The Cold Commands Read Online Free PDF Page A

spreads it around. Because anyone who doesn’t get the message, I will be forced to hurt, probably very badly. And if
you
ever come back here again.” The Dragonbane dug his index fingernail in under the invigilator’s chin and lifted his face closer. Looked into his eyes to make it stick. “Well, then I’ll kill you. Okay?”

    From the man’s face, he judged the message conveyed.

    He got up, looked around at the tumbled, twitching bodies, and the goggling crowd that had gathered.

    “Show’s over,” he said brusquely. “Nothing to see here.”

    And there it was, something in the words as he spoke them, some echo of the elusive feeling he’d been carrying around all day—which now slid out from the shadows and took on recognizable form.

    Bored
, he realized with a slight shock.
Dragonbane—you are bored
.

CHAPTER 3

    ater, with the band muffled up in thickening cloud and the last of the daylight gone to a fading orange glow over the trees to the west, the march-masters set about building campfires. Tinder sparked and flared at intervals across the low open ground where the thirty-five coffles of slaves were huddled against the growing chill of night. Gerin watched the flames spring up, and counted—four, no, five of them among the slaves and another smaller one farther out where the overseer’s tents were pitched. None was close enough to cast more than the faintest radiance on the men in his coffle—a gleam here and there on a few pale, city-bred faces like Tigeth’s, the odd glint of an eye catching the light as someone turned their head. But mostly, the slaves made a rumpled and undistinguished mass of shadow in the gloom.

    There was a faint, watery itching in Gerin’s eyes and throat. He felt suddenly, ineptly weak.

    He forced it down.
No time for that now
.

    Those march-masters not tasked with the fires began the lengthy business of feeding and watering their charges. They moved outward among the slaves in ones and twos, dealing out the odd casual kick or blow to open passage. The men overseeing Gerin’s coffle at least seemed in rough good humor as they went around, slopping cold stew into the shallow wooden bowls with reasonable attempts at accuracy, taking the trouble to hand out the chunks of stale bread rather than just throw them, here and there grunting the kind of gruffly soothing words you’d offer a well-behaved dog. Gerin put it down to Barat’s absence—with the troublemaker off the chain and left to rot, there’d be no more unwelcome attention from the overseers, and that had to be good. Now they could all, slaves and march-masters together, get on with the practical business of reaching journey’s end in peace.

    Gerin forced down mouthfuls of the gelatinous stew, gnawed at a corner of his bread. He swallowed hard, breathed, swallowed again, and—

    Abruptly, he was
choking
.

    Choking—thrashing—flailing hard in his chains, so the manacles gouged at his wrists and ankles, and the men around him panicked back as far as their own restraints would let them. Clamor went back and forth.

    “What the—”

    “Look out, look
out
, he’s having a fi—”

    “Fever! It’s the coughing fever!”

    “Get him the fuck away from m—”

    “Poison,
poison
!”

    “Don’t touch the fucking food!”

    “Spit it up, man. Spit it the fuck
up
!”

    And then the new cry, the new terror. “
Possessed, possessed!
The Dark Court has him.
Hoiran comes!
Don’t let him touch you, he’ll break the chains like a—”

    “Hoiran! Hoiran!
Abase
yourselves, it is—”

    “Hoiran walks!”

    “Back, get
back—
”

    The march-masters arrived. Gerin was barely aware of them, visiontorn back and forth in splinters as his neck spasmed front and
side
, front and
side
, front and
side
. The spittle was gathering in his throat—he coughed and spat desperately, felt it start to foam and blow on his lips. A dimly seen form stooped across him, a fist clobbered inaccurately down. The blow