Ричард Морган - The Cold Commands

Gritted teeth snarl. “I have an ordained right—”

Egar slapped the rest of the sentence out of the man’s mouth.

“We’re not discussing rights , my friend. Do I look like a lawyer to you? We’re talking here about a polite and reasonable personal request I’m making, to you and all your bearded chums. Stay the fuck away from this house. Take that back to Menkarak, make sure he spreads it around. Because anyone who doesn’t get the message, I will be forced to hurt, probably very badly. And if you ever come back here again.” The Dragonbane dug his index fingernail in under the invigilator’s chin and lifted his face closer. Looked into his eyes to make it stick. “Well, then I’ll kill you. Okay?”

From the man’s face, he judged the message conveyed.

He got up, looked around at the tumbled, twitching bodies, and the goggling crowd that had gathered.

“Show’s over,” he said brusquely. “Nothing to see here.”

And there it was, something in the words as he spoke them, some echo of the elusive feeling he’d been carrying around all day—which now slid out from the shadows and took on recognizable form.

Bored , he realized with a slight shock. Dragonbane—you are bored .

Later, with the band muffled up in thickening cloud and the last of the daylight gone to a fading orange glow over the trees to the west, the march-masters set about building campfires. Tinder sparked and flared at intervals across the low open ground where the thirty-five coffles of slaves were huddled against the growing chill of night. Gerin watched the flames spring up, and counted—four, no, five of them among the slaves and another smaller one farther out where the overseer’s tents were pitched. None was close enough to cast more than the faintest radiance on the men in his coffle—a gleam here and there on a few pale, city-bred faces like Tigeth’s, the odd glint of an eye catching the light as someone turned their head. But mostly, the slaves made a rumpled and undistinguished mass of shadow in the gloom.

There was a faint, watery itching in Gerin’s eyes and throat. He felt suddenly, ineptly weak.

He forced it down. No time for that now .

Those march-masters not tasked with the fires began the lengthy business of feeding and watering their charges. They moved outward among the slaves in ones and twos, dealing out the odd casual kick or blow to open passage. The men overseeing Gerin’s coffle at least seemed in rough good humor as they went around, slopping cold stew into the shallow wooden bowls with reasonable attempts at accuracy, taking the trouble to hand out the chunks of stale bread rather than just throw them, here and there grunting the kind of gruffly soothing words you’d offer a well-behaved dog. Gerin put it down to Barat’s absence—with the troublemaker off the chain and left to rot, there’d be no more unwelcome attention from the overseers, and that had to be good. Now they could all, slaves and march-masters together, get on with the practical business of reaching journey’s end in peace.

Gerin forced down mouthfuls of the gelatinous stew, gnawed at a corner of his bread. He swallowed hard, breathed, swallowed again, and—

Abruptly, he was choking .

Choking—thrashing—flailing hard in his chains, so the manacles gouged at his wrists and ankles, and the men around him panicked back as far as their own restraints would let them. Clamor went back and forth.

“What the—”

“Look out, look out , he’s having a fi—”

“Fever! It’s the coughing fever!”

“Get him the fuck away from m—”

“Poison, poison !”

“Don’t touch the fucking food!”

“Spit it up, man. Spit it the fuck up !”

And then the new cry, the new terror. “ Possessed, possessed! The Dark Court has him. Hoiran comes! Don’t let him touch you, he’ll break the chains like a—”

“Hoiran! Hoiran! Abase yourselves, it is—”

“Hoiran walks!”

“Back, get back— ”

The march-masters arrived. Gerin was barely aware of them, vision torn back and forth in splinters as his neck spasmed front and side , front and side , front and side . The spittle was gathering in his throat—he coughed and spat desperately, felt it start to foam and blow on his lips. A dimly seen form stooped across him, a fist clobbered inaccurately down. The blow glanced off the side of his head. His spine arched, and he made deep snarling noises at the base of his throat. A second march-master joined the first.

“Not like that, you fucking twat. Get a grip on his—”

“Yeah, you fucking try to—”

“Just hold him still , will you!”

Someone got fully astride Gerin, tried to pin him down by the arms. He thought he recognized the march-master’s face from days earlier—hair grizzled and receding beneath a knitted wool cap, brow creased, and eyes worried. Another younger, angrier face loomed behind him and to the side. Deep in the fit and foaming, Gerin glimpsed the second man raising a fist wrapped in metallic knuckle-duster gleam. Saw the way he angled carefully for the punch. This one would break his face for sure.

Something thin and glinting whipped loosely upward in the night air, dropped down again over the younger man’s head—Gerin knew it for a length of chain. He dropped his Strov-practiced spasming like a peeled cloak, hinged furiously up against the grip on his arms, nuzzled into the older march-master’s neck like a lover.

He bit deep and hung on.

The march-master yelped and tried to smack him away. The younger man’s steel-loaded punch misfired, hit his struggling companion in the shoulder. Then the chain pulled taut, ripped him backward and tumbling away. Gerin locked his jaws on the older man’s neck, got his hands up to help the clinch. The other slaves on the coffle crowded about, prevented retreat. The march-master was bleating now, stumbling, trying to elbow a path clear. Flailing to get Gerin off him. The woolen cap got knocked askew on his balding head, then away, into the confusion. Gerin rode the struggles, felt his nose bloodied from a random blow, ignored it, ground and sliced and scissored with his teeth, worked at tearing a ragged hole in the man’s neck. Skin, sinew, tiny gobbets of shredded flesh and there, there , the tiny, wet-pulsing pipe of the artery. He spat loose, let go. The march-master staggered back, eyes wide on Gerin’s in the poor light, mouth gaping like a plea. He slapped a hand to the wound in his neck, felt the damage there, the swift pulse of his life running out over his fingers. Made a kind of moaning sound and fell over gibbering.

“Get his fucking bolt cutters! Now! ”

It was the Rajal veteran, through gritted teeth as he sawed the length of chain link back and forth across the younger march-master’s throat. His fist were up and doubled about the chain in an attempt to keep the worst of the strain off his manacles—still Gerin saw how the veteran bled at the wrists from the pressure. The march-master thrashed and kicked, booted legs lashing out, trying to find purchase. But the dull metal links had sunk deep in the flesh at his throat, and his eyes bulged inhumanly large as he choked, filled with the desperate knowledge of his own death. Gerin darted in, grabbed the cutters from his belt. He wrestled with the unfamiliar angles of the tool, trying to make it bite on the edge of his ankle cuffs.

“You motherfuckers!” Heavy blow across his shoulder. “Get on the fucking ground, you piece of sh—”

Gerin staggered, did not quite go down. The third, newly arrived march-master snarled and slammed the club into him again, from the side. It put him in the dirt this time. The march-master stood over him a single hard-breathing second with club raised again—and was clawed down by the other men on the coffle before he could strike. An awful, wailing yell came up from the ground where he hit. Chained forms piled onto him.