Ричард Морган - The Cold Commands

“No, you wouldn’t,” he said tautly.

Darhan flung up his arms, exasperated. “All right, all right, I wouldn’t. But that makes me the single man in this city you can trust right now, and I’m telling you, if they try to draft me for Demlarashan this winter, I won’t even be that. It’s more money than any of us are going to see in a lifetime, Eg.” His anger took a sudden gust upward. “Twenty thousand cold, clinking elementals against one man’s life. Just think about that. It’s retirement in style, it’s a villa upriver, a kitchen full of slaves and a tidy little harem wing, cuties out of Trelayne or Shenshenath on tap. It’s that happy fucking ending none of us are ever going to see, Eg. Just like some bullshit kid’s fairy tale. Now what the fuck loose end is worth running against that kind of bounty? And don’t you be telling me it’s a woman.”

“It’s not.” Egar blew a weary sigh. “Look, there’s this kid. Ishlinak, not long in the city. Big, stroppy mouth on him and no more smarts than a six-week calf. He’s in this, and if I don’t get word to him, he’s going to get taken for question.”

Darhan gave him a narrow look. “Ishlinak?”

“Yeah. Dumb as fuck, but aren’t you all. But he’s a nice enough kid for his age, might even make something of himself if he stays alive long enough. Reminds me of…” He gestured. “Yeah, well. Like I said. He’s in this, and that’s on me.”

“So what’s his name?”

“Harath.” Eg blinked. “Why?”

Darhan shrugged. “No mention of him on the bounty sheet. It’s just you. Pretty good likeness, too, except for the hair. Smart move, blacking it up like that. But it isn’t going to keep you safe for long. The Guard are a lot smarter than they used to be in our day.”

“Can you help me out, then? Carry a message?”

Darhan dug at the sparse turf underfoot with the toe of one boot. “Yeah, guess I can do that much. Is he in there now?”

“I don’t know. I was going to look.”

The older man shook his grizzled head. “You really are something else, Eg.”

“Yeah, well. Share hearth and heart’s truth , right?”

“Sure. But just look over there, Eg.” Darhan gestured broadly at the tavern and its lamplit environs, the strewn mob of men whose life was killing others just like them. “I mean, just look at them. Most of them, they’d sell their own mothers for a tenth that much.”

Egar stared at the dim, flicker-lit figures. “I know. But that doesn’t—”

The blow floored him. Dropped him to his hands and knees. Roaring, whirling in his ears, as he struggled not to go all the way down. A boot lashed in, struck with precision at the base of his ribs, lifted him with its force, killed his lungs. He went all the way down. The boot dug in under his shoulder, shoved him over, onto his back.

Darhan stood over him.

“Guess what, Eg,” he said flatly. “They drafted me for Demlarashan this winter.”

Egar made creaking, wheezing noises. Blood in his mouth, he’d clipped his tongue with his teeth when Darhan hit him in the head. Tears in his eyes. He spat with slack lack of force, not much more than a belch of bloodied spittle that hung out the side of his mouth and down his chin. He clawed after breath. He tried to reach his knife.

“Uh-uh.” Darhan trod on his hand. Knelt and pinned the Dragonbane’s arm beneath his knee, found the weapon under the clothes. “Saw you twitch after this baby before. Thought you’d rumbled me then.”

He tugged the knife from its sheath, tossed it into the river. Egar heard the tiny, going-away splash it made.

“Faithless,” he managed through hoarse wheezing, “cunt.”

“Yeah, yeah.” Darhan frisked him with professional speed, turned up the other two knives, and threw them after their brother. “You talk when you’re closing on sixty and it’s back to Demlarashan or lose your commission. Fucking pointless war. I’m not dying down there for eight bucks a day and campaign rations. Not anymore.”

He stood and cupped hands to mouth. “Hoy! Guard! Guard sergeant! Got your fugitive for you! Right here! Guard! ”

Commotion at the trestles. Figures rising to their feet and peering. Voices back and forth in the evening air. The door of the tavern flung back, yellowish lanternlight spilling out. More bulky figures silhouetted there. Darhan gestured.

“They were in there all the time, Eg. Six-man squad, doing the rounds. Anybody seen this face, there’s a reward. You’d walked on in there like you planned, they would have gotten you just the same. Except I’d be out twenty grand. Hoy , you lot! Back the fuck off! My prisoner, my bounty.”

This to the rough, bunched-up crescent of freebooters already coalescing around them. Darhan stood forward, blocked them from Egar’s crumpled form. There was a taut grin on his face, and his hand rested on the hilt of his own short-sword where it hung at his waist.

“You heard me! Back the fuck up, the lot of you. Job’s done, no help needed. My prisoner. Now will somebody go and drag the Guard off their on-the-house arses and get them out here.”

“They’re coming,” said someone at the back of the press.

They were, too—six lean, hard-looking men who, if they had been cadging free drink in the tavern, showed remarkably little sign of it in stance or stare. They were not what Egar had expected at all. Not a saddlebag belly among them, and they carried their day-clubs with the relaxed ease of fighters, not bullies. A couple of them carried torches, too. They shouldered their blunt way through the crowd and stood looking down at Egar. The squad captain jutted his chin.

“Who you got there, then?”

Darhan stood theatrically aside for them. “That is Egar the Dragonbane, in all his outlaw glory. Murderer of Saril Ashant. Mark me up for the reward.”

One of the Guardsmen guffawed. “Yeah, right!”

Laughter laced through the crowd. They weren’t buying it, either. Egar, still trying to get breath back into his lungs and wipe the drooled filth from his chin, couldn’t really blame them.

The Guard captain wasn’t laughing. “And you are?”

“Darhan the Hammer. Recruit intake commander, Ninth Combined Irregulars.”

“You’re Majak?”

Darhan’s stance tightened up. “I’m an imperial citizen of twenty-six years standing, and a decorated veteran. And I’ve just done your fucking job for you. Now you going to put my name on this arrest or what?”

The captain considered. He crouched to get a closer look at Egar, jammed a sharp thumb under the Dragonbane’s chin, and lifted his face to the light from his companions’ torches. He breathed out a soft, resigned obscenity. Straightened up.

“It’s him,” he said quietly. “Jaran, Tald, get him up. Bind his hands. The rest of you, get these people back.”

It was a shrewd order. As the captain’s words sank in, the crowd began to boil. Muttering and shoving, a growing ruck of bodies, tussling for a clearer look. The two torchbearers planted their torches spike downward in the ground, drew their day-clubs, and joined their comrades. The murmuring surged like surf.

“It’s him.”

“No fucking w—”

“—can’t—”

“Look, man. Got to be. They’re taking him.”

“It is him!”

The five City Guard enforcers wrestled them back, none too gentle with their clubs in the process. Egar saw bellies poked, shins thwacked, and reaching arms smacked down. He struggled for focus in the murky light, caught one man’s gaze among the many staring down at him. Shaven head, puckered about on one side with burn scars, the ear on that side gone to a ravaged scroll of cartilage, the eye a milky pit. He saw the man’s hand like a claw, clamped on someone else’s bracing arm as they shoved back against the Guard cordon. The single-eyed stare pinned him like a flung lance.