The Cold Commands by Richard Morgan Read Free Book Online

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 prettypoor 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.”

    “And your entourage at the river will not wait? That seems unlikely, my lady
kir
-Archeth.”

    Irony dripped off the title, or at least seemed to—with the Helmsmen you could never quite tell. But the rest of Manathan’s sentence was unquestionably the understatement of the day. Unlikely wasn’t in it—the imperial river frigate
Sword of Justice Divine
would hold station until Lady kir-Archeth of the clan Indamaninarmal chose to come back down from communing with her past at An-Monal, no matter what hour of the day or night that might be. The captain of the vessel and the commander in charge of the marine detachment aboard had both been charged by the Emperor himself to protect her life as if it were his own, and while the Holy Invigilator attached might not in theory be bound by such secular authority, this one was young and fresh to his post and quite evidently overawed by her presence. Which wasn’t an uncommon stance.