by Amy Lane
“I know, Nyx. We’ve done this before.”
“Be careful. There’s a bell at the entranceway, probably a tocsin button from his room, and as far as I know, some sort of bloody loud noisemaking thing at every threshold, and—”
“Nyx!”
Dorjan took a deep breath. “Ready, Cricket?”
“Chirp-fucking-chirp.”
Dorjan swung his head slowly so Taern’s impassive mask appeared in his goggles. Taern’s mask was much the same as his own, only rounder in the head, and his goggles were flatter and wider to the faceplate, but Dorjan didn’t need to see his expression. The tilt of the boy’s head said it all.
“You bloody sphincter. Can we go now?”
Dorjan didn’t need to see his irreverent grin, either, but as they ghosted along the side of the stable to the back entrance very much like the one to their own home, he was damned sure it was there.
It went flawlessly at first. Eaumond was their first target precisely because he was such a compulsive record keeper. He kept a filing cabinet, of all things, wooden, massive, perfectly organized and, even in the dim light of the moons coming through the window of the darkened study, clearly labeled.
They struck gold in the file labeled simply “Transactions.”
“Glory,” murmured Taern, sub-voice box, as he looked over Dorjan’s shoulder. “This is enough to….”
“To implicate everybody,” Dorjan murmured. “This is Septra’s entire roster of cronies. That force in the universe again—it loves us, just a little.”
“Why would he just leave this here—”
“In a locked filing cabinet in a locked house in his personal study?” Dorjan whispered dryly, and he didn’t have to see Taern’s eyes to know they were narrow.
“Don’t be smart.”
“Arrogance,” Dorjan murmured. “He thinks he can’t be caught.”
“Apparently we have something in common!”
Dorjan looked up at the indignant voice to see Forum Master Eaumond at his doorway, two healthy-looking guards, dressed for bed, at his back. Dorjan’s heart raced for a moment and then continued to beat strongly in his chest.
“Oh thank Bimuit,” he said evenly. “I was really starting to worry this was too easy.”
And then Eaumond rang the tocsin bell at his entryway, and Dorjan didn’t think it was easy at all.
“Don’t kill them, Cricket!” Dorjan ordered, tucking the rather thick file in his satchel.
Taern didn’t say anything—he just launched himself at Eaumond, but while young and fairly fit, apparently the Forum Master didn’t believe in fighting for his honor, because he simply stepped aside. Taern crashed into the two bodyguards, knocking one backward and unconscious against the doorframe by pure accident, and kicking the other in the shin. The guard’s bone gave way in the face of the armor, and the man screamed and crumpled to the floor.
“Hells!” Taern swore, but he didn’t pause, and Dorjan was right on his heels.
“Left!” Dorjan shouted as they fled through the front door. There would be soldiers streaming toward the house that way, but they’d already discussed it: go toward the stews, fight their way through the soldiers, circle around on the other side of the graveyard that marked the center square of the upper classes. The run would be considerable, but there would be no soldiers that way, and hopefully the blood that had so concerned the lokogos the morning after the riots would be considered a fluke, given the Nyx’s latest flight pattern.
Taern didn’t even bother to reply as he went sprinting down the stairs and down the street, Dorjan hot on his heels.
The tocsin wailed above the neighborhood, loud enough to be heard from the Forum hall and the military barracks beyond, and several of the neighbors came out of their houses to see what was going on. Dorjan ignored them, and when they came to a gap between houses, he shouted, “Left!” again.
Taern took his word for it, both of them dodging far behind the courtyard in the back to the narrow grass-lined alley wedged at the back of every house on the block. Yes, the soldiers could easily be directed after them—but first they would have to communicate with the people standing on their stoops, and Dorjan had been doing this long enough to know that folks weren’t always excited about getting involved when a battalion of men invaded their neighborhoods.
So they heard the soldiers entering the good quarter from the barracks side of Thenis, and kept running. They hid in the shadows at the cross street, waiting for the battalion to clear out. When it did, they ghosted across the street and ran perpendicular, keeping to the side streets, avoiding the main thoroughfares where the soldiers would begin their concentration, before spreading out. They ran steadily and quietly, not getting winded (much—Dorjan was dismayed at how much recovering he still had to do!) and not making any noise. They dodged in the shadows every two blocks or so and listened breathlessly to see if they’d been followed.
The sound of the tocsin faded once they passed the graveyard. It was barely discernible over the street sounds emanating off of the hells of Thenis, deeper toward the center. As it was, they didn’t even garner a shout of recognition or a soldier in their quarter as they cleared the other side of the graveyard and slunk along the shadows to their home.
They were in the stables, stripping their armor off, when they heard the heavy sound of knocking on their front door. Dorjan dropped his boots and his long-sleeved undershirt on the straw for Taern to pick up, and slid into the kitchen silently. Krissa was there waiting for him with a dressing gown, which he put over his smallclothes, and together they opened the door to the same lokogos who had visited them the morning after the riots.
“Good evening, Officer,” Krissa purred. She was wearing a winter-weight black velvet dressing gown with white flannel lining and delicate little fur-lined slippers, but her demeanor was no less sultry than it had been earlier.
The lokogos didn’t even try to hide his delight in seeing her again, and Dorjan wrapped his arm protectively around her waist.
“Lokogos,” Dorjan said worriedly. They could hear the tocsin when they opened the doors, and Dorjan thought he looked sufficiently concerned about the alarm. “I trust it’s nothing serious!”
“There’s been a break-in of a gennelman’s house nearby, wot was it!” the lokogos told them earnestly. “We’re hoping you’ve seen something. Has he been in here?”
Dorjan tried not to raise his eyebrows at that, but the look of disbelief Krissa shot him didn’t help.
“Has who been in here, sir?” Dorjan asked politely.
“The Nyx! Bloody giant lout in armor! Has himself a trained chimp this time, a real hell-raiser! Word is he throws his shite at you an’ your bones break by themselves!”
Dorjan felt his jaw drop, and Krissa had to reply or he would have found himself giggling, much like Taern probably would when they told him.
“Well, sir, he certainly sounds impudent! We should definitely report to you if we ever see a shite-throwing chimp!”
“Oh, aye!” The lokogos nodded, then smiled shyly. He was, Dorjan noted, missing some teeth. “And I’ll protect you real gennelmen-like, miss.” His voice dropped, and he darted a covert glance toward Dorjan, although Dorjan hadn’t moved an inch from where he’d stood during the rest of the conversation. “An unlike some of yer dandies and soforth, I’ll keep yer virtue unspoiled, right?”
Krissa nodded gravely. “You’re a brave man, Lokogos. We’ll sleep better knowing your sort is wandering the street, looking for bloody giant louts and their shite-throwing chimpanzees!”
The lokogos smiled again and edged his way out, and Krissa closed the door behind him before leaning against it in relief. She blew out a breath and then glared sternly at Dorjan, who was bravely trying to hold a straight face.
“Don’t you start!” she admonished, although her own smile was trying to break out. “Let’s get that information to Areau, and then we can—”
The piercing sound of Taern’s cackle interrupted he
r, and she closed her eyes. “Bimuit!”
When they got to the kitchen, they found Taern collapsed behind the door, howling with laughter and gasping “shite-throwing chimp!” whenever breath allowed. Dorjan found his own hysteria fading and a true, warm laughter taking over. He bent down and pulled up the satchel Taern was clutching, then handed it to Lady Krissa with a bow.
“I’ll be up early to see what Areau thinks, but tell him I’ve got some ideas of my own,” he said soberly. Krissa took it and bowed, then left the two of them—Taern still giggling—and walked out of the kitchen toward the stairs.
Dorjan looked down and laughed outright, then squatted and hoisted the boy over his shoulder, wriggling with laughter and all.
“Dorjan!” Taern objected, still giggling, and Dorjan slid his hand under Taern’s smallclothes and squeezed his bare backside just to hear him yelp.
“Has it occurred to you,” Dorjan asked reasonably, “how amazing it would feel to have you laugh like that while I was inside you?”
It was not his imagination—he felt Taern hardening against his shoulder as he traversed the stairs, and Taern’s wriggle became decidedly sexual.
“I would never laugh while you were inside me,” Taern breathed, and Dorjan squeezed the boy’s arse harder, allowing his finger to slide down his crease and graze his puckered little entrance. Taern groaned and Dorjan kept walking.
“You’d never throw shite at an enemy,” Dorjan said smugly, “but that doesn’t mean it wouldn’t be amazing too.”
They had reached his door by then, and he opened it and deposited Taern on his feet. Taern dropped promptly to his knees on the carpet, burrowed beneath Dorjan’s dressing gown, and dropped his knitted pants and his briefs. Dorjan gasped as the boy took his barely lengthening cock into a hot mouth and suckled, hard. He was burgeoning and erect so quickly he saw stars, and Taern clamped his lips around Dorjan in his mouth.
Dorjan leaned back against the door because his knees weren’t going to do the job, and Taern started pumping him in a tight fist. “If I grease myself up,” Taern whispered, “and bend over so you can fuck me, I promise I won’t laugh.”
Dorjan groaned when Taern added his other hand to Dorjan’s balls and began to massage those too. “And I promise it will be amazing,” he breathed. Taern broke away from him to shimmy out of his clothes and reach for the vial of scented oil he’d started keeping on the end table without the electric lamp.
Dorjan dropped his clothes as well, and when Taern bent over, fingering his rim, his swollen bollocks, his hard, surprisingly large cock, Dorjan was on him so quickly he felt armor enhanced. The young man’s body was tight and muscled under Dorjan’s own, and as Dorjan slid into him, Taern muffled a cry of pleasure on his arm. Dorjan stilled for a moment, leaned over his shoulder, and whispered, “Good, right?” because his wounds were still there, and his need to know that it really was pleasure overran his need to drive himself into Taern mindlessly.
“Amazing!” Taern breathed. “Now faster! Harder! Oh, Karanos, Dorjan, now!”
Dorjan did, thrusting hard, pounding, while Taern buried his face in the mattress and held on with one hand and pumped his own cock frantically with the other. Dorjan’s climax burst upon him, and he cried out, biting Taern’s shoulder as the white-red of orgasm rushed his spine and burst behind his eyes, and Taern groaned beneath him and spurted all over his fist.
Taern collapsed on the bed and Dorjan fell on top of him, the two of them panting and half laughing with the explosion of lust and sex and completion that left them breathless and still aroused.
“Here,” Dorjan said after a moment. “I’m going to go get a cloth, but don’t move when I pull out.”
“Why not?” Taern asked, although he didn’t seem inclined to move at all either.
“I want to see,” Dorjan murmured and eased his way from Taern’s body and stood back.
Taern was dilated, his entrance loose and messy, awash in Dorjan’s spend, which was trickling down the crease of his backside to his upper thighs.
Tentatively, Dorjan reached out a finger and traced the curve of Taern’s plump, muscular cheeks, then allowed his finger to dip into that dark recess. Taern moaned softly when Dorjan touched his rim, and Dorjan jerked his finger away.
“No,” Taern said harshly. “I like it. Keep touching.”
Dorjan did, then wrapped his arm under Taern’s middle, hoisted Taern’s arse in the air again, and reached out a tentative tongue to trace the pattern of spend on the bottoms of his thighs.
Taern groaned and spread his legs and begged. “Grab me, Dorjan. Stroke!”
Dorjan did and found that he was aroused again as well. He plied his tongue once, just to watch Taern shudder, and then sat up and positioned himself and thrust again. This time they were slower. Dorjan reached across Taern’s chest and rubbed it, tweaked his nipples, palmed his softly skinned, tightly muscled stomach, and then stroked his cock, slow and easy, even as he pumped inside.
This time Taern turned his head sideways and they met in an awkward, hungry kiss. Taern spasmed first, and Dorjan watched, his chin buried in the hollow of Taern’s neck and shoulder, as Taern’s spend shot across the bed and spattered on the sheets. This time Dorjan felt Taern in his arms as he buried his whole face in that hollow and came again. They didn’t speak for a very long time, and Taern was the one who got up to get the washcloth, and who cleaned Dorjan off with a reverence Dorjan had never seen before.
THE next day they met over an early breakfast, after Dorjan and Taern’s conditioning and before their customary run through the stews to the Forum.
“What’s your plan?” Areau asked Dorjan, and Dorjan was relieved, because he had one, and he’d been afraid of what Areau would come up with, given the massive quantities of information they’d garnered in one short grab.
“The plan is much the same,” Dorjan said soberly, between taking bites of his boiled oats and sugar with relish. “The plan is, I take the information that implicates Eaumond and slip it on an honest man’s desk. There is a vote tomorrow in which Eaumond figures large—let’s see if the information discredits him enough for the vote to swing my way.”
Areau nodded. “And if the information doesn’t make the rounds?”
Dorjan shrugged. “Then we try another honest man, because my first choice was obviously not honest enough.”
Areau nodded again. “The bastard was generous—made laborious notarized hand copies of everything. I hope his secretary gets paid a fortune, because the man or woman has earned it. So, what if it works?”
Dorjan felt in his gut that it would work. “We keep going. I know of two more drug-brokering meetings happening in this next week. If Taern and I could interrupt those and rob Septra of his bribe silver, we can also give people in the Forum the information they need to make honest decisions, and not ones tainted by blood money. If we can swing the Forum our way, we can pull the troops within the end of the month.”
“And then what?” Taern asked seriously. “Ending the wars will not make things all better—you know that!”
Dorjan nodded sadly. “Then we start rebuilding,” he said, looking Taern evenly in the eyes. “And when our world is stable again, we go to our keep and make that perfect too.”
Taern nodded. “What will we be at your keep?” he asked, his gaze flickering to Krissa, and Dorjan and Areau met eyes. Areau’s eyes were beautiful, blue, and for the moment, unshadowed by sadness.
“You shall be besieged by our mothers,” Areau said lightly. “My mother shall try to cook for you, and Dorjan’s mother shall try to sew you new sheets and bed quilts, and both of them will pepper you with questions about how happy you plan to make their sons.”
Dorjan laughed softly, because it was true. His mother and Areau’s mother were great friends. “And we shall write to Dre’s keep,” he said seriously, “and you shall see your sisters again.”
Taern shook his head and looked studiously down.
“You don’t wan
t to meet your sisters again?”
Taern looked up and wiped his eyes. “It’s a beautiful fantasy, Nyx, but… but I’ve got a feeling in the pit of my stomach that it was never meant to be.”
Dorjan and Areau met eyes again. “It’s going to be hard and long,” Dorjan said quietly, and then he leaned over and kissed Taern softly, trying to reassure him. “But that doesn’t mean it’s not something to strive for.”
Taern smiled at him hopefully, and Dorjan kissed him again before running upstairs to change.
HE ARRIVED at the Forum a wee bit early and slid into the unlocked office of Emon Keely, one of his father’s oldest friends. He knew the man had been disappointed in Kyon’s less-than-spectacular son, and he’d been earnest about trying to change the destructive course of the country.
Dorjan left a copy of the business transaction—three young girls from Eaumond’s keep given to another Forum Master in trade for his vote. There was no note as to what the girls were for, but they’d been sold like chattel, and Dorjan and Taern were paying the other Forum Master a visit that night to see if the girls needed help. The receipt was damning, and since there was a debate that morning at to whether or not the government should forcibly conscript able-bodied men from the middle-class families into the war effort, Dorjan could only hope it would make a difference.
He was still hoping as he sat in the crowded conference room, listening to Eaumond make what sounded like a closing argument before asking for a vote. Keely had arrived late, pale and concerned, and was sitting through Eaumond’s argument clutching what looked to be a few sheets of parchment with shaking fingers. Dorjan sat in his customary “don’t look at me” position—his arms crossed, his jaw dropped to his chest, almost as though he was about to fall asleep, but he couldn’t keep from studying Keely during the course of Eaumond’s speech.
The man had the look of someone on a precipice, wondering if he had the courage to jump.
Dorjan realized that he was going to have to put himself out just a little if he wanted this to work. He caught Keely’s eyes then and regarded him steadily, soberly, without the customary idiot smile on his face. Keely clung to their gaze like a drowning man, and Dorjan allowed his eyes to flicker down to the papers and back. Keely’s own eyes widened, and Dorjan nodded. Yes. Yes, he knew exactly what was on that parchment, why do you ask?