The Cold Commands (9 page)

“Let’s hope not.” Darhan downed his stock, threw out the dregs on the training yard dirt. “So anyway, what you doing up here, Eg? You looking for a job or something?”

“No, mate. Just some information.”

“About?”

Egar squinted into the brightening light across the yard. Now, with the sun up and another human being around to broach the subject to, his newfound sense of purpose suddenly seemed a bit foolish.

“You heard anything about any of the brothers down here taking the Citadel’s coin? Hiring on officially, I mean. Livery, the whole works.”

“Citadel?”
Darhan blinked. “Don’t think so. Reckon I’d remember pretty well, too. Not like the holy robe mob were ever very keen on our kind. Where’d you hear this anyway?”

Egar gestured vaguely. “Around. You know how it is. Just thought I’d chase it up, see if …” He gestured vaguely.

“If what?” Darhan was, he knew, looking down at him quizzically. “What’s your end of this, Eg? Why should you give a shit?”

Why indeed?

Come on, Dragonbane. Make some sense a fellow steppe thug can follow
.

“Thing is, Darh …” Slow and measured. Laying it out in words for the first time since he’d had the idea, and pleased it didn’t sound quite as half-arsed as he’d expected. “I’ve got this bodyguard gig right now. High ranker at court, and she’s had some scrap with the robes. Happened last year, but it doesn’t look like it’s going to go away. I’m just looking for a
back door in. Try to get some intelligence, maybe some advance warning set up from inside. Figure another Majak might see it my way, and help me out.”

“Or not.” Darhan, dubious. “There’s still a code of sorts going around, Eg, even these days. Take their coin, you owe them the fight. That’s still what I’m teaching up here, anyway.”

“Yeah, but the fucking
Citadel
?” Egar glanced up at his old trainer. “Come on.”

Quiet close in, the yells and messy rattle of staff play across the yard. Darhan stared out at his men.

“You ever run into Marnak?” he asked distantly.

“Sure. Last year, back up on the steppe.” Egar chuckled to cover a sudden stab of regret. “Old bastard never seems to age.”

“He didn’t think about coming back south with you?”

“No chance. He’s happy up there, Darh.” Egar didn’t add that the circumstances of his own departure hadn’t allowed for Marnak to express a preference one way or the other. “Found his place in the world, I reckon.”

Darhan grunted. “He ever tell you we fought opposite sides of a couple of battles, back when he was taking League coin? Back when we were young?”

Egar couldn’t remember.

“Never mentioned it,” he said breezily. “You making a point or something?”

“My point is, Eg, there was a time, Marnak might have killed me if we’d ever come face-to-face on those battlefields, and he would have done it without blinking. Same goes for me—the Empire paid my wages, I killed their enemies for them. Still do when there’s call. If those enemies turn out to be Majak, turn out to be Ishlinak-Majak even—well, that’s a damn shame, but there it is.” Darhan turned to look at him intently. “You don’t want to lean too much on that tribal thing, is what I’m saying.”

Egar levered himself unhurriedly to his feet.

“That sounds like a warning, Darh. There something you’re trying to tell me?”

For a moment, their gazes locked. Then Darhan snorted, shook his head, grinned at the ground. Looked up, still smiling.

“You’re a fucking idiot, Dragonbane, that’s what I’m trying to tell you. You, and your loyalties. Going to get you killed one of these days. Look, a couple of decades back, it was the League and the Empire, right? Then the lizards came and stirred everything up so we were all friends in the grand human alliance. And afterward we went right back to killing each other, League and Empire, same as it ever was.”

“You don’t need to remind me, Dar. It’s why I went home.”

“Yeah, but now you’re back. So I guess things didn’t work out the way you hoped up there. Life on the steppe not how you remembered it?”

Egar found a grimace of his own. “Don’t ask.”

“Yeah. What I thought. So like I said, you’re back and now it looks like the palace and the Citadel might end up going at it for a while. So what, Eg, so fucking what? Politics. It’ll pass, just like the lizards, just like the war. Let it go, stand aside if you can. At a minimum, make sure you don’t get caught in the middle unpaid.”

“Been paid, Darh.” Egar made a formal bow, Yhelteth horse-clan style, hinged fingers of each hand locked together to form a flat double fist at chest height. It was the first thing they’d learned as recruits into the imperial war machine. The first physical thing Darhan the Hammer taught them. “You made me that smart, at least. Look, I’ve got to go. Clients to shake down, whorehouses to frequent, you know how it is. Do me a favor, though. If you do hear anything about the robes hiring Majak enforcers, could you send me a runner? They’ll get me on the Boulevard of the Ineffable Divine, number ninety-one.”

“Yeah, right. The Boulevard.”

“Yeah, it’s just a temporary thing. Till I get my own place, you know.”

“Fuck, right, off.”

“Seriously.” Egar winked. “Make it worth your while. I’ll come up and buy you a beer.”

“Yeah, you’ll buy me a fucking barrel if that really is your address. Fucking court puppy. Get out of here, before I come with you, see if they don’t need someone to feed their fucking dogs or something.”

They bumped fists once more.

“Good to see you again, Darh. Thanks for the soup.”

“Hey, any trainee of mine, fallen on hard times. The least I can do, y’know. A cup of gruel.”

“Hospitality worthy of the ancestors, truly.”

“Yeah, your ancestors, maybe.”

Egar grinned, forked an obscene shaman’s gesture at the other man for farewell, and walked. He was halfway across the yard, still chuckling in the sunlight, when Darhan yelled after him. Egar stopped, turned about to field what was likely going to be some parting obscenity about his tribe.

“Yeah?”

“Just occurred to me.” The old instructor’s voice pitched effortlessly to carry over the shouts and blows of the ongoing staff drill. “Probably came to the wrong place. You really want to chase this Citadel hire thing, why don’t you try the Pony Stringer’s. Same crowd as ever down there.”

Egar frowned. “That place? Under the Black Folk Span? I thought it burned down years ago.”

“Yeah, it did. They rebuilt it. Been open a couple of years now. They’re calling it the Lizard’s Head.”

“Oh, that’s fucking original.”

Darhan shrugged. “What you going to do? They’ve got the head.”

he imperial trade legate was less than impressed.

“When slaves are shackled in Yhelteth,” he sniffed, peering out at the slow gray creep of dawn across the scrub, “they
stay
shackled.”

Poppy Snarl held down an urge to stab the man right under that neatly kept little fucking goatee he wore. Wouldn’t have been hard to do it, either; two steps across the tent, he barely topped her by an inch and a half anyway, and like most imperials she’d met he was mannered and perfumed like some harbor-end ladyboy with delusions of courtly station. Useless piece of shit. He’d done nothing but bitch about the conditions on the march since they set out, and the endless comparisons with how much better things were done in Yhelteth were beginning to wear her down. She didn’t like the imperials and their oh-so-fucking-superior airs, even at the best of times. And this—well short of cock-crow, the night without sleep, nearly an entire coffle of male merchandise somehow
escaped, or killed or crippled beyond salable worth in the attempt, close to a dozen of her march-masters dead or dying, and another dozen still out unaccounted for in the hills—this was definitively
not
the best of times.

Still—fingers forced, through a major effort of will, to remain loose on the hilt of the fruit knife she was using to peel a breakfast apple, a bland diplomatic smile put on like makeup—she needed this man’s good graces. They all did. Preferred supplier status was not something the Empire granted lightly, and Trelayne was not the only city in the League jostling for position now that Liberalization had opened up the trade again.
Play nice
, Slab Findrich had advised her over a celebratory pipe before they left.
Let him feel superior, if that’s what gets his ink on the parchment. It’s just business, you’ve got to suck it up
.

Yeah, easy for you to say
, she’d snapped.
You’re not the one going to be on the road with him for a solid two months
.

Findrich just fixed her with his leaden eyes. He wasn’t much for histrionics.

We’re legitimate now, Poppy
. An equally leaden patience in the rasping, pipe-cooked voice.
This is how it’s done
.

Yeah, this was how it was done. Like the war all over again. The perfumed fucking imperials standing around like priests at an orgy, while she and her League muscle scrambled to get a tourniquet on the escape. Findrich’s legate pal and his high-tone bodyguards hadn’t lifted a finger all night except to examine their fucking nails in the firelight.

They were just
so
fucking above it all.

Her palm itched where the knife lay across it. She settled for imagination, chopped deep into the apple with her blade, and sliced off a glistening chunk. Chewed it and swallowed.

“Of course,” she said smoothly, “I’d be most grateful for anything I can learn from our more advanced colleagues in the Yhelteth slave market. It’s part of the reason for this trip. But right
now
, I’m afraid we—”

Scuff of boots outside the tent flap.

“Milady?”

“Irgesh. Good morning. Are we accounted for, finally?”

The lead march-master ducked his head into the tent. Red-eyed and
weary from the night’s hunt. “Uhm, in fact no, milady. Still missing eight. It’s just—there’s someone here to see you.”

“To see me?” She raised one groomed brow. “At this time of the morning? Is he from Hinerion?”

“Not sure, milady.” Hastily, spotting the smolder of exasperation in her face. “He … he’s not a commoner, that’s for sure. Noble-born, no question.”

Snarl sighed. “Oh, very well. Tell him I’ll be out. But if it’s the Hinerion border patrol commander, he’s a bit bloody late.”

“Yes, milady.”

Irgesh ducked out with visible relief. Snarl set down apple and knife and wiped her hands on a cloth.

“Sent out to Hinerion when all this kicked off,” she muttered. “He’s had the whole fucking night to get his men out the gate, and now he shows up when we’ve done all the work ourselves. Sometimes I wonder why we pay taxes.”

The imperial legate stroked his chin.

“As I have said numerous times, worthy merchants such as yourselves could not fail to benefit from an allocation of imperial levies along the major trade routes. A hand in trading friendship that my Emperor would be only too happy to extend if you might persuade the League Assembly in that direction.”

Snarl looked at him bleakly. “Yeah, you’re right. You have said that numerous times.”

She found her cloak and snugged it around her shoulders. Looked briefly into the tent’s tiny dressing mirror at the caked makeup, the sleepless eyes, the creeping signs of age. She hesitated a moment, then made an exasperated gesture, a spitting sound, and left everything the way it was. She stalked out into the dawn, let the legate follow or not, as he wished.

It seemed he did wish. She heard the tent flap again behind her as she swept past the burned-down campfire and the standing march-master guard. The huddled mass of slaves stretched away into the graying gloom around her, thankfully quiescent now after the chaos of the night before. They’d had to beat down at least three or four other coffles aside from the one that had so mysteriously come apart, as understanding
of the escape spread through the caravan. She thought, glancing back through what had happened, that it might have been touch-and-go there for a while. Could easily have ended up with a full-blown chain revolt like the one at Parashal last year.

“Eight remaining,” the legate said at her shoulder. “That’s little enough wastage. My advice would be to call off the search, strike camp, and not waste more valuable journey time.”

“No.” Tight-lipped on the monosyllable. Snarl spotted the newly arrived nobleman down the rise from the tents at one of the other fires, in conversation with Irgesh and a handful of the imperials. She headed downward, trailing explanation in tones just this side of polite. “I don’t work that way, I’m afraid. I don’t know how you handle these things in the Empire, but we’re staying put until the runaways are all accounted for.”

“But eight slaves, Mistress Snarl. So small a loss is—”

“
My
loss, my lord legate, is the major part of that coffle, counting these eight or not. And there’s not one damn thing I can do about that. What I can do is make sure nothing like this
ever happens again.
” She felt her temper slipping. Bit down on her words for a clamp. “We are going to make examples here, soon as the sun comes up. And the word is going out for future fucking reference: Nobody, no-
body
gets off the chain on one of my caravans and lives.”

The legate muttered something in Tethanne. She didn’t know the language well enough to follow what he’d said, but guessed it for an insult. She was past caring. If Hinerion had sent help, they stood some chance of getting out of here today. If not, she’d have this watch commander’s balls. She reached the dying embers of the campfire, felt the faint wash of warmth it still radiated into the dawn chill. She drew breath to speak.

The new arrival showed no sign he’d noticed her approach—he stood with face and spread hands turned away, toward the ashen fire, evidently feeling the cold as well and trying to soak up some of the remnant heat. Rich black brocade cloak over broad swordsman’s shoulders and what looked like a Kiriath blade and scabbard across his back. Snarl blinked, impressed despite herself. If the weapon was real and not one of the cheap replicas knocked out by forges across the League since the war,
then her guest was a noble indeed. No one else outside the Empire could afford Kiriath steel, and across the free cities it was something of an ultimate in terms of status. Even in Trelayne itself, there were only a handful of men who—