The Cold Commands (2 page)

“Never been in a desert,” he said to no one in particular. “Never seen that before.”

Someone else sneezed violently.

“I’ve seen march or die,” said another man seated farther away. Half his face was nightmarishly scarred, poorly healed burns so severe that even in the failing light you could see the puckered contours of the scar tissue as he moved his head. “In the war, on the retreat from Rajal. Kid’s right, that’s how it works. They left the wounded where they fell. Made us march right past them, you could hear them calling after us, pleading. Begging us not to leave them for the lizards. And we weren’t even slaves back then, we were still citizens, we were
soldiers.
”

Tigeth made an exasperated noise. “It’s not the same, that was a
war
. It’s not the same thing at—”

“What’s the matter, big man?” The gaunt captive stared at Tigeth with open dislike. “You reckon some rich Yhelteth widow’s going to buy you for a scribe and butler just cuz you can read and write? Think you’ll be too good for minework or carrying a hod till you drop?”

“Nah, just too fucking fat for it,” someone jeered.

“Too fucking fat for a widow ’n’ all,” said someone else. “ ’Less she buys him for a cushion.”

General laughter, low and mean. Tigeth bristled.

“He isn’t going to be fat by the time we get there,” said the Rajal veteran quietly. “March like we got ahead of us, he’s going to be just as burned down and blistered and broken as everybody else. If he makes it at all.”

Quiet welled up in the wake of the words. The captives looked at one another as the message sank in. Most of them had doubtless seen some casual brutality since they were arrested and sold; maybe a few of the younger and prettier among them had suffered—like Gerin—the same inevitable dungeon rapes as the women who now marched on separate coffles. But by and large these men had not yet had to face the idea they might die.

Faint, feverish chills moved along Gerin’s spine as he realized that up until now, neither had he. In all his twisting and scheming to get out of this, he’d envisaged a lot of bad outcomes, but none involved his own extinction. He’d foreseen various brutalities, improvising off those he’d witnessed himself in the past or had heard in campfire tales. He’d relived the memories of his rape in the debt cells, imagined that it might well happen to him again who knew how many times. He’d even brooded briefly, and unable to repress his shudders, on the chances of castration, which they said wasn’t uncommon for male slaves in the Yhelteth trade.

But he’d never once imagined his life might end. Never really believed
he
might be the one cut loose and abandoned, begging and babbling as the coffles trooped on into the desert glare. Never thought it could be
him
, Gerin Trickfinger, fifteen years old, life barely begun, lying there too weak to move, too weak for anything but husked prayers to the Dark Court, Hoiran or Dakovash, Kwelgrish or Horchalat, Firfirdar or
fucking
anyone
who might be listening out there, entreaties bargaining down like a roped and filled bucket let slip through weary fingers and back down the well, hope failing; prayers to be rescued, then prayers simply to be found, albeit by more slavers or bandits; finally the simple plea that thirst and heat might kill him before he felt the first darting, tentative tugs at his flesh, as the scavengers circled his twitching body and the vultures spiraled down to take his eyes …

He shivered—this
fucking
cold—and stared miserably around at his fellow captives. The gaunt man looked across at the Rajal veteran.

“You, scar-face. You think you’ll make it?”

The veteran grimaced. Against the scarring, it wasn’t a pretty sight. Gerin thought of tusked and fanged statues he’d seen in the candlelit shadows of the temple to Hoiran at Trelayne’s southern gate. And they said that dark spirits were drawn to malformed and mutilated flesh. His father had once told him …

The scarred man shrugged.

“Probably would, yeah. But you got to think like that. It’s all over if you don’t.”

“Right.”

“Look,” said Gerin, desperate to shrug off the shiver of his own sudden fear. “I’m not saying most of us won’t survive. That’s not the point.”

The veteran’s ravaged features turned, fixed on him. With the onset of night, the long gleaming scimitar edge of the band could now be seen clearly, slicing out of the clouds overhead, spilling a soft, uneven light on whatever the Dark Court deemed it appropriate to touch. Some of that light seemed to catch and gleam in the man’s eye as he looked at Gerin.

“What is the point, then?” he asked softly.

It felt oddly like staging, like one of the tricked-up little pieces of street drama he helped set off down at Strov to pull in an audience or milk passersby for sympathy. As if there was a correct, fixed answer to this. Gerin, having no idea what that might be, looked around at his fellow captives and their stares.

He cleared his throat.

“We’re none of us used to desert heat,” he said. “And half of us are already coming down with the fucking snots and sneezes. We’re going to be sick and stumbling tired. We get a few days into the scrublands on the
rations they’re feeding us, doesn’t matter who survives, who doesn’t,
none
of us is going to be in any fit state to make any kind of escape. This is our last chance for that.”

“Escape?” Tigeth snorted phlegmily. “You stupid fucking—”

And the Rajal survivor cuffed him savagely across the head. Tigeth yelped and fell over sideways with the force of the blow. He opened his mouth to say something more but the veteran stared him down and Tigeth thought better of it. Then the scarred man’s gaze swung back to Gerin again. He opened one chained hand in invitation.

“If you have an idea, lad, I think now might be the time to spit it out.”

he 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?”