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 somewhere behind 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 every loaded look, transgression against the appointed hour of prayer would light her up like a taper soaked in oil. Her eyes wide, her lips flexed apart, the arched tension of appalled delight on her face at what he was doing to her, at when he was doing it to her. Occasionally, he d catch the waft of memory from those days, and go hard to the root just thinking about it.
And then later, settling more comfortably into the harness of their mutual attraction, they still spent postcoital evenings out on her apartment balconies, wrapped up in each other s tangled, sweat-slick limbs, listening to the evening call and watching the sun melt into layers of heat and dust over the western city.
His smile waned, turned ugly with the weight of current events. Knight fucking commander or not, Dragonbane, one day you should just
He grabbed the thought by the scruff of its neck. Enough.
Time to be elsewhere. Definitely.
Habit took his feet south, put him on the boulevard of the Ineffable Divine. He didn t think Archeth would be back from An-Monal yet, but there was always Kefanin to talk to in the meantime. Ishgrim to leer at, if she chose to put in an appearance. And anyway, he reminded himself, a little sourly, it was his job to keep an eye on them all; it was the genteel pretense he and Archeth maintained that his place as long-term houseguest was paid out by informal security duties on her behalf.
That this amounted to not much more than being visible and visibly Majak about the place was not discussed. Nor were the small purses of silver coin that showed up regularly in the pockets of his attire when it came back from cleaning and was laid out in his rooms.
He tried not to feel too much like a kept hound.
Truth was, the Citadel raid on Archeth s household was the best part of three full seasons in the past now, and the way it had worked out, it seemed unlikely the same powers would try again. Menkarak and his kind had backed off. There was a ticklish equilibrium in place across Yhelteth these days, like some massive set of scales hanging in the sky above the city, one cupped, brass weighing bowl dipped over the imperial palace, the other riding the air above the raised crag and keep of the Citadel.
No one wanted to disturb that balance if they could help it.
He felt it again that same coiling restlessness, familiar but just out of reach.
Could always look for a real job, of course. Dragonbane.
He could, and with that name attached, there d be no shortage of offers; you mostly had to look in graveyards for men called Dragonbane the ones still walking around were few and far between. Any regiment in the city would kill to have one as a commander, or even a color officer. But a command, even a sinecure command, would mean responsibility requirements to attend reviews and a hundred other tedious regimental affairs of one beribboned sort or another, when he d really rather be out on a sun-soaked balcony somewhere, fucking Imrana or drinking and shooting the shit with Archeth. And a real command would be worse still the way things were right now, he d more than likely find himself deployed south to Demlarashan to supervise the slaughter of yet more deluded, poorly armed young men who had evidently somehow not managed to get their fill of war last time around.
The war; the years as clanmaster back on the steppe afterward it still clogged him. It sat in his stomach and throat whenever he thought about it, the morning-after feel of too much undigested food and wine from some overblown feast the night before. He didn t care if he never held another command in his life.
He was done giving other men orders.
Let the dumb fucks work it out themselves, for a change.
He pitched up at Archeth s place in no better mood than that. Got in off the crowded street and paused in the cool shadows of the gate arch to wipe sweat from neck and brow. The two young guardsmen stationed there nodded warily at him. More warily than you d expect, given that he d played dice with them a couple of times at shift change.
He forced a grin.
All right, lads? Seen the Lady Archeth at all?
The man on the left shook his head. No word yet, my lord.
Shrug. Kefanin, then.
He crossed the sunstruck cobbles of the courtyard, went inside, and rattled about the house a bit until he finally discovered the eunuch talking to Ishgrim in one of the enclosed garden patios out back. Egar didn t catch what they were discussing, but they seemed to his jaundiced eye to be getting on altogether too well for a young woman shaped the way Ishgrim was and a man with no balls. The slave girl was laughing, tipping her long candlewax-colored hair back from her eyes. Body curves shoving gratuitously at the yellow linen shift she wore, straining the material at hip and breast. Kefanin made some convoluted gesture with both hands, shook out a red silk handkerchief, and spread his fingers wide so it hung between them. A small cascade of white rose petals drifted down onto the stone bench between them. Ishgrim gasped, clapped her hands like a small child. Her breasts gathered up and inward with the action, not like a small child at all. Egar felt a throb go through his groin at the sight.
Not what he needed right now.
He coughed and made himself known.
Lo, Kef.
The eunuch got hurriedly to his feet. My lord.
No sign of Archeth, then?
No. Ordinarily, I would have expected her back by now, but
But once she gets up there to that house full of phantoms, who the fuck can tell. Egar s voice came out gruffer than he d intended. Right?
Kefanin s lips pursed diplomatically.
Would you care for some refreshment, my lord?
No, I m good. Egar glanced down at Ishgrim, wondering, not for the first time, where Archeth found her restraint. If the girl had been his slave a gift of the Emperor, no less, it doesn t get much more legitimate than that he would have plundered those curves fucking months ago. Would have lit her up like a steppe-storm sky, put a fucking smile on her face for once, instead of that perpetually downcast look she dragged around the house all the time like a bucket of used bathwater.
Ishgrim flushed and shifted on the stone bench.
Are you going to tell him? she asked in a small voice.
Silence. Egar switched a glance between the two of them. Tell me what?
