The Cold Commands

CHAPTER 34

There was a wolf out there in the dark, he knew, and it was watching him. It was waiting for him to move.

Oddly, the thought didn’t bother him at all.

He stood alone, head tipped exhilaratingly back, on the tilting, turning surface of the Earth, felt the massy weight of its whirl behind his eyes. The steppe sky spun by overhead, darkened purplish masses of cloud fracturing apart on the wind and letting in a golden orange light. He heard the hurrying of the breeze, felt the deep chill on his face that seemed to distance him from his own flesh…

Campfire smoke, drifting across his eyes, fragrant with—

No, wait…

Somewhere distant, someone coughed. He blinked at the sound, and it was as if the world turned slowly, majestically upside down and let him fall. The steppe washed away, the smoke remained. It hung in the air, thick and sweet, the unmistakable catch of flandrijn at the back of his throat. The cough came again, from somewhere behind him, and this time he joined in. He propped himself up on one elbow and rubbed at his eyes.

Drapes of muslin, the hue of dirty honey in the low flickering lamplight. A dimly seen jumble of reclining figures beyond, and the odd upright form, bending to minister to them. He felt a body at his back, felt someone mutter grumpily at his sudden movement. Memory swam up into view, like a big ugly fish on a line.

I’m in the pipe house.

He was indeed. The long, smooth barrel of the flandrijn pipe was cupped loosely in his left hand, but the ember was long out. He set it aside and sat up fully. No pain in his leg, though he could feel the tug of the stitches the doctor had put in. And his clothes smelled faintly of liniment. He had no idea what time of day or night it was. He had no idea how long he’d been here. On closer examination, along with the whiff of liniment, he detected less pleasant odors. Then again, his clothes hadn’t been exactly clean when he stumbled in here, however long ago that was. Blood, sweat, drenching with river water, and, he now remembered, somewhere in the long run of pipes they’d brought him, he’d lain there and pissed himself with the gentle disregard of a baby.

He gathered up his bundled cloak and lurched stiffly to his feet. Stumbled through the carpet of drowsing bodies, trailing a wake of curses and complaints. An attendant came running, fresh pipe in hand, but he waved her away.

“Enough,” he said gruffly. “Had enough.”

His immediate instinct was to seek some coffee and a good long soak in a hot bath. But on reflection, he supposed the way he smelled now would go a good way to completing his beggar’s disguise. Best keep it that way.

He grimaced at the thought.

Life in the big city, Eg.

Yeah, and life in the big city is making you soft as the next fucking courtier, Dragonbane. How often did you bathe in hot water out on the steppe? Come to that, how often did you bathe at all on deployment during the war?

True enough—he spent most of the war smelling far worse than he did now. At Gallows Gap, Ringil had joked with him, handkerchief held affectedly to mouth, that just the way they stank ought to turn the reptile advance.

Urann’s balls, he missed that faggot.

He got himself outside, squinting at the blast of the sun overhead. He estimated time of day, reckoned early afternoon. He’d been piped up for at least a full day, then, maybe two.

Yeah, maybe three, said something authoritative, through the fumes in his head.

Vaguely, he recalled the doctor muttering, as he finished up his ministrations, something about cheap pain relief from our coastal brethren downstairs. The disdain in his voice would have been hilarious if Egar hadn’t felt quite so much like boiled shit. Well, you’re the one renting a coffin-sized room above them, he’d felt like growling. You’re the one doesn’t look like he’s been on a fucking horse in his life.

He’d dripped coins into the doctor’s hand in silence instead, watched with thin satisfaction at the little fish-mouth gape the man made with each clink. Then he lurched shakily away downstairs to talk to the coastal brethren.

They’d sorted him out. Quite politely, too, the good doctor’s disdain notwithstanding.

Doesn’t matter where you go, Ringil told him once, as they sat horses on the cliffs at Demlarashan, overlooking the beach, that shit never changes. Men need someone to hate. It makes them feel strong, it makes them feel good about themselves. Binds them together. Yhelteth against the League, coastlanders against the horse tribes, marsh dwellers against the city—

Skaranak against Ishlinak, Egar offered companionably.

Just so. Same shit everywhere, Eg. Only way you stop them squabbling is show them someone else they can all hate together.

Egar grinned in his beard, and gestured down to the beach below. Better hope we don’t beat these fuckers too easily then.

The fury of the previous week’s storms had shoved the dragondrift up almost to the base of the cliffs, and it was beginning to bubble up in a way they’d seen before, farther north. Just a matter of time, they both knew, before the hatching began. There was a queasy kind of excitement building around the camp with the waiting. Previous experience had shown you could never be sure what exactly would come tearing its way out of the sticky, purplish-black mess when the time came. Might be eight-foot-tall high-caste reptiles, might be swarms of the weaker, smaller peons. Might be something else entirely.

Of course, on this occasion, something else entirely turned out to be exactly right.

A something else entirely that would send men—many of them seasoned levy troops—screaming for their lives in retreat. A something else entirely it would cost over a hundred lives to defeat, and earn Egar the title that would catapult him into the upper ranks of the alliance overnight.

Yeah, shame we’re down to brawling with jealous husbands and priests these days, Dragonbane. Not going to give you any medals for that, now, are they?

He limped up the sun-saturated street with a wry grimace. Leaning into the limp a little more than strictly necessary—it couldn’t hurt to get in the habit, after all. Start playing his new role to the hilt. He let the cavalry cloak flap open a little in his grubby grasp, enough so it showed what it was. He slowed his pace to a beggar’s shuffle. Something appropriate to a broken man of war.

Close enough, after all, innit? Egar Cuckoldbane.

Yeah, yeah, very fucking funny.

His age fell on him abruptly, out of the pitiless, sun-glaring sky. He felt himself sag for real, no theater in it now.

Is this how it ends, then? Faded glories and memories of a youth growing dim. The cold creep of time as it eats you. Weaker and weary, less and less triumph in your stride, less and less to warm you outside of those recollections of another, brighter, harder, younger man…

The sour meander of his thoughts brought him, inevitably, to Harath. He owed the boy coin—coin he probably ought to hang on to himself for the foreseeable future. But more than that, he owed him a warning. By now the City Guard would be out in force, wrapping their pointy little heads as best they could about the task of apprehending a Dragonbane Majak. If Harath was out flapping his mouth—oh surely not—about their exploits at Afa’marag, he was likely going to get hauled in for questioning. And while he knew nothing of consequence that could endanger Egar, and was, to boot, an irritating little shit, the Dragonbane could still not find it in himself to dislike the young Ishlinak enough to let him be taken by the Guard’s inquisitors.

A warning, that’s all, he promised himself, keeping carefully to the shuffling gait, playing the limp for all it was worth. In place of the coin he’s trusting you to bring. He deserves that much. He’d do as much for you, any Majak would.

Well, maybe not an Ishlinak.

But still…

Fuck it. Share hearth and heart’s truth, right? Break bread and sup under a shared sky.

Right.

HE WALKED THE BACKSTREETS TO THE AN-MONAL ROAD, TACKING BACK and forth to stay off major thoroughfares and getting genuinely lost a couple of times in the process. The smell of the river on his left flank kept him more or less on track; later he had caught glimpses of the Black Folk Span between leaning tenement piles. Eventually, the slow grumble and creak of cartwheels and the tramp of feet up ahead alerted him to the proximity of his goal. He climbed one final, aching flight of stone steps, up from a gloomy dead-end alley, and found himself standing at last at the edge of the road and its boisterous flow. Making time to catch his breath, he checked left and right for the glint of Guard helmets. No sign he could see. He stepped quickly into the fringes of the traffic. Kept his head down. Worked the limp.

Pleasantly surprised at how relatively painless his injured leg actually felt.

He found the pawnbroker’s again, found Harath gone.

Big fucking surprise.

“Didn’t say where,” the old man sulked at him. “Reckoned he’d get better lodgings at a better price elsewhere. In riverside! Bloody fool. I was doing him a favor at those rates!”

“Yeah, well.” Egar produced a coin between finger and thumb. “Want to do me a favor? If he comes by for any reason, tell him he wants to keep his mouth well shut about recent events and steer wide of the City Guard. Could be, they’ll want words with him.”

The old man’s solitary eye glinted. “Really?”

“Yeah. Really.” Egar whisked the coin back out from under the man’s nose, dropped an arm on his bony shoulder instead, the way he had with the invigilator outside Archeth’s place. He leaned in, conspirator-close. He lowered his tone and put the sharp crack of bone into his stare. “Course, if I were to hear that you’d taken that to the City Guard yourself, I might have to come back here and recover my coin. And I’d take the interest out in teeth. We understand each other here?”

“Of course.” The old man, struggling feebly to extricate himself from under the Dragonbane’s arm. He did a good impression of being affronted. “I’m no friend to the Guard. How do you think I lost this eye? I’m no grass.”

“Good.” Egar let him go. Tossed him the coin. “So, if he comes back, you’ll tell him.”

The old man bit the coin. Stowed it and sneered. “Oh, he’ll be back. Mark my words. He has the reek of whore on him. Some pretty has him shacked up and is milking him dry. But she’ll tire and throw him out soon enough. The way that one pisses his purse up against the wall, he won’t be featherbedding on the northside for long.”

“Northside?” Egar, on his way out, stopped and turned with dangerous calm. “You told me he didn’t say where he was going.”

“And he didn’t,” said the pawnbroker with asperity. “Just said he was off over the Span and glad to be going.”

“Across the Span, eh?”

“That’s what he said.” The old man sniffed and gestured. “Here, you want to sell that cloak? Give you a good price for it.”

THE PONY STRINGER’S GOOD FORTUNE, THEN.

Eg couldn’t believe Harath would be that stupid. But then he’d evidently been stupid enough to walk out on the only address the Dragonbane could trace him to with the balance of his pay, so who could tell.

He got laid. Just like the old man says. He got taken back to some working girl’s garret, and she’s got him playing part-time pimp while the silver lasts.

Wasn’t like he hadn’t done similar in his own muddle-headed, mercenary youth.

And crooked coin-toss odds, this whore flops walking distance from the Pony Stringer.

But he didn’t cross the river just yet. Harath might be dumb as fuck, don’t mean you got to act the same, Eg. Instead, he found a small plaza with a sliced view of the Span and a war memorial bas-relief across its eastern wall. He folded himself into a shaded corner there, with his cloak spread across his knees. There was a small satisfaction in the act, a quiet taking-stock that seemed to soothe. He hadn’t yet eaten, but didn’t really feel the need—the residue of flandrijn in his system, he knew from experience, would kill his appetite for some time to come, just as it killed his pain. Drink would have been nice, but it could wait. He’d been at least as thirsty as this most of his fighting life. Meantime, flame-orange scents of spice and fruit drifted to him on the breeze from stalls across the way, the sweat was cooling on his brow and under his grubby clothing, his minor wounds all seemed to have scabbed up nicely. Even the ache of the sewn gash in his thigh felt good—there was an itching there, deep in the flesh, that presaged the healing to come.

Like any good soldier, he knew how to wait.

Presently someone came by and threw a handful of copper coins into the dust at his feet.

HE GAVE IT UNTIL EARLY EVENING, WHEN THE HEAT WAS GONE FROM the air and the light beginning to seep away. Across at the stalls, the sellers who remained were already lighting candles and lamps, casting a homely yellow haze over their wares and the darting, gesturing hands of their customers. Night and its assumptions, settling in. Even the scents in the square had changed, from produce to dinner, from fruit and spice to grilling meat and fish stews that were, Egar had to admit, starting to make his stomach twinge.

Another of the streetwalkers waggled by—cloutingly overdone waft of her perfume, crunch of sandaled feet skirting him. The undercurrent scent of used woman tugged faintly at his groin, but he didn’t look up, and she didn’t trouble him. Like everyone else, the whores were leaving him alone in his new incarnation. He’d raked in his coppers on the couple of occasions they were tossed to him, and his purse was well hidden. Hard-luck cavalry cloak aside, he was showing nothing anyone would want. The best he’d done for attention in the hours since he sat down were a couple of scrawny street dogs—they sniffed around his feet for a couple of minutes, smelled nothing easily edible, and moved on, tracking more promising odors.

For the human denizens of the neighborhood, for all the notice they paid him, he could as well have been one of the bas-relief figures on the war memorial wall he sat against.

And when he moved, stiffly at first, with the long hours sitting, it felt—Egar found himself grinning a little at the thought—as if he were stepping down from among those chiseled, valorous figures, coming to sudden, eerie life and leaving their weathered, white-stone ranks for some altogether grubbier destiny in the unwinding nighttime streets.

He found a coffee merchant among the stalls, prodded together his gathered coppers in the palm of his hand, and dredged up the price of a cup. The seller barely glanced at him, eyes fixed on the count of coin instead. Egar drank the bitter draft down—could not, without revealing his real purse, afford the sugar to sweeten it—then shouldered his way back through the other browsers and buyers, and plotted a path for the Span. The Pony Stringer—Lizard’s Head, whatever—would be filling up by now. Plenty of cover in the rough crowd of irregulars down from the hill and the other, unaligned freebooters there’d be. In his day, the City Guard had always steered clear of the place unless absolutely forced to it, and he doubted things would have changed much in the intervening years. He’d be safe there long enough to find Harath, if he was around, long enough to give him the warning, maybe even shake some sense into the lad while there was still time.

And if the young Ishlinak didn’t show, well, there’d be ways to leave a message.

Traffic on the darkened Span was sparse, soft-footed slaves running late errands mostly, the odd metallic snatch of song rung out by hooves as some accredited messenger sped by. Somewhere near the midpoint, he met a clanking ox-drawn cart coming the other way, big upright barrels rubbing squeaking wooden shoulders in the back, one gaunt old driver up front, cloak-wrapped and nodding half asleep over the reins. Egar stopped and stepped aside to let the vehicle pass. Alerted by something, the driver lifted his head, just barely, unhooded his gaze, and met the Dragonbane’s eye. His gaze was surprisingly piercing for the hour and his apparent age. He stared at Egar for a moment, as if trying to place him from some past encounter, and then he seemed to nod, approving something they both knew at a level deeper than either of them, or any man, could actually express.

Egar stood there, struck. Turned to watch the cart rumble and grind out of sight in the gloom. A faint shiver wove across his shoulders.

He shrugged it off, glanced up and down the gleaming iron thoroughfare of the Span, then went and leaned his aching frame against the estuary-side railing. Stared down at the rough-dappled stripe of bandlight across black water. It looked, he thought vaguely, like a horse-tribe Sold daub, slapped across the flank of some midnight-colored stallion.

So long since he’d had a good horse. No real call for it in the city, and he’d been nowhere else in so many months.

He shrugged, and it felt like an excuse.

Up in the vast steel cradle of the Span’s structure, the evening wind swooped and keened. Off to his left and right, the city glimmered. Fragments of thought swirled through him, flandrijn-fogged and slippery, hard to hang on to. He rubbed at his chin, distracted, felt the lengthening growth there. Suddenly he couldn’t decide if he’d let it thicken and bush out when this was all done, get back his full Majak beard, gray-streaked though it might now be; or go back to the soft-murmuring old man this had all started with and get scraped down to city-slick standards all over again.

Yeah, and tell the old fucker while I’m there what a mess he set me up for.

Laughter behind him as a gaggle of young street toughs went by. He heard them pause in their merriment as they spotted his solitary figure. Felt them draw closer. Something colder than the flandrijn rose in him, washed away his vagueness as the old signals tripped in his nerves. He dropped a hand into his garb, found a knife hilt. Put his weariness aside and turned, grinning.

“Got something for me, lads?”

They backed up, bunching instinctively behind the ringleader as they saw what was waiting for them in the grin. Egar relaxed. Warriors would have done the opposite, would have spread to bracket him.

The wind hooted, up in the shadowy steel spaces.

“Well then, you’d better get on home. Your mothers will be wondering what manner of mouth to clamp on their dripping teats without you.”

That got a collective snarl, and a couple of barked, disbelieving curses. But it was street-cur stuff, and they all knew it; it was clutching at the suddenly razored hems of their street-tough dignity, and finding abruptly what cheap, unsatisfactory cloth it was.

Egar stamped forward a step, growled in his throat. Showed them teeth and blade unsheathed. They tumbled away backward, scattered and fled like silverfry from the net. Egar jerked his chin after them and snorted, watched the pale flecks of their heels fade away down the Span. Enjoying now the quickened thud of the blood in his veins.

Yeah, nice work, Cuckoldbane. Your triumphs grow ever greater. You’ll have medals from the Emperor before you know it.

He shook off the last of his flandrijn-tinted introspection. On the northside, the glimmering city beckoned. Craning his neck over the rail, he thought he could make out the ruddy glow of the Pony Stringer’s lit windows by the water’s edge below.

He could be there in a matter of minutes.