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!”
&nbs
p; 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.
CHAPTER 37
t took Ringil longer than he’d have liked to get to the Black Folk Span. The streets below the palace on the estuary side were crammed, impassable at any pace above that of a snail with a diploma in law. Wagons and carts and every variety of human traffic vied for space. No way to open passage, short of spurring his horse forward into the press, trampling down anyone too slow or stubborn to get out of his way.
But that could only draw attention, and violence of one sort or another, and despite the spiky, hungover will to do harm in his head, what he needed right now was to stay as inconspicuous as possible, to lose himself in the hubbub of Yhelteth’s heart. Archeth would let him go, he knew, and he clung to a hope that Rakan might, too. But word had to get back to Jhiral sooner or later, and that meant a limited amount of time to work with. So he gathered his small store of patience around him like a threadbare cloak, rode the slow throb of his aching head, and sat his horse like a man midway across a river in full summer spate, up to his knees in the flow of citizenry, moving slower than he could have walked.
It gave him time for thinking he would rather not have had.
In the back of his mind, the leaf spiraled downward again, to join its myriad dried-out and curling cousins on the footpath through the garden. The woody light around him shifted, and he heard the crunch of footfalls over parched leaf remains, coming closer behind him.
He knew what he would see if he turned. Had somehow seen it already, though he didn’t know what it meant.
A woman, face shrouded, head bowed, the lap of her plain white robe blotched and stained with blood. Something small and bundled and bloody cradled in her arms.
The cold legions wrap around you …
He shook it off. Urged his horse forward with his thighs, fighting a cool sense of dread that he was running much too late.
The street he was on finally gave out onto the main estuary wharf road, and here there were at least cargo marshals and dockmasters to ensure that the thoroughfare did not become too clogged for freight to pass. They saw him coming, made him for some merchant or merchant’s agent, and did their best to open easy passage for him. Closer in, his scar and the Ravensfriend sent a different sort of message, but achieved a similar result. A good many of the berthed vessels along the estuary were heading for Demlarashan, hauling troops or supplies or both, and there were enough mercenaries mixed in with the levy that he would pass for a freebooter captain in a hurry to confirm some detail of passage for his men.
Pass for a freebooter captain, Gil? Pass for? Freebooter captain is pretty much what you are these days.
Thought I was long-lost imperial nobility, welcomed home after long absence. You heard Shanta last night. Undeserving Victims of the Ashnal Schism, Exiles of Conscience in a Time of Great Turmoil, carrying the Flame of Faith to Safer Lands.
Despite himself, he felt the corner of his mouth quirk. Shanta had done a superb job, rolling out the tale with all due ponderous, lachrymose formality of idiom and salute—for a man so well versed in the practicalities of building ships, he certainly had a very flowery turn of phrase when he chose to deploy it. Gil was pretty sure he’d caught the aged Shab Nyanar dabbing delicately at the corner of one eye with his napkin at one point.
He thought his mother, had she been in attendance at the banquet, would have enjoyed that speech. Not so much for its leaky sentiments—Ishil was never one for tears or romance—as for its blunt manipulation, for its masterful twisting of messy, mundane events into some refined poetry of significance, into a narrative built to tug at the heartstrings of those who lived desperate for validation of the codified ways they saw the world.
No one will like the truth of who you are, she’d told him once, when he was barely into his teens. But if they can once be sold a gilded nobility that covers for the truth, well, then—that they may be taught to love more than any real aspect of their own grubby little lives. And by such ruses, we live and prosper.
Just don’t tell your father that.
Sampling his own early drafts of youthful cynicism at the time, he’d believed she was talking about social standing and how it was maintained. It was only much later, recalling the sadness of her smile, that he understood she had seen in him what he was becoming, and was offering him a survival strategy.
Yeah. Fumbled that catch, though, didn’t you?
Sometimes—it surprised him abruptly to realize—he missed Ishil. Missed that eyebrow-arching appreciation of artifice and life’s attendant irony that seemed to serve her so well as armor. Missed her haughty, witch queen poise.
He thought she would have done rather well in Yhelteth.
Shade falling across his face made him look up. The Black Folk Span had crept up on him while he brooded; the shadow it cast downriver at this time of the morning was cool around him, as if he’d ridden into the fringes of a wood. The estuary road had become a sparsely trafficked towpath, and the Good Luck Dead Lizard, or whatever they were calling it these days, was just up ahead. He nudged the horse into a trot.
Outside the tavern, a small boy was swabbing down the trestle tables, answering occasionally to a grizzled old man who sat at one already cleaned. There was an untouched pint of beer in front of this solitary customer, and horse tackle dumped at his side. He glanced up at the sound of Ringil’s horse’s hooves; he seemed to be waiting for someone. Ringil dismounted and tethered his horse to a convenient trestle leg. The old man watched him steadily as he approached, and for just a moment Gil thought there might be something vaguely familiar about the face.
He shrugged it off. “This where the fight was last night?”
“Over there.” The old man nodded at the riverbank. There were blackened patches on the thin grass and bald patches of earth. It looked as if someone had knocked a torch or lamp over and left it there to burn into the ground.
“Did you see it?” Ringil asked him.
“No, I was not here.” The old man picked up his pint and sipped at it. He seemed to be enjoying a private joke.
“Anybody around who did see it?”
“You might try inside. There are those who claim witness.” The old man shrugged. “But who can tell for sure? Tales are already being spun around whatever truth there once was.”
Ringil grunted.
“Some never left, my lord,” the boy piped up, pausing for a moment in his wiping. “They stayed the whole night and are talking of it still.”
Someone had blacked his eye for him a while back; there were fading blue-and-yellow bruises still in evidence, and scabbing on a swollen lower lip. But youthful enthusiasm shone through the damage like sunrise through marsh-weather cloud.
“They say the Dragonbane tore free of his bonds in a berserk rage, sir. They say he magicked a sword from the air, then called up fire spirits to scorch his attackers.”
“I see,” said Ringil gravely.
“Maybe his victory over the dragon gave him powers, sir.”
Gil nodded, ignored the knowing look the old man was giving him. “That’s very possible. I have heard similar stories before.”
“My father died fighting dragons,” said the boy hopefully.
Ringil held back a grimace. Mouthed the rancid words. “Then your father was a … great … hero. And I’m sure … I’m sure his spirit is watching over you from, uh, from a high place of honor and peace.”
“And my mother, sir.”
“Yes. And your mother.”
The old man was still watching him, keenly. As Ringil turned to go inside, he called out. “You carry a Kiriath blade, sir.”
Ringil stopped, did not turn back. “Expert in swords, are you?”
“No, sir. A humble barber only. But I work with blades of my own,
after a fashion, and I know their strengths and weaknesses. I know steel. And that is Kiriath steel upon your back.”
“And if it is?”
“Well, then perhaps you are some sort of hero as well?”
Still without turning, Gil closed his eyes for a moment. But what he found there on the inside of his eyelids gave him no respite.
Some sort of hero.
He opened his eyes again, found himself turning unwillingly back to face his accuser.
“Appearances are deceptive, old man,” he said shortly. “You’d do better not to judge a man by the steel he carries on his back.”
“Gracious advice.” The old man bowed his head. Still that maddening familiarity about him. “I am indebted. Should you ever wish for a shave, I am at your disposal. Finest barbering in the city. I am in the Palace Quarter. Ask for Old Ran’s place.”
“I’ll keep it in mind.” Ringil saw the way the boy was watching him, the enthralled look in his eyes again. “Now, if you’ll excuse me.”
And he fled from the boy’s gaze, into the cool gloom of the tavern and the harsh back-and-forth quarrel of grown men talking shit at the tops of their voices.
“THAT’S YOUR BEST BET,” THE PUBLICAN SAID, TAPPING THE COIN ON the bar-top and sliding it into his pocket. He nodded across the crowded room and the noise. “In the corner there, with his new whore.”
Ringil darted a surreptitious glance over to where a greasy-looking Majak in his early twenties sat goblet in hand at a table against the wall. The whore in question was young, too, and likely pricey by house standards, a little raddled, but otherwise quite shapely and not making much effort to hide the fact. She’d split her skirts apart, put one leg on display to the top of the thigh, and her breasts were pushed up almost to spilling from her bodice. She was pressing them up against the Majak’s arm, chattering insistently in his ear between drafts from her goblet.
Ringil frowned, still hazy with hangover. “Really?”
“Yeah.” The publican grinned and shifted a toothpick around his mouth. “I know. Little fucker doesn’t look like much, does he?”
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