The Cold Commands Read Free Page B

Eg
.

    “Will there be anything else, my lord?” The barber was down to a strictly unnecessary brushing off of collar and shoulders. “A massage perhaps?”

    Egar reckoned the brutal handling his ears had just had was probably about his limit today. And the confines of the barbershop felt suddenly tight. He shook his head, made an effort to dump his brooding. He got up out of the chair and fumbled for his purse. Saw the big, freshly shaven man in the mirror do the same. It caught him out as ever
—shit, that’s a lot of gray hair!
For something to say while he dug out coins, he asked:

    “And you say these compatriots of mine come in here a lot?”

    “Regularly, yes, my lord.” The barber took the proffered payment. “Any message for them?”

    The Dragonbane stared the mirror down, trying not to let a sudden weariness show through. What would he say? What message could he possibly pass on to young men possessed of all the idiotic, indestructible confidence he’d owned himself when he rolled into town a couple of decades back?

    Enjoy it while it lasts, it sure don’t last long
, maybe?

    Get paid well for the years you give?

    If they were getting Palace Quarter shaves on a regular basis, they’d already learned that lesson better than he could teach it.

    The man in the mirror frowned at him. The barber hovered. Behind the traitorous weariness, another sensation coiled, restless, like smoke; like something summoned but not yet called to tangible form. He tried to name it—could not.

    He shook it off instead.

    “No message,” he said, and stepped back out into the sun-blasted brightness of the street.

    HE WALKED AT RANDOM FOR A WHILE, LET THE FLOW OF HUMANITY through the Palace Quarter carry and soothe him. Women in brightly colored wrapping, like toffees too numerous to choose from, and the heady slap of perfume across the eyes as they passed. Slaves and retainers in the livery of this or that courtier’s service, bent beneath upholstered saddles piled five feet high with burden, or—the lucky ones—bearing some lettered and sealed communication from one lordly house to another. A noble trailing an entourage in his wake like noisy gulls at the stern of a fishing skiff. Here and there the odd brace of City Guard, sun smashed too bright to look at across their cuirasses. Beggars and street poets not dirty, deformed, or disruptive enough to be worth the effort of moving on.

    Faint, twining scents of fruit and flowers from a market somewhere close. The broken rhythms of the sellers, crying their wares.

    Heat like a blanket. Street dust stirring beneath the tramp of feet.

    Egar drifted on it all like a swimmer with the current—nursing for a while the still-sharp, piercing pleasure of just
being
here, of having come back to this place he never thought he’d see again. But in the end, it was no good. His eyes tracked inevitably up and west, to the stately, tree-shaded white mansions along Harbor Hill Rise. To one particular mansion, in fact, with the mosaic dome cupola at its southern end, where
right now probably …

    Come on, Dragonbane. Really. Leave it alone
.

    Too late. His gaze stuck on the cupola’s polished wink and gleam like a blade in a frost-chilled scabbard. He felt his mood sour. Felt the unreasoning anger flare, the way it always did.

     … right now probably, sucking him off in that big bed …

    Grow up, Eg. You knew you’d have to live with this. Besides
—a sly, steppe nomad wit intruding, relic of a man he sometimes wondered if he still was—
it’s way too close to prayer time for that sort of thing. He’s a pious little fucker, remember. She told you as much
.

    As if in confirmation, the prayer call floated out from a tower somewherebehind him. Egar put up half a twisted grin for a shield, and hung on to it. Memory of Imrana was inextricably bound up with the plaintive skyline ache of that sound.

    In the early days, when passion flared between them at every touch, at