Best Served Cold

The Thousand Swords fought for Ospria against Muris. They fought for Muris against Sipani. They fought for Sipani against Muris, then for Ospria again. Between contracts, they sacked Oprile on a whim. A month later, judging they had perhaps not been thorough enough, they sacked it again, and left it in smouldering ruins. They fought for everyone against no one, and no one against everyone, and all the while they hardly did any fighting at all.

But robbery and plunder, arson and pillage, rape and extortion, yes.

Nicomo Cosca liked to surround himself with the curious that he might seem strange and romantic. A nineteen-year-old swordswoman inseparable from her younger brother seemed to qualify, so he kept them close. At first he found them interesting. Then he found them useful. Then he found them indispensable.

He and Monza would spar together in the cold mornings—the flicker and scrape of steel, the hiss and smoke of snatched breath. He was stronger, and she quicker, and so they were well matched. They would taunt each other, and spit at each other, and laugh. Men from the company would gather to watch them, laugh to see their captain bested by a girl half his age, often as not. Everyone laughed, except Benna. He was no swordsman.

He had a trick for numbers, though, and he took charge of the company's books, and then the buying of the stocks, and then the management and resale of the booty and the distribution of the proceeds. He made money for everyone, and had an easy manner, and soon was well loved.

Monza was a quick study. She learned what Stolicus wrote, and Verturio, and Bialoveld, and Farans. She learned all that Nicomo Cosca had to teach. She learned tactics and strategy, manoeuvre and logistics, how to read the ground and how to read an enemy. She learned by watching, then she learned by doing. She learned all the arts and all the sciences that were of use to the soldier.

"You have a devil in you," Cosca told her, when he was drunk, which was not rarely. She saved his life at Muris, then he saved hers. Everyone laughed, except Benna, again. He was no lifesaver.

Old Sazine died of an arrow, and the captains of the companies that made up the Thousand Swords voted Nicomo Cosca to the captain general's chair. Monza and Benna went with him. She carried Cosca's orders. Then she told him what his orders should be. Then she gave orders while he was passed out drunk and pretended they were his. Then she stopped pretending they were his, and no one minded because her orders were better than his would have been, even had he been sober.

As the months passed and turned to years, he was sober less and less. The only orders he gave were in the tavern. The only sparring he did was with a bottle. When the Thousand Swords had picked one part of the country clean and it came time to move on, Monza would search for him through the taverns, and the smoke-houses, and the brothels, and drag him back.

She hated to do it, and Benna hated to watch her do it, but Cosca had given them a home and they owed him, so she did it still. As they wended their way to camp in the dusk, him stumbling under the weight of drink, and her stumbling under the weight of him, he would whisper in her ear.

"Monza, Monza. What would I do without you?"

Vengeance, Then

General ganmark's highly polished cavalry boots click-clicked against the highly polished floor. The chamberlain's shoes squeak-squeaked along behind. The echoes of both snap-snapped from the glittering walls and around the great, hollow space, their hurry setting lazy dust motes swirling through bars of light. Shenkt's own soft work boots, scuffed and supple from long use, made no sound whatsoever.

"Upon entering the presence of his Excellency," the chamberlain's words frothed busily out, "you advance towards him, without undue speed, looking neither right nor left, your eyes tilted down towards the ground and at no point meeting those of his Excellency. You stop at the white line upon the carpet. Not before the line and under no circumstances beyond it but precisely at the line. You then kneel—"

"I do not kneel," said Shenkt.

The chamberlain's head rotated towards him like an affronted owl's. "Only the heads of state of foreign powers are excepted! Everyone must—"

"I do not kneel."

The chamberlain gasped with outrage, but Ganmark snapped over him. "For pity's sake! Duke Orso's son and heir has been murdered! His Excellency does not give a damn whether a man kneels if he can bring him vengeance. Kneel or not, as it suits you." Two white-liveried guardsmen lifted their crossed halberds to let them pass, and Ganmark shoved the double doors wide open.

The hall beyond was dauntingly cavernous, opulent, grand. Fit for the throne room of the most powerful man in Styria. But Shenkt had stood in greater rooms, before greater men, and had no awe left in him. A thin red carpet stretched away down the mosaic floor, a white line at its lonely end. A high dais rose beyond it, a dozen men in full armour standing guard in front. Upon the dais was a golden chair. Within the chair was Grand Duke Orso of Talins. He was dressed all in black, but his frown was blacker yet.

A strange and sinister selection of people, three score or more, of all races, sizes and shapes, knelt before Orso and his retinue in a wide arc. They carried no weapons now, but Shenkt guessed they usually carried many. He knew some few of them by sight. Killers. Assassins. Hunters of men. Persons in his profession, if the whitewasher could be said to be in the same profession as the master painter.

He advanced towards the dais, without undue speed, looking neither right nor left. He passed through the half-circle of assorted murderers and stopped precisely at the line. He watched General Ganmark stride past the guards and up the steps to the throne, lean to whisper in Orso's ear while the chamberlain took up a disapproving pose at his other elbow.

The grand duke stared at Shenkt for a long moment and Shenkt stared back, the hall cloaked all the while in that oppressive silence that only great spaces can produce. "So this is he. Why is he not kneeling?"

"He does not kneel, apparently," said Ganmark.

"Everyone else kneels. What makes you special?"

"Nothing," said Shenkt.

"But you do not kneel."

"I used to. Long ago. No more."

Orso's eyes narrowed. "And what if a man tried to make you?"

"Some have tried."

"And?"

"And I do not kneel."

"Stand, then. My son is dead."

"You have my sorrow."

"You do not sound sorrowful."

"He was not my son."

The chamberlain nearly choked on his tongue, but Orso's sunken eyes did not deviate. "You like to speak the truth, I see. Blunt counsel is a valuable thing to powerful men. You come to me with the highest recommendations."

Shenkt said nothing.

"That business in Keln. I understand that was your work. All of that, your work alone. It is said that the things that were left could hardly be called corpses."

Shenkt said nothing.

"You do not confirm it."

Shenkt stared into Duke Orso's face, and said nothing.

"You do not deny it, though."

More nothing.

"I like a tight-lipped man. A man who says little to his friends will say less than nothing to his enemies."

Silence.

"My son is murdered. Thrown from the window of a brothel like rubbish. Many of his friends and associates, my citizens, were also killed. My son-in-law, his Majesty the King of the Union, no less, only just escaped the burning building with his life. Sotorius, the half-corpse Chancellor of Sipani who was their host, wrings his hands and tells me he can do nothing. I am betrayed. I am bereaved. I am… embarrassed. Me!" he screamed suddenly, making the chamber ring, and every person in it flinch.

Every person except Shenkt. "Vengeance, then."

"Vengeance!" Orso smashed the arm of his chair with his fist. "Swift and terrible."

"Swift I cannot promise. Terrible—yes."

"Then let it be slow, and grinding, and merciless."

"It may be necessary to cause some harm to your subjects and their property."

"Whatever it takes. Bring me their heads. Every man, woman or child involved in this, to the slightest degree. Whatever is necessary. Bring me their heads."

"Their heads, then."

"What will be your advance?"

"Nothing."

"Not even—"

"If I complete the job, you will pay me one hundred thousand scales for the head of the ringleader, and twenty thousand for each assistant to a maximum of one quarter of a million. That is my price."

"A very high one!" squeaked the chamberlain. "What will you do with so much money?"

"I will count it and laugh, while considering how a rich man need not answer the questions of idiots. You will find no employer, anywhere, unsatisfied with my work." Shenkt moved his eyes slowly to the half-circle of scum at his back. "You can pay less to lesser men, if you please."

"I will," said Orso. "If one of them should find the killers first."

"I would accept no other arrangement, your Excellency."

"Good," growled the duke. "Go, then. All of you, go! Bring… me… revenge!"

"You are dismissed!" screeched the chamberlain. There was a rustling, rattling, clattering as the assassins rose to leave the great chamber. Shenkt turned and walked back down the carpet towards the great doors, without undue speed, looking neither right nor left.

One of the killers blocked his path, a dark-skinned man of average height but wide as a door, lean slabs of muscle showing through the gap in his brightly coloured shirt. His thick lip curled. "You are Shenkt? I expected more."

"Pray to whatever god you believe in that you never see more."

"I do not pray."

Shenkt leaned close, and whispered in his ear. "I advise you to start."

Although a large room by most standards, General Ganmark's study felt cluttered. An oversized bust of Juvens frowned balefully from above the fireplace, his stony bald spot reflected in a magnificent mirror of coloured Visserine glass. Two monumental vases loomed either side of the desk almost to shoulder height. The walls were crowded with canvases in gilded frames, two of them positively vast. Fine paintings. Far too fine to be squeezed.

"A most impressive collection," said Shenkt.

"That one is by Coliere. It would have burned in the mansion in which I found it. And these two are Nasurins, that by Orhus." Ganmark pointed them out with precise jabs of his forefinger. "His early period, but still. Those vases were made as tribute to the first Emperor of Gurkhul, many hundreds of years ago, and somehow found their way to a rich man's house outside Caprile."

"And from there to here."

"I try to rescue what I can," said Ganmark. "Perhaps when the Years of Blood end, Styria will still have some few treasures worth keeping."

"Or you will."

"Better I have them than the flames. The campaign season begins, and I will be away to Visserine in the morning, to take the city under siege. Skirmishes, sacks and burnings. March and counter-march. Famine and pestilence, naturally. Maim and murder, of course. All with the awful randomness of a stroke from the heavens. Collective punishment. Of everyone, for nothing. War, Shenkt, war. And to think I once dreamed of being an honourable man. Of doing good."

"We all dream of that."

The general raised one eyebrow. "Even you?"

"Even me." Shenkt slid out his knife. A Gurkish butcher's sickle, small but sharp as fury.

"I wish you joy of it, then. The best I can do is strive to keep the waste to the merely… epic."

"These are wasteful times." Shenkt took the little lump of wood from his pocket, dog's head already roughly carved into the front.

"Aren't they all? Wine? It is from Cantain's own cellar."

"No."

Shenkt worked carefully with his knife while the general filled his own glass, woodchips scattering across the floor between his boots, the hindquarters of the dog slowly taking shape. Hardly a work of art like those around him, but it would serve. There was something calming in the regular movements of the curved blade, in the gentle fluttering down of the shavings.

Ganmark leaned against the mantel, drew out the poker and gave the fire a few unnecessary jabs. "You have heard of Monzcarro Murcatto?"

"The captain general of the Thousand Swords. A most successful soldier. I heard she was dead."

"Can you keep a secret, Shenkt?"

"I keep many hundreds."

"Of course you do. Of course." He took a long breath. "Duke Orso ordered her death. Hers and her brother's. Her victories had made her popular in Talins. Too popular. His Excellency feared she might usurp his throne, as mercenaries can do. You are not surprised?"

"I have seen every kind of death, and every kind of motive."

"Of course you have." Ganmark frowned at the fire. "This was not a good death."

"None of them are."

"Still. This was not a good one. Two months ago Duke Orso's bodyguard vanished. No great surprise, he was a foolish man, took little care over his safety, was prone to vice and bad company and had made many enemies. I thought nothing of it."

"And?"

"A month later, the duke's banker was poisoned in Westport, along with half his staff. This was a different matter. He took a very great deal of care over his safety. To poison him was a task of the greatest difficulty, carried out with a formidable professionalism and an exceptional lack of mercy. But he dabbled widely in the politics of Styria, and the politics of Styria is a fatal game with few merciful players."

"True."

"Valint and Balk themselves suspected a long enmity with Gurkish rivals might be the motive."

"Valint and Balk."

"You are familiar with the institution?"

Shenkt paused. "I believe they employed me once. Go on."

"But now Prince Ario, murdered." The general pushed one fingertip under his ear. "Stabbed in the very spot in which he stabbed Benna Murcatto, then thrown down from a high window?"

"You think Monzcarro Murcatto is still alive?"

"A week after his son's death, Duke Orso received a letter. From one Carlot dan Eider, Prince Ario's mistress. We had long suspected she was here to spy for the Union, but Orso tolerated the affair."

"Surprising."

Ganmark shrugged. "The Union is our confirmed ally. We helped them win the latest round of their endless wars against the Gurkish. We both enjoy the backing of the Banking House of Valint and Balk. Not to mention the fact that the King of the Union is Orso's son-in-law. Naturally we send each other spies, by way of neighbourly good manners. If one must entertain a spy, she might as well be a charming one, and Eider was, undeniably, charming. She was with Prince Ario in Sipani. After his death she disappeared. Then the letter."

"And it said?"

"That she was compelled through poison to assist Prince Ario's murderers. That they included among their number a mercenary named Nicomo Cosca and a torturer named Shylo Vitari, and were led by none other than Murcatto herself. Very much alive."

"You believe it?"

"Eider had no reason to lie to us. No letter will save her from his Excellency's wrath if she is found, and she must know it. Murcatto was alive when she went over the balcony, that much I am sure of. I have not seen her dead."

"She is seeking revenge."

Ganmark gave a joyless chuckle. "These are the Years of Blood. Everyone is seeking revenge. The Serpent of Talins, though? The Butcher of Caprile? Who loved nothing in the world but her brother? If she lives, she is on fire with it. There are few more single-minded enemies a man could find."

"Then I should find this woman Vitari, this man Cosca and this serpent Murcatto."

"No one must learn she might still live. If it was known in Talins that Orso was the one who planned her death… there could be unrest. Revolt, even. She was much loved among the people. A talisman. A mascot. One of their own, risen through merit. As the wars drag on and the taxes mount, his Excellency is… less well liked than he could be. I can trust you to keep silent?"

Shenkt kept silent.

"Good. There are associates of Murcatto's still in Talins. Perhaps one of them knows where she is." The general looked up, the orange glow of the fire splashed across one side of his tired face. "But what am I saying? It is your business to find people. To find people, and to…" He stabbed again at the glowing coals and sent up a shower of dancing sparks. "I need not tell you your business, need I?"

Shenkt put away his half-finished carving, and his knife, and turned for the door. "No."

Downwards

They came upon Visserine as the sun was dropping down behind the trees and the land was turning black. You could see the towers even from miles distant. Dozens of 'em. Scores. Sticking up tall and slim as lady's fingers into the cloudy blue-grey sky, pricks of light scattered where lamps burned in high windows.

"Lot o' towers," Shivers muttered to himself.

"There always was a fashion for them in Visserine." Cosca grinned sideways at him. "Some date all the way back to the New Empire, centuries old. The greatest families compete to build the tallest ones. It is a point of pride. I remember when I was a boy, one fell before it was finished, not three streets from where I lived. A dozen poor dwellings were destroyed in the collapse. It's always the poor who are crushed under rich men's ambitions. And yet they rarely complain, because… well…"

"They dream of having towers o' their own?"

Cosca chuckled. "Why, yes, I suppose they do. They don't see that the higher you climb, the further you have to fall."

"Men rarely see that 'til the ground's rushing at 'em."

"All too true. And I fear many of the rich men of Visserine will be tumbling soon…"

Friendly lit a torch, Vitari too, and Day a third, set at the front of the cart to light the way. Torches were lit all round them, 'til the road was a trickle of tiny lights in the darkness, winding through the dark country towards the sea. Would've made a pretty picture, at another time, but not now. War was coming, and no one was in a pretty mood.

The closer they came to the city, the more choked the road got with people, and the more rubbish was scattered either side of it. Half of 'em seemed desperate to get into Visserine and find some walls to hide behind, the other half to get out and find some open country to run through. It was a bastard of a choice for farmers, when war was on the way. Stick to your land and get a dose of fire and robbery for certain, with rape or murder more'n likely. Make for a town on the chance they'll find room for you, risk being robbed by your protectors, or caught up in the sack if the place falls. Or run for the hills to hide, maybe get caught, maybe starve, maybe just die of an icy night.

War killed some soldiers, sure, but it left the rest with money, and songs to sing, and a fire to sit around. It killed a lot more farmers, and left the rest with nought but ashes.

Just to lift the mood rain started flitting down through the darkness, spitting and hissing as it fell on the flickering torches, white streaks through the circles of light around 'em. The road turned to sticky mud. Shivers felt the wet tickle his scalp, but his thoughts were far off. Same place they'd tended to stray to these last few weeks. Back to Cardotti's, and the dark work he'd done there.

His brother had always told him it was about the lowest thing a man could do, kill a woman. Respect for womenfolk, and children, sticking to the old ways and your word, that was what set men apart from animals, and Carls from killers. He hadn't meant to do it, but when you swing steel in a crowd you can't duck the blame for the results. The good man he'd come here to be should've been gnawing his nails to the bloody quick over what he'd done. But all he could get in his head when he thought of his blade chopping a bloody chunk out of her ribs, the hollow sound it made, her staring face as she slid dying down the wall, was relief he'd got away with it.

Killing a woman by mistake in a brothel was murder, evil as it got, but killing a man on purpose in a battle was all kinds of noble? A thing to take pride in, sing songs of? Time was, gathered round a fire up in the cold North, that had seemed simple and obvious. But Shivers couldn't see the difference so sharp as he'd used to. And it wasn't like he'd got himself confused. He'd suddenly got it clear. You set to killing folk, there's no right place to stop that means a thing.

"You look as if you've dark thoughts in mind, my friend," said Cosca.

"Don't seem the time for jokes."

The mercenary chuckled. "My old mentor Sazine once told me you should laugh every moment you live, for you'll find it decidedly difficult afterwards."

"That so? And what became of him?"

"Died of a rotten shoulder."

"Poor punchline."

"Well, if life's a joke," said Cosca, "it's a black one."

"Best not to laugh, then, in case the joke's on you."

"Or trim your sense of humour to match."

"You'd need a twisted sense of humour to make laughs o' this."

Cosca scratched at his neck as he looked towards the walls of Visserine, rising up black out of the thickening rain. "I must confess, for now I'm failing to see the funny side."

You could tell from the lights there was an ugly press at the gate, and it got no prettier the closer they came. Folk were coming out from time to time—old men, young men, women carrying children, gear packed up on mules or on their backs, cartwheels creaking round through the sticky mud. Folk were coming out, easing nervous through the angry crowd, but there weren't many being let the other way. You could feel the fear, heavy on the air, and the thicker they all crowded the worse it got.

Shivers swung down from his horse, stretched his legs and made sure he loosened his sword in its sheath.

"Alright." Under her hood, Monza's hair was stuck black to the side of her scowling face. "I'll get us in."

"You are absolutely convinced that we should enter?" demanded Morveer.

She gave him a long look. "Orso's army can't be more than two days behind us. That means Ganmark. Faithful Carpi too, maybe, with the Thousand Swords. Wherever they are is where we need to be, and that's all."

"You are my employer, of course. But I feel duty-bound to point out that there is such a thing as being too determined. Surely we can devise a less perilous alternative to trapping ourselves in a city that will soon be surrounded by hostile forces."

"We'll do no good waiting out here."

"No good will be done if we are all killed. A plan too brittle to bend with circumstance is worse than no—" She turned before he'd finished and made off towards the archway, shoving her way between the bodies. "Women," Morveer hissed through gritted teeth.

"What about them?" growled Vitari.

"Present company entirely excepted, they are prone to think with heart rather than head."

"For what she's paying she can think with her arse for all I care."

"Dying rich is still dying."

"Better'n dying poor," said Shivers.

Not long after, a half-dozen guards came shoving through the crowd, herding folk away with their spears, clearing a muddy path to the gate. An officer came frowning with 'em, Monza just behind his shoulder. No doubt she'd sown a few coins, and this was the harvest.

"You six, with the cart there." The officer pointed a gloved finger at Shivers and the rest. "You're coming in. You six and no one else."

There were some angry mutters from the rest stood about the gate. Somebody gave the cart a kick as it started moving. "Shit on this! It ain't right! I paid my taxes to Salier all my life, and I get left out?" Someone snatched at Shivers' arm as he tried to lead his horse after. A farmer, from what he could tell in the torchlight and the spitting rain, even more desperate than most. "Why should these bastards be let through? I've got my family to—"

Shivers smashed his fist into the farmer's face. He caught him by his coat as he fell and dragged him up, followed the first punch with another, knocked him sprawling on his back in the ditch by the road. Blood bubbled down his face, black in the dusk as he tried to push himself up. You start some trouble, it's best to start it and finish it all at once. A bit of sharp violence can save you a lot worse down the line. That's the way Black Dow would've handled it. So Shivers stepped forwards quick, planted his boot on the man's chest and shoved him back into the mud.

"Best stay where y'are." A few others stood behind, dark outlines of men, a woman with two children around her legs. One lad looking straight at him, bent over like he was thinking of doing something about it all. The farmer's son, maybe. "I do this shit for a living, boy. You feel a pressing need to lie down?"

The lad shook his head. Shivers took hold of his horse's bridle again, clicked his tongue and made for the archway. Not too fast. Good and ready in case anyone was fool enough to test him. But they were already back to shouting before he'd got a stride or two, calling out how they were special, why they should be let in while the rest were left to the wolves. A man getting his front teeth knocked out was nothing to cry about in all this. Those that hadn't seen far worse guessed they'd be seeing it soon enough, and all their care was to make sure they weren't on the sharp end of it. He followed the others, blowing on his skinned knuckles, under the archway and into the darkness of the long tunnel.

Shivers tried to remember what the Dogman had told him, a hundred years ago it seemed now, back in Adua. Something about blood making more blood, and it not being too late to be better'n that. Not too late to be a good man. Rudd Threetrees had been a good man, none better. He'd stuck to the old ways all his life, never took the easy path, if he thought it was the wrong one. Shivers was proud to say he'd fought beside the man, called him chief, but in the end, what had Threetrees' honour got him? A few misty-eyed mentions around the fire. That, and a hard life, and a place in the mud at the end of it. Black Dow had been as cold a bastard as Shivers ever knew. A man who never faced an enemy if he could take him in the back, burned villages without a second thought, broke his own oaths and spat on the results. A man as merciful as the plague, and with a conscience the size of a louse's cock. Now he sat in Skarling's chair with half the North at his feet and the other half feared to say his name.

They came out from the tunnel and into the city. Water spattered from broken gutters and onto worn cobbles. A wet procession of men, women, mules, carts, waiting to get out, watching them as they tramped the other way. Shivers tipped his head back, eyes narrowed against the rain flitting down into his face as they went under a great tower, soaring up into the black night. Must've been three times the height of the tallest thing in Carleon, and it weren't even the biggest one around.

He glanced sideways at Monza, the way he'd got so good at doing. She had her usual frown, eyes fixed right ahead, light from passing torches shifting across the hard bones in her face. She set her mind to a thing, and did whatever it took. Shit on conscience and consequences both. Vengeance first, questions later.

He moved his tongue around in his mouth and spat. The more he saw, the more he saw she was right. Mercy and cowardice were the same. No one was giving prizes for good behaviour. Not here, not in the North, not anywhere. You want a thing, you have to take it, and the greatest man is the one that snatches most. Maybe it would've been nice if life was another way.

But it was how it was.

Monza was stiff and aching, just like always. She was angry and tired, just like always. She needed a smoke, worse than ever. And just to sprinkle some spice on the evening, she was getting wet, cold and saddle-sore besides.

She remembered Visserine as a beautiful place, full of twinkling glass and graceful buildings, fine food, laughter and freedom. She'd been in a rare good mood when she last visited, true, in a warm summer rather than a chill spring, with no one but Benna looking to her for leadership and no four men she had to kill.

But even so, the place was a long way from the bright pleasure garden of her memory.

Where there was a lamp burning the shutters were closed tight, light just leaking out around the edges, catching the little glass figures in their niches above the doors and making them twinkle. Household spirits, a tradition from long ago, before the time of the New Empire even, put there to bring prosperity and drive off evil. Monza wondered what good those chunks of glass would be when Orso's army broke through into the city. Not much. The streets were thick with fear, the sense of threat so heavy it seemed to stick to Monza's clammy skin and make the hairs on her neck prickle.

Not that Visserine wasn't crawling with people. Some were running, making for docks or gates. Men and women with packs, everything they could save on their backs, children in tow, elders shuffling behind. Wagons rattled along stacked with sacks and boxes, with mattresses and chests of drawers, with all manner of useless junk that would no doubt end up abandoned, lining one road or another out of Visserine. A waste of time and effort, trying to save anything but your lives at a time like this.

You chose to run, you'd best run fast.

But there were plenty who'd chosen to run into the city for refuge, and found to their great dismay it was a dead end. They lined the streets in places. They filled the doorways, huddled under blankets against the rain. They crammed the shadowy arcades of an empty market in their dozens, cowering as a column of soldiers tramped past, armour beaded up with moisture, gleaming by torchlight. Sounds came echoing through the murk. Crashes of breaking glass or tearing wood. Angry shouts, or fearful. Once or twice an outright scream.

Monza guessed a few of the city's own people were making an early start on the sacking. Settling a score or two, or snatching a few things they'd always envied while the eyes of the powerful were fixed on their own survival. This was one of those rare moments when a man could get something for free, and there'd be more and more taking advantage of it as Orso's army gathered outside the city. The stuff of civilisation, already starting to dissolve.

Monza felt eyes following her and the rest of the merry band as they rode slowly through the streets. Fearful eyes, suspicious eyes, and the other kind—trying to judge if they were soft enough or rich enough to be worth robbing. She kept the reins in her right hand, for all it hurt her to tug at them, so her left could rest on her thigh, close to the hilt of her sword. The only law in Visserine now was at the edge of a blade. And the enemy hadn't even arrived yet.

I have seen hell, Stolicus wrote, and it is a great city under siege.

Up ahead the road passed under a marble arch, a long rivulet of water spattering from its high keystone. A mural was painted on the wall above. Grand Duke Salier sat enthroned at the top, optimistically depicted as pleasantly plump rather than massively obese. He held one hand up in blessing, a heavenly light radiating from his fatherly smile. Beneath him an assortment of Visserine's citizens, from the lowest to the highest, humbly enjoyed the benefits of his good governance. Bread, wine, wealth. Under them, around the top of the archway, the words charity, justice, courage were printed in gold letters high as a man. Someone with an appetite for truth had managed to climb up there and daub over them in streaky red, greed, torture, cowardice.

"The arrogance of that fat fucker Salier." Vitari grinned sideways at her, orange hair black-brown with rain. "Still, I reckon he's made his last boast, don't you?"

Monza only grunted. All she could think about as she looked into Vitari's sharp-boned face was how far she could trust her. They might be in the middle of a war, but the greatest threats were still more than likely from within her own little company of outcasts. Vitari? Here for the money—ever a risky motivation since there's always some bastard with deeper pockets. Cosca? How can you trust a notoriously treacherous drunk you once betrayed yourself? Friendly? Who knew how the hell that man's mind worked?

But they were all tight as family beside Morveer. She stole a glance over her shoulder, caught him frowning at her from the seat of his cart. The man was poison, and the moment he could profit by it he'd murder her easily as crushing a tick. He was already suspicious of the choice to come into Visserine, but the last thing she wanted was to share her reasoning. That Orso would have Eider's letter by now. Would have offered a king's ransom of Valint and Balk's money for her death and got half the killers in the Circle of the World scouring Styria hoping to put her head in a bag. Along with the heads of anyone who'd helped her, of course.

The chances were high they'd be safer in the middle of a battle than outside it.

Shivers was the only one she could even halfway trust. He rode hunched over, big and silent beside her. His babble had been quite the irritation in Westport, but now it had dried up, strange to say, it had left a gap. He'd saved her life, in foggy Sipani. Monza's life wasn't all it had been, but a man saving it still raised him a damn sight higher in her estimation.

"You're quiet, all of a sudden."

She could hardly see his face in the darkness, just the hard set of it, shadows in his eye sockets, in the hollows under his cheeks. "Don't reckon I've much to say."

"Never stopped you before."

"Well. I'm starting to see all kinds o' things different."

"That so?"

"You might think it comes easy to me, but it's an effort, trying to stay hopeful. An effort that don't ever seem to pay off."

"I thought being a better man was its own reward."

"I guess it ain't reward enough for all the work. In case you hadn't noticed, we're in the middle of a war."

"Believe me, I know what a war looks like. I've been living in one most of my life."

"Well, what are the odds o' that? Me too. From what I've seen, and I've seen plenty, a war ain't really the place for bettering yourself. I'm thinking I might try it your way, from now on."

"Pick out a god and praise him! Welcome to the real world!" She wasn't sure she didn't feel a twinge of disappointment though, for all her grinning. Monza might have given up on being a decent person long ago, but somehow she liked the idea that she could have pointed one out. She pulled on her reins and eased her horse up, the cart clattering to a halt behind her. "We're here."

The place she and Benna had bought in Visserine was an old one, built before the city had good walls, and rich men each took their own care to guard what was theirs. A stone tower-house on five storeys, hall and stables to one side, with slit windows on the ground floor and battlements on the high roof. It stood big and black against the dark sky, a very different beast from the low brick-and-timber houses that crowded in close around it. She lifted the key to the studded door, then frowned. It was open a crack, light gathering on the rough stone down its edge. She put her finger to her lips and pointed towards it.

Shivers raised one big boot and kicked it shuddering open, wood clattering on the other side as something was barged out of the way. Monza darted in, left hand on the hilt of her sword. The kitchen was empty of furniture and full of people. Grubby and tired-looking, every one of them staring at her, shocked and fearful, in the light of one flickering candle. The nearest, a stocky man with one arm in a sling, stumbled up from an empty barrel and caught hold of a length of wood.

"Get back!" he screamed at her. A man in a dirty farmer's smock took a stride towards her, waving a hatchet.

Shivers stepped around Monza's shoulder, ducking under the lintel and straightening up, big shadow shifting across the wall behind him, his heavy sword drawn and gleaming down by his leg. "You get back."

The farmer did as he was told, scared eyes fixed on that length of bright metal. "Who the hell are you?"

"Me?" snapped Monza. "This is my house, bastard."

"Eleven of them," said Friendly, slipping through the doorway on the other side.

As well as the two men there were two old women and a man even older, bent right over, gnarled hands dangling. There was a woman about Monza's age, a baby in her arms and two little girls sat near her, staring with big eyes, like enough to be twins. A girl of maybe sixteen stood by the empty fireplace. She had a rough-forged knife out that she'd been gutting a fish with, her other arm across a boy, might've been ten or so, pushing him behind her shoulder.

Just a girl, looking out for her little brother.

"Put your sword away," Monza said.

"Eh?"

"No one's getting killed tonight."

Shivers raised one heavy brow at her. "Now who's the optimist?"

"Lucky for you I bought a big house." The one with his arm in a sling looked like the head of the family, so she fixed her eye on him. "There's room for all of us."

He let his club drop. "We're farmers from up the valley, just looking for somewhere safe. Place was like this when we found it, we didn't steal nothing. We'll be no trouble—"

"You'd better not be. This all of you?"

"My name's Furli. That's my wife—"

"I don't need your names. You'll stay down here, and you'll stay out of our way. We'll be upstairs, in the tower. You don't come up there, you understand? That way no one gets hurt."

He nodded, fear starting to mix with relief. "I understand."

"Friendly, get the horses stabled, and that cart off the street." Those farmers' hungry faces—helpless, weak, needy—made Monza feel sick. She kicked a broken chair out of the way then started up the stairs, winding into the darkness, her legs stiff from a day in the saddle. Morveer caught up with her on the fourth landing, Cosca and Vitari just behind him, Day at the back, a trunk in her arms. Morveer had brought a lamp with him, light pooling on the underside of his unhappy face.

"Those peasants are a decided threat to us," he murmured. "A problem easily solved, however. It will hardly be necessary to utilise the King of Poisons. A charitable contribution of a loaf of bread, dusted with Leopard Flower of course, and they would cease to—"

"No."

He blinked. "If your intention is to leave them at liberty down there, I must most strongly protest at—"

"Protest away. Let's see if I care a shit. You and Day can take that room." As he turned to peer into the darkness, Monza snatched the lamp out of his hand. "Cosca, you're on the second floor with Friendly. Vitari, seems like you get to sleep alone next door."

"Sleeping alone." She kicked some fallen plaster away across the boards. "Story of my life."

"I will to my cart, then, and bring my equipment into the Butcher of Caprile's hostel for displaced peasantry." Morveer was shaking his head with disgust as he turned for the stairs.

"Do that," snapped Monza at his back. She loitered for a moment, until she'd heard his boots scrape down a few flights and out of earshot. Until, apart from Cosca's voice burbling away endlessly to Friendly downstairs, it was quiet on the landing. Then she followed Day into her room and gently pushed the door closed. "We need to talk."

The girl had opened her trunk and was just getting a chunk of bread out of it. "What about?"

"The same thing we talked about in Westport. Your employer."

"Picking at your nerves, is he?"

"Don't tell me he isn't picking at yours."

"Every day for three years."

"Not an easy man to work for, I reckon." Monza took a step into the room, holding the girl's eye. "Sooner or later a pupil has to step out from her master's shadow, if she's ever going to become the master herself."

"That why you betrayed Cosca?"

That gave Monza a moment's pause. "More or less. Sometimes you have to take a risk. Grasp the nettle. But then you've got much better reasons even than I had." Said offhand, as though it was obvious.

Day's turn to pause. "What reasons?"

Monza pretended to be surprised. "Well… because sooner or later Morveer will betray me, and go over to Orso." She wasn't sure of it, of course, but it was high time she guarded herself against the possibility.

"That so?" Day wasn't smiling any longer.

"He doesn't like the way I do things."

"Who says I like the way you do things?"

"You don't see it?" Day only narrowed her eyes, food, for once, forgotten in her hand. "If he goes to Orso, he'll need someone to blame. For Ario. A scapegoat."

Now she got the idea. "No," she snapped. "He needs me."

"How long have you been with him? Three years, did you say? Managed before, didn't he? How many assistants do you think he's had? See a lot of them around, do you?"

Day opened her mouth, blinked, then thoughtfully shut it.

"Maybe he'll stick, and we'll stay a happy family and part friends. Most poisoners are good sorts, when you get to know them." Monza leaned down close to whisper. "But when he tells you he's going over to Orso, don't say I didn't warn you."

She left Day frowning at her chunk of bread, slipped quietly through the door and brushed it shut with her fingertips. She peered down the stairwell, but there was no sign of Morveer, only the handrail spiralling down into the shadows. She nodded to herself. The seed was planted now, she'd have to see what sprouted from it. She pushed her tired legs up the narrow steps to the top of the tower, through the creaking door and into the high chamber under the roof, faint sound of rain drumming above.

The room where she and Benna had spent a happy month together, in the midst of some dark years. Away from the wars. Laughing, talking, watching the world from the wide windows. Pretending at how life might have been if they'd never taken up warfare, and somehow made it rich some other way. She found she was smiling, despite herself. The little glass figure still gleamed in its niche above the door. Their household spirit. She remembered Benna grinning over his shoulder as he pushed it up there with his fingertips.

So it can watch over you while you sleep, the way you've always watched over me.

Her smile leaked away, and she walked to the window and dragged open one of the flaking shutters. Rain had thrown a grey veil across the dark city, pelting down now, spattering against the sill. A stroke of distant lightning picked out the tangle of wet roofs below for an instant, the grey outlines of other towers looming from the murk. A few moments later the thunder crackled sullen and muffled across the city.

"Where do I sleep?" Shivers stood in the doorway, arm up on the frame and some blankets over one shoulder.

"You?" She glanced up to the little glass statue above his head, then back to Shivers' face. Maybe she'd had high standards, long ago, but back then she'd had Benna, and both her hands, and an army behind her. She had nothing behind her now but six well-paid misfits, a good sword and a lot of money. A general should keep her distance from her troops, maybe, and a wanted woman from everyone, but Monza wasn't a general anymore. Benna was dead, and she needed something. You can weep over your misfortunes, or you can pick yourself up and make the best of things, shit though they may be. She elbowed the shutter closed, sank down wincing on the bed and set the lamp on the floor.

"You're in here, with me."

His brows went up. "I am?"

"That's right, optimist. Your lucky night." She leaned back on her elbows, old bed-frame creaking, and stuck one foot up at him. "Now shut the door and help me get my fucking boots off."

Rats in a Sack

Cosca squinted as he stepped out onto the roof of the tower. Even the sunlight seemed set on tormenting him, but he supposed he richly deserved it. Visserine was spread out around him: jumbles of brick-and-timber houses, villas of cream-coloured stone, the green tops of leafing trees where the parks and broad avenues were laid out. Everywhere windows glinted, statues of coloured glass on the rooflines of the grandest buildings catching the morning sun and shining like jewels. Other towers were widely scattered, dozens of them, some far taller than the one he stood on, each casting its own long shadow across the sprawl.

Southwards the grey-blue sea, the smoke of industry still rising from the city's famous glass-working district on its island just offshore, the gliding specks of seabirds circling above it. To the east the Visser was a dark snake glimpsed through the buildings, four bridges linking the two halves of the city. Grand Duke Salier's palace squatted jealously on an island in its midst. A place where Cosca had spent many enjoyable evenings, an honoured guest of the great connoisseur himself. When he had still been loved, feared and admired. So long ago it seemed another man's life.

Monza stood motionless at the parapet, framed by the blue sky. The blade of her sword and her sinewy left arm made a line, perfectly straight, from shoulder to point. The steel shone bright, the ruby on her middle finger glittered bloody, her skin gleamed with sweat. Her vest stuck to her with it. She let the sword drop as he came closer, as he lifted the wine jug and took a long, cool swallow.

"I wondered how long it would take you."

"Only water in it, more's the pity. Did you not witness my solemn oath never to touch wine again?"

She snorted. "That I've heard before, with small results."

"I am in the slow and agonising process of mending my ways."

"I've heard that too, with even smaller ones."

Cosca sighed. "Whatever must a man do to be taken seriously?"

"Keep his word once in his life?"

"My fragile heart, so often broken in the past! Can it take such a buffeting?" He wedged one boot up on the battlements beside her. "I was born in Visserine, you know, no more than a few streets away. A happy childhood but a wild youth, full of ugly incidents. Including the one that obliged me to flee the city to seek my fortune as a paid soldier."

"Your whole life has been full of ugly incidents."

"True enough." He had few pleasant memories, in fact. And most of those, Cosca realised as he peered sideways at Monza, had involved her. Most of the best moments of his life, and the very worst of all. He took a sharp breath and shielded his eyes with a hand, looking westwards, past the grey line of the city walls and out into the patchwork of fields beyond. "No sign of our friends from Talins yet?"

"Soon. General Ganmark isn't a man to turn up late to an engagement." She paused for a moment, frowning, as always. "When are you going to say you told me?"

"Told you what?"

"About Orso."

"You know what I told you."

"Never trust your own employer." A lesson he had learned at great cost from Duchess Sefeline of Ospria. "And now I'm the one paying your wages."

Cosca made an effort at a grin, though it hurt his sore lips to do it. "But we are fittingly suspicious in all our dealings with each other."

"Of course. I wouldn't trust you to carry my shit to the stream."

"A shame. Your shit smells sweet as roses, I am sure." He leaned back against the parapet and blinked into the sun. "Do you remember how we used to spar, in the mornings? Before you got too good."

"Before you got too drunk."

"Well, I could hardly spar afterwards, could I? There is a limit to how much a man should be willing to embarrass himself before breakfast. Is that a Calvez you have there?"

She lifted the sword, sun's gleam gliding along its edge. "I had it made for Benna."

"For Benna? What the hell would he do with a Calvez? Use it as a spit and cook apples on it?"

"He didn't even do that much, as it goes."

"I used to have one, you know. Damn good sword. Lost it in a card game. Drink?" He held out the jug.

She reached for it. "I could—"

"Hah!" He flung the water in her face and she yelped, stumbling back, drops flying. He ripped his sword from its sheath and as the jug shattered against the roof he was already swinging. She managed to parry the first cut, ducked desperately under the second, slipped, sprawled, rolled away as Cosca's blade squealed down the roofing lead where she had been a moment before. She came up in a crouch, sword at the ready.

"You're getting soft, Murcatto." He chuckled as he paced out into the centre of the roof. "You'd never have fallen for the old water in the face ten years ago."

"I didn't fall for it just now, idiot." She wiped her brow slowly with her gloved hand, water dripping from the ends of her wet hair, never taking her eyes from his. "You got anything more than water in the face, or is that as far as your swordsmanship reaches these days?"

Not much further, if he was honest. "Why don't we find out?"

She sprang forwards and their blades feathered together, metal ringing and scraping. She had a long scar on her bare right shoulder, another curving round her forearm and into her black glove.

He waved his sword at it. "Fighting left-handed, eh? Hope you're not taking pity on an old man."

"Pity? You know me better than that." He flicked away a jab, but another came so quickly behind it he only just got out of the way, the blade punching a ragged hole in his shirt before it whipped back out.

He raised his brows. "Good thing I lost some weight during my last binge."

"You could lose more, if you're asking me." She circled him, the point of her tongue showing between her teeth.

"Trying to get the sun behind you?"

"You never should've taught me all those dirty tricks. Care to use your left, even things up a little?"

"Give up an advantage? You know me better than that!" He feinted right then went the other way and left her lunging at nothing. She was quick, but not near as quick as she had been with her right hand. He trod on her boot as she passed, made her stumble, the point of his sword left a neat scratch across the scar on her shoulder, and made a cross of it.

She peered down at the little wound, a bead of blood forming at its corner. "You old bastard."

"A little something to remember me by." And he twirled his sword around and slashed ostentatiously at the air. She lunged at him again and their swords rang together, cut, cut, jab and parry. All a touch clumsy, like sewing with gloves on. The time was they had given exhibitions, but it seemed time had done nothing for either of them. "One question…" he murmured, keeping his eyes on hers. "Why did you betray me?"

"I got tired of your fucking jokes."

"I deserved to be betrayed, of course. Every mercenary ends up stabbed in the front or the back. But by you?" He jabbed at her, followed it with a cut that made her shuffle back, wincing. "After all I taught you? All I gave you? Safety, and money, and a place to belong? I treated you like my own daughter!"

"Like your mother, maybe. You've left out getting so drunk you'd shit in your clothes. I owed you, but there's a limit." She circled him, looking for an opening, no more than the thickness of a finger between the points of their swords. "I might've followed you to hell, but I wasn't taking my brother there with me."

"Why not? He'd have been right at home."

"Fuck yourself!" She tricked him with a feint, switched angle and forced him to hop away with all the grace of a dying frog. He had forgotten how much work swordplay required. His lungs were burning already, shoulder, forearm, wrist, hand, all aching with a vengeance. "If it hadn't been me it would've been one of the other captains. Sesaria! Victus! Andiche!" She pushed home each hated name with a sharp cut, jarring the sword in his hand. "They were all falling over themselves to be rid of you at Afieri!"

"Can we not mention that damn place!" He parried her next effort and switched smartly to the attack with something close to his old vigour, driving her back towards the corner of the roof. He needed to bring this to a close before he died of exhaustion. He lunged again and caught her sword on his. He drove her off balance against the parapet, bent her back over the battlements, guards scraping together until their faces were no more than a few inches apart, the long drop to the street looming into view behind her head. He could feel her quick breath on his cheek. For the briefest moment he almost kissed her, and he almost pushed her off the roof. Perhaps it was only because he could not decide which to do that he did neither one.

"You were better with your right hand," he hissed.

"You were better ten years ago." She slid from under his sword and her gloved little finger came from nowhere and poked him in the eye.

"Eeeee!" he squealed, free hand clapped to his face. Her knee thudded almost silently into his fruits and sent a lance of pain through his belly as far as his neck. "Oooooof…" He tottered, blade clattering from his clutching fingers, bent over, unable to breathe. "A little something to remember me by." And the glittering point of Monza's sword left him a burning scratch across his cheek.

"Gah!" He sank down slowly to the roofing lead. Back on his knees. There really is no place like home…

Through the savage pain he heard slow clapping coming from the stairway. "Vitari," he croaked, squinting over at her as she ambled out into the sunlight. "Why is it… you always find me… at my lowest moments?"

"Because I enjoy them so."

"You bitches don't know your luck… that you'll never feel the pain… of a blow to the fruits."

"Try childbirth."

"A charming invitation… if I were a little less bruised in the relevant areas, I would definitely take you up on it."

But, as so often, his wit was wasted. Vitari's attention was already fixed far beyond the battlements, and Monza's too. Cosca dragged himself up, bow-legged. A long column of horsemen had crested a rise to the west of the city, framed between two nearby towers, a cloud of dust rising from the hooves of their horses and leaving a brown smear across the sky.

"They're here," said Vitari. From somewhere behind them a bell began to ring, soon joined by others.

"And there," said Monza. A second column had appeared. And a pillar of smoke, drifting up beyond a hill to the north.

Cosca stood as the sun slowly rose into the blue sky, no doubt administering a healthy dose of sunburn to his spreading bald patch, and watched Duke Orso's army steadily deploy in the fields outside the city. Regiment after regiment smoothly found their positions, well out of bowshot from the walls. A large detachment forded the river to the north and completed the encirclement. The horse screened the foot as they formed neat lines, then fell back behind them, no doubt to set about the business of ravaging anything carelessly left unravaged last season.

Tents began to appear, and carts too as the supplies came up, stippling the muddy land behind the lines. The tiny defenders at the walls could do nothing but watch as the Talinese dug in around them, as orderly as the workings of a gigantic clock. Not Cosca's style, of course, even when sober. More engineering than artistry, but one had to admire the discipline.

He spread his arms wide. "Welcome, one and all, to the siege of Visserine!"

The others had all gathered on the roof to watch Ganmark's grip on the city tighten. Monza stood with her left hand on her hip, gloved right slack on the pommel of her sword, black hair stirring around her scowl. Shivers was on Cosca's other side, staring balefully out from under his brows. Friendly sat near the door to the stairs, rolling his dice between his crossed legs. Day and Vitari muttered to each other further along the parapet. Morveer looked even more sour than usual, if that was possible.

"Can no one's sense of humour withstand so small a thing as a siege? Cheer up, my comrades!" Cosca gave Shivers a hearty clap on his broad back. "It isn't every day you get to see so large an army handled so well! We should all congratulate Monza's friend General Ganmark on his exceptional patience and discipline. Perhaps we should pen him a letter."

"My dear General Ganmark." Monza worked her mouth, curled her tongue and blew spit over the battlements. "Yours ever, Monzcarro Murcatto."

"A simple missive," observed Morveer, "but no doubt he will treasure it."

"Lot o' soldiers down there," Shivers grunted.

Friendly's voice drifted gently over. "Thirteen thousand four hundred, or thereabouts."

"Mostly Talinese troops." Cosca waved at them with the eyeglass. "Some regiments from Orso's older allies—flags of Etrisani on the right wing, there, near the water, and some others of Cesale in the centre. All regulars, though. No sign of our old comrades-in-arms, the Thousand Swords. Shame. It would be fine to renew some old friendships, wouldn't it, Monza? Sesaria, Victus, Andiche. Faithful Carpi too, of course." Renew old friendships… and be revenged on old friends.

"The mercenaries will be away to the east." Monza jerked her head across the river. "Holding off Duke Rogont and his Osprians."

"Great fun for all involved, no doubt. But we, at least, are here." Cosca gestured towards the crawling soldiers outside the city. "General Ganmark, one presumes, is there. The plan, to bring us all together in a happy reunion? We presume you have a plan?"

"Ganmark is a cultured man. He has a taste for art."

"And?" demanded Morveer.

"No one has more art than Grand Duke Salier."

"His collection is impressive." Cosca had admired it on several occasions, or at any rate pretended to, while admiring his wine.

"The finest in Styria, they say." Monza strode to the opposite parapet, looking towards Salier's palace on its island in the river. "When the city falls, Ganmark will make straight for the palace, eager to rescue all those priceless works from the chaos."

"To steal them for himself," threw in Vitari.

Monza's jaw was set even harder than usual. "Orso will want to be done with this siege quickly. Leave as much time as possible to put an end to Rogont. Finish the League of Eight for good and claim his crown before winter comes. That means breaches, and assaults, and bodies in the streets."

"Marvellous!" Cosca clapped his hands. "Streets may boast noble trees, and stately buildings, but they never feel complete without a dusting of corpses, do they?"

"We take armour, uniforms, weapons from the dead. When the city falls, which will be soon, we disguise ourselves as Talinese. We find our way into the palace, and while Ganmark is going about the rescue of Salier's collection and his guard is down…"

"Kill the bastard?" offered Shivers.

There was a pause. "I believe I perceive the most minute of flaws in the scheme." Morveer's whining words were like nails driven into the back of Cosca's skull. "Grand Duke Salier's palace will be among the best-guarded locations in Styria at the present moment, and we are not in it. Nor likely to receive an invitation."

"On the contrary, I have one already." Cosca was gratified to find them all staring at him. "Salier and I were quite close some years ago, when he employed me to settle his boundary issues with Puranti. We used to dine together once a week and he assured me I was welcome whenever I found myself in the city."

The poisoner's face was a caricature of contempt. "Would this, by any chance, have been before you became a wine-ravaged sot?"

Cosca waved one careless hand while filing that slight carefully away with the rest. "During my long and most enjoyable transformation into one. Like a caterpillar turning into a beautiful butterfly. In any case, the invitation still stands."

Vitari narrowed her eyes at him. "How the hell do you plan to make use of it?"

"I imagine I will address the guards at the palace gate, and say something along the lines of—‘I am Nicomo Cosca, famed soldier of fortune, and I am here for dinner.' "

There was an uncomfortable silence, quite as if he had contributed a giant turd rather than a winning idea.

"Forgive me," murmured Monza, "but I doubt your name opens doors the way it used to."

"Latrine doors, maybe." Morveer gave a sneering shake of his head. Day chuckled softly into the wind. Even Shivers had a dubious curl to his lip.

"Vitari and Morveer, then," snapped Monza. "That's your job. Watch the palace. Find us a way in." The two of them gave each other an unenthusiastic frown. "Cosca, you know something about uniforms."

He sighed. "Few men more. Every employer wants to give you one of their own. I had one from the Aldermen of Westport cut from cloth of gold, about as comfortable as a lead pipe up the—"

"Something less eye-catching might be better suited to our purpose."

Cosca drew himself up and snapped out a vibrating salute. "General Murcatto, I will do my straining utmost to obey your orders!"

"Don't strain. Man of your age, you might rupture something. Take Friendly with you, once the assaults begin." The convict shrugged, and went back to his dice.

"We will most nobly strip the dead to their naked arses!" Cosca turned towards the stairs, but was brought up short by the sight in the bay. "Ah! Duke Orso's fleet has joined the fun." He could just see ships moving on the horizon, white sails marked with the black cross of Talins.

"More guests for Duke Salier," said Vitari.

"He always was a conscientious host, but I'm not sure even he can be prepared for so many visitors at once. The city is entirely cut off." And Cosca grinned into the wind.

"A prison," said Friendly, and almost with a smile of his own.

"We are helpless as rats in a sack!" snapped Morveer. "You speak quite as if that were a good thing."

"Five times I have been under siege, and always quite relished the experience. It has a wonderful way of limiting the options. Of freeing the mind." Cosca took a long breath in through his nose and blew it happily out. "When life is a cell, there is nothing more liberating than captivity."

The Forlorn Hope

Fire.

Visserine by night had become a place of flame and shadow. An endless maze of broken walls, fallen roofs, jutting rafters. A nightmare of disembodied cries, ghostly shapes flitting through the darkness. Buildings loomed, gutted shells, the eyeless gaps of window and doorway screaming open, fire spurting out, licking through, tickling at the darkness. Charred beams stabbed at the flames and they stabbed back. Showers of white sparks climbed into the black skies, and a black snow of ash fell softly the other way. The city had new towers now, crooked towers of smoke, glowing with the light of the fires that gave them birth, smudging out the stars.

"How many did we get the last time?" Cosca's eyes gleamed yellow from the flames across the square. "Three was it?"

"Three," croaked Friendly. They were safe in the chest in his room: the armour of two Talinese soldiers, one with the square hole left by a flatbow bolt, and the uniform of a slight young lieutenant he had found crushed under a fallen chimney. Bad luck for him, but then Friendly supposed it was his side throwing the fire everywhere.

They had catapults beyond the walls, five on the west side of the river, and three on the east. They had catapults on the twenty-two white-sailed ships in the harbour. The first night, Friendly had stayed up until dawn watching them. They had thrown one hundred and eighteen burning missiles over the walls, scattering fires about the city. Fires shifted, and burned out, and split, and merged one with another, and so they could not be counted. The numbers had deserted Friendly, and left him alone and afraid. It had taken but six short days, three nights times two, for peaceful Visserine to turn to this.

The only part of the city untouched was the island on which Duke Salier's palace stood. There were paintings there, Murcatto said, and other pretty things that Ganmark, the leader of Orso's army, the man they were here to kill, wished to save. He would burn countless houses, and countless people in them, and order murder night and day, but these dead things of paint had to be protected. Friendly thought this was a man who should be put in Safety, so that the world outside could be a safer place. But instead he was obeyed, and admired, and the world burned. It seemed all turned around, all wrong. But then Friendly could not tell right from wrong, the judges had told him so.

"You ready?"

"Yes," lied Friendly.

Cosca flashed a crazy grin. "Then to the breach, dear friend, once more!" And he trotted off down the street, one hand on the hilt of his sword, the other clasping his hat to his head. Friendly swallowed, then followed, lips moving silently as he counted the steps he took. He had to count something other than the ways he could die.

It only grew worse the closer they got to the city's western edge. The fires rose up in terrible magnificence, creaking and roaring, towering devils, gnawing at the night. They burned Friendly's eyes and made them weep. Or perhaps he wept anyway, to see the waste of it. If you wanted a thing, why burn it? And if you did not want it, why fight to take it from someone else? Men died in Safety. They died there all the time. But there was no waste like this. There was not enough there to risk destroying what there was. Each thing was valued.

"Bloody Gurkish fire!" Cosca cursed as they gave another roaring blaze a wide berth. "Ten years ago no one had dreamed of using that stuff as a weapon. Then they made Dagoska an ash-heap with it, knocked holes in the walls of the Agriont with it. Now no sooner does a siege begin than everyone's clamouring to blow things up. We liked to torch a building or two in my day, just to get things moving, but nothing like this. War used to be about making money. Some degree of modest misery was a regrettable side effect. Now it's just about destroying things, and the more thoroughly the better. Science, my friend, science. Supposed to make life easier, I thought."

Lines of sooty soldiers tramped by, armour gleaming orange with reflected flames. Lines of sooty civilians passed buckets of water from hand to hand, desperate faces half-lit by the glow of unquenchable fires. Angry ghosts, black shapes in the sweltering night. Behind them, a great mural on a shattered wall. Duke Salier in full armour, sternly pointing the way to victory. He had been holding a flag, Friendly thought, but the top part of the building had collapsed, and his raised arm along with it. Dancing flames made it look as if his painted face was twitching, as if his painted mouth was moving, as if the painted soldiers around him were charging onwards to the breach.

When Friendly was young, there had been an old man in the twelfth cell on his corridor who had told tales of long ago. Tales of the time before the Old Time, when this world and the world below were one, and devils roamed the earth. The inmates had laughed at that old man, and Friendly had laughed at him too, since it was wise in Safety to do just as others did and never to stand out. But he had gone back when no one else was near, to ask how many years, exactly, it had been since the gates were sealed and Euz shut the devils out of the world. The old man had not known the number. Now it seemed the world below had broken through the gates between again, flooding out into Visserine, chaos spreading with it.

They hurried past a tower in flames, fire flickering in its windows, pluming up from its broken roof like a giant's torch. Friendly sweated, coughed, sweated more. His mouth was endlessly dry, his throat endlessly rough, his fingertips chalky with soot. He saw the toothed outline of the city's walls at the end of a street strangled with rubble.

"We're getting close! Stay with me!"

"I… I…" Friendly's voice croaked to nothing on the smoky air. He could hear a noise, now, as they sidled down a narrow alley, red light flickering at its end. A clattering and clashing, a surging tide of furious voices. A noise like the great riot had made in Safety, before the six most feared convicts, Friendly among them, had agreed to put a stop to the madness. Who would stop the madness here? There was a boom that made the earth shudder, and a ruddy glare lit the night sky.

Cosca slipped up to the trunk of a scorched tree, keeping low, and crouched against it. The noise grew louder as Friendly crept after, terribly loud, but his heart pounding in his ears almost drowned it out.

The breach was no more than a hundred strides off, a ragged black patch of night torn from the city wall and clogged with heaving Talinese troops. They crawled like ants over the nightmare of fallen masonry and broken timbers that formed a ragged ramp down into a burned-out square at the city's edge. There might have been an orderly battle when the first assault came, but now it had dissolved into a shapeless, furious mкlйe, defenders crowding in from barricades thrown up before the gutted buildings, attackers fumbling their way on, on through the breach, adding their mindless weight to the fight, their breathless corpses to the carnage.

Axe and sword blades flashed and glinted, pikes and spears waved and tangled, a torn flag or two hung limp over the press. Arrows and bolts flitted up and down, from the Talinese crowding outside the walls, from defenders at their barricades, from a crumbling tower beside the breach. While Friendly watched, a great chunk of masonry was sent spinning down from the top of the wall and into the boiling mass below, tearing a yawning hole through them. Hundreds of men, struggling and dying by the hellish glare of burning torches, of burning missiles, of burning houses. Friendly could hardly believe it was real. It all looked false, fake, a model staged for a lurid painting.

"The breach at Visserine," he whispered to himself, framing the scene with his hands and imagining it hanging on some rich man's wall.

When two men set out to kill each other, there is a pattern to it. A few men, for that matter. A dozen, even. With a situation like that, Friendly had always been entirely comfortable. There is a form to be followed, and by being faster, stronger, sharper, you can come out alive. But this was otherwise. The mindless press. Who could know when you would be pushed, by the simple pressure of those behind, onto a pike? The awful randomness. How could you predict an arrow, or a bolt, or a falling rock from above? How could you see death coming, and how could you avoid it? It was one colossal game of chance with your life as the stake. And like the games of chance at Cardotti's House of Leisure, in the long run, the players could only lose.

"Looks like a hot one!" Cosca screamed in his ear.

"Hot?"

"I've been in hotter! The breach at Muris looked like a slaughter yard when we were done!"

Friendly could hardly bring himself to speak, his head was spinning so much. "You've been… in that?"

Cosca waved a dismissive hand. "A few times. But unless you're mad you soon tire of it. Looks like fun, maybe, but it's no place for a gentleman."

"How do they know who's on whose side?" hissed Friendly.

Cosca's grin gleamed in his soot-smeared face. "Guesswork, mostly. You just try to stay pointed in the right direction and hope for the… ah."

A fragment had broken from the general mкlйe and was flowing forwards, bristling with weapons. Friendly could not even tell whether they were the besiegers or the besieged, they hardly seemed like men at all. He turned to see a wall of spears advancing down the street from the opposite direction, shifting light gleaming on dull metal, across stony faces. Not individual men, but a machine for killing.

"This way!" Friendly felt a hand grab his arm, shove him through a broken doorway in a tottering piece of wall. He stumbled and slipped, pitched over on his side. He half-ran, half-slid down a great heap of rubble, through a cloud of choking ash, and lay on his belly beside Cosca, staring up towards the combat in the street above. Men crashed together, killed and died, a formless soup of rage. Over their screams, their bellows of anger, the clash and squeal of metal, Friendly could hear something else. He stared sideways. Cosca was bent over on his knees, shaking with ill-suppressed mirth.

"Are you laughing?"

The old mercenary wiped his eyes with a sooty finger. "What's the alternative?"

They were in a kind of darkened valley, choked with rubble. A street? A drained canal? A sewer? Ragged people picked through the rubbish. Not far away a dead man lay face down. A woman crouched over the corpse with a knife out, in the midst of cutting the fingers from one limp hand for his rings.

"Away from that body!" Cosca lurched up, drawing his sword.

"This is ours!" A scrawny man with tangled hair and a club in his hand.

"No." Cosca brandished the blade. "This is ours." He took a step forwards and the scavenger stumbled back, falling through a scorched bush. The woman finally got through the bone with her knife, pulled the ring off and stuffed it in her pocket, flung the finger at Cosca along with a volley of abuse, then scuttled off into the darkness.

The old mercenary peered after them, weighing his sword in his hand. "He's Talinese. His gear, then!"

Friendly crept numbly over and began to unbuckle the dead man's armour. He pulled the backplate away and slid it into his sack.

"Swiftly, my friend, before those sewer rats return."

Friendly had no mind to delay, but his hands were shaking. He was not sure why. They did not normally shake. He pulled the soldier's greaves off, and his breastplate, rattling into the sack with the rest. Four sets, this would be. Three plus one. Three more and they would have one each. Then perhaps they could kill Ganmark, and be done, and he could go back to Talins, and sit in Sajaam's place, counting the coins in the card game. What happy times those seemed now. He reached out and snapped off the flatbow bolt in the man's neck.

"Help me." Hardly more than a whisper. Friendly wondered if he had imagined it. Then he saw the soldier's eyes were wide open. His lips moved again. "Help me."

"How?" whispered Friendly. He undid the hooks and eyes on the man's padded jacket and, as gently as he could, stripped it from him, dragging the sleeve carefully over the oozing stumps of his severed fingers. He stuffed his clothes into the sack, then gently rolled him back over onto his face, just as he had found him.

"Good!" Cosca pointed towards a burned-out tower leaning precariously over a collapsed roof. "That way, maybe?"

"Why that way?"

"Why not that way?"

Friendly could not move. His knees were trembling. "I don't want to go."

"Understandable, but we should stay together." The old mercenary turned and Friendly caught his arm, words starting to burble out of his mouth.

"I'm losing count! I can't… I can't think. What number are we up to, now? What… what… have I gone mad?"

"You? No, my friend." Cosca was smiling as he clapped his hand down on Friendly's shoulder. "You are entirely sane. This. All this!" He swept his hat off and waved it wildly around. "This is insanity!"

Mercy and Cowardice

Shivers stood at the window, one half open and the other closed, the frame around him like the frame around a painting, watching Visserine burn. There was an orange edge to his black outline from the fires out towards the city walls—down the side of his stubbly face, one heavy shoulder, one long arm, the twist of muscle at his waist and the hollow in the side of his bare arse.

If Benna had been there he'd have warned her she was taking some long chances, lately. Well, first he'd have asked who the big naked Northman was, then he'd have warned her. Putting herself in the middle of a siege, death so close she could feel it tickling at her neck. Letting her guard down even this much with a man she was meant to be paying, walking the soft line with those farmers downstairs. She was taking risks, and she felt that tingling mix of fear and excitement that a gambler can't do without. Benna wouldn't have liked it. But then she'd never listened to his warnings when he was alive. If the odds stand long against you, you have to take long chances, and Monza had always had a knack for picking the right ones.

Up until they killed Benna and threw her down the mountain, at least.

Shivers' voice came out of the darkness. "How'd you come by this place, anyway?"

"My brother bought it. Long time ago." She remembered him standing at the window, squinting into the sun, turning to her and smiling. She felt a grin tug at the corner of her own mouth, just for a moment.

Shivers didn't turn, now, and he didn't smile either. "You were close, eh? You and your brother."

"We were close."

"Me and my brother were close. Everyone that knew him felt close to him. He had that trick. He got killed, by a man called the Bloody-Nine. He got killed when he'd been promised mercy, and his head nailed to a standard."

Monza didn't much care for this story. On the one hand it was boring her, on the other it was making her think of Benna's slack face as they tipped him over the parapet. "Who'd have thought we had so much in common? Did you take revenge?"

"I dreamed of it. My fondest wish, for years. I had the chance, more'n once. Vengeance on the Bloody-Nine. Something a lot of men would kill for."

"And?"

She saw the muscles working on the side of Shivers' head. "The first time I saved his life. The second I let him go, and chose to be a better man."

"And you've been wandering round like a tinker with his cart ever since, peddling mercy to anyone who'll take? Thanks for the offer, but I'm not buying."

"Not sure I'm selling anymore. I been acting the good man all this time, talking up the righteous path, hoping to convince myself I done the right thing walking away. Breaking the circle. But I didn't, and that's a fact. Mercy and cowardice are the same, just like you told me, and the circle keeps turning, whatever you try. Taking vengeance… it might not answer no questions. It sure won't make the world a fairer place or the sun shine warmer. But it's better'n not taking it. It's a damn stretch better."

"I thought you were all set on being Styria's last good man."

"I've tried to do the right thing when I could, but you don't get a name in the North without doing some dark work, and I done my share. I fought beside Black Dow, and Crummock-i-Phail, and the Bloody-Nine his self, for that matter." He gave a snort. "You think you got cold hearts down here? You should taste the winters where I come from." There was something in the set of his face she hadn't seen before, and hadn't expected to. "I'd like to be a good man, that's true. But you need it the other way, then I know how."

There was silence for a moment, while they looked at each other. Him leaning against the window frame, her sprawled on the bed with one hand behind her head.

"If you really are such a snow-hearted bastard, why did you come back for me? In Cardotti's?"

"You still owe me money."

She wasn't sure if he was joking. "I feel warm all over."

"That and you're about the best friend I've got in this mad fucking country."

"And I don't even like you."

"I'm still hoping you'll warm to me."

"You know what? I might just be getting there."

She could see his grin in the light from beyond the window. "Letting me in your bed. Letting Furli and the rest stay in your house. If I didn't know better I'd be thinking I'd peddled you some mercy after all."

She stretched out. "Maybe beneath this harsh yet beautiful shell I'm really still a soft-hearted farmer's daughter, only wanting to do good. You think of that?"

"Can't say I did."

"Anyway, what's my choice? Put them out on the street, they might start talking. Safer here, where they owe us something."

"They're safest of all in the mud."

"Why don't you go downstairs and put all our minds at rest, then, killer? Shouldn't be a problem for the hero that used to carry Black Now's luggage."

"Dow."

"Whoever. Best put some trousers on first, though, eh?"

"I'm not saying we should've killed 'em or nothing, I'm just pointing out the fact. Mercy and cowardice are the same, I heard."

"I'll do what needs doing, don't worry. I always have. But I'm not Morveer. I'm not murdering eleven farmers just for my convenience."

"Nice to hear, I guess. All those little people dying in the bank didn't seem to bother you none, long as one of 'em was Mauthis."

She frowned. "That wasn't the plan."

"Nor the folk at Cardotti's."

"Cardotti's didn't go quite the way I had in mind either, in case you didn't notice."

"I noticed pretty good. The Butcher of Caprile, they call you, no? What happened there?"

"What needed doing." She remembered riding up in the dusk, the stab of worry as she saw the smoke over the city. "Doing it and liking it are different things."

"Same results, no?"

"What the hell would you know about it? I don't remember you being there." She shook the memory off and slid from the bed. The careless warmth of the last smoke was wearing through and she felt strangely awkward in her own scarred skin, crossing the room with his eyes on her, stark naked but for the glove still on her right hand. The city, and its towers, and its fires spread out beyond the window, blurred through the bubbly glass panes in the closed half. "I didn't bring you up here to remind me of my mistakes. I've made enough of the bastards."

"Who hasn't? Why did you bring me up here?"

"Because I've an awful weakness for big men with tiny minds, what do you think?"

"Oh, I try not to think much, makes my tiny mind hurt. But I'm starting to get the feeling you might not be quite so hard as you make out."

"Who is?" She reached out and touched the scar on his chest. Fingertip trailing through hair, over rough, puckered skin.

"We've all got our wounds, I guess." He slid his hand down the long scar on her hip bone, and her stomach clenched up tight. That gambler's mix of fear and excitement still, with a trace of disgust mixed in.

"Some worse than others." The words sour in her mouth.

"Just marks." His thumb slid across the scars on her ribs, one by one. "They don't bother me any."

She pulled the glove off her crooked right hand and stuck it in his face. "No?"

"No." His big hands closed gently around her ruined one, warm and tight. She stiffened up at first, almost dragged it away, breath catching with ugly shock, as if she'd caught him caressing a corpse. Then his thumbs started to rub at her twisted palm, at the aching ball of her thumb, at her crooked fingers, all the way to the tips. Surprisingly tender. Surprisingly pleasant. She let her eyes close and her mouth open, stretched her fingers out as wide as they'd go, and breathed.

She felt him closer, the warmth of him, his breath on her face. Not much chance to wash lately and he had a smell—sweat and leather and a hint of bad meat. Sharp, but not entirely unpleasant. She knew she had a smell herself. His face brushed hers, rough cheek, hard jaw, nudging against her nose, nuzzling at her neck. She was half-smiling, skin tingling in the draught from the window, carrying that familiar tickle of burning buildings to her nose.

One of his hands still held hers, out to the side now, the other slid up her flank, over the knobble of her hip bone, slid under her breast, thumb rubbing back and forth over her nipple, slightly pleasant, slightly clumsy. Her free hand brushed against his cock, already good and hard, up, and down, damp skin sticky on her palm. She lifted one foot, heel scraping loose plaster from the wall, wedged it on the windowsill so her legs were spread wide. His fingers slid back and forth between them with a soft squelch, squelch.

Her right hand was round under his jaw, twisted fingers pulling at his ear, turning his head sideways, thumb dragging his mouth open so she could push her tongue into it. It tasted of the cheap wine they'd been drinking, but hers probably did too, and who cared a shit anyway?

She drew him close, pressing up against him, skin sliding against skin. Not thinking about her dead brother, not thinking about her crippled hand, not thinking about the war outside, or needing a smoke, or the men she had to kill. Just his fingers and her fingers, his cock and her cunt. Not much, maybe, but something, and she needed something.

"Get on and fuck me," she hissed in his ear.

"Right," he croaked at her, hooked her under one knee, lifted her to the bed and dumped her on her back, frame creaking. She wriggled away, making room, and he knelt down between her open knees, working his way forwards, fierce grin on his face as he looked down at her. Same grin she had, keen to get on with it. She felt the end of his cock sliding around between her thighs, one side, then the other. "Where the fuck…"

"Bloody Northmen, couldn't find your arse with a chair."

"My arse ain't the hole I'm looking for."

"Here." She dragged some spit off her tongue with her fingers, propped herself up on one elbow, reached down and took hold of him, working his cock around until she found the spot.

"Ah."

"Ah," she grunted back. "That's it."

"Aye." He moved his hips in circles, easing deeper with each one. "That… is… it." He ran his hands up her thighs, fingers into the short hair, started rubbing at her with his thumb.

"Gently!" She slapped his hand away and slid her own down in its place, middle finger working slowly round and round. "You're not trying to crack a nut, fool."

"Your nut, your business, I reckon." His cock slid out as he worked his way forwards, onto his arms above her, but she slid it back in easy enough. They started finding a rhythm, patient but building, bit by bit.

She kept her eyes open, looking in his face, and she could see the gleam of his in the darkness looking back. Both of them with teeth bared, breathing hard. He opened his mouth to meet hers, then moved his head away as she craned up to kiss him, always just out of reach until she had to slump back flat with a gasp that sent a warm shiver through her.

She slid her right hand onto his backside, squeezing at one buttock as it tensed and relaxed, tensed and relaxed. Faster now, damp skin slap-slapping, and she pushed her twisted hand round further, down into the crack of his arse. She strained her head up off the bed again, biting at his lips, at his teeth, and he nipped at her, grunting in his throat and her grunting back. He came down onto one elbow, his other hand sliding up over her ribs, squeezing hard at one breast then the other, almost painful.

Creak, creak, creak, and her feet were off the bed and in the air, his hand tangled in her hair, fingers rubbing at the coins under her skin, dragging her head back, her face up against his, and she sucked his tongue out of his mouth and into hers, bit at it, licked at it. Deep, slobbery, hungry, snarling kisses. Hardly kisses at all. She pushed her finger into his arsehole, up to the first knuckle.

"What the fuck?" He broke clear of her as if she'd slapped him in the face, stopped moving, still and tense above her. She jerked her right hand back, left still busy between her legs.

"Alright," she hissed. "Doesn't make you less of a man, you know. Your arse, your business. I'll keep clear of it in—"

"Not that. D'you hear something?"

Monza couldn't hear anything but her own fast breath and the faint sound of her fingers still sliding wetly up and down. She pushed her hips back up against him. "Come on. There's nothing but—"

The door crashed open, wood flying from the splintered lock. Shivers scrambled from the bed, tangled with the blanket. Monza was dazzled by lamplight, caught a glimpse of bright metal, armour, a shout and a sword swung.

There was a metallic thud, Shivers gave a squawk and went down hard on the boards. Monza felt spots of blood patter on her cheek. She had the hilt of the Calvez in her hand. Right hand, stupidly, by force of habit, blade a few inches drawn.

"No you don't." A woman coming through the ruins of the door, loaded flatbow levelled, hair scraped back from a soft-looking round face. A man turned from standing over Shivers and towards Monza, sword in hand. She could scarcely see more of him than the outline of his armour, his helmet. Another soldier stomped through the door, lantern in one fist and an axe in the other, curved blade gleaming. Monza let her twisted fingers open and the Calvez clattered down beside the bed half-drawn.

"That's better," said the woman.

Shivers gave a groan, tried to push himself up, eyes narrowed against the light, blood trickling down his face from a cut in his hair. Must have been clubbed with the flat. The one with the axe stepped forwards and swung a boot into his ribs, thud, thud, made him grunt, curled up naked against the wall. A fourth soldier walked in, some dark cloth over one arm.

"Captain Langrier."

"What did you find?" asked the woman, handing him the flatbow.

"This, and some others."

"Looks like a Talinese uniform." She held the jacket up so Monza could see it. "Got anything to say about this?"

The jolt of cold shock was fading, and an even frostier fear was pressing in fast behind it. These were Salier's soldiers. She'd been so fixed on killing Ganmark, so fixed on Orso's army, she hadn't spared a thought for the other side. They'd got her attention now, alright. She felt a sudden need for another smoke, so bad she was nearly sick. "It's not what you think," she managed to croak out, acutely aware she was stark naked and smelled sharply of fucking.

"How do you know what I think?"

Another soldier with a big drooping moustache appeared in the doorway. "A load of bottles and suchlike in one of the rooms. Didn't fancy touching 'em. Looked like poison to me."

"Poison, you say, Sergeant Pello?" Langrier stretched her head to one side and rubbed at her neck. "Well, that is damn suspicious."

"I can explain it." Monza's mouth was dry. She knew she couldn't. Not in any way these bastards would believe.

"You'll get your chance. Back at the palace, though. Bind 'em up."

Shivers grimaced as the axeman dragged his wrists behind his back and snapped manacles shut on them, hauled him to his feet. One of the others grabbed Monza's arm, twisted it roughly behind her as he jammed the cuffs on.

"Ah! Mind my hand!" One of them dragged her off the bed, shoved her stumbling towards the door and she nearly slipped, getting her balance back without much dignity. There wasn't much dignity to be had in all of this. Benna's little glass statue watched from its niche. So much for household spirits. "Can we get some clothes at least?"

"I don't see why." They hauled her out onto the landing, into the light of another lantern. "Wait there." Langrier squatted down, frowning at the zigzag scars on Monza's hip and along her thigh, neat pink dots of the pulled stitches almost faded. She prodded at them with one thumb as though she was checking a joint of meat in a butcher's for rot. "You ever seen marks like that before, Pello?"

"No."

She looked up at Monza. "How did you get these?"

"I was shaving my cunt and the razor slipped."

The woman spluttered with laughter. "I like that. That's funny."

Pello was laughing too. "That is funny."

"Good thing you've got a sense of humour." Langrier stood up, brushing dust from her knees. "You'll need that later." She thumped Monza on the side of the head with an open hand and sent her tumbling down the stairs. She fell on her shoulder with a jarring impact, the steps battered her back, skinned her knees, her legs went flying over. She squealed and grunted as the wood drove the air out of her, then the wall cracked her in the nose and knocked her sprawling, one leg buckled against the plaster. She lifted her head, groggy as a drunkard, the stairway still reeling. Her mouth tasted of blood. She spat it out. It filled up again.

"Fuh," she grunted.

"No more jokes? We've got a few more flights if you're still feeling witty."

She wasn't. She let herself be dragged up, grunting as pain ground at her battered shoulder-joint.

"What's this?" She felt the ring pulled roughly off her middle finger, saw Langrier smiling as she held her hand up to the light, ruby glinting.

"Looks good on you," said Pello. Monza kept her silence. If the worst she lost out of this was Benna's ring, she'd count herself lucky indeed.

There were more soldiers on the floors below, rooting through the tower, dragging gear from the chests and boxes. Glass crunched and tinkled as they upended one of Morveer's cases onto the floor. Day was sitting on a bed nearby, yellow hair hanging over her face, hands bound behind her. Monza met her eye for a moment, and they stared at each other, but there wasn't much pity to spare. At least she'd been lucky enough to have her shift on when they came.

They shoved Monza down into the kitchen and she leaned against the wall, breathing fast, stark naked but past caring. Furli was down there, and his brother too. Langrier walked over to them and pulled a purse from her back pocket.

"Looks like you were right. Spies." She counted coins out into the farmer's waiting palm. "Five scales for each of them. Duke Salier thanks you for your diligence, citizen. You say there were more?"

"Four others."

"We'll keep a watch on the tower and pick them up later. You'd better find somewhere else for your family."

Monza watched Furli take the money, licking at the blood running out of her nose and thinking this was where charity got you. Sold for five scales. Benna would probably have been upset by the size of the bounty, but she had far bigger worries. The farmer gave her a last look as they dragged her stumbling out through the door. There was no guilt in his eyes. Maybe he felt he'd done the best thing for his family, in the midst of a war. Maybe he was proud that he'd had the courage to do it. Maybe he was right to be.

Seemed it was as true now as it had been when Verturio wrote the words. Mercy and cowardice are the same.

The Odd Couple

It was morveer's considered opinion that he was spending entirely too much of his time in lofts, of late. It did not help in the slightest that this one was exposed to the elements. Large sections of the roof of the ruined house were missing, and the wind blew chill into his face. It reminded him most unpleasingly of that crisp spring night, long ago, when two of the prettiest and most popular girls had lured him onto the roof of the orphanage then locked him up there in his nightshirt. He was found in the morning, grey-lipped and shivering, close to having frozen to death. How they had all laughed.

The company was far from warming him. Shylo Vitari crouched in the darkness, her head a spiky outline with the night sky behind, one eye shut, her eyeglass to the other. Behind them in the city, fires burned. War might be good for a poisoner's business, but Morveer had always preferred to keep it at arm's length. Considerably beyond, in fact. A city under siege was no place for a civilised man. He missed his orchard. He missed his good goose-down mattress. He attempted to shift the collars of his coat even higher around his ears, and transferred his attention once again to the palace of Grand Duke Salier, brooding on its long island in the midst of the fast-flowing Visser.

"Why ever a man of my talents should be called upon to survey a scene of this nature is entirely beyond me. I am no general."

"Oh no. You're a murderer on a much smaller scale."

Morveer frowned sideways. "As are you."

"Surely, but I'm not the one complaining."

"I resent being dropped into the centre of a war."

"It's Styria. It's spring. Of course there's a war. Let's just come up with a plan and get back out of the night."

"Huh. Back to Murcatto's charitable institution for the housing of displaced agricultural workers, do you mean? The stench of self-righteous hypocrisy in that place causes my bile to rise."

Vitari blew into her cupped hands. "Better than out here."

"Is it? Downstairs, the farmer's brats wail into the night. Upstairs, our employer's profoundly unsubtle erotic adventures with our barbarian companion keep the floorboards groaning at all hours. I ask you, is there anything more unsettling than the sound of other… people… fucking?"

Vitari grinned. "You've got a point there. They'll have that floor in before they're done."

"They'll have my skull in before that. I ask you, is an iota of professionalism too much to ask for?"

"Long as she's paying, who cares?"

"I care if her carelessness leads to my untimely demise, but I suppose we must make do."

"Less whining and more work, then, maybe? A way in."

"A way in, because the noble leaders of Styrian cities are trusting folk, always willing to welcome uninvited guests into their places of residence…"

Morveer moved his eyeglass carefully across the front of the sprawling building, rising up sheer from the frothing waters of the river. For the home of a renowned aesthete, it was an edifice of minimal architectural merit. A confusion of ill-matched styles awkwardly mashed together into a jumble of roofs, turrets, cupolas, domes and dormers, its single tower thrusting up into the heavens. The gatehouse was comprehensively fortified, complete with arrow loops, bartizans, machicolations and gilded portcullis facing the bridge into the city. A detachment of fifteen soldiers were gathered there in full armour.

"The gate is far too well guarded, the front elevation far too visible to climb, either to roof or window."

"Agreed. The only spot we'd have a chance of getting in without being seen is the north wall."

Morveer swung his eyeglass towards the narrow northern face of the building, a sheer expanse of mossy grey stone pierced by darkened stained-glass windows and with a begargoyled parapet above. Had the palace been a ship sailing upriver, that would have been its prow, and fast-flowing water foamed with particular energy around its sloping base. "Unobserved, perhaps, but also the most difficult to reach."

"Scared?" Morveer lowered his eyeglass with some irritation to see Vitari grinning at him.

"Let us say rather that I am dubious as to our chances of success. Though I confess I feel some warmth at the prospect of your plunging from a rope into the frothing river, I am far from attracted by the prospect of following you."

"Why not just say you're scared?"

Morveer refused to rise to such ham-fisted taunting. It had not worked in the orphanage; it would most certainly not work now. "We would require a boat, of course."

"Shouldn't be too hard to find something upriver."

He pursed his lips as he weighed the benefits. "The plan would have the added advantage of providing a means of egress, an aspect of the venture by which Murcatto seems decidedly untroubled. Once Ganmark has been put paid to, we might hope to reach the roof, still disguised, and back down the rope to the boat. Then we could simply float out to sea and—"

"Look at that." Vitari pointed at a group moving briskly along the street below, and Morveer trained his eyeglass upon them. Perhaps a dozen armoured soldiers marched on either side of two stumbling figures, entirely naked, hands bound behind them. A woman and a large man.

"Looks like they've caught some spies," said Vitari. "Bad luck for them."

One of the soldiers jabbed the man with the butt of his spear and knocked him over in the road, bare rump sticking into the air. Morveer chuckled. "Oh yes, indeed, even among Styrian prisons, the dungeons beneath Salier's palace enjoy a black reputation." He frowned through the eyeglass. "Wait, though. The woman looks like—"

"Murcatto. It's fucking them!"

"Can nothing run smoothly?" Morveer felt a mounting sense of horror he had in no way expected. Stumbling along at the back in her nightshirt, hands bound behind her, was Day. "Curse it all! They have my assistant!"

"Piss on your assistant. They have our employer! That means they have my pay!"

Morveer could do nothing but grind his teeth as the prisoners were herded across the bridge and into the palace, the heavy gates tightly sealed behind them. "Damn it! The tower-house is no longer safe! We cannot return there!"

"An hour ago you couldn't stand the thought of going back to that den of hypocrisy and erotic adventure."

"But my equipment is there!"

"I doubt it." Vitari nodded her spiky head towards the palace. "It'll be with all the boxes they carried in there."

Morveer slapped petulantly at the bare rafter by his head, winced as he took a splinter in his forefinger and was forced to suck it. "Damn and shitting blast!"

"Calm, Morveer, calm."

"I am calm!" The sensible thing to do was undeniably to find a boat, to float silently up to Duke Salier's palace, then past it and out to sea, writing off his losses, return to the orchard and train another assistant, leaving Murcatto and her imbecile Northman to reap the consequences of their stupidity. Caution first, always, but…

"I cannot leave my assistant behind in there," he barked. "I simply cannot!"

"Why?"

"Well, because…" He was not sure why. "I flatly refuse to go through the trouble of instructing another!"

Vitari's irritating grin had grown wider. "Fine. You need your girl and I need my money. You want to cry about it or work on a way in? I still say boat down the river to the north wall, then rope and grapple to the roof."

Morveer squinted unhopefully towards the sheer stonework. "You can truthfully secure a grapple up there?"

"I could get a grapple through a fly's arse. It's you getting the boat into position that worries me."

He was not about to be outdone. "I challenge you to find a more accomplished oarsman! I could hold a boat steady in a deluge twice as fierce, but it will not be needful. I can drive a hook into that stonework and anchor the boat against those rocks all night."

"Good for you."

"Good. Excellent." His heart was beating with considerable urgency at the argument. He might not have liked the woman, but her competence was in no doubt. Given the circumstances he could not have selected a more suitable companion. A most handsome woman, too, in her own way, and no doubt every bit as firm a disciplinarian as the sternest nurse at the orphanage had been…

Her eyes narrowed. "I hope you're not going to make the same suggestion you made last time we worked together."

Morveer bristled. "There will be no repetition of that whatsoever, I can assure you!"

"Good. Because I'd still rather fuck a hedgehog."

"You made your preferences quite clear on that occasion!" he answered shrilly, then moved with all despatch to shift the topic. "There is no purpose in delay. Let us find a vessel appropriate to our needs." He took one last look down as he slithered back into the attic, and paused. "Who's this now?" A single figure was striding boldly towards the palace gates. Morveer felt his heart sink even lower. There was no mistaking the flamboyant gait. "Cosca. Whatever is that horrible old drunkard about?"

"Who knows what goes through that scabby head?"

The mercenary strode towards the guards quite as if it was his palace rather than Duke Salier's, waving one arm. Morveer could just hear his voice in between the sighing of the wind, but had not the slightest notion of the words. "What are they saying?"

"You can't read lips?" Vitari muttered.

"No."

"Nice to find there's one subject you're not the world's greatest expert on. The guards are challenging him."

"Of course!" That much was clear from the halberds lowered at Cosca's chest. The old mercenary swept off his hat and bowed low.

"He is replying… my name is Nicomo Cosca… famed soldier of fortune… and I am here…" She lowered the eyeglass, frowning.

"Yes?"

Vitari's eyes slid towards him. "And I am here for dinner."

Darkness

Utter dark. monza opened her eyes wide, squinted and stared, and saw nothing but fizzing, tingling blackness. She wouldn't have been able to see her hand before her face. But she couldn't move her hand there anyway, or anywhere else.

They'd chained her to the ceiling by her wrists, to the floor by her ankles. If she hung limp, her feet just brushed the clammy stones. If she stretched up on tiptoe, she could ease the throbbing ache through her arms, through her ribs, through her sides, a merciful fraction. Soon her calves would start to burn, though, worse and worse until she had to ease back down, teeth gritted, and swing by her skinned wrists. It was agonising, humiliating, terrifying, but the worst of it was, she knew—this was as good as things were going to get.

She wasn't sure where Day was. Probably she'd blinked those big eyes, shed a single fat tear and said she knew nothing, and they'd believed her. She had the sort of face that people believed. Monza never had that sort of face. But then she probably didn't deserve one. Shivers was struggling somewhere in the inky black, metal clinking as he twisted at his chains, cursing in Northern, then Styrian. "Fucking Styria. Fucking Vossula. Shit. Shit."

"Stop!" she hissed at him. "Might as well… I don't know… keep your strength."

"Strength going to help us, you reckon?"

She swallowed. "Couldn't hurt." Couldn't help. Nothing could.

"By the dead, but I need to piss."

"Piss, then," she snapped into the darkness. "What's the difference?"

A grunt. The sound of liquid spattering against stone. She might've joined him if her bladder hadn't been knotted up tight with fear. She pushed up on her toes again, legs aching, wrists, arms, sides burning with every breath.

"You got a plan?" Shivers' words sank away and died on the buried air.

"What fucking plan do you think I'd have? They think we're spies in their city, working for the enemy. They're sure of it! They're going to try and get us to talk, and when we don't have anything to say they want to hear, they're going to fucking kill us!" An animal growl, more rattles. "You think they didn't plan for you struggling?"

"What d'you want me to do?" His voice was strangled, shrill, as if he was on the verge of sobbing. "Hang here and wait for them to start cutting us?"

"I…" She felt the unfamiliar thickness of tears at the back of her own throat. She didn't have the shadow of an idea of a way clear of this. Helpless. How could you get more helpless than chained up naked, deep underground, in the pitch darkness? "I don't know," she whispered. "I don't know."

There was the clatter of a lock turning and Monza jerked her head up, skin suddenly prickling. A door creaked open and light stabbed at her eyes. A figure came down stone steps, boots scraping, a torch flickering in his hand. Another came behind him.

"Let's see what we're doing, shall we?" A woman's voice. Langrier, the one who'd caught them in the first place. The one who'd knocked Monza down the stairs and taken her ring. The other one was Pello, with the moustache. They were both dressed like butchers, stained leather aprons and heavy gloves. Pello went around the room, lighting torches. They didn't need torches, they could've had lamps. But torches are that bit more sinister. As if, at that moment, Monza needed scaring. Light crept out across rough stone walls, slick with moisture, splattered with green moss. There were a couple of tables about, heavy cast-iron implements on them. Unsubtle-looking implements.

She'd felt better when it was dark.

Langrier bent over a brazier and got it lit, blowing patiently on the coals, orange glow flaring across her soft face with each breath.

Pello wrinkled his nose. "Which one of you pissed?"

"Him," said Langrier. "But what's the difference?" Monza watched her slide a few lengths of iron into the furnace, and felt her throat close up tight. She looked sideways at Shivers, and he looked back at her, and said nothing. There was nothing to say. "More than likely they'll both be pissing soon enough."

"Alright for you, you don't have to mop it up."

"I've mopped up worse." She looked at Monza, and her eyes were bored. No hate in them. Not much of anything. "Give them some water, Pello."

The man offered a jug. She would've liked to spit in his face, scream obscenities, but she was thirsty, and it was no time for pride. So she opened her mouth and he stuck the spout in it, and she drank, and coughed, and drank, and water trickled down her neck and dripped to the cold flags between her bare feet.

Langrier watched her get her breath back. "You see, we're just people, but I have to be honest, that's probably the last kindness you'll be getting out of us if you're not helpful."

"It's a war, boy." Pello offered the jug to Shivers. "A war, and you're on the other side. We don't have the time to be gentle."

"Just give us something," said Langrier. "Just a little something I can give to my colonel, then we can leave you be, for now, and we'll all be a lot happier."

Monza looked her right in the eye, unwavering, and did her best to make her believe. "We're not with Orso. The opposite. We're here—"

"You had his uniforms, didn't you?"

"Only so we could drop in with them if they broke into the city. We're here to kill Ganmark."

"Orso's Union general?" Pello raised his brows at Langrier and she shrugged back.

"It's either what she said, or they're spies, working with the Talinese. Here to assassinate the duke, maybe. Now which of those seems the more likely?"

Pello sighed. "We've been in this game a long time, and the obvious answer, nine times out of ten, is the right one."

"Nine times out of ten." Langrier spread her hands in apology. "So you might have to do better than that."

"I can't do any fucking better," Monza hissed through gritted teeth, "that's all I—"

Langrier's gloved fist thudded suddenly into her ribs. "The truth!" Her other fist into Monza's other side. "The truth!" A punch in the stomach. "The truth! The truth! The truth!" She sprayed spit in Monza's face as she screamed it, knocking her back and forth, the sharp thumps and Monza's wheezing grunts echoing dully from the damp walls of the place.

She couldn't do any of the things her body desperately needed to do—bring her arms down, or fold up, or fall over, or breathe even. She was helpless as a carcass on a hook. When Langrier got tired of pounding the guts out of her she shuddered silently for a moment, eyes bulging, every muscle cramped up bursting tight, creaking back and forth by her wrists. Then she coughed watery puke into her armpit, heaved half a desperate, moaning breath in and drooled out some more. She drooped limp as a wet sheet on a drying line, hair tangled across her face, heard that she was whimpering like a beaten dog with every shallow breath but couldn't stop it and didn't care.

She heard Langrier's boots scraping over to Shivers. "So she's a fucking idiot, that's proven. Let's give you a chance, big man. I'll start with something simple. What's your name?"

"Caul Shivers," voice high and tight with fear.

"Shivers." Pello chuckled.

"Northerners. Who dreams up all these funny names? What about her?"

"Murcatto, she calls herself. Monzcarro Murcatto." Monza slowly shook her head. Not because she blamed him for saying her name. Just because she knew the truth couldn't help.

"What do you know? The Butcher of Caprile herself in my little cell! Murcatto's dead, idiot, months ago, and I'm getting bored. You'd think none of us would ever die, the way you're wasting our time."

"You reckon they're very stupid," asked Pello, "or very brave?"

"What's the difference?"

"You want to hold him?"

"You mind doing it?" Langrier winced as she worked one elbow around. "Damn shoulder's aching today. Wet weather always gets it going."

"You and your bloody shoulder." Metal rattled as Pello let a stride of chain out through the pulley above and Shivers' hands dropped down around his head. Any relief he felt was short lived, though. Pello came up behind and kicked him in the back of his legs, sent him lurching onto his knees, arms stretched out again, kept him there by planting one boot on the back of his calves.

"Look!" It was cold but Shivers' face was all beaded up with sweat. "We're not with Orso! I don't know nothing about his army. I just… I just don't know!"

"It's the truth," Monza croaked, but so quiet no one could hear her. Even that started her coughing, each heave stabbing through her battered ribs.

Pello slid one arm around Shivers' head, elbow under his jaw, his other hand firm behind, tilting his face back.

"No!" squawked Shivers, the one bulging eye Monza could see rolling towards her. "It was her! Murcatto! She hired me! To kill seven men! Vengeance, for her brother! And… and—"

"You've got him?" asked Langrier.

"I've got him."

Shivers' voice rose higher. "It was her! She wants to kill Duke Orso!" He was trembling now, teeth chattering together. "We did Gobba, and a banker! A banker… called Mauthis! Poisoned him, and then… and then… Prince Ario, in Sipani! At Cardotti's! And now—"

Langrier stuck a battered wooden dowel between his jaws, putting a quick end to his wasted confession. "Wouldn't want you to chew your tongue off. Still need you to tell me something worth hearing."

"I've got money!" croaked Monza, her voice starting to come back.

"What?"

"I've got money! Gold! Boxes full of it! Not with me, but… Hermon's gold! Just—"

Langrier chuckled. "You'd be amazed how everyone remembers buried treasure at a time like this. Doesn't often work out."

Pello grinned. "If I had just a tenth of what I've been promised in this room I'd be a rich man. I'm not, in case you're wondering."

"But if you did have boxes full of gold, where the hell would I spend it now? You came a few weeks too late to bribe us. The Talinese are all around the city. Money's no use here." Langrier rubbed at her shoulder, winced, worked her arm in a circle, then dragged an iron from the brazier. It squealed out with the sound of metal on metal, sent up a drifting shower of orange sparks and a sick twist of fear through Monza's churning guts.

"It's true," she whispered. "It's true." But all the strength had gone out of her.

"'Course it is." And Langrier stepped forwards and pressed the yellow-hot metal into Shivers' face. It made a sound like a slice of bacon dropped into a pan, but louder, and with his mindless, blubbering screech on top of it, of course. His back arched, his body thrashed and trembled like a fish on a line, but Pello kept his grip on him, grim-faced.

Greasy steam shot up, a little gout of flame that Langrier blew out with a practised puff of air through pursed lips, grinding the iron one way then the other, into his eye. While she did it, she had the same look she might have had wiping a table. A tedious, distasteful chore that had fallen to her and unfortunately had to be done.

The sizzling grew quieter. Shivers' scream had become a moaning hiss, the last air in his lungs being dragged out of him, spit spraying from his stretched-back lips, frothing from the wood between his bared teeth. Langrier stepped away. The iron had cooled to dark orange, smeared down one side with smoking black ash. She tossed it clattering back into the coals with some distaste.

Pello let go and Shivers' head dropped forwards, breath bubbling in his throat. Monza didn't know if he was awake or not, aware or not. She prayed not. The room smelled of charred meat. She couldn't look at his face. Couldn't look. Had to look. A glimpse of a great blackened stripe across his cheek and through his eye, raw-meat-red around it, bubbled and blistered, shining oily with fat cooked from his face. She jerked her eyes back to the floor, wide open, the air crawling in her throat, all her skin as clammy-cold as a corpse dragged from a river.

"There we go. Aren't we all better off for that, now? All so you could keep your secrets for a few minutes longer? What you won't tell us, we'll just get out of that little yellow-haired bitch later." She waved a hand in front of her face. "Damn, that stinks. Drop her down, Pello."

The chains rattled and she went down. Couldn't stand, even. Too scared, too hurting. Her knees grazed the stone. Shivers' breath crackled. Langrier rubbed at her shoulder. Pello clicked his tongue softly as he made the chains fast. Monza felt the sole of his boot dig into the backs of her calves.

"Please," she whispered, whole body shivering, teeth rattling. Monzcarro Murcatto, the dreaded Butcher of Caprile, the fearsome Serpent of Talins, that monster who'd washed herself in the Years of Blood, all that was a distant memory. "Please."

"You think we enjoy doing this? You think we wouldn't rather get on with people? I'm well liked mostly, aren't I, Pello?"

"Mostly."

"For pity's sake, give me something I can use. Just tell me…" Langrier closed her eyes and rubbed at them with the back of her wrist. "Just tell me who you get your orders from, at least. Let's just start with that."

"Alright, alright!" Monza's eyes were stinging. "I'll talk!" She could feel tears running down her face. "I'm talking!" She wasn't sure what she was saying. "Ganmark! Orso! Talins!" Gibberish. Nothing. Anything. "I… I work for Ganmark!" Anything to keep the irons in the brazier for a few more moments. "I take my orders from him!"

"From him directly?" Langrier frowned over at Pello, and he took a break from picking at the dry skin on one palm to frown back. "Of course you do, and his Excellency Grand Duke Salier is constantly down here checking how we're getting along. Do you think I'm a fucking idiot?" She cuffed Monza across the face, one way and back the other, turned her mouth bloody and set her skin burning, made the room jerk and sway. "You're making this up as you go along!"

Monza tried to shake the mud out of her head. "Wha' d'you wan' me to tell you?" Words all mangled in her swollen mouth.

"Something that fucking helps me!"

Monza's bloody lip moved up and down, but nothing came out except a string of red drool. Lies were useless. The truth was useless. Pello's arm snaked around her head from behind, tight as a noose, dragged her face back towards the ceiling.

"No!" she squawked. "No! N—" The piece of wood was wedged into her mouth, wet with Shivers' spit.

Langrier loomed into Monza's blurry vision, shaking one arm out. "My damn shoulder! I swear I'm in more pain than anyone, but no one has mercy on me, do they?" She dragged a fresh iron clear of the coals, held it up, yellow-white, casting a faint glow across her face, making the beads of sweat on her forehead glisten. "Is there anything more boring than other people's pain?"

She raised the iron, Monza's weeping eye jammed wide open and fixed on its white tip as it loomed towards her, fizzing ever so softly. The breath wheezed and shuddered in her throat. She could almost feel the heat from it on her cheek, almost feel the pain already. Langrier leaned forwards.

"Stop." Out of the corner of her eye, she saw a blurry figure in the doorway. She blinked, eyelids fluttering. A great fat man, standing at the top of the steps in a white dressing gown.

"Your Excellency!" Langrier shoved the iron back into the brazier as though it was her it was burning. The grip round Monza's neck was suddenly released, Pello's boot came off the back of her calves.

Grand Duke Salier's eyes shifted slowly in his great expanse of pale face, from Monza, to Shivers, and back to Monza. "Are these they?"

"Indeed they are." Nicomo Cosca peered over the duke's shoulder and down into the room. Monza couldn't remember ever in her life being so glad to see someone. The old mercenary winced. "Too late for the Northman's eye."

"Early enough for his life, at least. But whatever have you done to her skin, Captain Langrier?"

"The scars she had already, your Excellency."

"Truly? Quite the collection." Salier slowly shook his head. "A most regrettable case of mistaken identity. For the time being, these two people are my honoured guests. Some clothes for them, and do what you can for his wound."

"Of course." She snatched the dowel out of Monza's mouth and bowed her head. "I deeply regret my mistake, your Excellency."

"Quite understandable. This is war. People get burned." The duke gave a long sigh. "General Murcatto, I hope you will accept a bed in my palace, and join us for breakfast in the morning?"

The chains rattled free and her limp hands fell down into her lap. She thought she managed to gasp out a "yes" before she started sobbing so hard she couldn't speak, tears running free down her face.

Terror, and pain, and immeasurable relief.

The Connoisseur

Anyone would have supposed it was an ordinary morning of peace and plenty in Duke Salier's expansive dining chamber, a room in which his Excellency no doubt spent much of his time. Four musicians struck up sweet music in a far-distant corner, all smiling radiantly, as though serenading the doomed in a palace surrounded by enemies was all they had ever wished for. The long table was stacked high with delicacies: fish and shellfish, breads and pastries, fruits and cheeses, sweets, meats and sweetmeats, all arranged as neatly on their gilded plates as medals on a general's chest. Too much food for twenty, and there were but three to dine, and two of those not hungry.

Monza did not look well. Both of her lips were split, her face was ashen in the centre, swollen and bruised shiny pink on both sides, the white of one eye red with bloodshot patches, fingers trembling. Cosca felt raw to look at her, but he supposed it might have been worse. Small help to their Northern friend. He could have sworn he could hear the groans through the walls all night long.

He reached out with his fork, ready to spear a sausage, well-cooked meat striped black from the grill. An image of Shivers' well-cooked, black-striped face drifted through his mind, and he cleared his throat and caught himself instead a hard-boiled egg. It was only when it was halfway to his plate that he noticed its similarity to an eyeball. He shook it hastily off his fork and into its dish with a rumbling of nausea, and contented himself with tea, silently pretending it was heavily laced with brandy.

Duke Salier was busy reminiscing on past glories, as men are prone to do when their glories are far behind them. One of Cosca's own favourite pastimes, and, if it was even a fraction as boring when he did it, he resolved to give it up. "…Ah, but the banquets I have held in this very room! The great men and women who have enjoyed my hospitality at this table! Rogont, Cantain, Sotorius, Orso himself, for that matter. I never trusted that weasel-faced liar, even back then."

"The courtly dance of Styrian power," said Cosca. "Partners never stay together long."

"Such is politics." The roll of fat around Salier's jaw shifted softly as he shrugged. "Ebb and flow. Yesterday's hero, tomorrow's villain. Yesterday's victory…" He frowned at his empty plate. "I fear the two of you will be my last guests of note and, if you will forgive me, you both have seen more notable days. Still! One takes the guests one has, and makes the merry best of it!" Cosca gave a weary grin. Monza did not stretch herself even that far. "No mood for levity? Anyone would think my city was on fire by your long faces! We will do no more good at the breakfast table, anyway. I swear I've eaten twice what the two of you have combined." Cosca reflected that the duke undoubtedly weighed more than twice what the two of them did combined. Salier reached for a glass of white liquid and raised it to his lips.

"Whatever are you drinking?"

"Goat's milk. Somewhat sour, but wondrous for the digestion. Come, friends—and enemies, of course, for there is nothing more valuable to a powerful man than a good enemy—take a turn with me." He struggled from his chair with much grunting, tossed his glass away and led them briskly across the tiled floor, one plump hand waving in time to the music. "How is your companion, the Northman?"

"Still in very great pain," murmured Monza, looking in some herself.

"Yes… well… a terrible business. Such is war, such is war. Captain Langrier tells me there were seven of you. The blond woman with the child's face is with us, and your man, the quiet one who brought the Talinese uniforms and has apparently been counting every item in my larder since the crack of dawn this morning. One does not need his uncanny facility with numbers to note that two of your band are still… at large."

"Our poisoner and our torturer," said Cosca. "A shame, it's so hard to find good ones."

"Fine company you keep."

"Hard jobs mean hard company. They'll be out of Visserine by now, I daresay." They would be halfway to being out of Styria by now, if they had any sense, and Cosca was far from blaming them.

"Abandoned, eh?" Salier gave a grunt. "I know the feeling. My allies have abandoned me, my soldiers, my people. I am distraught. My sole remaining comfort is my paintings." One fat finger pointed to a deep archway, heavy doors standing open and bright sunlight spilling through.

Cosca's trained eye noted a deep groove in the stonework, metal points gleaming in a wide slot in the ceiling. A portcullis, unless he was much mistaken. "Your collection is well protected."

"Naturally. It is the most valuable in Styria, long years in the making. My great-grandfather began it." Salier ushered them into a long hallway, a strip of gold-embroidered carpet beckoning them down the centre, many-coloured marble gleaming in the light from huge windows. Vast and brooding oils crowded the opposite wall in long procession, gilt frames glittering.

"This hall is given over to the Midderland masters, of course," Salier observed. There was a snarling portrait of bald Zoller, a series of Kings of the Union—Harod, Arnault, Casimir, and more. One might have thought they all shat molten gold, they looked so smug. Salier paused a moment before a monumental canvas of the death of Juvens. A tiny, bleeding figure lost in an immensity of forest, lightning flaring across a lowering sky. "Such brushwork. Such colouring, eh, Cosca?"

"Astounding." Though one daub looked much like another to his eye.

"The happy days I have spent in profound contemplation of these works. Seeking the hidden meanings in the minds of the masters." Cosca raised his brows at Monza. More time in profound contemplation of the campaign map and less on dead painters and perhaps Styria would not have found itself in the current fix.

"Sculptures from the Old Empire," murmured the duke as they passed through a wide doorway and into a second airy gallery, lined on both sides with ancient statues. "You would not believe the cost of shipping them from Calcis." Heroes, emperors, gods. Their missing noses, missing arms, scarred and pitted bodies gave them a look of wounded surprise. The forgotten winners of ten centuries ago, reduced to confused amputees. Where am I? And for pity's sake, where are my arms?

"I have been wondering what to do," said Salier suddenly, "and would value your opinion, General Murcatto. You are renowned across Styria and beyond for your ruthlessness, single-mindedness and commitment. Decisiveness has never been my greatest talent. I am too prone to think on what is lost by a certain course of action. To look with longing at all those doors that will be closed, rather than the possibilities presented by the one that I must open."

"A weakness in a soldier," said Monza.

"I know it. I am a weak man, perhaps, and a poor soldier. I have relied on good intentions, fair words and righteous causes, and it seems I and my people now will pay for it." Or for that and his avarice, betrayals and endless warmongering, at least. Salier examined a sculpture of a muscular boatman. Death poling souls to hell, perhaps. "I could flee the city, by small boat in the hours of darkness. Down the river and away, to throw myself upon the mercy of my ally Grand Duke Rogont."

"A brief sanctuary," grunted Monza. "Rogont will be next."

"True. And a man of my considerable dimensions, fleeing? Terribly undignified. Perhaps I could surrender myself to your good friend General Ganmark?"

"You know what would follow."

Salier's soft face turned suddenly hard. "Perhaps Ganmark is not so utterly bereft of mercy as some of Orso's other dogs have been?" Then he seemed to sink back down, face settling into the roll of fat under his chin. "But I daresay you are right." He peered significantly sideways at a statue that had lost its head some time during the last few centuries. "My fat head on a spike would be the best that I could hope for. Just like good Duke Cantain and his sons, eh, General Murcatto?"

She looked evenly back at him. "Just like Cantain and his sons." Heads on spikes, Cosca reflected, were still as fashionable as ever.

Around a corner and into another hall, still longer than the first, walls crowded with canvases. Salier clapped his hands. "Here hang the Styrians! Greatest of our countrymen! Long after we are dead and forgotten, their legacy will endure." He paused before a scene of a bustling marketplace. "Perhaps I could bargain with Orso? Curry favour by delivering to him a mortal enemy? The woman who murdered his eldest son and heir, perhaps?"

Monza did not flinch. She never had been the flinching kind. "The best of luck."

"Bah. Luck has deserted Visserine. Orso would never negotiate, even if I could give him back his son alive, and you have put well and truly paid to that possibility. We are left with suicide." He gestured at a huge, dark-framed effort, a half-naked soldier offering his sword to his defeated general. Presumably so they could make the last sacrifice that honour demanded. That was where honour got a man. "To plunge the mighty blade into my bared breast, as did the fallen heroes of yesteryear!"

The next canvas featured a smirking wine merchant leaning on a barrel and holding a glass up to the light. Oh, a drink, a drink, a drink. "Or poison? Deadly powders in the wine? Scorpion in the bedsheets? Asp down one's undergarments?" Salier grinned round at them. "No? Hang myself? I understand men often spend, when they are hanged." And he flapped his hands away from his groin in demonstration, as though they had been in any doubt as to his meaning. "Sounds like more fun than poison, anyway." The duke sighed and stared glumly at a painting of a woman surprised while bathing. "Let us not pretend I have the courage for such exploits. Suicide, that is, not spending. That I still manage once a day, in spite of my size. Do you still manage it, Cosca?"

"Like a fucking fountain," he drawled, not to be outdone in vulgarity.

"But what to do?" mused Salier. "What to—"

Monza stepped in front of him. "Help me kill Ganmark." Cosca felt his brows go up. Even beaten, bruised and with the enemy at the gates, she could not wait to draw the knives again. Ruthlessness, single-mindedness and commitment indeed.

"And why ever would I wish to do that?"

"Because he'll be coming for your collection." She had always had a knack for tickling people where they were most ticklish. Cosca had seen her do it often. To him, among others. "Coming to box up all your paintings, and your sculptures, and your jars, and ship them back to Fontezarmo to adorn Orso's latrines." A nice touch, his latrines. "Ganmark is a connoisseur, like yourself."

"That Union cocksucker is nothing like me!" Anger suddenly flared red across the back of Salier's neck. "A common thief and braggart, a degenerate man-fucker, tramping blood across the sweet soil of Styria as though its mud were not fit for his boots! He can have my life, but he'll never have my paintings! I will see to it!"

"I can see to it," hissed Monza, stepping closer to the duke. "He'll come here, when the city falls. He'll rush here, keen to secure your collection. We can be waiting, dressed as his soldiers. When he enters," she snapped her fingers, "we drop your portcullis, and we have him! You have him! Help me."

But the moment had passed. Salier's veneer of heavy-lidded carelessness had descended again. "These are my two favourites, I do believe," gesturing, all nonchalance, towards two matching canvases. "Parteo Gavra's studies of the woman. They were intended always as a pair. His mother, and his favourite whore."

"Mothers and whores," sneered Monza. "A curse on fucking artists. We were talking of Ganmark. Help me!"

Salier blew out a tired sigh. "Ah, Monzcarro, Monzcarro. If only you had sought my help five seasons ago, before Sweet Pines. Before Caprile. Even last spring, before you spiked Cantain's head above his gate. Even then, the good we could have done, the blows we could have struck together for freedom. Even—"

"Forgive me if I'm blunt, your Excellency, but I spent the night being beaten like a sack of meat." Monza's voice cracked slightly on the last word. "You ask for my opinion. You've lost because you're too weak, too soft and too slow, not because you're too good. You fought alongside Orso happily enough when you shared the same goals, and smiled happily enough at his methods, as long as they brought you more land. Your men spread fire, rape and murder when it suited you. No love of freedom then. The only open hand the farmers of Puranti had from you back in those days was the one that crushed them flat. Play the martyr if you must, Salier, but not with me. I feel sick enough already."

Cosca felt himself wincing. There was such a thing as too much truth, especially in the ears of powerful men.

The duke's eyes narrowed. "Blunt, you say? If you spoke to Orso in such a manner it is small wonder he threw you down a mountain. I almost wish I had a long drop handy. Tell me, since candour seems the fashion, what did you do to anger Orso so? I thought he loved you like a daughter? Far more than his own children, not that any of those three ever were so very lovable—fox, shrew and mouse."

Her bruised cheek twitched. "I became too popular with his people."

"Yes. And?"

"He was afraid I might steal his throne."

"Indeed? And I suppose your eyes were never turned upon it?"

"Only to keep him in it."

"Truly?" Salier grinned sideways at Cosca. "It would hardly have been the first chair your loyal claws tore from under its owner, would it?"

"I did nothing!" she barked. "Except win his battles, make him the greatest man in Styria. Nothing!"

The Duke of Visserine sighed. "I have a fat body, Monzcarro, not a fat head, but have it your way. You are all innocence. Doubtless you handed out cakes at Caprile as well, rather than slaughter. Keep your secrets if you please. Much good may they do you now."

Cosca narrowed his eyes against the sudden glare as they stepped out of an open doorway, through an echoing arcade and into the pristine garden at the centre of Salier's gallery. Water trickled in pools at its corners. A pleasant breeze made the new flowers nod, stirred the leaves of the topiary, plucked specks of blossom from Suljuk cherry trees, no doubt torn from their native soil and brought across the sea for the amusement of the Duke of Visserine.

A magnificent sculpture towered over them in the midst of a cobbled space, twice life-size or more, carved from perfectly white, almost translucent marble. A naked man, lean as a dancer and muscular as a wrestler, one arm extended and with a bronze sword, turned dark and streaked with green, thrust forwards in the fist. As if directing a mighty army to storm the dining room. He had a helmet pushed back on the top of his head, a frown of stern command on his perfect features.

"The Warrior," murmured Cosca, as the shadow of the great blade fell across his eyes, the glare of sunlight blazing along its edge.

"Yes, by Bonatine, greatest of all Styrian sculptors, and this perhaps his greatest work, carved at the height of the New Empire. It originally stood on the steps of the Senate House in Borletta. My father took it as an indemnity after the Summer War."

"He fought a war?" Monza's split lip curled. "For this?"

"Only a small one. But it was worth it. Beautiful, is it not?"

"Beautiful," Cosca lied. To the starving man, bread is beautiful. To the homeless man, a roof is beautiful. To the drunkard, wine is beautiful. Only those who want for nothing else need find beauty in a lump of rock.

"Stolicus was the inspiration, I understand, ordering the famous charge at the Battle of Darmium."

Monza raised an eyebrow. "Leading a charge, eh? You'd have thought he'd have put some trousers on for work like that."

"It's called artistic licence," snapped Salier. "It's a fantasy, one can do as one pleases."

Cosca frowned. "Really? I always felt a man makes more points worth making if he steers always close to the truth…"

Hurried boot heels cut him off and a nervous-looking officer rushed across the garden, face touched with sweat, a long smear of black mud down the left side of his jacket. He came to one knee on the cobbles, head bowed.

"Your Excellency."

Salier did not even look at him. "Speak, if you must."

"There has been another assault."

"So close to breakfast time?" The duke winced as he placed a hand on his belly. "A typical Union man, this Ganmark, he has no more regard for mealtimes than you did, Murcatto. With what result?"

"The Talinese have forced a second breach, towards the harbour. We drove them back, but with heavy losses. We are greatly outnumbered—"

"Of course you are. Order your men to hold their positions as long as possible."

The colonel licked his lips. "And then…?»

"That will be all." Salier did not take his eyes from the great statue.

"Your Excellency." The man retreated towards the door. And no doubt to a heroic, pointless death at one breach or another. The most heroic deaths of all were the pointless ones, Cosca had always found.

"Visserine will soon fall." Salier clicked his tongue as he stared up at the great image of Stolicus. "How profoundly… depressing. Had I only been more like this."

"Thinner waisted?" murmured Cosca.

"I meant warlike, but while we are wishing, why not a thin waist too? I thank you for your… almost uncomfortably honest counsel, General Murcatto. I may have a few days yet to make my decision." To delay the inevitable at the cost of hundreds of lives. "In the meantime, I hope the two of you will remain with us. The two of you, and your three friends."

"Your guests," asked Monza, "or your prisoners?"

"You have seen how my prisoners are treated. Which would be your choice?"

Cosca took a deep breath, and scratched slowly at his neck. A choice that more or less made itself.

Vile Jelly

Shivers' face was near healed. Faint pink stripe left across his forehead, through his brow, across his cheek. More'n likely it would fade altogether in a few days more. His eye still ached a bit, but he'd kept his looks alright. Monza lay in the bed, sheet round her waist, skinny back turned towards him. He stood a moment, grinning, watching her ribs shift gently as she breathed, patches of shadow between them shrinking and growing. Then he padded from the mirror across to the open window, looking out. Beyond it the city was burning, fires lighting up the night. Strange thing though, he wasn't sure which city, or why he was there. Mind was moving slowly. He winced, rubbing at his cheek.

"Hurts," he grunted. "By the dead it hurts."

"Oh, that hurts?" He whipped round, stumbling back against the wall. Fenris the Feared loomed over him, bald head brushing the ceiling, half his body tattooed with tiny letters, the rest all cased in black metal, face writhing like boiling porridge.

"You're… you're fucking dead!"

The giant laughed. "I'll say I'm fucking dead." He had a sword stuck right through his body, the hilt above one hip, point of the blade sticking out under his other arm. He jerked one massive thumb at the blood dripping from the pommel and scattering across the carpet. "I mean, this really hurts. Did you cut your hair? I liked you better before."

Bethod pointed to his smashed-in head, a twisted mess of blood, brains, hair, bone. "Shuth uth, the pair o' youth." He couldn't speak right because his mouth was all squashed in on itself. "Thith ith whath hurts lookth like!" He gave the Feared a pointless shove. "Why couldn't you win, you thtupid half-devil bathtard?"

"I'm dreaming," Shivers said to himself, trying to think his way through it, but his face was throbbing, throbbing. "I must be dreaming."

Someone was singing. "I… am made… of death!" Hammer banging on a nail. "I am the Great Leveller!" Bang, bang, bang, each time sending a jolt of pain through Shivers' face. "I am the storm in the High Places!" The Bloody-Nine hummed to himself as he cut the corpse of Shivers' brother into bits, stripped to the waist, body a mass of scars and twisted muscle all daubed-up with blood. "So you're the good man, eh?" He waved his knife at Shivers, grinning. "You need to fucking toughen up, boy. You should've killed me. Now help me get his arms off, optimist."

"The dead know I don't like this bastard any, but he's got a point." Shivers' brother's head peered down at him from its place nailed to Bethod's standard. "You need to toughen up. Mercy and cowardice are the same. You reckon you could get this nail out?"

"You're a fucking embarrassment!" His father, slack face streaked with tears, waving his jug around. "Why couldn't you be the one dead, and your brother lived? You useless little fuck! You useless, gutless, disappointing speck o' shit!"

"This is rubbish," snarled Shivers through gritted teeth, sitting down on his crossed legs by the fire. His whole head was pulsing. "This is just… just rubbish!"

"What's rubbish?" gurgled Tul Duru, blood leaking from his cut throat as he spoke.

"All this. Faces from the past, saying meaningful stuff. Bit fucking obvious, ain't it? Couldn't you do better'n this shit?"

"Uh," said Grim.

Black Dow looked a bit put out. "Don't blame us, boy. Your dream, no? You cut your hair?"

Dogman shrugged. "If you was cleverer, maybe you'd have cleverer dreams."

He felt himself grabbed from behind, face twisted round. The Bloody-Nine was there beside him, hair plastered to his head with blood, scarred face all dashed with black. "If you was cleverer, maybe you wouldn't have got your eye burned out." And he ground his thumb into Shivers' eye, harder and harder. Shivers thrashed, and twisted, and screamed, but there was no way free. It was already done.

He woke up screaming, 'course. He always did now. You could hardly call it a scream anymore, his voice was worn down to a grinding stub, gravel in his raw throat.

It was dark. Pain tore at his face like a wolf at a carcass. He thrashed free of the blankets, reeled to nowhere. Like the iron was still pressed against him, burning. He crashed into a wall, fell on his knees. Bent over, hands squeezing the sides of his skull like they might stop his head from cracking open. Rocking, every muscle flexed to bursting. He groaned and moaned, whimpered and snarled, spat and blubbered, drooled and gibbered, mad from it, mindless with it. Touch it, press it. He held his quivering fingers to the bandages.

"Shhhh." He felt a hand. Monza, pawing at his face, pushing back his hair.

Pain split his head where his eye used to be like an axe splitting a log, split his mind too, broke it open, thoughts all spilling out in a mad splatter. "By the dead… make it stop… shit, shit." He grabbed her hand and she winced, gasped. He didn't care. "Kill me! Kill me. Just make it stop." He wasn't even sure what tongue he was talking. "Kill me. By the…" He was sobbing, tears stinging the eye he still had. She tore her hand away and he was rocking again, rocking, pain ripping through his face like a saw through a tree-stump. He'd tried to be a good man, hadn't he?

"I tried, I fucking tried. Make it stop… please, please, please, please—"

"Here." He snatched hold of the pipe and sucked at it, greedy as a drunkard at the bottle. He hardly even marked the smoke biting, just heaved in air until his lungs were full, and all the while she held him, arms tight around him, rocking him back and forwards. The darkness was full of colours, now. Covered with glittering smears. The pain was a step away, 'stead of pressed burning against him. His breathing had softened to a whimper, aching body all washed out.

She helped him up, dragging him to his feet, pipe clattering from his limp hand. The open window swayed, a painting of another world. Hell maybe, red and yellow spots of fire leaving long brushstrokes through the dark. The bed came up and swallowed him, sucked him down. His face throbbed still, pulsed a dull ache. He remembered, remembered why.

"The dead…" he whispered, tears running down his other cheek. "My eye. They burned my eye out."

"Shhhh," she whispered, gently stroking the good side of his face. "Quiet now, Caul. Quiet."

The darkness was reaching for him, wrapping him up. Before it took him he twisted his fingers clumsily in her hair and dragged her face towards his, close enough almost to kiss his bandages.

"Should've been you," he whispered at her. "Should've been you."

Other People's Scores

That's his place," said the one with the sore on his cheek. "Sajaam's place."

A stained door in a stained wall, pasted with fluttering old bills decrying the League of Eight as villains, usurpers and common criminals. A pair of caricature faces stared from each one, a bloated Duke Salier and a sneering Duke Rogont. A pair of common criminals stood at the doorway, scarcely less caricatures themselves. One dark-skinned, the other with a heavy tattoo down one arm, both sweeping the street with identical scowls.

"Thank you, children. Eat, now." Shenkt pressed a scale into each grubby hand, twelve pairs of eyes wide in smudged faces to have so much money. Once a few days had passed, let alone a few years, he knew it would have done them little good. They were the beggars, thieves, whores, early dead of tomorrow. But Shenkt had done much harm in his life, and so he tried, wherever possible, to be kind. It put nothing right, he knew that. But perhaps a coin could tip the scales of life by that vital degree, and one among them would be spared. It would be a good thing, to spare even one.

He hummed quietly to himself as he crossed the street, the two men at the door frowning at him all the way. "I am here to speak to Sajaam."

"You armed?"

"Always." He and the dark-skinned guard stared at each other for a moment. "My ready wit could strike at any moment."

Neither one of them smiled, but Shenkt had not expected them to, and did not care into the bargain. "What've you got to say to Sajaam?"

" ‘Are you Sajaam?' That shall be my opening gambit."

"You mocking us, little man?" The guard put one hand on the mace hanging at his belt, no doubt thinking himself fearsome.

"I would not dare. I am here to enjoy myself, and have money to spend, nothing more."

"Maybe you came to the right place after all. With me."

He led Shenkt through a hot, dim room, heavy with oily smoke and shadows. Lit blue, green, orange, red by lamps of coloured glass. Husk-smokers sprawled around it, pale faces twisted with smiles, or hanging slack and empty. Shenkt found that he was humming again, and stopped himself.

A greasy curtain pushed aside into a large back room that smelled of unwashed bodies, smoke and vomit, rotten food and rotten living. A man covered in tattoos sat cross-legged upon a sweat-stained cushion, an axe leaning against the wall beside him. Another man sat on the other side of the room, digging at an ugly piece of meat with a knife, a loaded flatbow beside his plate. Above his head an old clock hung, workings dangling from its underside like the intestines from a gutted corpse, pendulum swinging, tick, tick, tick.

Upon a long table in the centre of the room were the chattels of a card game. Coins and counters, bottles and glasses, pipes and candles. Men sat about it, six of them in all. A fat man at Shenkt's right hand, a scrawny one at the left, stuttering out a joke to his neighbour.

"…he fuh, fuh, fucked her!"

Harsh laughter, harsh faces, cheap lives of cheap smoke, cheap drink, cheap violence. Shenkt's guide walked around to the head of the table, leaned down to speak to a broad-shouldered man, black-skinned, white-haired, with the smile of comfortable ownership on his lined face. He toyed with a golden coin, flipping it glinting across the tops of his knuckles.

"You are Sajaam?" asked Shenkt.

He nodded, entirely at his ease. "Do I know you?"

"No."

"A stranger, then? We do not entertain many strangers here, do we, my friends?" A couple of them grinned half-heartedly. "Most of my customers are well known to us. What can Sajaam do for you, stranger?"

"Where is Monzcarro Murcatto?"

Like a man plunging through thin ice, the room was sucked into sudden, awful silence. That heavy quiet before the heavens split. That pregnant stillness, bulging with the inevitable.

"The Snake of Talins is dead," murmured Sajaam, eyes narrowing.

Shenkt felt the slow movement of the men around him. Their smiles creeping off, their feet creeping to the balance for killing, their hands creeping to their weapons. "She is alive and you know where. I want only to talk to her."

"Who the shuh, shit does this bastard thuh, think he is?" asked the scrawny card player, and some of the others laughed. Tight, fake laughs, to hide their tension.

"Only tell me where she is. Please. Then no one's conscience need grow any heavier today." Shenkt did not mind pleading. He had given up his vanity long ago. He looked each man in the eyes, gave each a chance to give him what he needed. He gave everyone a chance, where he could. He wished more of them took it.

But they only smiled at him, and at each other, and Sajaam smiled widest of all. "I carry my conscience lightly enough."

Shenkt's old master might have said the same. "Some of us do. It is a gift."

"I tell you what, we'll toss for it." Sajaam held his coin up to the light, gold flashing. "Heads, we kill you. Tails, I tell you where Murcatto is…" His smile was all bright teeth in his dark face. "Then we kill you." There was the slightest ring of metal as he flicked his coin up.

Shenkt sucked in breath through his nose, slow, slow.

The gold crawled into the air, turning, turning.

The clock beat deep and slow as the oars of a great ship.

Boom… boom… boom…

Shenkt's fist sank into the great gut of the fat man on his right, almost to the elbow. Nothing left to scream with, he gave the gentlest fragment of a sigh, eyes popping. An instant later the edge of Shenkt's open hand caved his astonished face in and ripped his head half-off, bone crumpling like paper. Blood sprayed across the table, black spots frozen, the expressions of the men around it only now starting to shift from rage to shock.

Shenkt snatched the nearest of them from his chair and flung him into the ceiling. His cry was barely begun as he crashed into a pair of beams, wood bursting, splinters spinning, mangled body falling back down in a languid shower of dust and broken plaster. Long before that one hit the floor, Shenkt had seized the next player's head and rammed his face through the table, through the floor beneath it. Cards, and broken glasses, chunks of planking, fragments of wood and flesh made a swelling cloud. Shenkt ripped the half-drawn hatchet from his fist as he went down, sent it whirling across the room and into the chest of the tattooed man, halfway up from his cushion and the first note of a war cry throbbing from his lips. It hit him haft first, so hard it scarcely mattered, spun him round and round like a child's top, ripped wide open, blood gouting from his body in all directions.

The flatbow twanged, deep and distorted, string twisting as it pushed the bolt towards him, swimming slowly through the dust-filled air as if through treacle, shaft flexing lightly back and forth. Shenkt snatched it from its path and drove it clean through a man's skull, his face folding into itself, meat bursting from torn skin. Shenkt caught him under the jaw and sent his corpse hurtling across the room with a flick of his wrist. He crashed into the archer, the two bodies mashed together, flailing bonelessly into the wall, through the wall, out into the alley on the other side, leaving a ragged hole in the shattered planks behind them.

The guard from the door had his mace raised, mouth open, air rushing in as he made ready to roar. Shenkt leaped the ruins of the table and slapped him backhanded across the chest, burst his ribcage and sent him reeling, twisting up like a corkscrew, mace flying from his lifeless hand. Shenkt stepped forwards and snatched Sajaam's coin from the air as it spun back down, metal slapping into his palm.

He breathed out, and time flowed again.

The last couple of corpses tumbled across the floor. Plaster dropped, settled. The tattooed man's left boot rattled against the boards, leg quivering as he died. One of the others was groaning, but not for much longer. The last spots of blood rained softly from the air around them, misting across the broken glass, the broken wood, the broken bodies. One of the cushions had burst, the feathers still fluttering down in a white cloud.

Shenkt's fist trembled before Sajaam's slack face. Steam hissed from it, then molten gold, trickling from between his fingers, running down his forearm in shining streaks. He opened his hand and showed it, palm forwards, daubed with black blood, smeared with glowing metal.

"Neither heads nor tails."

"Fuh… fuh… fuh…" The stuttering man still sat at his place, where the table had been, cards clutched in his rigid hand, every part of him spattered, spotted, sprayed with blood.

"You," said Shenkt. "Stuttering man. You may live."

"Fuh… fuh…"

"You alone are spared. Out, before I reconsider."

The mumbling beggar dropped his cards, fled whimpering for the door and tumbled through it. Shenkt watched him go. A good thing, even to spare one.

As he turned back, Sajaam was swinging his chair over his head. It burst apart across Shenkt's shoulder, broken pieces bouncing from the floor and clattering away. A futile gesture, Shenkt scarcely even felt it. The edge of his hand chopped into the man's big arm, snapped it like a dead twig, spun him around and sent him rolling over and over across the floor.

Shenkt walked after him, his scuffed work boots making not the slightest sound as they found the gaps between the debris. Sajaam coughed, shook his head, started to worm away on his back, gurgling through gritted teeth, hand dragging behind him the wrong way up. The heels of his embroidered Gurkish slippers kicked at the floor, leaving stuttering trails through the detritus of blood, dust, feathers and splinters that had settled across the whole room like leaves across a forest floor in autumn.

"A man sleeps through most of his life, even when awake. You get so little time, yet still you spend it utterly oblivious. Angry, frustrated, fixated on meaningless nothings. That drawer does not close flush with the front of my desk. What cards does my opponent hold, and how much money can I win from him? I wish I were taller. What will I have for dinner, for I am not fond of parsnips?" Shenkt rolled a mangled corpse out of his way with the toe of one boot. "It takes a moment like this to jerk us to our senses, to draw our eyes from the mud to the heavens, to root our attention in the present. Now you realise how precious is each moment. That is my gift to you."

Sajaam reached the back wall and propped himself up against it, worked himself slowly to standing, broken arm hanging limp.

"I despise violence. It is the last tool of feeble minds." Shenkt stopped a stride away. "So let us have no more foolishness. Where is Monzcarro Murcatto?"

To give the man his due for courage, he made for the knife at his belt.

Shenkt's pointed finger sank into the hollow where chest met shoulder, just beneath his collarbone. It punched through shirt, skin, flesh, and as the rest of his fist smacked hard against Sajaam's chest and drove him back against the wall, his fingernail was already scraping against the inside surface of his shoulder blade, buried in his flesh right to the knuckles. Sajaam screamed, knife clattering from his dangling fingers.

"No more foolishness, I said. Where is Murcatto?"

"In Visserine the last I heard!" His voice was hoarse with pain. "In Visserine!"

"At the siege?" Sajaam nodded, bloody teeth clenched tight together. If Visserine had not fallen already, it would have by the time Shenkt got there. But he never left a job half-done. He would assume she was still alive, and carry on the chase. "Who does she have with her?"

"Some Northman beggar, called himself Shivers! A man of mine named Friendly! A convict! A convict from Safety!"

"Yes?" Shenkt twisted his finger in the man's flesh, blood trickling from the wound and down his hand, around the streaks of gold dried to his forearm, dripping from his elbow, tap, tap, tap.

"Ah! Ah! I put her in touch with a poisoner called Morveer! In Westport, and in Sipani with a woman called Vitari!" Shenkt frowned. "A woman who can get things done!"

"Murcatto, Shivers, Friendly, Morveer… Vitari."

A desperate nod, spit flying from Sajaam's gritted teeth with every heaving, agonised breath.

"And where are these brave companions bound next?"

"I'm not sure! Gah! She said seven men! The seven men who killed her brother! Ah! Puranti, maybe! Keep ahead of Orso's army! If she gets Ganmark, maybe she'll try for Faithful next, for Faithful Carpi!"

"Maybe she will." Shenkt jerked his finger free with a faint sucking sound and Sajaam collapsed, sliding down until his rump hit the floor, his shivering, sweat-beaded face twisted with pain.

"Please," he grunted. "I can help you. I can help you find her."

Shenkt squatted down in front of him, blood-smeared hands dangling on the knees of his blood-smeared trousers. "But you have helped. You can leave the rest to me."

"I have money! I have money."

Shenkt said nothing.

"I was planning on turning her in to Orso, sooner or later, once the price was high enough."

More nothing.

"That doesn't make any difference, does it?"

Silence.

"I told that bitch she'd be the death of me."

"You were right. I hope that is a comfort."

"Not much of one. I should have killed her then."

"But you saw money to be made. Have you anything to say?"

Sajaam stared at him. "What would I say?"

"Some people want to say things, at the end. Do you?"

"What are you?" he whispered.

"I have been many things. A student. A messenger. A thief. A soldier in old wars. A servant of great powers. An actor in great events. Now?" Shenkt puffed out an unhappy breath as he gazed around at the mangled corpses hunched, sprawled, huddled across the room. "Now, it seems, I am a man who settles other people's scores."

The Fencing Master

Monza's hands were shaking again, but that was no surprise. The danger, the fear, not knowing if she was going to live out the next moment. Her brother murdered, herself broken, everything she'd worked for gone. The pain, the withering need for husk, trusting no one, day after day, week after week. Then there was all the death she'd been the cause of, in Westport, in Sipani, gathering on her shoulders like a great weight of lead.

The last few months had been enough to make anyone's hands shake. But maybe it was just watching Shivers have his eye burned out and thinking she'd be next.

She looked nervously towards the door between her room and his. He'd be awake soon. Screaming again, which was bad enough, or silent, which was worse. Kneeling there, looking at her with his one eye. That accusing look. She knew she should have been grateful, should have cared for him the way she used to for her brother. But a growing part of her just wanted to kick him and not stop. Maybe when Benna died everything warm, or decent, or human in her had been left rotting on the mountainside with his corpse.

She pulled her glove off and stared at the thing inside. At the thin pink scars where the shattered bones had been put back together. The deep red line where Gobba's wire had cut into her. She curled the fingers into a fist, or something close, except the little one, still pointing off like a signpost to nowhere. It didn't hurt as badly as it used to, but more than enough to bring a grimace to her face, and the pain cut through the fear, crushed the doubts.

"Revenge," she whispered. Kill Ganmark, that was all that mattered now. His soft, sad face, his weak, watery eyes. Calmly stabbing Benna through the stomach. Rolling his corpse off the terrace. That's that. She squeezed her fist tighter, bared her teeth at it.

"Revenge." For Benna and for herself. She was the Butcher of Caprile, merciless, fearless. She was the Snake of Talins, deadly as the viper and no more regretful. Kill Ganmark, and then…

"Whoever's next." And her hand was steady.

Running footsteps slapped hard along the hallway outside and away. She heard someone shout in the distance, couldn't make out the words, but couldn't miss the edge of fear in the voice. She crossed to the window and pulled it open. Her room, or her cell, was high up on the north face of the palace. A stone bridge spanned the Visser upstream, tiny dots moving fast across it. Even from this distance she could tell people running for their lives.

A good general gets to know the smell of panic, and suddenly it was reeking. Orso's men must have finally carried the walls. The sack of Visserine had begun. Ganmark would be on his way to the palace, even now, to take possession of Duke Salier's renowned collection.

The door creaked open and Monza spun about. Captain Langrier stood in the doorway in a Talinese uniform, a bulging sack in one hand. She had a sword at one hip and a long dagger at the other. Monza had nothing of the kind, and she found herself acutely aware of the fact. She stood, hands by her sides, trying to look as if every muscle wasn't ready to fight. And die, more than likely.

Langrier moved slowly into the room. "So you really are Murcatto, eh?"

"I'm Murcatto."

"Sweet Pines? Musselia? The High Bank? You won all those battles?"

"That's right."

"You ordered all those folk killed at Caprile?"

"What the fuck do you want?"

"Duke Salier says he's decided to do it your way." Langrier dumped the sack on the floor and it sagged open. Metal gleamed inside. The Talinese armour Friendly had stolen out near the breach. "Best put this on. Don't know how long we'll have before your friend Ganmark gets here."

Alive, then. For now. Monza dragged a lieutenant's jacket from the sack and pulled it on over her shirt, started to button it up. Langrier watched her for a minute, then started talking.

"I just wanted to say… while there's a chance. Well. That I always admired you, I guess."

Monza stared at her. "What?"

"A woman. A soldier. Getting where you've been. Doing what you've done. You might've stood on the other side from us, but you always were something of a hero to—"

"You think I care a shit?" Monza didn't know which sickened her more—being called a hero or who was saying it.

"Can't blame me for not believing you. Woman with your reputation, thought you'd be harder in a fix like that—"

"You ever watched someone have their eye burned out of their head and thought you'd be next?"

Langrier worked her mouth. "Can't say I've sat on that side of the issue."

"You should try it, see how fucking hard you end up." Monza pulled some stolen boots on, not so bad a fit.

"Here." Langrier was holding Benna's ring out to her, big stone gleaming the colour of blood. "Doesn't suit me anyway."

Monza snatched it from her hand, twisted it onto her finger. "What? Give me back what you stole in the first place and think that makes us even?"

"Look, I'm sorry about your man's eye and the rest, but it isn't about you, understand? Someone's a threat to my city, I have to find out how. I don't like it, it's just what has to be done. Don't pretend you haven't done worse. I don't expect we'll ever share any jokes. But for now, while we've got this task to be about, we'll need to put it behind us."

Monza kept her silence as she dressed. It was true enough. She'd done worse, alright. Watched it done, anyway. Let it be done, which was no better. She buckled on the breastplate, must've come from some lean young officer and fitted her well enough, pulled the last strap through. "I need something to kill Ganmark with."

"Once we get to the garden you can have a blade, not—"

Monza saw a hand close around the grip of Langrier's dagger. She started to turn, surprised. "Wha—" The point slid out of the front of her neck. Shivers' face loomed up beside hers, white and wasted, bandages bound tight over one whole side of it, a pale stain through the cloth where his eye used to be. His left arm slid around Langrier's chest from behind and drew her tight against him. Tight as a lover.

"It ain't about you, understand?" He was almost kissing at her ear as blood began to run from the point of the knife and down her neck in a thick black line. "You take my eye, I've got to take your life." She opened her mouth, and her tongue flopped out, and blood started to trickle from the tip of it and down her chin. "I don't like it." Her face turned purple, eyes rolling up. "Just what has to be done." Her legs kicked, her boot heels clattering against the boards as he lifted her up in the air. "Sorry about your neck." The blade ripped sideways and opened her throat up wide, black blood showering out across the bedclothes, spraying up the wall in an arc of red spots.

Shivers let her drop and she crumpled, sprawling face down as if her bones had turned to mud, another gout of blood spurting sideways. Her boots moved, toes scraping. One set of nails scratched at the floor. Shivers took a long breath in through his nose, then he blew it out, and he looked up at Monza, and he smiled. A friendly little grin, as if they'd shared some private joke that Langrier just hadn't got.

"By the dead but I feel better for that. Ganmark's in the city, did she say?"

"Uh." Monza couldn't speak. Her skin was flushed and burning.

"Then I reckon we got work ahead of us." Shivers didn't seem to notice the rapidly spreading slick of blood creep between his toes, around the sides of his big bare feet. He dragged the sack up and peered inside. "Armour in here, then? Guess I'd better get dressed, eh, Chief? Hate to arrive at a party in the wrong clothes."

The garden at the centre of Salier's gallery showed no signs of imminent doom. Water trickled, leaves rustled, a bee or two floated lazily from one flower to another. White blossom occasionally filtered down from the cherry trees and dusted the well-shaved lawns.

Cosca sat cross-legged and worked the edge of his sword with a whetstone, metal softly ringing. Morveer's flask pressed into his thigh, but he felt no need for it. Death was at the doorstep, and so he was at peace. His blissful moment before the storm. He tipped his head back, eyes closed, sun warm on his face, and wondered why he could never feel this way unless the world was burning down around him.

Calming breezes washed through the shadowy colonnades, through doorways into hallways lined with paintings. Through one open window Friendly could be seen, in the armour of a Talinese guardsman, counting every soldier in Nasurin's colossal painting of the Second Battle of Oprile. Cosca grinned. He tried always to be forgiving of other men's foibles. He had enough of his own, after all.

Perhaps a half-dozen of Salier's guards had remained, disguised as soldiers from Duke Orso's army. Men loyal enough to die beside their master at the last. He snorted as he ran the whetstone once more down the edge of his sword. Loyalty had always sat with honour, discipline and self-restraint on his list of incomprehensible virtues.

"Why so happy?" Day sat beside him on the grass, a flatbow across her knees, chewing at her lip. The uniform she wore must have come from some dead drummer-boy, it fit her well. Very well. Cosca wondered if it was wrong of him to find something peculiarly alluring about a pretty girl in a man's clothes. He wondered furthermore if she might be persuaded to give a comrade-in-arms… a little help sharpening his weapon before the fighting started? He cleared his throat. Of course not. But a man could dream.

"Perhaps something is wrong in my head." He rubbed a blemish from the steel with his thumb. "Getting out of bed." Metal rang. "A day of honest work." Whetstone scraped. "Peace. Normality. Sobriety." He held the sword up to the light and watched the metal gleam. "These are the things that terrify me. Danger, by contrast, has long been my only relief. Eat something. You'll need your strength."

"I've no appetite," she said glumly. "I've never faced certain death before."

"Oh, come, come, don't say such a thing." He stood, brushed the blossom from the captain's insignia on the sleeves of his stolen uniform. "If there is one thing I have learned in all my many last stands, it is that death is never certain, only… extremely likely."

"Truly inspirational words."

"I try. Indeed I do." Cosca slapped his sword into its sheath, picked up Monza's Calvez and ambled away towards the statue of The Warrior. His Excellency Duke Salier stood in its muscular shadow, arrayed for a noble death in a spotless white uniform festooned with gold braid.

"How did it end like this?" he was musing. The very same question Cosca had so often asked himself, while sucking the last drop from one cheap bottle or another. Waking baffled in one unfamiliar doorway, or another. Carrying out one hateful, poorly paid act of violence. Or another. "How did it end… like this?"

"You underestimated Orso's venomous ambition and Murcatto's ruthless competence. Don't feel too badly, though, we've all done it."

Salier's eyes rolled sideways. "The question was intended to be rhetorical. But you are right, of course. It seems I have been guilty of arrogance, and the penalty will be harsh. No less than everything. But who could have expected a young woman would win one unlikely victory over us after another? How I laughed when you made her your second, Cosca. How we all laughed when Orso gave her command. We were already planning our triumphs, dividing his lands between us. Our chuckles are become sobs now, eh?"

"I find chuckles have a habit of doing so."

"I suppose that makes her a very great soldier and me a very poor one. But then I never aspired to be a soldier, and would have been perfectly happy as merely a grand duke."

"Now you are nothing, instead, and so am I. Such is life."

"Time for one last performance, though."

"For both of us."

The duke grinned back. "A pair of dying swans, eh, Cosca?"

"A brace of old turkeys, maybe. Why aren't you running, your Excellency?"

"I must confess I am wondering myself. Pride, I think. I have spent my life as the Grand Duke of Visserine, and insist on dying the same way. I refuse to be simply fat Master Salier, once of importance."

"Pride, eh? Can't say I ever had much of the stuff."

"Then why aren't you running, Cosca?"

"I suppose…" Why was he not running? Old Master Cosca, once of importance, who always kept his last thought for his own skin? Foolish love? Mad bravery? Old debts to pay? Or simply so that merciful death could spare him from further shame? "But look!" He pointed to the gate. "Only think of her and she appears."

She wore a Talinese uniform, hair gathered up under a helmet, jaw set hard. Just like a serious young officer, clean-shaven this morning and keen to get stuck into the manly business of war. If Cosca had not known, he swore he would never have guessed. A tiny something in the way she walked, perhaps? In the set of her hips, the length of her neck? Again, the women in men's clothes. Did they have to torture him so?

"Monza!" he called. "I was worried you might not make it!"

"And leave you to die gloriously alone?" Shivers came behind her wearing breastplate, greaves and helmet stolen from a big corpse out near the breach. Bandages stared accusingly from one blind eyehole. "From what I can hear, they're at the palace gate already."

"So soon?" Salier's tongue darted over his plump lips. "Where is Captain Langrier?"

"She ran. Seems glory didn't appeal."

"Is there no loyalty left in Styria?"

"I never noticed any before." Cosca tossed the Calvez over in its scabbard and Monza snatched it smartly from the air. "Unless you count each man for himself. Is there any plan, besides wait for Ganmark to come calling?"

"Day!" She pointed up to the narrower windows on the floor above. "I want you up there. Drop the portcullis once we've had a try at Ganmark. Or once he's had a try at us."

The girl looked greatly relieved to be put at least temporarily out of harm's way, though Cosca feared it would be no more than temporary. "Once the trap's sprung. Alright." She hurried off towards one of the doorways.

"We wait here. When Ganmark arrives we tell him we've captured Grand Duke Salier. We bring your Excellency close, and then… you realise we may well all die today?"

The duke smiled weakly, jowls trembling. "I am not a fighter, General Murcatto, but nor am I a coward. If I am to die, I might as well spit from my grave."

"I couldn't agree more," said Monza.

"Oh, nor me," Cosca threw in. "Though a grave's a grave, spit or no. You are quite sure he'll come?"

"He'll come."

"And when he does?"

"Kill," grunted Shivers. Someone had given him a shield and a heavy studded axe with a long pick on the reverse. Now he took a brutal-looking practice swipe with it.

Monza's neck shifted as she swallowed. "I guess we just wait and see."

"Ah, wait and see." Cosca beamed. "My kind of plan."

A crash came from somewhere in the palace, distant shouting, maybe even the faint clash and clatter of steel. Monza worked her left hand nervously around the hilt of the Calvez, hanging drawn beside her leg.

"Did you hear that?" Salier's soft face was pale as butter beside her. His guards, scattered about the garden fingering their borrowed weapons, looked hardly more enthusiastic. But that was the thing about facing death, as Benna had often pointed out. The closer it gets, the worse an idea it seems. Shivers didn't look like he had any doubts. Hot iron had burned them out of him, maybe. Cosca neither, his happy grin widening with each moment. Friendly sat cross-legged, rolling his dice across the cobbles.

He looked up at her, face blank as ever. "Five and four."

"That a good thing?"

He shrugged. "It's nine." Monza raised her brows. A strange group she'd gathered, surely, but when you have a half-mad plan you need men at least half-mad to see it through.

Sane ones might be tempted to look for a better idea.

Another crash, and a thin scream, closer this time. Ganmark's soldiers, working their way through the palace towards the garden at its centre. Friendly threw his dice once more, then gathered them up and stood, sword in hand. Monza tried to stay still, eyes fixed on the open doorway ahead, the hall lined with paintings beyond it, beyond that the archway that led into the rest of the palace. The only way in.

A helmeted head peered round the side of the arch. An armoured body followed. A Talinese sergeant, sword and shield raised and ready. Monza watched him creep carefully under the portcullis, across the marble tiles. He stepped cautiously out into the sunlight, frowning about at them.

"Sergeant," said Cosca brightly.

"Captain." The man straightened up, letting his sword point drop. More men followed him. Well-armed Talinese soldiers, watchful and bearded veterans tramping into the gallery with weapons at the ready. They looked surprised, at first, to see their own side already in the garden, but not unhappy. "That him?" asked the sergeant, pointing to Salier.

"This is him," said Cosca, grinning back.

"Well, well. Fat fucker, ain't he?"

"That he is."

More soldiers were coming through the entrance now, and behind them a knot of staff officers in pristine uniforms, with fine swords but no armour. Striding at their head with an air of unchallengeable authority came a man with a soft face and sad, watery eyes.

Ganmark.

Monza might have felt some grim satisfaction that she'd predicted his actions so easily, but the swell of hatred at the sight of him crowded it away. He had a long sword at his left hip, a shorter one at his right. Long and short steels, in the Union style.

"Secure the gallery!" he called in his clipped accent as he marched out into the garden. "Above all, ensure no harm comes to the paintings!"

"Yes, sir!" Boots clattered as men moved to follow his orders. Lots of men. Monza watched them, jaw set aching hard. Too many, maybe, but there was no use weeping about it now. Killing Ganmark was all that mattered.

"General!" Cosca snapped out a vibrating salute. "We have Duke Salier."

"So I see. Well done, Captain, you were quick off the mark, and shall be rewarded. Very quick." He gave a mocking bow. "Your Excellency, an honour. Grand Duke Orso sends his brotherly greetings."

"Shit on his greetings," barked Salier.

"And his regrets that he could not be here in person to witness your utter defeat."

"If he was here, I'd shit on him too."

"Doubtless. He was alone?"

Cosca nodded. "Just waiting here, sir, looking at this." And he jerked his head towards the great statue in the centre of the garden.

"Bonatine's Warrior." Ganmark paced slowly towards it, smiling up at the looming marble image of Stolicus. "Even more beautiful in person than by report. It shall look very well in the gardens of Fontezarmo." He was no more than five paces away. Monza tried to keep her breath slow, but her heart was hammering. "I must congratulate you on your wonderful collection, your Excellency."

"I shit on your congratulations," sneered Salier.

"You shit on a great many things, it seems. But then a person of your size no doubt produces a vast quantity of the stuff. Bring the fat man closer."

Now was the moment. Monza gripped the Calvez tight, stepped forwards, gloved right hand on Salier's elbow, Cosca moving up on his other side. Ganmark's officers and guards were spreading out, staring at the statue, at the garden, at Salier, peering through the windows into the hallways. A couple still stuck close to their general, one with his sword drawn, but they didn't look worried. Didn't look ready. All comrades together.

Friendly stood, still as a statue, sword in hand. Shivers' shield hung loose, but she saw his knuckles white on the haft of his axe, saw his good eye flickering from one enemy to another, judging the threat. Ganmark's grin spread as they led Salier forwards.

"Well, well, your Excellency. I still remember the text of that rousing speech, the one you made when you formed the League of Eight. What was it you said? That you'd rather die than kneel to a dog like Orso? I'd very much like to see you kneel, now." He grinned at Monza as she came closer, no more than a couple of strides between them. "Lieutenant, could you—" His pale eyes narrowed for an instant, and he knew her. She sprang at him, barging his nearest guard out of the way, lunging for his heart.

She felt the familiar scrape of steel on steel. In that flash Ganmark had somehow managed to get his sword half-drawn, enough to send her thrust wide by a hair. He jerked his head to one side and the point of the Calvez left him a long cut across his cheek before he flicked it away, his sword ringing clear from its sheath.

Then it was chaos in the garden.

Monza's blade left a long scratch down Ganmark's face. The nearest officer gave Friendly a puzzled look. "But—"

Friendly's sword hacked deep into his head. The blade stuck in his skull as he fell, and Friendly let it go. A clumsy weapon, he preferred to work closer. He slid out the cleaver, the knife from his belt, felt the comfort of the familiar grips in his fists, the overwhelming relief that things were now simple. Kill as many as possible while they were surprised. Even the odds. Eleven against twenty-six were not good ones.

He stabbed a red-haired officer in the stomach before he could draw his sword, shoved him back into a third and sent his arm wide, crowded in close and hacked the cleaver into his shoulder, heavy blade splitting cloth and flesh. He dodged a spear-thrust and the soldier who held it stumbled past. Friendly sank the knife into his armpit, and out, blade scraping against the edge of his breastplate.

There was a screeching, rattling sound as the portcullis dropped. Two soldiers were standing in the archway. The gate came down just behind one, sealing him into the gallery with everyone else. The other must have leaned back, trying to get out of the way. The plummeting spikes caught him in the stomach and crushed him helpless into the floor, stoving in his breastplate, one leg folded underneath him, the other kicking wildly. He began to scream, but it hardly mattered. By then everyone was screaming.

The fight spread out across the garden, spilled into the four beautiful hallways surrounding it. Cosca dropped a guard with a slash across the backs of his thighs. Shivers had cut one man near in half when the fight began, and now was hemmed in by three more, backing towards the hall full of statues, swinging wildly, making a strange noise between a laugh and a roar.

The red-haired officer Friendly had stabbed limped away, groaning, through the doorway into the first hall, leaving a scattering of bloody spots across the polished floor. Friendly sprang after, rolled under a panicky sweep of his sword, came up and took the back of his head off with the cleaver. The soldier pinned under the portcullis gibbered, gurgled, tore pointlessly at the bars. The other one, only just now working out what was happening, pointed his halberd at Friendly. A confused-looking officer with a birthmark across one cheek turned from contemplation of one of the seventy-eight paintings in the hall and drew his sword.

Two of them. One and one. Friendly almost smiled. This he understood.

Monza slashed at Ganmark again but one of his soldiers got in her way, bundled into her with his shield. She slipped, rolled sideways and scrambled up, the fight thrashing around her.

She saw Salier give a bellow, whip out a narrow small-sword from behind his back and cut one astonished officer down with a slash across the face. He thrust at Ganmark, surprisingly agile for a man of his size, but nowhere near agile enough. The general sidestepped and calmly ran the Grand Duke of Visserine right through his big belly. Monza saw a bloody foot of metal slide out from the back of his white uniform. Just as it had slid out through the back of Benna's white shirt.

"Oof," said Salier. Ganmark raised a boot and shoved him off, sent him stumbling back across the cobbles and into The Warrior's marble pedestal. The duke slid down it, plump hands clutched to the wound, blood soaking through the soft white cloth.

"Kill them all!" bellowed Ganmark. "But mind the pictures!"

Two soldiers came at Monza. She hopped sideways so they got in each other's way, slid round a careless overhead chop from one, lunged and ran him through the groin, just under his breastplate. He made a great shriek, falling to his knees, but before she could find her balance again the other was swinging at her. She only just parried, the force almost jarring the Calvez from her hand. He slammed her in the chest with his shield and the rim of her breastplate dug into her stomach and drove her breath out, left her helpless. He raised his sword again, squawked, lurched sideways. One knee buckled and he pitched on his face, sliding forwards. The flights of a flatbow bolt stuck from the nape of his neck. Monza saw Day leaning from a window above, bow in her hands.

Ganmark pointed up towards her. "Kill the blond woman!" She vanished inside, and the last of the Talinese soldiers hurried obediently after her.

Salier stared down at the blood leaking out over his plump hands, eyes slightly unfocused. "Whoever would've thought… I'd die fighting?" And his head dropped back against the statue's pedestal.

"Is there no end to the surprises the world throws up?" Ganmark undid the top button of his jacket and pulled a handkerchief from inside it, dabbed at the bleeding cut on his face, then carefully wiped Salier's blood from the blade of his sword. "It's true, then. You are still alive."

Monza had her breath back now, and her brother's sword up. "It's true, cocksucker."

"I always did admire the subtlety of your rhetoric." The one Monza had stabbed through the groin was groaning as he tried to drag himself towards the entrance. Ganmark stepped carefully over him on his way towards her, tucking the bloody handkerchief into a pocket and doing his top button up again with his free hand. The crash, scrape, cry of fighting leaked from the halls beyond the colonnades, but for now they were alone in the garden. Unless you counted all the corpses scattered around the entrance. "Just the two of us, then? It's been a while since I drew steel in earnest, but I'll endeavour not to disappoint you."

"Don't worry about that. Your death will be entirely satisfying."

He gave his weak smile, and his damp eyes drifted down to her sword. "Fighting left-handed?"

"Thought I'd give you some kind of chance."

"The least I can do is extend to you the same courtesy." He flicked his sword smartly from one palm into the other, switched his guard and pointed the blade towards her. "Shall we—"

Monza had never been one to wait for an invitation. She lunged at him but he was ready, sidestepped it, came back at her with a sharp pair of cuts, high and low. Their blades rang together, slid and scraped, darting back and forth, glittering in the strips of sunlight between the trees. Ganmark's immaculately polished cavalry boots glided across the cobbles as nimbly as a dancer's. He jabbed at her, lightning fast. She parried once, twice, then nearly got caught and only just twisted away. She had to stumble back a few quick steps, take a breath and set herself afresh.

It is a deplorable thing to run from the enemy, Farans wrote, but often better than the alternative.

She watched Ganmark as he paced forwards, gleaming point of his sword moving in gentle little circles. "You keep your guard too low, I am afraid. You are full of passion, but passion without discipline is no more than a child's tantrum."

"Why don't you shut your fucking mouth and fight?"

"Oh, I can talk and cut pieces from you both at once." He came at her in earnest, pushing her from one side of the garden to the other, parrying desperately, jabbing weakly back when she could, but not often, and to no effect.

She'd heard it said he was one of the greatest swordsmen in the world, and it wasn't hard to believe, even with his left hand. A good deal better than she'd been at her best, and her best was squashed under Gobba's boot and scattered down the mountainside beneath Fontezarmo. Ganmark was quicker, stronger, sharper. Which meant her only chance was to be cleverer, trickier, dirtier. Angrier.

She screeched as she came at him, feinted left, jabbed right. He sprang back, and she pulled her helmet off and flung it in his face. He saw it just in time to duck, it bounced from the top of his head and made him grunt. She came in after it but he twisted sideways and she only nicked the gold braid on the shoulder of his uniform. She jabbed and he parried, well set again.

"Tricky."

"Get your arse fucked."

"I think I might be in the mood, once I've killed you." He slashed at her, but instead of backing off she came in close, caught his sword, their hilts scraping. She tried to trip him but he stepped around her boot, just kept his balance. She kicked at him, caught his knee, his leg buckled for the briefest moment. She cut viciously, but Ganmark had already slid away and she only hacked a chunk from some topiary, little green leaves fluttering.

"There are easier ways to trim hedges, if that's your aim." Almost before she knew it he was on her with a series of cuts, driving her across the cobbles. She hopped over the bloody corpse of one of his guards, ducked behind the great legs of the statue, keeping it between them, trying to think out some way to come at him. She undid the buckles on one side of her breastplate, pulled it open and let it clatter down. It was no protection against a swordsman of his skill, and the weight of it was only tiring her.

"No more tricks, Murcatto?"

"I'll think of something, bastard!"

"Think fast, then." Ganmark's sword darted between the statue's legs and missed by a hair as she jerked out of its way. "You don't get to win, you know, simply because you think yourself aggrieved. Because you believe yourself justified. It is the best swordsman who wins, not the angriest."

He seemed about to slide around The Warrior's huge right leg, but came instead the other way, jumping over Salier's corpse slumped against the pedestal. She saw it coming, knocked his sword wide then hacked at his head with small elegance but large force. He ducked just in time. The blade of the Calvez clanged against Stolicus' well-muscled calf and sent chips of marble flying. She only just kept a hold on the buzzing grip, left hand aching as she reeled away.

Ganmark frowned, gently touched the crack in the statue's leg with his free hand. "Pure vandalism." He leaped at her, caught her sword and drove her back, once, then twice, her boots sliding from the cobbles and up onto the turf beside, fighting all the while to tease, or trick, or bludgeon out some opening she could use. But Ganmark saw everything well before it came, handled it with the simple efficiency of masterful skill. He was scarcely even breathing hard. The longer they fought the more he had her measure, and the slimmer dwindled her chances.

"You should mind that backswing," he said. "Too high. It limits your options and leaves you open." She cut at him, and again, but he flicked them dismissively away. "And you are prone to tilt your steel to the right when extended." She jabbed and he caught the blade on his, metal sliding on metal, his sword whipping around hers. With an effortless twist of his wrist he tore the Calvez from her hand and sent it skittering across the cobbles. "See what I mean?"

She took a shocked step back, saw the gleam of light as Ganmark's sword darted out. The blade slid neatly through the palm of her left hand, point passing between the bones and pricking her in the shoulder, bending her arm back and holding it pinned like meat and onions on a Gurkish skewer. The pain came an instant later, making her groan as Ganmark twisted the sword and drove her helplessly down onto her knees, bent backwards.

"If that feels undeserved from me, you can tell yourself it's a gift from the townsfolk of Caprile." He twisted his sword the other way and she felt the point grind into her shoulder, the steel scrape against the bones in her hand, blood running down her forearm and into her jacket.

"Fuck you!" she spat at him, since it was that or scream.

His mouth twitched into that sad smile. "A gracious offer, but your brother was more my type." His sword whipped out of her and she lurched onto all fours, chest heaving. She closed her eyes, waiting for the blade to slide between her shoulder blades and through her heart, just the way it had through Benna's.

She wondered how much it would hurt, how long it would hurt for. A lot, most likely, but not for long.

She heard boot heels clicking away from her on cobbles, and slowly raised her head. Ganmark hooked his foot under the Calvez and flicked it up into his waiting hand. "One touch to me, I rather think." He tossed the sword arrow-like and it thumped into the turf beside her, wobbling gently back and forth. "What do you say? Shall we make it the best of three?"

The long hall that housed Duke Salier's Styrian masterpieces was now further adorned by five corpses. The ultimate decoration for any palace, though the discerning dictator needs to replace them regularly if he is to avoid an odour. Especially in warm weather. Two of Salier's disguised soldiers and one of Ganmark's officers all sprawled bloodily in attitudes of scant dignity, though one of the general's guards had managed to die in a position approaching comfort, curled around an occasional table with an ornamental vase on top.

Another guard was dragging himself towards the far door, leaving a greasy red trail across the polished floor as he went. The wound Cosca had given him was in his stomach, just under his breastplate, and it was tough to crawl and hold your guts in all at once.

That left two young staff officers, bright swords drawn and bright eyes full of righteous hate, and Cosca. Probably they would both have been nice enough people under happier circumstances. Probably their mothers loved them and probably they loved their mothers back. Certainly they did not deserve to die here in this gaudy temple to greed simply for choosing one self-serving side over another. But what choice for Cosca other than to do his very best to kill them? The lowest slug, weed, slime struggle always to stay alive. Why should Styria's most infamous mercenary hold himself to another standard?

The two officers moved apart, one heading for the tall windows, the other for the paintings, herding Cosca towards the end of the room and, more than likely, the end of his life. He was prickly with sweat under the Talinese uniform, the breath burning his lungs. Fighting to the death was undeniably a young man's game.

"Now, now, lads," he muttered, weighing his sword. "How about you face me one at a time? Have you no honour?"

"No honour?" sneered one. "Us?"

"You disguised yourself in order to launch a cowardly attack upon our general by stealth!" hissed the other, face pinking with outrage.

"True. True." Cosca let the point of his sword drop. "And the shame of it stabs at me. I surrender."

The one on the left was not taken in for a moment. The one on the right looked somewhat puzzled, though, lowered his sword for an instant. It was him that Cosca flung his knife at.

It twittered through the air and thudded into the young man's side, doubling him over. Cosca charged in behind it, aiming for the chest. Perhaps the boy leaned forwards, or perhaps Cosca's aim was wayward, but the blade caught the officer's neck and, in a spectacular justification of all the sharpening, took his head clean off. It spun away, spraying spots of blood, bounced from one of the paintings with a hollow clonk and a flapping of canvas. The body keeled forwards, blood welling from the severed neck in long spurts and creeping out across the floor.

Even as Cosca yelped with surprised triumph, the other officer was on him, slashing away like a man beating a carpet. Cosca ducked, weaved, parried, jerked helplessly back from a savage cut, tripped over the headless corpse and went sprawling in the slick of blood around it.

The officer gave a shriek as he sprang to finish the work. Cosca's flailing hand clutched for the nearest thing, gripped it, flung it. The severed head. It caught the young man in the face and sent him stumbling. Cosca floundered to his blade and snatched it up, spun about, hand, sword, face, clothes all daubed with red. Strangely fitting, for a man who had lived the life he had.

The officer was already at him again with a flurry of furious cuts. Cosca gave ground as fast as he could without falling over, sword drooping, pretending at complete exhaustion and not having to pretend all that much. He collided with the table, nearly fell, his free hand fished behind him, found the rim of the ornamental jar. The officer came forwards, lifting his sword with a yelp of triumph. It turned to a gurgle of shock as the jar came flying at him. He managed to smash it away with the hilt of his sword, fragments of pottery bursting across one side of him, but that left his blade wide for a moment. Cosca made one last desperate lunge, felt a gentle resistance as his blade punched through the officer's cheek and out through the back of his head with textbook execution.

"Oh." The officer wobbled slightly as Cosca whipped his sword back and capered sharply away. "Is that…" His look was one of bleary-eyed surprise, like a man who had woken up drunk to find himself robbed and tied naked to a post. Cosca could not quite remember whether it was in Etrisani or Westport that had happened to him, those years all rather blended into one.

"Whasappenah?" The officer slashed with exaggerated slowness and Cosca stepped out of the way, let him spin round in a wide circle and sprawl over onto his side. He laboriously rolled, clambered up, blood running gently from the neat little slit beside his nose. The eye above it was flickering now, face on that side gone slack as old leather.

"Sluviduviduther," he drooled.

"Your pardon?" asked Cosca.

"Slurghhh!" And he raised his quivering sword and charged. Directly sideways into the wall. He crashed into the painting of the girl surprised while bathing, tore a great gash through it with his flailing sword arm, brought the great canvas keeling down on top of him as he fell, one boot sticking out from underneath the gilded frame. He did not move again.

"The lucky bastard," Cosca whispered. To die beneath a naked woman. It was the way he had always wanted to go.

The wound in Monza's shoulder burned. The one through her left hand burned far worse. Her palm, her fingers, sticky with blood. She could barely make a fist, let alone grip a blade. No choice, then. She dragged the glove from her right hand with her teeth, reached out and took hold of the Calvez' hilt with it, feeling the crooked bones shift as her twisted fingers closed around the grip, little one still painfully straight.

"Ah. Right-handed?" Ganmark flicked his sword spinning into the air, snatched it back with his own right hand as nimbly as a circus trickster. "I always did admire your determination, if not the goals on which you trained it. Revenge, now, eh?"

"Revenge," she snarled.

"Revenge. If you could even get it, what good would it do you? All this expenditure of effort, pain, treasure, blood, for what? Who is ever left better off for it?" His sad eyes watched her slowly stand. "Not the avenged dead, certainly. They rot on, regardless. Not those who are avenged upon, of course. Corpses all. And what of the ones who take vengeance, what of them? Do they sleep easier, do you suppose, once they have heaped murder on murder? Sown the bloody seeds of a hundred other retributions?" She circled around, trying to think of some trick to kill him with. "All those dead men at that bank in Westport, that was your righteous work, I suppose? And the carnage at Cardotti's, a fair and proportionate reply?"

"What had to be done!"

"Ah, what had to be done. The favourite excuse of unexamined evil echoes down the ages and slobbers from your twisted mouth." He danced at her, their swords rang together, once, twice. He jabbed, she parried and jabbed back. Each contact sent a jolt of pain up her arm. She ground her teeth together, forced the scowl to stay on her face, but there was no disguising how much it hurt her, or how clumsy she was with it. If she'd had small chances with her left, she had none at all with her right, and he knew it already.

"Why the Fates chose you for saving I will never guess, but you should have thanked them kindly and slunk away into obscurity. Let us not pretend you and your brother did not deserve precisely what you received."

"Fuck yourself! I didn't deserve that!" But even as she said it, she had to wonder. "My brother didn't!"

Ganmark snorted. "No one is quicker to forgive a handsome man than I, but your brother was a vindictive coward. A charming, greedy, ruthless, spineless parasite. A man of the very lowest character imaginable. The only thing that lifted him from utter worthlessness, and utter inconsequence, was you." He sprang at her with lethal speed and she reeled away, fell against a cherry tree with a grunt and stumbled back through the shower of white blossom. He could surely have spitted her but he stayed still as a statue, sword at the ready, smiling faintly as he watched her thrash her way clear.

"And let us face the facts, General Murcatto. You, for all your undeniable talents, have hardly been a paragon of virtue. Why, there must be a hundred thousand people with just reasons to fling your hated carcass from that terrace!"

"Not Orso. Not him!" She came low, jabbing sloppily at his hips, wincing as he flicked her sword aside and jarred the grip in her twisted palm.

"If that's a joke, it's not a funny one. Quibble with the judge, when the sentence is self-evidently more than righteous?" He placed his feet with all the watchful care of an artist applying paint to a canvas, steering her back onto the cobbles. "How many deaths have you had a hand in? How much destruction? You are a bandit! A glorified profiteer! You are a maggot grown fat on the rotting corpse of Styria!" Three more blows, rapid as a sculptor's hammer on his chisel, snapping her sword this way and that in her aching grip. "Did not deserve, you say to me, did not deserve? That excuse for a right hand is embarrassing enough. Pray do not shame yourself further."

She made a tired, pained, clumsy lunge. He deflected it disdainfully, already stepping around her and letting her stumble past. She expected his sword in her back; instead she felt his boot thud into her arse and send her sprawling across the cobbles, Benna's sword bouncing from her numb fingers one more time. She lay there a moment, panting for breath, then slowly rolled over, came up to her knees. There hardly seemed much point standing. She'd be back here soon enough, once he ran her through. Her right hand throbbed, trembled. The shoulder of her stolen uniform was dark with blood, the fingers of her left hand were dripping with it.

Ganmark flicked his wrist, whipped the head from a flower and into his waiting palm. He lifted it to his face and breathed in deep. "A beautiful day, and a good place to die. We should have finished you up at Fontezarmo, along with your brother. But now will do."

She couldn't think of much in the way of sharp last words, so she just tipped her head back and spat at him. It spattered against his neck, his collar, the pristine front of his uniform. Not much vengeance, maybe, but something. Ganmark peered down at it. "A perfect lady to the end."

His eyes flickered sideways and he jerked away as something flashed past him, twittered into a flower bed behind. A thrown knife. There was a snarl and Cosca was on him, barking like a mad dog as he harried the general back across the cobbles.

"Cosca!" Fumbling her sword up. "Late, as ever."

"I was somewhat occupied next door," growled the old mercenary, pausing to catch his breath.

"Nicomo Cosca?" Ganmark frowned at him. "I thought you were dead."

"There have always been false reports of my death. Wishful thinking—"

"On the part of his many enemies." Monza stood, shaking the weakness out of her limbs. "You've got a mind to kill me, you should get it done instead of talking about it."

Ganmark backed slowly away, sliding his short steel from its sheath with his left hand, pointing it towards her, the long towards Cosca, his eyes flitting back and forth between them. "Oh, there's still time."

Shivers weren't himself. Or maybe he finally was. The pain had turned him mad. Or the eye they'd left him wasn't working right. Or he was still all broken up from the husk he'd been sucking at the past few days. Whatever the reasons, he was in hell.

And he liked it.

The long hall pulsed, glowed, swam like a rippling pool. Sunlight burned through the windows, stabbing and flashing at him through a hundred hundred glittering squares of glass. The statues shone, smiled, sweated, cheered him on. He might've had one eye less than before, but he saw things clearer. The pain had swept away all his doubts, his fears, his questions, his choices. All that shit had been dead weight on him. All that shit was weakness, and lies, and a waste of effort. He'd made himself think things were complicated when they were beautifully, awfully simple. His axe had all the answers he needed.

Its blade caught the sunlight and left a great white, fizzing smear, hacked into a man's arm sending black streaks flying. Cloth flapping. Flesh torn. Bone splintered. Metal bent and twisted. A spear squealed across Shivers' shield and he could taste the roar in his mouth, sweet as he swung the axe again. It crashed into a breastplate and left a huge dent, sent a body flailing into a pitted urn, burst it apart, writhing on the floor in a mass of shattered pottery.

The world was turned inside out, like the glistening innards of the officer he'd gutted a few moments before. He used to get tired when he fought. Now he got stronger. The rage boiled up in him, leaked out of him, set his skin on fire. With every blow he struck it got worse, better, muscles burning until he had to scream it out, laugh it out, weep, sing, thrash, dance, shriek.

He smashed a sword away with his shield, tore it from a hand, was on the soldier behind it, arms around him, kissing his face, licking at him. He roared as he ran, ran, legs pounding, rammed him into one of the statues, sent it over, crashing into another, and another beyond that, tipping, smashing on the floor, breaking apart into chunks in a cloud of dust.

The guard groaned, sprawling in the ruins, tried to roll over. Shivers' axe stoved the top of his helmet in deep with a hollow clonk, drove the metal rim right down over his eyes and squashed his nose flat, blood running out from underneath.

"Fucking die!" Shivers bashed in the side of the helmet and sent his head one way. "Die!" Swung back and crumpled the other side, neck crunching like a sock full of gravel. "Die! Die!" Bonk, bonk, like pots and pans clattering in the river after mealtime. A statue looked on, disapproving.

"Look at me?" Shivers smashed its head off with his axe. Then he was on top of someone, not knowing how he got there, ramming the edge of his shield into a face until it was nothing but a shapeless mess of red. He could hear someone whispering, whispering in his ear. Mad, hissing, croaking voice.

"I am made of death. I am the Great Leveller. I am the storm in the High Places." The Bloody-Nine's voice, but it came from his own throat. The hall was strewn with fallen men and fallen statues, scattered with bits of both. "You." Shivers pointed his bloody axe at the last of them, cringing at the far end of the dusty hallway. "I see you there, fucker. No one gets away." He realised he was talking in Northern. The man couldn't understand a word he said. Hardly mattered, though.

He reckoned he got the gist.

Monza forced herself on down the arcade, wringing the last strength from her aching legs, snarling as she lunged, jabbed, cut clumsily, not letting up for a moment. Ganmark was on the retreat, dropping back through sunlight, then shadow, then sunlight again, frowning with furious concentration. His eyes flickered from side to side, parrying her blade and Cosca's as it jabbed at him from between the pillars on her right, their hard breathing, their shuffling footsteps, the quick scraping of steel echoing from the vaulted ceiling.

She cut at him, then back the other way, ignoring the burning pain in her fist as she tore the short steel from his hand and sent it clattering into the shadows. Ganmark lurched away, only just turned one of Cosca's thrusts wide with his long steel, left his unguarded side facing her. She grinned, was pulling her arm back to lunge when something crashed into the window on her left, sent splinters of glass flying into her face. She thought she heard Shivers' voice, roaring in Northern from the other side. Ganmark slipped between two pillars as Cosca slashed at him and away across the lawn, backing off into the centre of the garden.

"Could you get on and kill this bastard?" wheezed Cosca.

"Doing my best. You go left."

"Left it is." They moved apart, herding Ganmark towards the statue. He looked spent now, blowing hard, soft cheeks turned blotchy pink and shining with sweat. She smiled as she feinted at him, sensing victory, felt her smile slip as he suddenly sprang to meet her. She dodged his first thrust, slashed at his neck, but he caught it and pushed her away. He was a lot less spent than she'd thought, and she was a lot more. Her foot came down badly and she tottered sideways. Ganmark darted past and his sword left a burning cut across her thigh. She tried to turn, screeched as her leg crumpled, fell and rolled, the Calvez tumbling from her limp fingers and bouncing away.

Cosca sprang past with a hoarse cry, swinging wildly. Ganmark dropped under his cut, lunged from the ground and ran him neatly through the stomach. Cosca's sword clanged hard into The Warrior's shin and flew from his hand, stone chips spinning. The general whipped his blade free and Cosca dropped to his knees, sagged sideways with a long groan.

"And that's that." Ganmark turned towards her, Bonatine's greatest work looming up behind him. A few flakes of marble trickled from the statue's ankle, already cracked where Monza's sword had chopped into it. "You've given me some exercise, I'll grant you that. You are a woman—or have been a woman—of remarkable determination." Cosca dragged himself across the cobbles, leaving spotty smears of blood behind him. "But in keeping your eyes always ahead, you blinded yourself to everything around you. To the nature of the great war you fight in. To the natures of the people closest to you." Ganmark flicked out his handkerchief again, dabbed sweat from his forehead, carefully wiped blood from his steel. "If Duke Orso and his state of Talins are no more than a sword in the hand of Valint and Balk, then you were never more than that sword's ruthless point." He flicked the shining point of his own sword with his forefinger. "Always stabbing, always killing, but never considering why." There was a gentle creaking, and over his shoulder The Warrior's own great sword wobbled ever so slightly. "Still. It hardly matters now. For you the fight is over." Ganmark still wore his sad smile as he came to a stop a stride from her. "Any pithy last words?"

"Behind you," growled Monza through gritted teeth, as The Warrior rocked ever so gently forwards.

"You must take me for—" There was a loud bang. The statue's leg split in half and the whole vast weight of stone toppled inexorably forwards.

Ganmark was just beginning to turn as the point of Stolicus' giant sword pinned him between the shoulder blades, drove him onto his knees, burst out through his stomach and crashed into the cobbles, spraying blood and rock chips in Monza's stinging face. The statue's legs broke apart as they hit the ground, noble feet left on the pedestal, the rest cracking into muscular chunks and rolling around in a cloud of white marble dust. From the hips up, the proud image of the greatest soldier of history stayed in one magnificent piece, staring sternly down at Orso's general, impaled on his monstrous sword beneath him.

Ganmark made a sucking sound like water draining from a broken bath, and coughed blood down the front of his uniform. His head fell forwards, steel clattering from his dangling hand.

There was a moment of stillness.

"Now that," croaked Cosca, "is what I call a happy accident."

Four dead, three left. Monza saw someone creep out from one of the colonnades, grimaced as she shuffled to her sword and dragged it up for the third time, hardly sure which ruined hand to hold it in. It was Day, loaded flatbow levelled. Friendly trudged along behind her, knife and cleaver hanging from his fists.

"You got him?" asked the girl.

Monza looked at Ganmark's corpse, kneeling spitted on the great length of bronze. "Stolicus did."

Cosca had kicked his way as far as one of the cherry trees and sat with his back against the trunk. He looked just like a man relaxing on a summer's day. Apart from the bloody hand pressed to his stomach. She limped up to him, stuck the Calvez point-first into the turf and knelt down.

"Let me have a look." She fumbled with the buttons on Cosca's jacket, but before she got the second one undone he reached up, gently took her bloody hand and her twisted one in his.

"I've been waiting years for you to tear my clothes off, but I think I'll have politely to decline. I'm finished."

"You? Never."

He squeezed her hands tighter. "Right through the guts, Monza. It's over." His eyes rolled towards the gate, and she could hear the faint clattering as soldiers on the other side struggled to lever the portcullis open. "And you'll have other problems soon enough. Four of seven, though, girl." He grinned. "Never thought you'd make four of seven."

"Four of seven," muttered Friendly, behind her.

"I wish I could've made Orso one of them."

"Well." Cosca raised his brows. "It's a noble calling, but I guess you can't kill everyone."

Shivers was walking slowly over from one of the doorways. He barely even glanced at Ganmark's impaled corpse as he passed. "None left?"

"Not in here." Friendly nodded towards the gate. "Some out there, though."

"Reckon so." The Northman stopped not far away. His hanging axe, his dented shield, his pale face and the bandages across one half of it were all dashed and speckled dark red.

"You alright?" asked Monza.

"Don't rightly know what I am."

"Are you hurt, I'm asking?"

He touched one hand to the bandages. "No worse'n before we started… reckon I must be beloved o' the moon today, as the hillmen say." His eye rolled down to her bloody shoulder, her bloody hand. "You're bleeding."

"My fencing lesson turned ugly."

"You need a bandage?"

She nodded towards the gateway, the noise of the Talinese soldiers on the other side getting louder with every moment. "We'll be lucky if we get the time to bleed to death."

"What now, then?"

She opened her mouth, but nothing came out. There was no use fighting, even if she'd had the strength. The palace would be swarming with Orso's soldiers. There was no use surrendering, even if she'd been the type. They'd be lucky if they made it back to Fontezarmo to be killed. Benna had always warned her she didn't think far enough ahead, and it seemed he'd had a point—

"I've an idea." Day's face had broken out in an unexpected smile. Monza followed her pointing finger, up to the roofline above the garden, and squinted into the sun. A black figure crouched there against the bright sky.

"A fine afternoon to you!" She never thought she'd be glad to hear Castor Morveer's scraping whine. "I was hoping to view the Duke of Visserine's famous collection and I appear to have become entirely lost! I don't suppose any of you kind gentlefolk know where I might find it? I hear he has Bonatine's greatest work!"

Monza jerked her bloody thumb at the ruined statue. "Not all it's cracked up to be!"

Vitari had appeared beside the poisoner now, was smoothly lowering a rope. "We're rescued," grunted Friendly, in just the same tone as he might have said, "We're dead."

Monza hardly had the energy even to feel pleased. She hardly knew if she was pleased. "Day, Shivers, get up there."

"No doubt." Day tossed her bow away and ran for it. The Northman frowned at Monza for a moment, then followed.

Friendly was looking down at Cosca. "What about him?" The old mercenary seemed to have dozed off for a moment, eyelids flickering.

"We'll have to pull him up. Get a hold."

The convict slid one arm around his back and started to lift him. Cosca woke with a jolt, grimaced. "Dah! No, no, no, no, no." Friendly let him carefully back down and Cosca shook his scabby head, breathing ragged. "I'm not screaming my way up a rope just so I can die on a roof. Here's as good a place as any, and this as good a time. I've been promising to do it for years. Might as well keep my word this once."

She squatted down beside him. "I'd rather call you a liar one more time, and keep you watching my back."

"I only stayed there… because I like looking at your arse." He bared his teeth, winced, gave a long growl. The clanging at the gate was getting louder.

Friendly offered Cosca's sword to him. "They'll be coming. You want this?"

"Why would I? It was messing with those things got me into this fix in the first place." He tried to shift, winced and sagged back, his skin already carrying that waxy sheen that corpses have.

Vitari and Morveer had bundled Shivers over the gutter and onto the roof. Monza jerked her head at Friendly. "Your turn."

He crouched there for a moment, not moving, then looked to Cosca. "Do you want me to stay?"

The old mercenary took Friendly's big hand and smiled as he gave it a squeeze. "I am touched beyond words to hear you make the offer. But no, my friend. This I had better handle alone. Give your dice a roll for me."

"I will." Friendly stood and strode off towards the rope without a backward glance. Monza watched him go. Her hands, her shoulder, her leg burned, her battered body ached. Her eyes slunk over the bodies scattered across the garden. Sweet victory. Sweet vengeance. Men turned into meat.

"Do me one favour." Cosca had a sad smile, almost as if he guessed her thoughts.

"You came back for me, didn't you? I can stretch to one."

"Forgive me."

She made a sound—half-snort, half-retch. "I thought I was the one betrayed you?"

"What does it matter now? Treachery is commonplace. Forgiveness is rare. I'd rather go without any debts. Except all the money I owe in Ospria. And Adua. And Dagoska." He weakly waved one bloody hand. "Let's say no debts to you, anyway, and leave it at that."

"That I can do. We're even."

"Good. I lived like shit. Glad to see at least I got the dying right. Get on."

Part of her wanted to stay with him, to be with him when Orso's men broke through the gate, make sure there really were no debts. But not that big a part. She'd never been prone to sentiment. Orso had to die, and if she was killed here, who'd get it done? She pulled the Calvez from the ground, slid it back into its sheath and turned without another word. Words are poor tools at a time like that. She limped to the rope, tied it off under her hips the best she could, twisted it around her wrist.

"Let's go!"

From the roof Monza could see right across the city. The wide curve of the Visser and its graceful bridges. The many towers poking at the sky, dwarfed by pillars of smoke still rising from the scattered fires. Day had already got a pear from somebody and was biting happily into it, yellow curls blowing on the breeze, juice gleaming on her chin.

Morveer raised one eyebrow at the carnage down in the garden. "I am relieved to observe that, in my absence, you succeeded in keeping the slaughter under tight control."

"Some things never change," she snapped at him.

"Cosca?" asked Vitari.

"Not coming."

Morveer gave a sickening little grin. "He failed to save his own skin this time? So a drunkard can change after all."

Rescue or not, Monza would have stabbed him at that moment if she'd had a good hand to do it with. From the way Vitari scowled at the poisoner, she was feeling much the same. She jerked her spiky head towards the river instead. "We should have the tearful reunion down in the boat. The city's full of Orso's troops. High time we were floating out to sea."

Monza took one last look back. All was still down in the garden. Salier had slid from the fallen statue's pedestal and rolled onto his back, arms outstretched as if welcoming a dear old friend. Ganmark knelt in a wide slick of blood, impaled on The Warrior's great bronze blade, head dangling. Cosca's eyes were closed, hands resting in his lap, a slight smile still on his tipped-back face. Cherry blossom wafted down and settled across his stolen uniform.

"Cosca, Cosca," she murmured. "What will I do without you?"