Ричард Морган - The Cold Commands

“A city standing in the ocean?”

“An-Naranash in Lake Shaktan stands above the water in exactly the same way.”

“Yes, so they tell me. And is abandoned.”

Their voices were growing heated again. Archeth backed off, seated herself on a tall, arching tree root just off the path. Her pulse was up, her vision dizzied dim. Her thoughts skittered back and forth on the shiny jagged edges of krinzanz lack.

She forced calm.

“My lord, whether the city is abandoned or not is hardly the issue.”

“Is it not, Archeth? Is it not?”

He had her—however hard she tried to crush the knowledge out. “My concern, my lord—”

“Is that you may yet find some of your father’s race who have not abandoned the world.” Jhiral sighed and sat down beside her on the root. His shoulder jolted her. He stared across the path into the foliage opposite. “I don’t blame you, Archeth. Really, I don’t. Who wouldn’t like to call back their parents sometimes? But your need is transparent. Be honest. With me, even if you cannot with yourself. You are supposed to be my most trusted adviser. Can you—honestly—tell me this is about a threat to the Empire?”

She grimaced.

“I carried a warning to you last winter that we came close to ignoring, and look how that turned out.”

“Yes, rub my face in that, why don’t you.”

“The facts remain, my lord.”

“All right, don’t milk it.” Jhiral leaned back and peered upward into the canopy of the tree, as if he might discern a way out among the branches. He frowned. “You said after Ennishmin that the dwenda do not favor harsh light, that they can probably not abide the sun in these latitudes.”

“That’s not what I said, my lord. It’s what the knight Ringil Eskiath said he surmised from his time among them. It’s a supposition, nothing more.”

The young Emperor nodded vigorously. “Yes, but still. Even in Ennishmin, where the sun barely breaks through the clouds, even in the pall of winter, the dwenda chose to fight at night.”

“They could fight at night here, too.”

“That was not what this… Eskiath surmised , though, was it?”

Most of the time I was in the Aldrain marches, it was dark or dim, like twilight . Ringil’s hesitant theorizing rose in her memory. One place we went, there was something like a sun in the sky, but it was almost burned out. Like a hollow shell of itself. If that’s where the dwenda are from originally, it might explain why they can’t tolerate bright light .

“They still came to Khangset,” she said stubbornly. “They ripped the town apart. And if the Helmsman is to be believed, the Ilwrack Changeling is not dwenda at all. He’s an undead human sorcerer, wielding Aldrain powers. How, unaided, would you stop something like that?”

“You believe in this Ilwrack Changeling, then? Tell the truth, Archeth. Have you even heard of him?”

“No, my lord.”

“Then—”

“But the timing is suggestive. Less than a year after our skirmish with the dwenda, and here we are, warned of an escalation in the conflict. Can we afford to ignore this as some kind of coincidence?”

“I’ll tell you what we can’t afford to do, Archeth. We can’t afford to equip a full naval expedition to the middle of the northern ocean in the hope that it’ll stumble on some figment of a mad machine’s imagination. Quite apart from anything else, that’s the other side of League waters. We sail there in force, it’s a major diplomatic incident in the making.”

“We are not at war with the League, my lord.”

“No,” said the Emperor glumly. “Not yet. But piracy is on the increase north of Hinerion. And I have it on good authority from the admiralty’s spies in Trelayne that the League shipmasters’ association is pressing for a renewal of privateer licensing. You know what that means. It always kicks off the same way.”

Except when we kick it off ourselves by marching north in force .

She quelled the thought. She had no great love for the League, had always believed, as her father’s people had—perhaps because her father’s people had—that Yhelteth offered the better way forward.

But:

“Admiral Sang’s… spies… are less than wholly reliable.” She trod warily. “They’ve been known to exaggerate claims before.”

“As has the old bastard himself. Yes, all right, Archeth, I know you don’t like him.” Abruptly, Jhiral was on his feet again, pacing. “But I’ve read the reports, and I don’t think this is Sang beating the drum. We’ve seen this before, after all. Those mercantile little shits up north can’t afford a war right now any more than we can, and they know it. But it won’t stop them farming the unpleasantries out to private shipmasters and then taking a tithe on the booty it brings in. Their coffers fill up with plunder from imperial cargo, their diplomats shake their weasel heads in sorrow and deny all knowledge. And meantime, as if we didn’t have enough to worry about down in Demlarashan and up at Ennishmin, we have to raid the treasury again to build navy pickets, or risk losing our own trade lanes to League competition.”

“Maybe Admiral Sang is just looking for some new warships.”

“I already told you I don’t think it’s that.” Trace of a growl in his voice now.

“Besides which there must be a whole constellation of League trade interests on land who don’t want any kind of war. The slavers to name but one. The League aren’t necessarily bound to listen to what the shipmasters want. They—”

“Archeth, will you stop building castles in the air!”

“I”—before she could stop herself—“trust Sang about as far as I could throw his fat arse. He’s not reliable.”

“Oh, and the fucking Helmsmen are?”

Suddenly he was in her face. Hands clamping down on her shoulders, thumbs hooking in, cabled strength in the arms. She was forcibly reminded that if Prince Jhiral, heir apparent, had never seen anything of the war against the Scaled Folk or his father’s earlier campaigns, had in fact never struck a sword blow in anger his whole life—well, neither then had he missed a day’s combat schooling for anything other than sickness since he was twelve years old. There was a lot of muscle under the ocher-and-black draped shoulders, a lot of trained and channeled power.

But even with the krinzanz jitters, she could have put Bandgleam in his throat faster than he could blink.

Could have…

She met his eyes.

Perhaps he sensed it. He let her go. Straightened up.

“Archeth, you were at An-Naranash. You saw how it went down.” His voice was back to regal, council-chamber calm. He gestured, throwaway, with one open palm. “All that Helmsman burbling, months to cross the desert, all the diplomatic wrangling with the nautocrats in Shaktur, the lake tolls and bribes, and what do we end up with? A mausoleum on stilts, centuries deserted, stripped of anything even remotely valuable.”

She remembered. The slow-dying excitement in her guts as they swung in closer to An-Naranash’s silent, towering bulk, and she saw the extent of the dilapidation. The clenched, sickening disappointment as she boarded at one massive, barnacle-crusted leg, climbed the endless damp-reeking stairwells, and prowled the echoing gloom of spaces as abandoned as anything she knew at An-Monal.

“It cost us half a million elementals to mount that expedition, Archeth. All because the Helmsmen said go. It’s one of the biggest mistakes my father ever made. Do you really expect me to follow in his footsteps? Is that what you want?”

For that, she had no answer.

Because you forced the Shaktur expedition, Archidi, and you know it. It wasn’t the Helmsmen, not really. You squeezed it out of Akal in his dying melancholy and regret, funds and men he could ill afford in the postwar mess, a paid penance, an old man’s attempt to atone —the unspoken bargain that she would no longer torment him with the tales of what she saw at Vanbyr, if he underwrote the expedition and gave her the command. That she would, in some unclear fashion, absolve him.