The Living Throne (The War of Memory Cycle Book 3) (9 page)

Out of sight, out of mind.

*****

Linciard fumbled with his key in the near-dark, his mind on other things.  If only he hadn't broached the subject of the girl...

I almost did worse.  I almost said it.

'Do you ever wonder if we're wrong?'

Oh, how he'd wanted to.  He was almost certain that the captain felt it too: that precipice they had stood at for a moment, peering over into darkness.  That uncertain edge between their lives as Imperial servants and treason.

He had enough trouble right now without courting more.  Done was done, and no point in brooding, as the captain had said.  Yet the captain wasn't taking that advice either—which was a problem with a mentalist in their midst.

Just let it go.  Pretend it never happened, like everything on the border.  Like all the—

“And how is our esteemed captain?”

Linciard twitched, almost breaking his key in the lock.  He shot a hard look into the shadows, recognizing Sergeant Rallant's voice, then glanced around quickly.  The upstairs hall was empty and no light showed beyond the inner balcony, the assembly chamber empty below.  Moonlight slanted through half-open shutters in the east hallway, their only company.

“Hard to say,” Linciard murmured, not trusting the solitude.  Not trusting himself in this mood.  Rallant was a danger in more ways than one.

“Have you told him about us?”

“No.  I don't think...  I told you not to—“

“I'm making a social call.  That's not banned, is it?  After all, you're not my direct superior, so this isn't fraternization.”

“Don't know about that,” Linciard muttered, but twisted the key until he felt the latch clunk.  Pushing the door open, he stepped into the dark room, half-prepared to seal himself in and leave it at that.

But Rallant was already in the doorway, smiling in a way that Linciard could feel more than see, the moonlight limning his fine hair and the frame of his face.  “Going to invite me in?” he said silkily.

“You've already been—“

“Yes, but it's only polite.”

He hesitated, the dice tumbling in his head, but it seemed agreeing would be wiser.  “Well, come in then,” he sighed, and felt around by the door for the lantern and striker.  He should have brought it with him, but the day had been a blur of running and riding and shouting to the point that he'd barely remembered he had a room, let alone that there was a lamp in it.

The side of his hand hit it and then it was tumbling from the shelf, and he cursed and fumbled it in the dark, the glass casing trying to slide free, the oil sloshing.  Then came an exhale by his ear, and cool hands plucked the lamp away.  “Stay still before you break something,” said Rallant, low and close.

Linciard crossed his arms, wishing he could step away without running into invisible furniture.  He heard the sound of glass being removed, then the rasp of the striker.  Light bloomed slowly from the lamp, gilding Rallant's sculpted features and making mirrors of his eyes, and not for the first time Linciard found himself captured by them.

“Good, wonderful,” he said, trying to be gruff.  “Now get out of the doorway before someone sees you.”

“Such concern,” said Rallant, sidling in.  “I'd almost think you're ashamed of me.”

For a moment, Linciard just stared out the empty doorway, wondering what he was doing.  He felt the presence of the man behind him as something more than physical: a pervasive, alluring sort of instinctual awareness, though he knew Rallant was not using his specialist talents.  Those came with a scent, and right now all he could catch was dust and sweat and—

Stop it.  Think with your brain, not your dick.

The problem was, he had lost track of the difference.  He thought it had been his brain telling him to get friendly with the Shield-Sergeant, to wring out some confidential information about the specialists, but now—with a full week of assignations rolling through his memory—he was no longer sure.

Had he initiated it on his own, or had there been something in that bite?

Just thinking about it made his lip sting and his skin prickle with heat.  Curse the man.

“You certainly don't show much shame,” said Rallant with a possessive slyness that would have made Linciard punch someone he wasn't already sleeping with.  Fingers tugged at his collar and he made an abortive motion to shrug them off, and Rallant laughed.  “Tsk.  Really, it's not like you complained.”

“You gave me a blasted hickey,” Linciard hissed.  “Had to wear my collar up all day and I swear I saw people looking.”

“I promise to put the next one somewhere safer.”

Linciard swallowed and shut the door with a weird sense of finality.  “Not what I was asking for,” he said even as he hauled the bar into place.

“I wonder about these Illanites,” said Rallant, nodding toward the bar as Linciard turned.  He had set the lamp on the desk and stood casually, comfortably, as if he had been here a thousand times.  “Do they rise up against their militia so often that they must be barred out?”

The question slid right past him.  It was much less important than the fact that Rallant wore just an undershirt and loose trousers over his infantryman's physique, his collar unlaced to show a long V of muscled chest and the glint of his teardrop pendant.  Aside from the view, it meant he had come through the packed garrison and up the stairs like that.  The lieutenants and captain were the only personnel on the second floor; the rest of the space was conference rooms and storage.  Sergeants like Rallant bunked downstairs with their platoons.

Which meant Rallant's men knew he was out 'visiting', and they probably knew with who, so—

Rallant sighed.  “Erolan, stop over-thinking it.  We're not breaking any rules.  You are not my lieutenant, we're both off-duty, and I'm fairly sure we've done everything by mutual consent.”

Have we?
  “It's not that, it's...”

“Not the Jernizen again.”

Linciard jumped on that opening, not daring to say
I think you're playing me for a fool
.  “Look, Rallant, I know you don't see it as a problem.  But your platoon is all Heartlanders, and Heartlanders don't care, so—“

Callused hands caught his face, setting his cheeks aflame even as he was forced to meet Rallant's pale gaze.  They were of a height, Rallant only a shade taller, and from this close the senvraka could have been carved from warm ivory, every plane of his face perfect from razor jaw to eloquent brows.  Only the furrow between them marred the image, but it just made him want to kiss it away.

“I told you, call me Sav,” he said, his tone gone serious.  “Savaad if you insist.  I will not call you Linciard, you will not call me Rallant, and we will stop talking about work.  Yes?”

It took great effort to keep his hands at his sides, to maintain his resistance.  The slug of whiskey burned in his veins but so did a different sort of heat, kinder and far more devastating.  “But if someone tells them—“

“Then you will beat their stupid asses.  You are their lieutenant and you will not tolerate disrespect from a pack of foreigners.  Former enemies!  And that's if they even say anything.”

“They will.  They're great lancers but they have bad piking attitudes.“

“So stop trying.  You can't tailor yourself to their approval because you're never going to get it.  Just live your life and let them rot in their jealousy.”

“Jealousy, eh?”

With a smirk, Rallant ran his hands down to Linciard's collar and popped open the first button.  “Obviously.  Who wouldn't want to have me?”

Linciard couldn't muster any actual words for that, but managed to pull away with a garble that he hoped sounded sentient.  He took over the unbuttoning though, which changed Rallant's annoyance to amusement, and tried not to stare as the senvraka turned away.

“I swear, if not for you, I might have had to throttle Lieutenant Gellart just to take over his room,” Rallant said as he sauntered past the folded screen into the living-area.  “Bed and privacy?  Bliss.”

More like torture
, Linciard thought, watching the way his lover moved under those light garments.  Linciard hadn't exactly slept his way through the ranks, but he'd been around, and he'd thought he could control himself.  Yet whenever Rallant was close, he felt like an adolescent again, fixated on the idea of skin against skin even when he didn't want to be in the mood.  He couldn't kick his boots off without the motion jarring through his groin and reminding him of his vulnerability.

Rallant wasn't a tryst or a trophy or even fellow soldier.  He was a specialist—a blessed one, a creature of the Emperor—and beyond that fair façade was another face.  Behind those mirroring eyes was the judgment of the Light, while Linciard pondered treason.

I should kick him out like the captain kicked out Ilia
, he thought, but it was too late for that.  And he didn't want to, anyway.  The captain led a sterile life, remote as an eagle on a cliff, and what did that solitude gain him?  A night alone with a bottle, unable to chase away the treacherous thoughts and dark memories.

I guess I prefer life in the gutter.  Piking pretty men.  When will I learn?

To judge by the tingle that ran down his spine when Rallant called for him, Linciard guessed never.

*****

Night did not exist in Oretcht'ke, the Shadow Realm.  It had no sun, no moon, no stars, yet there was always light: its vast cavernous expanse was stitched by glowing pathways, and the Spindle at its epicenter radiated a dull ochre aurora, pervasive yet sourceless.  Lanterns dotted the streets as well, leaving few places in all the Realm that could be called dark.

Enforcer Ardent of Taradzur-
kai
looked into one of them now, her shadowblood eyes straining against the blackness.  She was at the outer limit of the Realm, where the air grew smoky with unmanifested eiyet-presence but had not yet solidified into an eiyenbridge or an umbral wall—the narrow dividing zone between Shadow and reality.  The markings on the white walkway told her that this was where the bridge to Bahlaer-
kai
had stood before its destruction.

In its place, the quarantine chamber hung like an apple from a bough, a perfect sphere twice her height and connected laterally to the great black artery that extended from the umbral wall into the Realm.  There were other chambers suspended at other angles, but most had shriveled away, their occupants dead or gone.  Quarantine clusters like this were the eiyets' response to anything unusual being shoved into the Realm: a contagion, an enemy—

Or a victim, like the mangled figure she saw within.

With an exhale, she squared her shoulders and stepped from the edge.  Eiyets assembled beneath her feet to bridge the gap.  There were more here than there should be, teeming like wasps at a disturbed hive, and as she touched the thin cool membrane that surrounded the chamber, she felt the shiver of their mood.  Spite, mischief, menace.

Then she was through, and the whiff of sweat and fresh waste filled her nostrils, making her grimace.  As important as the quarantine chambers were for blocking pathogens and limiting the eiyets' blood-frenzy, their total containment was not kind to the trapped subject.

He lay there on a bed of malleable shadow: the infamous Shan Cayer.  A scarred, thick-set older Illanite, unblooded and abominably truncated on the right side, both his upper arm and lower thigh capped with black material where they had been severed during his extraction.  Except for them, he was nude, the shadows not concerned with prudery.  At least he looked clean; someone had washed him after they cut him from his bloody clothes, and the bed took care of any excretions.  It just couldn't banish the smell.

At the sound of her slippers on the whispering floor, he turned his head, weak human eyes unfocused in the gloom.

“Who is it?” he rasped, and the dryness in his voice had her reaching for her canteen in sympathy.  “You piking bureaucrats have taken your time.”

“My name is Enforcer Ardent, and I am here to inform you of the disposition of Bah-kai,” she said, approaching his side.  He followed the sound of her with the skill of a long-time Kheri, head turning to keep her fixed in his unseeing stare, and as she flicked the sparker on her hand-held lantern she saw him smile.  It kindled after a moment, and she slowly peeled her fingers away from the eye-shaped cut-outs, listening for any warning hiss.  When nothing happened, she exhaled in relief.

“Having trouble with the little darlings?” he said, squinting against the faint light.

“They are agitated.  You understand.”

“Yes.”  He tried to prop himself up to get a better look at her, but his remaining elbow kept sinking into the black mass of the bed.  With a whisper of eiyenriu, she caused it to adjust into something more like a seat, and saw him clutch at it in alarm before he realized.

“My apologies,” she said.  “I should have asked.”

“You should have...”  He trailed off, weathered face nonplussed.  She supposed he wasn't used to politeness from her kind.  Then he gave her a raking look, and she held the lantern to one side obligingly, letting the eye-shaped lights fall over her Enforcer armor, her fighting sticks and killing blades, her black hair pinned back in the scorpion-tail style, her shadowmarks and scars.