Ричард Морган - The Cold Commands

He gathered up his bundled cloak and lurched stiffly to his feet. Stumbled through the carpet of drowsing bodies, trailing a wake of curses and complaints. An attendant came running, fresh pipe in hand, but he waved her away.

“Enough,” he said gruffly. “Had enough.”

His immediate instinct was to seek some coffee and a good long soak in a hot bath. But on reflection, he supposed the way he smelled now would go a good way to completing his beggar’s disguise. Best keep it that way.

He grimaced at the thought.

Life in the big city, Eg .

Yeah, and life in the big city is making you soft as the next fucking courtier, Dragonbane. How often did you bathe in hot water out on the steppe? Come to that, how often did you bathe at all on deployment during the war?

True enough—he spent most of the war smelling far worse than he did now. At Gallows Gap, Ringil had joked with him, handkerchief held affectedly to mouth, that just the way they stank ought to turn the reptile advance.

Urann’s balls, he missed that faggot.

He got himself outside, squinting at the blast of the sun overhead. He estimated time of day, reckoned early afternoon. He’d been piped up for at least a full day, then, maybe two.

Yeah, maybe three , said something authoritative, through the fumes in his head.

Vaguely, he recalled the doctor muttering, as he finished up his ministrations, something about cheap pain relief from our coastal brethren downstairs . The disdain in his voice would have been hilarious if Egar hadn’t felt quite so much like boiled shit. Well, you’re the one renting a coffin-sized room above them , he’d felt like growling. You’re the one doesn’t look like he’s been on a fucking horse in his life .

He’d dripped coins into the doctor’s hand in silence instead, watched with thin satisfaction at the little fish-mouth gape the man made with each clink. Then he lurched shakily away downstairs to talk to the coastal brethren.

They’d sorted him out. Quite politely, too, the good doctor’s disdain notwithstanding.

Doesn’t matter where you go , Ringil told him once, as they sat horses on the cliffs at Demlarashan, overlooking the beach, that shit never changes. Men need someone to hate. It makes them feel strong, it makes them feel good about themselves. Binds them together. Yhelteth against the League, coastlanders against the horse tribes, marsh dwellers against the city—

Skaranak against Ishlinak , Egar offered companionably.

Just so. Same shit everywhere, Eg. Only way you stop them squabbling is show them someone else they can all hate together .

Egar grinned in his beard, and gestured down to the beach below. Better hope we don’t beat these fuckers too easily then .

The fury of the previous week’s storms had shoved the dragondrift up almost to the base of the cliffs, and it was beginning to bubble up in a way they’d seen before, farther north. Just a matter of time, they both knew, before the hatching began. There was a queasy kind of excitement building around the camp with the waiting. Previous experience had shown you could never be sure what exactly would come tearing its way out of the sticky, purplish-black mess when the time came. Might be eight-foot-tall high-caste reptiles, might be swarms of the weaker, smaller peons. Might be something else entirely.

Of course, on this occasion, something else entirely turned out to be exactly right.

A something else entirely that would send men—many of them seasoned levy troops—screaming for their lives in retreat. A something else entirely it would cost over a hundred lives to defeat, and earn Egar the title that would catapult him into the upper ranks of the alliance overnight.

Yeah, shame we’re down to brawling with jealous husbands and priests these days, Dragonbane. Not going to give you any medals for that, now, are they?

He limped up the sun-saturated street with a wry grimace. Leaning into the limp a little more than strictly necessary—it couldn’t hurt to get in the habit, after all. Start playing his new role to the hilt. He let the cavalry cloak flap open a little in his grubby grasp, enough so it showed what it was. He slowed his pace to a beggar’s shuffle. Something appropriate to a broken man of war.

Close enough, after all, innit? Egar Cuckoldbane .

Yeah, yeah, very fucking funny .

His age fell on him abruptly, out of the pitiless, sun-glaring sky. He felt himself sag for real, no theater in it now.

Is this how it ends, then? Faded glories and memories of a youth growing dim. The cold creep of time as it eats you. Weaker and weary, less and less triumph in your stride, less and less to warm you outside of those recollections of another, brighter, harder, younger man…

The sour meander of his thoughts brought him, inevitably, to Harath. He owed the boy coin—coin he probably ought to hang on to himself for the foreseeable future. But more than that, he owed him a warning. By now the City Guard would be out in force, wrapping their pointy little heads as best they could about the task of apprehending a Dragonbane Majak. If Harath was out flapping his mouth— oh surely not —about their exploits at Afa’marag, he was likely going to get hauled in for questioning. And while he knew nothing of consequence that could endanger Egar, and was, to boot, an irritating little shit, the Dragonbane could still not find it in himself to dislike the young Ishlinak enough to let him be taken by the Guard’s inquisitors.

A warning, that’s all , he promised himself, keeping carefully to the shuffling gait, playing the limp for all it was worth. In place of the coin he’s trusting you to bring. He deserves that much. He’d do as much for you, any Majak would .

Well, maybe not an Ishlinak.

But still…

Fuck it. Share hearth and heart’s truth, right? Break bread and sup under a shared sky .

Right.

HE WALKED THE BACKSTREETS TO THE AN-MONAL ROAD, TACKING BACK and forth to stay off major thoroughfares and getting genuinely lost a couple of times in the process. The smell of the river on his left flank kept him more or less on track; later he had caught glimpses of the Black Folk Span between leaning tenement piles. Eventually, the slow grumble and creak of cartwheels and the tramp of feet up ahead alerted him to the proximity of his goal. He climbed one final, aching flight of stone steps, up from a gloomy dead-end alley, and found himself standing at last at the edge of the road and its boisterous flow. Making time to catch his breath, he checked left and right for the glint of Guard helmets. No sign he could see. He stepped quickly into the fringes of the traffic. Kept his head down. Worked the limp.

Pleasantly surprised at how relatively painless his injured leg actually felt.

He found the pawnbroker’s again, found Harath gone.

Big fucking surprise .

“Didn’t say where,” the old man sulked at him. “Reckoned he’d get better lodgings at a better price elsewhere. In riverside! Bloody fool. I was doing him a favor at those rates!”

“Yeah, well.” Egar produced a coin between finger and thumb. “Want to do me a favor? If he comes by for any reason, tell him he wants to keep his mouth well shut about recent events and steer wide of the City Guard. Could be, they’ll want words with him.”

The old man’s solitary eye glinted. “Really?”

“Yeah. Really.” Egar whisked the coin back out from under the man’s nose, dropped an arm on his bony shoulder instead, the way he had with the invigilator outside Archeth’s place. He leaned in, conspirator-close. He lowered his tone and put the sharp crack of bone into his stare. “Course, if I were to hear that you’d taken that to the City Guard yourself, I might have to come back here and recover my coin. And I’d take the interest out in teeth. We understand each other here?”