every time he walks in the Gray Places. It blows around him in barely visible cobweb vortices, and the fragments of those alternatives swirl to him like storm waters pouring down into a drain.

You’d be living inside a million different possibilities at once . The—slightly drunken—opinion of a scholar in dwenda lore he knows back in Trelayne. Imagine the will it would take to survive that. Your average peasant human is just going to go screaming insane .

It certainly sounds like insanity: a Ringil not disowned, a Ringil cherished enough by family —yeah, or maybe just soft enough to bend to family will —that his transgressions meet with no worse sanction than an iffy diplomatic posting. He sees himself hurried urbanely out of that other Trelayne with face-saving rank, appointment, entourage. Sent in genteel disgrace a thousand miles northeast to the steppes, a place where his appetites can no longer bring the name of House Eskiath into disrepute because no one in Trelayne will know or care what he does there.

He wonders vaguely if he’d meet some alternative Egar out under those aching, open skies. An Egar who’s perhaps not quite so resolutely and exclusively dedicated to pussy.

There’s a feeling in his chest now, dangerously close to longing.

What if…

He stamps down on it.

You don’t do that shit, Gil. There are no alternatives. You live with what is .

And you don’t let your ghosts rent room in your head .

But he glances sideways at Shend anyway, can’t quite repress the impulse, and it’s not a pretty sight. The poet’s once-fine features have sagged and bloated with his years away, and his hair is stringy with lack of care. His nails are bitten down to the quick, his belly hangs like a money changer’s apron at his waist. That he woke up one morning in exile and just gave up is written into his flesh like branding.

Pouched eyes give Ringil back his stare. What you looking at? See something you like?

Look, Hinerion’s not that bad , Ringil says uncomfortably.

Really? Then why are you leaving?

I’m not… leaving . Some unlooked for puzzlement in his voice at this. I’m…

Sudden, crushing image of a black sail on the horizon.

… dying… ?

Shend sniffs. Looks like leaving to me. And in such exalted company .