The Cold Commands (5 page)

“We left them behind,” he said, as if explaining something to a child.

Moth-wing blur of motion—the bolt cutters, slashing in at head height.

The march-master staggered sideways, face torn open from the blow, one eye gone, socket caved in. The torch flew away in a splatter of sparks. The march-master made a broken howling sound, dropped his sword, and sagged to his knees. The veteran was already turning on his companion. The second man got the reverse swing of the cutters across his face as well. He fell back in fright, blood oozing from the gouges, sword clutched upright like some kind of magical ward against demons. In the fitful glow from the dropped torch, the veteran came on, snarling.

“Orders,” he said to the uncomprehending march-master, and hacked him in the head with the cutters, once, twice, until he went down. “They
made
us leave them.”

For a moment, he stood like a statue between his two felled adversaries. He looked around in the fitful torchlight as if just waking up.

The second of the armed march-masters was on his back, head twisted to one side, skull a ruined cup. The first was propped on his knees and one trembling arm, trying to hold his shattered face together with the other hand. Weeping, gibbering. The veteran spotted the man’s fallen sword, grunted, and let the bolt cutters fall. He took up the sword, hefted it a couple of times, then settled into a two-handed grip, whipped around and heaved it down on the injured march-master’s neck. Passable executioner’s stroke—the blade sliced spine and most of the neck, dropped the man flat to the ground. The veteran flexed, cleared the blade with drilled precision, looked down for a moment at the damage he’d done.

“We heard them screaming after us for fucking miles,” he told the man’s corpse.

More cries, the rush of something through the night air, a savage, incoherent yell. The veteran pitched about, saw the next march-master in mid-heave behind the downward slice of a morning-star mace and chain. The veteran seemed to just drift out of the way of the flail blow as
if in a trance, let it come down and snag in the grassy ground. He stepped in close, like a newlywed to his bride, and swung the sword at belly height as the march-master struggled to get the morning star’s spikes back out of the ground.

“Some of them
cursed
us,” he grunted on the stroke.

The march-master screamed as the steel bit through leather jerkin and into the unprotected flesh beneath. The veteran hauled and sliced through, cleared the blade out under the man’s ribs at the back.

“Some,” he said conversationally, “just wept.”

Beyond the collapsing ruins of the man he’d just gutted, he faced three more torch-and-steel-equipped figures. They were holding back now, aware of the corpses of their comrades littering the ground, aware that something serious was happening here. They huddled shoulder-to-shoulder and stared.

But behind them, others were coming.

The veteran settled his grip on the sword, angled it toward the gathering march-masters, and jerked his head for them to come ahead. Torchlight painted him massive and flicker-shadowed behind the blade.

He made them a grin from his scarred and ravaged features.

“Do I look like a fucking slave to you?” he asked them.

And though, finally, they would bring him down with sheer weight of numbers, none who heard him ask that question lived to see the dawn.

here was an iron alloy tree in one corner of the courtyard, gleaming where the late-afternoon sunlight played off features in the gnarled metal bark. Sharp black shadow ran out from the trunk like spilled ink, then split into branching rivulets that spread out across the stone paving, as if in search of something. Archeth sat well out of reach on the courtyard floor opposite—booted legs propped up in front of her, warmth of the sun-drenched courtyard wall at her back—and watched the rivulet shadows creep toward her. She bit into an apple she’d plucked from another tree in another courtyard, one that humans might have been a little more comfortable with.

Nothing grows at An-Monal
, the superstitions whispered across Yhelteth like the wind.
Nothing lives there
.

Like most things humans believed, it was missing the point. The iron alloy tree was not alive in any conventional sense, true, but every year
the blue-black leaves it lifted against the sky would rust through as winter approached, speckling and staining first to a purplish red, then to pale orange, and then finally to a stark silvery white that crumbled and turned to glinting ash in the breeze. And then, every spring, the leaves slid back out of the alloy bark like tiny blades unsheathing, like a winning hand of cards spread out on the table before your eyes.

The quiet metallic process had been going on for as long as Archeth could remember, which was coming up on a couple of centuries now; and—despite a slew of idiot prophecies about such things ceasing when the Kiriath abandoned the world—when the last of her people’s fireships did finally submerge in the An-Monal crater and something seemed to tear for good in Archeth’s heart, the tree never missed a beat.

She wasn’t really surprised, could have told the prophesying priests it was a stupid idea from the start. Her father’s people prided themselves on creating processes and artifacts that did not need them to officiate over.

We are what we build
, Grashgal once told her cryptically, in the brief months between the end of the war and the Departure.
Forces older and darker than knowing forced knowing upon us and long ago locked us out of paradise. There is no way back. The only victory against those forces is to build. To build well enough that, when we look back along the path of exile we have engineered, the view is bearable
.

If there’s no way back
, she begged him,
then why are you leaving?

But by then it was a rancid argument. Grashgal could no more sway the Council of Captains than she could herself. The aftermath of the war had broken something in the Kiriath, had horrified them in some way that was still mostly obscure to her. They wanted out. After thousands of years of settled inertia, they were making plans again, drawing charts and asking their machines for counsel their own delicately damaged minds could not provide. Down in the workshops at An-Monal, the welding torches raged blue-white again, and sparks cascaded vermilion and gold down the curved iron flanks of the fireships in dry dock. The Helmsmen stirred in their brooding, mothballed darkness, and pondered the questions put to them, and said it could be done.

Involuntarily, she glanced left across the courtyard, toward the arched entrance and the paths that wound down to the workshops beyond. Ghost memories of the clangor faded out as she came back to the
present; sharp acid taste of apple on her tongue and the warmth of the sun on her skin. She’d been down to the workshops that morning, had wandered the deserted iron gantries and crane platforms, leaned there and stared at the few fireships left behind in the cobweb gloom, until the familiar tears, the ones she’d been biting back for months now, came welling up and spilled burning down her face like some Kiriath etching chemical she’d been careless with.

And left her emptied out, but feeling no cleaner inside.

It’s the krinzanz, Archidi
. She’d quite consciously not packed any when she left the city this time. Two days away, three at worst—how bad could it be? Now she had her answer.
If you will go on these wildly optimistic cold quit jags
.

She cleared her throat. Took another bite at the apple and shaded her eyes against the lowering sun. The tree branched low, not much over head height for a human, and spread intricately tangled limbs upward and out—a dispersal derived not, Archeth knew, from any sculptor’s observation or skill, but from certain mathematical musings her father’s people had incubated in the hearts of their machines like song. She remembered swinging from those branches as a child, plucking at the emerging leaf blades one spring and being shocked to discover that they were burning hot to the touch.

She ran wailing to her mother at the time, got her burned fingers salved and bandaged, and when she asked questions, got the usual human explanation for these things.

It’s magic
, her mother said tranquilly.
The tree is magic
.

Her father let her get well into her teens before he disabused her of that notion. Maybe because he didn’t want to hurt his wife’s feelings, maybe just because he found it easier to discipline Archeth—who was growing up tough and scrappy—as long as she believed he really was a necromancer burned black by his passage through the veins of the Earth. Though, truth be told, it hadn’t taken Archeth long to see through that one—if, for example, Flaradnam’s journey through the twisted places really had burned him black, then how did you explain
her
ebony skin when she’d never been allowed closer than a hundred feet to a lava flow or the crater’s edge at An-Monal? It made no sense, and sense was something that she clung to from an early age.

Then again, from that same early age, Archeth could also see there
was something going on beneath the surface of her parents’ relationship, something that reminded her of the stealthy bubble and churn of the magma in the eye of An-Monal. The sporadic eruptions it occasioned scared her, and she knew that magic was one of the subjects that would invariably cause the tension to bubble over.

I have
explained
it to you
, she heard him shouting one evening when she should have been in bed, but had crept out to read by the radiant globe on the staircase wall.
No magic, no miracles, no angels or demons lying in wait for unwary human sinners. You
will not
fill her head with this ignorant dross. You
will not
chain her this way
.

But the invigilators say—

The invigilators say, the invigilators say!
Crash of something crystal flung at a wall.
The invigilators
lie,
Nantara, they lie to you all. Just look around you at this piece-of-shit torture chamber of a world. Does it look to you like something ruled by a benign lord of all creation? Does it
look
as if someone’s up there watching out for you all?

The Revelation teaches us to live so that the world will become a better place
.

Yeah? Tell that to the Ninth Tribe
.

Oh. Will you blame me for that now, too?
Her mother’s own not inconsiderable temper rising to the fight.
You, who helped Sabal the Conqueror fall on them, who planned the campaign and rode at the head of our armies with him to see it done? Who came home splattered head-to-foot with the blood of
infants?

I killed no fucking children! We did not want—

You knew
. The black acid tones of mirthless laughter in her voice now—Archeth, eight or nine and used to various degrees of being told off, knew the small, frightening smile that would be playing about her mother’s lips, the kindled fury it signaled.
Oh, you knew. You talk of lies, you knew what he would do. You dream about it still
.

You weren’t there, Nantara. We had no choice. You can’t build an empire without—

Murdered children—

Civilization doesn’t just
grow,
Nantara. You have to—

You lecture me about ignorance and lies. Take one clean fucking look at yourself, ’Nam, and tell me who’s lying
.

And so forth.

So, tough common sense notwithstanding, Archeth learned early to stay away from the topic of
magic
, to just let it slide, and subsequently that habit proved tough to unlearn. When she started receiving her—characteristically patchy and distracted—tutoring in Kiriath matters from Flaradnam and Grashgal, the mark of those first fifteen or so years was on her. Magic still looked pretty much like magic to her, even when it apparently wasn’t. And there was something deeply buried in her, something human maybe, inherited from her mother’s side, that wanted to just accept the magic, just leave it at that rather than go through all the awkward detail of
understanding
. Many decades on, long after her mother had lived out her human life span and died, Archeth could sometimes still feel herself looking at Kiriath technology through Nantara’s eyes. In nearly two centuries, she had never quite managed to shake the eerie sense of unnatural power it radiated.

“Are you brooding, child? Or simply coping badly without your drugs?”

Dark, sardonic voice without origin, snaking through the sun-split air to her ears. As if the deep-rooted stones of the An-Monal keep itself were talking to her.

She closed her eyes. “Manathan.”

“A safe bet, wouldn’t you say?” As ever, the Helmsman’s tones rang almost human—avuncular and reassuring but for the tiny slide at the end of each syllable, the caught-breath slippage that seemed like the rising edge of a suppressed scream. As if the voice might at any given moment suddenly shift mid-sentence from intelligible sound into the shriek of steel being driven against the grindstone. “Or have you started believing in
angelic presence
and
divine revelatory grace
? Are the locals getting to you, daughter of Flaradnam?”

“I have a name of my own,” she snapped. “You want to try using it occasionally?”

“Archeth,” said the Helmsman smoothly. “Would you be so good as to join me in your father’s study?”

The door was set in the wall at her back, almost beside the place she had chosen to sit. She rolled her head sideways to look at its black, rivet-studded bulk. Faced front and studied the declining sun for a while instead. She bit into the apple again.

“If that’s intended as defiance, daughter of Flaradnam, it’s a pretty
poor fist you’re making of it. Perhaps you should abandon abstinence as a strategy for the time being. It doesn’t seem to do much for you. And you are still young enough to take the damage.”

She chewed down the mouthful of apple. “What do you want, Manathan? It’s getting late.”