Ричард Морган - The Cold Commands

Egar frowned. It was the same crap they handed daughters the world over, he supposed. But slaves ? And some of the women he’d seen didn’t look to be much under thirty summers. If Menkarak thought he was holding a crop of virgins here, he had to be more fucked in the head than even Archeth reckoned he was.

“Why untouched?” he asked.

A visible shudder ran through her. “The angels have chosen us. When it’s their time to walk here, they’ll come for us.”

“Angels.” He was getting tired of this.

“You don’t believe me,” she whispered. Her gaze wilted downward, her knuckles pressed through the blanket against her mouth as if she was trying not to be sick. Voice mumbling almost too low to catch the words. “You’re from the north, farther north even than me. Why would you believe? Men like you.”

And then, as if these last words had woken something in her, the girl’s eyes snapped up again. Fixed on his.

“Get me out of here.” It jerked out of her. “Please, get me out. ”

“Uhm, look…”

“ Please . I’ll do anything, anything . I’m good, I was in a Parashal training stable before this, I can, you can.” She swallowed. “Anything. But you have to take me with you, right now.”

“Listen…”

“You don’t understand.” Taut desperation now, snapping her jaw tight on the words. “I’ve seen them. I’ve seen the fucking angels for myself. Just like they said. They came and I was judged. Blue fire. Blue fire and voices like beasts at play.”

Blue fire…

He sat back as if she’d slapped him.

Abruptly, he was back in the mist-tangled marshes of Ennishmin, crouched among hardened artifact scavengers, watching the faint flicker of blue in the distance.

Swamp wraith , murmured one of the men, and the others made gestures at the various charms they wore. We don’t go this way .

And later, at the tavern with Ringil, he saw the way a decrepit old man melted before his eyes, leaking that same blue radiance as he went down. Saw what rose instead to replace the illusion of humanity…

Ringil always argued they couldn’t come here, to Yhelteth. Wouldn’t come here, where the sun was a withering white blast across the sky…

The squat black glirsht statues in the altar chamber.

Some kind of beacon for the dwenda .

He almost turned to look, over his shoulder, back the way they’d come. To what might now be blocking their way out.

Once, barely twenty years old, deep in the Dhashara pass, he’d gotten into a tomb alone, only to find it was now a scree panther lair. The sarcophagus was tumbled, lid broken in huge fragments across the earthen floor. Bones strewn everywhere, and the piles of panther spore, the marks of iron-hard claws through the dust, the paw-pad traces.

The cave exit was thirty yards of chilled and twisting raw rock tunnel back the way he’d come. He shuffled bent-backed along every darkened foot of it expecting to hear the scrape of claws ahead and the low yowl of the panther returning. Prayers in his throat to the Dwellers, begging—he’d go to his death gladly, whenever, wherever they chose, if it could only be under open skies.

When he made it out into the hot mountain sunlight, it was like being born again.

“No fucking way.” Harath, grumbling back from the courtyard. “Stone’s solid as the day they carved it. Take a week to chisel through.”

“Right. Back the way we came then. Get the lantern. We’re leaving.”

“Thank Vavada’s tits for that.”

Egar reached out his hand to the girl. “You want out, girl? This is it. Let’s go.”

The slave girl gaped disbelief, then grabbed at his hand as if coming up from drowning. Harath guffawed. Egar made a mighty effort and didn’t smack him. He pulled the girl to her feet instead. Thin cotton shift under the blanket; the garment was practically translucent, barely made it to her shins. Her breasts molded to it, showed dark nipples through the cloth. Harath made an appreciative noise deep in his throat and reached to grope one of the soft mounds. Egar slapped him away.

“We’re in a hurry,” he said gruffly.

“You’re a sad old man, Dragonbane.” The Ishlinak gave him a filthy grin. “I fucking told you, if you wanted—”

Egar peeled him a look and he shut up.

“And I told you we’re in a hurry. Now pick up that fucking lamp.”

Perhaps it was there in his voice, a trace of tight-roped tension that closed the Ishlinak down. Or maybe Harath could feel the same thing Egar did not want to admit he felt. The creeping sensation that now breathed from every darkened alcove and doorway around them, that stalked the rooms behind them like the ghost of vengeance for brothers slain.

Something on its way .

They loped back through the endless rooms, knives out and carried low. Ignoring the blanket-bundled bodies to left and right, whether they woke and watched them go or not. Skirmish party pace—soft, rapid crunch of their footfalls, the hurrying puddle of the lantern, and behind it all, a yawning prescient quiet. The girl, stumbling as she struggled to keep up on bare feet.

They cleared the main door to the slave quarters, found the bodies undisturbed. The other lanterns and the stretched-hideous flickering shadows that capered out from their bases. The staircase back up, the way they’d come, and there at the top—

Egar slammed to a halt.

The girl saw. Moaned low in her throat.

Blue fire .

Hjel’s band slipped away from the fire in dribs and drabs, to bedrolls and tents laid out across the ancient paving. Ringil watched them lay themselves down to sleep like ghosts in the gloom—phantoms drifting to their graves at dawn, after a hard night of undead revelry. The last couple to go were a man and woman huddled up together and sharing a depleted flask of wine. Finally, the man responded to the woman’s repeated tugging at his sleeve and significant glances, rose clumsily and unsteadily to his feet, and pulled his partner up at his side.

“G’night then, gents,” he slurred.

“Sleep well, Cortin.” Hjel didn’t look up from beneath the brim of his hat. “You, too, Enith.”

The woman smiled in the low flicker of the firelight. “Will you play us to our blankets, Hjel?”

Hjel nodded assent, but his heart clearly wasn’t in it. His fingers plucked up a thin cascade of notes from the mandolin, and the woman led her partner away with lightly sprung steps to the tune. The man let her tug him along, glanced back once and winked at Ringil. Then the two of them were gone, off into the darkness.

The mandolin’s song coasted to a halt. The brim tipped up, and Hjel’s eyes gleamed with light thrown back from the coals in the firebed.

“What are you looking at?” Ringil asked him softly.

“I’m not sure.” One hand lifted from the mandolin fretboard, palm opened outward. “A mirror, perhaps? A choice I might have made?”

Ringil felt something climb his spine on icy talons and settle like a demon familiar under the angle of his jaw. He hunched his shoulders against the touch, painted his face with a smile.

“Yeah, you made about as much sense as this the last time.”

“Very likely.” The sorcerer played a pair of chords and let them fade. Across the twist in the heated air above the fire, his eyes still gleamed, but Ringil got the impression they were no longer looking at him. “Did I tell you, last time—next time, whichever it is—did I tell you that my ancestors were once kings?”

“It came up, yes. To be frank, our minds were on other things.”