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?
Of course. The old man, struggling feebly to extricate himself from under the Dragonbane s arm. He did a good impression of being affronted. I m no friend to the Guard. How do you think I lost this eye? I m no grass.
Good. Egar let him go. Tossed him the coin.
So, if he comes back, you ll tell him.
The old man bit the coin. Stowed it and sneered. Oh, he ll be back. Mark my words. He has the reek of whore on him. Some pretty has him shacked up and is milking him dry. But she ll tire and throw him out soon enough. The way that one pisses his purse up against the wall, he won t be featherbedding on the northside for long.
Northside? Egar, on his way out, stopped and turned with dangerous calm. You told me he didn t say where he was going.
And he didn t, said the pawnbroker with asperity. Just said he was off over the Span and glad to be going.
Across the Span, eh?
That s what he said. The old man sniffed and gestured. Here, you want to sell that cloak? Give you a good price for it.
The pony stringer s good fortune, then.
Eg couldn t believe Harath would be that stupid. But then he d evidently been stupid enough to walk out on the only address the Dragonbane could trace him to with the balance of his pay, so who could tell.
He got laid. Just like the old man says. He got taken back to some working girl s garret, and she s got him playing part-time pimp while the silver lasts.
Wasn t like he hadn t done similar in his own muddle-headed, mercenary youth.
And crooked coin-toss odds, this whore flops walking distance from the Pony Stringer.
But he didn t cross the river just yet. Harath might be dumb as fuck, don t mean you got to act the same, Eg. Instead, he found a small plaza with a sliced view of the Span and a war memorial bas-relief across its eastern wall. He folded himself into a shaded corner there, with his cloak spread across his knees. There was a small satisfaction in the act, a quiet taking-stock that seemed to soothe. He hadn t yet eaten, but didn t really feel the need the residue of flandrijn in his system, he knew from experience, would kill his appetite for some time to come, just as it killed his pain. Drink would have been nice, but it could wait. He d been at least as thirsty as this most of his fighting life. Meantime, flame-orange scents of spice and fruit drifted to him on the breeze from stalls across the way, the sweat was cooling on his brow and under his grubby clothing, his minor wounds all seemed to have scabbed up nicely. Even the ache of the sewn gash in his thigh felt good there was an itching there, deep in the flesh, that presaged the healing to come.
Like any good soldier, he knew how to wait.
Presently someone came by and threw a handful of copper coins into the dust at his feet.
He gave it until early evening, when the heat was gone from the air and the light beginning to seep away. Across at the stalls, the sellers who remained were already lighting candles and lamps, casting a homely yellow haze over their wares and the darting, gesturing hands of their customers. Night and its assumptions, settling in. Even the scents in the square had changed, from produce to dinner, from fruit and spice to grilling meat and fish stews that were, Egar had to admit, starting to make his stomach twinge.
Another of the streetwalkers waggled by cloutingly overdone waft of her perfume, crunch of sandaled feet skirting him. The undercurrent scent of used woman tugged faintly at his groin, but he didn t look up, and she didn t trouble him. Like everyone else, the whores were leaving him alone in his new incarnation. He d raked in his coppers on the couple of occasions they were tossed to him, and his purse was well hidden. Hard-luck cavalry cloak aside, he was showing nothing anyone would want. The best he d done for attention in the hours since he sat down were a couple of scrawny street dogs they sniffed around his feet for a couple of minutes, smelled nothing easily edible, and moved on, tracking more promising odors.
For the human denizens of the neighborhood, for all the notice they paid him, he could as well have been one of the bas-relief figures on the war memorial wall he sat against.
And
when he moved, stiffly at first, with the long hours sitting, it felt Egar found himself grinning a little at the thought as if he were stepping down from among those chiseled, valorous figures, coming to sudden, eerie life and leaving their weathered, white-stone ranks for some altogether grubbier destiny in the unwinding nighttime streets.
He found a coffee merchant among the stalls, prodded together his gathered coppers in the palm of his hand, and dredged up the price of a cup. The seller barely glanced at him, eyes fixed on the count of coin instead. Egar drank the bitter draft down could not, without revealing his real purse, afford the sugar to sweeten it then shouldered his way back through the other browsers and buyers, and plotted a path for the Span. The Pony Stringer Lizard s Head, whatever would be filling up by now. Plenty of cover in the rough crowd of irregulars down from the hill and the other, unaligned freebooters there d be. In his day, the City Guard had always steered clear of the place unless absolutely forced to it, and he doubted things would have changed much in the intervening years. He d be safe there long enough to find Harath, if he was around, long enough to give him the warning, maybe even shake some sense into the lad while there was still time.
And if the young Ishlinak didn t show, well, there d be ways to leave a message.
Traffic on the darkened Span was sparse, soft-footed slaves running late errands mostly, the odd metallic snatch of song rung out by hooves as some accredited messenger sped by. Somewhere near the midpoint, he met a clanking ox-drawn cart coming the other way, big upright barrels rubbing squeaking wooden shoulders in the back, one gaunt old driver up front, cloak-wrapped and nodding half asleep over the reins. Egar stopped and stepped aside to let the vehicle pass. Alerted by something, the driver lifted his head, just barely, unhooded his gaze, and met the Dragonbane s eye. His gaze was surprisingly piercing for the hour and his apparent age. He stared at Egar for a moment, as if trying to place him from some past encounter, and then he seemed to nod, approving something they both knew at a level deeper than either of them, or any man, could actually express.
Egar stood there, struck. Turned to watch the cart rumble and grind out of sight in the gloom. A faint shiver wove across his shoulders.
He shrugged it off, glanced up and down the gleaming iron thoroughfare of the Span, then went and leaned his aching frame against the estuary-side railing. Stared down at the rough-dappled stripe of bandlight across black water. It looked, he thought vaguely, like a horse-tribe Sold daub, slapped across the flank of some midnight-colored stallion.
So long since he d had a good horse. No real call for it in the city, and he d been nowhere else in so many months.
He shrugged, and it felt like an excuse.
Up in the vast steel cradle of the Span s structure, the evening wind swooped and keened. Off to his left and right, the city glimmered. Fragments of thought swirled through him, flandrijn-fogged and slippery, hard to hang on to. He rubbed at his chin, distracted, felt the lengthening growth there. Suddenly he couldn t decide if he d let it thicken and bush out when this was all done, get back his full Majak beard, gray-streaked though it might now be; or go back to the soft-murmuring old man this had all started with and get scraped down to city-slick standards all over again.
Yeah, and tell the old fucker while I m there what a mess he set me up for.
Laughter behind him as a gaggle of young street toughs went by. He heard them pause in their merriment as they spotted his solitary figure. Felt them draw closer. Something colder than the flandrijn rose in him, washed away his vagueness as the old signals tripped in his nerves. He dropped a hand into his garb, found a knife hilt. Put his weariness aside and turned, grinning.
Got something for me, lads?
They backed up, bunching instinctively behind the ringleader as they saw what was waiting for them in the grin. Egar relaxed. Warriors would have done the opposite, would have spread to bracket him.
The wind hooted, up in the shadowy steel spaces.
Well then, you d better get on home. Your mothers will be wondering what manner of mouth to clamp on their dripping teats without you.
That got a collective snarl, and a couple of barked, disbelieving curses. But it was street-cur stuff, and they all knew it; it was clutching at the suddenly razored hems of their street-tough dignity, and finding abruptly what cheap, unsatisfactory cloth it was.
Egar stamped forward a step, growled in his throat. Showed them teeth and blade unsheathed. They tumbled away backward, scattered and fled like silverfry from the net. Egar jerked his chin after them and snorted, watched the pale flecks of their heels fade away down the Span. Enjoying now the quickened thud of the blood in his veins.
Yeah, nice work, Cuckoldbane. Your triumphs grow ever greater. You ll have medals from the Emperor before you know it.
He shook off the last of his flandrijn-tinted introspection. On the northside, the glimmering city beckoned. Craning his neck over the rail, he thought he could make out the ruddy glow of the Pony Stringer s lit windows by the water s edge below.
He could be there in a matter of minutes.
CHAPTER 35
Ranging at the gate. Muffled voices.
Ringil stirred in the broad bed, wine-sodden senses floundering for some clue to his current whereabouts, let alone what was going on outside. He d been dreaming of Egar some incoherent nonsense, sitting out on the steppe at night, hearing the lick and splinter of campfire flames and watching the Dragonbane s bearded face against the spark-ridden dark, watching his lips as they enunciated words Gil kept craning close to catch, but somehow couldn t make out.
He came up out of it, spiked through with creeping black unease and a sense of time and place gone irredeemably awry
The damp-earth odors of recent sex suffused the room around him. It was still dark beyond the shutters.
Banging at the banging back the chamber door as they stumbled drunkenly in together. Shoving Noyal Rakan hard against the wooden paneling and pressing up against him. Grins and little growling noises, and then Gil thrust stiffened fingers forward into the young captain s luxuriant curly locks, tangling there and tugging Rakan s face in closer for the first stabbing kiss
Ah.
Final, blessed release from the long, solemn, and unbelievably tedious banquet Shanta had thrown in honor of the Nyanar clan. Father and eldest son of said clan both pontificating across the feast-laden table to their host as only courtiers can. And down the table, Shanta and Nethena Gral making arid, mannered counterpoint. Florid toasts, tossed back and forth like escalating bets in some smug game of flattery and form. Speech after turgid toe-the-line speech to the greater glory of Empire, Emperor, Imperial Charter, and the Most Assured Success of this, Our Current Venture, which cannot fail to Magnify His Radiance s munificent wisdom in
He caught Archeth stifling yawns and holding down a glower. Dared not catch her eye thereafter, for fear he would be unable to choke back the bubbles of hilarity rising in his belly. He caught Noyal Rakan s gaze instead, and held it, gently, feeling it flutter against his own, like a moth in the curl of his closed-up palm.
Beneath the satin drape of the tablecloth, a building heat in his groin.
Raise your glasses, I pray you, gentlemen and ladies, raise your glasses once more and drink. To the Holy Might of Yhelteth and her Godly Appointed Mission to lead humankind out from the Shadow of Lesser
Yawn.
Later, while Shanta saw the Nyanars and their entourage to the door, and bade them all farewell, Ringil walked behind Rakan through the dimly lamplit corridors of the riverside villa, shepherding the younger man gradually toward the rooms Shanta had given him. It was taut, skin-thin theater. They paused now and then to admire the naval engineer s taste in art or sculpture, murmured meaningless syllables back and forth on the edge of excited laughter, brushed against each other in seeming accident, turned suddenly to lock gazes then look away, as those rising bubbles in Gil s belly turned from hilarity into something urgently else And burst.
Once
, just once, inches off that first kiss, Rakan hesitated, Rakan said:
I my brother, he He would not
Fuck your brother, Ringil growled, tongue delirious on the tips of his own teeth. I m fucking you, not him.
And then it was glorious and burning and heated flesh to flesh as the door slammed shut behind them. It was kissing and clinging and peeling clothes and kneeling, finally, before Rakan s sculpted soldier s musculature, taking his swollen prick into his mouth and tasting, sucking in, swallowing, all that velvet flesh like a man at the extremes of thirst, given water at last.
The young captain made noises close to weeping as he came. His hands plastered down, again and again, on Ringil s head, patting, pressing, as if trying to fit some veil or maybe diadem over the man that was doing this to him.
Ringil rose, grinning vampiric through the taste, enfolded Rakan s still-shuddering frame in his arms, folded him down to the bed, and turned him over
Banging at the fucking gate.
Voices, now recognizably barking in coarse Tethanne.
Open now, in the Emperor s name!
Ringil sat up in the sheets. He groped at his side, found the smooth rising slope of Rakan s torso as the captain propped himself up on one elbow.
A tiny ache welled up inside him at the contact with the other man s flesh. He blinked, swallowed sudden shock, as he made the feeling for what it was; an obscure gratitude, that Rakan had stayed. Had not, as Gil had grown so used to expecting in these cases, fled the scene.
Fuck is going on out there? he grumbled, scrambling to cover his feelings.
It is the palace, said Rakan somberly.
There was the sound of unbolting and opening. Hooves, clattering in on cobbles. Ringil climbed out of bed and went to the window. He slid the edge of the curtain back a judicious half inch.
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