Ричард Морган - The Cold Commands

Somehow, the state he was in, Egar didn’t see himself taking down a dwenda warrior.

He crossed the river by the Sabal pontoon, blending into the ragged crowd as well as he could, slumping his shoulders, curving his back, and chopping his stride to a shuffle. When his turn came at the toll hut on the far side, he broke into a racking, spluttering cough, mumbling and waving and covering his face. The toll officer averted his own face with thinly veiled disgust, snatched the proffered coin, and waved Egar on without a second glance.

In the stew of streets up from the bridge, he prowled about for a while, checking the frontages. He found a doctor’s signboard, hanging above the entrance to a flandrijn pipe parlor, but both businesses were shut up tight at this early hour. He shrugged and found a spot across the street to wait, a cool stone alcove between the buttresses of what appeared to have once been a temple. He sank down into the shade. Throb of agony in his thigh as the muscles stretched and tugged at the wound. He pressed lips and teeth together and rode the pain. Glowered across the street at the pipe house sign.

Could fucking use a flandrijn smoke right about now, these assholes just kept decent hours .

He thought vaguely about breaking in and helping himself, but decided against it. Anyone dealing in flandrijn would have watchmen on the premises, and while they might well be sleeping at this time of day, such men—war veterans, more than likely—would sleep with one ear cocked for disturbance. He wouldn’t get past them in his current condition. And if the pipe house owners were well enough connected, a break-in was going to bring the City Guard down on the neighborhood like pox on a campaign whore.

He needed the doctor’s services worse than he needed relief from pain right now, and that meant waiting. Anything else just wasn’t smart.

Good to see you acting smart now, Dragonbane—when it’s way too late to be useful .

Oh yeah, what was I supposed to do? Let that cuckold asshole and his pal clear their steel first? Watch them run Imrana through for an adulteress, and then spit me on the same blade for good measure?

No. But maybe you should just have stayed away from Imrana until you knew Ashant was back on his hero’s horse and somewhere south .

The girl—

The girl, horseshit. You been looking to pick that fight for a fortnight now, and you know it .

He turned his head against the cool, shadowed stonework. Managed a weak smirk. Pretty slow for crack imperial officers. Riot duty in Demlarashan must be turning them soft .

Yeah, that and whatever they’d been drinking all night. Don’t kid yourself, Dragonbane. You got lucky, is all .

Or the Dwellers got my back. Takavach, maybe, watching over me…

He dozed in and out of his pain. Time marched past, like the grubby street crowd, barely registering through his drooping eyelids and occasional starts back to consciousness. Around him, the shadows melted down the dilapidated temple walls like dark, fast-burning candles, as the sun cranked up into the sky. The city’s sounds turned to a blurred ebb and flow in his ears. He drifted, back to memories of the steppe, the great bleeding sunsets at the bottom of the sky, the huddled mass of buffalo moving between the governing points of Skaranak herd riders in the gloom, the barked commands in Majak across the chilly air. He shivered in his doze, and turned tighter into the temple wall. He dreamed about getting a shave. The barber, cleaning soap scum from the razor, applying the blade to his throat. The cold metal presses in, begins to slice… Do not disconcert yourself, my lord .

He jerked awake. Head snapped suddenly upright.

Across the street, a tubby black-clad man stood waiting while his much taller slave unsnapped the bolts at the top of the pipe house entrance. Egar grunted and got himself to his feet. Reeling a little, the first few steps, but he firmed up as he crossed the street. Pain stabbed through his thigh, scorched and bit at him elsewhere—old habit forced it out, straightened his stride. He stood a couple of paces off the tubby man’s shoulder and cleared his throat.

“You the bone man?”

Both men jumped. The slave’s hand fell to his belt as he turned, and the seasoned wooden billy club that swung there. Egar cut him a glance, shook his head.

“You the bone man?” he repeated quietly, eyes on the master.

The tubby man drew himself up. “Now, look, I… I have already tithed this month. I’m a devout man. But I don’t do charity work on demand. I have to make a living. You’ll just have to—”

“I can pay,” Egar told him. He patted the purse at his belt and made it clink .

Palpable relief washed across the doctor’s face. It was like watching a man slide into well-warmed bathwater.

“Oh,” he said. “Well, that’s different.”

“And how exactly did you come by that murderous little item?”

Ringil reached up and touched the pommel of the Ravensfriend, where it rose at his shoulder. “It was forged for me at An-Monal by Grashgal the Wanderer.”

“Yes—actually, I was talking to the sword.”

HELMSMEN—HE’D NEVER MUCH LIKED THEM, EVEN IN THE OLD DAYS. Too little readability in their immobile iron bodies, when you could actually see one, and in their disembodied avuncular voices when you couldn’t. And too fucking impressed with themselves by half. Personally , he told Archeth, when the subject of Anasharal came up, I’d trust one of those things about as far as I could carry its melted-down carcass up the street. They’re no better than demons—it’s like keeping the Dark Court in a fucking bottle on your mantelpiece. Who knows what they’re thinking, or what they want?

In truth, he was exaggerating a little for effect. During the war, he’d spent time at An-Monal and conversed with Manathan on and off, albeit mostly in the company of its Kiriath handlers. The Helmsman had given him no reason to dislike it, if you didn’t include the run of tiny cold shivers he felt every time it spoke unexpectedly to him out of the bedrock air. To Grashgal and the others, the creatures were part of the furniture, and over time Ringil had found himself able to cultivate a similar attitude. But it didn’t change the fact that you were dealing with something as inert as a sword or a temple wall, and it still—apparently—had intelligence far greater than your own. And seemed to enjoy reminding you of the fact.

The Dark Court and the dwenda at least had the courtesy to appear human.

“Well, you’re still going to have to talk to it.” Archeth, pragmatic as ever when anything other than her own life was concerned. “It’s the heart of the expedition, it’s the reason we’re going in the first place.”

“Yeah, makes you wonder, doesn’t it?”

“What?” They were riding back from the Shanta boatyards, side by side through noon city bustle and heat. But even against the backdrop hubbub of the streets and clop of their horses’ hooves on cobbles, he could hear the irritable tension clambering upward in her voice. “Makes you wonder what ?”

He sighed. They were long overdue for this conversation. He’d been putting it off for days.

Might as well get it over with .

“Archeth, come on . A watchtower city in the ocean, a clan dedicated to standing eternal guard down the centuries? That’s not how people live , and you know it. Not even your people. Anasharal is spinning you a fireside yarn for children. You don’t believe it any more than I do. That’s not what this is about.”