Best Served Cold

The first year they were always hungry, and Benna had to beg in the village while Monza worked the ground and scavenged in the woods.

The second year they took a better harvest, and grew roots in a patch by the barn, and got some bread from old Destort the miller when the snows swept in and turned the valley into a place of white silence.

The third year the weather was fine, and the rain came on time, and Monza raised a good crop in the upper field. As good a crop as her father had ever brought in. Prices were high because of troubles over the border. They would have money, and the roof could be mended, and Benna could have a proper shirt. Monza watched the wind make waves in the wheat, and she felt that pride at having made something with her own hands. That pride her father used to talk about.

A few days before reaping time, she woke in the darkness and heard sounds. She shook Benna from his sleep beside her, one hand over his mouth. She took her father's sword, eased open the shutters, and together they stole through the window and into the woods, hid in the brambles behind a tree-trunk.

There were black figures in front of the house, torches flickering in the darkness.

"Who are they?"

"Shhhh."

She heard them break the door down, heard them crashing through the house and the barn.

"What do they want?"

"Shhhh."

They spread out around the field and set their torches to it, and the fire ate through the wheat until it was a roaring blaze. She heard someone cheering. Another laughing.

Benna stared, face dim-lit with shifting orange, tear-tracks glistening on his thin cheeks. "But why would they… why would they…?»

"Shhhh."

Monza watched the smoke rolling up into the clear night. All her work. All her sweat and pain. She stayed there long after the men had gone, and watched it burn.

In the morning more men came. Folk from around the valley, hard-faced and vengeful, old Destort at their head with a sword at his hip and his three sons behind him.

"Came through here too then, did they? You're lucky to be alive. They killed Crevi and his wife, up the valley. Their son too."

"What are you going to do?"

"We're going to track them, then we're going to hang them."

"We'll come."

"You might be better—"

"We'll come."

Destort had not always been a miller, and he knew his business. They caught up with the raiders the next night, working their way back south, camped around fires in the woods without even a proper guard. More thieves than soldiers. Farmers among them too, just from one side of the border rather than the other, chosen to settle some made-up grievance while their lords were busy settling theirs.

"Anyone ain't ready to kill best stay here." Destort drew his sword and the others made their cleavers, and their axes, and their makeshift spears ready.

"Wait!" hissed Benna, clinging at Monza's arm.

"No."

She ran quiet and low, her father's sword in her hand, fires dancing through the black trees. She heard a cry, a clash of metal, the sound of a bowstring.

She came out from the bushes. Two men crouched by a campfire, a pot steaming over it. One had a thick beard, a wood-axe in his fist. Before he lifted it halfway Monza slashed him across the eyes and he fell down, screaming. The other turned to run and she spitted him through the back before he got a stride. The bearded man roared and roared, hands clutching at his face. She stabbed him in the chest, and he groaned out a few wet breaths, then stopped.

She frowned down at the two corpses while the sounds of fighting slowly petered out. Benna crept from the trees, and he took the bearded man's purse from his belt, and he tipped a heavy wedge of silver coins out into his palm.

"He has seventeen scales."

It was twice as much as the whole crop had been worth. He held the other man's purse out to her, eyes wide. "This one has thirty."

"Thirty?" Monza looked at the blood on her father's sword, and thought how strange it was that she was a murderer now. How strange it was that it had been so easy to do. Easier than digging in the stony soil for a living. Far, far easier. Afterwards, she waited for the remorse to come upon her. She waited for a long time.

It never came.

Poison

It was just the kind of afternoon that Morveer most enjoyed. Crisp, even chilly, but perfectly still, immaculately clear. The bright sun flashed through the bare black branches of the fruit trees, found rare gold among dull copper tripod, rods and screws, struck priceless sparks from the tangle of misted glassware. There was nothing finer than working out of doors on a day like this, with the added advantage that any lethal vapours released would harmlessly dissipate. Persons in Morveer's profession were all too frequently despatched by their own agents, after all, and he had no intention of becoming one of their number. Quite apart from anything else, his reputation would never recover.

Morveer smiled upon the rippling lamp flame, nodded in time to the gentle rattling of condenser and retort, the soothing hiss of escaping steam, the industrious pop and bubble of boiling reagents. As the drawing of the blade to the master swordsman, as the jingle of coins to the master merchant, so were these sounds to Morveer. The sounds of his work well done. It was with comfortable satisfaction, therefore, that he watched Day's face, creased with concentration, through the distorting glass of the tapered collection flask.

It was a pretty face, undoubtedly: heart-shaped and fringed with blond curls. But it was an unremarkable and entirely unthreatening variety of prettiness, further softened by a disarming aura of innocence. A face that would attract a positive response, but excite little further comment. A face that would easily slip the mind. It was for her face, above all, that Morveer had selected her. He did nothing by accident.

A jewel of moisture formed at the utmost end of the condenser. It stretched, bloated, then finally tore itself free, tumbled sparkling through space and fell silently to the bottom of the flask.

"Excellent," muttered Morveer.

More droplets swelled and broke away in solemn procession. The last of them clung reluctantly at the edge, and Day reached out and gently flicked the glassware. It fell, and joined the rest, and looked, for all the world, like a little water in the bottom of a flask. Barely enough to wet one's lips.

"And carefully, now, my dear, so very, very carefully. Your life hangs by a filament. Your life, and mine too."

She pressed her tongue into her lower lip, ever so carefully twisted the condenser free and set it down on the tray. The rest of the apparatus followed, piece by slow piece. She had fine, soft hands, Morveer's apprentice. Nimble yet steady, as indeed they were required to be. She pressed a cork carefully into the flask and held it up to the light, the sunshine making liquid diamonds of that tiny dribble of fluid, and she smiled. An innocent, a pretty, yet an entirely forgettable smile. "It doesn't look much."

"That is the entire point. It is without colour, odour or taste. And yet the most infinitesimal drop consumed, the softest mist inhaled, the gentlest touch upon the skin, even, will kill a man in minutes. There is no antidote, no remedy, no immunity. Truly… this is the King of Poisons."

"The King of Poisons," she breathed, with suitable awe.

"Keep this knowledge close to your heart, my dear, to be used only in the extreme of need. Only against the most dangerous, suspicious and cunning of targets. Only against those intimately acquainted with the poisoner's art."

"I understand. Caution first, always."

"Very good. That is the most valuable of lessons." Morveer sat back in his chair, making a steeple of his fingers. "Now you know the deepest of my secrets. Your apprenticeship is over, but… I hope you will continue, as my assistant."

"I'd be honoured to stay in your service. I still have much to learn."

"So do we all, my dear." Morveer jerked his head up at the sound of the gate bell tinkling in the distance. "So do we all."

Two figures were approaching the house down the long path through the orchard, and Morveer snapped open his eyeglass and trained it upon them. A man and a woman. He was very tall, and powerful-looking with it, wearing a threadbare coat, long hair swaying. A Northman, from his appearance.

"A primitive," he muttered, under his breath. Such men were prone to savagery and superstition, and he held them in healthy contempt.

He trained the eyeglass on the woman, now, though she was dressed much like a man. She looked straight towards the house, unwavering. Straight towards him, it almost seemed. A beautiful face, without doubt, edged with coal-black hair. But it was a hard and unsettling variety of beauty, further sharpened by a brooding appearance of grim purpose. A face that at once issued a challenge and a threat. A face that, having been glimpsed, one would not quickly forget. She did not compare with Morveer's mother in beauty, of course, but who could? His mother had almost transcended the human in her goodly qualities. Her pure smile, kissed by the sunlight, was etched forever into Morveer's memory as if it were a—

"Visitors?" asked Day.

"The Murcatto woman is here." He snapped his fingers towards the table. "Clear all this away. With the very greatest care, mark you! Then bring wine and cakes."

"Do you want anything in them?"

"Only plums and apricots. I mean to welcome my guests, not kill them." Not until he had heard what they had to say, at least.

While Day swiftly cleared the table, furnished it with a cloth and drew the chairs back in around it, Morveer took some elementary precautions. Then he arranged himself in his chair, highly polished knee-boots crossed in front of him and hands clasped across his chest, very much the country gentleman enjoying the winter air of his estate. Had he not earned it, after all?

He rose with his most ingratiating smile as his visitors came in close proximity to the house. The Murcatto woman walked with the slightest hint of a limp. She covered it well, but over long years in the trade Morveer had sharpened his perceptions to a razor point, and missed no detail. She wore a sword on her right hip, and it appeared to be a good one, but he paid it little mind. Ugly, unsophisticated tools. Gentlemen might wear them, but only the coarse and wrathful would stoop to actually use one. She wore a glove on her right hand, suggesting she had something she was keen to hide, because her left was bare, and sported a blood-red stone big as his thumbnail. If it was, as it certainly appeared to be, a ruby, it was one of promisingly great value.

"I am—"

"You are Monzcarro Murcatto, once captain general of the Thousand Swords, recently in the service of Duke Orso of Talins." Morveer thought it best to avoid that gloved hand, and so he offered out his left, palm upwards, in a gesture replete with humbleness and submission. "A Kantic gentleman of our mutual acquaintance, one Sajaam, told me to expect your visit." She gave it a brief shake, firm and businesslike. "And your name, my friend?" Morveer leaned unctuously forwards and folded the Northman's big right hand in both of his.

"Caul Shivers."

"Indeed, indeed, I have always found your Northern names delightfully picturesque."

"You've found 'em what now?"

"Nice."

"Oh."

Morveer held his hand a moment longer, then let it free. "Pray have a seat." He smiled upon Murcatto as she worked her way into her chair, the barest phantom of a grimace on her face. "I must confess I was expecting you to be considerably less beautiful."

She frowned at that. "I was expecting you to be less friendly."

"Oh, I can be decidedly unfriendly when it is called for, believe me." Day silently appeared and slid a plate of sweet cakes onto the table, a tray with a bottle of wine and glasses. "But it is hardly called for now, is it? Wine?"

His visitors exchanged a loaded glance. Morveer grinned as he pulled the cork and poured himself a glass. "The two of you are mercenaries, but I can only assume you do not rob, threaten and extort from everyone you meet. Likewise, I do not poison my every acquaintance." He slurped wine noisily, as though to advertise the total safety of the operation. "Who would pay me then? You are safe."

"Even so, you'll forgive us if we pass."

Day reached for a cake. "Can I—"

"Gorge yourself." Then to Murcatto. "You did not come here for my wine, then."

"No. I have work for you."

Morveer examined his cuticles. "The deaths of Grand Duke Orso and sundry others, I presume." She sat in silence, but it suited him to speak as though she had demanded an explanation. "It scarcely requires a towering intellect to make the deduction. Orso declares you and your brother killed by agents of the League of Eight. Then I hear from your friend and mine Sajaam that you are less deceased than advertised. Since there has been no tearful reunion with Orso, no happy declaration of your miraculous survival, we can assume the Osprian assassins were in fact… a fantasy. The Duke of Talins is a man of notoriously jealous temper, and your many victories made you too popular for your master's taste. Do I come close to the mark?"

"Close enough."

"My heartfelt condolences, then. Your brother, it would appear, could not be with us, and I understood you were inseparable." Her cold blue eyes had turned positively icy now. The Northman loomed grim and silent beside her. Morveer carefully cleared his throat. Blades might be unsophisticated tools, but a sword through the guts killed clever men every bit as thoroughly as stupid ones. "You understand that I am the very best at my trade."

"A fact," said Day, detaching herself from her sweetmeat for a moment. "An unchallengeable fact."

"The many persons of quality upon whom I have utilised my skills would so testify, were they able, but, of course, they are not."

Day sadly shook her head. "Not a one."

"Your point?" asked Murcatto.

"The best costs money. More money than you, having lost your employer, can, perhaps, afford."

"You've heard of Somenu Hermon?"

"The name is familiar."

"Not to me," said Day.

Morveer took it upon himself to explain. "Hermon was a destitute Kantic immigrant who rose to become, supposedly, the richest merchant in Musselia. The luxury of his lifestyle was notorious, his largesse legendary."

"And?"

"Alas, he was in the city when the Thousand Swords, in the pay of Grand Duke Orso, captured Musselia by stealth. Loss of life was kept to a minimum, but the city was plundered, and Hermon never heard from again. Nor was his money. The assumption was that this merchant, as merchants often do, greatly exaggerated his wealth, and beyond his gaudy and glorious accoutrements possessed… precisely… nothing." Morveer took a slow sip of wine, peering at Murcatto over the rim of his glass. "But others would know far better than I. The commanders of that particular campaign were… what were the names now? A brother and sister… I believe?"

She stared straight back at him, eyes undeviating. "Hermon was far wealthier than he pretended to be."

"Wealthier?" Morveer wriggled in his chair. "Wealthier? Oh my! The advantage to Murcatto! See how I squirm at the mention of so infinite a sum of bountiful gold! Enough to pay my meagre fees two dozen times and more, I do not doubt! Why… my overpowering greed has left me quite…" He lifted his open hand and slapped it down against the table with a bang. "Paralysed. "

The Northman toppled slowly sideways, slid from his chair and thumped onto the patchy turf beneath the fruit trees. He rolled gently over onto his back, knees up in the air in precisely the form he had taken while sitting, body rigid as a block of wood, eyes staring helplessly upwards.

"Ah," observed Morveer as he peered over the table. "The advantage to Morveer, it would seem."

Murcatto's eyes flicked sideways, then back. A flurry of twitches ran up one side of her face. Her gloved hand trembled on the tabletop by the slightest margin, and then lay still.

"It worked," murmured Day.

"How could you doubt me?" Morveer, liking nothing better than a captive audience, could not resist explaining how it had been managed. "Yellowseed oil was first applied to my hands." He held them up, fingers outspread. "In order to prevent the agent affecting me, you understand. I would not want to find myself suddenly paralysed, after all. That would be a decidedly unpleasant experience!" He chuckled to himself, and Day joined him at a higher pitch while she bent down to check the Northman's pulse, second cake wedged between her teeth. "The active ingredient was a distillation of spider venom. Extremely effective, even on touch. Since I held his hand for longer, your friend has taken a much heavier dose. He'll be lucky to move today… if I choose to let him move again, of course. You should have retained the power of speech, however."

"Bastard," Murcatto grunted through frozen lips.

"I see that you have." He rose, slipped around the table and perched himself beside her. "I really must apologise, but you understand that I am, as you have been, a person at the precarious summit of my profession. We of extraordinary skills and achievements are obliged to take extraordinary precautions. Now, unimpeded by your ability to move, we can speak with absolute candour on the subject of… Grand Duke Orso." He swilled around a mouthful of wine, watched a little bird flit between the branches. Murcatto said nothing, but it hardly mattered. Morveer was happy to speak for them both.

"You have been done a terrible wrong, I see that. Betrayed by a man who owed you so much. Your beloved brother killed and you rendered… less than you were. My own life has been littered with painful reverses, believe me, so I entirely empathise. But the world is brimming with the awful and we humble individuals can only alter it by… small degrees." He frowned over at Day, munching noisily.

"What?" she grunted, mouth full.

"Quietly if you must, I am trying to expound." She shrugged, licking her fingers with entirely unnecessary sucking sounds. Morveer gave a disapproving sigh. "The carelessness of youth. She will learn. Time marches in only one direction for us all, eh, Murcatto?"

"Spare me the fucking philosophy," she forced through tight lips.

"Let us confine ourselves to the practical, then. With your notable assistance, Orso has made himself the most powerful man in Styria. I would never pretend to have your grasp of all things military, but it scarcely takes Stolicus himself to perceive that, following your glorious victory at the High Bank last year, the League of Eight are on the verge of collapse. Only a miracle will save Visserine when summer comes. The Osprians will treat for peace or be crushed, depending on Orso's mood, which, as you know far better than most, tends towards crushings. By the close of the year, barring accidents, Styria will have a king at last. An end to the Years of Blood." He drained his glass and waved it expansively. "Peace and prosperity for all and sundry! A better world, surely? Unless one is a mercenary, I suppose."

"Or a poisoner."

"On the contrary, we find more than ample employment in peacetime too. In any case, my point is that killing Grand Duke Orso—quite apart from the apparent impossibility of the task—seems to serve nobody's interests. Not even yours. It will not bring your brother back, or your hand, or your legs." Her face did not flicker, but that might merely have been due to paralysis. "The attempt will more than likely end in your death, and possibly even in mine. My point is that you have to stop this madness, my dear Monzcarro. You have to stop it at once, and give it no further thought."

Her eyes were pitiless as two pots of poison. "Only death will stop me. Mine, or Orso's."

"No matter the cost? No matter the pain? No matter who's killed along the path?"

"No matter," she growled.

"I find myself entirely convinced as to your level of commitment."

"Everything." The word was a snarl.

Morveer positively beamed. "Then we can do business. On that basis, and no other. What do I never deal in, Day?"

"Half-measures," his assistant murmured, eyeing the one cake left on the plate.

"Correct. How many do we kill?"

"Six," said Murcatto, "including Orso."

"Then my rate shall be ten thousand scales per secondary, payable upon proof of their demise, and fifty thousand for the Duke of Talins himself."

Her face twitched slightly. "Poor manners, to negotiate while your client is helpless."

"Manners would be ludicrous in a conversation about murder. In any case, I never haggle."

"Then we have a deal."

"I am so glad. Antidote, please."

Day pulled the cork from a glass jar, dipped the very point of a thin knife into the syrupy reduction in its bottom and handed it to him, polished handle first. He paused, looking into Murcatto's cold blue eyes.

Caution first, always. This woman they called the Serpent of Talins was dangerous in the extreme. If Morveer had not known it from her reputation, from their conversation, from the employment she had come to engage him for, he could have seen it at a single glance. He most seriously considered the possibility of giving her a fatal jab instead, throwing her Northern friend in the river and forgetting the whole business.

But to kill Grand Duke Orso, the most powerful man in Styria? To shape the course of history with one deft twist of his craft? For his deed, if not his name, to echo through the ages? What finer way to crown a career of achieving the impossible? The very thought made him smile the wider.

He gave a long sigh. "I hope I will not come to regret this." And he jabbed the back of Murcatto's hand with the point of the knife, a single bead of dark blood slowly forming on her skin.

Within a few moments the antidote was already beginning to take effect. She winced as she turned her head slowly one way, then the other, worked the muscles in her face. "I'm surprised," she said.

"Truly? How so?"

"I was expecting a Master Poisoner." She rubbed at the mark on the back of her hand. "Who'd have thought I'd get such a little prick?"

Morveer felt his grin slip. It only took him a moment to regain his composure, of course. Once he had silenced Day's giggle with a sharp frown. "I hope your temporary helplessness was not too great an inconvenience. I am forgiven, am I not? If the two of us are to cooperate, I would hate to have to labour beneath a shadow."

"Of course." She worked the movement back into her shoulders, the slightest smile at one corner of her mouth. "I need what you have, and you want what I have. Business is business."

"Excellent. Magnificent. Un… paralleled." And Morveer gave his most winning smile.

But he did not believe it for a moment. This was a most deadly job, and with a most deadly employer. Monzcarro Murcatto, the notorious Butcher of Caprile, was not a person of the forgiving variety. He was not forgiven. He was not even in the neighbourhood. From now on it would have to be caution first, second and third.

Science and Magic

Shivers pulled his horse up at the top of the rise. The country sloped away, a mess of dark fields with here or there a huddled farm or village, a stand of bare trees. No more'n a dozen miles distant, the line of the black sea, the curve of a wide bay, and along its edge a pale crust of city. Tiny towers clustered on three hills above the chilly brine, under an iron-grey sky.

"Westport," said Friendly, then clicked his tongue and moved his horse on.

The closer they came to the damn place the more worried Shivers got. And the more sore, cold and bored besides. He frowned at Murcatto, riding on her own ahead, hood up, a black figure in a black landscape. The cart's wheels clattered round on the road. The horses clopped and snorted. Some crows caw-cawed from the bare fields. But no one was talking.

They'd been a grim crowd all the way here. But then they'd a grim purpose in mind. Nothing else but murder. Shivers wondered what his father would've made of that. Rattleneck, who'd stuck to the old ways tight as a barnacle to a boat and always looked for the right thing to do. Killing a man you never met for money didn't seem to fit that hole however you twisted it around.

There was a sudden burst of high laughter. Day, perched on the cart next to Morveer, a half-eaten apple in her hand. Shivers hadn't heard much laughter in a while, and it drew him like a moth to flame.

"What's funny?" he asked, starting to grin along at the joke.

She leaned towards him, swaying with the cart. "I was just wondering, when you fell off your chair like a turtle tipped over, if you soiled yourself."

"I was of the opinion you probably did," said Morveer, "but doubted we could have smelled the difference."

Shivers' smile was stillborn. He remembered sitting in that orchard, frowning across the table, trying to look dangerous. Then he'd felt twitchy, then dizzy. He'd tried to lift his hand to his head, found he couldn't. He'd tried to say something about it, found he couldn't. Then the world tipped over. He didn't remember much else.

"What did you do to me?" He lowered his voice. "Sorcery?"

Day sprayed bits of apple as she burst out laughing. "Oh, this just gets better."

"And I said he would be an uninspiring travelling companion." Morveer chuckled. "Sorcery. I swear. It's like one of those stories."

"Those big, thick, stupid books! Magi and devils and all the rest!" Day was having herself quite the snigger. "Stupid stories for children!"

"Alright," said Shivers. "I think I get it. I'm slow as a fucking trout in treacle. Not sorcery. What, then?"

Day smirked. "Science."

Shivers didn't much care for the sound of it. "What's that? Some other kind of magic?"

"No, it most decidedly is not," sneered Morveer. "Science is a system of rational thought devised to investigate the world and establish the laws by which it operates. The scientist uses those laws to achieve an effect. One which might easily appear magical in the eyes of the primitive." Shivers struggled with all the long Styrian words. For a man who reckoned himself clever, Morveer had a fool's way of talking, seemed meant to make the simple difficult. "Magic, conversely, is a system of lies and nonsense devised to fool idiots."

"Right y'are. I must be the stupidest bastard in the Circle of the World, eh? It's a wonder I can hold my own shit in without paying mind to my arse every minute."

"The thought had occurred."

"There is magic," grumbled Shivers. "I've seen a woman call up a mist."

"Really? And how did it differ from ordinary mist? Magic coloured? Green? Orange?"

Shivers frowned. "The usual colour."

"So a woman called, and there was mist." Morveer raised one eyebrow at his apprentice. "A wonder indeed." She grinned, teeth crunching into her apple.

"I've seen a man marked with letters, made one half of him proof against any blade. Stabbed him myself, with a spear. Should've been a killing blow, but didn't leave a mark."

"Ooooooh!" Morveer held both hands up and wiggled his fingers like a child playing ghost. "Magic letters! First, there was no wound, and then… there was no wound? I recant! The world is stuffed with miracles." More tittering from Day.

"I know what I've seen."

"No, my mystified friend, you think you know. There is no such thing as magic. Certainly not here in Styria."

"Just treachery," sang Day, "and war, and plague, and money to be made."

"Why did you favour Styria with your presence, anyway?" asked Morveer. "Why not stay in the North, swaddled in the magic mists?"

Shivers rubbed slowly at the side of his neck. Seemed a strange reason, now, and he felt even more of a fool saying it. "I came here to be a better man."

"Starting from where you are, I hardly think that would prove too difficult."

Shivers had some pride still, and this prick's sniggering was starting to grate on it. He'd have liked to just knock him off his cart with an axe. But he was trying to do better, so he leaned over instead and spoke in Northern, nice and careful. "I think you've got a head full of shit, which is no surprise because your face looks like an arse. You little men are all the same. Always trying to prove how clever y'are so you've something to be proud of. But it don't matter how much you laugh at me, I've won already. You'll never be tall." And he grinned right round his face. "Seeing across a crowded room will always be a dream to you."

Morveer frowned. "And what is that jabber supposed to mean?"

"You're the fucking scientist. You work it out."

Day snorted with high laughter until Morveer caught her with a hard glance. She was still smiling, though, as she stripped the apple core to the pips and tossed it away. Shivers dropped back and watched the empty fields slither by, turned earth half-frozen with a morning frost. Made him think of home. He gave a sigh, and it smoked out against the grey sky. The friends Shivers had made in his life had all been fighters. Carls and Named Men, comrades in the line, most back in the mud, now, one way or another. He reckoned Friendly was the closest thing he'd get to that in the midst of Styria, so he gave his horse a nudge in the flanks and brought it up next to the convict.

"Hey." Friendly didn't say a word. He didn't even move his head to show he'd heard. Silence stretched out. Looking at that brick wall of a face it was hard to picture the convict a bosom companion, chuckling away at his jokes. But a man's got to clutch at some hope, don't he? "You were a soldier, then?"

Friendly shook his head.

"But you fought in battles?"

And again.

Shivers ploughed on as if he'd said yes. Not much other choice, now. "I fought in a few. Charged in the mist with Bethod's Carls north of the Cumnur. Held the line next to Rudd Threetrees at Dunbrec. Fought seven days in the mountains with the Dogman. Seven desperate days, those were."

"Seven?" asked Friendly, one heavy brow twitching with interest.

"Aye," sighed Shivers. "Seven." The names of those men and those places meant nothing to no one down here. He watched a set of covered carts coming the other way, men with steel caps and flatbows in their hands frowning at him from their seats. "Where did you learn to fight, then?" he asked, the smear of hope at getting some decent conversation drying out quick.

"In Safety."

"Eh?"

"Where they put you when they catch you for a crime."

"Why keep you safe after that?"

"They don't call it Safety because you're safe there. They call it Safety because everyone else is safe from you. They count out the days, months, years they'll keep you. Then they lock you in, deep down, where the light doesn't go, until the days, months, years have all rubbed past, and the numbers are all counted down to nothing. Then you say thank you, and they let you free."

Sounded like a barbaric way of doing things to Shivers. "You do a crime in the North, you pay a gild on it, make it right. That, or if the chieftain decides, they hang you. Maybe put the bloody cross in you, if you've done murders. Lock a man in a hole? That's a crime itself."

Friendly shrugged. "They have rules there that make sense. There's a proper time for each thing. A proper number on the great clock. Not like out here."

"Aye. Right. Numbers, and that." Shivers wished he'd never asked.

Friendly hardly seemed to hear him. "Out here the sky is too high, and every man does what he pleases when he likes, and there are no right numbers for anything." He was frowning off towards Westport, still just a sweep of hazy buildings round the cold bay. "Fucking chaos."

They got to the city walls about midday, and there was already a long line of folk waiting to get in. Soldiers stood about the gate, asking questions, going through a pack or a chest, poking half-hearted at a cart with their spear-butts.

"The Aldermen have been nervous since Borletta fell," said Morveer from his seat. "They are checking everyone who enters. I will do the talking." Shivers was happy enough to let him, since the prick loved the sound of his own voice so much.

"Your name?" asked the guard, eyes infinitely bored.

"Reevrom," said the poisoner, with a massive grin. "A humble merchant from Puranti. And these are my associates—"

"Your business in Westport?"

"Murder." An uncomfortable silence. "I hope to make a veritable killing on the sale of Osprian wines! Yes, indeed, I hope to make a killing in your city." Morveer chuckled at his own joke and Day tittered away beside him.

"This one doesn't look like the kind we need." Another guard was frowning up at Shivers.

Morveer kept chuckling. "Oh, no need to worry on his account. The man is practically a retard. Intellect of a child. Still, he is good for shifting a barrel or two. I keep him on out of sentiment as much as anything. What am I, Day?"

"Sentimental," said the girl.

"I have too much heart. Always have had. My mother died when I was very young, you see, a wonderful woman—"

"Get on with it!" someone called from behind them.

Morveer took hold of the canvas sheet covering the back of the wagon. "Do you want to check—"

"Do I look like I want to, with half of Styria to get through my bloody gate? On." The guard waved a tired hand. "Move on."

The reins snapped, the cart rolled into the city of Westport, and Murcatto and Friendly rode after. Shivers came last, which seemed about usual lately.

Beyond the walls it was crushed in tight as a battle, and not much less frightening. A paved road struck between high buildings, bare trees planted on either side, crammed with a shuffling tide of folk every shape and colour. Pale men in sober cloth, narrow-eyed women in bright silks, black-skinned men in white robes, soldiers and sell-swords in chain mail and dull plate. Servants, labourers, tradesmen, gentlemen, rich and poor, fine and stinking, nobles and beggars. An awful lot of beggars. Walkers and riders came surging up and away in a blur, horses and carts and covered carriages, women with a weight of piled-up hair and an even greater weight of jewellery, carried past on teetering chairs by pairs of sweating servants.

Shivers had thought Talins was rammed full with strange variety. Westport was way worse. He saw a line of animals with great long necks being led through the press, linked by thin chains, tiny heads swaying sadly about on top. He squeezed his eyes shut and shook his head, but when he opened them the monsters were still there, heads bobbing over the milling crowd, not even remarked upon. The place was like a dream, and not the pleasant kind.

They turned down a narrower way, hemmed in by shops and stalls. Smells jabbed at his nose one after another—fish, bread, polish, fruit, oil, spice and a dozen others he'd no idea of—and they made his breath catch and his stomach lurch. Out of nowhere a boy on a passing cart shoved a wicker cage in Shivers' face and a tiny monkey inside hissed and spat at him, near knocking him from his saddle in surprise. Shouts battered at his ears in a score of different tongues. A kind of a chant came floating up over the top of it, louder and louder, strange but beautiful, made the hairs on his arms bristle.

A building with a great dome loomed over one side of a square, six tall turrets sprouting from its front wall, golden spikes gleaming on their roofs. It was from there the chanting was coming. Hundreds of voices, deep and high together, mingling into one.

"It's a temple." Murcatto had dropped back beside him, her hood still up, not much more of her face showing than her frown.

If Shivers was honest, he was more'n a bit feared of her. It was bad enough that he'd watched her break a man apart with a hammer and give every sign of enjoying it. But he'd had this creeping feeling afterwards, when they were bargaining, that she was on the point of stabbing him. Then there was that hand she always kept a glove on. He couldn't remember ever being scared of a woman before, and it made him shamed and nervous at once. But he could hardly deny that, apart from the glove, and the hammer, and the sick sense of danger, he liked the looks of her. A lot. He wasn't sure he didn't like the danger a bit more than was healthy too. All added up to not knowing what the hell to say from one moment to the next.

"Temple?"

"Where the Southerners pray to God."

"God, eh?" Shivers' neck ached as he squinted up at those spires, higher than the tallest trees in the valley where he was born. He'd heard some folk down South thought there was a man in the sky. A man who'd made the world and saw everything. Had always seemed a mad kind of a notion, but looking at this Shivers weren't far from believing it himself. "Beautiful."

"Maybe a hundred years ago, when the Gurkish conquered Dawah, a lot of Southerners fled before them. Some crossed the water and settled here, and they raised up temples in thanks for their salvation. Westport is almost as much a part of the South as it's a part of Styria. But then it's part of the Union too, since the Aldermen finally had to pick a side, and bought the High King his victory over the Gurkish. They call this place the Crossroads of the World. Those that don't call it a nest of liars, anyway. There are people settled here from across the Thousand Isles, from Suljuk and Sikkur, from Thond and the Old Empire. Northmen even."

"Anything but those stupid bastards."

"Primitives, to a man. I hear some of them grow their hair long like women. But they'll take anyone here." Her gloved finger pointed out a long row of men on little platforms at the far end of the square. A strange bloody crowd, even for this place. Old and young, tall and short, fat and bony, some with strange robes or headgear, some half-naked and painted, one with bones through his face. A few had signs behind 'em in all kinds of letters, beads or baubles hanging. They danced and capered, threw their arms up, stared at the sky, dropped on their knees, wept, laughed, raged, sang, screamed, begged, all blathering away over each other in more languages than Shivers had known about.

"Who the hell are these bastards?" he muttered.

"Holy men. Or madmen, depending who you ask. Down in Gurkhul, you have to pray how the Prophet tells you. Here each man can worship as he pleases."

"They're praying?"

Murcatto shrugged. "More like they're trying to convince everyone else that they know the best way."

People stood watching 'em. Some nodding along with what they were saying. Some shaking their heads, laughing, shouting back even. Some just stood there, bored. One of the holy men, or the madmen, started screaming at Shivers as he rode past in words he couldn't make a smudge of sense from. He knelt, stretching out his arms, beads round his neck rattling, voice raw with pleading. Shivers could see it in his red-rimmed eyes—he thought this was the most important thing he'd ever do.

"Must be a nice feeling," said Shivers.

"What must?"

"Thinking you know all the answers…" He trailed off as a woman walked past with a man on a lead. A big, dark man with a collar of shiny metal, carrying a sack in either hand, his eyes kept on the ground. "You see that?"

"In the South most men either own someone or are owned themselves."

"That's a bastard custom," muttered Shivers. "I thought you said this was part o' the Union, though."

"And they love their freedom over in the Union, don't they? You can't make a man a slave there." She nodded towards some more, being led past meek and humble in a line. "But if they pass through no one's freeing them, I can tell you that."

"Bloody Union. Seems those bastards always want more land. There's more of 'em than ever in the North. Uffrith's full of 'em, since the wars started up again. And what do they need more land for? You should see that city they've got already. Makes this place look a village."

She looked sharply across at him. "Adua?"

"That's the one."

"You've been there?"

"Aye. I fought the Gurkish there. Got me this mark." And he pulled back his sleeve to show the scar on his wrist. When he looked back she had an odd look in her eye. You might almost have called it respect. He liked seeing it. Been a while since anyone looked at him with aught but contempt.

"Did you stand in the shadow of the House of the Maker?" she asked.

"Most of the city's in the shadow of that thing one time o' day or another."

"What was it like?"

"Darker'n outside it. Shadows tend to be, in my experience."

"Huh." The first time Shivers had seen anything close to a smile on her face, and he reckoned it suited her. "I always said I'd go."

"To Adua? What's stopping you?"

"Six men I need to kill."

Shivers puffed out his cheeks. "Ah. That." A surge of worry went through him, and he wondered afresh just why the hell he'd ever said yes. "I've always been my own worst enemy," he muttered.

"Stick with me, then." Her smile had widened some. "You'll soon have worse. We're here."

Not all that heartening, as a destination. A narrow alley, dim as dusk. Crumbling buildings crowded in, shutters rotten and peeling, sheets of plaster cracking away from damp bricks. He led his horse after the cart and through a dim archway while Murcatto swung the creaking doors shut behind them and shot the rusted bolt. Shivers tethered his horse to a rotting post in a yard strewn with weeds and fallen tiles.

"A palace," he muttered, staring up towards the square of grey sky high above, the walls all round coated with dried-up weeds, the shutters hanging miserable from their hinges. "Once."

"I took it for the location," said Murcatto, "not the dйcor."

They made for a gloomy hall, empty doorways leading into empty chambers. "Lot of rooms," said Shivers.

Friendly nodded. "Twenty-two."

Their boots thump, thumped on the creaking staircase as they made their way up through the rotten guts of the building.

"How are you going to begin?" Murcatto was asking Morveer.

"I already have. Letters of introduction have been sent. We have a sizeable deposit to entrust to Valint and Balk tomorrow morning. Sizeable enough to warrant the attention of their most senior officer. I, my assistant and your man Friendly will infiltrate the bank disguised as a merchant and his associates. We will meet with—then seek out an opportunity to kill—Mauthis."

"Simple as that?"

"Seizing an opportunity is more often than not the key in these affairs, but if the moment does not present itself, I will be laying the groundwork for a more… structured approach."

"What about the rest of us?" asked Shivers.

"Our employer, obviously, is possessed of a memorable visage and might be recognised, while you," and Morveer sneered back down the stairs at him, "stand out like a cow among the wolves, and would be no more useful than one. You are far too tall and far too scarred and your clothes are far too rural for you to belong in a bank. As for that hair—"

"Pfeeesh," said Day, shaking her head.

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"Exactly how it sounded. You are simply far, far too…" Morveer swirled one hand around. "North. "

Murcatto unlocked a flaking door at the top of the last flight of steps and shoved it open. Muddy daylight leaked through and Shivers followed the others out blinking into the sun.

"By the dead." A jumble of mismatched roofs every shape and pitch stretched off all round—red tiles, grey slates, white lead, rotting thatch, bare rafters caked with moss, green copper streaked with dirt, patched with canvas and old leather. A tangle of leaning gables, garrets, beams, paint peeling and sprouting with weeds, dangling gutters and crooked drains, bound up with chains and sagging washing lines, built all over each other at every angle and looking like the lot might slide off into the streets any moment. Smoke belched up from countless chimneys, cast a haze that made the sun a sweaty blur. Here and there a tower poked or a dome bulged above the chaos, the odd tangle of bare wood where some trees had beaten the odds and managed to stick out a twig. The sea was a grey smudge in the distance, the masts of ships in the harbour a far-off forest, shifting uneasily with the waves.

From up here the city seemed to make a great hiss. Noise of work and play, of men and beasts, calls of folk selling and buying, wheels rattling and hammers clanging, splinters of song and scraps of music, joy and despair all mixed up together like stew in a great pot.

Shivers edged to the lichen-crusted parapet beside Murcatto and peered over. People trickled up and down a cobbled lane far below, like water in the bottom of a canyon. A monster of a building loomed up on the other side.

Its wall was a sheer cliff of smooth-cut pale stone, with a pillar every twenty strides that Shivers couldn't have got both arms around, crusted at the top with leaves and faces carved out of stone. There was a row of small windows at maybe twice the height of a man, then another above, then a row of much bigger ones, all blocked by metal grilles. Above that, all along the line of the flat roof, about level with where Shivers was standing, a hedge of black iron spikes stuck out, like the spines on a thistle.

Morveer grinned across at it. "Ladies, gentlemen and savages, I give you the Westport branch… of the Banking House… of Valint and Balk."

Shivers shook his head. "Place looks like a fortress."

"Like a prison," murmured Friendly.

"Like a bank," sneered Morveer.

The Safest Place in the World

The banking hall of the Westport office of Valint and Balk was an echoing cavern of red porphyry and black marble. It had all the gloomy splendour of an emperor's mausoleum, the minimum light necessary creeping in through small, high windows, their thick bars casting cross-hatched shadows across the shining floor. A set of huge marble busts stared smugly down from on high: great merchants and financiers of Styrian history, by the look of them. Criminals made heroes by colossal success. Morveer wondered whether Somenu Hermon was among them, and the thought that the famous merchant might indirectly be paying his wages caused his smirk to expand by the slightest margin.

Sixty clerks or more attended identical desks loaded with identical heaps of papers, each with a huge, leather-bound ledger open before him. All manner of men, with all colours of skin, some sporting the skullcaps, turbans or characteristic hairstyles of one Kantic sect or other. The only prejudice here was in favour of those who could turn the fastest coin. Pens rattled in ink bottles, nibs scratched on heavy paper, pages crackled as they were turned. Merchants stood in clumps and haggles, conversing in whispers. Nowhere was a single coin in evidence. The wealth here was made of words, of ideas, of rumours and lies, too valuable to be held captive in gaudy gold or simple silver.

It was a setting intended to awe, to amaze, to intimidate, but Morveer was not a man to be intimidated. He belonged here perfectly, just as he did everywhere and nowhere. He swaggered past a long queue of well-dressed supplicants with the air of studied self-satisfaction that always accompanied new money. Friendly lumbered in his wake, strongbox held close, and Day tiptoed demurely at the rear.

Morveer snapped his fingers at the nearest clerk. "I have an appointment with…" He consulted his letter for effect. "One Mauthis. On the subject of a sizeable deposit."

"Of course. If you would wait for one moment."

"One, but no more. Time and money are the same."

Morveer inconspicuously studied the arrangements for security. It would have been an understatement to call them daunting. He counted twelve armed men stationed around the hall, as comprehensively equipped as the King of the Union's bodyguard. There had been another dozen outside the towering double-doors.

"The place is a fortress," muttered Day under her breath.

"But considerably better defended," replied Morveer.

"How long is this going to take?"

"Why?"

"I'm hungry."

"Already? For pity's sake! You will not starve if you—Wait."

A tall man had emerged from a high archway, gaunt-faced with a prominent beak of a nose and thinning grey hair, arrayed in sombre robes with a heavy fur collar. "Mauthis," murmured Morveer, from Murcatto's exhaustive description. "Our intended."

He was walking behind a younger man, curly haired and with a pleasant smile, not at all richly dressed. So unexceptional, in fact, he would have had a fine appearance for a poisoner. And yet Mauthis, though supposedly in charge of the bank, hurried after with hands clasped, as though he was the junior. Morveer sidled closer, bringing them within earshot.

"…Master Sulfur, I hope you will inform our superiors that everything is under complete control." Mauthis had, perhaps, the very slightest note of panic in his voice. "Absolute and complete—"

"Of course," answered the one called Sulfur, offhand. "Though I rarely find our superiors need informing as to how things stand. They are watching. If everything is under complete control, I am sure they will already be satisfied. If not, well…" He smiled wide at Mauthis, and then at Morveer, and Morveer noticed he had different-coloured eyes, one blue, one green. "Good day." And he strode away and was soon lost in the crowds.

"May I be of assistance?" grated Mauthis. He looked as if he had never laughed in his life. He was running out of time to try it now.

"I certainly hope you may. My name is Reevrom, a merchant of Puranti." Morveer tittered inwardly at his own joke, as he did whenever he utilised the alias, but his face showed nothing but the warmest bonhomie as he offered his hand.

"Reevrom. I have heard of your house. A privilege to make your acquaintance." Mauthis disdained to shake it, and kept a carefully inoffensive distance between them. Evidently a cautious man. Just as well, for his sake. The tiny spike on the underside of Morveer's heavy middle-finger ring was loaded with scorpion venom in a solution of Leopard Flower. The banker would have sat happily through their meeting, then dropped dead within the hour.

"This is my niece," continued Morveer, not in the least downhearted by his failed attempt. "I have been entrusted with the responsibility of escorting her to an introduction with a potential suitor." Day looked up from beneath her lashes with perfectly judged shyness. "And this is my associate." He glanced sideways at Friendly and the man frowned back. "I do him too much credit. My bodyguard, Master Charming. He is not a great conversationalist, but when it comes to bodyguarding, he is… barely adequate in truth. Still, I promised his old mother that I would take him under my—"

"You have come here on a matter of business?" droned Mauthis.

Morveer bowed. "A sizeable deposit."

"I regret that your associates must remain behind, but if you would care to follow me we would, of course, be happy to accept your deposit and prepare a receipt."

"Surely my niece—"

"You must understand that, in the interests of security, we can make no exceptions. Your niece will be perfectly comfortable here."

"Of course, of course you will, my dear. Master Charming! The strongbox!" Friendly handed the metal case over to a bespectacled clerk, left tottering under its weight. "Now wait here, and get up to no mischief!" Morveer gave a heavy sigh as he followed Mauthis into the depths of the building, as though he had insurmountable difficulties securing competent help. "My money will be safe here?"

"The bank's walls are at no point less than twelve feet in thickness. There is only one entrance, guarded by a dozen well-armed men during the day, sealed at night with three locks, made by three different locksmiths, the keys kept by three separate employees. Two parties of men constantly patrol the exterior of the bank until morning. Even then the interior is kept under watch by a most sharp-eyed and competent guard." He gestured towards a bored-looking man in a studded leather jerkin, seated at a desk to the side of the hallway.

"He is locked in?"

"All night."

Morveer worked his mouth with some discomfort. "Most comprehensive arrangements."

He pulled out his handkerchief and pretended to cough daintily into it. The silk was soaked in Mustard Root, one of an extensive range of agents to which he had himself long since developed an immunity. He needed only a few moments unobserved, then he could clasp it to Mauthis' face. The slightest inhalation and the man would cough himself to bloody death within moments. But the clerk laboured along between them with the strongbox in his arms, and not the slightest opportunity was forthcoming. Morveer was forced to tuck the lethal cloth away, then narrow his eyes as they turned into a long hallway lined with huge paintings. Light poured in from above, the very roof, far overhead, fashioned from a hundred thousand diamond panes of glass.

"A ceiling of windows!" Morveer turned slowly round and round, head back. "Truly a wonder of architecture!"

"This is an entirely modern building. Your money could not be more secure anywhere, believe me."

"The depths of ruined Aulcus, perhaps?" joked Morveer, as an overblown artist's impression of the ancient city passed by on their left.

"Not even there."

"And making a withdrawal would be considerably more testing, I imagine! Ha ha. Ha ha."

"Quite so." The banker did not display even the inkling of a smile. "Our vault door is a foot thickness of solid Union steel. We do not exaggerate when we say this is the safest place in the Circle of the World. This way."

Morveer was ushered into a voluminous chamber panelled with oppressively dark wood, ostentatious yet still uncomfortable, tyrannised by a desk the size of a poor man's house. A sombre oil was set above a looming fireplace: a heavyset bald man glowering down as though he suspected Morveer of being up to no good. Some Union bureaucrat of the dusty past, he suspected. Zoller, maybe, or Bialoveld.

Mauthis took up a high, hard seat and Morveer found one opposite while the clerk lifted the lid of the strongbox and began to count out the money, using a coin-stacker with practised efficiency. Mauthis watched, scarcely blinking. At no stage did he touch either case or coins himself. A cautious man. Damnably, infuriatingly cautious. His slow eyes slid across the desk.

"Wine?"

Morveer raised an eyebrow at the distorted glassware behind the windows of a towering cabinet. "Thank you, no. I become quite flustered under its influence, and between the two of us have frequently embarrassed myself. I decided, in the end, to abstain entirely, and stick to selling it to others. The stuff is… poison." And he gave a huge smile. "But don't let me stop you." He slid an unobtrusive hand into a hidden pocket within his jacket where the vial of Star Juice was waiting. It would be a small effort to mount a diversion and introduce a couple of drops to Mauthis' glass while he was—

"I too avoid it."

"Ah." Morveer released the vial and instead plucked a folded paper from his inside pocket quite as if that had been his intention from the first. He unfolded it and pretended to read while his eyes darted about the office. "I counted five thousand…" He took in the style of lock upon the door, the fashion of its construction, the frame within which it was set. "Two hundred…" The tiles from which the floor was made, the panels on the walls, the render of the ceiling, the leather of Mauthis' chair, the coals on the unlit fire. "And twelve scales." Nothing seemed promising.

Mauthis showed no emotion at the number. Fortunes and small change, all one. He opened the heavy cover of a huge ledger upon his desk. He licked one finger and flicked steadily through the pages, paper crackling. Morveer felt a warm satisfaction spread out from his stomach to every extremity at the sight, and it was only with an effort that he prevented himself from whooping with triumph. He settled for a prim smile. "Takings from my last trip to Sipani. Wine from Ospria is always a profitable venture, even in these uncertain times. Not everyone has our temperance, Master Mauthis, I am happy to say!"

"Of course." The banker licked his finger once again as he turned the last few pages.

"Five thousand, two hundred and eleven," said the clerk.

Mauthis' eyes flickered up. "Trying to get away with something?"

"Me?" Morveer passed it off with a false chuckle. "Damn that man Charming, he can't count for anything! I swear he has no feel for numbers whatsoever."

The nib of Mauthis' pen scratched across the ledger; the clerk hurried over and blotted the entry as his master neatly, precisely, emotionlessly prepared the receipt. The clerk carried it to Morveer and offered it to him along with the empty strongbox.

"A note for the full amount in the name of the Banking House of Valint and Balk," said Mauthis. "Redeemable at any reputable mercantile institution in Styria."

"Must I sign anything?" asked Morveer hopefully, his fingers closing around the pen in his inside pocket. It doubled as a highly effective blow-gun, the needle concealed within containing a lethal dose of—

"No."

"Very well." Morveer smiled as he folded the paper and slid it away, taking care that it did not catch on the deadly edge of his scalpel. "Better than gold, and a great deal lighter. For now, then, I take my leave. It has been a decided pleasure." And he held out his hand again, poisoned ring glinting. No harm in making the effort.

Mauthis did not move from his chair. "Likewise."

Evil Friends

It had been benna's favourite place in Westport. He'd dragged her there twice a week while they were in the city. A shrine of mirrors and cut glass, polished wood and glittering marble. A temple to the god of male grooming. The high priest—a small, lean barber in a heavily embroidered apron—stood sharply upright in the centre of the floor, chin pointed to the ceiling, as though he'd been expecting them that very moment to enter.

"Madam! A delight to see you again!" He blinked for a moment. "Your husband is not with you?"

"My brother." Monza swallowed. "And no, he… won't be back. I've an altogether tougher challenge for you—"

Shivers stepped through the doorway, gawping about as fearfully as a sheep in a shearing pen. She opened her mouth to speak but the barber cut her off. "I believe I see the problem." He made a sharp circuit of Shivers while the Northman frowned down at him. "Dear, dear. All off?"

"What?"

"All off," said Monza, taking the barber by the elbow and pressing a quarter into his hand. "Go gently, though. I doubt he's used to this and he might startle." She realised she was making him sound like a horse. Maybe that was giving him too much credit.

"Of course." The barber turned, and gave a sharp intake of breath. Shivers had already taken his new shirt off and was looming pale and sinewy in the doorway, unbuckling his belt.

"He means your hair, fool," said Monza, "not your clothes."

"Uh. Thought it was odd, but, well, Southern fashions…" Monza watched him as he sheepishly buttoned his shirt back up. He had a long scar from his shoulder across his chest, pink and twisted. She might've thought it ugly once, but she'd had to change her opinions on scars, along with a few other things.

Shivers lowered himself into the chair. "Had this hair all my life."

"Then it is past time you were released from its suffocating embrace. Head forwards, please." The barber produced his scissors with a flourish and Shivers lurched out of his seat.

"You think I'm letting a man I never met near my face with a blade?"

"I must protest! I trim the heads of Westport's finest gentlemen!"

"You." Monza caught the barber's shoulder as he backed away and marched him forwards. "Shut up and cut hair." She slipped another quarter into his apron pocket and gave Shivers a long look. "You, shut up and sit still."

He sidled back into the chair and clung so tight to its arms that the tendons stood from the backs of his hands. "I'm watching you," he growled.

The barber gave a long sigh and with lips pursed began to work.

Monza wandered around the room while the scissors snip-snipped behind her. She walked along a shelf, absently pulling the stoppers from the coloured bottles, sniffing at the scented oils inside. She caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror. A hard face, still. Thinner, leaner, sharper even than she used to be. Eyes sunken from the nagging pain up her legs, from the nagging need for the husk that made the pain go away.

You look especially beautiful this morning, Monza…

The idea of a smoke stuck in her mind like a bone in her craw. Each day the need crept up on her earlier. More time spent sick, sore and twitchy, counting the minutes until she could creep off and be with her pipe, sink back into soft, warm nothingness. Her fingertips tingled at the thought, tongue working hungrily around her dry mouth.

"Always worn it long. Always." She turned back into the room. Shivers was wincing like a torture victim as tufts of cut hair tumbled down and built up on the polished boards under the chair. Some men clam up when they're nervous. Some men blather. It seemed Shivers was in the latter camp. "Guess my brother had long hair and I went and did the same. Used to try and copy him. Looked up to him. Little brothers, you know… What was your brother like?"

She felt her cheek twitch, remembering Benna's grinning face in the mirror, and hers behind it. "He was a good man. Everyone loved him."

"My brother was a good man. Lot better'n me. My father thought so, anyway. Never missed a chance to tell me… I mean, just saying, nothing strange 'bout long hair where I come from. Folk got other things to cut in a war than their hair, I guess. Black Dow used to laugh at me, 'cause he'd always hacked his right off, so as not to get in the way in a fight. But then he'd give a man shit about anything, Black Dow. Hard mouth. Hard man. Only man harder was the Bloody-Nine his self. I reckon—"

"For someone with a weak grip on the language, you like to talk, don't you? You know what I reckon?"

"What?"

"People talk a lot when they've nothing to say."

Shivers heaved out a sigh. "Just trying to make tomorrow that bit better than today is all. I'm one of those… you've got a word for it, don't you?"

"Idiots?"

He looked sideways at her. "It was a different one I had in mind."

"Optimists."

"That's the one. I'm an optimist."

"How's it working out for you?"

"Not great, but I keep hoping."

"That's optimists. You bastards never learn." She watched Shivers' face emerging from that tangle of greasy hair. Hard-boned, sharp-nosed, with a nick of a scar through one eyebrow. It was a good face, in so far as she cared. She found she cared more than she'd thought she would. "You were a soldier, right? What do they call them up in the North… a Carl?"

"I was a Named Man, as it goes," and she could hear the pride in his voice.

"Good for you. So you led men?"

"I had some looking to me. My father was a famous man, my brother too. A little some of that rubbed off, maybe."

"So why throw it away? Why come down here to be nothing?"

He looked at her in the mirror while the scissors clicked round his face. "Morveer said you were a soldier yourself. A famous one."

"Not that famous." It was only half a lie. Infamous was closer to it.

"That'd be a strange job for a woman, where I come from."

She shrugged. "Easier than farming."

"So you know war, am I right?"

"Yes."

"Daresay you've seen some battles. You've seen men killed."

"Yes."

"Then you've seen what goes with it. The marches, the waiting, the sickness. Folk raped, robbed, crippled, burned out who've done nought to deserve it."

Monza thought of her own field burning, all those years ago. "You've got a point, you can out and say it."

"That blood only makes more blood. That settling one score only starts another. That war gives a bastard of a sour taste to any man that's not half-mad, and it only gets worse with time." She didn't disagree. "So you know why I'd rather be free of it. Make something grow. Something to be proud of, instead of just breaking. Be… a good man, I guess."

Snip, snip. Hair tumbled down and gathered on the floor. "A good man, eh?"

"That's right."

"So you've seen dead men yourself?"

"I've seen my share."

"You've seen a lot together?" she asked. "Stacked up after the plague came through, spread out after a battle?"

"Aye, I've seen that."

"Did you notice some of those corpses had a kind of glow about them? A sweet smell like roses on a spring morning?"

Shivers frowned. "No."

"The good men and the bad, then—all looked about the same, did they? They always did to me, I can tell you that." It was his turn to stay quiet. "If you're a good man, and you try to think about what the right thing is every day of your life, and you build things to be proud of so bastards can come and burn them in a moment, and you make sure and say thank you kindly each time they kick the guts out of you, do you think when you die, and they stick you in the mud, you turn into gold?"

"What?"

"Or do you turn to fucking shit like the rest of us?"

He nodded slowly. "You turn to shit, alright. But maybe you can leave something good behind you."

She barked empty laughter at him. "What do we leave behind but things not done, not said, not finished? Empty clothes, empty rooms, empty spaces in the ones who knew us? Mistakes never made right and hopes rotted down to nothing?"

"Hopes passed on, maybe. Good words said. Happy memories, I reckon."

"And all those dead men's smiles you've kept folded up in your heart, they were keeping you warm when I found you, were they? How did they taste when you were hungry? They raise a smile, even, when you were desperate?"

Shivers puffed out his cheeks. "Hell, but you're a ray of sunshine. Might be they did me some good."

"More than a pocketful of silver would've?"

He blinked at her, then away. "Maybe not. But I reckon I'll try to keep thinking my way, just the same."

"Hah. Good luck, good man." She shook her head as if she'd never heard such stupidity. Give me only evil men for friends, Verturio wrote. Them I understand.

A last quick clicking of the scissors and the barber stepped away, dabbing at his own sweaty brow with the back of one sleeve. "And we are all finished."

Shivers stared into the mirror. "I look a different man."

"Sir looks like a Styrian aristocrat."

Monza snorted. "Less like a Northern beggar, anyway."

"Maybe." Shivers looked less than happy. "I daresay that's a better-looking man there. A cleverer man." He ran one hand through his short dark hair, frowning at his reflection. "Not sure if I trust that bastard, though."

"And to finish…" The barber leaned forwards, a coloured crystal bottle in his hands, and squirted a fine mist of perfume over Shivers' head.

The Northman was up like a cat off hot coals. "What the fuck?" he roared, big fists clenched, shoving the man away and making him totter across the room with a squeal.

Monza burst out laughing. "Looks of a Styrian nobleman, maybe." She pulled out a couple more quarters and tucked them into the gaping barber's apron pocket. "The manners might be a while coming, though."

It was getting dark when they came back to the crumbling mansion, Monza with her hood drawn up and Shivers striding proudly along in his new coat. A cold rain flitted down into the ruined courtyard, a single lamp burned in a window on the first floor. She frowned towards it, and then at Shivers, found the grip of the knife in the back of her belt with her left hand. Best to be ready for every possibility. Up the creaking stairs a peeling door stood ajar, light spilling out across the boards. She stepped up and poked it open with her boot.

A pair of burning logs in the soot-blackened fireplace barely warmed the chamber on the other side. Friendly stood beside the far window, peering through the shutters towards the bank. Morveer had some sheets of paper spread out on a rickety old table, marking his place with an ink-spotted hand. Day sat on the tabletop with her legs crossed, peeling an orange with a dagger. "Definite improvement," she grunted, giving Shivers a glance.

"Oh, I cannot but agree." Morveer grinned. "A dirty, long-haired idiot left the building this morning. A clean, short-haired idiot has returned. It must be magic."

Monza let go the grip of her knife while Shivers muttered angrily to himself in Northern. "Since you're not crowing your own praises, I'm guessing the job's not done."

"Mauthis is a most cautious and well-protected man. The bank is far too heavily guarded during the day."

"On his way to the bank, then."

"He leaves by an armoured carriage with a dozen guards in attendance. To try and intercept them would be too great a risk."

Shivers tossed another log on the fire and held his palms out towards it. "At his house?"

"Pah," sneered Morveer. "We followed him there. He lives on a walled island in the bay where several of the city's Aldermen have their estates. The public are not admitted. We have no method of gaining advance access to the building even if we can deduce which one is his. How many guards, servants, family members would be in attendance? All unknown. I flatly refuse to attempt a job of this difficulty on conjecture. What do I never take, Day?"

"Chances."

"Correct. I deal in certainties, Murcatto. That is why you came to me. I am hired for a certain man most certainly dead, not for a butcher's mess and your target slipped away in the chaos. We are not in Caprile, now—"

"I know where we are, Morveer. What's your plan, then?"

"I have gathered the necessary information and devised a sure means of achieving the desired effect. I need only gain access to the bank during the hours of darkness."

"And how do you plan to do that?"

"How do I plan to do that, Day?"

"Through the rigorous application of observation, logic and method."

Morveer flashed his smug little smile again. "Precisely so."

Monza glanced sideways at Benna. Except Benna was dead, and Shivers was in his place. The Northman raised his eyebrows, blew out a long sigh and looked back to the fire. Give me only evil men for friends, Verturio wrote. But there had to be a limit.

Two Twos

The dice came up two twos. Two times two is four. Two plus two is four. Add the dice, or multiply, the same result. It made Friendly feel helpless, that thought. Helpless but calm. All these people struggling to get things done, but whatever they did, it turned out the same. The dice were full of lessons. If you knew how to read them.

The group had formed two twos. Morveer and Day were one pair. Master and apprentice. They had joined together, they stayed together, they laughed together at everyone else. But now Friendly saw that Murcatto and Shivers were forming a pair of their own. They crouched next to each other at the parapet, black outlines against the dim night sky, staring across towards the bank, an immense block of thicker darkness. He had often seen that it was in the nature of people to form pairs. Everyone except him. He was left alone, in the shadows. Maybe there was something wrong with him, the way the judges had said.

Sajaam had chosen him to form a pair with, in Safety, but Friendly had no illusions. Sajaam had chosen him because he was useful. Because he was feared. As feared as anyone in the darkness. But Sajaam had not pretended any differently. He was the only honest man that Friendly knew, and so it had been an honest arrangement. It had worked so well that Sajaam had made enough money in prison to buy his freedom from the judges. But he was an honest man and so, when he was free, he had not forgotten Friendly. He had come back and bought his freedom too.

Outside the walls, where there were no rules, things were different. Sajaam had other business, and Friendly was left alone again. He did not mind, though. He was used to it, and had the dice for company. So he found himself here, in the darkness, on a roof in Westport, in the dead of winter. With these two mismatched pairs of dishonest people.

The guards came in two twos as well, four at a time, and two groups of four, following each other endlessly around the bank all night. It was raining now, a half-frozen sleet spitting down. Still they followed each other, round, and round, and round through the darkness. One party trudged along the lane beneath, well armoured, polearms shouldered.

"Here they come again," said Shivers.

"I see that," sneered Morveer. "Start a count."

Day's whisper came through the night, high and throaty. "One… two… three… four… five…" Friendly stared open-mouthed at her lips moving, the dice forgotten by his limp hand. His own mouth moved silently along with hers. "Twenty-two… twenty-three… twenty-four…"

"How to reach the roof?" Morveer was musing. "How to reach the roof?"

"Rope and grapple?" asked Murcatto.

"Too slow, too noisy, too uncertain. The rope would be left in plain view the entire time, even supposing we could firmly set a grapple. No. We need a method that allows for no accidents."

Friendly wished they would shut their mouths so he could listen to Day's counting. His cock was aching hard from listening to it. "One hundred and twelve… one hundred and thirteen…" He let his eyes close, let his head fall back against the wall, one finger moving back and forth in time. "One hundred and eighty-two… one hundred and eighty-three…"

"No one could climb up there free," came Murcatto's voice. "Not anyone. Too smooth, too sheer. And the spikes to worry on."

"I am in complete agreement."

"Up from inside the bank, then."

"Impossible. Entirely too many eyes. It must be up the walls, then in via the great windows in the roof. At least the lane is deserted during the hours of darkness. That is something in our favour."

"What about the other sides of the building?"

"The north face is considerably busier and better lit. The east contains the primary entrance, with an additional party of four guards posted all night. The south is identical to this face, but without the advantage of our having access to an adjacent roof. No. This wall is our only option."

Friendly saw the faint flicker of light down below in the lane. The next patrol, two times two guards, two plus two guards, four guards working their steady way around the bank.

"All night they keep this up?"

"There are two other parties of four that relieve them. They maintain their vigil uninterrupted until daybreak."

"Two hundred and ninety-one… two hundred and ninety-two… and here comes the next set." Day clicked her tongue. "Three hundred, give or take."

"Three hundred," hissed Morveer, and Friendly could see his head shaking in the darkness. "Not enough time."

"Then how?" snapped Monza.

Friendly swept the dice up again, felt their familiar edges pressing into his palm. It hardly mattered to him how they got into the bank, or even whether they ever did. His hopes mostly involved Day starting to count again.

"There must be a way… there must be a—"

"I can do it." They all looked round. Shivers was sitting against the parapet, white hands dangling.

"You?" sneered Morveer. "How?"

Friendly could just make out the curve of the Northman's grin in the darkness. "Magic."

Plans and Accidents

The guards grumbled their way down the lane. Four of 'em—breastplates, steel caps, halberd blades catching the light from their swinging lanterns. Shivers pressed himself deep into the doorway as they clattered past, waited a nervy moment, then padded across the lane and into the shadows beside the pillar he'd chosen. He started counting. Three hundred or so, to make it to the top and onto the roof. He looked up. Seemed a bastard of a long way. Why the hell had he said yes to this? Just so he could slap the smile off that idiot Morveer's face, and show Murcatto he was worth his money?

"Always my own worst enemy," he whispered. Turned out he'd too much pride. That and a terrible weakness for fine-looking women. Who'd have thought it?

He pulled the rope out, two strides long with an eye at one end and a hook at the other. He cast a glance over the windows in the buildings facing him. Most were shuttered against the cold night, but a few were open, a couple still with lights burning inside. He wondered what the chances were of someone looking out and seeing him shinning up the side of a bank. Higher than he'd like, that was sure.

"Worst fucking enemy." He got ready to climb up onto the pillar's base.

"Somewhere here."

"Where, idiot?"

Shivers froze, rope dangling from his hands. Footsteps now, armour jingling. Bastard guards were coming back. They'd never done that in fifty circuits of the place. For all his chat about science, that bloody poisoner had made an arse of it and Shivers was the one left with his fruits dangling in the wind. He squeezed deeper into the shadows, felt the big flatbow on his back scraping stone. How the hell was he going to explain that? Just a midnight stroll, you know, all in black, taking the old bow for a walk.

If he bolted they'd see him, chase him, more'n likely stab him with something. Either way they'd know someone had been trying to creep into the bank and that would be the end of the whole business. If he stayed put… same difference, more or less, except the stabbing got a sight more likely.

The voices came closer. "Can't be far away, all we bloody do is go round and round…"

One of 'em must've lost something. Shivers cursed his shitty luck, and not for the first time. Too late to run. He closed his fist round the grip of his knife. Footsteps thumped, just on the other side of the pillar. Why'd he taken her silver? Turned out he'd a terrible weakness for money too. He gritted his teeth, waited for—

"Please!" Murcatto's voice. She walked out across the lane, hood back, long coat swishing. Might've been the first time Shivers had seen her without a sword. "I'm so, so sorry to bother you. I'm only trying to get home, but I seem to have got myself completely lost."

One of the guards stepped round the pillar, his back to Shivers, and then another. They were no more than arm's length away, between him and her. He could almost have reached out and touched their backplates.

"Where you staying?"

"With some friends, near the fountain on Lord Sabeldi Street, but I'm new in the city, and," she gave a hopeless laugh, "I've quite misplaced it."

One of the guards pushed back his helmet. "I'll say you have. Other side of town, that."

"I swear I've been wandering the city for hours." She began to move away, drawing the men gently after her. Another guard appeared, and another. All four now, with their backs still to Shivers. He held his breath, heart thumping so loud it was a wonder none of them could hear it. "If one of you gentlemen could point me in the right direction I'd be so grateful. Stupid of me, I know."

"No, no. Confusing place, Westport."

"'Specially at night."

"I get lost here myself, time to time." The men laughed, and Monza laughed along, still drawing 'em on. Her eye caught Shivers' just for an instant, and they looked right at each other, and then she was gone round the next pillar, and the guards too, and their eager chatter drifted away. He closed his eyes, and slowly breathed out. Just as well he weren't the only man around with a weakness for women.

He swung himself up onto the square base of the pillar, slid the rope around it and under his rump, hooked it to make a loop. No idea what the count was now, just knew he had to get up there fast. He set off, gripping the stone with his knees and the edges of his boots, sliding the loop of rope up, then dragging it tight while he shifted his legs and set 'em again.

It was a trick his brother taught him, when he was a lad. He'd used it to climb the tallest trees in the valley and steal eggs. He remembered how they'd laughed together when he kept falling off near the bottom. Now he was using it to help kill folk, and if he fell off he'd be dead himself. Safe to say life hadn't turned out quite the way he'd hoped.

Still, he went up quick and smooth. Just like climbing a tree, except no eggs at the end of it and less chance of bark-splinters in your fruits. Hard work, though. He was sweating through by the time he made it up the pillar and still had the hardest part to go. He worked one hand into the mess of stonework at the top, unhooked the rope with the other and dragged it over his shoulder. Then he pulled himself up, fingers and toes digging holds out among the carvings, breath hissing, arms burning. He slipped one leg over a sculpture of a woman's frowning face and sat there, high above the lane, clinging to a pair of stone leaves and hoping they were stronger than the leafy kind.

He'd been in some better spots, but you had to look on the sunny side. It was the first time he'd had a woman's face between his legs in a while. He heard a hiss from across the lane, picked out Day's black shape on the roof. She pointed down. The next patrol were on their way.

"Shit." He pressed himself tight to the stonework, trying to look like rock himself, hands tingling raw from gripping the hemp, hoping no one chose that moment to look up. They clattered by underneath and he let out a long hiss of air, heart pounding in his ears louder than ever. He waited for them to move off round the corner of the building, getting his breath back for the last stretch.

The spikes further along the walls were mounted on poles, could spin round and round. Impossible to get over. At the tops of the pillars, though, they were mortared to the stone. He took his gloves out—heavy smith's gloves—and pulled them on, then he reached up and worked his hands tight around two spikes, took a deep breath. He let go with his legs and swung free, drew himself up, staring a touch cross-eyed at the iron points in front of his face. Just like pulling yourself into the branches, except for the chance of taking your eye out, of course. Be nice to come out of this with both his eyes.

He swung one way, then heaved himself back the other and got one boot up on top. He twisted himself round, felt the spikes scrape against his thick jerkin, digging at his chest as he dragged himself over.

And he was up.

Seventy-eight… seventy-nine… eighty…" Friendly's lips moved by themselves as he watched Shivers roll over the parapet and onto the roof of the bank.

"He made it," whispered Day, voice squeaky with disbelief.

"And in good time too." Morveer chuckled softly. "Who would have thought he would climb… like an ape."

The Northman stood, a darker shape against the dark night sky. He pulled the big flatbow off his back and started to fiddle with it. "Let's hope he doesn't shoot like an ape," whispered Day.

Shivers took aim. Friendly heard the soft click of the bowstring. A moment later he felt the bolt thud into his chest. He snatched hold of the shaft, frowning down. It hardly hurt at all.

"A happy circumstance that it has no point." Morveer unhooked the wire from the flights. "We would do well to avoid any further mishaps, and your untimely death would seem to qualify."

Friendly tossed the blunt bolt away and tied the rope off to the end of the wire.

"You sure that thing will take his weight?" muttered Day.

"Suljuk silk cord," said Morveer smugly. "Light as down but strong as steel. It would take all three of us simultaneously, and no one looking up will see a thing."

"You hope."

"What do I never take, my dear?"

"Yes, yes."

The black cord hissed through Friendly's hands as Shivers started reeling the wire back in. He watched it creep out across the space between the roofs, counting the strides. Fifteen and Shivers had the other end. They pulled it tight between them, then Friendly looped it through the iron ring they'd bolted to the roof timbers and began to knot it, once, twice, three times.

"Are you entirely sure of that knot?" asked Morveer. "There is no place in the plan for a lengthy drop."

"Twenty-eight strides," said Friendly.

"What?"

"The drop."

A brief pause. "That is not helpful."

A taut black line linked the two buildings. Friendly knew it was there, and still he could hardly see it in the darkness.

Day gestured towards it, curls stirred by the breeze. "After you."

Morveer fumbled his way over the balustrade, breathing hard. In truth, the trip across the cord had not been a pleasant excursion by any stretch of the imagination. A chilly wind had blown up halfway and set his heart to hammering. There had been a time, during his apprenticeship to the infamous Moumah-yin-Bek, when he had executed such acrobatic exertions with a feline grace, but he suspected it was dwindling rapidly into his past along with a full head of hair. He took a moment to compose himself, wiped chill sweat from his forehead, then realised Shivers was sitting there, grinning at him.

"Is there some manner of a joke?" demanded Morveer.

"Depends what makes you laugh, I reckon. How long will you be in there?"

"Precisely as long as I need to be."

"Best move quicker than you did across that rope, then. You might still be climbing in when they open the place tomorrow." The Northman was still smiling as he slipped over the parapet and back across the cord, swift and sure for all his bulk.

"If there is a God, he has cursed me through my acquaintance." Morveer gave only the briefest consideration to the notion of cutting the knot while the primitive was halfway across, then crept away down a narrow lead channel between low-pitched slopes of slate towards the centre of the building. The great glass roof glowed ahead of him, faint light glittering through thousands of distorting panes. Friendly squatted beside it, already unwinding a second length of cord from around his waist.

"Ah, the modern age." Morveer knelt beside Day, pressing his hands gently to the expanse of glass. "What will they think of next?"

"I feel blessed to live in such exciting times."

"So should we all, my dear." He carefully peered down into the bank's interior. "So should we all." The hallway was barely lit, a single lamp burning at each end, bringing a precious gleam to the gilt frames of the huge paintings but leaving the doorways rich with shadow. "Banks," he whispered, a ghost of a smile on his face, "always trying to economise."

He pulled out his glazing tools and began to prise away the lead with pliers, lifting each piece of glass out carefully with blobs of putty. The brilliance of his dexterity was quite undimmed by age, and it took him mere moments to remove nine panes, to snip the lead latticework with pincers and peel it back to leave a diamond-shaped hole ample for his purposes.

"Perfect timing," he murmured. The light from the guard's lantern crept up the panelled walls of the hallway, brought a touch of dawn to the dark canvases. His footsteps echoed as he passed by underneath them, giving vent to a booming yawn, his long shadow stretching out over the marble tiles. Morveer applied the slightest blast of air to his blowpipe.

"Gah!" The guard clapped a hand to the top of his head and Morveer ducked away from the window. There were footsteps below, a scuffling, a gurgle, then the loud thump and clatter of a toppling body. On peering back through the aperture the guard was plainly visible, spreadeagled on his back, lit lamp on its side by one outstretched hand.

"Excellent," breathed Day.

"Naturally."

"However much we talk about science, it always seems like magic."

"We are, one might say, the wizards of the modern age. The rope, if you please, Master Friendly." The convict tossed one end of the silken cord over, the other still knotted around his waist. "You are sure you can take my weight?"

"Yes." There was indeed a sense of terrible strength about the silent man that lent even Morveer a level of confidence. With the rope secured by a knot of his own devising, he lowered first one soft shoe and then the other into the diamond-shaped opening. He worked his hips through, then his shoulders, and he was inside the bank.

"Lower away." And down he drifted, as swiftly and smoothly as if lowered by a machine. His shoes touched the tiles and he slipped the knot with a jerk of his wrist, slid silently into a shadowy doorway, loaded blow-gun ready in one hand. He was expecting but the single guard within the building, but one should never become blinded by expectations.

Caution first, always.

His eyes rolled up and down the darkened hallway, his skin tingling with the excitement of the work under way. There was no movement. Only silence so complete it seemed almost a pressure against his prickling ears.

He looked up, saw Day's face at the gap and beckoned gently to her. She slid through as nimbly as a circus performer and glided down, their equipment folded around her body in a bandolier of black cloth. When her feet touched the ground she slipped free of the rope and crouched there, grinning.

He almost grinned back, then stopped himself. It would not do to let her know the warm admiration for her talents, judgement and character that had developed during their three years together. It would not do to let her even suspect the depth of his regard. It was when he did so that people inevitably betrayed his trust. His time in the orphanage, his apprenticeship, his marriage, his working life—all were scattered with the most poignant betrayals. Truly his heart bore many wounds. He would keep matters entirely professional, and thus protect them both. Him from her, and her from herself.

"Clear?" she hissed.

"As an empty squares board," he murmured, standing over the stricken guard, "and all according to plan. What do we most despise, after all?"

"Mustard?"

"And?"

"Accidents."

"Correct. There are no such things as happy ones. Get his boots."

With considerable effort they manoeuvred him down the hallway to his desk and into his chair. His head flopped back and he began to snore, long moustache fluttering gently around his lips.

"Ahhhhh, he sleeps like a babe. Props, if you please."

Day handed him an empty spirits bottle and Morveer placed it carefully on the tiles beside the guard's boot. She passed him a half-full bottle, and he removed the stopper and sloshed a generous measure down the front of the guard's studded leather jerkin. Then he placed it carefully on its side by his dangling fingers, spirits leaking out across the tiles in an acrid puddle.

Morveer stepped back and framed the scene with his hands. "The tableau… is prepared. What employer does not suspect his nightwatchman of partaking, against his express instructions, of a measure or two after dark? Observe the slack features, the reek of strong spirits, the loud snoring. Ample grounds, upon his discovery at dawn, for his immediate dismissal. He will protest his innocence, but in the total absence of any evidence" —he rummaged through the guard's hair with his gloved fingers and plucked the spent needle from his scalp—"no further suspicions will be aroused. All perfectly as normal. Except it will not be normal, will it? Oh no. The silent halls of the Westport office… of the Banking House of Valint and Balk… will conceal a deadly secret." He blew out the flame of the guard's lantern, sinking them into deeper darkness. "This way, Day, and do not dither."

They crept together down the hallway, a pair of silent shadows, and stopped beside the heavy door to Mauthis' office. Day's picks gleamed as she bent down to work the lock. It only took a moment for her to turn the tumblers with a meaty clatter, and the door swung silently open.

"Poor locks for a bank," as she slid her picks away.

"They put the good locks where the money is."

"And we're not here to steal."

"Oh no, no, we are rare thieves indeed. We leave gifts behind us." He padded around Mauthis' monstrous desk and swung the heavy ledger open, taking care not to move it so much as a hair from its position. "The solution, if you please."

She handed him the jar, full almost to the brim with thin paste, and he carefully twisted the cork out with a gentle thwop. He used a fine paintbrush for the application. The very tool for an artist of his incalculable talents. The pages crackled as he turned them, giving a flick of the brush to the corners of each and every one.

"You see, Day? Swift, smooth and precise, but with every care. With every care, most of all. What kills most practitioners of our profession?"

"Their own agents."

"Precisely so." With every care, therefore, he swung the ledger closed, its pages already close to dry, slid the paintbrush away and pressed the cork back into the jar.

"Let's go," said Day. "I'm hungry."

"Go?" Morveer's smile widened. "Oh no, my dear, we are far from finished. You must still earn your supper. We have a long night's work ahead of us. A very long… night's… work."

Here."

Shivers nearly jumped clean over the parapet, he was that shocked, lurched round, heart in his mouth. Murcatto crouched behind, grinning, breath leaving a touch of smoke about her shadowy face.

"By the dead but you gave me a scare!" he hissed.

"Better than what those guards would've given you." She crept to the iron ring and tugged at the knot. "You made it up there, then?" More'n a touch of surprise in her voice.

"You ever doubt I'd do it?"

"I thought you'd break your skull, if you even got high enough to fall."

He tapped his head with a finger. "Least vulnerable part o' me. Shake our friends off?"

"Halfway to bloody Lord Sabeldi Street, I did. If I'd known they'd be that easily led I'd have hooked them in the first place."

Shivers grinned. "Well, I'm glad you hooked 'em in the end, or they'd most likely have hooked me."

"Couldn't have that. We've still got a lot of work to do." Shivers wriggled his shoulders, uncomfortable. It was easy to forget at times that the work they were about was killing a man. "Cold, eh?"

He snorted. "Where I come from, this is a summer day." He dragged the cork from the bottle and held it out to her. "This might help keep you warm."

"Well, that's very thoughtful of you." She took a long swallow, and he watched the thin muscles in her neck shifting.

"I'm a thoughtful man, for one out of a gang of hired killers."

"I'll have you know that some hired killers are very nice people." She took another swig, then handed the bottle back. "None of this crew, of course."

"Hell, no, we're shits to a man. Or woman."

"They're in there? Morveer and his little echo?"

"Aye, a while now, I reckon."

"And Friendly with them?"

"He's with them."

"Morveer say how long he'd be?"

"Him, tell me anything? I thought I was the optimist."

They crouched in cold silence, close together by the parapet, looking across at the dark outline of the bank. For some reason he felt very nervy. Even more than you'd expect going about a murder. He stole a sideways glance at her, then didn't look away quite quick enough when she looked at him.

"Not much for us to do but wait and get colder, then," she said.

"Not much, I reckon. Unless you want to cut my hair any shorter."

"I'd be scared to get the scissors out in case you tried to strip."

That brought a laugh from him. "Very good. Reckon that earns you another pull." He held out the bottle.

"I'm quite the humorist, for a woman who hires killers." She came closer to take it. Close enough to give him a kind of tingle in the side that was near her. Close enough that he could feel the breath in his throat all of a sudden, coming quick. He looked away, not wanting to make a fool of himself any more than he'd been doing the last couple of weeks. Heard her tip the bottle, heard her drink. "Thanks again."

"Not a worry. Anything I can do, Chief, just let me know."

When he turned his head she was looking right at him, lips pressed together in a hard line, eyes fixed on his, that way she had, like she was working out how much he was worth. "There is one other thing."

Morveer pushed the last lips of lead into position with consummate delicacy and stowed his glazing tools.

"Will that do?" asked Day.

"I doubt it will deflect a rainstorm, but it will serve until tomorrow. By then I suspect they will have considerably greater worries than a leaking window." He rolled the last smudges of putty away from the glass, then followed his assistant across the rooftop to the parapet. Friendly had already negotiated the cord, a squat shape on the other side of a chasm of empty air. Morveer peered over the edge. Beyond the spikes and the ornamental carvings, the smooth stone pillar dropped vertiginously to the cobbled lane. One of the groups of guards slogged past it, lamps bobbing.

"What about the rope?" Day hissed once they were out of earshot. "When the sun comes up someone will—"

"No detail overlooked." Morveer grinned as he produced the tiny vial from an inside pocket. "A few drops will burn through the knot some time after we have crossed. We need only wait at the far side and reel it in."

As far as could be ascertained by darkness, his assistant appeared unconvinced. "What if it burns more quickly than—"

"It will not."

"Seems like an awful chance, though."

"What do I never take, my dear?"

"Chances, but—"

"You go first, then, by all means."

"You can count on it." Day swung quickly under the rope and swarmed across, hand over hand. It took her no longer than a count of thirty to make it to the other side.

Morveer uncorked the little bottle and allowed a few drops to fall onto the knots. Considering it, he allowed a few more. He had no desire to wait until sunup for the cursed thing to come apart. He allowed the next patrol to pass below, then clambered over the parapet with, it had to be admitted, a good deal less grace than his assistant had displayed. Still, there was no need for undue haste. Caution first, always. He took the rope in his gloved hands, swung beneath it, hooked one shoe over the top, lifted the other—

There was a harsh ripping sound, and the wind blew suddenly cold about his knee.

Morveer peered down. His trouser-leg had caught upon a spike bent upwards well above the others, and torn almost as far as his rump. He thrashed his foot, trying to untangle it, but only succeeded in entrapping it more thoroughly.

"Damn it." Plainly, this had not been part of the plan. Faint smoke was curling now from the balustrade around which the rope was knotted. It appeared the acid was acting more swiftly than anticipated.

"Damn it." He swung himself back to the roof of the bank and perched beside the smoking knot, gripping the rope with one hand. He slid his scalpel from an inside pocket, reached forwards and cut the flapping cloth away from the spike with a few deft strokes. One, two, three and it was almost done, neat as a surgeon. The final stroke and—

"Ah!" He realised with annoyance, then mounting horror, that he had nicked his ankle with the blade. "Damn it!" The edge was tainted with Larync tincture and, since the stuff had always given him a swell of nausea in the mornings, he had allowed his resistance to it to fade. It would not be fatal. Not of itself. But it might cause him to drop off a rope, and he had developed no immunity to a flailing plunge onto hard, hard cobblestones. The irony was bitter indeed. Most practitioners of his profession were killed, after all, by their own agents.

He pulled one glove off with his teeth and fumbled through his many pockets for that particular antidote, gurgling curses around the leather, swaying this way and that as the chill wind gusted up and spread gooseflesh all the way down his bare leg. Tiny tubes of glass rattled against his fingertips, each one etched with a mark that enabled him to identify it by touch.

Under the circumstances, though, the operation was still a testing one. He burped and felt a rush of nausea, a sudden painful shifting in his stomach. His fingers found the right mark. He let the glove fall from his mouth, pulled the phial from his coat with a trembling hand, dragged the cork out with his teeth and sucked up the contents.

He gagged on the bitter extract, spluttered sour spit down onto the faraway cobbles. He clung tight to the rope, fighting dizziness, the black street seeming to tip round and round him. He was a child again, and helpless. He gasped, whimpered, clung on with both hands. As desperately as he had clung to his mother's corpse when they came to take him.

Slowly the antidote had its effect. The dark world steadied, his stomach ceased its mad churning. The lane was beneath him, the sky above, back in their customary positions. His attention was drawn sharply to the knots again, smoking more than ever now and making a slight hissing sound. He could distinctly smell the acrid odour as they burned through.

"Damn it!" He hooked both legs over the rope and set off, pitifully weak from the self-administered dose of Larync. The air hissed in his throat, tightened now by the unmistakable grip of fear. If the cord burned through before he reached the other side, what then? His guts cramped up and he had to pause for a moment, teeth gritted, wobbling up and down in empty air.

On again, but he was lamentably fatigued. His arms trembled, his hands shuffled, bare palm and bare leg burning from friction. Well beyond halfway now, and creeping onwards. He let his head hang back, sucking in air for one more effort. He saw Friendly, an arm out towards him, big hand no more than a few strides distant. He saw Day, staring, and Morveer wondered with some annoyance if he could detect the barest hint of a smile on her shadowy face.

Then there was a faint ripping sound from the far end of the rope.

The bottom dropped out of Morveer's stomach and he was falling, falling, swinging downwards, chill air whooshing in through his gaping mouth. The side of the crumbling building plunged towards him. He started to let go a mad wail, just like the one he made when they tore him from his mother's dead hand. There was a sickening impact that drove his breath out, cut his scream off, tore the cord from his grasping hands.

There was a crashing, a tearing of wood. He was falling, clawing at the air, mind a cauldron of mad despair, eyes bulging sightless. Falling, arms flailing, legs kicking helplessly, the world reeling around him, wind rushing at his face. Falling, falling… no further than a stride or two. His cheek slapped against floorboards, fragments of wood clattering down around him

"Eh?" he muttered.

He was shocked to find himself snatched around the neck, dragged into the air and rammed against a wall with bowel-loosening force, breath driven out in a long wheeze for the second time in a few moments.

"You! What the fuck?" Shivers. The Northman was, for some reason still obscure, entirely naked. The grubby room behind him was dimly lit by some coals banked up in a grate. Morveer's eyes wandered down to the bed. Murcatto was in it, propped up on her elbows, rumpled shirt hanging open, breasts flattened against her ribs. She peered at him with no more than a mild surprise, as if she'd opened her front door to see a visitor she had not been expecting until later.

Morveer's mind clicked into place. Despite the embarrassment of the position, the residual pulsing of mortal terror and the tingling scratches on his face and hands, he began to chuckle. The rope had snapped ahead of time and, by some freak but hugely welcome chance, he had swung down in a perfect arc and straight through the rotten shutters of one of the rooms in the crumbling house. One had to appreciate the irony.

"It seems there is such a thing as a happy accident after all!" he cackled.

Murcatto squinted over from the bed, eyes somewhat unfocused. She had a set of curious scars, he noticed, following the lines of her ribs on one side.

"Why you smoking?" she croaked.

Morveer's eyes slid to the husk-pipe on the boards beside the bed, a ready explanation for her lack of surprise at the unorthodox manner of his entrance. "You are confused, but it is easy to see why. I believe it is you that has been smoking. That stuff is absolute poison, you realise. Absolute—"

Her arm stretched out, limp finger pointing towards his chest. "Smoking, idiot." He looked down. A few acrid wisps were curling up from his shirt.

"Damn it!" he squeaked as Shivers took a shocked step back and let him fall. He tore his jacket off, fragments of glass from the shattered acid bottle tinkling to the boards. He scrabbled with his shirt, the front of which had begun to bubble, ripped it open and flung it on the floor. It lay there, smoking noticeably and filling the grubby chamber with a foul reek. The three of them stared at it, by a turn of fate that surely no one could have anticipated, all now at least half-naked.

"My apologies." Morveer cleared his throat. "Plainly, this was not part of the plan."

Repaid in Full

Monza frowned at the bed, and she frowned at Shivers in it. He lay flat out, blanket rumpled across his stomach. One big long arm hung off the edge of the mattress, white hand lying limp on its back against the floorboards. One big foot stuck from under the blanket, black crescents of dirt under the nails. His face was turned towards her, peaceful as a child's, eyes shut, mouth slightly open. His chest, and the long scar across it, rose and fell gently with his breathing.

By the light of day, it all seemed like a serious error.

She tossed the coins at Shivers and they jingled onto his chest and scattered across the bed. He jerked awake, blinking around.

"Whassis?" He stared blearily down at the silver stuck to his chest.

"Five scales. More than a fair price for last night."

"Eh?" He pushed sleep out of his eye with two fingers. "You're paying me?" He shoved the coins off his skin and onto the blanket. "I feel something like a whore."

"Aren't you one?"

"No. I've got some pride."

"So you'll kill a man for money, but you won't suck a cunt for it?" She snorted. "There's morals for you. You want my advice? Take the five and stick to killing in future. That you've got a talent for."

Shivers rolled over and dragged the blanket up around his neck. "Shut the door on your way out, eh? It's dreadful cold in here."

The blade of the Calvez slashed viciously at the air. Cuts left and right, high and low. She spun in the far corner of the courtyard, boots shuffling across the broken paving, lunging with her left arm, bright point darting out chest-high. Her quick breath smoked around her face, shirt stuck to her back in spite of the cold.

Her legs were a little better each day. They still burned when she moved quickly, were stiff as old twigs in the morning and ached like fury by evening time, but at least she could almost walk without grimacing. There was some spring in her knees even, for all their clicking. Her shoulder and her jaw were loosening. The coins under her scalp barely hurt when she pressed them.

Her right hand was as ruined as ever, though. She tucked Benna's sword under her arm and pulled the glove off. Even that was painful. The twisted thing trembled, weak and pale, the scar from Gobba's wire lurid purple round the side. She winced as she forced the crooked fingers closed, little one still stubbornly straight. The thought that she'd be cursed with this hideous liability for the rest of her life brought on a sudden rush of fury.

"Bastard," she hissed through gritted teeth, and dragged the glove back on. She remembered her father giving her a sword to hold for the first time, no more than eight years old. She remembered how heavy it had felt, how strange and unwieldy in her right hand. It hardly felt much better now, in her left. But she had no choice but to learn.

To start from nothing, if that was what it took.

She faced a rotten shutter, blade out straight towards it, wrist turned flat to the ground. She snapped out three jabs and the point tore three slats from the frame, one above the other. She snarled as she twisted her wrist and slashed downwards, splitting it clean in two, splinters flying.

Better. Better each day.

"Magnificent. " Morveer stood in a doorway, a few fresh scratches across one cheek. "There is not a shutter in Styria that will dare oppose us." He ambled forwards into the courtyard, hands clasped behind him. "I daresay you were even more impressive when your right hand still functioned."

"I'll worry about that."

"A great deal, I should think. Recovered from your… exertions of last night with our Northern acquaintance?"

"My bed, my business. And you? Recovered from your little drop through my window?"

"No more than a scratch or two."

"Shame." She slapped the Calvez back into its sheath. "Is it done?"

"It will be."

"He's dead?"

"He will be."

"When?"

Morveer grinned up at the square of pale sky above them. "Patience is the first of virtues, General Murcatto. The bank has only just opened its doors, and the agent I used takes some time to work. Jobs done well are rarely done quickly."

"But it will work?"

"Oh, absolutely so. It will be… masterful."

"I want to see it."

"Of course you do. Even in my hands the science of death is never utterly precise, but I would judge about an hour's time to be the best moment. I strongly caution you to touch nothing within the bank, however." He turned away, wagging one finger at her over his shoulder. "And take care you are not recognised. Our work together is only just commencing."

The banking hall was busy. Dozens of clerks worked at heavy desks, bent over great ledgers, their pens scratching, rattling, scratching again. Guards stood bored about the walls, watching half-heartedly or not watching at all. Monza weaved between primped and pretty groups of wealthy men and women, slid between their oiled and bejewelled rows, Shivers shouldering his way through after. Merchants and shopkeepers and rich men's wives, bodyguards and lackeys with strongboxes and money bags. As far as she could tell it was an ordinary day's monumental profits for the Banking House of Valint and Balk.

The place Duke Orso got his money.

Then she caught a glimpse of a lean man with a hook nose, speaking to a group of fur-trimmed merchants and with a clerk flanking him on either side, ledgers tucked under their arms. That vulture face sprang from the crowds like a spark in a cellar, and set a fire in her. Mauthis. The man she'd come to Westport to kill. And it hardly needed saying that he looked very much alive.

Somebody called out over in the corner of the hall but Monza's eyes were fixed ahead, jaw suddenly clenched tight. She started to push through the queues towards Orso's banker.

"What're you doing?" Shivers hissed in her ear, but she shook him off, shoved a man in a tall hat out of her way.

"Give him some air!" somebody shouted. People were looking around, muttering, craning up to see something, the orderly queues starting to dissolve. Monza kept going, closer now, and closer. Closer than was sensible. She had no idea what she'd do when she got to Mauthis. Bite him? Say hello? She was less than ten paces away—as near as she'd been when he peered down at her dying brother.

Then the banker gave a sudden wince. Monza slowed, easing carefully through the crowd. She saw Mauthis double over as if he'd been punched in the stomach. He coughed, and again—hard, retching coughs. He took a lurching step and clutched at the wall. People were moving all around, the place echoing with curious whispers, the odd strange shout.

"Stand back!"

"What is it?"

"Turn him over!"

Mauthis' eyes shimmered with wet, veins bulging from his thin neck. He clawed at one of the clerks beside him, knees buckling. The man staggered, guiding his master slowly to the floor.

"Sir? Sir?"

An atmosphere of breathless fascination seemed to have gripped the whole hall, teetering on the brink of fear. Monza edged closer, peering over a velvet-clad shoulder. Mauthis' starting eyes met hers, and they stared straight at each other. His face was stretched tight, skin turning red, fibres of muscle standing rigid. One quivering arm raised up towards her, one bony finger pointing.

"Muh," he mouthed. "Muh… Muh…"

His eyes rolled back and he started to dance, legs flopping, back arching, jerking madly around on the marble tiles like a landed fish. The men about him stared down, horrified. One of them was doubled up by a sudden coughing fit. People were shouting all over the banking hall.

"Help!"

"Over here!"

"Somebody!"

"Some air, I said!"

A clerk lurched up from his desk, chair clattering over, hands at his throat. He staggered a few steps, face turning purple, then crashed down, a shoe flying off one kicking foot. One of the clerks beside Mauthis was on his knees, fighting for breath. A woman gave a piercing scream.

"By the dead—" came Shivers' voice.

Pink foam frothed from the banker's wide-open mouth. His thrashing settled to a twitching. Then to nothing. His body sagged back, empty eyes goggling up over Monza's shoulder, towards the grinning busts ranged round the walls.

Two dead. Five left.

"Plague!" somebody shrieked, and as if a general had roared for the charge on a battlefield, the place was plunged instantly into jostling chaos. Monza was nearly barged over as one of the merchants who'd been talking to Mauthis turned to run. Shivers stepped up and gave him a shove, sent him sprawling on top of the banker's corpse. A man with skewed eyeglasses clutched at her, bulging eyes horribly magnified in his pink face. She punched on an instinct with her right hand, gasped as her twisted knuckles jarred against his cheek and sent a jolt of pain to her shoulder, chopped at him with the heel of her left and knocked him over backwards.

No plague spreads quicker than panic, Stolicus wrote, or is more deadly.

The veneer of civilisation was peeled suddenly away. The rich and self-satisfied were transformed into animals. Those in the way were flung aside. Those that fell were given no mercy. She saw a fat merchant punch a well-dressed lady in the face and she collapsed with a squeal, was kicked to the wall, wig twisted across her bloody face. She saw an old man huddled on the floor, trampled by the mob. A strongbox banged down, silver coins spilling, ignored, kicked across the floor by milling shoes. It was like the madness of a rout. The screaming and the jostling, the swearing and the stink of fear, the scattering of bodies and broken junk.

Someone shoved at her and she lashed out with an elbow, felt something crunch, spots of blood on her cheek. She was caught up by the crush like a twig in a river, jabbed at, twisted, torn and tangled. She was carried snarling through the doorway and into the street, feet scarcely touching the ground, people pressing, thrashing, wriggling up against her. She was swept sideways, slipped from the steps, twisted her leg on the cobbles and lurched against the wall of the bank.

She felt Shivers grab her by the elbow and half-lead, half-carry her off. A couple of the bank's guards stood, trying ineffectually to stem the flow of panic with the hafts of their halberds. There was a sudden surge in the crowd and Monza was carried back. Between flailing arms she saw a man quivering on the ground, coughing red foam onto the cobbles. A wall of horrified, fascinated faces twitched and bobbed as people fought to get away from him.

Monza felt dizzy, mouth sour. Shivers strode beside her, breathing fast through his nose, glancing back over his shoulder. They rounded the corner of the bank and made for the crumbling house, the maddened clamour fading behind them. She saw Morveer, standing at a high window like a wealthy patron enjoying the theatre from his private box. He grinned down, and waved with one hand.

Shivers growled something in his own tongue as he heaved the heavy door open and Monza came after him. She snatched up the Calvez and made straight for the stairs, taking them two at a time, hardly noticing the burning in her knees.

Morveer still stood by the window when she got there, his assistant cross-legged on the table, munching her way through half a loaf of bread. "There seems to be quite the ruckus down in the street!" The poisoner turned into the room, but his smile vanished as he saw Monza's face. "What? He's alive?"

"He's dead. Dozens of them are."

Morveer's eyebrows went up by the slightest fraction. "An establishment of that nature, the books will be in constant movement around the building. I could not take the risk that Mauthis would end up working from another. What do I never take, Day?"

"Chances. Caution first, always." Day tore off another mouthful of bread, and mumbled around it. "That's why we poisoned them all. Every ledger in the place."

"This isn't what we agreed," Monza growled.

"I rather think it is. Whatever it takes, you told me, no matter who gets killed along the way. Those are the only terms under which I work. Anything else allows for misunderstandings." Morveer looked somewhat puzzled, somewhat amused. "I am well aware that some individuals are uncomfortable with wholesale murder, but I certainly never anticipated that you, Monzcarro Murcatto, the Serpent of Talins, the Butcher of Caprile, would be one. You need not worry about the money. Mauthis will cost you ten thousand, as we agreed. The rest are free of—"

"It's not a question of money, fool!"

"Then what is the question? I undertook a piece of work, as commissioned by you, and was successful, so how can I be at fault? You say you never had in mind any such result, and did not undertake the work yourself, so how can you be at fault? The responsibility seems to drop between us, then, like a turd straight from a beggar's arse and into an open sewer, to be lost from sight forever and cause nobody any further discomfort. An unfortunate misunderstanding, shall we say? An accident? As if a sudden wind blew up, and a great tree fell, and caught every little insect in that place and squashed… them… dead!"

"Squashed 'em," chirped Day.

"If your conscience nags at you—"

Monza felt a stab of anger, gloved hand gripping the sword's scabbard painfully hard, twisted bones clicking as they shifted. "Conscience is an excuse not to do what needs doing. This is about keeping control. We'll stick to one dead man at a time from now on."

"Will we indeed?"

She took a sudden stride into the room and the poisoner edged away, eyes flickering nervously down to her sword, then back. "Don't test me. Not ever. One… at a time… I said."

Morveer carefully cleared his throat. "You are the client, of course. We will proceed as you dictate. There really is no cause to get angry."

"Oh, you'll know if I get angry."

He gave a pained sigh. "What is the tragedy of our profession, Day?"

"No appreciation." His assistant popped the last bit of crust into her mouth.

"Precisely so. Come, we will take a turn about the city while our employer decides which name on her little list next merits our attentions. The atmosphere in here feels somewhat tainted by hypocrisy." He marched out with an air of injured innocence. Day looked up from under her sandy lashes, shrugged, stood, brushed crumbs from the front of her shirt, then followed her master.

Monza turned back to the window. The crowds had mostly broken up. Groups of nervous city watch had appeared, blocking off the street before the bank, keeping a careful distance from the still shapes sprawled out on the cobbles. She wondered what Benna would've said to this. Told her to calm down, most likely. Told her to think it through.

She grabbed a chest with both hands and snarled as she flung it across the room. It smashed into the wall, sending lumps of plaster flying, clattered down and sagged open, clothes spilling out across the floor.

Shivers stood there in the doorway, watching her. "I'm done."

"No!" She swallowed. "No. I still need your help."

"Standing up and facing a man, that's one thing… but this—"

"The rest will be different. I'll see to it."

"Nice, clean murders? I doubt it. You set your mind to killing, it's hard to pick the number of the dead." Shivers slowly shook his head. "Morveer and his fucking like might be able to step away from it and smile, but I can't."

"So what?" She walked slowly to him, the way you might walk to a skittish horse, trying to stop it bolting with your eyes. "Back to the North with fifty scales for the journey? Grow your hair and go back to bad shirts and blood on the snow? I thought you had pride. I thought you wanted to be better than that."

"That's right. I wanted to be better."

"You can be. Stick. Who knows? Maybe you can save some lives, that way." She laid her left hand gently on his chest. "Steer me down the righteous path. Then you can be good and rich at once."

"I'm starting to doubt a man can be both."

"Help me. I have to do this… for my brother."

"You sure? The dead are past helping. Vengeance is for you."

"For me then!" She forced her voice to drop soft again. "There's nothing I can do to change your mind?"

His mouth twisted. "Going to toss me another five, are you?"

"I shouldn't have done that." She slid her hand up, traced the line of his jaw, trying to judge the right words, pitch the right bargain. "You didn't deserve it. I lost my brother, and he's all I had. I don't want to lose someone else…" She let it hang in the air.

There was a strange look in Shivers' eye, now. Part angry, part hungry, part ashamed. He stood there silent for a long moment, and she felt the muscles clenching and unclenching on the side of his face.

"Ten thousand," he said.

"Six."

"Eight."

"Done." She let her hand fall, and they stared at each other. "Get packed, we leave within the hour."

"Right." He slunk guiltily out of the door without meeting her eye and left her there, alone.

And that was the trouble with good men. Just so damned expensive.