The Cold Commands Read Free

than he remembered.

    “Do not disconcert yourself, my lord,” the barber purred. He thumbed the gathered soap foam off his razor and flicked it into the basin. Angled in close for another draw up the Dragonbane’s lathered neck, voice turning a little tighter with concentration. “You are in Yhelteth now, crowned queen of civilized cities. In this chair have sat visiting dignitaries from every corner of the known world. All left with throat intact.”

    Egar fixed him with one baleful eye—no easy thing to do with his head at the angle it was.

    “I have done this before, you know.”

    “Well, my lord, you’ll be pleased to hear that makes two of us.” The barber wiped his blade clean again and tilted his customer’s head back the other way. “Just so, and hold there. Thank you. Though I don’t recall having had the pleasure of serving your worthiness previously. Was it one of your steppe brethren who recommended me?”

    “My steppe brethren wouldn’t pay your prices.”

    True enough—in fact, most Majak went bearded in Yhelteth pretty much as they would have back home on the northern plains. Why pay good money to scrape hair off your face that was just going to grow back the following week? Why, for that matter, scrape it off at all? Kept the sun off, didn’t it? Tickled the wenches, let them know they’d been with a man, not a boy. Trim it back if you had to, if the grooming standards of whichever imperial mercenary brigade you’d signed up with required it, but otherwise …

    The barber frowned a little as he bent and peered at his handiwork. “I beg to differ, my lord. In
fact
, I had a brace of your brethren in here only last week. Young lads, not long in the city by the way they talked.”

    Egar grunted. “Then they’re getting better pay than I did at their age.”

    “Perhaps so. They wore the livery of the Citadel Guard, as near as I recall.”

    “Fucking
Citadel
?”

    A flickered glance at the barber to see if this would cause offense—the imperials were funny about religious matters, had this clerk-arsed unforgiving book of rules to their observances, and very little sense of humor where it was infringed upon. Ordinarily, Egar could give a shit if he offended them or not, but it doesn’t pay to upset a man who has a razor at your throat.

    “Yes, well …” Immersed in his task, the barber was apparently unmoved by any stirrings of religious fervor. He took the blade up under Egar’s eye, back to the ear, strokes as smooth and practiced as the voice and the bland platitudes it uttered. “The ranks of the Sacred Guard were much depleted in the war, my lord. Martyrdom called multitudes of the righteous away.”

    “Yeah, didn’t it just.”

    Egar had seen some martyrdom operations during the southern campaign, and they sickened even his well-worn mercenary soul. Waves of men and boys, some of them barely twelve or thirteen years old, hurling their bodies forward against the lizard lines with the name of the Revelation on their lips. Most struck at best a single blow before the reptile peons clawed or chewed them down. They died in their screaming thousands out on the field while the commanding invigilators looked on and offered prayers for victory.

    At Egar’s side on an overlooking promontory, one of the other Majak mercenary commanders spat in the dirt and shook his head.

    And they call
us
berserkers?

    But Yhelteth was like that. It lulled you along with its shaves and its baths, its book learning and its law; and then, abruptly, when you least expected it, you saw the vaunted trappings of imperial civilization cast aside, like the cloth and baked clay of some wealthy leper’s mask, and you were abruptly face-to-face with the leering horror beneath—a violent, tribal people, smug in their own assumed superiority and a faith that licensed their dominance wherever they could make it stick.

    It doesn’t pay to have too many illusions about us
, Imrana once told him