The Cold Commands Read Online Free PDF

glanced off the side of his head. His spine arched, and he made deep snarling noises at the base of his throat. A second march-master joined the first.

    “Not like that, you fucking twat. Get a grip on his—”

    “Yeah,
you
fucking try to—”

    “Just hold him
still
, will you!”

    Someone got fully astride Gerin, tried to pin him down by the arms. He thought he recognized the march-master’s face from days earlier—hair grizzled and receding beneath a knitted wool cap, brow creased, and eyes worried. Another younger, angrier face loomed behind him and to the side. Deep in the fit and foaming, Gerin glimpsed the second man raising a fist wrapped in metallic knuckle-duster gleam. Saw the way he angled carefully for the punch. This one would break his face for sure.

    Something thin and glinting whipped loosely upward in the night air, dropped down again over the younger man’s head—Gerin knew it for a length of chain. He dropped his Strov-practiced spasming like a peeled cloak, hinged furiously up against the grip on his arms, nuzzled into the older march-master’s neck like a lover.

    He bit deep and hung on.

    The march-master yelped and tried to smack him away. The younger man’s steel-loaded punch misfired, hit his struggling companion in the shoulder. Then the chain pulled taut, ripped him backward and tumbling away. Gerin locked his jaws on the older man’s neck, got his hands up to help the clinch. The other slaves on the coffle crowded about, prevented retreat. The march-master was bleating now, stumbling, trying to elbow a path clear. Flailing to get Gerin off him. The woolen cap got knocked askew on his balding head, then away, into the confusion. Gerin rode the struggles, felt his nose bloodied from a random blow, ignored it, ground and sliced and scissored with his teeth, worked at tearing a ragged hole in the man’s neck. Skin, sinew, tiny gobbets of shredded flesh and there,
there
, the tiny, wet-pulsing pipe of the artery. He spatloose, let go. The march-master staggered back, eyes wide on Gerin’s in the poor light, mouth gaping like a plea. He slapped a hand to the wound in his neck, felt the damage there, the swift pulse of his life running out over his fingers. Made a kind of moaning sound and fell over gibbering.

    “Get his fucking bolt cutters!
Now!
”

    It was the Rajal veteran, through gritted teeth as he sawed the length of chain link back and forth across the younger march-master’s throat. His fist were up and doubled about the chain in an attempt to keep the worst of the strain off his manacles—still Gerin saw how the veteran bled at the wrists from the pressure. The march-master thrashed and kicked, booted legs lashing out, trying to find purchase. But the dull metal links had sunk deep in the flesh at his throat, and his eyes bulged inhumanly large as he choked, filled with the desperate knowledge of his own death. Gerin darted in, grabbed the cutters from his belt. He wrestled with the unfamiliar angles of the tool, trying to make it bite on the edge of his ankle cuffs.

    “You motherfuckers!” Heavy blow across his shoulder. “Get on the fucking ground, you piece of sh—”

    Gerin staggered, did not quite go down. The third, newly arrived march-master snarled and slammed the club into him again, from the side. It put him in the dirt this time. The march-master stood over him a single hard-breathing second with club raised again—and was clawed down by the other men on the coffle before he could strike. An awful, wailing yell came up from the ground where he hit. Chained forms piled onto him.

    “Cut me loose, son. Do it quick.”

    It was the gaunt man, arms out-thrust. Gerin hesitated an instant, then fastened the bolt cutters on the man’s manacles. He heaved and twisted, forearms aching from the effort. For one sickening moment, he thought the cutters would not work. Then the manacle bent, and split, and tore.

    “That’s it, that’s it,” the gaunt man