Read The Cold Commands for Free Online Page B

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 therewas 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,