Ричард Морган - The Cold Commands

BACK ALONG THE GALLERY, DOUBLE-TIMING, AND HE SAW HOW THE glirsht mannequins below ran and glistened with flickering blue fire, like upjutting teeth in some monstrous jaw, alive with luminescent saliva. He thought he could feel the whole building tightening down around them, the jaws snapping closed, swallowing them. Like back in the rock tomb all over again, and the flaring terror of dying enclosed.

Glance back at Harath, and he saw the feeling mirrored there in the younger man’s eyes. Fear strummed him like a lute chord, hung in the air like a palpable thing.

This is not mine .

It hit him as they headed down the stairway at the other end—a vague understanding, slippery in his grasp. This was not his fear . His blood was up, he’d killed dwenda before, and in tighter straits than these, he could still feel the faint, giddy traces of exhilaration from the fight. The grin was still on his face, still stitching back his cheeks. Fear might come later, as that savage pulsing ebbed, but this…

Memory arose—a couple of decades back at least, he’d have been barely fifteen. Chilly star-filled night on the steppe, the band like a vast burnished scimitar blade, raised across the sky—watching with the other herdboys as Olgan the shaman muttered and made passes in the air, cast powders and fluids onto the flames and conjured weird, wailing half-human faces there.

The fear gripped him then as it gripped them all, possibly even old Olgan himself—the young Egar saw how the old man’s teeth were gritted tight around his invocations. But as the discordant cries and the strength of the blaze grew higher, when it seemed the faces in the fire would be pretty soon reaching out for him with claws of flame, Olgan suddenly stopped his chanting and told them to step back, look away, and seek the Sky Road with their gaze.

To place their souls on that road.

It was the hardest thing he’d ever done in his young life—like looking away from a coiled and rattling snake you’d just stumbled on in the steppe grass—but he did it. He put his back to the yowling things in the fire. He stared up at the band, found its curving edge and imagined himself poised on that edge, looking down on the wide windy world below.

The fear puddled out of him like water from a dropped flask.

He heard Olgan’s voice behind him.

What you feel is not yours. You need not own it. Creatures like these breed the fear in you as we fatten a buffalo calf, and with similar intent .

Screeching from the fire—he thought he heard outrage in the half-formed sounds.

Choose your feelings as you would a weapon. This is what it is to be Majak .

Later, Olgan would teach them to bellow back at the creatures in the flames, to laugh and hurl obscenities at them, to stamp and punch into the fire. To lose themselves finally in the berserker state, where nothing mattered but the will to do harm.

This is what it is to be Majak .

They hit the bottom of the stairs, sprinted flat-out. Howling echoed through the hollow environs of the temple behind them. Through slanting falls of bandlight, past the towering, forgotten gods. The statue of defanged Urann seemed to meet his eyes for a moment as they raced toward it. Blank stone gaze—no help there at all. At his side, the girl tripped and nearly went headlong. He clamped tight on her wrist, held her up with sheer force, dragged her back to her feet without stopping. On through the gloom. The howls seemed to have found one another somewhere back there. He felt the dwenda presence on the nape of his neck like a taloned hand, poised to grab. He knew, he knew , they could not be that close, but still he had to fight the urge to look back.

Not his fear.

He shook it off.

“There it is!” Harath, almost yelping with relief.

And the rope—dangling straight in the diffuse rays of bandlight that streamed down from the hole at the top. Relief slammed through him. No sign of guards, human or otherwise. They piled to a halt and Egar let go of the girl’s hand, took the staff lance two-handed again.

“Can you climb that?” he asked her.

And saw the answer in her face. Not really, no . But she made the attempt anyway, clung and hauled for all she was worth. Barely got head height above the ground before she started to slip. Soft hands, and softened muscles—the old harem curse. Her head drooped, her panting built up and then turned to tears. Harath snorted, derisive.

And more rolling howls through the gloom.

Egar shook the rope impatiently. She slid down but clung on, keening. Barely audible words through the sound. Don’t, don’t leave me…

“Stupid fucking bitch…”

“Shut up ! Give me your lance, get up that fucking rope! We’ll haul her up.”

“Man, we don’t have the—”

“Just fucking do it, will you!”

Angry clatter as Harath tossed the lance aside. He leapt to the rope and went up it in savage bursts, teeth gritted and muttering. As soon as he was clear, Egar dropped his own lance, looped a broad noose into the bottom end of the rope, tugged the knot tight, and slid it over the weeping girl’s shoulders.

“Sit in—calm down . I’m not going to leave you—sit in this. Hold the sides.” He got the loop settled under her arse, so she sat on it like a swing. “When he starts pulling you up, just hang on. Got it?”

She nodded, wide-eyed, face streaked grubby with snot and tears.

“Ready!” Harath bawled from above, voice tight with anger he still hadn’t worked out on the climb. Egar grinned. He’d go far, this one.

“Okay, girl, that’s it. Hold on tight.” He tipped his head back. “Pull! Pull like you were born a fucking Skaranak , not some city-dwelling Ishlinak bitch!”

The rope jerked upward, a solid yard. Jerked again. The girl looking down at him past her dangling, naked feet. Wide eyes.

Wide eyes, staring.

He grabbed up his lance and whipped around, saw them, prowling out of the gloom like beasts. Glint of blue along the edges of their weapons, but aside from that they were wholly dark. The same blunt helmets, the same leather gear. One carried a delicately made long-hafted ax, the other a sword. And they warbled softly to each other as they drew closer.

“Help you cunts with something?” he barked.

And twirled his staff lance through a couple of basic blocks, so the blades at either end whooped softly in the dark air.

“Want to fuck off now, before I kill you both?”

They came on, silent now, intent. He hefted the lance.

“Your loss!”

He struck hard at the dwenda on the left, lance blade jabbing up and faceward. The creature fell back a step, swung its ax to guard. Slice at the other one, and spring back. Whatever you do, Dragonbane, don’t let them get either side of you . The staff lance gave him reach, could in theory win a bracketed fight like this, but he’d seen the dwenda in action at Ennishmin, knew how fast they could be, and if these two knew what they were doing—

In came the swordsman. Weird hooting howl, and the flickering lash of the blade. Egar went low, looped the attack away, felt the ax strike coming at his back in the hairs on the nape of his neck. He sawed upward behind him, didn’t need to look back to know he’d broken that attack, too. He sensed the dwenda stagger wide, heard it make a furious cat-like hissing.

A combat smile touched the corners of his mouth. The berserker fury stirring now, on the straw-strewn cage floor of his mind.

They circled him, and he stood and watched, turning the minimum he needed to keep them both in view. The lance slanted loosely through his two-handed quarterstaff grip. It was the familiar feel of an old lover under his hands. He was the windmill fulcrum at the heart of the world as it turned, the spindle of a promised and rising rage.