Orso glanced sideways at the man with the curly hair. 'I congratulate you on the achievement. Though it has been the cause of some considerable discomfort to me and my associates. Pray explain why I should not have you killed for it.'

Morveer attempted to pass it off with a vivacious chuckle, but it died a slow death in the chilly vastness of the hall. 'I . . . er . . . had no notion, of course, that you were in any way to be discomfited. None. Really, it was all due to a regrettable failing, or indeed a wilful oversight, deliberate dishonesty, a lie, even, on the part of my cursed assistant that I took the job in the first place. I should never have trusted that greedy bitch . . .' He realised he was doing himself no good by blaming the dead. Great men want living people to hold responsible, that they might have them tortured, hanged, beheaded and so forth. Corpses offer no recompense. He swiftly changed tack. 'I was but the tool, your Excellency. Merely the weapon. A weapon I now offer for your own hand to wield, as you see fit.' He bowed again, even lower this time, muscles in his rump, already sore from climbing the cursed mountainside to Fontezarmo, trembling in their efforts to prevent him from pitching on his face.

'You seek a new employer?'

'Murcatto proved as treacherous towards me as she did towards your illustrious Lordship. The woman is a snake indeed. Twisting, poisonous and . . . scaly,' he finished lamely. 'I was lucky to escape her toxic clutches with my life, and now seek redress. I am prepared to seek it most earnestly, and will not be denied!'

'Redress would be a fine thing for us all,' murmured the man with the curly hair. 'News of Murcatto's survival spreads through Talins like wild-fire. Papers bearing her face on every wall.' A fact, Morveer had seen them as he passed through the city. 'They say you stabbed her through the heart but she lived, your Excellency.'

The duke snorted. 'Had I stabbed her, I would never have aimed for her heart. Without doubt her least vulnerable organ.'

'They say you burned her, drowned her, cut her into quarters and tossed them from your balcony, but she was stitched back together and lived again. They say she killed two hundred men at the fords of the Sulva. That she charged alone into your ranks and scattered them like chaff on the wind.'

'The stamp of Rogont's theatrics,' hissed the duke through gritted teeth. 'That bastard was born to be an author of cheap fantasies rather than a ruler of men. We will hear next that Murcatto has sprouted wings and given birth to the second coming of Euz!'

'I wouldn't be at all surprised. Bills are posted on every street corner proclaiming her an instrument of the Fates, sent to deliver Styria from your tyranny.'

'Tyrant, now?' The duke barked a grim chuckle. 'How quickly the wind shifts in the modern age!'

'They say she cannot be killed.'

'Do . . . they . . . indeed?' Orso's red-rimmed eyes swivelled to Morveer. 'What do you say, poisoner?'

'Your Excellency,' and he plunged down into the lowest of bows once more, 'I have fashioned a successful career upon the principle that there is nothing that lives that cannot be deprived of life. It is the remarkable ease of killing, rather than the impossibility of it, that has always caused me astonishment.'

'Do you care to prove it?'

'Your Excellency, I humbly entreat only the opportunity.' Morveer swept out another bow. It was his considered opinion that one could never bow too much to men of Orso's stamp, though he did reflect that persons of huge ego were a great drain on the patience of bystanders.

'Then here it is. Kill Monzcarro Murcatto. Kill Nicomo Cosca. Kill Countess Cotarda of Affoia. Kill Duke Lirozio of Puranti. Kill First Citizen Patine of Nicante. Kill Chancellor Sotorius of Sipani. Kill Grand Duke Rogont, before he can be crowned. Perhaps I will not have Styria, but I will have revenge. On that you can depend.'

Morveer had been warmly smiling as the list began. By its end he was smiling no longer, unless one could count the fixed rictus he maintained across his trembling face only by the very greatest of efforts. It appeared his bold gambit had spectacularly oversucceeded. He was forcibly reminded of his attempt to discomfort four of his tormentors at the orphanage by placing Lankam salts in the water, which had ended, of course, with the untimely deaths of all the establishment's staff and most of the children too.

'Your Excellency,' he croaked, 'that is a significant quantity of murder.'

'And some fine names for your little list, no? The rewards will be equally significant, on that you can rely, will they not, Master Sulfur?'

'They will.' Sulfur's eyes moved from his fingernails to Morveer's face. Different-coloured eyes, Morveer now noticed, one green, one blue. 'I represent, you see, the Banking House of Valint and Balk.'

'Ah.' Suddenly, and with profound discomfort, Morveer placed the man. He had seen him talking with Mauthis in the banking hall in Westport but a few short days before he had filled the place with corpses. 'Ah. I really had not the slightest notion, you understand . . .' How he wished now that he had not killed Day. Then he could have noisily denounced her as the culprit and had something tangible with which to furnish the duke's dungeons. Fortunately, it seemed Master Sulfur was not seeking scapegoats. Yet.

'Oh, you were but the weapon, as you say. If you can cut as sharply on our behalf you have nothing to worry about. And besides, Mauthis was a terrible bore. Shall we say, if you are successful, the sum of one million scales?'

'One . . . million?' muttered Morveer.

'There is nothing that lives that cannot be deprived of life.' Orso leaned forwards, eyes fixed on Morveer's face. 'Now get about it!'

Night was falling when they came to the place, lamps lit in the grimy windows, stars spilled out across the soft night sky like diamonds on a jeweller's cloth. Shenkt had never liked Affoia. He had studied there, as a young man, before he ever knelt to his master and before he swore never to kneel again. He had fallen in love there, with a woman too rich, too old and far too beautiful for him, and been made a whining fool of. The streets were lined not only with old pillars and thirsty palms, but with the bitter remnants of his childish shame, jealousy, weeping injustice. Strange, that however tough one's skin becomes in later life, the wounds of youth never close.

Shenkt did not like Affoia, but the trail had led him here. It would take more than ugly memories to make him leave a job half-done.

'That is the house?' It was buried in the twisting backstreets of the city's oldest quarter, far from the thoroughfares where the names of men seeking public office were daubed on the walls along with their great qualities and other, less complimentary words and pictures. A small building, with slumping lintels and a slumping roof, squeezed between a warehouse and a leaning shed.

'That's the house.' The beggar's voice was soft and stinking as rotten fruit.

'Good.' Shenkt pressed five scales into his scabby palm. 'This is for you.' He closed the man's fist around the money then held it with his own. 'Never come back here.' He leaned closer, squeezed harder. 'Not ever.'

He slipped across the cobbled street, over the wall before the house. His heart was beating unusually fast, sweat prickling his scalp. He crept across the overgrown front garden, old boots finding the silent spaces between the weeds, and to the lighted window. Reluctant, almost afraid, he peered through. Three children sat on a worn red carpet beside a small fire. Two girls and a boy, all with the same orange hair. They were playing with a brightly painted wooden horse on wheels. Clambering onto it, pushing each other around on it, pushing each other off it, to faint squeals of amusement. He squatted there, fascinated, and watched them.

Innocent. Unformed. Full of possibilities. Before they began to make their choices, or had their choices made for them. Before the doors began to close, and sent them down the only remaining path. Before they knelt. Now, for this briefest spell, they could be anything.

'Well, well. What have we here?'

She was crouching above him on the low roof of the shed, her head on one side, a line of light from a window across the way cutting hard down her face, strip of spiky red hair, red eyebrow, narrowed eye, freckled skin, corner of a frowning mouth. A chain hung gleaming down from one fist, cross of sharpened metal swinging gently on the end of it.

Shenkt sighed. 'It seems you have the better of me.'

She slid from the wall, dropped to the dirt and thumped smoothly down on her haunches, chain rattling. She stood, tall and lean, and took a step towards him, raising her hand.

He breathed in, slow, slow.

He saw every detail of her face: lines, freckles, faint hairs on her top lip, sandy eyelashes crawling down as she blinked.

He could hear her heart beating, heavy as a ram at a gate.

Thump . . . thump . . . thump . . .

She slid her hand around his head, and they kissed. He wrapped his arms about her, pressed her thin body tight against him, she tangled her fingers in his hair, chain brushing against his shoulders, dangling metal knocking lightly against the backs of his legs. A long, gentle, lingering kiss that made his body tingle from his lips to his toes.

She broke away. 'It's been a while, Cas.'

'I know.'

'Too long.'

'I know.'

She nodded towards the window. 'They miss you.'

'Can I . . .'

'You know you can.'

She led him to the door, into the narrow hallway, unbuckling the chain from her wrist and slinging it over a hook, cross-shaped knife dangling. The oldest girl dashed out from the room, stopped dead when she saw him.

'It's me.' He edged slowly towards her, his voice strangled. 'It's me.' The other two children came out from the room, peering around their sister. Shenkt feared no man, but before these children, he was a coward. 'I have something for you.' He reached into his coat with trembling fingers.

'Cas.' He held out the carved dog, and the little boy with his name snatched it from his hand, grinning. 'Kande.' He put the bird in the cupped hands of the littlest girl, and she stared dumbly at it. 'For you, Tee,' and he offered the cat to the oldest girl.

She took it. 'No one calls me that any more.'

'I'm sorry it's been so long.' He touched the girl's hair and she flinched away, he jerked his hand back, awkward. He felt the weight of the butcher's sickle in his coat as he moved, and he stood sharply, took a step back. The three of them stared up at him, carved animals clutched in their hands.

'To bed now,' said Shylo. 'He'll still be here tomorrow.' Her eyes were on him, hard lines across the freckled bridge of her nose. 'Won't you, Cas?'

'Yes.'

She brushed their complaints away, pointed to the stairs. 'To bed.' They filed up slowly, step by step, the boy yawning, the younger girl hanging her head, the other complaining that she wasn't tired. 'I'll come sing to you later. If you're quiet until then, maybe your father will even hum the low parts.' The youngest of the two girls smiled at him, between the banisters at the top of the stairs, until Shylo pushed him into the living room and shut the door.

'They got so big,' he muttered.

'That's what they do. Why are you here?'

'Can't I just-'

'You know you can, and you know you haven't. Why are you . . .' She saw the ruby on his forefinger and frowned. 'That's Murcatto's ring.'

'She lost it in Puranti. I nearly caught her there.'

'Caught her? Why?'

He paused. 'She has become involved . . . in my revenge.'

'You and your revenge. Did you ever think you might be happier forgetting it?'

'A rock might be happier if it was a bird, and could fly from the earth and be free. A rock is not a bird. Were you working for Murcatto?'

'Yes. So?'

'Where is she?'

'You came here for that?'

'That.' He looked towards the ceiling. 'And them.' He looked her in the eye. 'And you.'

She grinned, little lines cutting into the skin at the corners of her eyes. It took him by surprise, how much he loved to see those lines. 'Cas, Cas. For such a clever bastard you're a stupid bastard. You always look for all the wrong things in all the wrong places. Murcatto's in Ospria, with Rogont. She fought in the battle there. Any man with ears knows that.'

'I didn't hear.'

'You don't listen. She's tight with the Duke of Delay, now. My guess is he'll be putting her in Orso's place, keep the people of Talins alongside when he reaches for the crown.'

'Then she'll be following him. Back to Talins.'

'That's right.'

'Then I will follow them. Back to Talins.' Shenkt frowned. 'I could have stayed there these past weeks, and simply waited for her.'

'That's what happens if you're always chasing things. Works better if you wait for what you want to come to you.'

'I was sure you'd have found another man by now.'

'I found a couple. They didn't stick.' She held out her hand to him. 'You ready to hum?'

'Always.' He took her hand, and she pulled him from the room, and through the door, and up the stairs.

VII.

TALINS.

'Revenge is a dish best served cold'

Pierre Choderlos de Laclos Rogont of Ospria was late to the field at Sweet Pines, but Salier of Visserine still enjoyed the weight of numbers and was too proud to retreat. Especially when the enemy was commanded by a woman. He fought, he lost, he ended up retreating anyway, and left the city of Caprile defenceless. Rather than face a certain sack, the citizens opened their gates to the Serpent of Talins in the hope of mercy.

Monza rode in, but most of her men she left outside. Orso had made allies of the Baolish, convinced them to fight with the Thousand Swords under their ragged standards. Fierce fighters, but with a bloody reputation. Monza had a bloody reputation of her own, and that only made her trust them less.

'I love you.'

'Of course you do.'

'I love you, but keep the Baolish out of town, Benna.'

'You can trust me.'

'I do trust you. Keep the Baolish out of town.'

She rode three hours as the sun went down, back to the rotting battlefield at Sweet Pines, to dine with Duke Orso and learn his plans for the close of the season.

'Mercy for the citizens of Caprile, if they yield to me entirely, pay indemnities and acknowledge me their rightful ruler.'

'Mercy, your Excellency?'

'You know what it is, yes?' She knew what it was. She had not thought he did. 'I want their land, not their lives. Dead men cannot obey. You have won a famous victory here. You shall have a great triumph, a procession through the streets of Talins.'

That would please Benna, at least. 'Your Excellency is too kind.'

'Hah. Few would agree with that.'

She laughed as she rode back in the cool dawn, and Faithful laughed beside her. They talked of how rich the soil was, on the banks of the Capra, watching the good wheat shift in the wind.

Then she saw the smoke above the city, and she knew.

The streets were full of dead. Men, women, children, young and old. Birds gathered on them. Flies swarmed. A confused dog limped along beside their horses. Nothing else living showed itself. Empty windows gaped, empty doorways yawned. Fires still burned, whole rows of houses nothing but ash and tottering chimney stacks.

Last night, a thriving city. This morning, Caprile was hell made real.

It seemed Benna had not been listening. The Baolish had begun it, but the rest of the Thousand Swords drunk, angry, fearing they would miss out on the easy pickings had eagerly joined in. Darkness and dark company make it easy for even half-decent men to behave like animals, and there were few half-decent men among the scum Monza commanded. The boundaries of civilisation are not the impregnable walls civilised men take them for. As easily as smoke on the wind, they can dissolve.

Monza flopped down from her horse and puked Duke Orso's fine breakfast over the rubbish-strewn cobbles.