Best Served Cold

Not two weeks later, men came over the border looking to even the tally, and they hanged old Destort and his wife, and burned the mill. A week after that his sons set out for vengeance, and Monza took down her father's sword and went with them, Benna snivelling along behind. She was glad to go. She had lost the taste for farming.

They left the valley to settle a score, and for two years they did not stop. Others joined them, men who had lost their work, their farms, their families. Before too long it was them burning crops, breaking into farmhouses, taking what they could find. Before too long it was them doing the hangings. Benna grew up quickly, and sharpened to a merciless edge. What other choice? They avenged killings, then thefts, then slights, then the rumours of slights. There was war, so there was never any shortage of wrongs to avenge.

Then, at the end of summer, Talins and Musselia made peace with nothing gained on either side but corpses. A man with a gold-edged cloak rode into the valley with soldiers behind him and forbade reprisals. Destort's sons and the rest split up, took their spoils with them, went back to what they had been doing before the madness started or found new madness to take a hand in. By then, Monza's taste for farming had grown back.

They made it as far as the village.

A vision of martial splendour stood at the edge of the broken fountain in a breastplate of shining steel, a sword hilt set with glinting gemstones at his hip. Half the valley had gathered to listen to him speak.

"My name is Nicomo Cosca, captain of the Company of the Sun—a noble brotherhood fighting with the Thousand Swords, greatest mercenary brigade in Styria! We have a Paper of Engagement from the young Duke Rogont of Ospria and are looking for men! Men with experience of war, men with courage, men with a love of adventure and a taste for money! Are any of you sick of grubbing in the mud for a living? Do any of you hope for something better? For honour? For glory? For riches? Join us!"

"We could do that," Benna hissed.

"No," said Monza, "I'm done with fighting."

"There will be little fighting!" shouted Cosca, as if he could guess her thoughts. "That I promise you! And what there is you will be well paid for thrice over! A scale a week, plus shares of booty! And there will be plenty of booty, lads, believe me! Our cause is just… or just enough, and victory is a certainty."

"We could do that!" hissed Benna. "You want to go back to tossing mud? Broken down tired every night and dirt under your fingernails? I won't!"

Monza thought of the work she would have just to clear the upper field, and how much she might make from doing it. A line had formed of men keen to join the Company of the Sun, beggars and farmers mostly. A black-skinned notary took their names down in a ledger.

Monza shoved past them.

"I am Monzcarro Murcatto, daughter of Jappo Murcatto, and this is my brother Benna, and we are fighters. Can you find work for us in your company?"

Cosca frowned at her, and the black-skinned man shook his head. "We need men with experience of war. Not women and boys." He tried to move her away with his arm.

She would not be moved. "We've experience. More than these scrapings."

"I've work for you," said one of the farmers, made bold by signing his mark on the paper. "How about you suck my cock?" He laughed at that. Until Monza knocked him down in the mud and made him swallow half his teeth with the heel of her boot.

Nicomo Cosca watched this methodical display with one eyebrow slightly raised. "Sajaam, the Paper of Engagement. Does it specify men, exactly? What is the wording?"

The notary squinted at a document. "Two hundred cavalry and two hundred infantry, those to be persons well equipped and of quality. Persons is all it says."

"And quality is such a vague term. You, girl! Murcatto! You are hired, and your brother too. Make your marks."

She did so, and so did Benna, and as simply as that they were soldiers of the Thousand Swords. Mercenaries. The farmer clutched at Monza's leg.

"My teeth."

"Pick through your shit for them," she said.

Nicomo Cosca, famed soldier of fortune, led his new hirings from the village to the sound of a merry pipe, and they camped under the stars that night, gathered round fires in the darkness, talking of making it rich in the coming campaign.

Monza and Benna huddled together with their blanket around their shoulders. Cosca came out of the murk, firelight glinting on his breastplate. "Ah! My war-children! My lucky mascots! Cold, eh?" He swept his crimson cloak off and tossed it down to them. "Take this. Might keep the frost from your bones."

"What d'you want for it?"

"Take it with my compliments, I have another."

"Why?" she grunted, suspicious.

" ‘A captain looks first to the comfort of his men, then to his own,' Stolicus said."

"Who's he?" asked Benna.

"Stolicus? Why, the greatest general of history!" Monza stared blankly at him. "An emperor of old. The most famous of emperors."

"What's an emperor?" asked Benna.

Cosca raised his brows. "Like a king, but more so. You should read this." He slid something from a pocket and pressed it into Monza's hand. A small book, with a red cover scuffed and scarred.

"I will." She opened it and frowned at the first page, waiting for him to go.

"Neither of us can read," said Benna, before Monza could shut him up.

Cosca frowned, twisting one corner of his waxed moustache between finger and thumb. Monza was waiting for him to tell them to go back to the farm, but instead he lowered himself slowly and sat cross-legged beside them. "Children, children." He pointed at the page. "This here is the letter ‘A.'"

Fogs and Whispers

Sipani smelled of rot and old salt water, of coal smoke, shit and piss, of fast living and slow decay. Made Shivers feel like puking, though the smell mightn't have mattered so much if he could've seen his hand before his face. The night was dark, the fog so thick that Monza, walking close enough to touch, weren't much more than a ghostly outline. His lamp scarcely lit ten cobbles in front of his boots, all shining with cold dew. More than once he'd nearly stepped straight off into water. It was easily done. In Sipani, water was hiding round every corner.

Angry giants loomed up, twisted, changed to greasy buildings and crept past. Figures charged from the mist like the Shanka did at the Battle of Dunbrec, then turned out to be bridges, railings, statues, carts. Lamps swung on poles at corners, torches burned by doorways, lit windows glowed, hanging in the murk, treacherous as marsh-lights. Shivers would set his course by one set, squinting through the mist, only to see a house start drifting. He'd blink, and shake his head, the ground shifting dizzily under his boots. Then he'd realise it was a barge, sliding past in the water beside the cobbled way, bearing its lights off into the night. He'd never liked cities, fog or salt water. The three together were like a bad dream.

"Bloody fog," Shivers muttered, holding his lamp higher, as though that helped. "Can't see a thing."

"This is Sipani," Monza tossed over her shoulder. "City of Fogs. City of Whispers."

The chill air was full of strange sounds, alright. Everywhere the slap, slop of water, the creaking of ropes as rowing boats squirmed on the shifting canals. Bells tolling in the darkness, folk calling out, all kinds of voices. Prices. Offers. Warnings. Jokes and threats spilling over each other. Dogs barked, cats hissed, rats skittered, birds croaked. Snatches of music, lost in the mist. Ghostly laughter fluttered past on the other side of the seething water, lamps bobbing through the gloom as some revel wended into the night from tavern, to brothel, to gambling den, to smoke-house. Made Shivers' head spin, and left him sicker than ever. Felt like he'd been sick for weeks. Ever since Westport.

Footsteps echoed from the darkness and Shivers pressed himself against the wall, right hand on the haft of the hatchet tucked in his coat. Men loomed up and away, brushing past him. Women too, one holding a hat to her piled-up hair as she ran. Devil faces, smeared with drunken smiles, reeling past in a flurry and gone into the night, mist curling behind their flapping cloaks.

"Bastards," hissed Shivers after them, letting go his axe and peeling himself away from the sticky wall. "Lucky I didn't split one of 'em."

"Get used to it. This is Sipani. City of Revels. City of Rogues."

Rogues were in long supply, alright. Men slouched around steps, on corners, beside bridges, dishing out hard looks. Women too, black outlines in doorways, lamps glowing behind, some of 'em hardly dressed in spite of the cold. "A scale!" one called at him from a window, letting one thin leg dangle in the murk. "For a scale you get the night of your life! Ten bits then! Eight!"

"Selling themselves," Shivers grunted.

"Everyone's selling themselves," came Monza's muffled voice. "This is—"

"Yes, yes. This is fucking Sipani."

Monza stopped and he nearly walked into her. She pushed her hood back and squinted at a narrow doorway in a wall of crumbling brickwork. "This is it."

"You take a man to all the finest places, eh?"

"Maybe later you'll get the tour. For now we've got business. Look dangerous."

"Right y'are, Chief." Shivers stood up tall and fixed his hardest frown. "Right y'are."

She knocked, and not long after the door wobbled open. A woman stared out from a dim-lit hallway, long and lean as a spider. She had a way of standing, hips loose and tilted to one side, arm up on the doorframe, one thin finger tapping at the wood. Like the fog was hers, and the night, and them too. Shivers brought his lamp up a touch closer. A hard, sharp face with a knowing smile, spattered with freckles, short red hair sprouting all ways from her head.

"Shylo Vitari?" asked Monza.

"You'll be Murcatto, then."

"That's right."

"Death suits you." She narrowed her eyes at Shivers. Cold eyes, with a hint of a cruel joke in 'em. "Who's your man?"

He spoke for himself. "Name's Caul Shivers, and I'm not hers."

"No?" She grinned at Monza. "Whose is he, then?"

"I'm my own."

She gave a sharp laugh at that. Seemed everything about her had an edge on it. "This is Sipani, friend. Everyone belongs to someone. Northman, eh?"

"That a problem?"

"Got tossed down a flight of stairs by one once. Haven't been entirely comfortable around them since. Why Shivers?"

She caught him off balance with that one. "What?"

"Up in the North, the way I heard it, a man earns his name. Great deeds done, and all that. Why Shivers?"

"Er…" The last thing he needed was to look the fool in front of Monza. He was still hoping to make it back into her bed at some point. "Because my enemies shiver with fear when they face me," he lied.

"That so?" Vitari stood back from the door, giving him a mocking grin as he ducked under the low lintel. "You must have some cowardly bloody enemies."

"Sajaam says you know people here," said Monza as the woman led them into a narrow sitting room, barely lit by some smoky coals on a grate.

"I know everyone." She took a steaming pot off the fire. "Soup?"

"Not me," said Shivers, leaning against the wall and folding his arms over his chest. He'd been a lot more careful about hospitality since he met Morveer.

"Nor me," said Monza.

"Suit yourselves." Vitari poured a mug out for herself and sat, folding one long leg over the other, pointed toe of her black boot rocking backwards and forwards.

Monza took the only other chair, wincing a touch as she lowered herself into it. "Sajaam says you can get things done."

"And just what is it that the two of you need doing?"

Monza glanced across at Shivers, and he shrugged back at her. "I hear the King of the Union is coming to Sipani."

"So he is. Seems he's got it in mind that he's the great statesman of the age." Vitari smiled wide, showing two rows of clean, sharp teeth. "He's going to bring peace to Styria."

"Is he now?"

"That's the rumour. He's brought together a conference to negotiate terms, between Grand Duke Orso and the League of Eight. He's got all their leaders coming—those who are still alive, at least, Rogont and Salier at the front. He's got old Sotorius to play host—neutral ground here in Sipani, is the thinking. And he's got his brothers-in-law on their way, to speak for their father."

Monza craned forwards, eager as a buzzard at a carcass. "Ario and Foscar both?"

"Ario and Foscar both."

"They're going to make peace?" asked Shivers, and soon regretted saying anything. The two women each gave him their own special kind of sneer.

"This is Sipani," said Vitari. "All we make here is fog."

"And that's all anyone will be making at this conference, you can depend on that." Monza eased herself back into her chair, scowling. "Fogs and whispers."

"The League of Eight is splitting at the seams. Borletta fallen. Cantain dead. Visserine will be under siege when the weather breaks. No talk's going to change that."

"Ario will sit, and smirk, and listen, and nod. Scatter a little trail of hopes that his father will make peace. Right up until Orso's troops appear outside the walls of Visserine."

Vitari lifted her cup again, narrow eyes on Monza. "And the Thousand Swords alongside them."

"Salier and Rogont and all the rest will know that well enough. They're no fools. Misers and cowards, maybe, but no fools. They're only playing for time to manoeuvre."

"Manoeuvre?" asked Shivers, chewing on the strange word.

"Wriggle," said Vitari, showing him her teeth again. "Orso won't make peace, and the League of Eight aren't looking for it. The only man who's come here hoping for anything but fog is his August Majesty, but they say he's got a talent for self-deception."

"Comes with the crown," said Monza, "but he's nothing to me. Ario and Foscar are my business. What will they be about, other than feeding lies to their brother-in-law?"

"There's going to be a masked ball in honour of the king and queen at Sotorius' palace on the first night of the conference. Ario and Foscar will be there."

"That'll be well guarded," said Shivers, doing his best to keep up. Didn't help that he thought he could hear a child crying somewhere.

Vitari snorted. "A dozen of the best-guarded people in the world, all sharing a room with their bitterest enemies? There'll be more soldiers than at the Battle of Adua, I'll be bound. Hard to think of a spot where the brothers would be less vulnerable."

"What else, then?" snapped Monza.

"We'll see. I'm no friend of Ario's, but I know someone who is. A close, close friend."

Monza's black brows drew in. "Then we should be talking to—"

The door creaked suddenly open and Shivers spun round, hatchet already halfway out.

A child stood in the doorway. A girl maybe eight years old, dressed in a too-long shift with bony ankles and bare feet sticking out the bottom, red hair poking from her head in a tangled mess. She stared at Shivers, then Monza, then Vitari with wide blue eyes. "Mama. Cas is crying."

Vitari knelt down and smoothed the little girl's hair. "Never you mind, baby, I hear. Try and soothe him. I'll be up soon as I can, and sing to you all."

"Alright." The girl gave Shivers another look, and he pushed his axe away, somewhat shamefaced, and tried to make a grin. She backed off and pulled the door shut.

"My boy's got a cough," said Vitari, her voice with its hard edge again. "One gets ill, then they all get ill, then I get ill. Who'd be a mother, eh?"

Shivers lifted his brows. "Can't say I've got the equipment."

"Never had much luck with family," said Monza. "Can you help us?"

Vitari's eyes flickered over to Shivers, and back. "Who else you got along with you?"

"A man called Friendly, as muscle."

"Good, is he?"

"Very," said Shivers, thinking of the two men hacked bloody on the streets of Talins. "Bit strange, though."

"You need to be in this line of work. Who else?"

"A poisoner and his assistant."

"A good one?"

"According to him. Name of Morveer."

"Gah!" Vitari looked as if she'd the taste of piss in her mouth. "Castor Morveer? That bastard's about as trustworthy as a scorpion."

Monza looked back, hard and level. "Scorpions have their uses. Can you help us, I asked?"

Vitari's eyes were two slits, shining in the firelight. "I can help you, but it'll cost. If we can get the job done, something tells me I won't be welcome in Sipani anymore."

"Money isn't a problem. Just as long as you can get us close. You know someone who can help with that?"

Vitari drained her mug, then tossed the dregs hissing onto the coals. "Oh, I know all kinds of people."

The Arts of Persuasion

It was early, and the twisting streets of Sipani were quiet. Monza hunched in a doorway, coat wrapped tight around her, hands wedged under her armpits. She'd been hunched there for an hour at least, steadily getting colder, breathing fog into the foggy air. The edges of her ears and her nostrils tingled unpleasantly. It was a wonder the snot hadn't frozen in her nose. But she could be patient. She had to be.

Nine-tenths of war is waiting, Stolicus wrote, and she felt he'd called it low.

A man wheeled past a barrow heaped with straw, tuneless whistling deadened by the thinning mist, and Monza's eyes slid after him until he became a murky outline and was gone. She wished Benna was with her.

And she wished he'd brought his husk pipe with him.

She shifted her tongue in her dry mouth, trying to push the thought out of her mind, but it was like a splinter under her thumbnail. The painful, wonderful bite at her lungs, the taste of the smoke as she let it curl from her mouth, her limbs growing heavy, the world softening. The doubt, the anger, the fear all leaking away…

Footsteps clapped on wet flagstones and a pair of figures rose out of the gloom. Monza stiffened, fists clenching, pain flashing through her twisted knuckles. A woman in a bright red coat edged with gold embroidery. "Hurry up!" Snapped in a faint Union accent to a man lumbering along behind with a heavy trunk on one shoulder. "I do not mean to be late again—"

Vitari's shrill whistle cut across the empty street. Shivers slid from a doorway, loomed up behind the servant and pinned his arms. Friendly came out of nowhere and sank four heavy punches into his gut before he could even shout, sent him to the cobbles blowing vomit.

Monza heard the woman gasp, caught a glimpse of her wide-eyed face as she turned to run. Before she'd gone a step Vitari's voice echoed out of the gloom ahead. "Carlot dan Eider, unless I'm much mistaken!"

The woman in the red coat backed towards the doorway where Monza was standing, one hand held up. "I have money! I can pay you!"

Vitari sauntered out of the murk, loose and easy as a mean cat in her own garden. "Oh, you'll pay alright. I must say I was surprised when I learned Prince Ario's favourite mistress was in Sipani. I heard you could hardly be dragged from his bedchamber." Vitari herded her towards the doorway and Monza backed off, into the dim corridor, wincing at the sharp pains through her legs as she started to move.

"Whatever the League of Eight are paying, I'll—"

"I don't work for them, and I'm hurt by the assumption. Don't you remember me? From Dagoska? Don't you remember trying to sell the city to the Gurkish? Don't you remember getting caught?" And Monza saw her let something drop and clatter against the cobbles—a cross-shaped blade, dancing and rattling on the end of a chain.

"Dagoska?" Eider's voice had a note of strange terror in it now. "No! I've done everything he asked! Everything! Why would he—"

"Oh, I don't work for the Cripple anymore." Vitari leaned in close. "I've gone freelance."

The woman in the red coat stumbled back over the threshold and into the corridor. She turned and saw Monza waiting, gloved hand slack on the pommel of her sword. She stopped dead, ragged breath echoing from the damp walls. Vitari shut the door behind them, latch dropping with a final-sounding click.

"This way." She gave Eider a shove and she nearly fell over her own coat-tails. "If it please you." Another shove as she found her feet and she sprawled through the doorway on her face. Vitari dragged her up by one arm and Monza followed them slowly into the room beyond, jaw clenched tight.

Like her jaw, the room had seen better days. The crumbling plaster was stained with black mould, bubbling up with damp, the stale air smelled of rot and onions. Day leaned back in one corner, a carefree smile on her face as she buffed a plum the colour of a fresh bruise against her sleeve. She offered it to Eider.

"Plum?"

"What? No!"

"Suit yourself. They're good though."

"Sit." Vitari shoved Eider into the rickety chair that was the only furniture. Usually a good thing, getting the only seat. But not now. "They say history moves in circles but who'd ever have thought we'd meet like this again? It's enough to bring tears to our eyes, isn't it? Yours, anyway."

Carlot dan Eider didn't look like crying any time soon, though. She sat upright, hands crossed in her lap. Surprising composure, under the circumstances. Dignity, almost. She was past the first flush of youth, but a most striking woman still, and everything carefully plucked, painted and powdered to make the best show of it. A necklace of red stones flashed around her throat, gold glittered on her long fingers. She looked more like a countess than a mistress, as out of place in the rotting room as a diamond ring in a rubbish heap.

Vitari prowled slowly around the chair, leaning down to hiss in her ear. "You're looking well. Always did know how to land on your feet. Quite the tumble, though, isn't it? From head of the Guild of Spicers to Prince Ario's whore?"

Eider didn't even flinch. "It's a living. What do you want?"

"Just to talk." Vitari's voice purred low and husky as a lover's. "Unless we don't get the answers we want. Then I'll have to hurt you."

"No doubt you'll enjoy that."

"It's a living." She punched Ario's mistress suddenly in the ribs, hard enough to twist her in the chair. She doubled up, gasping, and Vitari leaned over her, bringing her fist up again. "Another?"

"No!" Eider held her hand up, teeth bared, eyes flickering round the room then back to Vitari. "No… ah… I'll be helpful. Just… just tell me what you need to know."

"Why are you down here, ahead of your lover?"

"To make arrangements for the ball. Costumes, masks, all kinds of—"

Vitari's fist thumped into her side in just the same spot, harder than the first time, the sharp thud echoing off the damp walls. Eider whimpered, arms wrapped around herself, took a shuddering breath then coughed it out, face twisted with pain. Vitari leaned down over her like a black spider over a bound-up fly. "I'm losing patience. Why are you here?"

"Ario's putting on… another kind of celebration… afterwards. For his brother. For his brother's birthday."

"What kind of celebration?"

"The kind for which Sipani is famous." Eider coughed again, turned her head and spat, a few wet specks settling across the shoulder of her beautiful coat.

"Where?"

"At Cardotti's House of Leisure. He's hired the whole place for the night. For him, and for Foscar, and for their gentlemen. He sent me here to make the arrangements."

"He sent his mistress to hire whores?"

Monza snorted. "Sounds like Ario. What arrangements?"

"To find entertainers. To make the place ready. To make sure it's safe. He… trusts me."

"More fool him." Vitari chuckled. "I wonder what he'd do if he knew who you really worked for, eh? Who you really spy for? Our mutual friend at the House of Questions? Our crippled friend from his Majesty's Inquisition? Keeping an eye on Styrian business for the Union, eh? You must have trouble remembering who you're supposed to betray from week to week."

Eider glowered back at her, arms still folded around her battered ribs. "It's a living."

"A dying, if Ario learns the truth. One little note is all it would take."

"What do you want?"

Monza stepped from the shadows. "I want you to help us get close to Ario, and to Foscar. I want you to let us into Cardotti's House of Leisure on the night of this celebration of yours. When it comes to arranging the entertainments, I want you to hire who we say, when we say, how we say. Do you understand?"

Eider's face was very pale. "You mean to kill them?" No one spoke, but the silence said plenty. "Orso will guess I betrayed him! The Cripple will know I betrayed him! There aren't two worse enemies in the Circle of the World! You might as well kill me now!"

"Alright." The blade of the Calvez rang gently as she drew it. Eider's eyes went wide.

"Wait—"

Monza reached out, resting the glinting point of the sword in the hollow between Eider's collarbones, and gently pushed. Ario's mistress arched back over the chair, hands opening and closing helplessly.

"Ah! Ah!" Monza twisted her wrist, steel flashing as the slender blade tilted one way and the other, the point grinding, digging, screwing ever so slowly into Eider's neck. A line of dark blood trickled from the wound it made and crept down her breastbone. Her squealing grew more shrill, more urgent, more terrified. "No! Ah! Please! No!"

"No?" Monza held her there, pinned over the back of the chair. "Not quite ready to die after all? Not many of us are, when it comes to the moment." She slid the Calvez free and Eider rocked forwards, touching one trembling fingertip to her bloody neck, breath coming in ragged gasps.

"You don't understand. It isn't just Orso! It isn't just the Union! They're both backed by the bank. By Valint and Balk. Owned by the bank. The Years of Blood are no more than a sideshow to them. A skirmish. You've no idea whose garden you're pissing in—"

"Wrong." Monza leaned down and made Eider shrink back. "I don't care. There's a difference."

"Now?" asked Day.

"Now."

The girl's hand darted out and pricked Eider's ear with a glinting needle. "Ah!"

Day yawned as she slipped the splinter of metal into an inside pocket. "Don't worry, it's slow-working. You've got at least a week."

"Until what?"

"Until you get sick." Day took a bite out of her plum and juice ran down her chin. "Bloody hell," she muttered, catching it with a fingertip.

"Sick?" breathed Eider.

"Really, really sick. A day after that you'll be deader than Juvens."

"Help us, you get the antidote, and at least the chance to run." Monza rubbed the blood from the point of Benna's sword with gloved thumb and forefinger. "Try and tell anyone what we're planning, here or in the Union, Orso, or Ario, or your friend the Cripple, and…" She slid the blade back into its sheath and slapped the hilt home with a sharp snap. "One way or another, Ario will be short one mistress."

Eider stared round at them, one hand still pressed to her neck. "You evil bitches."

Day gave the plum pit a final suck then tossed it away. "It's a living."

"We're done." Vitari dragged Ario's mistress to her feet by one elbow and started marching her towards the door.

Monza stepped in front of them. "What will you be telling your battered manservant, when he comes round?"

"That… we were robbed?"

Monza held out her gloved hand. Eider's face fell even further. She unclasped her necklace and dropped it into Monza's palm, then followed it with her rings. "Convincing enough?"

"I don't know. You seem like the kind of woman to put up a struggle." Monza punched her in the face. She squawked, stumbled, would've fallen if Vitari hadn't caught her. She looked up, blood leaking from her nose and her split lip, and for an instant she had this strange expression. Hurt, yes. Afraid, of course. But more angry than either one. Like the look Monza had herself, maybe, when they threw her from the balcony.

"Now we're done," she said.

Vitari yanked at Eider's elbow and dragged her out into the hallway, towards the front door, their footsteps scraping against the grubby boards. Day gave a sigh, then pushed herself away from the wall and brushed plaster-dust from her backside. "Nice and neat."

"No thanks to your master. Where is he?"

"I prefer employer, and he said there were some errands he had to run."

"Errands?"

"That a problem?"

"I paid for the master, not the dog."

Day grinned. "Woof, woof. There's nothing Morveer can do that I can't."

"That so?"

"He's getting old. Arrogant. That rope burning through was nearly the death of him, in Westport. I wouldn't want any carelessness like that to interfere with your business. Not for what you're paying. No one worse to have next to you than a careless poisoner."

"You'll get no argument from me on that score."

Day shrugged. "Accidents happen all the time in our line of work. Especially to the old. It's a young person's trade, really." She sauntered out into the corridor, passed Vitari stalking back the other way. The look of glee was long gone from her sharp face, and the swagger with it. She lifted one black boot and shoved the chair angrily away into one corner.

"There's our way in, then," she said.

"Seems so."

"Just what I promised you."

"Just what you promised."

"Ario and Foscar, both together, and a way to get to them."

"A good day's work."

They looked at each other, and Vitari ran her tongue around the inside of her mouth as if it tasted bitter. "Well." She shrugged her bony shoulders. "It's a living."

The Life of the Drinker

A drink, a drink, a drink. Where can a man find a drink?"

Nicomo Cosca, famed soldier of fortune, tottered against the wall of the alley, rooting through his purse yet again with quivering fingers. There was still nothing in it but a tuft of grey fluff. He dug it out, blew it from his fingertips and watched it flutter gently down. All his fortune.

"Bastard purse!" He flung it in the gutter in a feeble rage. Then he thought better of it and had to stoop to pick it up, groaning like an old man. He was an old man. A lost man. A dead man, give or take a final rattle of breath. He sank slowly to his knees, gazing at his broken reflection in the black water gathered between the cobblestones.

He would have given all he owned for the slightest taste of liquor. He owned nothing, it had to be said. But his body was his, still. His hands, which had raised up princes to the heights of power and flung them down again. His eyes, which had surveyed the turning points of history. His lips, which had softly kissed the most celebrated beauties of the age. His itching cock, his aching guts, his rotting neck, he would happily have sold it all for a single measure of grape spirit. But it was hard to see where he would find a buyer.

"I have become myself… an empty purse." He raised his leaden arms imploringly and roared into the murky night. "Someone give me a fucking drink!"

"Stop your mouth, arsehole!" a rough voice called back, and then, with the clatter of shutters closing, the alley plunged into deeper gloom.

He had dined at the tables of dukes. He had sported in the beds of countesses. Cities had trembled at the name of Cosca.

"How did it ever come… to this?" He clambered up, swallowing the urge to vomit. He smoothed his hair back from his throbbing temples, fumbled with the limp ends of his moustaches. He made for the lane with something approaching his famous swagger of old. Out between the ghostly buildings and into a patch of lamplight in the mist, moist night breeze tickling at his sore face. Footsteps approached and Cosca lurched round, blinking.

"Good sir! I find myself temporarily without funds, and wonder whether you would be willing to advance me a small loan until—"

"Away and piss, beggar." The man shoved past, barging him against the wall.

Cosca's skin flushed with greasy outrage. "You address none other than Nicomo Cosca, famed soldier of fortune!" The effect was somewhat spoiled by the brittle cracking of his ravaged voice. "Captain general of the Thousand Swords! Ex-captain general, that is." The man made an obscene gesture as he disappeared into the fog. "I dined… at the beds… of dukes!" Cosca collapsed into a fit of hacking coughs and was obliged to bend over, shaking hands on his shaking knees, aching ribcage going like a creaky bellows.

Such was the life of the drinker. A quarter on your arse, a quarter on your face, a quarter on your knees and the rest of your time bent over. He finally hawked up a great lump of phlegm, and with one last cough blew it spinning from his sore tongue. Would this be his legacy? Spit in a hundred thousand gutters? His name a byword for petty betrayal, avarice and waste? He straightened with a groan of the purest despair, staring up into nothingness, even the stars denied him by Sipani's all-cloaking fog.

"One last chance. That's all I'm asking." He had lost count of the number of last chances he had wasted. "Just one more. God!" He had never believed in God for an instant. "Fates!" He had never believed in Fates either. "Anyone!" He had never believed in anything much beyond the next drink. "Just one… more… chance."

"Alright. One more."

Cosca blinked. "God? Is that… you?"

Someone chuckled. A woman's voice, and a sharp, mocking, most ungodlike sort of a chuckle. "You can kneel if you like, Cosca."

He squinted into the sliding mist, pickled brains spurred into something approaching activity. Someone knowing his name was unlikely to be a good thing. His enemies far outnumbered his friends, and his creditors far outnumbered both. He fished drunkenly for the hilt of his gilded sword, then realised he had pawned it months ago in Ospria and bought a cheap one. He fished drunkenly for the hilt of that instead, then realised he had pawned that one when he first reached Sipani. He let his shaky hand drop. Not much lost. He doubted he could have swung a blade even if he'd had one.

"Who the bloody hell's out there? If I owe you money, make ready" —his stomach lurched and he gave vent to a long, acrid burp—"to die?"

A dark shape rose suddenly from the murk at his side and he spun, tripped over his own feet and went sprawling, head cracking against the wall and sending a blinding flash across his vision.

"So you're alive, still. You are alive, aren't you?" A long, lean woman, a sharp face mostly in shadow, spiky hair tinted orange. His mind fumbled sluggishly to recognition.

"Shylo Vitari, well I never." Not an enemy, perhaps, but certainly not a friend. He propped himself up on one elbow, but from the way the street was spinning, decided that was far enough. "Don't suppose you might consent… to buy a man a drink, might you?"

"Goat's milk?"

"What?"

"I hear it's good for the digestion."

"They always said you had a flint for a heart, but I never thought even you would be so cold as to suggest I drink milk, damn you! Just one more shot of that old grape spirit." A drink, a drink, a drink. "Just one more and I'm done."

"Oh, you're done alright. How long you been drunk this time?"

"I've a notion it was summer when I started. What is it now?"

"Not the same year, that's sure. How much money have you wasted?"

"All there is and more. I'd be surprised if there's a coin in the world that hasn't been through my purse at some point. But I seem to be out of funds right now, so if you could just spare some change—"

"You need to make a change, not spend some."

He drew himself up, as far as his knees at least, and jabbed at his chest with a crabbing finger. "Do you suppose the shrivelled, piss-soaked, horrified better part of me, the part that screams to be released from this torture, doesn't know that?" He gave a helpless shrug, aching body collapsing on itself. "But for a man to change he needs the help of good friends, or, better yet, good enemies. My friends are all long dead, and my enemies, I am forced to admit… have better things to do."

"Not all of us." Another woman's voice, but one that sent a creeping shiver of familiarity down Cosca's back. A figure formed out of the gloom, mist sucked into smoky swirls after her flicking coat-tails.

"No…" he croaked.

He remembered the moment he first laid eyes on her: a wild-haired girl of nineteen with a sword at her hip and a bright stare rich with anger, defiance and the slightest fascinating hint of contempt. There was a hollowness to her face now, a twist of pain about her mouth. The sword hung on the other side, gloved right hand resting slack on the pommel. Her eyes still had that unwavering sharpness, but there was more anger, more defiance and a long stretch more contempt. Who could blame her for that? Cosca was beyond contemptible, and knew it.

He had sworn a thousand times to kill her, of course, if he ever saw her again. Her, or her brother, or Andiche, Victus, Sesaria, Faithful Carpi or any of the other treacherous bastards from the Thousand Swords who had once betrayed him. Stolen his place from him. Sent him fleeing from the battlefield at Afieri with his reputation and his clothes both equally tattered.

He had sworn a thousand times to kill her, but Cosca had broken all manner of oaths in his life, and the sight of her brought no rage. Instead what welled up in him was a mixture of worn-out self-pity, sappy joy and, most of all, piercing shame at seeing in her face how far he had fallen. He felt the ache in his nose, behind his cheeks, tears welling in his stinging eyes. For once he was grateful that they were red as wounds at the best of times. If he wept, no one could tell the difference.

"Monza." He tried to tug his filthy collar straight, but his hands were shaking too badly to manage it. "I must confess I heard you were dead. I was meaning to take revenge, of course—"

"On me or for me?"

He shrugged. "Difficult to remember… I stopped on the way for a drink."

"Smells like it was more than one." There was a hint of disappointment in her face that pricked at his insides almost worse than steel. "I heard you finally got yourself killed in Dagoska."

He managed to lift one arm high enough to wave her words away. "There have always been false reports of my death. Wishful thinking, on the part of my many enemies. Where is your brother?"

"Dead." Her face did not change.

"Well. I'm sorry for that. I always liked the boy." The lying, gutless, scheming louse.

"He always liked you." They had detested each other, but what did it matter now?

"If only his sister had felt as warmly about me, things might be so much different."

" ‘Might be' takes us nowhere. We've all got… regrets."

They looked at each other for a long moment, her standing, him on his knees. Not quite how he had pictured their reunion in his dreams. "Regrets. The cost of the business, Sazine used to tell me."

"Perhaps we should put the past behind us."

"I can hardly remember yesterday," he lied. The past weighed on him like a giant's suit of armour.

"The future, then. I've a job for you, if you'll take it. Reckon you're up to a job?"

"What manner of job?"

"Fighting."

Cosca winced. "You always were far too attached to fighting. How often did I tell you? A mercenary has no business getting involved with that nonsense."

"A sword is for rattling, not for drawing."

"There's my girl. I've missed you." He said it without thinking, had to cough down his shame and nearly coughed up a lung.

"Help him up, Friendly."

A big man had silently appeared while they were talking, not tall but heavyset, with an air of calm strength about him. He hooked Cosca under his elbow and pulled him effortlessly to his feet.

"That's a strong arm and a good deed," he gurgled over a rush of nausea. "Friendly is your name? Are you a philanthropist?"

"A convict."

"I see no reason why a man cannot be both. My thanks in any case. Now if you could just point us in the direction of a tavern—"

"The taverns will have to wait for you," said Vitari. "No doubt causing a slump in the wine industry. The conference begins in a week and we need you sober."

"I don't do sober anymore. Sober hurts. Did someone say conference?"

Monza was still watching him with those disappointed eyes. "I need a good man. A man with courage and experience. A man who won't mind crossing Grand Duke Orso." The corner of her mouth curled up. "You're as close as we could find at short notice."

Cosca clung to the big man's arm while the misty street tipped around. "From that list, I have… experience?"

"I'll take one of four, if he needs money too. You need money, don't you, old man?"

"Shit, yes. But not as much as I need a drink."

"Do the job right and we'll see."

"I accept." He found he was standing tall, looking down at Monza now, chin held high. "We should have a Paper of Engagement, just like the old days. Written in swirly script, with all the accoutrements, the way Sajaam used to write them. Signed with red ink and… where can a man find a notary this time of night?"

"Don't worry. I'll take your word."

"You must be the only person in Styria who would ever say that to me. But as you please." He pointed decisively down the street. "This way, my man, and try to keep up." He boldly stepped forwards, his leg buckled and he squawked as Friendly caught him.

"Not that way," came the convict's slow, deep voice. He slid one hand under Cosca's arm and half-led him, half-carried him in the opposite direction.

"You are a gentleman, sir," muttered Cosca.

"I am a murderer."

"I see no reason why a man cannot be both…" Cosca strained to focus on Vitari, loping along up ahead, then at the side of Friendly's heavy face. Strange companions. Outsiders. Those no one else would find a use for. He watched Monza walking, the purposeful stride he remembered from long ago turned slightly crooked. Those who were willing to cross Grand Duke Orso. And that meant madmen, or those with no choices. Which was he?

The answer was in easy reach. There was no reason a man could not be both.

Left Out

Friendly's knife flashed and flickered, twenty strokes one way and twenty the other, grazing the whetstone with a sharpening kiss. There was little worse than a blunt knife and little better than a sharp one, so he smiled as he tested the edge and felt that cold roughness against his fingertip. The blade was keen.

"Cardotti's House of Leisure is an old merchant's palace," Vitari was saying, voice chilly calm. "Wood-built, like most of Sipani, round three sides of a courtyard with the Eighth Canal right at its rear."

They had set up a long table in the kitchen at the back of the warehouse, and the six of them sat about it now. Murcatto and Shivers, Day and Morveer, Cosca and Vitari. On the table stood a model of a large wooden building on three sides of a courtyard. Friendly judged that it was one thirty-sixth the size of the real Cardotti's House of Leisure, though it was hard to be precise, and he liked very much to be precise.

Vitari's fingertip trailed along the windows on one side of the tiny building. "There are kitchens and offices on the ground floor, a hall for husk and another for cards and dice." Friendly pressed his hand to his shirt pocket and was comforted to feel his own dice nuzzling against his ribs. "Two staircases in the rear corners. On the first floor thirteen rooms where guests are entertained—"

"Fucked," said Cosca. "We're all adults here, let's call it what it is." His bloodshot eyes flickered up to the two bottles of wine on the shelf, then back. Friendly had noticed they did that a lot.

Vitari's finger drifted up towards the model's roof. "Then, on the top floor, three large suites for the… fucking of the most valued guests. They say the Royal Suite in the centre is fit for an emperor."

"Then Ario might just consider it fit for himself," growled Murcatto.

The group had grown from five to seven, so Friendly cut each of the two loaves into fourteen slices, the blade hissing through the crust and sending up puffs of flour dust. There would be twenty-eight slices in all, four slices each. Murcatto would eat less, but Day would make up for it. Friendly hated to leave a slice of bread uneaten.

"According to Eider, Ario and Foscar will have three or four dozen guests, some of them armed but not keen to fight, as well as six bodyguards."

"She telling the truth?" Shivers' heavy accent.

"Chance may play a part, but she won't lie to us."

"Keeping charge o' that many… we'll need more fighters."

"Killers," interrupted Cosca. "Again, let's call them what they are."

"Twenty, maybe," came Murcatto's hard voice, "as well as you three."

Twenty-three. An interesting number. Heat kissed the side of Friendly's face as he unhooked the door of the old stove and pulled it creaking open. Twenty-three could be divided by no other number, except one. No parts, no fractions. No half-measures. Not unlike Murcatto herself. He hauled the big pot out with a cloth around his hands. Numbers told no lies. Unlike people.

"How do we get twenty men inside without being noticed?"

"It's a revel," said Vitari. "There'll be entertainers. And we'll provide them."

"Entertainers?"

"This is Sipani. Every other person in the city is an entertainer or a killer. Shouldn't be too difficult to find a few who are both."

Friendly was left out of the planning, but he did not mind. Sajaam had asked him to do what Murcatto said, and that was the end of it. He had learned long ago that life became much easier if you ignored what was not right before you. For now the stew was his only concern.

He dipped in his wooden spoon and took a taste, and it was good. He rated it forty-one out of fifty. The smell of cooking, the sight of the steam rising, the sound of the fizzing logs in the stove, it all put him in comforting mind of the kitchens in Safety. Of the stews, and soups, and porridge they used to make in the great vats. Long ago, back when there was an infinite weight of comforting stone always above his head, and the numbers added, and things made sense.

"Ario will want to drink for a while," Murcatto was saying, "and gamble, and show off to his idiots. Then he'll be brought up to the Royal Suite."

Cosca split a crack-lipped grin. "Where women will be waiting for him, I take it?"

"One with black hair and one with red." Murcatto exchanged a hard look with Vitari.

"A surprise fit for an emperor," chuckled Cosca, wetly.

"When Ario's dead, which will be quickly, we'll move next door and pay Foscar the same kind of visit." Murcatto shifted her scowl to Morveer. "They'll have brought guards upstairs to watch things while they're busy. You and Day can handle them."

"Can we indeed?" The poisoner took a brief break from sneering at his fingernails. "A fit purpose for our talents, I am sure."

"Try not to poison half the city this time. We should be able to kill the brothers without raising any unwanted attention, but if something goes wrong, that's where the entertainers come in."

The old mercenary jabbed at the model with a quivery finger. "Take the courtyard first, the gaming and smoking halls, and from there secure the staircases. Disarm the guests and round them up. Politely, of course, and in the best taste. Keep control."

"Control." Murcatto's gloved forefinger stabbed the tabletop. "That's the word I want at the front of your tiny minds. We kill Ario, we kill Foscar. If any of the rest make trouble, you do what you have to, but keep the murder to a minimum. There'll be trouble enough for us afterwards without a bloodbath. You all got that?"

Cosca cleared his throat. "Perhaps a drink would help me to commit it all to—"

"I've got it." Shivers spoke over him. "Control, and as little blood as possible."

"Two murders." Friendly set the pot down in the middle of the table. "One and one, and no more. Food." And he began to ladle portions out into the bowls.

He would have liked very much to ensure that everyone had the exact same number of pieces of meat. The same number of pieces of carrot and onion too, the same number of beans. But by the time he had counted them out the food would have been cold, and he had learned that most people found that level of precision upsetting. It had led to a fight in the mess in Safety once, and Friendly had killed two men and cut a hand from another. He had no wish to kill anyone now. He was hungry. So he satisfied himself by giving each one of them the same number of ladles of stew, and coped with the deep sense of unease it left him.

"This is good," gurgled Day, around a mouthful. "This is excellent. Is there more?"

"Where did you learn to cook, my friend?" Cosca asked.

"I spent three years in the kitchens in Safety. The man who taught me used to be head cook to the Duke of Borletta."

"What was he doing in prison?"

"He killed his wife, and chopped her up, and cooked her in a stew, and ate it."

There was quiet around the table. Cosca noisily cleared his throat. "No one's wife in this stew, I trust?"

"The butcher said it was lamb, and I've no reason to doubt him." Friendly picked up his fork. "No one sells human meat that cheap."

There was one of those uncomfortable silences that Friendly always seemed to produce when he said more than three words at once. Then Cosca gave a gurgling laugh. "Depends on the circumstances. Reminds me of when we found those children, do you remember, Monza, after the siege at Muris?" Her scowl grew even harder than usual, but there was no stopping him. "We found those children, and we wanted to sell them on to some slavers, but you thought we could—"

"Of course!" Morveer almost shrieked. "Hilarious! What could possibly be more amusing than orphan children sold into slavery?"

There was another awkward silence while the poisoner and the mercenary gave each other a deadly glare. Friendly had seen men exchange that very look in Safety. When new blood came in, and prisoners were forced into a cell together. Sometimes two men would just catch each other wrong. Hate each other from the moment they met. Too different. Or too much the same. Things were harder to predict out here, of course. But in Safety, when you saw two men look at each other that way you knew, sooner or later, there would be blood.

A drink, a drink, a drink. Cosca's eyes lurched from that preening louse Morveer and down to the poisoner's full wine glass, around the glasses of the others, reluctantly back to his own sickening mug of water and finally to the wine bottle on the table, where his gaze was gripped as if by burning pincers. A quick lunge and he could have it. How much could he swallow before they wrestled it from his hands? Few men could drink faster when circumstances demanded—

Then he noticed Friendly watching him, and there was something in the convict's sad, flat eyes that made him think again. He was Nicomo Cosca, damn it! Or he had been once, at least. Cities had trembled, and so on. He had spent too many years never thinking beyond his next drink. It was time to look further. To the drink after next, at any rate. But change was not easy.

He could almost feel the sweat springing out of his skin. His head was pulsing, booming with pain. He clawed at his itchy neck but that only made it itch the more. He was smiling like a skull, he knew, and talking far too much. But it was smile, and talk, or scream his exploding head off.

"…saved my life at the siege of Muris, eh, Monza? At Muris, was it?" He hardly even knew how his cracking voice had wandered onto the subject. "Bastard came at me out of nowhere. A quick thrust!" He nearly knocked his water cup over with a wayward jab of his finger. "And she ran him through! Right through the heart, I swear. Saved my life. At Muris. Saved my… life…"

And he almost wished she had let him die. The kitchen seemed to be spinning, tossing, tipping wildly like the cabin of a ship in a fatal tempest. He kept expecting to see the wine slosh from the glasses, the stew spray from the bowls, the plates slide from the see-sawing table. He knew the only storm was in his head, yet still found himself clinging to the furniture whenever the room appeared to heel with particular violence.

"…wouldn't have been so bad if she hadn't done it again the next day. I took an arrow in the shoulder and fell in the damn moat. Everyone saw, on both sides. Making me look a fool in front of my friends is one thing, but in front of my enemies—"

"You've got it wrong."

Cosca squinted up the table at Monza. "I have?" Though he had to admit he could hardly remember his last sentence, let alone the events of a siege a dozen drunken years ago.

"It was me in the moat, you that jumped in to pull me out. Risked your life, and took an arrow doing it."

"Seems astoundingly unlikely I'd have done a thing like that." It was hard to think about anything beyond his violent need for a drink. "But I'm finding it somewhat difficult to recall the details, I must confess. Perhaps if one of you could just see your way to passing me the wine I could—"

"Enough." She had that same look she always used to have when she dragged him from one tavern or another, except even angrier, even sharper and even more disappointed. "I've five men to kill, and I've no time to be saving anyone anymore. Especially from their own stupidity. I've no use for a drunk." The table was silent as they all watched him sweat.

"I'm no drunk," croaked Cosca. "I simply like the taste of wine. So much so that I have to drink some every few hours or become violently ill." He clung to his fork while the room swayed around him, fixed his aching smile while they chuckled away. He hoped they enjoyed their laughter while they could, because Nicomo Cosca always laughed last. Provided he wasn't being sick, of course.

Morveer was feeling left out. He was a scintillating conversationalist face to face, it hardly needed to be said, but had never been at his ease in large groups. This scenario reminded him unpleasantly of the dining room in the orphanage, where the larger children had amused themselves by throwing food at him, a terrifying prelude to the whisperings, beatings, dunkings and other torments in the nocturnal blackness of the dormitories.

Murcatto's two new assistants, on the hiring of whom he had not been given even the most superficial consultation, were far from putting his mind at ease. Shylo Vitari was a torturer and broker in information, highly competent but possessed of an abrasive personality. He had collaborated with her once before, and the experience had not been a happy one. Morveer found the whole notion of inflicting pain with one's own hands thoroughly repugnant. But she knew Sipani, so he supposed he could suffer her. For now.

Nicomo Cosca was infinitely worse. A notoriously destructive, treacherous and capricious mercenary with no code or scruple but his own profit. A drunkard, dissipater and womaniser with all the self-control of a rabid dog. A self-aggrandising backslider with an epically inflated opinion of his own abilities, he was everything Morveer was not. But now, as well as taking this dangerously unpredictable element into their confidence and involving him intimately in their plans, the group seemed to be paying court to the trembling shell. Even Day, his own assistant, was chortling at his jokes whenever she did not have her mouth full, which, admittedly, was but rarely.

"…a group of miscreants hunched around a table in an abandoned warehouse?" Cosca was musing, bloodshot eyes rolling round the table. "Talking of masks, and disguises, and weaponry? I cannot imagine how a man of my high calibre ended up in such company. One would think there was some underhand business taking place!"

"My own thoughts exactly!" Morveer shrilly interjected. "I could never countenance such a stain upon my conscience. That is why I applied an extract of Widow's Blossom to your bowls. I hope you all enjoy your last few agonising moments!"

Six faces frowned back at him, entirely silent.

"A jest, of course," he croaked, realising instantly that his conversational foray had suffered a spectacular misfire. Shivers exhaled long and slow. Murcatto curled her tongue sourly around one canine tooth. Day was frowning down at her bowl.

"I've taken more amusing punches in the face," said Vitari.

"Poisoners' humour." Cosca glowered across the table, though the effect was somewhat spoiled by the rattling of his fork against his bowl as his right hand vibrated. "A lover of mine was murdered by poison. I have had nothing but disgust for your profession ever since. And all its members, naturally."

"You can hardly expect me to take responsibility for the actions of every person in my line of work." Morveer thought it best not to mention that he had, in fact, been personally responsible, having been hired by Grand Duchess Sefeline of Ospria to murder Nicomo Cosca some fourteen years before. It was becoming a matter of considerable annoyance that he had missed the mark and killed his mistress instead.

"I crush wasps whenever I find them, whether they have stung me or not. To my mind you people—if I can call you people—are all equally worthy of contempt. A poisoner is the filthiest kind of coward."

"Second only to a drunkard!" returned Morveer with a suitable curling of his upper lip. "Such human refuse might almost evoke pity were they not so utterly repellent. No animal is more predictable. Like a befouled homing pigeon, the drunk returns ever to the bottle, unable to change. It is their one route of escape from the misery they leave in their wake. For them the sober world is so crowded with old failures and new fears that they suffocate in it. There is a true coward." He raised his glass and took a long, self-satisfied gulp of wine. He was unused to drinking rapidly and felt, in fact, a powerful urge to vomit, but forced a queasy smile onto his face nonetheless.

Cosca's thin hand clutched the table with a white-knuckled intensity as he watched Morveer swallow. "How little you understand me. I could stop drinking whenever I wish. In fact, I have already resolved to do so. I would prove it to you." The mercenary held up one wildly flapping hand. "If I could just get half a glass to settle these damn palsies!"

The others laughed, the tension diffused, but Morveer caught the lethal glare on Cosca's face. The old soak might have seemed harmless as a village dunce, but he had once been counted among the most dangerous men in Styria. It would have been folly to take such a man lightly, and Morveer was nobody's fool. He was no longer the orphan child who had blubbered for his mother while they kicked him.

Caution first, each and every time.

Monza sat still, said no more than she had to and ate less, gloved hand painfully clumsy with the knife. She left herself out, up here at the head of the table. The distance a general needs to keep from the soldiers, an employer from the hirelings, a wanted woman from everyone, if she's got any sense. It wasn't hard to do. She'd been keeping her distance for years and leaving Benna to do the talking, and the laughing, and be liked. A leader can't afford to be liked. Especially not a woman. Shivers kept glancing up the table towards her, and she kept not meeting his eye. She'd let things slip in Westport, made herself look weak. She couldn't let that happen again.

"The pair o' you seem pretty familiar," Shivers was saying now, eyes moving between her and Cosca. "Old friends, are you?"

"Family, rather!" The old mercenary waved his fork wildly enough to have someone's eye out. "We fought side by side as noble members of the Thousand Swords, most famous mercenary brigade in the Circle of the World!" Monza frowned sideways at him. His old bloody stories were bringing back things done and choices made she'd sooner have left in the past. "We fought across Styria and back, while Sazine was captain general. Those were the days to be a mercenary! Before things started to get… complicated."

Vitari snorted. "You mean bloody."

"Different words for the same thing. People were richer back then, and scared more easily, and the walls were all lower. Then Sazine took an arrow in the arm, then lost the arm, then died, and I was voted to the captain general's chair." Cosca poked his stew around. "Burying that old wolf, I realised that fighting was too much hard work, and I, like most persons of quality, wished to do as little of it as possible." He gave Monza a twitchy grin. "So we split the brigade in two."

"You split the brigade in two."

"I took one half, and Monzcarro and her brother Benna took the other, and we spread a rumour we'd had a falling out. We hired ourselves out to both sides of every argument we could find—and we found plenty—and… pretended to fight."

"Pretended?" muttered Shivers.

Cosca's trembling knife and fork jabbed at each other in the air. "We'd march around for weeks at a time, picking the country clean all the while, mount the odd harmless skirmish for the show of it, then leave off at the end of each season a good deal richer but with no one dead. Well, a few of the rot, maybe. Every bit as profitable as having at the business in earnest, though. We even mounted a couple of fake battles, didn't we?"

"We did."

"Until Monza took an engagement with Grand Duke Orso of Talins, and decided she was done with fake battles. Until she decided to mount a proper charge, with swords well sharpened and swung in earnest. Until you decided to make a difference, eh, Monza? Shame you never told me we weren't faking anymore. I could've warned my boys and saved some lives that day."

"Your boys." She snorted. "Let's not pretend you ever cared for anyone's life but your own."

"There have been a few others I valued higher. I never profited by it, though, and neither did they." Cosca hadn't taken his bloodshot eyes from Monza's. "Which of your own people turned on you? Faithful Carpi, was it? Not so faithful in the end, eh?"

"He was as faithful as you could wish for. Right up until he stabbed me."

"And now he's taken the captain general's chair, no doubt?"

"I hear he's managed to wedge his fat arse into it."

"Just as you slipped your skinny one into it after mine. But he couldn't have taken anything without the consent of some other captains, could he? Fine lads, those. That bastard Andiche. That big leech Sesaria. That sneering maggot Victus. Were those three greedy hogs still with you?"

"They still had their faces in the trough. All of them turned on me, I'm sure, just the way they turned on you. You're telling me nothing I don't know."

"No one thanks you, in the end. Not for the victories you bring them. Not for the money you make them. They get bored. And the first sniff of something better—"

Monza was out of patience. A leader can't afford to look soft. Especially not a woman. "For such an expert on people, it's a wonder you ended up a friendless, penniless drunk, eh, Cosca? Don't pretend I didn't give you a thousand chances. You wasted them all, like you wasted everything else. The only question that interests me is—are you set on wasting this one too? Can you do as I fucking tell you? Or are you set on being my enemy?"

Cosca only gave a sad smile. "In our line of work, enemies are things to be proud of. If experience has taught the two of us anything, it's that your friends are the ones you need to watch. My congratulations to the cook." He tossed his fork down in his bowl, got up and strutted from the kitchen in almost a straight line. Monza frowned at the sullen faces he left around the table.

Never fear your enemies, Verturio wrote, but your friends, always.

A Few Bad Men

The warehouse was a draughty cavern, cold light finding chinks in the shutters and leaving bright lines across the dusty boards, across the empty crates piled up in one corner, across the old table in the middle of the floor. Shivers dropped into a rickety chair next to it, felt the grip of the knife Monza had given him pressing at his calf. A sharp reminder of what he'd been hired for. Life was getting way more dark and dangerous than back home in the North. As far as being a better man went, he was going backwards, and quicker every day.

So why the hell was he still here? Because he wanted Monza? He had to admit it, and the fact she'd been cold with him since Westport only made him want her more. Because he wanted her money? That too. Money was a damn good thing for buying stuff. Because he needed the work? He did. Because he was good at the work? He was.

Because he enjoyed the work?

Shivers frowned. Some men aren't stamped out for doing good, and he was starting to reckon he might be one of 'em. He was less and less sure with every day that being a better man was worth all the effort.

The sound of a door banging tugged him from his thoughts, and Cosca came down the creaking wooden steps from the rooms where they were sleeping, scratching slowly at the splatter of red rash up the side of his neck.

"Morning."

The old mercenary yawned. "So it seems. I can barely remember the last one of these I saw. Nice shirt."

Shivers twitched at his sleeve. Dark silk, with polished bone buttons and clever stitching round the cuff. A good stretch fancier than he'd have picked out, but Monza had liked it. "Hadn't noticed."

"I used to be one for fine clothes myself." Cosca dropped into a rickety chair next to Shivers. "So did Monza's brother, for that matter. He had a shirt just like that one, as I recall."

Shivers weren't sure what the old bastard was getting at, but he was sure he didn't like it. "And?"

"Spoken much about her brother, has she?" Cosca had a strange little smile, like he knew something Shivers didn't.

"She told me he's dead."

"So I hear."

"She told me she's not happy about it."

"Most decidedly not."

"Something else I should know?"

"I suppose we could all be wiser than we are. I'll leave that up to her, though."

"Where is she?" snapped Shivers, patience drying up.

"Monza?"

"Who else?"

"She doesn't want anyone to see her face that doesn't have to. But not to worry. I have hired fighting men all across the Circle of the World. And my fair share of entertainers too, as it goes. Do you have any issue with my taking charge of the proceedings?"

Shivers had a pile of issues with it. It was plain the only thing Cosca had taken charge of for a good long while was a bottle. After the Bloody-Nine killed his brother, and cut his head off, and had it nailed up on a standard, Shivers' father had taken to drinking. He'd taken to drinking, and rages, and having the shakes. He'd stopped making good choices, and he'd lost the respect of his people, and he'd wasted all he'd built, and died leaving Shivers nought but sour memories.

"I don't trust a man who drinks," he growled, not bothered about dressing it up. "A man takes to drinking, then he gets weak, then his mind goes."

Cosca sadly shook his head. "You have it back to front. A man's mind goes, then he gets weak, then he takes to drink. The bottle is the symptom, not the cause. But though I am touched to my core by your concern, you need not worry on my account. I feel a great deal steadier today!" He spread his hands out above the tabletop. It was true they weren't shaking as bad as they had been. A gentle quiver rather than a mad jerk. "I'll be back to my best before you know it."

"I can hardly wait to see that." Vitari strutted out from the kitchen, arms folded.

"None of us can, Shylo!" And Cosca slapped Shivers on the arm. "But enough about me! What criminals, footpads, thugs and other such human filth have you dug from the slimy backstreets of old Sipani? What fighting entertainers have you for our consideration? Musicians who murder? Deadly dancers? Singers with swords? Jugglers who… who…"

"Kill?" offered Shivers.

Cosca's grin widened. "Brusque and to the point, as always."

"Brusque?"

"Thick." Vitari slid into the last chair and unfolded a sheet of paper on the scarred tabletop. "First up, there's a band I found playing for bits near the docks. I reckon they make a fair stretch more from robbing passers-by than serenading them, though."

"Rough-and-tumble fellows, eh? The very type we need." Cosca stretched out his scrawny neck like a cock about to crow. "Enter!"

The door squealed open and five men wandered in. Even where Shivers came from they would've been reckoned a rough-looking set. Greasy-haired. Pock-faced. Rag-dressed. Their eyes darted about, narrow and suspicious, dirty hands clutching a set of stained instruments. They shuffled up in front of the table, one of them scratching his groin, another prodding at a nostril with his drumstick.

"And you are?" asked Cosca.

"We're a band," the nearest said.

"And has your band a name?"

They looked at each other. "No. Why would it?"

"Your own names, then, if you please, and your specialities both as entertainer and fighter."

"My name's Solter. I play the drum, and the mace." Flicking his greasy coat back to show the dull glint of iron. "I'm better with the mace, if I'm honest."

"I'm Morc," said the next in line. "Pipe, and cutlass."

"Olopin. Horn, and hammer."

"Olopin, as well." Jerking a thumb sideways. "Brother to this article. Fiddle, and blades." Whipping a pair of long knives from his sleeves and spinning 'em round his fingers.

The last had the most broken nose Shivers had ever seen, and he'd seen some bad ones. "Gurpi. Lute, and lute."

"You fight with your lute?" asked Cosca.

"I hits 'em with it just so." The man showed off a sideways swipe, then flashed two rows of shit-coloured teeth. "There's a great-axe hidden in the body."

"Ouch. A tune, then, if you please, my fellows, and make it something lively!"

Shivers weren't much for music, but even he could tell it was no fine playing. The drum was out of time. The pipe was tuneless tooting. The lute was flat, probably on account of all the ironware inside. But Cosca nodded along, eyes shut, like he'd never heard sweeter music.

"My days, what multi-talented fellows you are!" he shouted after a couple of bars, bringing the din to a stuttering halt. "You're hired, each one of you, at forty scales per man for the night."

"Forty… scales… a man?" gawped the drummer.

"Paid on completion. But it will be tough work. You will undoubtedly be called upon to fight, and possibly even to play. It may have to be a fatal performance, for our enemies. You are ready for such a commitment?"

"For forty scales a man?" They were all grinning now. "Yes, sir, we are! For that much we're fearless."

"Good men. We know where to find you."

Vitari leaned across as the band made their way out. "Ugly set of bastards."

"One of the many advantages of a masked revel," whispered Cosca. "Stick 'em in motley and no one will be any the wiser."

Shivers didn't much care for the idea of trusting his life to those lot. "They'll notice the playing, no?"

Cosca snorted. "People don't visit Cardotti's for the music."

"Shouldn't we have checked how they fight?"

"If they fight like they play we should have no worries."

"They play about as well as runny shit."

"They play like lunatics. With luck they fight the same way."

"That's no kind of—"

"I hardly thought of you as the fussy type." Cosca peered at Shivers down his long nose. "You need to learn to live a little, my friend. All victories worth the winning are snatched with vim and brio!"

"With who?"

"Carelessness," said Vitari.

"Dash," said Cosca. "And seizing the moment."

"And what do you make of all this?" Shivers asked Vitari. "Vim and whatever."

"If the plan goes smoothly we'll get Ario and Foscar away from the others and—" She snapped her fingers with a sharp crack. "Won't matter much who strums the lute. Time's running out. Four days until the great and good of Styria descend on Sipani for their conference. I'd find better men, in an ideal world. But this isn't one."

Cosca heaved a throaty sigh. "It most certainly is not. But let's not be downhearted—a few moments in and we're five men to the good! Now, if I could just get a glass of wine we'd be well on our way to—"

"No wine," growled Vitari.

"It's coming to something when a man can't even wet his throat." The old mercenary leaned close enough that Shivers could pick out the broken veins across his cheeks. "Life is a sea of sorrows, my friend. Enter!"

The next man barely fit through the warehouse door, he was that big. A few fingers taller than Shivers but a whole lot weightier. He had thick stubble across his great chunk of jaw and a mop of grey curls though he didn't seem old. His heavy hands fussed with each other as he came towards the table, a bit stooped like he was shamed of his own size, boards giving a complaining creak every time one of his great boots came down.

Cosca whistled. "My, my, that is a big one."

"Found him in a tavern down by the First Canal," said Vitari, "drunk as shit but everyone too scared to move him. Hardly speaks a word of Styrian."

Cosca leaned towards Shivers. "Perhaps you might take the lead with this one? The brotherhood of the North?"

Shivers didn't remember there being that much brotherhood up there in the cold, but it was worth a try. The words felt strange in his mouth, it was that long since he'd used them. "What's your name, friend?"

The big man looked surprised to hear Northern. "Greylock." He pointed at his hair. "S'always been this colour."

"What brought you all the way down here?"

"Come looking for work."

"What sort o' work?"

"Whatever'll have me, I reckon."

"Even if it's bloody?"

"Likely it will be. You're a Northman?"

"Aye."

"You look like a Southerner."

Shivers frowned, drew his fancy cuffs back and out of sight under the table. "Well, I'm not one. Name's Caul Shivers."

Greylock blinked. "Shivers?"

"Aye." He felt a flush of pleasure that the man knew his name. He still had his pride, after all. "You heard o' me?"

"You was at Uffrith, with the Dogman?"

"That's right."

"And Black Dow too, eh? Neat piece o' work, the way I heard it."

"That it was. Took the city with no more'n a couple dead."

"No more'n a couple." The big man nodded slowly, eyes never leaving Shivers' face. "That must've been real smooth."

"It was. He was a good chief for keeping folk alive, the Dogman. Best I took orders from, I reckon."

"Well, then. Since the Dogman ain't here his self, it'd be my honour to stand shoulder to shoulder with a man like you."

"Right you are. Likewise. Pleased to have you along. He's in," said Shivers in Styrian.

"Are you sure?" asked Cosca. "He has a certain… sourness to his eye that worries me."

"You need to learn to live a little," grunted Shivers. "Get some fucking brio in."

Vitari snorted laughter and Cosca clutched his chest. "Gah! Run through with my own rapier! Well, I suppose you can have your little friend. What could we do with a pair of Northmen, now?" He threw up one finger. "We could mount a re-enactment! A rendering of that famous Northern duel—you know the one, Fenris the Feared, or whatever, and… you know, what's-his-name now…"

Shivers' back went cold as he said the name. "The Bloody-Nine."

"You've heard of it?"

"I was there. Right in the thick. I held a shield at the edge of the circle."

"Excellent! You should be able to bring a frisson of historical accuracy to the proceedings, then."

"Frisson?"

"Bit," grunted Vitari.

"Why not just bloody say bit, then?"

But Cosca was too busy grinning at his own notion. "A whiff of violence! Ario's gentlemen will lap it up! And what better excuse for weapons in plain sight?" Shivers was a sight less keen. Dressing up as the man who killed his brother, a man he'd nearly killed himself, and pretending to fight. The one thing in its favour was he wouldn't have to strum a lute, at least.

"What's he saying?" rumbled Greylock in Northern.

"The two of us are going to pretend to have a duel."

"Pretend?"

"I know, but they pretend all kinds o' shit down here. We'll put a show on. Act it out, you know. Entertainment."

"The circle's no laughing matter," and the big man didn't look like laughing either.

"Down here it is. First we pretend, then we might have some others to fight for real. Forty scales if you can make it work."

"Right you are, then. First we pretend. Then we fight for real. Got it." Greylock gave Shivers a long, slow look, then lumbered away.

"Next!" bellowed Cosca. A skinny man pranced through the doorway in orange tights and a bright red jacket, big bag in one hand. "Your name?"

"I am none other than" —he gave a fancy bow—"the Incredible Ronco!"

The old mercenary's brows shot up as fast as Shivers' heart sank. "And your specialities, both as entertainer and fighter?"

"They are one and the same, sirs!" Nodding to Cosca and Shivers. "My lady!" Then to Vitari. He turned slowly round, reaching stealthily into his bag, then spun about, one hand to his face, cheeks puffed out—

There was a rustle and a blaze of brilliant fire shot from Ronco's lips, close enough for Shivers to feel the heat sting his cheek. He would've dived from his chair if he'd had the time, but instead he was left rooted—blinking, staring, gasping, as his eyes got used to the darkness of the warehouse again. A couple of patches of fire clung to the table, one just beyond the ends of Cosca's trembling fingers. The flames sputtered, in silence, and died, leaving behind a smell that made Shivers want to puke.

The Incredible Ronco cleared his throat. "Ah. A slightly more… vigorous demonstration than I intended."

"But damned impressive!" Cosca wafted the smoke away from his face. "Undeniably entertaining, and undeniably deadly. You are hired, sir, at the price of forty scales for the night."

The man beamed. "Delighted to be of service!" He bowed even lower this time round. "Sirs! My lady! I take… my leave!"

"You sure about that?" asked Shivers as Ronco strutted to the door. "Bit of a worry, ain't it? Fire in a wooden building?"

Cosca looked down his nose again. "I thought you Northmen were all wrath and bad teeth. If things turn sour, fire in a wooden building could be just the equaliser we need."

"The what we need, now?"

"Leveller," said Vitari.

That seemed a bad word to pick. They called death the Great Leveller, up in the hills of the North. "Fire indoors could end up levelling the lot of us, and in case you didn't notice, that bastard weren't too precise. Fire is dangerous."

"Fire is pretty. He's in."

"But won't he—"

"Ah." Cosca held up a silencing hand.

"We should—"

"Ah."

"Don't tell me—"

"Ah, I said! Do you not have the word ‘ah' in your country? Murcatto put me in charge of the entertainers and, with the greatest of respect, that means I say who is in. We are not taking votes. You concentrate on mounting a show to make Ario's gentlemen cheer. I'll handle the planning. How does that sound?"

"Like a short cut to disaster," said Shivers.

"Ah, disaster!" Cosca grinned. "I can't wait. Who have we to consider in the meantime?"

Vitari cocked one orange brow at her list. "Barti and Kummel—tumblers, acrobats, knife-artists and walkers on the high wire."

Cosca nudged Shivers in the ribs with his elbow. "Walkers on the high wire, there you go. How could that end badly?"

The Peacemakers

It was a rare clear day in the City of Fogs. The air was crisp and cold, the sky was perfectly blue and the King of the Union's conference of peace was due to begin its noble work. The ragged rooflines, the dirty windows, the peeling doorways were all thick with onlookers, waiting eagerly for the great men of Styria to appear. They trickled down both gutters of the wide avenue below, a multicoloured confusion, pressing up against the grim grey lines of soldiers deployed to hold them back. The hubbub of the crowd was a weight on the air. Thousands of murmuring voices, stabbed through here and there by the shouts of hawkers, bellowed warnings, squeals of excitement. Like the sound of an army before a battle.

Nervously waiting for the blood to start spilling.

Five more dots, perched on the roof of a crumbling warehouse, were nothing to remark upon. Shivers stared down, big hands dangling over the parapet. Cosca had his boot propped carelessly on the cracked stonework, scratching at his scabby neck. Vitari leaned back against the wall, long arms folded. Friendly stood bolt upright to the side, seeming lost in a world of his own. The fact that Morveer and his apprentice were away on their own business gave Monza scant confidence. When she first met the poisoner, she hadn't trusted him at all. Since Westport, she trusted him an awful lot less. And these were her troops. She sucked in a long, bitter breath, licked her teeth and spat down into the crowd below.

When God means to punish a man, the Kantic scriptures say, he sends him stupid friends, and clever enemies.

"That's a lot o' people," said Shivers, eyes narrowed against the chilly glare. Just the kind of stunning revelation Monza had come to expect from the man. "An awful lot."

"Yes." Friendly's eyes flickered over the crowds, lips moving silently, giving Monza the worrying impression that he was trying to count them.

"This is nothing." Cosca dismissed half of Sipani with an airy wave. "You should have seen the throng that packed the streets of Ospria after my victory at the Battle of the Isles! They filled the air with falling flowers! Twice as many, at the least. You should have been there!"

"I was there," said Vitari, "and there were half as many at the most."

"Does pissing on my dreams give you some sick satisfaction?"

"A little." Vitari smirked at Monza, but she didn't laugh. She was thinking of the triumph they'd put on for her in Talins, after the fall of Caprile. Or the massacre at Caprile, depending on who you asked. She remembered Benna grinning while she frowned, standing in his stirrups and blowing kisses to the balconies. The people chanting her name, even though Orso was riding in thoughtful silence just behind with Ario at his shoulder. She should've seen it coming then…

"Here they are!" Cosca shielded his eyes with one hand, leaning out dangerously far over the railing. "All hail our great leaders!"

The noise of the crowd swelled as the procession came into view. Seven mounted standard-bearers brought up the front, flags on lances all at the exact same angle—the illusion of equality deemed necessary for peace talks. The cockleshell of Sipani. The white tower of Ospria. The three bees of Visserine. The black cross of Talins. The symbols of Puranti, Affoia and Nicante stirred lazily in the breeze alongside them. A man in gilded armour rode behind, the golden sun of the Union drooping from his black lance.

Sotorius, Chancellor of Sipani, was the first of the great and good to appear. Or the mean and evil, depending on who you asked. He was truly ancient, with thin white hair and beard, hunched under the weight of the heavy chain of office he'd worn since long before Monza was born. He hobbled along doggedly with the aid of a cane and with the eldest of his many sons, probably in his sixties himself, at his elbow. Several columns of Sipani's leading citizens followed, sun twinkling on jewels and polished leather, bright silk and cloth of gold.

"Chancellor Sotorius," Cosca was noisily explaining to Shivers. "According to tradition, the host goes on foot. Still alive, the old bastard."

"Looks like he needs a rest though," muttered Monza. "Someone get the man a coffin."

"Not quite yet, I think. Half-blind he may be, but he still has clearer sight than most. The long-established master of the middle ground. One way or another he's kept Sipani neutral for two decades. Right through the Years of Blood. Ever since I gave him a bloody nose at the Battle of the Isles!"

Vitari snorted. "Didn't stop you taking his coin when it all turned sour with Sefeline of Ospria, as I recall."

"Why should it have? Paid soldiers can't be too picky over their employers. You have to blow with the wind in this business. Loyalty on a mercenary is like armour on a swimmer." Monza frowned sideways, wondering whether that was meant for her, but Cosca was blathering on as though it meant nothing to anyone. "Still, he never suited me much, old Sotorius. It was a wedding of necessity, an unhappy marriage and, once victory was won, a divorce we were both happy to agree to. Peaceful men find little work for mercenaries, and the old Chancellor of Sipani has made a rich and glorious career from peace."

Vitari sneered down at the wealthy citizens tramping by below. "Looks like he's hoping to make an export of it."

Monza shook her head. "One thing Orso will never be buying."

The leaders of the League of Eight came next. Orso's bitter enemies, which had meant Monza's too, until her tumble down a mountain. They were attended by a regiment of hangers-on, all decked out in a hundred clashing liveries. Duke Rogont rode at the front on a great black charger, reins in one sure hand, giving the occasional nod to the crowds as someone shouted for him. He was a popular man, and was called on to nod often, almost to the point that his head bobbed like a turkey's. Salier had somehow been wedged into the saddle of a stocky roan beside Rogont, pink jowls bulging out over the gilded collar of his uniform, on one side, then the other, in time to the movement of his labouring mount.

"Who's the fat man?" asked Shivers.

"Salier, Grand Duke of Visserine."

Vitari sniggered. "For another month or two, maybe. He squandered his city's soldiers in the summer." Monza had charged them down on the High Bank, with Faithful Carpi beside her. "His city's food in the autumn." Monza had merrily burned the fields about the walls and driven off the farmers. "And he's fast running out of allies." Monza had left Duke Cantain's head rotting on the walls of Borletta. "You can almost see him sweating from here, the old bastard."

"Shame," said Cosca. "I always liked the man. You should see the galleries in his palace. The greatest collection of art in the world, or so he says. Quite the connoisseur. Kept the best table in Styria too, in his day."

"It shows," said Monza.

"One does wonder how they get him in his saddle."

"Block and tackle," snapped Vitari.

Monza snorted. "Or dig a trench and ride the horse up underneath him."

"What about the other one?" asked Shivers.

"Rogont, Grand Duke of Ospria."

"He looks the part." True enough. Tall and broad-shouldered with a handsome face and a mass of dark curls.

"Looks it." Monza spat again. "But not much more."

"The nephew of my one-time employer, now thankfully deceased, the Duchess Sefeline." Cosca had made his neck bleed with his scratching. "They call him the Prince of Prudence. The Count of Caution. The Duke of Delay. A fine general, by all accounts, but doesn't like to gamble."

"I'd be less charitable," said Monza.

"Few people are less charitable than you."

"He doesn't like to fight."

"No good general likes to fight."

"But every good general has to, from time to time. Rogont's been pitted against Orso throughout the Years of Blood and never fought more than a skirmish. The man's the best withdrawer in Styria."

"Toughest thing to manage, a retreat. Maybe he just hasn't found his moment yet."

Shivers gave a faraway sigh. "We're all of us waiting for our moment."

"He's wasted all his chances now," said Monza. "Once Visserine falls, the way to Puranti is open, and beyond that nothing but Ospria itself, and Orso's crown. No more delays. The sand's run through on caution."

Rogont and Salier passed underneath them. The two men who, along with honest, honourable, dead Duke Cantain, had formed the League of Eight to defend Styria against Orso's insatiable ambition. Or to frustrate his rightful claims so they could fight among themselves for whatever was left, depending on who you asked. Cosca had a faraway smile on his face as he watched them go. "You live long enough, you see everything ruined. Caprile, a shell of her former glory."

Vitari grinned at Monza. "That was one of yours, no?"

"Musselia most shamefully capitulated to Orso in spite of her impenetrable walls."

Vitari grinned wider. "Wasn't that one of yours too?"

"Borletta fallen," Cosca lamented, "bold Duke Cantain dead."

"Yes," growled Monza, before Vitari could open her mouth.

"The invincible League of Eight has withered to a company of five and will soon dwindle to a party of four, with three of those far from keen on the whole notion."

Monza could just hear Friendly's whisper, "Eight… five… four… three…"

Those three followed now, glittering households trailing them like the wake behind three ducks. Junior partners in the League. Lirozio, the Duke of Puranti, defiant in elaborate armour and even more elaborate moustaches. The young Countess Cotarda of Affoia—a pasty girl whose pale yellow silks weren't helping her complexion, her uncle and first advisor, some said her first lover, hovering close at her shoulder. Patine came last, First Citizen of Nicante—his hair left wild, dressed in sackcloth with a knotted rope for a belt, to show he was no better than the lowest peasant in his care. The rumour was he wore silken undergarments and slept on a golden bed, and with no shortage of company. So much for the humility of the powerful.

Cosca was already looking to the next chapter in the procession of greatness. "By the Fates. Who are these young gods?"

They were a magnificent pair, there was no denying that. They rode identical greys with effortless confidence, arrayed in matching white and gold. Her snowy gown clung to her impossibly tall and slender form and spread out behind her, fretted with glittering thread. His gilded breastplate was polished to a mirror-glare, simple crown set with a single stone so big Monza could almost see its facets glittering a hundred strides distant.

"How incredibly fucking regal," she sneered.

"One can almost smell the majesty," threw in Cosca. "I would kneel if I thought my knees could bear it."

"His August Majesty, the High King of the Union." Vitari's voice was greasy with irony. "And his queen, of course."

"Terez, the Jewel of Talins. She sparkles brightly, no?"

"Orso's daughter," Monza forced out through clenched teeth. "Ario and Foscar's sister. Queen of the Union, and a royal cunt into the bargain."

Even though he was a foreigner on Styrian soil, even though Union ambitions were treated with the greatest suspicion here, even though his wife was Orso's daughter, the crowd found themselves cheering louder for a foreign king than they had for their own geriatric chancellor.

The people far prefer a leader who appears great, Bialoveld wrote, to one who is.

"Hardly the most neutral of mediators, you'd think." Cosca puffed his cheeks out thoughtfully. "Bound so tight to Orso and his brood you can hardly see the light between them. Husband, and brother, and son-in-law to Talins?"

"No doubt he considers himself above such earthly considerations." Monza's lip curled as she watched the royal pair approach. It looked as if they'd ridden from the pages of a lurid storybook and out into the drab and slimy city by accident. Wings on their horses were all they needed to complete the fantasy. It was a wonder someone hadn't glued some on. Terez wore a great necklace of huge stones, flashing so brilliantly in the sun they were painful to look at.

Vitari was shaking her head. "How many jewels can you pile on one woman?"

"Not many more without burying the bitch," growled Monza. The ruby that Benna had given her seemed a child's trinket by comparison.

"Jealousy is a terrible thing, ladies." Cosca nudged Friendly in the ribs. "She seems well enough in my eyes, eh, my friend?" The convict said nothing. Cosca tried Shivers instead. "Eh?"

The Northman glanced sideways at Monza, then away. "Don't get the fuss, myself."

"Well, a pretty pair, the two of you! I never met such cold-blooded fighting men. I may be past my prime but I'm nothing like so withered inside as you set of long faces. My heart can still be moved by a young couple in love."

Monza doubted there could be that much fire between them, however they might grin at one another. "Few years ago now, well before she was a queen in anything but her own mind, Benna had a bet with me that he could bed her."

Cosca raised one brow. "Your brother always liked to sow his seed widely, as I recall. The results?"

"Turned out he wasn't her type." It had turned out Monza interested her a great deal more than Benna ever could.

A household even grander than the whole League of Eight had fielded followed respectfully behind the royal couple. A score at least of ladies-in-waiting, each one dripping jewels of her own. A smattering of Lords of Midderland, Angland and Starikland, weighty furs and golden chains about their shoulders. Men-at-arms plodded behind, armour stained with dust from the hooves in front. Each man choking on the dirt of his betters. The ugly truth of power.

"King of the Union, eh?" mused Shivers, watching the royal couple move off. "That there is the most powerful man in the whole Circle of the World?"

Vitari snorted. "That there is the man he stands behind. Everyone kneels to someone. You don't know too much about politics, do you?"

"About what?"

"Lies. The Cripple rules the Union. That boy with all the gold is the mask he wears."

Cosca sighed. "If you looked like the Cripple, I daresay you'd get a mask too…"

Such cheering as there was moved off slowly after the king and queen, and left a sullen silence behind it. Quiet enough that Monza could hear the clattering of the wheels as a gilded carriage rattled down the avenue. Several score of grim guardsmen tramped in practised columns to either side, weapons less well polished than the Union's had been, but better used. A crowd of well-dressed and entirely useless gentlemen followed.

Monza closed her right fist tight, crooked bones shifting. The pain crept across her knuckles, through her hand, up her arm, and she felt her mouth twist into a grim smile.

"There they are," said Cosca.

Ario sat on the right, draped over his cushions, swaying gently with the movement of the carriage, his customary look of lazy contempt smeared across his face. Foscar sat pale and upright beside him, head starting this way and that at every smallest sound. Preening tomcat and eager puppy dog, placed neatly together.

Gobba had been nothing. Mauthis had been just a banker. Orso would scarcely have remarked on the new faces around him when they were replaced. But Ario and Foscar were his sons. His precious flesh. His future. If she could kill them, it would be the next best thing to sticking the blade in Orso's own belly. Her smile grew, imagining his face as they brought him the news.

Your Excellency! Your sons… are dead…

A sudden shriek split the silence. "Murderers! Scum! Orso's bastards!" Some limbs flailed down in the crowd below, someone trying to break through the cordon of soldiers. "You're a curse on Styria!" There was a swell of angry mutterings, a nervous ripple spread out through the onlookers. Sotorius might have called himself neutral, but the people of Sipani had no love for Orso or his brood. They knew when he broke the League of Eight, they'd be next. Some men always want more.

A couple of the mounted gentlemen drew steel. Metal gleamed at the edge of the crowd, there was a thin scream. Foscar was almost standing in the carriage, staring off into the heaving mass of people. Ario pulled him down and slouched back in his seat, careless eyes fixed on his fingernails.

The disturbance was finished. The carriage rattled off, gentlemen finding their formation again, soldiers in the livery of Talins tramping behind. The last of them passed under the roof of the warehouse, and off down the avenue.

"And the show is over," sighed Cosca, pushing himself from the railing and making for the door that led to the stairs.

"I wish it could've gone on forever," sneered Vitari as she turned away.

"One thousand eight hundred and twelve," said Friendly.

Monza stared at him. "What?"

"People. In the parade."

"And?"

"One hundred and five stones in the queen's necklace."

"Did I fucking ask?"

"No." Friendly followed the others back to the stairs.

She stood there alone, frowning into the stiffening wind for a moment longer, glaring off up the avenue as the crowd began to disperse, her fist and her jaw still clenched aching tight.

"Monza." Not alone. When she turned her head, Shivers was looking her in the eye, and from closer than she'd have liked. He spoke as if finding the words was hard work. "Seems like we haven't… I don't know. Since Westport… I just wanted to ask—"

"Best if you don't." She brushed past him and away.

Cooking up Trouble

Nicomo cosca closed his eyes, licked his smiling lips, breathed in deep through his nose in anticipation and raised the bottle. A drink, a drink, a drink. The familiar promise of the tap of glass against his teeth, the cooling wetness on his tongue, the soothing movement of his throat as he swallowed… if only it hadn't been water.

He had crept from his sweat-soaked bed and down to the kitchen in his clammy nightshirt to hunt for wine. Or any old piss that could make a man drunk. Something to make his dusty bedroom stop shaking like a carriage gone off the road, banish the ants he felt were crawling all over his skin, sponge away his pounding headache, whatever the costs. Shit on change, and Murcatto's vengeance too.

He had hoped that everyone would be in bed, and squirmed with trembling frustration when he had seen Friendly at the stove, making porridge for breakfast. Now, though, he had to admit, he was strangely glad to have found the convict here. There was something almost magical about Friendly's aura of calmness. He had the utter confidence to stay silent and simply not care what anyone thought. Enough to take Cosca a rare step towards calmness himself. Not silence, though. Indeed he had been talking, virtually uninterrupted, since the first light began to creep through the chinks in the shutters and turn to dawn.

"…why the hell am I doing this, Friendly? Fighting, at my age? Fighting! I've never enjoyed that part of the business. And on the same side as that self-congratulating vermin Morveer! A poisoner? Stinking way to kill a man, that. And I am acutely aware, of course, that I am breaking the soldier's first rule."

Friendly cocked one eyebrow a fraction as he slowly stirred the porridge. Cosca strongly suspected the convict knew exactly why he had come here, but if he did, he had better manners than to bring it up. Convicts, in the main, are wonderfully polite. Bad manners can be fatal in prison. "First?" he asked.

"Never fight for the weaker side. Much though I have always despised Duke Orso with a flaming passion, there is a huge and potentially fatal gulf between hating the man and actually doing anything about it." He thumped his fist gently against the tabletop and made the model of Cardotti's rattle gently. "Particularly on behalf of a woman who already betrayed me once…"

Like a homing pigeon drawn endlessly back to its loved and hated cage, his mind was dragged back through nine wasted years to Afieri. He pictured the horses thundering down the long slope, sun flashing behind them, as he had so many times since in a hundred different stinking rooms, and bone-cheap boarding houses, and broken-down slum taverns across the Circle of the World. A fine pretence, he had thought as the cavalry drew closer, smiling through the haze of drink to see it done so well. He remembered the cold dismay as the horsemen did not slow. The sick lurch of horror as they crashed into his own slovenly lines. The mixture of fury, hopelessness, disgust and dizzy drunkenness as he scrambled onto his horse to flee, his ragtag brigade ripped apart around him and his reputation with it. That mixture of fury, hopelessness, disgust and dizzy drunkenness that had followed him as tightly as his shadow ever since. He frowned at the distorted reflection of his wasted face in the bubbly glass of the water bottle.

"The memories of our glories fade," he whispered, "and rot away into half-arsed anecdotes, thin and unconvincing as some other bastard's lies. The failures, the disappointments, the regrets, they stay raw as the moments they happened. A pretty girl's smile, never acted on. A petty wrong we let another take the blame for. A nameless shoulder that knocked us in a crowd and left us stewing for days, for months. Forever." He curled his lip. "This is the stuff the past is made of. The wretched moments that make us what we are."

Friendly stayed silent, and it drew Cosca out better than any coaxing.

"And none more bitter than the moment Monzcarro Murcatto turned on me, eh? I should be taking my revenge on her, instead of helping her take hers. I should kill her, and Andiche, and Sesaria, and Victus, and all my other one-time bastard friends from the Thousand Swords. So what the shit am I doing here, Friendly?"

"Talking."

Cosca snorted. "As ever. I always had poor judgement where women were concerned." He barked with sudden laughter. "In truth, I always had dire judgement on every issue. That is what has made my life such a series of thrills." He slapped the bottle down on the table. "Enough penny philosophy! The fact is I need the chance, I need to change and, much more importantly, I desperately need the money." He stood up. "Fuck the past. I am Nicomo Cosca, damn it! I laugh in the face of fear!" He paused for a moment. "And I am going back to bed. My earnest thanks, Master Friendly, you make as fine a conversation as any man I've known."

The convict looked away from his porridge for just a moment. "I've hardly said a word."

"Exactly."

Morveer's morning repast was arranged upon the small table in his small bedchamber, once perhaps an upstairs storeroom in an abandoned warehouse in an insalubrious district of Sipani, a city he had always despised. Refreshment consisted of a misshapen bowl of cold oatmeal, a battered cup of steaming tea, a chipped glass of sour and lukewarm water. Beside them, in a neat row, stood seventeen various vials, bottles, jars and tins, each filled with its own pastes, liquids or powders in a range of colours from clear, to white, through dull buff to the verdant blue of the scorpion oil.

Morveer reluctantly spooned in a mouthful of mush. While he worked it around his mouth with scant relish, he removed the stoppers from the first four containers, slid a glinting needle from its packet, dipped it in the first and pricked the back of his hand. The second, and the same. The third, and the fourth, and he tossed the needle distastefully away. He winced as he watched a tiny bead of blood well from one of the prick-marks, then dug another spoonful from the bowl and sat back, head hanging, while the wave of dizziness swept over him.

"Damn Larync!" Still, it was far preferable that he should endure a tiny dose and a little unpleasantness every morning, than that a large dose, administered by malice or misadventure, should one day burst every blood vessel in his brain.

He forced down another mouthful of salty slop, opened the tin next in line, scooped out a tiny pinch of Mustard Root, held one nostril closed and snorted it up the other. He shivered as the powder burned at his nasal passages, licked at his teeth as his mouth turned unpleasantly numb. He took a mouthful of tea, found it unexpectedly scalding as he swallowed and nearly coughed it back up.

"Damn Mustard Root!" That he had employed it against targets with admirable efficacy on several occasions gave him no extra love for consuming the blasted stuff himself. Quite the opposite. He gargled a mouthful of water in a vain attempt to sluice away the acrid taste, knowing full well that it would be creeping from the back of his nose for hours to come.

He lined up the next six receptacles, unscrewed, uncorked, uncapped them. He could have swallowed their contents one at a time, but long years of such breakfasts had taught him it was better to dispose of them all at once. So he squirted, flicked and dripped the appropriate amounts into his glass of water, mixed them carefully with his spoon, gathered himself and forced it back in three ugly swallows.

Morveer set the glass down, wiped the tears from under his eyes and gave vent to a watery burp. He felt a momentary nudge of nausea, but it swiftly calmed. He had been doing this every morning for twenty years, after all. If he was not accustomed to it by—

He dived for the window, flung the shutters open and thrust his head through just in time to spray his meagre breakfast into the rotten alley beside the warehouse. He gave a bitter groan as he slumped back, dashed the burning snot from his nose and picked his way unsteadily to the washstand. He scooped water from the basin and rubbed it over his face, stared at his reflection in the mirror as moisture dripped from his brows. The worst of it was that he would now have to force more oatmeal into his rebellious guts. One of the many unappreciated sacrifices he was forced to make, simply in order to excel.

The other children at the orphanage had never appreciated his special talents. Nor had his master, the infamous Moumah-yin-Bek. His wife had not appreciated him. His many apprentices had not. And now it seemed his latest employer, also, had no appreciation for his selfless, for his discomforting, for his—no, no, it was no exaggeration—heroic efforts on her behalf. That dissolute old wineskin Nicomo Cosca was afforded greater respect than he.

"I am doomed," he murmured disconsolately. "Doomed to give, and give, and get nothing in return."

A knock at the door, and Day's voice. "You ready?"

"Soon."

"They're getting everyone together downstairs. We need to be off to Cardotti's. Lay the groundwork. The importance of preparation and all that." It sounded as if she was talking with her mouth full. It would, in fact, have been a surprise had she not been.

"I will catch up with you!" He heard her footsteps moving off. There, at least, was one person with the requisite admiration for his magisterial skills, who rendered him the fitting respect, exceeded his lofty expectations. He was coming to rely on her a great deal, he realised, both practically and emotionally. More than was cautious, perhaps.

But even a man of Morveer's extraordinary talents could not manage everything himself. He gave a long sigh, and turned from the mirror.

The entertainers, or the killers, for they were both, were scattered around the warehouse floor. Twenty-five of them, if Friendly counted himself. The three Gurkish dancers sat crossed-legged—two with their ornate cat-face masks pushed up on their oiled black hair. The last had her mask down, eyes glistening darkly behind the slanted eyeholes, rubbing carefully at a curved dagger. The band were already dressed in smart black jackets and tights striped grey and yellow, their silvered masks in the shape of musical notes, practising a jig they had finally managed to play half-decently.

Shivers stood nearby in a stained leather tunic with balding fur on the shoulders, a big round wooden shield on his arm and a heavy sword in the other hand. Greylock loomed opposite, an iron mask covering his whole face, a great club set with iron studs in his fists. Shivers was talking fast in Northern, showing how he was going to swing his sword, how he wanted Greylock to react, practising the show they would put on.

Barti and Kummel, the acrobats, wore tight-fitting chequered motley, arguing with each other in the tongue of the Union, one of them passionately waving a short stabbing sword. The Incredible Ronco watched from behind a mask painted vivid red, orange and yellow, like dancing flames. Beyond him the three jugglers were filling the air with a cascade of shining knives, flashing and flickering in the half-darkness. Others lounged against crates, sat cross-legged on the floor, capered about, sharpened blades, tinkered with costumes.

Friendly hardly recognised Cosca himself, dressed in a velvet coat heavy with silver embroidery, a tall hat on his head and a long black cane in his hand with a heavy golden knob on the end. The rash on his neck was disguised with powder. His greying moustaches were waxed to twinkling curves, his boots were polished to a glistening shine, his mask was crusted with splinters of sparkling mirror, but his eyes sparkled more.

He swaggered towards Friendly with the smirk of a ringmaster at a circus. "My friend, I hope you are well. My thanks again for your ear this morning."

Friendly nodded, trying not to grin. There was something almost magical about Cosca's aura of good humour. He had the utter confidence to talk, and talk, and know he would be listened to, laughed with, understood. It almost made Friendly want to talk himself.

Cosca held something out. A mask in the shape of a pair of dice, showing double one with eyeholes where the spots should have been. "I hoped you might do me the favour of minding the dice table tonight."

Friendly took the mask from him with a trembling hand. "I would like that very much."

Their mad crew wound through the twisting streets as the morning mists were clearing—down grey alleys, over narrow bridges, through hazy, rotting gardens and along damp tunnels, footfalls hollow in the gloom. The treacherous water was never far off, Shivers wrinkling his nose at the salt stink of the canals.

Half the city was masked and in costume, and it seemed they all had something to celebrate. Folk who weren't invited to the great ball in honour of Sipani's royal visitors had their own revels planned, and a lot of 'em were getting started good and early. Some hadn't gone too wild with their costumes—holiday coats and dresses with a plain mask around their eyes. Some had gone wild, then further still—huge trousers, high shoes, gold and silver faces locked up in animal snarls and madman grins. Put Shivers in mind of the Bloody-Nine's face when he fought in the circle, devil smile spattered with blood. That did nothing for his nerves. Didn't help he was wearing fur and leather like he used to in the North, carrying a heavy sword and shield not much different from ones he'd used in earnest. A crowd poured past all covered in yellow feathers, masks with great beaks, squawking like a flock of crazy seagulls. That did nothing for his nerves either.

Off in the mist, half-glimpsed round corners and across hazy squares, there were stranger shapes still, their hoots and warbles echoing down the wooden alleyways. Monsters and giants. Made Shivers' palms itch, thinking of the way the Feared rose out of the mist up at Dunbrec, bringing death with him. These were just silly bastards on stilts, of course, but still. You put a mask on a person, something weird happens. Changes the way they act along with the way they look. Sometimes they don't seem like people at all no more, but something else.

Shivers wouldn't have liked the flavour of it even if they hadn't been planning murder. Felt like the city was built on the borders of hell and devils were spilling out into the streets, mixing with the everyday and no one acting like there was much special about it. He had to keep reminding himself that, of all the strange and dangerous-seeming crowds, his was much the strangest and most dangerous they were likely to happen across. If there were devils in the city, he was one of the worst. Wasn't actually that comforting a thought, once it'd taken root.

"This way, my friends!" Cosca led them across a square planted with four clammy, leafless trees and a building loomed up from the gloom—a large wooden building on three sides of a courtyard. The same building that had been sitting on the kitchen table at the warehouse the last few days. Four well-armed guards were frowning around a gate of iron bars, and Cosca sprang smartly up the steps towards them, heels clicking. "A fine morning to you, gentlemen!"

"Cardotti's is closed today," the nearest growled back, "and tonight too."

"Not to us." Cosca took in the mismatched troupe with a sweep of his cane. "We are the entertainers for this evening's private function, selected and hired especially for the purpose by Prince Ario's consort, Carlot dan Eider. Now open that gate quick sharp, we have a great deal of preparation to attend to. In we come, my children, and don't dally! People must be entertained!"

The yard was bigger'n Shivers had been expecting, and a lot more of a disappointment too, since this was supposed to be the best brothel in the world. A stretch of mossy cobbles with a couple of rickety tables and chairs, painted in flaking gilt. Lines were strung from upstairs windows, sheets flapping sluggishly as they dried. A set of wine-barrels were badly stacked in one corner. A bent old man was sweeping with a worn-out broom, a fat woman was giving what might've been some underwear a right thrashing on a washboard. Three skinny women sat about a table, bored. One had an open book in her hand. Another frowned at her nails as she worked 'em with a file. The last slouched in her chair, watching the entertainers file in while she blew smoke from a little clay chagga pipe.

Cosca sighed. "There's nothing more mundane, or less arousing, than a whorehouse in the daytime, eh?"

"Seems not." Shivers watched the jugglers find a space over in one corner and start to unpack their tools, gleaming knives among 'em.

"I've always thought it must be a fine enough life, being a whore. A successful one, at any rate. You get the days off, and when finally you are called upon to work you can get most of it done lying down."

"Not much honour in it," said Shivers.

"Shit at least makes flowers grow. Honour isn't even that useful."

"What happens when you get old, though, and no one wants you no more? Seems to me all you're doing is putting off the despair and leaving a pack of regrets behind you."

Below Cosca's mask, his smile had a sad twist. "That's all any of us are doing, my friend. Every business is the same, and ours is no different. Soldiering, killing, whatever you want to call it. No one wants you when you get old." He strutted past Shivers and into the courtyard, cane flicking backwards and forwards with each stride. "One way or another, we're all of us whores!" He snatched a fancy cloth from a pocket, waved it at the three women as he passed and gave a bow. "Ladies. A most profound honour."

"Silly old cock," Shivers heard one of them mutter in Northern, before she went back to her pipe. The band were already tuning up, making almost as sour a whine as when they were actually playing.

Two tall doorways led from the yard—left to the gaming hall, right to the smoking hall, from those to the two staircases. His eyes crept up the ivy-covered wall, herringbone planks of weather-darkened wood, to the row of narrow windows on the first floor. Rooms for the entertainment of guests. Higher still, to bigger windows of coloured glass, just under the roofline. The Royal Suite, where the most valued visitors were welcomed. Where they planned to welcome Prince Ario and his brother Foscar in a few hours.

"Oy." A touch on his shoulder, and he turned, and stood blinking.

A tall woman stood behind him, a shining black fur draped around her shoulders, long black gloves on her long arms, black hair scraped over to one side and hanging soft and smooth across her white face. Her mask was scattered with chips of crystal, eyes gleaming through the narrow slots and set on him.

"Er…" Shivers had to make himself look away from her chest, the shadow between her tits drawing his eyes like a bear's to a beehive. "Something I can… you know…"

"I don't know, is there?" Her painted lips twisted up at one corner, part sneer and part smile. Seemed as if there was something familiar about that voice. Through the slit in her skirts he could just see the end of a long pink scar on her thigh.

"Monza?" he whispered.

"Who else as fine as this would have anything to say to the likes of you?" She eyed him up and down. "This brings back memories. You look almost as much of a savage as when I first met you."

"That's the idea, I reckon. You look, er…" He struggled for the word.

"Like a whore?"

"A damn pricey one, maybe."

"I'd hate to look a cheap one. I'm headed upstairs, to wait for our guests. All goes well, I'll see you at the warehouse."

"Aye. If all goes well." Shivers' life had a habit of not going well. He frowned up at those stained-glass windows. "You going to be alright?"

"Oh, I can handle Ario. I've been looking forward to it."

"I know, but, I'm just saying… if you need me closer—"

"Stick your tiny mind to keeping things under control down here. Let me worry about me."

"I'm worried enough that I can spare some."

"Thought you were an optimist," she tossed over her shoulder as she walked away.

"Maybe you talked me out of it," he muttered at her back. He didn't like it much when she spoke to him that way, but he liked it a lot better'n when she wouldn't speak to him at all. He saw Greylock glowering at him as he turned, and stabbed an angry finger at the big bastard. "Don't just stand there! Let's get this damn fake circle marked out, 'fore we get old!"

Monza was a long way from comfortable as she teetered through the gambling hall, Cosca beside her. She wasn't used to the high shoes. She wasn't used to the draught around her legs. Corsets were torture at the best of times, and it hardly helped that this one had two of the bones removed and replaced with long, thin knives, the points up between her shoulder blades and the grips hidden in the small of her back. Her ankles, and her knees, and her hips were already throbbing. The notion of a smoke tickled at the back of her mind, just like always, but she forced it away. She'd endured enough pain, these past few months. A little more was a light price to pay if it got her close to Ario. Close enough to stick a blade in his sneering face. The thought alone put some swagger back into her step.

Carlot dan Eider waited for them at the end of the room, standing with regal superiority between two card tables covered with grey sheets, wearing a red dress fit for an empress of legend.

"Will you look at the two of us?" sneered Monza as she came close. "A general dressed like a whore and a whore dressed like a queen. Everyone's pretending to be someone else tonight."

"That's politics." Ario's mistress frowned over at Cosca. "Who's this?"

"Magister Eider, what a delightful and unexpected honour." The old mercenary bowed as he swept his hat off, exposing his scabrous, sweat-beaded bald patch. "I never dreamed the two of us would meet again."

"You!" Eider stared coldly back at him. "I might have known you'd be caught up in this. I thought you died in Dagoska!"

"So did I, but it turned out I was only very, very drunk."

"Not so drunk you couldn't fumble your way to betraying me."

The old mercenary shrugged. "It's always a crying shame when honest people are betrayed. When it happens to the treacherous, though, one cannot avoid a certain sense of… cosmic justice." Cosca grinned from Eider, to Monza, and back. "Three people as loyal as us all on one side? I can hardly wait to see how this turns out."

Monza's guess was that it would turn out bloody. "When will Ario and Foscar get here?"

"When Sotorius' grand ball begins to break up. Midnight, or just before."

"We'll be waiting."

"The antidote," snapped Eider. "I've done my part."

"You'll get it when I get Ario's head on a plate. Not before."

"What if something goes wrong?"

"You'll die along with the rest of us. Better hope things run smoothly."

"What's to stop you from letting me die anyway?"

"My dazzling reputation for fair play and good behaviour."

Unsurprisingly, Eider didn't laugh. "I tried to do the right thing in Dagoska." She jabbed at her chest with a finger. "I tried to do the right thing! I tried to save people! Look what it's cost me!"

"There might be a lesson in there about doing the right thing." Monza shrugged. "I've never had that problem."

"You can joke! Do you know what it's like, to live in fear every moment?"

Monza took a quick step towards her and she shrank back against the wall. "Living in fear?" she snarled, their masks almost scraping together. "Welcome to my fucking life! Now quit whining and smile for Ario and the other bastards at the ball tonight!" She dropped her voice to a whisper. "Then bring him to us. Him and his brother. Do as I tell you, and you might still get a happy ending."

She knew that neither one of them thought that very likely. There'd be precious few happy endings to tonight's festivities.

Day turned the drill one last time, bit squealing through wood, then eased it gently free. A chink of light peeped up into the darkness of the attic and brightly illuminated a circular patch of her cheek. She grinned across at Morveer, and he was touched by a sudden bitter-sweet memory of his mother's smiling face by candlelight. "We're through."

Now was hardly the time for nostalgia. He swallowed the upwelling of emotion and crept over, taking the greatest care to set his feet only upon the rafters. A black-clad leg bursting through the ceiling and kicking wildly would no doubt give Orso's sons and their guards some cause for concern. Peering down through the hole, doubtless invisible among the thick mouldings, Morveer could see an opulent stretch of panelled corridor with a rich Gurkish carpet and two high doorways. A crown was carved into the wood above the nearer one.

"Perfect positioning, my dear. The Royal Suite." From here they had an unobstructed view of guards stationed by either door. He reached into his jacket, and frowned. He patted at his other pockets, panic stabbing at him.

"Damn it! I forgot my spare blowpipe! What if—"

"I brought two extra, just in case."

Morveer pressed one hand to his chest. "Thank the Fates. No! Damn the Fates. Thank your prudent planning. Where would I be without you?"

Day grinned her innocent little grin. "About where you are now, but with less charming company. Caution first, always."

"So true." He dropped his voice back to a whisper. "And here they come." Murcatto and Vitari appeared, both masked, powdered and dressed, or rather undressed, like the many female employees of the establishment. Vitari opened the door beneath the crown and entered. Murcatto glanced briefly up at the ceiling, nodded, then followed her. "They are within. So far all proceeds according to plan." But there was ample time yet for disasters. "The yard?"

Day wriggled on her stomach to the far edge of the attic where roof met rafters, and peered through the holes they had drilled overlooking the building's central courtyard. "Looks as if they're ready to welcome our guests. What now?"

Morveer crept to the minuscule, grubby window and brushed some cobwebs away with the side of one hand. The sun was sinking behind the ragged rooftops, casting a muddy flare over the City of Whispers. "The masked ball should soon be under way at Sotorius' palace." On the far side of the canal, behind Cardotti's House of Leisure, the torches were being lit, lamplight spilling from the windows in the black residences and into the blue evening. Morveer flicked the cobwebs from his fingers with some distaste. "Now we sit here in this mouldering attic, and wait for his Highness Prince Ario to arrive."

Sex and Death

By darkness, Cardotti's House of Leisure was a different world. A fantasy land, as far removed from drab reality as the moon. The gaming hall was lit by three hundred and seventeen flickering candles. Friendly had counted them as they were hoisted up on tinkling chandeliers, bracketed to gleaming sconces, twisted into glittering candlesticks.

The sheets had been flung back from the gaming tables. One of the dealers was shuffling his cards, another was sitting, staring into space, a third carefully stacking up his counters. Friendly counted silently along with him. At the far end of the room an old man was oiling the lucky wheel. Not too lucky for those that played it, by Friendly's assessment of the odds. That was the strange thing about games of chance. The chances were always against the player. You might beat the numbers for a day, but you could never beat them in the end.

Everything shone like hidden treasure, and the women most of all. They were dressed now, and masked, transformed by warm candlelight into things barely human. Long, thin limbs oiled and powdered and dusted with glitter, eyes shining darkly through the eyeholes of gilded masks, lips and nails painted black-red like blood from a fatal wound.

The air was full of strange, frightening smells. There had been no women in Safety, and Friendly felt greatly on edge. He calmed himself by rolling the dice over and over, and adding the scores one upon another. He had reached already four thousand two hundred and…

One of the women swept past, her ruffled dress swishing against the Gurkish carpet, one long, bare leg sliding out from the blackness with each step. Two hundred and… His eyes seemed glued to that leg, his heart beating very fast. Two hundred and… twenty-six. He jerked his eyes away and back to the dice.

Three and two. Utterly normal, and nothing to worry about. He straightened, and stood waiting. Outside the window, in the courtyard, the guests were beginning to arrive.

Welcome, my friends, welcome to Cardotti's! We have everything a growing boy needs! Dice and cards, games of skill and chance are this way! For those who relish the embrace of mother husk, that door! Wine and spirits on demand. Drink deep, my friends! There will be various entertainments mounted here in the yard throughout the evening! Dancing, juggling, music… even perhaps a little violence, for those with a taste for blood! As for female companionship, well… that you will find throughout the building…"

Men were pouring into the courtyard in a masked and powdered flow. The place was already heaving with expensively tailored bodies, the air thick with their braying chatter. The band were sawing out a merry tune in one corner of the yard, the jugglers flinging a stream of sparkling glasses high into the air in another. Occasionally one of the women would strut through, whisper to someone, lead him away into the building. And upstairs, no doubt. Cosca could not help wondering… could he be spared for a few moments?

"Quite utterly charmed," he murmured, tipping his hat at a willowy blonde as she swayed past.

"Stick to the guests!" she snarled viciously in his face.

"Only trying to lift the mood, my dear. Only trying to help."

"You want to help, you can suck a prick or two! I've enough to get through!" Someone touched her on the shoulder and she turned, smiling radiantly, took him by the arm and swept away.

"Who are all these bastards?" Shivers, muttering in his ear. "Three or four dozen, weren't we told, a few armed but not keen to fight? There must be twice that many in already!"

Cosca grinned as he clapped the Northman on the shoulder. "I know! Isn't it a thrill when you throw a party and you get more guests than you expected? Somebody's popular!"

Shivers did not look amused. "I don't reckon it's us! How do we keep control of all this?"

"What makes you think I have the answers? In my experience, life rarely turns out the way you expect. We must bend with the circumstances, and simply do our best."

"Maybe six guards, weren't we told? So who are they?" The Northman jerked his head towards a grim-looking knot of men gathered in one corner, all with polished breastplates over their padded black jackets, with serious masks of plain steel, serious swords and long knives at their hips, serious frowns on their chiselled jaws. Their eyes darted carefully about the yard as though looking for threats.

"Hmmm," mused Cosca. "I was wondering the same thing."

"Wondering?" The Northman's big fist was uncomfortably tight round Cosca's arm. "When does wondering turn into shitting yourself?"

"I've often wondered." Cosca peeled the hand away. "But it's a funny thing. I simply don't get scared." He made off through the crowd, clapping backs, calling for drinks, pointing out attractions, spreading good humour wherever he went. He was in his element, now. Vice, and high living, but danger too.

He feared old age, failure, betrayal and looking a fool. Yet he never feared before a fight. Cosca's happiest moments had been spent waiting for battles to begin. Watching the countless Gurkish march upon the walls of Dagoska. Watching the forces of Sipani deploy before the Battle of the Isles. Scrambling onto his horse by moonlight when the enemy sallied from the walls of Muris. Danger was the thing he most enjoyed. Worries for the future, purged. Failures of the past, erased. Only the glorious now remained. He closed his eyes and sucked in air, felt it tingling pleasantly in his chest, heard the excited babbling of the guests. He scarcely even felt the need for a drink anymore.

He snapped his eyes open to see two men stepping through the gate, others scraping away to make grovelling room for them. His Highness Prince Ario was dressed in a scarlet coat, silken cuffs drooping from his embroidered sleeves in a manner that implied he would never have to grip anything for himself. A spray of multicoloured feathers sprouted from the top of his golden mask, thrashing like a peacock's tail as he looked about him, unimpressed.

"Your Highness!" Cosca swept off his hat and bowed low. "We are truly, truly honoured by your presence."

"Indeed you are," said Ario. "And by the presence of my brother." He wafted a languid hand at the man beside him, dressed all in spotless white with a mask in the form of half a golden sun, somewhat twitchy and reluctant-seeming, Cosca rather thought. Foscar, no doubt, though he had grown a beard which very much suited him. "Not to mention that of our mutual friend, Master Sulfur."

"Alas, I cannot stay." A nondescript fellow had slipped in behind the two brothers. He had a curly head of hair, a simple suit and a faint smile. "So much to do. Never the slightest peace, eh?" And he grinned at Cosca. Inside the holes of his plain mask, his eyes were different colours: one blue, one green. "I must to Talins tonight, and speak to your father. We cannot allow the Gurkish a free hand."

"Of course not. Damn those Gurkish bastards. Good journey to you, Sulfur." Ario gave the slightest bow of his head.

"Good journey," growled Foscar, as Sulfur turned for the gate.

Cosca jammed his hat back on his head. "Well, your two honours are certainly most welcome! Please, enjoy the entertainments! Everything is at your disposal!" He sidled closer, flashing his most mischievous grin. "The top floor of the building has been reserved for you and your brother. Your Highness will find, I rather think, a particularly surprising diversion in the Royal Suite."

"There, brother. Let us see if, in due course, we can divert you from your cares." Ario frowned towards the band. "By the heavens, could that woman not have found some better music?"

The thickening throng parted to let the brothers pass. Several sneering gentlemen followed in their wake, as well as four more of the grim men with their swords and armour. Cosca frowned after their shining backplates as they stepped through the door into the gaming hall.

Nicomo Cosca felt no fear, that was a fact. But a measure of sober concern at all these well-armed men seemed only prudent. Monza had asked for control, after all. He hopped over to the entrance and touched one of the guards outside upon his arm. "No more in tonight. We are full." He shut the gate in the man's surprised face, turned the key in the lock and slipped it into his waistcoat pocket. Prince Ario's friend Master Sulfur would have the honour of being the last man to pass through the front gate tonight.

He flung one arm up at the band. "Something livelier lads, strike up a tune! We are here to entertain!"

Morveer knelt, hunched in the darkness of the attic, peering from the eaves of the roof into the courtyard far below. Men in ostentatious attire formed knots that swelled, dissolved, shifted and flowed in and out through the two doors that led into the building. They glittered and gleamed in pools of lamplight. Ribald exclamations and hushed chatter, poor music and good-natured laughter floated up through the night, but Morveer was not inclined to celebrate.

"Why so many?" he whispered. "We were anticipating less than half this number. Something… is awry."

A gout of incandescent flame went up into the frigid night and there was an eruption of clapping. That imbecile Ronco, endangering his own existence and that of every other person in the yard. Morveer slowly shook his head. If that was a good idea then he was the Emperor of—

Day hissed at him, and he fumbled his way back across the rafters, old wood creaking gently, and applied his eye to one of the holes. "Someone's coming."

A group of eight persons emerged from the stairway, all of them masked. Four were evidently guards, armoured in highly polished breastplates. Two were even more evidently women employed by Cardotti's. It was the final two men that were of interest to Morveer.

"Ario and Foscar," whispered Day.

"So it would undoubtedly appear." Orso's sons exchanged a brief word while their guards took up positions flanking the two doors. Then Ario bowed low, his snigger echoing faintly around the attic. He swaggered down the corridor to the second door, one of the women on each arm, leaving his brother to approach the Royal Suite.

Morveer frowned. "Something is most seriously awry."

It was an idiot's idea of what a king's bedchamber might look like. Everything was overpatterned, gaudy with gold and silver thread. The bed was a monstrous four-poster suffocated with swags of crimson silk. An obese cabinet burst with coloured liquor bottles. The ceiling was crusted with shadowy mouldings and an enormous, tinkling chandelier that hung too low. The fireplace was carved like a pair of naked women holding up a plate of fruit, all in green marble.

There was a huge canvas in a gleaming frame on one wall—a woman with an improbable bosom bathing in a stream, and seeming to enjoy it a lot more than was likely. Monza never had understood why getting out a tit or two made for a better painting. But painters seemed to think it did, so tits is what you got.

"That bloody music's giving me a headache," Vitari grumbled, hooking a finger under her corset and scratching at her side.

Monza jerked her head sideways. "That fucking bed's giving me a headache. Especially against that wallpaper." A particularly vile shade of azure blue and turquoise stripes with gilt stars splashed across them.

"Enough to drive a woman to smoking." Vitari prodded at the ivory pipe lying on the marbled table beside the bed, a lump of husk in a cut-glass jar beside it. Monza hardly needed it drawn to her attention. For the last hour her eyes had rarely been off it.

"Mind on the job," she snapped, jerking her eyes away and back towards the door.

"Always." Vitari hitched up her skirt. "Not easy with these bloody clothes. How does anyone—"

"Shhh." Footsteps, coming down the corridor outside.

"Our guests. You ready?"

The grips of the two knives jabbed at the small of Monza's back as she shifted her hips. "Bit late for second thoughts, no?"

"Unless you've decided you'd rather fuck them instead."

"I think we'll stick to murder." Monza slid her right hand up the window frame in what she hoped was an alluring pose. Her heart was thumping, the blood surging painfully loud in her ears.

The door creaked ever so slowly open, and a man stepped through into the room. He was tall and dressed all in white, his golden mask in the shape of half a rising sun. He had an impeccably trimmed beard, which failed to disguise a ragged scar down his chin. Monza blinked at him. He wasn't Ario. He wasn't even Foscar.

"Shit," she heard Vitari breathe.

Recognition hit Monza like spit in the face. It wasn't Orso's son, but his son-in-law. None other than the great peacemaker himself, his August Majesty, the High King of the Union.

Ready?" asked Cosca.

Shivers cleared his throat one more time. It had felt like there was something stuck in it ever since he'd walked into this damn place. "Bit late for second thoughts, no?"

The old mercenary's mad grin spread even wider. "Unless you've decided you'd rather fuck them instead. Gentlemen! Ladies! Your attention, please!" The band stopped playing and the violin began to hack out a single, sawing note. It didn't make Shivers feel much better.

Cosca jabbed with his cane, clearing the guests out of the circle they'd marked in the middle of the yard. "Step back, my friends, for you are in the gravest danger! One of the great moments of history is about to be acted out before your disbelieving eyes!"

"When do I get a fuck?" someone called, to ragged laughter.

Cosca leaped forwards, nearly took the man's eye out on the end of his cane. "Once someone dies!" The drum had joined in now, whack, whack, whack. Folk pressed round the circle by flickering torchlight. A ring of masks—birds and beasts, soldiers and clowns, leering skulls and grinning devils. Men's faces underneath—drunk, bored, angry, curious. At the back, Barti and Kummel teetered on each other's shoulders, whichever was on top clapping along with the drumbeats.

"For your education, edification and enjoyment…" Shivers hadn't a clue what that meant. "Cardotti's House of Leisure presents to you…" He took a rough breath, hefting sword and shield, and pushed through into the circle. "The infamous duel between Fenris the Feared…" Cosca flicked his cane out towards Greylock as he lumbered into the circle from the other side. "And Logen Ninefingers!"

"He's got ten fingers!" someone called, making a ripple of drunken laughter.

Shivers didn't join 'em. Greylock might've been a long way less frightening than the real Feared had been, but he was a long way clear of a comforting sight still, big as a house with that mask of black iron over his face, left side of his shaved head and his great left arm painted blue. His club looked awful heavy and very dangerous, right then, clutched in those big fists. Shivers had to keep telling himself they were on the same side. Just pretending was all. Just pretending.

"You gentlemen would be well advised to make room!" shouted Cosca, and the three Gurkish dancers pranced round the edge of the circle, black-cat masks over their black faces, herding the guests towards the walls. "There may be blood!"

"There'd better be!" Another wave of laughter. "I didn't come here to watch a pair of idiots dance with each other!"

The onlookers whooped, whistled, booed. Mostly booed. Shivers somehow doubted his plan—hop around the circle for a few minutes flailing at the air, then stab Greylock between his arm and his side while the big man burst a bladder of pig blood—was going to get these fuckers clapping. He remembered the real duel, outside the walls of Carleon with the fate of all the North hanging on the outcome. The cold morning, the breath smoking on the air, the blood in the circle. The Carls gathered round the edge, shaking their shields, screaming and roaring. He wondered what those men would've made of this nonsense. Life took you down some strange paths, alright.

"Begin!" shouted Cosca, springing back into the crowd.

Greylock gave a mighty roar and came charging forwards, swinging the club and swinging it hard. Gave Shivers the bastard of a shock. He got his shield up in time, but the weight of the blow knocked him clean over, sliding across the ground on his arse, left arm struck numb. He sprawled out, all tangled up with his sword, nicked his eyebrow on the edge. Lucky not to get the point in his eye. He rolled, the club crashing down where he'd lain a moment before and sending stone chips flying. Even as he was clambering up, Greylock was at him again, looking like he meant deadly business, and Shivers had to scramble away with all the dignity of a cat in a wolf-pen. He didn't remember this being what they discussed. Seemed the big man meant to give these bastards a show to remember after all.

"Kill him!" Someone laughed.

"Give us some blood, you idiots!"

Shivers tightened his hand round the grip of the sword. He suddenly had a bad feeling. Even worse'n before.

Rolling dice normally made Friendly feel calm, but not tonight. He had a bad feeling. Even worse than before. He watched them tumble, clatter, spin, their clicking seeming to dig at his clammy skin, and come to rest.

"Two and four," he said.

"We see the numbers!" snapped the man with the mask like a crescent moon. "Damn dice hate me!" He tossed them angrily over, bouncing against the polished wood.

Friendly frowned as he scooped them up and rolled them gently back. "Five and three. House wins."

"It seems to be making a habit of it," growled the one with the mask like a ship, and some of their friends muttered angrily. They were all of them drunk. Drunk and stupid. The house always makes a habit of winning, which is why it hosts games of chance in the first place. But it was hardly Friendly's job to educate them on that point. Someone at the far end of the room cried out with shrill delight as the lucky wheel brought up their number. A few of the card players clapped with mild disdain.

"Bloody dice." Crescent Moon slurped from his glass of wine as Friendly carefully gathered up the counters and added them to his own swelling stacks. He was having trouble breathing, the air was so thick with strange smells—perfume, and sweat, and wine, and smoke. He realised his mouth was hanging open, and snapped it shut.

The King of the Union looked from Monza, to Vitari, and back—handsome, regal and most extremely unwelcome. Monza realised her mouth was hanging open, and snapped it shut.

"I mean no disrespect, but one of you will be more than adequate and I have… always had a weakness for dark hair." He gestured to the door. "I hope I will not offend by asking you to leave us. I will make sure you are paid."

"How generous." Vitari glanced sideways and Monza gave her the tiniest shrug, her mind flipping around like a frog in hot water as it sought desperately for a way clear of this self-made trap. Vitari pushed herself away from the wall and strutted to the door. She brushed the front of the king's coat with the back of her hand on the way past. "Curse my red-haired mother," she sneered. The door clicked shut.

"A most…" The king cleared his throat. "Pleasing room."

"You're easily pleased."

He snorted with laughter. "My wife would not say so."

"Few wives say good things about their husbands. That's why they come to us."

"You misunderstand. I have her blessing. My wife is expecting our third child and therefore… well, that hardly interests you."

"I'll seem interested whatever you say. That's what I'm paid for."

"Of course." The king rubbed his hands somewhat nervously together. "Perhaps a drink."

She nodded towards the cabinet. "There they are."

"Do you need one?"

"No."

"No, of course, why would you?" Wine gurgled from the bottle. "I suppose this is nothing new for you."

"No." Though in fact it was hard to remember the last time she'd been disguised as a whore in a room with a king. She had two choices. Bed him, or murder him. Neither one held much appeal. Killing Ario would make trouble enough. To kill a king—even Orso's son-in-law—would be asking for a great deal more.

When faced with two dark paths, Stolicus wrote, a general should always choose the lighter. She doubted these were quite the circumstances he'd had in mind, but that changed nothing. She slid one hand around the nearest bedpost, lowered herself until she was sitting awkwardly on the garish covers. Then her eye fell on the husk pipe.

When faced with two dark paths, Farans wrote, a general should always find a third.

"You seem nervous," she murmured.

The king had made it as far as the foot of the bed. "I must confess it's been a long time since I visited… a place like this one."

"Something to calm you, then." She turned her back on him before he had the chance to say no, and began to fill the pipe. It didn't take her long to make it ready. She did it every night, after all.

"Husk? I'm not sure that I—"

"You need your wife's blessing for this too?" She held it out to him.

"Of course not."

She stood, lifting the lamp, holding his eye, and set the flame to the bowl. His first breath in he coughed out straight away. The second not much later. The third he managed to hold, then blow out in a plume of white smoke.

"Your turn," he croaked, pressing the pipe back into her hand as he sank down on the bed, smoke still curling up from the bowl and tickling her nose.

"I…" Oh, how she wanted it. She was trembling with her need for it. "I…" Right there, right in her hand. But this was no time to indulge herself. She needed to stay in control.

His mouth curled up in a gormless grin. "Whose blessing do you need?" he croaked. "I promise I won't tell a… oh."

She was already setting the flame to the grey-brown flakes, sucking the smoke in deep, feeling it burn at her lungs.

"Damn boots," the king was saying as he tried to drag his highly polished footwear off. "Don't bloody fit me. You pay… a hundred marks… for some boots… you expect them to—" One flew off and clattered into the wall, leaving a bright trace behind it. Monza was finding it hard to stand up.

"Again." She held the pipe out.

"Well… where's the harm?" Monza stared at the lamp flame as it flared up. Shimmering, shining, all the colours of a hoard of priceless jewels, the crumbs of husk glowing orange, turning from sweet brown to blazing red to used-up grey ash. The king breathed a long plume of sweet-smelling smoke in her face and she closed her eyes and sucked it in. Her head was full of it, swelling with it, ready to burst open.

"Oh."

"Eh?"

He stared around. "That is… rather…"

"Yes. Yes it is." The room was glowing. The pains in her legs had become pleasurable tickles. Her bare skin fizzed and tingled. She sank down, mattress creaking under her rump. Just her and the King of the Union, perched on an ugly bed in a whorehouse. What could've been more comfortable?

The king licked lazily at his lips. "My wife. The queen. You know. Did I mention that? Queen. She does not always—"

"Your wife likes women," Monza found she'd said. Then she snorted with laughter, and had to wipe some snot off her lip. "She likes them a lot."

The king's eyes were pink inside the eyeholes of his mask. They crawled lazily over her face. "Women? What were we talking of?" He leaned forwards. "I don't feel… nervous… anymore." He slid one clumsy hand up the side of her leg. "I think…" he muttered, working his tongue around his mouth. "I… think…" His eyes rolled up and he flopped back on the bed, arms outspread. His head tipped slowly sideways, mask skewing across his face, and he was still, faint snoring echoing in Monza's ears.

He looked so peaceful there. She wanted to lie down. She was always thinking, thinking, worrying, thinking. She needed to rest. She deserved to. But there was something nagging at her—something she needed to do first. What was it? She drifted to her feet, swaying uncertainly.

Ario.

"Uh. That's it." She left his Majesty sprawled across the bed and made for the door, the room tipping one way and then the other, trying to catch her out. Tricky bastard. She bent down and tore one of the high shoes off, tottered sideways and nearly fell. She flung the other away and it floated gently through the air, like an anchor sinking through water. She had to force her eyes open wide as she looked at the door, because there was a mosaic of blue glass between her and the world, candle flames beyond it leaving long, blinding smears across her sight.

Morveer nodded to Day, and she nodded back, a deeper black shape crouched in the fizzing darkness of the attic, the slightest strip of blue light across her grin. Behind her, the joists, the laths, the rafters were all black outlines touched down the edges with the faintest glow. "I will deal with the pair beside the Royal Suite," he whispered. "You… take the others."

"Done, but when?"

When was the question of paramount importance. He put his eye to the hole, blowpipe in one hand, fingertips of the other rubbing nervously against his thumb. The door to the Royal Suite opened and Vitari emerged from between the guards. She frowned up, then walked away down the corridor. There was no sign of Murcatto, no sign of Foscar, no further sign of anything. This was not part of the plan, of that Morveer was sure. He had still to kill the guards, of course, he had been paid to do so and always followed through on a contracted task. That was one thing among many that separated him from the obscene likes of Nicomo Cosca. But when, when, when…

Morveer frowned. He was sure he could hear the vague sound of someone chewing. "Are you eating?"

"Just a bun."

"Well stop it! We are at work, for pity's sake, and I am trying to think! Is an iota of professionalism too much to ask?"

Time stretched out to the vague accompaniment of the incompetent musicians down in the courtyard, but with the exception of the guards rocking gently from side to side, there was no further sign of movement. Morveer slowly shook his head. In this case, it seemed, as in so many, one moment was much like another. He breathed in deep, lifted the pipe to his lips, taking aim on the furthest of his allotted pair—

The door to Ario's chamber banged open. The two women emerged, one still adjusting her skirts. Morveer held his breath, cheeks puffed out. They pulled the door shut then made off down the corridor. One of the guards said something to the other, and he laughed. There was the most discreet of hisses as Morveer discharged his pipe, and the laughter was cut short.

"Ah!" The nearest guard pressed one hand to his scalp.

"What?"

"Something… I don't know, stung me."

"Stung you? What would've—" It was the other guard's turn to rub at his head. "Bloody hell!"

The first had found the needle in his hair, and now held it up to the light. "A needle." He fumbled for his sword with a clumsy hand, lurched back against the wall and slid down onto his backside. "I feel all…"

The second guard took an unsteady stride into the corridor, reached up at nothing, then pitched over on his face, arm outstretched. Morveer allowed himself the slightest nod of satisfaction, then crept over to Day, crouching over two of the holes with her blowpipe in her hand.

"Success?" he asked.

"Of course." She held the bun in the other, and now took a bite from it. Through the hole Morveer saw the two guards beside Ario's suite slumped motionless.

"Fine work, my dear. But that, alas, is all the work with which we were trusted." He began to gather up their equipment.

"Should we stay, see how it goes?"

"I see no reason so to do. The best we can hope for is that men will die, and that I have witnessed before. Frequently. Take it from me. One death is much like another. You have the rope?"

"Of course."

"Never too soon to secure the means of escape."

"Caution first, always."

"Precisely so."

Day uncoiled the cord from her pack and made one end of it fast around a heavy joist. She lifted one foot and kicked the little window from its frame. Morveer heard the sound of it splashing down into the canal behind the building.

"Most neatly done. What would I do without you?"

Die!" And Greylock came charging across the circle with that great lump of wood high over his head. Shivers gasped along with the crowd, only just scrambled clear in time, felt the wind of it ripping at his face. He caught the big man in a clumsy hug and they tottered together round the outside of the circle.

"What the fuck are you after?" Shivers hissed in his ear.

"Vengeance!" Greylock dealt him a knee in the side then flung him off.

Shivers stumbled away, finding his balance, picking his brains for some slight he'd given the man. "Vengeance? For what, you mad bastard?"

"For Uffrith!" He slapped his great foot down, feinting, and Shivers hopped back, peering over the top of his shield.

"Eh? No one got killed there!"

"You sure?"

"A couple o' men down on the docks, but—"

"My brother! No more'n fourteen years old!"

"I had no part o' that, you great turd! Black Dow did them killings!"

"Black Dow ain't before me now, and I swore to my mother I'd make someone pay. You'd a big enough part for me to knock it out o' you, fucker!" Shivers gave a girlish kind of squeak as he ducked back from another great sweep, heard men cheering around him, as keen for blood as the watchers might be at a real duel.

Vengeance, then. A double-edged blade if ever there was one. You never could tell when that bastard was going to cut you. Shivers stood, blood creeping down the side of his face from a knock he took just before, and all he could think was how fucking unfair it was. He'd tried to do the right thing, just the way his brother had always told him he should. He'd tried to be a better man. Hadn't he? This was where good intentions put you. Right in the shit.

"But I just… I done my best!" he bellowed in Northern.

Greylock sent spit spinning through the mouth-hole of his mask. "So did my brother!" He came on, club coming down in a blur. Shivers ducked round it, jerked his shield up hard and smashed the rim under the big man's jaw, sent him staggering back, spluttering blood.

Shivers still had his pride. That much he'd kept for himself. He was damned if he was going to be put in the mud by some great thick bastard who couldn't tell a good man from a bad. He felt the fury boiling up his throat, the way it used to back home in the North, when the battle was joined and he was in the thick of it.

"Vengeance, is it?" he screamed. "I'll show you fucking vengeance!"

Cosca winced as Shivers caught a blow on his shield and staggered sideways. He snarled something extremely angry-sounding in Northern, lashed at the air with his sword and missed Greylock by no more than the thickness of a finger, almost chopping deep into the onlookers on the backswing and making them shuffle nervously away.

"Amazing stuff!" someone frothed. "It looks almost real! I must hire them for my daughter's wedding…"

It was true, the Northmen were mounting a good show. Rather too good. They circled warily, eyes fixed on each other, one of them occasionally jabbing forwards with foot or weapon. The furious, concentrated caution of men who knew the slightest slip could mean death. Shivers had his hair matted to the side of his face with blood. Greylock had a long scratch through the leather on his chest and a cut under his chin where the shield-rim had cracked him.

The onlookers had stopped yelling obscenities, cooing and gasping instead, eyes locked hungrily on the fighters, caught between wanting to press forwards to see, and press back when the weapons were swung. They felt something on the air in the courtyard. Like the weight of the sky before a great storm. Genuine, murderous rage.

The band had more than got the trick of the battle music, the fiddle stabbing as Shivers slashed with the sword, drum booming whenever Greylock heaved his great club, adding significantly to the near-unbearable tension.

Quite clearly they were trying to kill each other, and Cosca had not the ghost of a notion how to stop them. He winced as the club crashed into Shivers' shield again and nearly knocked him off his feet. He glanced worriedly up towards the stained-glass windows high above the yard.

Something told him they were going to leave more than two corpses behind tonight.

The corpses of the two guards lay beside the door. One was sitting up, staring at the ceiling. The other lay on his face. They hardly looked dead. Just sleeping. Monza slapped her own face, tried to shake the husk out of her head. The door wobbled towards her and a hand in a black glove reached out and grabbed the knob. Damn it. She needed to do that. She stood there, swaying, waiting for the hand to let go.

"Oh." It was her hand. She turned it and the door came suddenly open. She fell through, almost pitched on her face. The room swam around her, walls flowing, melting, streaming waterfalls. Flames crackled, sparkling crystal in a fireplace. One window was open and music floated in, men shouting from down below. She could see the sounds, happy smears curling in around the glass, reaching across the changing space between, tickling at her ears.

Prince Ario lay on the bed, stark naked, body white on the rumpled cover, legs and arms spread out wide. His head turned towards her, the spray of feathers on his mask making long shadows creep across the glowing wall behind.

"More?" he murmured, taking a lazy swallow from a wine bottle.

"I hope we haven't… tired you out… already." Monza's own voice seemed to boom out of a faraway bucket as she padded towards the bed, a ship tossing on a choppy red sea of soft carpet.

"I daresay I can rise to the occasion," said Ario, fumbling with his cock. "You seem to have the advantage of me, though." He waved a finger at her. "Too many clothes."

"Uh." She shrugged the fur from her shoulders and it slithered to the floor.

"Gloves off." He swatted with his hand. "Don't care for them."

"Nor me." She pulled them off, tickling at her forearms. Ario was staring at her right hand. She held it up in front of her eyes, blinked at it. There was a long, pink scar down her forearm, the hand a blotchy claw, palm squashed, fingers twisted, little one sticking out stubbornly straight.

"Ah." She'd forgotten about that.

"A crippled hand." Ario wriggled eagerly down the bed towards her, his cock and the feathers sprouting from his head waggling from side to side with the movements of his hips. "How terribly… exotic."

"Isn't it?" The memory of Gobba's boot crunching down across it flashed through her mind and snatched her into the cold moment. She felt herself smile. "No need for this." She took hold of the feathers and plucked the mask from his head, tossed it away into the corner.

Ario grinned at her, pink marks around his eyes where the mask had sat. She felt the glow of the husk leaking from her mind as she stared into his face. She saw him stabbing her brother in the neck, heaving him off the terrace, complaining at being cut. And here he was, before her now. Orso's heir.

"How rude." He clambered up from the bed. "I must teach you a lesson."

"Or maybe I'll teach you one."

He came closer, so close that she could smell his sweat. "Bold, to bandy words with me. Very bold." He reached out and ran one finger up her arm. "Few women are as bold as that." Closer, and he slipped his other hand into the slit in her skirts, up her thigh, squeezing at her arse. "I almost feel as if I know you."

Monza took hold of the corner of her mask with her ruined right hand as Ario drew her closer still. "Know me?" She slid her other fist gently behind her back, found the grip of one of the knives. "Of course you know me."

She pulled her mask away. Ario's smile lingered for a moment longer as his eyes flickered over her face. Then they went staring wide.

"Somebody—!"

A hundred scales on this next throw!" Crescent Moon bellowed, holding the dice up high. The room grew quiet as people turned to watch.

"A hundred scales." It meant nothing to Friendly. None of it was his money, and money only interested him as far as counting it went. Losses and gains were exactly the same.

Crescent Moon rattled the dice in his hand. "Come on, you shits!" The man flung them recklessly across the table, bouncing and tumbling.

"Five and six."

"Hah!" Moon's friends whooped, chuckled, slapped him on the back as though he had achieved something fine by throwing one number instead of another.

The one with the mask like a ship threw his arms in the air. "Have that!"

The one with the fox mask made an obscene gesture.

The candles seemed to have grown uncomfortably bright. Too bright to count. The room was very hot, close, crowded. Friendly's shirt was sticking to him as he scooped up the dice and tossed them gently back. A few gasps round the table. "Five and six. House wins." People often forgot that any one score is just as likely as any other, even the same score. So it was not entirely a shock that Crescent Moon lost his sense of perspective.

"You cheating bastard!"

Friendly frowned. In Safety he would have cut a man who spoke to him like that. He would have had to, so that others would have known not to try. He would have started cutting him and not stopped. But they were not in Safety now, they were outside. Control, he had been told. He made himself forget the warm handle of his cleaver, pressing into his side. Control. He only shrugged. "Five and six. The dice don't lie."

Crescent Moon grabbed hold of Friendly's wrist as he began to sweep up the counters. He leaned forwards and poked him in the chest with a drunken finger. "I think your dice are loaded."

Friendly felt his face go slack, the breath hardly moving in his throat, it had constricted so painfully tight. He could feel every drop of sweat tickling at his forehead, at his back, at his scalp. A calm, cold, utterly unbearable rage seared through every part of him. "You think my dice are what?" he could barely whisper.

Poke, poke, poke. "Your dice are liars."

"My dice… are what?" Friendly's cleaver split the crescent mask in half and the skull underneath it wide open. His knife stabbed the man with the ship over his face through his gaping mouth and the point emerged from the back of his head. Friendly stabbed him again, and again, squelch, squelch, the grip of the blade turning slippery. A woman gave a long, shrill scream.

Friendly was vaguely aware that everyone in the hall was gaping at him, four times three times four of them, or more, or less. He flung the dice table over, sending glasses, counters, coins flying. The man with the fox mask was staring, eyes wide inside the eyeholes, spatters of dark brains across his pale cheek.

Friendly leaned forwards into his face. "Apologise!" he roared at the very top of his lungs. "Apologise to my fucking dice!"

Somebody—!"

Ario's cry turned to a breathy wheeze of an in-breath. He stared down, and she did too. Her knife had gone in the hollow where his thigh met his body, just beside his wilting cock, and was buried in him to the grip, blood running out all over her fist. For the shortest moment he gave a hideous, high-pitched shriek, then the point of Monza's other knife punched in under his ear and slid out of the far side of his neck.

Ario stayed there, eyes bulging, one hand plucking weakly at her bare shoulder. The other crept trembling up and fumbled at the handle of the blade. Blood leaked out of him thick and black, oozing between his fingers, bubbling down his legs, running down his chest in dark, treacly streaks, leaving his pale skin all smeared and speckled with red. His mouth yawned, but his scream was nothing but a soft farting sound, breath squelching around the wet steel in his throat. He tottered back, his other arm fishing at the air, and Monza watched him, fascinated, his white face leaving a bright trace across her vision.

"Three dead," she whispered. "Four left."

His bloody thighs slapped against the windowsill and he fell, head smashing against the stained glass and knocking the window wide. He tumbled through and out into the night.

The club came over, a blow that could've smashed in Shivers' skull like an egg. But it was tired, sloppy, left Greylock's side open. Shivers ducked it, already spinning, snarling as he whipped the heavy sword round. It cut into the big man's blue-painted forearm with a meaty thump, hacked it off clean, carried on through and chopped deep into the side of his stomach. Blood showered from the stump and into the faces of the onlookers. The club clattered to the cobbles, hand and wrist along with it. Someone gave a thin shriek. Someone else laughed.

"How'd they do that?"

Then Greylock started squealing like he'd caught his foot in a door. "Fuck! It hurts! Ah! Ah! What's my… by the—"

He reached around with the one hand he had left, fumbling at the gash in his side, dark mush bulging out. He lurched forwards onto one knee, head tipping back, and started to scream. Until Shivers' sword hit his mask right in the forehead and made a clang that cut his roar off dead, left a huge dent between the eyeholes. The big man crashed over on his back, his boots flew up in the air, then thumped down.

And that was the end of the evening's entertainment.

The band spluttered out a last few wobbly notes, then the music died. Apart from some vague yelling leaking from the gaming hall, the yard was silent. Shivers stared down at Greylock's corpse, blood bubbling out from beneath the stoved-in mask. His fury had suddenly melted, leaving him only with a painful arm, a scalp prickling with cold sweat and a healthy sense of creeping horror.

"Why do things like this always happen to me?"

"Because you're a bad, bad man," said Cosca, peering over his shoulder.

Shivers felt a shadow fall across his face. He was just looking up when a naked body crashed down headfirst into the circle from above, showering the already gaping crowd with blood.

That's Entertainment

All at once, things got confused.

"The king!" someone squealed, for no reason that made any sense. The blood-spattered space that had been the circle was suddenly full of stumbling bodies, running to nowhere. Everyone was bawling, wailing, shouting. Men's voices and women's, a noise fit to deafen the dead. Someone shoved at Shivers' shield and he shoved back on an instinct, sent them sprawling over Greylock's corpse.

"It's Ario!"

"Murder!" A guest started to draw his sword, and one of the band stepped calmly forwards and smashed his skull apart with a sharp blow of a mace.

More screams. Steel rang and grated. Shivers saw one of the Gurkish dancers slit a man's belly open with a curved knife, saw him fumble his sword as he vomited blood, stab the man behind him in the leg. There was a crash of tinkling glass and a flailing body came flying through one of the windows of the gambling hall. Panic and madness spread like fire in a dry field.

One of the jugglers was flinging knives, flying metal clattering about the yard, thudding into flesh and wood, just as deadly to friends as enemies. Someone grabbed hold of Shivers' sword arm and he elbowed them in the face, lifted his sword to hack at them and realised it was Morc, the pipe player, blood running from his nose. There was a loud whomp and a glare of orange through the heaving bodies. The screaming went up a notch, a mindless chorus.

"Fire!"

"Water!"

"Out of my way!"

"The juggler! Get the—"

"Help! Help!"

"Knights of the Body, to me! To me!"

"Where's the prince? Where's Ario?"

"Somebody help!"

"Back!" shouted Cosca.

"Eh?" Shivers called at him, not sure who was howling at who. A knife flickered past in the darkness, rattled away between the thrashing bodies.

"Back!" Cosca sidestepped a sword-thrust, whipped his cane around, a long, thin blade sliding free of it, ran a man through the neck with a swift jab. He slashed at someone else, missed and almost stabbed Shivers as he lurched past. One of Ario's gentlemen, mask like a squares board, nearly caught Cosca with a sword. Gurpi loomed up behind and smashed his lute over the man's head. The wooden body shattered, the axe blade inside split his shoulder right down to his chest and crushed his butchered wreckage into the cobbles.

Another surge of flame went up, people stumbled away, shoving madly, a ripple through the straining crowd. They suddenly parted and the Incredible Ronco came thrashing straight at Shivers, white fire wreathing him like some devil burst out of hell. Shivers tottered back, smashed him away with his shield. Ronco reeled into the wall, bounced off it and into another, showering globs of liquid fire, folk scrambling away, steel stabbing about at random. The flames spread up the dry ivy, first a crackle, then a roar, leaped to the wooden wall, bathing the heaving courtyard in wild, flickering light. A window shattered. The locked gates clattered as men clutched at 'em, screaming to be let out. Shivers beat the flames on his shield against the wall. Ronco was rolling on the ground, still burning, making a thin screech like a boiling kettle, the flames casting a crazy glare across the bobbing masks of guests and entertainers—twisted monsters' faces, everywhere Shivers looked.

There was no time to make sense of any of it. All that mattered was who lived and who died, and he'd no mind to join the second lot. He backed off, keeping close to the wall, shoving men away with his scorched shield as they grabbed at him.

A couple of the guards in breastplates were forcing their way through the press. One of 'em chopped Barti or Kummel down with his sword, hard to say which, caught one of Ario's gentlemen on the backswing and took part of his skull off. He staggered round, squealing, one hand clapped to his head, blood running out between his fingers, over his golden mask and down his face in black streaks. Barti or Kummel, whichever was left, stabbed a knife into the top of the swordsman's head, right up to the hilt, then hooted as the point of a blade slid out of the front of his chest.

Another armoured guard shouldered his way towards Shivers, sword held high, shouting something, sounded like the Union tongue. Didn't much matter where he was from, he had a mind for killing, that was clear, and Shivers didn't plan on giving him the first blow. He snarled as he swung, full-blooded, but the guard lurched back out of the way and Shivers' sword chopped into something else with a meaty thwack. A woman's chest, just happened to be stumbling past. She fell against the wall, scream turning to a gurgle as she slid down through the ivy, mask half-torn off, one eye staring at him, blood bubbling from her nose, from her mouth, pouring down her white neck.

The courtyard was a place of madness, lit by spreading flames. A fragment of a night-time battlefield, but a battle with no sides, no purpose, no winners. Bodies were kicked around under the panicking crowd—living, dead, split and bloodied. Gurpi was flailing, all tangled up with the wreckage of his lute, not even able to swing his axe for the broken strings and bits of wood. While Shivers watched, one of the guards hacked him down, sent blood showering black in the firelight.

"The smoking hall!" hissed Cosca, chopping someone out of their way with his sword. Shivers thought it might've been one of the jugglers, there was no way of telling. He dived through the open doorway after the old mercenary, together they started to heave the door shut. A hand came through and got caught against the frame, clutching wildly. Shivers bashed at it with the pommel of his sword until it slithered back trembling through the gap. Cosca wrestled the door closed and the latch dropped, then he tore the key around and flung it jingling away across the boards.

"What now?"

The old mercenary stared at him, eyes wild. "What makes you think I've got the fucking answers?"

The hall was long and low, scattered with cushions, split up by billowing curtains, lit by guttering lamps, smelling of sweet husk-smoke. The sounds of violence out in the yard were muffled. Someone snored. Someone else giggled. A man sat against the wall opposite, a beaked mask and a broad smile on his face, pipe dangling from his hand.

"What about the others?" hissed Shivers, squinting into the half-light.

"I think we've reached the point of every man for himself, don't you?" Cosca was busy trying to drag an old chest in front of the door, already shuddering from blows outside. "Where's Monza?"

"They'll get in by the gaming hall, no? Won't they—" Something crashed against a window and it burst inwards, spraying twinkling glass into the room. Shivers shuffled further into the murk, heart thumping hard as a hammer at the inside of his skull. "Cosca?" Nought but smoke and darkness, flickering light through the windows, flickering lamps on tables. He got tangled with a curtain, tore it down, fabric ripping from the rail above. Smoke was scratching at his throat. Smoke from the husk in here, smoke from the fire out there, more and more. The air was hazy with it.

He could hear voices. Crashing and screaming on his left like a bull going mad in the burning building. "My dice! My dice! Bastards!"

"Help!"

"Somebody send for… somebody!"

"Upstairs! The king! Upstairs!"

Someone was beating at a door with something heavy, he could hear the wood shuddering under the blows. A figure loomed at him. "Excuse me, could you—" Shivers smashed him in the face with his shield and knocked him flying, stumbled past, a vague idea he was after the stairs. Monza was upstairs. Top floor. He heard the door burst open behind him, shifting light, brown smoke, writhing figures began to pour through into the smoking hall, blades shining in the gloom. One of 'em pointed at him. "There! There he is!"

Shivers snatched a lamp up in his shield hand and flung it, missed the man at the front and hit the wall. It burst apart, showering burning oil across a curtain. People scattered, one of them screaming, arm on fire. Shivers ran the other way, deeper into the building, half-falling as cushions and tables tripped him in the darkness. He felt a hand grab his ankle and hacked at it with his sword. He staggered through the choking shadows to a doorway, a faint chink of light down the edge, shouldered it open, sure he'd get stabbed between the shoulder blades any moment.

He started up a set of spiral steps two at a time, panting with effort, legs burning as he climbed up towards the rooms where guests were entertained. Or fucked, depending how you looked at it. A panelled corridor met the stairway and a man came barrelling out of it just as Shivers got there, almost ran straight into him. They ended up staring into each other's masks. One of the bastards with the polished breastplates. He clutched at Shivers' shoulder with his free hand, showing his teeth, tried to pull his sword back for a thrust but got his elbow caught on the wall behind.

Shivers butted him in the face on an instinct, felt the man's nose crunch under his forehead. No room for the sword. Shivers chopped him in the hip with the edge of his shield, gave him a knee in the fruits that made him whoop, then swung him round and bundled him down the stairs, watched him flop over and over around the corner, sword clattering away. He kept going, upwards, not stopping for breath, starting to cough.

He could hear more shouting behind him, crashing, screaming. "The king! Protect the king!" He staggered on, one step at a time now, sword aching heavy in his hand, shield dangling from his limp arm. He wondered who was still alive. He wondered about the woman he'd killed in the courtyard, the hand he'd smashed in the doorway. He tottered into the hallway at the top of the stairs, wafting his shield in front of his face to try and clear the haze.

There were bodies here, black shapes sprawled under the wide windows. Maybe she was dead. Anyone could've been dead. Everyone. He heard coughing. Smoke rolled around near the ceiling, pouring into the corridor over the tops of the doors. He squinted into it. A woman, bent over, bare arms stretched out in front of her, black hair hanging.

Monza.

He ran towards her, trying to hold his breath, keep down low under the smoke. He caught her round the waist, she grabbed his neck, snarling. She had blood spotted across her face, soot around her nose and her mouth.

"Fire," she croaked at him.

"Over here." He turned back the way he came, and stopped still.

Down at the end of the corridor, two men with breastplates were getting to the top of the steps. One of them pointed at him.

"Shit." He remembered the model. Cardotti's backed onto the Eighth Canal. He lifted one boot and kicked the window wide. A long way down below, beyond the blowing smoke, water shifted, busy with the reflections of fire.

"My own worst fucking enemy," he forced through his gritted teeth.

"Ario's dead," Monza drawled in his ear. Shivers dropped his sword, grabbed hold of her. "What're you—" He threw her out of the window, heard her choking shriek as she started falling. He tore his shield from his arm and flung it at the two men as they ran down the corridor towards him, climbed up on the window ledge and jumped.

Smoke washed and billowed around him. The rushing air tore at his hair, his stinging eyes, his open mouth. He hit the water feet first and it dragged him down. Bubbles rushed in the blackness. The cold gripped him, almost forced him to suck in a breath of water. He hardly knew which way was up, flailing about, struck his head on something.

A hand grabbed him under the jaw, pulled at it, his face burst into the night and he gasped in cold air and cold water. He was dragged along through the canal, choking on the smoke he'd breathed, on the water he'd breathed, on the stink of the rotten water he was breathing now. He thrashed and jerked, wheezing, gasping.

"Still, you bastard!"

A shadow fell across his face, his shoulder scraped on stone. He fished around and his hand closed on an old iron ring, enough to hold his head above the water while he coughed up a lungful of canal. Monza was pressed to him, treading water, arm around his back, holding him tight. Her quick, scared, desperate breathing and his own hissed out together, merged with the slapping of the water and echoed under the arch of a bridge.

Beyond its black curve he could see the back of Cardotti's House of Leisure, the fire shooting high into the sky above the buildings around it, flames crackling and roaring, showers of sparks fizzing and popping, ash and splinters flying, smoke pouring up in a black-brown cloud. Light flickered and danced on the water and across one half of Monza's pale face—red, orange, yellow, the colours of fire.

"Shit," he hissed, shivering at the cold, at the aching lag-end of battle, at what he'd done back there in the madness. He felt tears burning at his eyes. Couldn't stop himself crying. He started to shake, to sob, only just managing to keep his grip on the ring. "Shit… shit… shit…"

"Shhh." Monza's hand clapped over his mouth. Footsteps snapped against the road above, shouted voices echoing back and forth. They shrank back together, pressing against the slimy stonework. "Shhh." Few hours ago he'd have given a lot to be pressed up against her like this. Somehow, right then, he didn't feel much in the way of romance, though.

"What happened?" she whispered.

Shivers couldn't even look at her. "I've no fucking idea."

What Happened

Nicomo cosca, infamous soldier of fortune, skulked in the shadows and watched the warehouse. All seemed quiet, shutters dark in their rotting frames. No vengeful mob, no clamour of guards. His instincts told him simply to walk off into the night, and pay no further mind to Monzcarro Murcatto and her mad quest for vengeance. But he needed her money, and his instincts had never been worth a runny shit. He shrank back into the doorway as a woman in a mask ran down the lane, skirts held up, giggling. A man chased after her. "Come back! Kiss me, you bitch!" Their footsteps clattered away.

Cosca strutted across the street as if he owned it, into the alley behind the warehouse, then plastered himself to the wall. He sidled up to the back door. He slid the sword from his cane with a faint ring of steel, blade coldly glittering in the night. The knob turned, the door crept open. He eased his way through into the darkness—

"Far enough." Metal kissed his neck. Cosca opened his hand and let the sword clatter to the boards.

"I am undone."

"Cosca, that you?" The blade came away. Vitari, pressed into the shadows behind the door.

"Shylo, you changed? I much preferred the clothes you had at Cardotti's. More… ladylike."

"Huh." She pushed past him and down the dark passageway. "That underwear, such as it was, was torture."

"I shall have to content myself with seeing it in my dreams."

"What happened at Cardotti's?"

"What happened?" Cosca bent over stiffly and fished his sword up between two fingers. "I believe the word ‘bloodbath' would fit the circumstances. Then it caught fire. I must confess… I made a quick exit." He was, in truth, disgusted with himself for having fled and saved his own worthless skin. But the decided habits of a whole life, especially a wasted life, were hard to change. "Why don't you tell me what happened?"

"The King of the Union happened."

"The what?" Cosca remembered the man in white, with the mask like the rising sun. The man who had not looked very much like Foscar. "Aaaaaah. That would explain all the guards."

"What about your entertainers?"

"Hugely expendable. None of them have shown their faces here?"

Vitari shook her head. "Not so far."

"Then, I would guess, they are largely, if not entirely, expended. So it always is with mercenaries. Easily hired, even more easily discharged and never missed once they are gone."

Friendly sat in the darkened kitchen, hunched over the table, rolling his dice gently in the light from a single lamp. A heavy and extremely threatening cleaver gleamed on the wood beside it.

Cosca came close, pointing to the dice. "Three and four, eh?"

"Three and four."

"Seven. A most ordinary score."

"Average."

"May I?"

Friendly looked sharply up at him. "Yes."

Cosca gathered the dice and gently rolled them back. "Six. You win."

"That's my problem."

"Really? Losing is mine. What happened? No trouble in the gaming hall?"

"Some."

There was a long streak of half-dried blood across the convict's neck, dark in the lamplight. "You've got something… just here," said Cosca.

Friendly wiped it off, looked down at his red-brown fingertips with all the emotion of an empty sink. "Blood."

"Yes. A lot of blood, tonight." Now Cosca was back to something approaching safety, the giddy rush of danger was starting to recede, and all the old regrets crowded in behind it. His hands were shaking again. A drink, a drink, a drink. He wandered through the doorway into the warehouse.

"Ah! The ringmaster for tonight's circus of murder!" Morveer leaned against the rail of the stairs, sneering down, Day not far behind, her dangling hands slowly peeling an orange.

"Our poisoners! I'm sorry to see you made it out alive. What happened?"

Morveer's lip curled still further. "Our allotted role was to remove the guards on the top floor of the building. That we accomplished with absolute speed and secrecy. We were not asked to remain in the building thereafter. Indeed we were ordered not to. Our employer does not entirely trust us. She was concerned that there be no indiscriminate slaughter."

Cosca shrugged. "Slaughter, by its very definition, would not appear to discriminate."

"Either way, your responsibility is over. I doubt anyone will object if you take this, now."

Morveer flicked his wrist and something sparkled in the darkness. Cosca snatched it from the air on an instinct. A metal flask, liquid sloshing inside. Just like the one he used to carry. The one he sold… where was it now? That sweet union of cold metal and strong liquor lapped at his memory, brought the spit flooding into his dry mouth. A drink, a drink, a drink—

He was halfway through unscrewing the cap before he stopped himself. "It would seem a sensible life lesson never to swallow gifts from poisoners."

"The only poison in there is the same kind you have been swallowing for years. The same kind you will never stop swallowing."

Cosca lifted the flask. "Cheers." He upended it and let the spirit inside spatter over the warehouse floor, then tossed it clattering away into a corner. He made sure he noted where it ended up, though, in case there was a trickle left inside. "No sign of our employer?" he called to Morveer. "Or her Northern puppy?"

"None. We should give some consideration to the possibility that there may never be any."

"He's right." Vitari was a black shape in the lamplit doorway to the kitchen. "Chances are good they're dead. What do we do then?"

Day looked at her fingernails. "I, for one, will weep a river."

Morveer had other plans. "We should have a scheme for dividing such money as Murcatto has here—"

"No," said Cosca, for some reason intensely irritated at the thought. "I say we wait."

"This place is not safe. One of the entertainers could have been captured by the authorities, could even now be divulging its location."

"Exciting, isn't it? I say we wait."

"Wait if you please, but I—"

Cosca whipped his knife out in one smooth motion. The blade whirred shining through the darkness and thumped, vibrating gently, into the wood no more than a foot or two from Morveer's face. "A little gift of my own."

The poisoner raised one eyebrow at it. "I do not appreciate drunks throwing knives at me. What if your aim had been off?"

Cosca grinned. "It was. We wait."

"For a man of notoriously fickle loyalties, I find your attachment to a woman who once betrayed you… perplexing."

"So do I. But I've always been an unpredictable bastard. Perhaps I'm changing my ways. Perhaps I've made a solemn vow to be sober, loyal and diligent in all my dealings from now on."

Vitari snorted. "That'll be the day."

"And how long do we wait?" demanded Morveer.

"I suppose you'll know when I say you can leave."

"And suppose… I choose… to leave before?"

"You're nothing like as clever as you think you are." Cosca held his eye. "But you're cleverer than that."

"Everyone be calm," snarled Vitari, in the most uncalming voice imaginable.

"I don't take orders from you, you pickled remnant!"

"Maybe I need to teach you how—"

The warehouse door banged open and two figures burst through. Cosca whipped his sword from his stick, Vitari's chain rattled, Day had produced a small flatbow from somewhere and levelled it at the doorway. But the new arrivals were not representatives of the authorities. They were none other than Shivers and Monza, both wet through, stained with dirt and soot and panting for breath as though they had been pursued through half the streets of Sipani. Perhaps they had.

Cosca grinned. "You need only mention her name and up she springs! Master Morveer was just now discussing how we should divide your money if it turned out you were burned to a cinder in the shell of Cardotti's."

"Sorry to disappoint you," she croaked.

Morveer gave Cosca a deadly glare. "I am by no means disappointed, I assure you. I have a vested interested in your survival to the tune of many thousands of scales. I was simply considering… a contingency."

"Best to be prepared," said Day, lowering the bow and sucking the juice from her orange.

"Caution first, always."

Monza lurched across the warehouse floor, one bare foot dragging, jaw muscles clenched tight against evident pain. Her clothes, which had not left too much to the imagination in the first instance, were badly ripped. Cosca could see a long red scar up one thin thigh, more across her shoulder, down her forearm, pale and prickly with gooseflesh. Her right hand was a mottled, bony claw, pressed against her hip as though to keep it out of sight.

He felt an unexpected stab of dismay at the sight of those marks of violence. Like seeing a painting one had always admired wilfully defaced. A painting one had secretly hoped to own, perhaps? Was that it? He shrugged his coat off and held it out to her as she came past him. She ignored it.

"Do we gather you are less than satisfied with tonight's endeavours?" asked Morveer.

"We got Ario. It could've been worse. I need some dry clothes. We leave Sipani right away." She limped up the steps, torn skirts dragging in the dust behind her, and shouldered past Morveer. Shivers swung the warehouse door shut and leaned against it, head back.

"That is one stone-hearted bitch," muttered Vitari as she watched her go.

Cosca pursed his lips. "I always said she had a devil in her. But of the two, her brother was the truly ruthless one."

"Huh." Vitari turned back into the kitchen. "It was a compliment."

Monza managed to shut the door and make it a few steps into her room before her insides clenched up as if she'd been punched in the guts. She retched so hard she could hardly breathe, a long string of bitter drool dangling from her lip and spattering against the boards.

She shivered with revulsion, started trying to twist her way out of the whore's clothes. Her flesh crept at the touch of them, her guts cramped at the rotten canal stink of them. Numb fingers wrestled with hooks and eyes, clawed at buttons and buckles. Gasping and grunting, she tore the damp rags off and flung them away.

She caught sight of herself in the mirror, in the light of the one lamp. Hunched like a beggar, shivering like a drunk, red scars standing out from white skin, black hair hanging lank and loose. A drowned corpse, standing. Just about.

You're a dream. A vision. The very Goddess of War!

She was doubled over by another stab of sickness, stumbled to her chest and started dragging fresh clothes on with trembling hands. The shirt had been one of Benna's. For a moment it was almost like having his arms around her. As close as she could ever get, now.

She sat on the bed, her own arms clamped around herself, bare feet pressed together, rocking back and forth, willing the warmth to spread. Another rush of nausea dragged her up and had her spitting bile. Once it passed she shoved Benna's shirt down behind her belt, bent to drag her boots on, grimacing at the cold aches through her legs.

She delved her hands into the washbasin and threw cold water on her face, started to scrape away the traces of paint and powder, the smears of blood and soot, digging at her ears, at her hair, at her nose.

"Monza!" Cosca's voice outside the door. "We have a distinguished visitor."

She pulled the leather glove back over her twisted joke of a hand, winced as she worked her bent fingers into it. She took a long, shuddering breath, then slid the Calvez out from under her mattress and into the clasp on her belt. It made her feel better just having it there. She pulled the door open.

Carlot dan Eider stood in the middle of the warehouse floor, gold thread gleaming in her red coat, watching Monza as she came down the steps, trying not to limp, Cosca following after.

"What in hell happened? Cardotti's is still burning! The city's in uproar!"

"What happened?" barked Monza. "Why don't you tell me what happened? His August fucking Majesty was where Foscar was supposed to be!"

The black scab on Eider's neck shifted as she swallowed. "Foscar wouldn't go. He said he had a headache. So Ario took his brother-in-law along in his place."

"And he happened to bring a dozen Knights of the Body with him," said Cosca. "The king's own bodyguards. As well as a far greater volume of guests than anyone anticipated. The results were not happy. For anyone."

"Ario?" muttered Eider, face pale.

Monza stared into her eyes. "Deader than fuck."

"The king?" she almost whispered.

"Alive. When I left him. But the building did tend to burn down after that. Maybe they got him out."

Eider looked at the floor, rubbing at one temple with her gloved hand. "I'd hoped you might fail."

"No such luck."

"There will be consequences now. You do a thing like this, there are consequences. Some you see coming, and some you don't." She held out one hand. "My antidote."

"There isn't one."

"I kept my side of the bargain!"

"There was no poison. Just a jab with a dry needle. You're free."

Eider barked despairing laughter at her. "Free? Orso won't rest until he's fed me to his dogs! Perhaps I can keep ahead of him, but I'll never keep ahead of the Cripple. I let him down, and put his precious king in harm's way. He won't let that pass. He never lets anything pass. Are you happy now?"

"You talk as if there was a choice. Orso and the rest die, or I do, and that's all. Happy isn't part of the sum." Monza shrugged as she turned away. "You'd better start running."

"I sent a letter."

She stopped, then turned back. "Letter?"

"Earlier today. To Grand Duke Orso. It was written in some passion, so I forget exactly what was said. The name Shylo Vitari was mentioned, though. And the name Nicomo Cosca."

Cosca waved it away with one hand. "I've always had a lot of powerful enemies. I consider it a point of pride. Listing them makes excellent dinner conversation."

Eider turned her sneer from the old mercenary back to Monza. "Those two names, and the name of Murcatto as well."

Monza frowned. "Murcatto."

"How much of a fool do you take me for? I know who you are, and now Orso will know too. That you're alive, and that you killed his son, and that you had help. A petty revenge, perhaps, but the best I could manage."

"Revenge?" Monza nodded slowly. "Well. Everyone's at it. It would've been better if you hadn't done that." The Calvez rattled gently as she rested her hand on its hilt.

"Why, will you kill me for it? Hah! I'm good as dead already!"

"Then why should I bother? You're not on my list. You can go." Eider stared at her for a moment, mouth slightly open as though she was about to speak, then she snapped it shut and turned for the door. "Aren't you going to wish me luck?"

"What?"

"The way I see it, your best hope now is that I kill Orso."

Ario's one-time mistress paused in the doorway. "Some fucking chance of that!" And she was gone.