The Cold Commands

CHAPTER 36

Crackle of embers, bathed in wavering orange glow.

Go easy, Dragonbane. Don’t drown yourself this time. You’re not safe here.

Egar glowered down into the pipe bowl, let the dark smoke come barreling aboard with its icy-cool cargo of release. He coughed a little with the depth of his draw. Clung to a fading caution for a moment, then let it go.

Not safe anywhere in this fucking city. Isn’t it about time you did the smart thing and just got out of town?

It was, he had to admit, looking that way.

Yeah, but for now…

He’d made for the same pipe house with cold calculation. Close to recent events, but that might work to his advantage—his enemies were almost certainly looking for him farther downriver. He had some sense of the local streets, too, which would count in a pinch. And they knew him here—just another smelly, derelict veteran in search of cheap oblivion. Nothing to talk about. Go somewhere else, there was no telling if he’d raise a ripple—the chatter-worthy wake of a new vessel through new waters.

It seemed like sense, but he was too shattered to be sure. And his strategic judgment, well, the less said about that the better right now, Dragonbane.

But he could still not quite believe how badly things had come unraveled, and with how much violent speed. Could still not believe the way it had gone down, even as he watched the events dance in iridescent memory—collide and coalesce, behind eyelids lowering closed under the cool weight of the flandrijn, rushing in…

THE LIZARD’S HEAD, GAY AND GARISH WITH LANTERN LIGHT, RAUCOUS bursts of laughter flung out of open windows like the contents of chamber pots. The head itself glistened wetly in its raised iron cage, faint, bandlit silver shifting to brighter, lamplit gold each time the tavern door banged open on the serving wenches and the heavily laden trays they carried. The trestles set outside were full, all seats taken by bulky figures upending tankards and bottles, either in moody isolation or with roars of approval and an eerie kind of unison that resembled a drill. The ground around was littered with discarded edged weapons and packs, and, even this early, the bonelessly slack forms of a couple of unseasoned drinkers who’d overdone it. The tavern had drawn its usual bag of variegated fighting muscle. Eg spotted half a dozen different regimental rigs in the crowd, sown in among the more common black or oatmeal-colored cloaks of uncommissioned freebooters.

The Black Folk Span bulked stark against the stars above, broke the shimmering arc of the band where it dipped earthward.

Egar limped closer, keeping warily back from the light of the hung lanterns and tabletop oil lamps—just another shambling drinker in the gloom. He scanned the lit faces as he moved from trestle to trestle, searching for Harath, listening for the younger man’s raised, excited tones. With luck, he’d find the Ishlinak out here, wouldn’t even have to duck inside the confines of the tavern itself. A quick word and—

“Eg? Fucking Egar?”

And of course, like a fool, he lurched around, into the light, at the sound of that familiar voice. Saw Darhan, now on his feet, staring and clearly pretty drunk.

“What the fuck are you doing here, Dragonspanker?” he rasped in Majak. “Don’t you know the City Guard are out after your carcass?”

Heads turning at the trestle behind him.

Egar lurched closer, grabbed the older man by the shoulder and faked a long-lost-cousin embrace. Into Darhan’s ear, he muttered, “Keep your fucking voice down, will you? Yeah, I know. I’m dealing with it.”

He stood back and clapped the trainer on both shoulders, faked a delighted oath and a vague gesture across the river. Then he steered the other man away from his drinking companions, toward the gloom and quiet down by the water’s edge.

“Seriously, Eg.” Darhan, now sobering up with veteran speed. “They got a reward posted and everything. Twenty thousand elementals. Twenty, thousand. You need to get the fuck out of town, man, while you still can.”

“I’m working on that. But I got loose ends.”

“Yeah? Like what?” Darhan spun on him, grabbed him in echo of the two-shoulder clasp Egar had just used. “Look in my face, Eg. Did you hear what I just said? Twenty, thousand, elementals. I’d hamstring you and turn you in myself for half that much.”

Locked gazes. Egar’s hand strayed to his knife hilt, he couldn’t help it.

“No, you wouldn’t,” he said tautly.

Darhan flung up his arms, exasperated. “All right, all right, I wouldn’t. But that makes me the single man in this city you can trust right now, and I’m telling you, if they try to draft me for Demlarashan this winter, I won’t even be that. It’s more money than any of us are going to see in a lifetime, Eg.” His anger took a sudden gust upward. “Twenty thousand cold, clinking elementals against one man’s life. Just think about that. It’s retirement in style, it’s a villa upriver, a kitchen full of slaves and a tidy little harem wing, cuties out of Trelayne or Shenshenath on tap. It’s that happy fucking ending none of us are ever going to see, Eg. Just like some bullshit kid’s fairy tale. Now what the fuck loose end is worth running against that kind of bounty? And don’t you be telling me it’s a woman.”

“It’s not.” Egar blew a weary sigh. “Look, there’s this kid. Ishlinak, not long in the city. Big, stroppy mouth on him and no more smarts than a six-week calf. He’s in this, and if I don’t get word to him, he’s going to get taken for question.”

Darhan gave him a narrow look. “Ishlinak?”

“Yeah. Dumb as fuck, but aren’t you all. But he’s a nice enough kid for his age, might even make something of himself if he stays alive long enough. Reminds me of…” He gestured. “Yeah, well. Like I said. He’s in this, and that’s on me.”

“So what’s his name?”

“Harath.” Eg blinked. “Why?”

Darhan shrugged. “No mention of him on the bounty sheet. It’s just you. Pretty good likeness, too, except for the hair. Smart move, blacking it up like that. But it isn’t going to keep you safe for long. The Guard are a lot smarter than they used to be in our day.”

“Can you help me out, then? Carry a message?”

Darhan dug at the sparse turf underfoot with the toe of one boot. “Yeah, guess I can do that much. Is he in there now?”

“I don’t know. I was going to look.”

The older man shook his grizzled head. “You really are something else, Eg.”

“Yeah, well. Share hearth and heart’s truth, right?”

“Sure. But just look over there, Eg.” Darhan gestured broadly at the tavern and its lamplit environs, the strewn mob of men whose life was killing others just like them. “I mean, just look at them. Most of them, they’d sell their own mothers for a tenth that much.”

Egar stared at the dim, flicker-lit figures. “I know. But that doesn’t—”

The blow floored him. Dropped him to his hands and knees. Roaring, whirling in his ears, as he struggled not to go all the way down. A boot lashed in, struck with precision at the base of his ribs, lifted him with its force, killed his lungs. He went all the way down. The boot dug in under his shoulder, shoved him over, onto his back.

Darhan stood over him.

“Guess what, Eg,” he said flatly. “They drafted me for Demlarashan this winter.”

Egar made creaking, wheezing noises. Blood in his mouth, he’d clipped his tongue with his teeth when Darhan hit him in the head. Tears in his eyes. He spat with slack lack of force, not much more than a belch of bloodied spittle that hung out the side of his mouth and down his chin. He clawed after breath. He tried to reach his knife.

“Uh-uh.” Darhan trod on his hand. Knelt and pinned the Dragonbane’s arm beneath his knee, found the weapon under the clothes. “Saw you twitch after this baby before. Thought you’d rumbled me then.”

He tugged the knife from its sheath, tossed it into the river. Egar heard the tiny, going-away splash it made.

“Faithless,” he managed through hoarse wheezing, “cunt.”

“Yeah, yeah.” Darhan frisked him with professional speed, turned up the other two knives, and threw them after their brother. “You talk when you’re closing on sixty and it’s back to Demlarashan or lose your commission. Fucking pointless war. I’m not dying down there for eight bucks a day and campaign rations. Not anymore.”

He stood and cupped hands to mouth. “Hoy! Guard! Guard sergeant! Got your fugitive for you! Right here! Guard!”

Commotion at the trestles. Figures rising to their feet and peering. Voices back and forth in the evening air. The door of the tavern flung back, yellowish lanternlight spilling out. More bulky figures silhouetted there. Darhan gestured.

“They were in there all the time, Eg. Six-man squad, doing the rounds. Anybody seen this face, there’s a reward. You’d walked on in there like you planned, they would have gotten you just the same. Except I’d be out twenty grand. Hoy, you lot! Back the fuck off! My prisoner, my bounty.”

This to the rough, bunched-up crescent of freebooters already coalescing around them. Darhan stood forward, blocked them from Egar’s crumpled form. There was a taut grin on his face, and his hand rested on the hilt of his own short-sword where it hung at his waist.

“You heard me! Back the fuck up, the lot of you. Job’s done, no help needed. My prisoner. Now will somebody go and drag the Guard off their on-the-house arses and get them out here.”

“They’re coming,” said someone at the back of the press.

They were, too—six lean, hard-looking men who, if they had been cadging free drink in the tavern, showed remarkably little sign of it in stance or stare. They were not what Egar had expected at all. Not a saddlebag belly among them, and they carried their day-clubs with the relaxed ease of fighters, not bullies. A couple of them carried torches, too. They shouldered their blunt way through the crowd and stood looking down at Egar. The squad captain jutted his chin.

“Who you got there, then?”

Darhan stood theatrically aside for them. “That is Egar the Dragonbane, in all his outlaw glory. Murderer of Saril Ashant. Mark me up for the reward.”

One of the Guardsmen guffawed. “Yeah, right!”

Laughter laced through the crowd. They weren’t buying it, either. Egar, still trying to get breath back into his lungs and wipe the drooled filth from his chin, couldn’t really blame them.

The Guard captain wasn’t laughing. “And you are?”

“Darhan the Hammer. Recruit intake commander, Ninth Combined Irregulars.”

“You’re Majak?”

Darhan’s stance tightened up. “I’m an imperial citizen of twenty-six years standing, and a decorated veteran. And I’ve just done your fucking job for you. Now you going to put my name on this arrest or what?”

The captain considered. He crouched to get a closer look at Egar, jammed a sharp thumb under the Dragonbane’s chin, and lifted his face to the light from his companions’ torches. He breathed out a soft, resigned obscenity. Straightened up.

“It’s him,” he said quietly. “Jaran, Tald, get him up. Bind his hands. The rest of you, get these people back.”

It was a shrewd order. As the captain’s words sank in, the crowd began to boil. Muttering and shoving, a growing ruck of bodies, tussling for a clearer look. The two torchbearers planted their torches spike downward in the ground, drew their day-clubs, and joined their comrades. The murmuring surged like surf.

“It’s him.”

“No fucking w—”

“—can’t—”

“Look, man. Got to be. They’re taking him.”

“It is him!”

The five City Guard enforcers wrestled them back, none too gentle with their clubs in the process. Egar saw bellies poked, shins thwacked, and reaching arms smacked down. He struggled for focus in the murky light, caught one man’s gaze among the many staring down at him. Shaven head, puckered about on one side with burn scars, the ear on that side gone to a ravaged scroll of cartilage, the eye a milky pit. He saw the man’s hand like a claw, clamped on someone else’s bracing arm as they shoved back against the Guard cordon. The single-eyed stare pinned him like a flung lance.

“Back! Get back!” The four Guardsmen were chanting it loud as they shoved. “In the Emperor’s name, stand down!”

For a few seconds, it looked as if it all might dissolve in chaos, and Egar drew desperate breath in preparation for the moment. But Jaran and Tald were pros—they rolled him on his face and secured his wrists with twine before they lifted. And as they pinioned him for the lift, he heard a shrill blast from the Guard captain’s whistle.

“That’s enough!” And a harsh scraping sound—Egar made it for the captain’s riot saber coming out. “In the Emperor’s name, you, will, stand, down!”

The crowd quieted. Egar’s two captors hauled him upright and set him on his feet. The captain brandished his saber. By city law, it was supposed to be blunted so as not to inflict lethal injury, but it didn’t look that way in the glint of bandlight and the torches.

Darhan stood, arms folded, looking on. He would not meet Egar’s eyes.

“If any of you”—the captain now stalking a short arc in front of the restrained crowd, voice pitched loud and lecturing—“wish to witness this man suffer the penalty for his murder of an accredited imperial officer, then you may do so at his execution.”

Undercurrent of murmuring. But all the force had gone out of it.

“For now, you will give way to the authority vested in me by His Imperial Radiance Jhiral Khimran, or face charges of your own for a breach of the Emperor’s peace. Do I make myself clear?”

The quiet held. The captain evidently judged it sufficient for his purposes.

“All right, lads. Let’s open some space here. Jaran, Tald—walk him through.”

Through was used advisedly. The press of freebooters opened grudgingly as Egar’s captors marched him forward. They all wanted a good look. See a Dragonbane brought low. See the man who dared to kill an imperial knight and rape his wife in their own bedchamber. See the doomed man walking. Egar, still groggy and sagging from the blow to the head, was almost glad of the two Guardsmen’s grip on his upper arms. The crowd of faces jostled past like something out of his recent pipe house dreams.

“That’s close enough,” the guard on his right snapped as part of the press lurched up against them. He and the Dragonbane both staggered a little from the push. Egar turned his head, saw, with sudden shock, the shaven-headed burn victim staring intensely at him among the pushers, scar-puckered face not much more than a foot away.

Something cool brushed upward, against his pinioned hands. Something stung the edge of his left palm, insect-like. Something thick and rounded pressed into the loose curl of his right. The twine on his wrists slithered away like tiny serpents.

“Hoy, Tald, he’s getting—”

But for Tald, it was already far too late.

The passed knife was scalpel-sharp, it had slit the twine bindings with less pressure than a soft kiss, put a thin cut in Egar’s left hand by touch alone, and settled into the Dragonbane’s right palm as if custom-built for that purpose.

Egar thrashed around, didn’t waste time getting the blade aloft. He cut downward, instinct honed in years of desperate battlefield clinches, found Tald’s inner thigh with the knife, and the big artery that pulsed there. The Guardsman yelped, outraged, and leapt back as he felt the sting of the blade. He did not yet know what had been done to him.

“He’s loose—”

Wailing, but choked off, as Egar cleared room with one hacking elbow into Tald’s sternum, and spun to face Jaran—slashed the man across the forehead before he could startle back more than inches. Blood rose in the wound, rinsed down the shocked Guardsman’s face in a flood. He snarled and flailed blindly out at his suddenly loosed prisoner. He struggled to swing his day-club. Egar booted him in the kneecap. He fell down. The Dragonbane kicked out again, connected with something soft. Jaran folded flat.

Egar swooped low, grabbed up Jaran’s club in his free hand, and whirled to face the others. Saw the captain’s saber glinting down, got in a block, looped and slammed the blade away, stepped in. Rallying cries around him now, the rest of the Guardsman floundering after response. Egar got in close with the captain, punch to the face, snap the head back, and jam the terrible small knife up under his jaw and in. He twisted, felt the slim blade snap and break off, let it go.

Darhan yelling somewhere, frustrated rage. “He’s free, you fools! He’s getting away!”

The captain reeled back, blood drooling out from under his chin, clutching at his wound, saber gone. No time to grab it. The crowd looked on, roaring as if it were sport. Egar met another Guardsman head-on, took a low, glancing blow off the hip, rode it. Stood and struck back with his club, side of the head, heard the crunch it made, and the man went down senseless.

The others came running in. This can’t last, Dragonbane. He spotted his next weapon, snarled with fierce joy. Traded blows with the first of his new attackers, screamed in his face for shock, and dodged past, into heat and brighter light. Seized the torch by its shaft where it stood pegged, plucked it up out of the earth with a triumphant bellow, and swung about. The flames whooped through the air.

He got lucky—hit two of the remaining Guardsmen on the same sweeping stroke as they charged him. Chunks of oil-soaked binding and pitch jarred loose, caught in clothing and hair. The flames splattered about. The burning men reeled back, beating at themselves in panic. Egar hauled back his head and howled, berserker ululation. It went through his aching head like an ax, it split the air like the rage of some vast bird of prey. He brandished club and torch aloft in either hand. Swung the flaming brand through the air again, made it whoop.

“Come on then! Who wants some more?”

He was bellowing in Majak without realizing—harsh, exotic syllables most of them would not understand. He saw men watching him in the firelight-painted murk, gathered faces like a theater audience—excited, appalled—none even close to taking him on.

Ten paces away, the river at his back. He spotted Darhan, hovering close on his flank, long-knife drawn. Egar pointed the torch at him, stared down its length, lined the Ishlinak up in the waver of heated air where the flames danced.

“You, you cunt!” he yelled. “I’m going to fucking have you!”

He hurled the torch at the other man, saw with gut-deep satisfaction how Darhan flinched away. Then he turned and sprinted flat-out for the riverbank.

Cast the day-club aside as he reached the edge.

Plowed a headlong dive, direct into the black water beyond.