The Cold Commands

CHAPTER 2

The blade came up, caught blinding sunlight along its leading edge for a moment, and then snicked inward.

Egar the Dragonbane grunted. Tipped his head a fraction of an inch sideways and felt the steel scrape skin. With a major effort of will, he kept his neck where it was and stared up at the barbershop ceiling.

It was harder than he remembered.

“Do not disconcert yourself, my lord,” the barber purred. He thumbed the gathered soap foam off his razor and flicked it into the basin. Angled in close for another draw up the Dragonbane’s lathered neck, voice turning a little tighter with concentration. “You are in Yhelteth now, crowned queen of civilized cities. In this chair have sat visiting dignitaries from every corner of the known world. All left with throat intact.”

Egar fixed him with one baleful eye—no easy thing to do with his head at the angle it was.

“I have done this before, you know.”

“Well, my lord, you’ll be pleased to hear that makes two of us.” The barber wiped his blade clean again and tilted his customer’s head back the other way. “Just so, and hold there. Thank you. Though I don’t recall having had the pleasure of serving your worthiness previously. Was it one of your steppe brethren who recommended me?”

“My steppe brethren wouldn’t pay your prices.”

True enough—in fact, most Majak went bearded in Yhelteth pretty much as they would have back home on the northern plains. Why pay good money to scrape hair off your face that was just going to grow back the following week? Why, for that matter, scrape it off at all? Kept the sun off, didn’t it? Tickled the wenches, let them know they’d been with a man, not a boy. Trim it back if you had to, if the grooming standards of whichever imperial mercenary brigade you’d signed up with required it, but otherwise…

The barber frowned a little as he bent and peered at his handiwork. “I beg to differ, my lord. In fact, I had a brace of your brethren in here only last week. Young lads, not long in the city by the way they talked.”

Egar grunted. “Then they’re getting better pay than I did at their age.”

“Perhaps so. They wore the livery of the Citadel Guard, as near as I recall.”

“Fucking Citadel?”

A flickered glance at the barber to see if this would cause offense—the imperials were funny about religious matters, had this clerk-arsed unforgiving book of rules to their observances, and very little sense of humor where it was infringed upon. Ordinarily, Egar could give a shit if he offended them or not, but it doesn’t pay to upset a man who has a razor at your throat.

“Yes, well…” Immersed in his task, the barber was apparently unmoved by any stirrings of religious fervor. He took the blade up under Egar’s eye, back to the ear, strokes as smooth and practiced as the voice and the bland platitudes it uttered. “The ranks of the Sacred Guard were much depleted in the war, my lord. Martyrdom called multitudes of the righteous away.”

“Yeah, didn’t it just.”

Egar had seen some martyrdom operations during the southern campaign, and they sickened even his well-worn mercenary soul. Waves of men and boys, some of them barely twelve or thirteen years old, hurling their bodies forward against the lizard lines with the name of the Revelation on their lips. Most struck at best a single blow before the reptile peons clawed or chewed them down. They died in their screaming thousands out on the field while the commanding invigilators looked on and offered prayers for victory.

At Egar’s side on an overlooking promontory, one of the other Majak mercenary commanders spat in the dirt and shook his head.

And they call us berserkers?

But Yhelteth was like that. It lulled you along with its shaves and its baths, its book learning and its law; and then, abruptly, when you least expected it, you saw the vaunted trappings of imperial civilization cast aside, like the cloth and baked clay of some wealthy leper’s mask, and you were abruptly face-to-face with the leering horror beneath—a violent, tribal people, smug in their own assumed superiority and a faith that licensed their dominance wherever they could make it stick.

It doesn’t pay to have too many illusions about us, Imrana once told him soberly. Take the Black Folk out of the equation and we’d probably still be a bunch of bloodthirsty horse tribes squabbling over turf.

The barber finished up his bladework, wiped Egar’s face and neck down with a moist towel, and brought a burning taper to scorch away the hairs growing from his ears. It was a painful process—set the hair on fire for a scant second, slap it out again with a cupped palm, repeat—but Egar submitted with a stoic lack of protest. He was hitting close to forty now, and had no desire to be reminded of the fact every time he looked in a mirror. Ears sprouting hair, gray in the beard and pelt, creases in brow and jowls that eased but never fully faded as his expression changed; it was all starting to pile up in ways he didn’t much like.

Nor did he like the space it was starting to rent in his head.

Back out on the steppe the last few years, he hadn’t really noticed the changes, because outside of shamanry, reflective surfaces weren’t something the Majak had a great deal of use for. But now, returned once more to the imperial city, Egar was forcibly reminded that Yhelteth prized fine mirrors as a sign of wealth and sophistication. Both homes and public buildings boasted a wide and ornate selection, lurking at unexpected locations in halls and reception rooms wherever he went. Imrana’s house was particularly well supplied, as befit, he supposed, her position at court, and her need to maintain a polished outward beauty. In the end, she said, a little bitterly, facing him in warm perfumed bathwater one evening, despite wealth, despite wisdom, despite contacts and court alliances, I am still a woman. And I will be judged on all counts for that single fact, via the cursed fucking geometry of how pleasing I am to the eye. Cheekbones and arse cheeks are my destiny.

I think you’re undervaluing a couple of other assets there. Lazy rumble of lechery in his voice, reaching forward to cup one slumped breast and thumb the nipple. Refusing to meet her tone with any seriousness of his own. Tip to tail, it’s all pretty pleasing to my eye. And a couple of other organs, too, in case you didn’t notice.

It got him a faint smile. And—what he’d been angling for, really—she put a hand on his already swelling prick, where it floated fatly between his legs in the bathwater.

Yes, an effect I’m quite sure any unlaced tavern wench half my age would produce in that selfsame organ just by brushing up against it. You can’t crawl back inside what you once had, Eg. You have to live with now. And now I am old. Practically a crone.

He snorted. You’re not yet forty, woman.

Though privately he suspected that she probably was, and a couple of years besides. Truth be told, it wasn’t something he’d ever given a lot of thought to. Years ago when they’d first met, with the war still raging and nothing certain to grab on to but the day you were given—well, then things were different. The fact Imrana was a handful of years older than him had given her a darkly exotic allure, a frisson he was unused to in his more usual brothel tumbles. Age and court sophistication were the heady perfumes she was steeped in, a rising, maddening scent that hit him like patchouli or rose oil, and filled him with a restless, indefinable hunger.

Now, with thoughts of age creeping up on him as well, her vanguard battles against the same enemy troubled him more than he liked to admit.

Yeah, Dragonbane. Troubles you almost as much as that escutcheoned fuck she’s got herself for a husband. And you don’t much like to admit that, either, do you.

Ah. That.

Yes, that—Knight Commander Saril Ashant, back from assignment in Demlarashan, where he steadfastly and selfishly didn’t manage to get himself killed by the rebels he was putting down. Came home instead, covered in glory and claiming as rightful reward a couple of weeks’ furlough complete with nightly conjugal…

Leave it alone, Eg.

“Will there be anything else, my lord?” The barber was down to a strictly unnecessary brushing off of collar and shoulders. “A massage perhaps?”

Egar reckoned the brutal handling his ears had just had was probably about his limit today. And the confines of the barbershop felt suddenly tight. He shook his head, made an effort to dump his brooding. He got up out of the chair and fumbled for his purse. Saw the big, freshly shaven man in the mirror do the same. It caught him out as ever—shit, that’s a lot of gray hair! For something to say while he dug out coins, he asked:

“And you say these compatriots of mine come in here a lot?”

“Regularly, yes, my lord.” The barber took the proffered payment. “Any message for them?”

The Dragonbane stared the mirror down, trying not to let a sudden weariness show through. What would he say? What message could he possibly pass on to young men possessed of all the idiotic, indestructible confidence he’d owned himself when he rolled into town a couple of decades back?

Enjoy it while it lasts, it sure don’t last long, maybe?

Get paid well for the years you give?

If they were getting Palace Quarter shaves on a regular basis, they’d already learned that lesson better than he could teach it.

The man in the mirror frowned at him. The barber hovered. Behind the traitorous weariness, another sensation coiled, restless, like smoke; like something summoned but not yet called to tangible form. He tried to name it—could not.

He shook it off instead.

“No message,” he said, and stepped back out into the sun-blasted brightness of the street.

HE WALKED AT RANDOM FOR A WHILE, LET THE FLOW OF HUMANITY through the Palace Quarter carry and soothe him. Women in brightly colored wrapping, like toffees too numerous to choose from, and the heady slap of perfume across the eyes as they passed. Slaves and retainers in the livery of this or that courtier’s service, bent beneath upholstered saddles piled five feet high with burden, or—the lucky ones—bearing some lettered and sealed communication from one lordly house to another. A noble trailing an entourage in his wake like noisy gulls at the stern of a fishing skiff. Here and there the odd brace of City Guard, sun smashed too bright to look at across their cuirasses. Beggars and street poets not dirty, deformed, or disruptive enough to be worth the effort of moving on.

Faint, twining scents of fruit and flowers from a market somewhere close. The broken rhythms of the sellers, crying their wares.

Heat like a blanket. Street dust stirring beneath the tramp of feet.

Egar drifted on it all like a swimmer with the current—nursing for a while the still-sharp, piercing pleasure of just being here, of having come back to this place he never thought he’d see again. But in the end, it was no good. His eyes tracked inevitably up and west, to the stately, tree-shaded white mansions along Harbor Hill Rise. To one particular mansion, in fact, with the mosaic dome cupola at its southern end, where right now probably…

Come on, Dragonbane. Really. Leave it alone.

Too late. His gaze stuck on the cupola’s polished wink and gleam like a blade in a frost-chilled scabbard. He felt his mood sour. Felt the unreasoning anger flare, the way it always did.

… right now probably, sucking him off in that big bed…

Grow up, Eg. You knew you’d have to live with this. Besides—a sly, steppe nomad wit intruding, relic of a man he sometimes wondered if he still was—it’s way too close to prayer time for that sort of thing. He’s a pious little fucker, remember. She told you as much.

As if in confirmation, the prayer call floated out from a tower somewhere behind him. Egar put up half a twisted grin for a shield, and hung on to it. Memory of Imrana was inextricably bound up with the plaintive skyline ache of that sound.

In the early days, when passion flared between them at every touch, at every loaded look, transgression against the appointed hour of prayer would light her up like a taper soaked in oil. Her eyes wide, her lips flexed apart, the arched tension of appalled delight on her face at what he was doing to her, at when he was doing it to her. Occasionally, he’d catch the waft of memory from those days, and go hard to the root just thinking about it.

And then later, settling more comfortably into the harness of their mutual attraction, they still spent postcoital evenings out on her apartment balconies, wrapped up in each other’s tangled, sweat-slick limbs, listening to the evening call and watching the sun melt into layers of heat and dust over the western city.

His smile waned, turned ugly with the weight of current events. Knight fucking commander or not, Dragonbane, one day you should just…

He grabbed the thought by the scruff of its neck. Enough.

Time to be elsewhere. Definitely.

HABIT TOOK HIS FEET SOUTH, PUT HIM ON THE BOULEVARD OF THE Ineffable Divine. He didn’t think Archeth would be back from An-Monal yet, but there was always Kefanin to talk to in the meantime. Ishgrim to leer at, if she chose to put in an appearance. And anyway, he reminded himself, a little sourly, it was his job to keep an eye on them all; it was the genteel pretense he and Archeth maintained—that his place as long-term houseguest was paid out by informal security duties on her behalf.

That this amounted to not much more than being visible—and visibly Majak—about the place was not discussed. Nor were the small purses of silver coin that showed up regularly in the pockets of his attire when it came back from cleaning and was laid out in his rooms.

He tried not to feel too much like a kept hound.

Truth was, the Citadel raid on Archeth’s household was the best part of three full seasons in the past now, and the way it had worked out, it seemed unlikely the same powers would try again. Menkarak and his kind had backed off. There was a ticklish equilibrium in place across Yhelteth these days, like some massive set of scales hanging in the sky above the city, one cupped, brass weighing bowl dipped over the imperial palace, the other riding the air above the raised crag and keep of the Citadel.

No one wanted to disturb that balance if they could help it.

He felt it again—that same coiling restlessness, familiar but just out of reach.

Could always look for a real job, of course. Dragonbane.

He could, and with that name attached, there’d be no shortage of offers; you mostly had to look in graveyards for men called Dragonbane—the ones still walking around were few and far between. Any regiment in the city would kill to have one as a commander, or even a color officer. But a command, even a sinecure command, would mean responsibility—requirements to attend reviews and a hundred other tedious regimental affairs of one beribboned sort or another, when he’d really rather be out on a sun-soaked balcony somewhere, fucking Imrana or drinking and shooting the shit with Archeth. And a real command would be worse still—the way things were right now, he’d more than likely find himself deployed south to Demlarashan to supervise the slaughter of yet more deluded, poorly armed young men who had evidently somehow not managed to get their fill of war last time around.

The war; the years as clanmaster back on the steppe afterward—it still clogged him. It sat in his stomach and throat whenever he thought about it, the morning-after feel of too much undigested food and wine from some overblown feast the night before. He didn’t care if he never held another command in his life.

He was done giving other men orders.

Let the dumb fucks work it out themselves, for a change.

He pitched up at Archeth’s place in no better mood than that. Got in off the crowded street and paused in the cool shadows of the gate arch to wipe sweat from neck and brow. The two young guardsmen stationed there nodded warily at him. More warily than you’d expect, given that he’d played dice with them a couple of times at shift change.

He forced a grin.

“All right, lads? Seen the Lady Archeth at all?”

The man on the left shook his head. “No word yet, my lord.”

Shrug. Kefanin, then.

He crossed the sunstruck cobbles of the courtyard, went inside, and rattled about the house a bit until he finally discovered the eunuch talking to Ishgrim in one of the enclosed garden patios out back. Egar didn’t catch what they were discussing, but they seemed to his jaundiced eye to be getting on altogether too well for a young woman shaped the way Ishgrim was and a man with no balls. The slave girl was laughing, tipping her long candlewax-colored hair back from her eyes. Body curves shoving gratuitously at the yellow linen shift she wore, straining the material at hip and breast. Kefanin made some convoluted gesture with both hands, shook out a red silk handkerchief, and spread his fingers wide so it hung between them. A small cascade of white rose petals drifted down onto the stone bench between them. Ishgrim gasped, clapped her hands like a small child. Her breasts gathered up and inward with the action, not like a small child at all. Egar felt a throb go through his groin at the sight.

Not what he needed right now.

He coughed and made himself known.

“ ’Lo, Kef.”

The eunuch got hurriedly to his feet. “My lord.”

“No sign of Archeth, then?”

“No. Ordinarily, I would have expected her back by now, but…”

“But once she gets up there to that house full of phantoms, who the fuck can tell.” Egar’s voice came out gruffer than he’d intended. “Right?”

Kefanin’s lips pursed diplomatically.

“Would you care for some refreshment, my lord?”

“No, I’m good.” Egar glanced down at Ishgrim, wondering, not for the first time, where Archeth found her restraint. If the girl had been his slave—a gift of the Emperor, no less, it doesn’t get much more legitimate than that—he would have plundered those curves fucking months ago. Would have lit her up like a steppe-storm sky, put a fucking smile on her face for once, instead of that perpetually downcast look she dragged around the house all the time like a bucket of used bathwater.

Ishgrim flushed and shifted on the stone bench.

“Are you going to tell him?” she asked in a small voice.

Silence. Egar switched a glance between the two of them. “Tell me what?”

“It’s nothing, really.” Kefanin waved a dismissive hand. “Not worth—”

“Tell me what, Kef?”

The majordomo sighed. “Well, then. It seems we are being subjected to a little more clerical brinkmanship. The Citadel wish once more to remind us of their existence.”

“They’re out there again?” Egar hadn’t noticed coming in, and an odd sense of shame crept through him at the realization. Some fucking hound, Eg. “Guys on the gate didn’t say a thing about it when I came in.”

Kefanin shrugged. “They are on loan from the palace. They don’t want unnecessary trouble.”

That ticklish fucking balance again. Egar remembered the wary looks the guardsmen had given him. Felt a fierce grin stitch itself onto his face.

“They think I’d cause unnecessary trouble?”

“My lord, I do not know if—”

“Leave it with me, Kef.”

Voice trailing out behind him as he walked away. Riding an upsurge of varying emotion now, at whose heart was that same vaguely familiar restlessness he couldn’t pin down. He strode back through the chambers and halls of the house. Across the blaze of the courtyard. Under the brief, cool caress of the arch, past the startled guardsmen—assholes—without a word. Out once more into the bustle and tramp of the street.

Paying attention now, he spotted them easily enough—there, under one of the acacia trees planted in twinned rows down the center of the boulevard. The lean, drab-robed figure of the invigilator and, flanking him in the cooling puddle of shade, the inevitable brace of men-at-arms; cheap bulk and professional scowls, lightweight mail shirts under surplices with the Citadel crest, short-swords sheathed at the hip.

There was a twinned flicker of motion as both men clapped hand to sword hilt when they saw the big Majak come striding through the traffic toward them. Egar nodded grim approval, let them know he’d seen it, and then he was planted firmly in front of the invigilator.

“You’ve got the wrong house,” he said conversationally.

The invigilator’s face mottled with anger. “How do you dare to—”

“No, you’re not listening to me.” Egar kept his voice patient and gentle. “There’s obviously been some mistake back at the Citadel. Pashla Menkarak isn’t keeping you up to date. When he sent you down here, didn’t he tell you how dangerous it is to stand under this tree?”

The invigilator flashed an inadvertent glance up at the branches over his head. Egar dropped an amiable right arm onto his shoulder, just above the collarbone. He dug in with his thumb. The invigilator uttered a strangled yelp. The men-at-arms came belatedly to life. One of them raised a meaty hand and grabbed Egar’s free arm.

“That’s en—”

Egar clubbed down with the blade of his right hand, felt the invigilator’s collarbone snap beneath the blow like a twig for kindling. The invigilator shrieked, collapsed in a sprawl of robes and choking pain. By then Egar had already turned on the man-at-arms who’d grabbed him. He locked up the grasping hand with a Majak wrestling trick, put the man into the trunk of the tree face-first. The other man-at-arms was a heartbeat too slow in reacting, and did entirely the wrong thing—he went for his sword. Egar swung a shoulder in with his full body weight behind it, trapped the man’s sword arm across his chest, and smacked him in the temple with the heel of one palm. At the last moment, something made him pull the full force of the blow, and the man went down merely stunned.

Meanwhile, the one he’d put face-first into the tree was still on his feet, blood streaming from a broken nose, and he’d also decided it was time to bring out the steel. He got the sword a handbreadth out of its scabbard and then the Dragonbane kicked his legs out from under him. He went down in a sudden heap. Egar stepped in and kicked him again in the head. That seemed to take care of things.

Behind him, the invigilator was still screeching and thrashing about on the ground in his robes like some kind of beached manta ray. An interested crowd was starting to form. Egar looked up and down the street for reinforcements, saw none, positioned himself carefully, and kicked the robed form hard in the guts. The screaming stopped, was replaced by a ruptured puking sound. Egar planted another solid kick, higher this time, and felt a couple of ribs snap against his boot. Then he crouched beside the invigilator, grabbed him by the throat, and dragged him in close.

“Look up there,” he said bleakly, and jerked the man’s head upward for emphasis. “Pay attention, because I’m only going to go through this once. See that window? Second floor, third across from the arch? That’s my room. It looks directly out onto the street, right here. Now I know that you people and the lady of this house have some prior history, but here’s the thing: I don’t fucking care. And more important, I don’t want to have to look out of that window and see your scowling face fucking up my view. Got it?”

Gritted teeth snarl. “I have an ordained right—”

Egar slapped the rest of the sentence out of the man’s mouth.

“We’re not discussing rights, my friend. Do I look like a lawyer to you? We’re talking here about a polite and reasonable personal request I’m making, to you and all your bearded chums. Stay the fuck away from this house. Take that back to Menkarak, make sure he spreads it around. Because anyone who doesn’t get the message, I will be forced to hurt, probably very badly. And if you ever come back here again.” The Dragonbane dug his index fingernail in under the invigilator’s chin and lifted his face closer. Looked into his eyes to make it stick. “Well, then I’ll kill you. Okay?”

From the man’s face, he judged the message conveyed.

He got up, looked around at the tumbled, twitching bodies, and the goggling crowd that had gathered.

“Show’s over,” he said brusquely. “Nothing to see here.”

And there it was, something in the words as he spoke them, some echo of the elusive feeling he’d been carrying around all day—which now slid out from the shadows and took on recognizable form.

Bored, he realized with a slight shock. Dragonbane—you are bored.