The Cold Commands

by Richard K. Morgan

  “I wouldn’t have come here if I had another choice.”

  Imrana glanced at the girl. “Really? In this whole city, you really can’t find anywhere else to play three in a bed.”

  “It’s not—”

  “What about your beautiful black-skinned sponsor? I hear she likes it that way, couldn’t you persuade her to—”

  “Will you shut up, woman! I didn’t come here to fuck you!”

  The echoes chased briefly around the chamber, lost themselves in the heavy black drapes and expensive wall hangings. Imrana stared at him. In the breathing space that followed, he discovered that what really stung was her apparent opinion, laid abruptly bare with this unscripted meeting. It lurched through the arrangement of his memories like a drunken thug in a spice market, scattering and trampling the little rows of jars and pots, the artfully opened, fine-odored sacks. Belch and curse and stagger, smash and spill. Everything he’d valued, turned over in his head—he watched it happen like the sack of some pretty hillside town. Thick-skull big-cock barbarian bit of rough—was that all he’d ever been? Or was it the march of years, clawing them apart? Had passing time and age done this to them both, made them colder and more distant, wound up in their own affairs and grasping scared at what was left? He cast his mind back, tried to remember. Found he couldn’t. Found he didn’t want to.

  His wounds ached, suddenly. Suddenly, he felt old.

  Perhaps she felt it, too. Perhaps she read the damage in his face. She went back and sat on the edge of the bed. Unconscious elegance in the lines of her legs, the spread of her arms out to the sides, pressing on the mattress, the downward tilt of her head and the way her hair swung forward to shroud her face. She took the ends of her robe tie, fiddled with them. Looked up with a new smile, one that stabbed him through the chest.

  “But you nearly did fuck me, Eg,” she said quietly. “Coming here like this.”

  “Well, that wasn’t the plan,” he growled.

  “No, perhaps not. And forgive me if I shouted, but Egar, you have to see. Saril and I have this down. I ignore his indiscretions, and he either genuinely believes I am chaste or he does not care so long as I appear so. It works, it is civilized. You … ”

  “I’m not civilized. Yeah, got that.”

  “That’s not what I mean.” She glanced again at Nil, seemed to see the girl properly for the first time. Another smile, one he couldn’t read, flickering across her face. “She’s kind of cute, Eg, but she’s filthy. And she’s dead on her feet. Where on Earth did you get her?”

  “That’s a long story.” Still the trace of the growl in his voice. “If you want to hear it.”

  “Of course I want to hear it. Look, I’ll have her cleaned up, and we’ll talk. All right?”

  It was almost like watching a knight putting on his plate, preparatory to battle. The sections of the Imrana he knew, strapped into place piece by piece. She got up and went to the bellpull at the head of the bed, tugged it sharply. One hand went up to her hair, stroked the dark fall back at her ear—it looked almost nervous. He saw how thin strands of gray and white twined through the dyed dark like the fine wires in some Kiriath machine. She tilted her head at him.

  “You know, Eg, all those years. If you’d wanted three in a bed, you only had to ask.”

  HE WASN’T SURE IF SHE BELIEVED HIM, WASN’T SURE IF HE MUDDLED through the tale clearly enough for it to make any sense to her. But with Nil taken away by Brinag for a bath, Imrana at least seemed to be listening. And he thought he read genuine anguish in her face when he showed her his wounds.

  “I thought we’d done with all this, you and I,” she murmured, kneeling in front of him at the bedside, pressing gently along the sides of the gash in his thigh. She’d torn his breeches where the wound was, to see the cut more clearly. Ashant wasn’t the first knight she’d been married to, and like most Yhelteth noblewomen she was well versed in the art of caring for spouses returned from the fray. “I thought you’d come back here to retire from all this.”

  “Yeah, me, too.” Though truth was, he’d never seen it in anything like those terms. “What can I tell you? Trouble grows lonely, comes looking for me again.”

  She darted him a look. “I think you may have that backward.”

  He grunted. Elsewhere in the mansion, through the walls, you could hear voices and the sounds of movement as the household got on its predawn feet. In here, though, it all felt very distant, the activity of other yurts around the camp when what counted was here before him in the soft glow of the lamps. The raw rift opened between them earlier seemed to have healed over, but he wasn’t sure if that didn’t unnerve him more than the revelation of the rift itself. He winced as she pressed tighter on the wound.

  “This is going to need stitches,” she said. “I’ll do it myself, if you’d like that.”

  “Yeah, fine. Question remains, Imrana. What am I supposed to do about all this? Can you keep the girl, at least for a while?”

  “Of course. Who’s going to notice, in a household this size? But you’ll need to tell all this to Archeth, you know you will. You can’t go head-to-head with the Citadel on your own.”

  “I told you, I can’t go near Archeth right now.”

  “Then get word to her. I can arrange that easily enough. But you can’t stay here while I do it, Egar. You know that, too, right?”

  “Right,” he said glumly.

  “Do you need cash? I can—”

  “Got cash, that’s not the problem. Problem is, who can I and can I not trust in this fucking city?”

  She shrugged. “Welcome to my world. At court, you wouldn’t—”

  Shouting from the corridor. The sounds of struggle.

  Their eyes met for a jagged second.

  “You squealing castrate piece of shit!” Hoarse bellowing, just outside the chamber. Something thumped heavily into the wall. “Cover up for her, will you, you fucking half man?”

  Panic flooded Imrana’s face.

  “It’s him, oh shit, it’s him! He’s back! Get out of here Eg, go, go! The window, get—”

  The doors to the chamber burst inward.

  Brinag came first, stumbling backward, arms wheeling for balance he could not find. He went over on his back. Scrabbled into a crouch on the carpet, face turned toward them. Egar made out the reddening weal across one cheek where he’d been struck.

  “My lady, I’m so sorry. He came unannounced—”

  Voice scaling to a sudden cry as Knight Commander Saril Ashant loomed up behind him and swung a well-worn campaign boot into his arse. Brinag lurched forward with the force of the kick, landed flat to the floor. Ashant stepped over his sprawled body and kicked him again, casually, in the head.

  “I’ll announce myself, gelding.” Well-bred voice loud and lecturing—Egar caught the tone. The Yhelteth knight was drunk or something like it, and his blood was up. “In my own house, to my own lady wife, I have no fucking need to be announced!”

  His eyes drank in the tableau by the bed—his wife, knelt before this Majak seated on his sheets. A savage grin peeled his lips back from his teeth.

  “Or maybe I do. It seems, my lord Hanan, that I owe you a hundred elementals and a heartfelt apology. You were right, my wife is a whore after all.” Lethal good cheer lurking at the edges of Ashant’s tone now. “Oh, no, my dear, don’t get up. Don’t stop what you’re doing. You’ve just saved me the necessity of a duel to defend your honor. Isn’t that right, Hanan?”

  A second figure stepped into the chamber at Ashant’s right shoulder. Same regimental colors, same campaign cloak and deceptively elegant court sword. Same telltale profession-of-violence shadow hanging over the man like a pall of charnel house smoke. Egar found himself wishing fervently he hadn’t left the Ishlinak staff lance on the temple floor at Afa’marag.

  “Much though it grieve me,” Hanan said somberly. “You are correct, my lord.”

  Imrana surged to her feet. Oddly, in this room suddenly crowded with men of war, she seemed the o
nly one with any grip on what to do next.

  “Saril, what is the meaning of this intrusion?” Icy and commanding in the wrap of her robe—a witch queen out of legend could not have carried it better. “How dare you storm in here, in company, without a word of civilized warning. What is this, the steppes?”

  Ashant goggled at her. It lasted a good, useful moment—then the spell broke.

  “Whore!” he yelled, pointing a trembling finger. “Filthy whore!”

  “Oh, don’t be such a fucking prick,” Egar told him wearily, and came up off the bed with his hands full of knives.

  He figured anything less would get him killed. Two Demlarashan veterans, noble-born and -bred, full of piss and righteous outrage, and the law on their side. Yhelteth jurists accorded any man, even a commoner, the right to butcher his wife on the spot if he caught her in the act of adultery. There were some legal limits on what could be done to the lover, but most magistrates were inclined to be lenient if the husband got carried away. And if that lover was Majak, and the injured party a nobleman just back from serving his Empire in uniform, well, it didn’t take a law clerk to work out how this was going to boil down …

  Ashant reached for his sword and Egar went in hard, full-body blow, pinned and blocked the draw before it got started. He knocked the knight to the floor—risky move, if Ashant had been sober and better poised, he probably wouldn’t have gotten away with it. He heard the hushed rasp of steel on his flank as Hanan cleared his blade—was already whirling to face the other man. The stiffness in his wound slowed him down, and his leg buckled on the turn. Hanan misread him, sliced too high. Egar snatched the chance, let the stumble take him all the way forward and down, stabbed savagely with his right-hand knife, down through the toe of Hanan’s boot and into the floorboards beneath.

  Hanan roared, ignored the pain, tried to chop him again with the sword. Egar was already rolling away, leave that knife where it is, Dragonbane. He banged into Ashant, who was trying to get up. They clawed at each other, held each other down, wrestled back and forth across the floor until Egar pulled a Majak wrestling trick, got loose and hacked, elbow to throat, once, twice, short vicious arcs, Urann’s balls wouldn’t this guy ever quit, three times then, and there, finally, Ashant fell back and lay faceup on the carpet, choking.

  Get up, Dragonbane, get up—

  Because Hanan, tough little motherfucker that he’d turned out to be, had meantime reached down and torn the knife up out of his foot with a bellow equal parts triumph and agony, and was now limping forward, sword and dagger style …

  Egar rolled to his feet, found himself inches off Hanan’s long blade. He leapt back, just as the Yhelteth knight thrust. The blade fetched up inches short once more. He gave ground again. Hanan grinned ferociously at him, whipped the supple court sword back and forth across the air so it made a sound like shredding cloth. Came on one grim, limping step at a time.

  “How now, steppe scum!” he rasped. “How now?”

  Falling back, Egar had an eyeblink instant to assess—down to one knife, left-handed; he had a third blade stowed in his burglar’s garb, but it was way too late to free it. He was going to get cut up badly on Hanan’s court sword, getting in close enough to kill the man, but—

  From the floor, Brinag—blood matted in his hair, streaming down his face from where Ashant had kicked him—grabbed desperately at the knight’s ankle.

  Hanan stumbled, cursed, whipped about and plunged his sword point into the eunuch’s arm. Brinag groaned and hung on. Egar—the knife changing hands like sorcery, spun from palm to gripping palm without thought—seizing the moment, leaping in …

  Hanan caught the move in the corner of his eye, swung about, court sword rising clumsily back to guard, and thrust. Egar ducked and hooked with his free arm, the blade went over his shoulder, the hooking arm caught it at the midpoint—twist at the elbow, get that tender inner arm out of the way, lead with the bone—smashed down and stepped in. A poorer blade would have snapped, a poorer soldier would have lost his grip. But Hanan hung on and the blade bent and sliced into Egar’s forearm as the knight twisted it desperately about.

  Egar yelled and stabbed—in under the sternum, full force.

  Hanan shrilled like a stuck pig. You knew from that cry he was done, but Egar only lurched closer in, hugging the man like a lover. Drove the blade deeper, twisting and hacking down into the belly. Stared into the man’s eyes as he carved the life out of him.

  “How now, city dweller?” he spat. “How now?”

  The court sword twanged free of Hanan’s grip as he went down. Blood and viscera gushed out over Egar’s hand as he pulled the knife free.

  He held Hanan’s sagging body up for a moment with his other arm. Patted the dead or dying man companionably on the shoulder a couple of times, panting, then let him fall.

  Weeping into quiet.

  Egar looked about vaguely, already sensing the fight was done. No more intruders, the open chamber doors yawned wide, but there was only gloom beyond. Imrana was knelt sobbing at her husband’s side, holding his head in her hands while he finished choking to death. Brinag fumbled to his feet, came and stood beside Egar, nursing the hole in his arm where Hanan had stabbed him. His face was a garish fright mask, red-streaked and smeared with the blood from his torn scalp.

  “Quite the harem adventure this morning, my lord,” he said acidly.

  Egar lifted and turned his own left arm, looked at the dark spreading soak of fresh blood through his sleeve where Hanan’s blade had sliced him up. He grimaced.

  “Bit tight, yeah.”

  From the floor, Imrana turned a hectic, tear-streaming face on him. “You killed him! Eg, he’s fucking dead, you killed him!”

  He spread his arms, blood-clotted knife still clutched in his right hand. Not a lot you could say, really. Second or third blow to Ashant’s throat, he’d felt the windpipe crush inward, he already knew he’d killed him. Wished she wasn’t so visibly upset about it, though. Could have done without that.

  “You’d better get out of here.” Brinag, at his shoulder. “Somehow, I don’t think we’re going to get away with dumping these two down the old well. Not this time.”

  “Yeah.” Egar glanced at the eunuch. “I owe you, Brin. You going to be all right?”

  “They cut off my balls at fifteen,” Brinag said tonelessly. “What else is there?”

  Egar, who in his time had seen the mutilated enemies of the Dhashara hill tribes and the roasting pits of the Scaled Folk, thought this showed remarkably little imagination on Brinag’s part. But now was really not the time. He clapped the eunuch on the shoulder.

  “Good man. You take care of her, then. Blame whatever you need to on me.”

  Brinag looked steadily back at him, nodded.

  “Eg?” Imrana, back on her feet, wiping away tears with angry swipes of her palm. “Eg, what are you talking about? What are you going to do? You can’t just … ”

  He sighed. “Imrana, they’re going to put your slaves to the question, they’re going to know I was here. And you told me yourself we’re pretty much an open secret in court circles. Hanan certainly knew, seems he fronted Saril with it, in front of who knows how many noble witnesses. You’ve got to hang this on me.”

  She stared at him. “No.”

  “Don’t be a fucking idiot, woman. It’s either that, or we conspired together to murder your husband, and you’ll go to the chair for it. Is that what you want? Look—you’d given me up, right? Fallen back in love with your husband. I broke in here furious, to rape you or whatever, that whole Majak steppe-thug thing, Hanan and Saril arrived just in time to stop me, but I killed them and fled. You’re just a victim of a noblewoman’s silly indiscretion that got out of hand. That’ll wash, right? You’ve got friends at court who’ll see it done?”

  She nodded numbly. He tried to take her in his arms, but she was still rigid with the shock. He settled for running a rough thumb down her tear-ribboned cheek.

  “Then that’s th
e way it has to be, Imrana.”

  “But they’ll … they’ll hunt you down.”

  He snorted. “Yeah, they’ll try. I’ve been hunted by steppe ghouls and starving wolves, Imrana. I think I can handle the Yhelteth City Guard.”

  And for one crazy moment, he wished he was back out there on the steppe once more, back under that great icy sky with staff lance and ax and knives at hand, and nothing more complicated to worry about than some pack of howling hungry creatures on the horizon who’d ill-advisedly decided they wanted a piece of him.

  Instead of which …

  This fucking city.

  He nodded once more at Brin, looked once more at Imrana standing there. Then he turned and headed back out into it.

  CHAPTER 31

  ou could hear the yelling from twenty yards off down the alcoved and colonnaded corridor. As they approached, Ringil glanced sideways and saw Archeth pull a face.

  “Worse than you thought it’d be?” he asked her.

  “Yeah.” But then she shrugged. “No. No, I suppose not.”

  “Fucking merchants, eh?”

  “You will keep your seat!” came through the door at full pitch. A young, unseasoned voice, trying for command and fraying at the edges. Ringil made it for Noyal Rakan. He’d eavesdropped on the young Throne Eternal captain earlier in the week, and had to agree with Shanta. He wasn’t the man for this job.

  Nice arse, though.

  They reached the door. Stood wordless, looking at each other. The storm raged on within, Rakan’s attempt to close down debate by now pretty much washed away in the waves of revolt. One heavily accented, bass voice trampled down the Throne Eternal captain’s commands. Behind that, other speakers with more homegrown Tethanne vied for mastery undeterred. Archeth looked at Ringil’s face and saw a cold smile wash across his eyes but barely touch the crooked line of his mouth.