The Cold Commands

CHAPTER 32

He’d dyed his hair deep black in a run-down brothel bathroom just after dawn. Took out his talismans. Bribed the whore whose dyes he borrowed to forget he was ever there.

It was a tidy sum by the standards of the place—certainly more than she’d make to fuck him—but her expression barely changed with the commerce. She bit and stashed the coins without comment, somewhere under her grubby skirts, then pointed wordless down the corridor to where the baths could be found. By her listless, flandrijn-stunned gaze and the way she shut her fuck-room door on him as he left, Egar judged that forgetting him was exactly what she planned to do.

The bath chambers were silent and cooling, and weak fingers of early daybreak probed down through the scant steam from a row of high windows on a slimy back wall. He saw no other clients, heard only some splashing and some patently false giggling somewhere in a darkened alcove. He found an alcove of his own, stripped himself to the waist, and worked rapidly with the dye. He gave it as long as he dared, then slicked back his newly blackened hair and squeezed it as dry as he could. Once out in the street, the sun would take care of the rest. He rinsed his hands a couple of times in the bathing pool, shook them dry, and put on his shirt again. The talismans went into his pocket. Then he slipped the catch on one of the high windows and hauled himself up and through, trying not to clout any of his wounds in the process. He clung from the outside ledge by his fingertips for a moment, then dropped down into the shaded back alley below.

Pain spiked through the wound in his thigh with the impact, bad enough for a clench-jawed cry. He stumbled, propped himself against the wall, panting.

Down the alley, what he’d taken for a pile of refuse made an answering groan.

He whipped around, hand to knife. For one desperate, floundering moment, he thought it was the front-parlor toughs, sent by the madam to investigate this customer who preferred to quit her premises by such unconventional means.

“No need for that blade, my friend.” The voice was hoarse, but showed no sign of fear. “I’ve no quarrel with any man who leaves a brothel by the back window.”

“Have you not?” Egar stalked closer, peering.

He made out a slim figure, cuddled into the wall beneath the folds of a Yhelteth cavalryman’s cloak. Sable on white, the rearing horse insignia, long worn to a grubby black and cream but unmistakable nonetheless. The bearded face that looked back from above its collar was scarred and grimed, the hair a poorly cropped mess. But the eyes were steady.

“No quarrel at all. Done it myself, time to time. Way I see it, the least a patriotic brothelkeeper can do for a man who’s served is waive payment. But they rarely see it that way.”

Dangerous to linger here, but…

Egar sank into a sprawl against the opposite wall of the alley, rested aching limbs for just a few moments. He nodded at the cloak.

“Cavalryman, huh?”

“Seventeenth Imperial, yes sir.” The man freed his right hand from the folds of the cloak, held it up for inspection. “Sadly no longer.”

Egar looked at the half-hand claw. Ring and little fingers gone, a ragged mass of scar tissue where the blade had chopped deep into the palm behind. He’d seen the like often enough before—rank-and-file cavalry swords were for shit when it came to anything other than hacking down fleeing infantry. The Empire’s factories churned them out cheap and fast and shiny, and about one in a dozen would likely fail as soon as you went up against a decently equipped mounted opponent. Couple of well-placed blows and the guard gave way like rusted scrap.

“Seventeenth, huh?” He racked weary brains for the memory. “You were at Oronak then, that first summer when the Scaled Folk came. Before the dragons.”

“Yes, we were.” The steady eyes never wavered.

They sat quietly for a few moments. It was in Egar’s mouth to say he’d seen the carnage at Oronak, to recall the nightmare they’d found when they rode into town. He’d been part of a relief column that arrived too late to do much more than wander the streets of the tiny port and count the dead. Repeated cavalry charges down Oronak’s main thoroughfares had driven the Scaled Folk back, but at massive cost. Not one man in five lived to make report when the reinforcements finally arrived, and the results of the battle looked like something out of the Revelation’s more twisted imaginings of hell: drifting smoke from buildings and boats set aflame by the command caste reptiles’ coughed-out venom, the corpses of men and horses scorched or bitten apart, the seared and screaming wounded reaching out to them…

Better you say nothing, Dragonbane. You don’t want to be remembered here. Better you get yourself gone.

Egar nodded across the alley at the man.

“You want to sell that cloak?”

IT COST HIM A LOT MORE THAN THE WHORE’S SILENCE, BUT HE EXPECTED as much. Visible military insignia were powerful tools in the begging game. They drew the eye on street corners, forced shame and remembrance on those who would just as soon walk on by with their purse safely stowed. They helped ward off the constant thuggery and assault that beggars were prone to suffer from street gangs or bands of young nobles out on a spree. Sometimes, if your luck was in, they could even get you charitable bed and board on feast days. Accordingly, soldiers’ cloaks and jackets were traded, stolen, even dug up out of graves on the outskirts of town for the revenue and comfort they could drum up.

In Egar’s case, there was a simpler calculus. Since the war ended, there were several thousand veterans begging and sleeping rough on the streets of Yhelteth, not to mention those others, probably also in the thousands, passing themselves off as such. You saw worn-down men in ragged military garb pretty much anywhere a neighborhood lacked either the paid enforcement or the callous collective will to drive them out. They were a part of the noisy, churning backdrop of city life, no more worthy of attention than the next scurrying urchin or street-corner whore. Just another unavoidable sign of the times.

Back on the steppe, there were tales of a shaman-enchanted wolf-skin robe in whose sorcerous folds the wearer could, at will, become invisible to the gaze of men. Wrapped in the cavalryman’s cloak, the Dragonbane could duck his head anywhere in Yhelteth and pull pretty much the same trick.

But not right now.

He left the alley with the garment bundled under his arm. The sun still wasn’t much above the horizon, but you could feel the heat building already. The streets had filled up while he was inside the brothel. Crowds ebbed and flowed, horse and mule hooves clattered. Skeletal, untenanted market stalls he’d passed on his way up the hill in the early hours were now hung with brightly colored cloth awnings, laden with artfully arrayed produce and mobbed with buyers, sellers, and a thin circling of prospective thieves.

He picked his way through the crisscross of sloping streets and alleys, heading for the river. Ideally, he’d have liked to find out what went on around Imrana’s mansion in the hours after he left, but now was not the time. He needed a doctor, one he could bribe or scare into silence, to dress and clean his wounds. He needed weapons, something a little more substantial than the knives he now carried. He needed to take stock and maybe, just maybe, catch a couple of hours’ sleep.

None of which was safe to do around here.

And you need to do it all before nightfall.

The faint whisper of his deeper fears—because while he was confident he could evade the City Guard for weeks at a time without incident, the dwenda were another, utterly unknown quantity. And whatever unholy alliance they had forged with Pashla Menkarak and the Citadel, he was tolerably sure they would work like the demons they resembled to keep it hidden. They would do their best to track him, and he had no idea what that best might involve. Ringil had always said, after the battle at Beksanara, that the dwenda were as shocked by their encounter with humans as the humans were with them. The outcome of the battle seemed—seemed—to bear that out, but these fuckers had still appeared more or less out of thin air, had still moved with inhuman speed and grace, had still massacred the better part of an entire detachment of the finest crack troops the Empire had to offer.

Somehow, the state he was in, Egar didn’t see himself taking down a dwenda warrior.

He crossed the river by the Sabal pontoon, blending into the ragged crowd as well as he could, slumping his shoulders, curving his back, and chopping his stride to a shuffle. When his turn came at the toll hut on the far side, he broke into a racking, spluttering cough, mumbling and waving and covering his face. The toll officer averted his own face with thinly veiled disgust, snatched the proffered coin, and waved Egar on without a second glance.

In the stew of streets up from the bridge, he prowled about for a while, checking the frontages. He found a doctor’s signboard, hanging above the entrance to a flandrijn pipe parlor, but both businesses were shut up tight at this early hour. He shrugged and found a spot across the street to wait, a cool stone alcove between the buttresses of what appeared to have once been a temple. He sank down into the shade. Throb of agony in his thigh as the muscles stretched and tugged at the wound. He pressed lips and teeth together and rode the pain. Glowered across the street at the pipe house sign.

Could fucking use a flandrijn smoke right about now, these assholes just kept decent hours.

He thought vaguely about breaking in and helping himself, but decided against it. Anyone dealing in flandrijn would have watchmen on the premises, and while they might well be sleeping at this time of day, such men—war veterans, more than likely—would sleep with one ear cocked for disturbance. He wouldn’t get past them in his current condition. And if the pipe house owners were well enough connected, a break-in was going to bring the City Guard down on the neighborhood like pox on a campaign whore.

He needed the doctor’s services worse than he needed relief from pain right now, and that meant waiting. Anything else just wasn’t smart.

Good to see you acting smart now, Dragonbane—when it’s way too late to be useful.

Oh yeah, what was I supposed to do? Let that cuckold asshole and his pal clear their steel first? Watch them run Imrana through for an adulteress, and then spit me on the same blade for good measure?

No. But maybe you should just have stayed away from Imrana until you knew Ashant was back on his hero’s horse and somewhere south.

The girl—

The girl, horseshit. You been looking to pick that fight for a fortnight now, and you know it.

He turned his head against the cool, shadowed stonework. Managed a weak smirk. Pretty slow for crack imperial officers. Riot duty in Demlarashan must be turning them soft.

Yeah, that and whatever they’d been drinking all night. Don’t kid yourself, Dragonbane. You got lucky, is all.

Or the Dwellers got my back. Takavach, maybe, watching over me…

He dozed in and out of his pain. Time marched past, like the grubby street crowd, barely registering through his drooping eyelids and occasional starts back to consciousness. Around him, the shadows melted down the dilapidated temple walls like dark, fast-burning candles, as the sun cranked up into the sky. The city’s sounds turned to a blurred ebb and flow in his ears. He drifted, back to memories of the steppe, the great bleeding sunsets at the bottom of the sky, the huddled mass of buffalo moving between the governing points of Skaranak herd riders in the gloom, the barked commands in Majak across the chilly air. He shivered in his doze, and turned tighter into the temple wall. He dreamed about getting a shave. The barber, cleaning soap scum from the razor, applying the blade to his throat. The cold metal presses in, begins to slice… Do not disconcert yourself, my lord.

He jerked awake. Head snapped suddenly upright.

Across the street, a tubby black-clad man stood waiting while his much taller slave unsnapped the bolts at the top of the pipe house entrance. Egar grunted and got himself to his feet. Reeling a little, the first few steps, but he firmed up as he crossed the street. Pain stabbed through his thigh, scorched and bit at him elsewhere—old habit forced it out, straightened his stride. He stood a couple of paces off the tubby man’s shoulder and cleared his throat.

“You the bone man?”

Both men jumped. The slave’s hand fell to his belt as he turned, and the seasoned wooden billy club that swung there. Egar cut him a glance, shook his head.

“You the bone man?” he repeated quietly, eyes on the master.

The tubby man drew himself up. “Now, look, I… I have already tithed this month. I’m a devout man. But I don’t do charity work on demand. I have to make a living. You’ll just have to—”

“I can pay,” Egar told him. He patted the purse at his belt and made it clink.

Palpable relief washed across the doctor’s face. It was like watching a man slide into well-warmed bathwater.

“Oh,” he said. “Well, that’s different.”