Ричард Морган - The Cold Commands

He’d dyed his hair deep black in a run-down brothel bathroom just after dawn. Took out his talismans. Bribed the whore whose dyes he borrowed to forget he was ever there.

It was a tidy sum by the standards of the place—certainly more than she’d make to fuck him—but her expression barely changed with the commerce. She bit and stashed the coins without comment, somewhere under her grubby skirts, then pointed wordless down the corridor to where the baths could be found. By her listless, flandrijn-stunned gaze and the way she shut her fuck-room door on him as he left, Egar judged that forgetting him was exactly what she planned to do.

The bath chambers were silent and cooling, and weak fingers of early daybreak probed down through the scant steam from a row of high windows on a slimy back wall. He saw no other clients, heard only some splashing and some patently false giggling somewhere in a darkened alcove. He found an alcove of his own, stripped himself to the waist, and worked rapidly with the dye. He gave it as long as he dared, then slicked back his newly blackened hair and squeezed it as dry as he could. Once out in the street, the sun would take care of the rest. He rinsed his hands a couple of times in the bathing pool, shook them dry, and put on his shirt again. The talismans went into his pocket. Then he slipped the catch on one of the high windows and hauled himself up and through, trying not to clout any of his wounds in the process. He clung from the outside ledge by his fingertips for a moment, then dropped down into the shaded back alley below.

Pain spiked through the wound in his thigh with the impact, bad enough for a clench-jawed cry. He stumbled, propped himself against the wall, panting.

Down the alley, what he’d taken for a pile of refuse made an answering groan.

He whipped around, hand to knife. For one desperate, floundering moment, he thought it was the front-parlor toughs, sent by the madam to investigate this customer who preferred to quit her premises by such unconventional means.

“No need for that blade, my friend.” The voice was hoarse, but showed no sign of fear. “I’ve no quarrel with any man who leaves a brothel by the back window.”

“Have you not?” Egar stalked closer, peering.

He made out a slim figure, cuddled into the wall beneath the folds of a Yhelteth cavalryman’s cloak. Sable on white, the rearing horse insignia, long worn to a grubby black and cream but unmistakable nonetheless. The bearded face that looked back from above its collar was scarred and grimed, the hair a poorly cropped mess. But the eyes were steady.

“No quarrel at all. Done it myself, time to time. Way I see it, the least a patriotic brothelkeeper can do for a man who’s served is waive payment. But they rarely see it that way.”

Dangerous to linger here, but…

Egar sank into a sprawl against the opposite wall of the alley, rested aching limbs for just a few moments. He nodded at the cloak.

“Cavalryman, huh?”

“Seventeenth Imperial, yes sir.” The man freed his right hand from the folds of the cloak, held it up for inspection. “Sadly no longer.”

Egar looked at the half-hand claw. Ring and little fingers gone, a ragged mass of scar tissue where the blade had chopped deep into the palm behind. He’d seen the like often enough before—rank-and-file cavalry swords were for shit when it came to anything other than hacking down fleeing infantry. The Empire’s factories churned them out cheap and fast and shiny, and about one in a dozen would likely fail as soon as you went up against a decently equipped mounted opponent. Couple of well-placed blows and the guard gave way like rusted scrap.

“Seventeenth, huh?” He racked weary brains for the memory. “You were at Oronak then, that first summer when the Scaled Folk came. Before the dragons.”

“Yes, we were.” The steady eyes never wavered.

They sat quietly for a few moments. It was in Egar’s mouth to say he’d seen the carnage at Oronak, to recall the nightmare they’d found when they rode into town. He’d been part of a relief column that arrived too late to do much more than wander the streets of the tiny port and count the dead. Repeated cavalry charges down Oronak’s main thoroughfares had driven the Scaled Folk back, but at massive cost. Not one man in five lived to make report when the reinforcements finally arrived, and the results of the battle looked like something out of the Revelation’s more twisted imaginings of hell: drifting smoke from buildings and boats set aflame by the command caste reptiles’ coughed-out venom, the corpses of men and horses scorched or bitten apart, the seared and screaming wounded reaching out to them…

Better you say nothing, Dragonbane. You don’t want to be remembered here. Better you get yourself gone .

Egar nodded across the alley at the man.

“You want to sell that cloak?”

IT COST HIM A LOT MORE THAN THE WHORE’S SILENCE, BUT HE EXPECTED as much. Visible military insignia were powerful tools in the begging game. They drew the eye on street corners, forced shame and remembrance on those who would just as soon walk on by with their purse safely stowed. They helped ward off the constant thuggery and assault that beggars were prone to suffer from street gangs or bands of young nobles out on a spree. Sometimes, if your luck was in, they could even get you charitable bed and board on feast days. Accordingly, soldiers’ cloaks and jackets were traded, stolen, even dug up out of graves on the outskirts of town for the revenue and comfort they could drum up.

In Egar’s case, there was a simpler calculus. Since the war ended, there were several thousand veterans begging and sleeping rough on the streets of Yhelteth, not to mention those others, probably also in the thousands, passing themselves off as such. You saw worn-down men in ragged military garb pretty much anywhere a neighborhood lacked either the paid enforcement or the callous collective will to drive them out. They were a part of the noisy, churning backdrop of city life, no more worthy of attention than the next scurrying urchin or street-corner whore. Just another unavoidable sign of the times.

Back on the steppe, there were tales of a shaman-enchanted wolf-skin robe in whose sorcerous folds the wearer could, at will, become invisible to the gaze of men. Wrapped in the cavalryman’s cloak, the Dragonbane could duck his head anywhere in Yhelteth and pull pretty much the same trick.

But not right now .

He left the alley with the garment bundled under his arm. The sun still wasn’t much above the horizon, but you could feel the heat building already. The streets had filled up while he was inside the brothel. Crowds ebbed and flowed, horse and mule hooves clattered. Skeletal, untenanted market stalls he’d passed on his way up the hill in the early hours were now hung with brightly colored cloth awnings, laden with artfully arrayed produce and mobbed with buyers, sellers, and a thin circling of prospective thieves.

He picked his way through the crisscross of sloping streets and alleys, heading for the river. Ideally, he’d have liked to find out what went on around Imrana’s mansion in the hours after he left, but now was not the time. He needed a doctor, one he could bribe or scare into silence, to dress and clean his wounds. He needed weapons, something a little more substantial than the knives he now carried. He needed to take stock and maybe, just maybe, catch a couple of hours’ sleep.

None of which was safe to do around here.

And you need to do it all before nightfall .

The faint whisper of his deeper fears—because while he was confident he could evade the City Guard for weeks at a time without incident, the dwenda were another, utterly unknown quantity. And whatever unholy alliance they had forged with Pashla Menkarak and the Citadel, he was tolerably sure they would work like the demons they resembled to keep it hidden. They would do their best to track him, and he had no idea what that best might involve. Ringil had always said, after the battle at Beksanara, that the dwenda were as shocked by their encounter with humans as the humans were with them. The outcome of the battle seemed —seemed —to bear that out, but these fuckers had still appeared more or less out of thin air, had still moved with inhuman speed and grace, had still massacred the better part of an entire detachment of the finest crack troops the Empire had to offer.