Ричард Морган - The Cold Commands

Yeah—heading that way again these days .

But she doesn’t seem to hear him. The raiding went back and forth at the borders for years, Gil, news every other week of towns burned and populations marched away in chains. And we were marked. No matter that we were merchants in good faith, wealth in our coffers and a generation of judicious marriage alliances. Still we had the red daub on our door, still we were barred from the Chancellery. Stones thrown at us in the street, spat upon with impunity by urchins. Southern scum, southern scum. In the school we attended, the priests beat my brothers at every opportunity. One of them struck Eldrin to the floor once, called him Yhelteth whelp, kicked him from his desk to the door and out into the corridor. He was five. He came home black and blue, and my father, shamed, could do nothing. My mother went begging to the priests instead, and the beatings stopped for a while, but she never spoke of that visit afterward as long as she lived. Do you know how relieved my parents looked the day I married Gingren Eskiath? Do you know how happy I was for them?

Were they happy for you?

No reply.

He looks back and sees that she, too, has left him.

In the time before this, the Earth was not the way you see it now .

In the time before this, the Earth was ravaged by endless conflict, fought over by races and beings you now remember only as myth and legend .

Weapons of hideous, unnatural power were unleashed, vast energies raged, horizon to horizon, the sky itself cracked open. The planet shuddered from the tread of the Visitors—enemies and allies too, the latter chosen in desperation from other worlds and places worse than other worlds, to hold the line against invaders who were probably in the end no more alien .

Whole nations and peoples disappeared inside storms that lasted decades .

Great jagged darknesses larger than mountains moved in the night sky, blocking out the stars and casting deathly shadow on those beneath .

Gates opened, in places no earthly passage should ever have been permitted , and the Visitors poured forth, met in battle, coiled and recoiled, worked their alien technologies in causes it is doubtful those who enlisted them could ever truly comprehend. It was a conflict beyond human reckoning, and mere humans found themselves trapped, cornered, hemmed in on all sides by what had been unleashed .

So Humanity fought, hopelessly, generation after generation, endured unimaginable horrors, changed at levels once believed intrinsic, splintered apart and became a dozen disparate races in itself—as if only in dissolution could the race once called human hide sufficiently well from the carnivorous glare of alien eyes .

And then—finally, for reasons no longer well understood—the wars ended, the Earth spun on along its customary course in relative peace .

And those who were left squabbled over what remained .

“NO CHANGE THERE THEN,” JHIRAL MUTTERED, AND ARCHETH GLANCED at him in mute surprise.

A brief and pointed silence, and then Anasharal’s voice resumed, with biting schoolmasterly emphasis:

“Into, this, void…”

INTO THIS VOID, THEN, BURST THE DWENDA, THE ALDRAIN, THE WITCH folk, glittering dark and beautiful, human at least in base form, and claiming a prior heritage, an ownership of Earth predating the conflict—though there were those who argued their memories were faulty, hopelessly distorted by their custom of dwelling for long periods in the realm of the Unrealized Possible; and others who believed that Time itself had been somehow collapsed, folded, or maybe just shredded in the wars, so that the past the dwenda claimed did not even belong, correctly speaking, to this version of the world .

But such arguments were at best academic—the wars had weakened the walls that held such places apart from the unshadowed world, and the Aldrain were not disposed to debate with the existing populations in lands they considered their own by ancestral right .

They took the Earth by storm and built there, summarily, an Empire that lasted seven thousand years. Many, including the humans they dominated, called it glorious .

They brought magic as a way of life, they sprinkled it across the planet like seed .

They stalked the night as absolute monarchs—and created a harsh human oligarchy to serve them wherever and whenever the light of the Realized sun struck too harshly for them to endure. A dynasty of kings, endowed with dark powers, a bloodline of human sorcerers with whom they mated and shared their heritage—to the extent that such heritage could ever be shared with ordinary human stock .

Most of the Dark Kings were insane .

It took the enemies of the dwenda all of those seven thousand years to learn the new rules—to master the new magic, to bend it to their will as the dwenda so long ago already had .

Seven thousand years to bring the Kiriath through the hidden gates in the bowels of the Earth, to summon a science and a people equal to the eldritch folk, to meet them in battle, to throw down their cities into marsh and ruin, to scatter their armies and their human adherents. To bring back a measure of sanity to the world .

To defeat the Last of the Dark Kings .

THE HELMSMAN FELL SILENT.

“I thought—” Archeth began, then shook her head. “Doesn’t matter.”

But the pinched wick of suspicion still smoked in her head. There were a lot of stories about how and why her people had arrived in the world, most of them told by humans ignorant of anything resembling actual facts. Come to that, even the legends the Kiriath themselves told about the Advent were erratic and hard to credit. But Angfal, who hung on her study wall like so much alien iron viscera and bulbous-limbed swelling, had always been scornful.

The Kiriath barely survived the voyage through the quick paths on their way here , he told her one fractious night as she tried to crowbar some useful answers out of him. They did not choose to come here, Archeth, despite anything the Chronicles might claim to the contrary. They were shipwrecked here, and if they stayed it wasn’t because they liked the scenery. It was because they were afraid that the return would break them .

Some of this she put down to bitterness—the resentment Angfal felt at being left behind. But still, she thought Anasharal’s version rang slightly overwrought.

The Emperor had taken a seat on one of the granite benches near the balcony, back to the glare of the sun. His face was in shadow, richly oiled hair hanging forward to screen his features, but she read the impatience in how he was sprawled, the sideways tilt of his head. She wondered if she’d gotten in the way of a visit to the harem—if commanding the executions had left him with the itching need to fuck something.

He brushed invisible dust from his lap.

“You, uh, plan to actually tell us something about this Last Dark King? His name, for instance? Who he was, what he did? How any of this has anything to do with the here-and-now?”

“It is better not to name him,” said the Helmsman somberly. “Better not to utter those syllables here.”

Archeth rolled her eyes.

“Yes—we’re not easily shocked around here,” said Jhiral. “Feel free.”

“Let us call him simply the Ilwrack Changeling, since it was that Aldrain clan who raised him in the Gray Places. Taken from a humble home on the marsh for the dark glimmer the dwenda prize so much in humans, brought up an Aldrain warrior, and ultimately given command of a dwenda legion, he rose to—”