Ричард Морган - The Cold Commands

“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.”

The 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.