The Cold Commands (46 page)

Egar gave the watching eyes a grim smile. “What I want is for you to tell Brinag that Egar the Dragonbane is outside, and he’d better get this door open before I kick it in for you.”

Shocked silence. A pair of heartbeats.

“Uhm—yes, my lord. Yes, I’ll … There is, my lord, the main gate. If you had only—”

“Just go and get him.”

“Yes, my lord.”

The slave hurried off, forgot to close the slat before he went. Egar glanced at Nil, who was sagging at his side.

“Not long now,” he murmured.

Brinag came bustling up, checked Egar through the slat, and unbolted the door. He ushered them inside, cupping a candle aside with one hand. Checked the street and closed the door, leaned his back against it. Cleared his throat with mannered eunuch delicacy.

“My lord, this is really not an ideal time to be calling. As you’re no doubt aware—”

“Is he in, though?”

“No, my lord.”

“And she is?”

Brinag sighed. “Yes, my lord.”

“What I thought. You’d better take me to her, then.”

“Very well.” The eunuch cast a cold eye over Nil. “And this is?”

“A gift,” Egar told him succinctly. “Brin, we’re wasting time.”

In the glow from the candle, the look on the eunuch’s face said he thought that was the least of their problems. But he made no further comment. He led them through the ornamental herb garden and up the decorative iron spiral staircase into the kitchens. Through the high-ceilinged spaces within, up more stairs and along the tastefully tapes-tried and carpeted corridors of the upper levels, toward the seaward wing of the house. Brinag nodding curtly at slaves and servants along the way, trading at one point his candle for a lantern.

“If this visit comes to light,” he muttered, “then—”

“Then I got in over the wall somehow. Just another Majak harem marauder, and you don’t know anything about it. Same as it ever was. Can you trust these people?”

“I can trust them not to want whipping within an inch of their lives,” Brinag said sourly. “I suppose that will have to do.”

He led them to the chief bedchamber. No surprises there, Imrana wasn’t an early riser at the best of times, and dawn was still a way off.
Back in the tavern, Egar would have put his whole purse on her being right here in this room. He wouldn’t have bet quite as much on Knight Commander Saril Ashant’s whereabouts, but he knew enough of the relationship to spit and hope for marital absence. It wasn’t exactly the worst risk he’d ever taken.

Brinag knocked apologetically at the chamber doors, held up a hand for quiet, waited, knocked again. Waited. Knocked louder.

A muffled, moaning volley of curses from within the chamber. The eunuch tipped a bleak glance at Egar. He eased one door open a crack and slipped through the gap. Twisted about, held up a forbidding finger.

“Wait here.”

The door closed with a tight
snap
, leaving them in the gloom. Murmur of voices beyond, first Brin’s and then the sleepy-toned responses, growing louder and less sleepy by the word. Egar grimaced. Then conversation stopped, caught up on some jag of angry disbelief. Long quiet, then another murmur. Brin’s footfalls back to the door. The door opened and the eunuch slipped back out. He surveyed the two of them, deadpan.

“The Lady Imrana will see you now,” he said. “Please go through.”

She was off the bed and tucking herself tight in a linen robe as they walked in. The Lady Imrana Nemaldath Amdarian, long black hair in comely disarray, the face it framed hard-boned and harsh, even in the kindly light of the lamps Brinag had lit for her before he came out. It took the softening effect of all the cosmetics she would later layer on to ease the command in that face, to make it into something more appropriately womanly, something more appropriate, Egar always thought, to how she was below the neck. Imrana was voluptuous by Yhelteth standards, despite the advancing years, breasts full and heavy in the tight-wrapped folds of the robe, tilt and curve of generous hips as she stalked barefoot across the tiles toward him. And with the anger marked on her face like that, scarlet spots burning at each cheekbone, man, he could feel a want for her coming on stronger than—

“Are you fucking
deranged
, Egar?” The obscenity, there in her mannered mouth like a plum. As ever, it made him hard just hearing that urbane, throaty courtier voice rolling out language fit for a Skaranak milkmaid. “Are you
out of your fucking mind
? Coming here like this?”

“Imrana, listen—”

“I said a fortnight! Is that so hard to get through your thick Majak skull? He’s still
here
, he’s still on fucking
furlough
!”

“Not in this bed, though.” Egar, stung by the epithet
Majak
. She’d never used it on him before outside of pillow play. “Didn’t take him long to burn through his marital obligations and take his business elsewhere, did it? Which brothel do you reckon it was this time?”

It stopped her like a slap. She breathed in, hard enough that he saw her fine aristo nostrils pinch with it. She retucked herself a little tighter in her robe, as if the temperature in the room had suddenly fallen. Her voice grew cold and calm.

“I have no idea, Egar. No idea at all. In truth, it’s more likely he’s with one of his mistresses. He will have had his fill of brothel flesh while he was on campaign.” Small, bleak smile for him. “So. Is speaking it aloud supposed to shock either of us?”

“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 only 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 …