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.
