Red Country

The Tally

They smelled Beacon long before they saw it. A waft of cooking meat set the famished column shambling downhill through the trees, men slipping and barging and knocking each other over in their haste, sending snow showering. An enterprising hawker had set sticks of meat to cook high up on the slope above the camp. Alas for her, the mercenaries were in no mood to pay and, brushing her protests aside, plundered every shred of gristle as efficiently as a horde of locusts. Even meat as yet uncooked was fought over and wolfed down. One man had his hand pressed into the glowing brazier in the commotion and knelt moaning in the snow, clutching his black-striped palm as Temple laboured past, hugging himself against the cold.

‘What a set o’ men,’ muttered Shy. ‘Richer than Hermon and they’d still rather steal.’

‘Doing wrong gets to be a habit,’ answered Temple, teeth chattering.

The smell of profit must have drifted all the way to Crease because the camp itself was positively booming. Several more barrows had been dug out and several new shacks thrown up and their chimneys busily smoking. More pedlars had set up shop and more whores set down mattress, all crowding happily out to offer succour to the brave conquerors, price lists surreptitiously amended as salesmen noticed, all avaricious amaze, the weight of gold and silver with which the men were burdened.

Cosca was the only one mounted, leading the procession on an exhausted mule. ‘Greetings!’ He delved into his saddlebag and with a carefree flick of the wrist sent a shower of ancient coins into the air. ‘And a happy birthday to you all!’

A stall was toppled, pots and pans clattering as people dived after the pinging coins, huddling about the hooves of the Old Man’s mount and jostling each other like pigeons around a handful of seed. An emaciated fiddler, undeterred by his lack of a full complement of strings, struck up a merry jig and capered among the mercenaries, toothlessly grinning.

Beneath that familiar sign proclaiming Majud and Curnsbick Metalwork, to which had been carefully added Weapons and Armour Manufactured and Repaired, stood Abram Majud, a couple of hirelings keeping the patent portable forge aglow on a narrow strip of ground behind him.

‘You’ve found a new plot,’ said Temple.

‘A small one. Would you build me a house upon it?’

‘Perhaps later.’ Temple clasped the merchant’s hand, and thought with some nostalgia of an honest day’s work done for a half-honest master. Nostalgia was becoming a favoured hobby of his. Strange, how the best moments of our lives we scarcely notice except in looking back.

‘And are these the children?’ asked Majud, squatting down before Pit and Ro.

‘We found ’em,’ said Shy, without displaying much triumph.

‘I am glad.’ Majud offered the boy his hand. ‘You must be Pit.’

‘I am,’ he said, solemnly shaking.

‘And you, Ro.’

The girl frowned away, and did not answer.

‘She is,’ said Shy. ‘Or… was.’

Majud slapped his knees. ‘And I am sure will be again. People change.’

‘You sure?’ asked Temple.

The merchant put a hand on his shoulder. ‘Does not the proof stand before me?’

He was wondering whether that was a joke or a compliment when Cosca’s familiar shriek grated at his ear. ‘Temple!’

‘Your master’s voice,’ said Shy.

Where was the purpose in disputing it? Temple nodded his apologies and slunk off towards the fort like the beaten dog he was. He passed a man ripping a cooked chicken apart with his hands, face slick with grease. Two others fought over a flask of ale, accidentally pulled the stopper, and a third dived between them, mouth open, in a vain effort to catch the spillings. A cheer rang out as a whore was hoisted up on three men’s shoulders, festooned with ancient gold, a coronet clasped lopsided to her head and screeching, ‘I’m the Queen of the fucking Union! I’m the fucking Queen of the fucking Union!’

‘I am glad to see you well.’ Sworbreck clapped him on the arm with what felt like genuine warmth.

‘Alive, at least.’ It had been some time since Temple last felt well.

‘How was it?’

Temple considered that. ‘No stories of heroism for you to record I fear.’

‘I have given up hope of finding any.’

‘I find hope is best abandoned early,’ muttered Temple.

The Old Man was beckoning his three captains into a conspiratorial and faintly unpleasant-smelling huddle in the shadow of Superior Pike’s great fortified wagon.

‘My trusted friends,’ he said, starting, as he would continue, with a lie. ‘We stand upon the heady pinnacle of attainment. But, speaking as one who has often done so, there is no more precarious perch and those that lose their footing have far to fall. Success tests a friendship far more keenly than failure. We must be doubly watchful of the men and triply cautious in our dealings with all outsiders.’

‘Agreed,’ nodded Brachio, jowls trembling.

‘Indeed,’ sneered Dimbik, sharp nose pinked by the cold.

‘God knows it,’ rumbled Jubair, eyes rolling to the sky.

‘How can I fail with three such pillars to support me? The first order of business must be to collect the booty. If we leave it with the men they will have frittered the majority away to these vultures by first light.’

Men cheered as a great butt of wine was tapped, red spots spattering the snow beneath, and began happily handing over ten times the price of the entire barrel for each mug poured.

‘By that time they will probably find themselves in considerable debt,’ observed Dimbik, slicking back a loose strand of hair with a dampened fingertip.

‘I suggest we gather the valuables without delay, then, observed by us all, counted by Sergeant Friendly, notarised by Master Temple, and stored in this wagon under triple-lock.’ And Cosca thumped the solid wood of which the wagon was made as though to advertise the good sense and dependability of his suggestion. ‘Dimbik, set your most loyal men to guard it.’

Brachio watched a fellow swing a golden chain around his head, jewels sparkling. ‘The men won’t hand their prizes over happily.’

‘They never do, but if we stand together and provide enough distractions they will succumb. How many do we number now, Friendly?’

‘One hundred and forty-three,’ said the sergeant.

Jubair shook his heavy head at the faithlessness of mankind. ‘The Company dwindles alarmingly.’

‘We can afford no further desertions,’ said Cosca. ‘I suggest all mounts be gathered, corralled and closely watched by trusted guards.’

‘Risky.’ Brachio scratched worriedly at the crease between his chins. ‘There are some skittish ones among ’em—’

‘That’s horses for you. See it done. Jubair, I want a dozen of your best in position to make sure our little surprise goes to plan.’

‘Already awaiting your word.’

‘What surprise?’ asked Temple. God knew, he was not sure he could endure any further excitement.

The captain general grinned. ‘A surprise shared is no surprise at all. Don’t worry! I feel sure you’ll approve.’ Temple was in no way reassured. His idea of a good thing and Cosca’s intersected less with every passing day. ‘Each to our work, then, while I address the men.’

As he watched his three captains move off, Cosca’s smile slowly faded, leaving him with eyes narrowed to slits of suspicion. ‘I don’t trust those bastards further than I could shit.’

‘No,’ said Friendly.

‘No,’ said Temple. Indeed, the only man he trusted less stood beside him now.

‘I want the two of you to account for the treasure. Every brass bit properly tallied, noted and stored away.’

‘Counted?’ said Friendly.

‘Absolutely, my old friend. And see to it also that there is food and water in the wagon, and a team of horses hitched and at the ready. If things turn… ugly here, we may require a swift exit.’

‘Eight horses,’ said Friendly. ‘Four pairs.’

‘Now help me up. I have a speech to make.’

With a great deal of grimacing and grumbling, the Old Man managed to clamber onto the seat and then the roof of the wagon, fists bunched upon its wooden parapet, facing out into the camp. By that stage, those not already thoroughly occupied had begun a chant in his honour, weapons, bottles and half-devoured morsels shaken at the evening sky. Tiring of their burden, they unceremoniously deposed the newly crowned Queen of the Union screeching in the mud and plundered her of her borrowed valuables.

‘Cosca! Cosca! Cosca!’ they roared as the captain general removed his hat, smoothed the white wisps across his pate and spread his arms wide to receive their adulation. Someone seized the beggar’s fiddle and smashed it to pieces, then further ensured his silence with a punch in the mouth.

‘My honoured companions!’ bellowed the Old Man. Time might have dulled some of his faculties but the volume of his voice was unimpaired. ‘We have done well!’ A rousing cheer. Someone threw money in the air, provoking an ugly scuffle. ‘Tonight we celebrate! Tonight we drink, and sing, and revel, as befits a triumph worthy of the heroes of old!’ Further cheers, and brotherly embraces, and slapping of backs. Temple wondered whether the heroes of old would have celebrated the herding of a few dozen ancients from a cliff. More than likely. That’s heroes for you.

Cosca held up a gnarled hand for quiet, eventually achieved aside from the soft sucking sounds of a couple who were beginning the celebrations early. ‘Before the revelry, however, I regret that there must be an accounting.’ An immediate change in mood. ‘Each man will surrender his booty—’ Angry mutterings now broke out. ‘All his booty!’ Angrier yet. ‘No swallowed jewels, no coins up arses! No one wants to have to look for them there.’ A few distinct boos. ‘That our majestic haul may be properly valued, recorded, safely kept under triple-lock in this very wagon, to be dispersed as appropriate when we have reached civilisation!’

The mood now verged on the ugly. Temple noted some of Jubair’s men, threading watchfully through the crowd. ‘We start out tomorrow morning!’ roared Cosca. ‘But for tonight each man will receive one hundred marks as a bonus to spend as he sees fit!’ Some amelioration of the upset at that. ‘Let us not spoil our triumph with sour dissent! Remain united, and we can leave this benighted country rich beyond the dreams of greed. Turn against each other, and failure, shame and death will be our just deserts.’ Cosca thumped one fist against his breastplate. ‘I think, as ever, only of the safety of our noble brotherhood! The sooner your booty is tallied, the sooner the fun begins!’

‘What of the rebels?’ rang out a piercing voice. Inquisitor Lorsen was shoving his way through the press towards the wagon, and from the look on his gaunt face the fun would not be starting any time soon. ‘Where are the rebels, Cosca?’

‘The rebels? Ah, yes. The strangest thing. We scoured Ashranc from top to bottom. Would you use the word “scoured”, Temple?’

‘I would,’ said Temple. They had smashed anything that might hold a coin, let alone a rebel.

‘But no sign of them?’ growled Lorsen.

‘We were deceived!’ Cosca thumped the parapet in frustration. ‘Damn, but these rebels are a slippery crowd! The alliance between them and the Dragon People was a ruse.’

‘Their ruse or yours?’

‘Inquisitor, you wrong me! I am as disappointed as you are—’

‘I hardly think so!’ snapped Lorsen. ‘You have lined your own pockets, after all.’

Cosca spread his hands in helpless apology. ‘That’s mercenaries for you.’

A scattering of laughter from the Company but their employer was in no mood to participate. ‘You have made me an accomplice to robbery! To murder! To massacre!’

‘I held no dagger to your neck. Superior Pike did ask for chaos, as I recall—’

‘To a purpose! You have perpetrated mindless slaughter!’

‘Mindful slaughter would surely be even worse?’ Cosca burst out in a chuckle but Lorsen’s black-masked Practicals, scattered about the shadows, lacked all sense of humour.

The Inquisitor waited for silence. ‘Do you believe in anything?’

‘Not if I can help it. Belief alone is nothing to be proud of, Inquisitor. Belief without evidence is the very hallmark of the savage.’

Lorsen shook his head in amazement. ‘You truly are disgusting.’

‘I would be the last to disagree, but you fail to see that you are worse. No man capable of greater evil than the one who thinks himself in the right. No purpose more evil than the higher purpose. I freely admit I am a villain. That’s why you hired me. But I am no hypocrite.’ Cosca gestured at the ragged remnants of his Company, fallen silent to observe the confrontation. ‘I have mouths to feed. You could just go home. If you are set on doing good, make something to be proud of. Open a bakery. Fresh bread every morning, there’s a noble cause!’

Inquisitor Lorsen’s thin lip curled. ‘There truly is nothing in you of what separates man from animal, is there? You are bereft of conscience. An utter absence of morality. You have no principle beyond the selfish.’

Cosca’s face hardened as he leaned forwards. ‘Perhaps when you have faced as many disappointments and suffered as many betrayals as I, you will see it—there is no principle beyond the selfish, Inquisitor, and men are animals. Conscience is a burden we choose to bear. Morality is the lie we tell ourselves to make its bearing easier. There have been many times in my life when I have wished it was not so. But it is so.’

Lorsen slowly nodded, bright eyes fixed on Cosca. ‘There will be a price for this.’

‘I am counting on it. Though it seems an almost ludicrous irrelevance now, Superior Pike promised me fifty thousand marks.’

‘For the capture of the rebel leader Conthus!’

‘Indeed. And there he is.’

There was a scraping of steel, a clicking of triggers, a rattling of armour as a dozen of Jubair’s men stepped forward. A circle of drawn swords, loaded flatbows, levelled polearms all suddenly pointed in towards Lamb, Sweet, Shy and Savian. Gently, Majud drew the wideeyed children close to him.

‘Master Savian!’ called Cosca. ‘I deeply regret that I must ask you to lay down your weapons. Any and all, if you please!’

Betraying no emotion, Savian slowly reached up to undo the buckle on the strap across his chest, flatbow and bolts clattering to the mud. Lamb watched him do it, and calmly bit into a leg of chicken. No doubt that was the easy way, to stand and watch. God knew, Temple had taken that way often enough. Too often, perhaps…

He dragged himself up onto the wagon to hiss in Cosca’s ear. ‘You don’t have to do this!’

‘Have to? No.’

‘Please! How does it help you?’

‘Help me?’ The Old Man raised one brow at Temple as Savian unbuttoned his coat and one by one shed his other weapons. ‘It helps me not at all. That is the very essence of selflessness and charity.’

Temple could only stand blinking.

‘Are you not always telling me to do the right thing?’ asked Cosca. ‘Did we not sign a contract? Did we not accept Inquisitor Lorsen’s noble cause as our own? Did we not lead him a merry chase up and down this forsaken gulf of distance? Pray be silent, Temple. I never thought to say this, but you are impeding my moral growth.’ He turned away to shout, ‘Would you be kind enough to roll up your sleeves, Master Savian?’

Savian cleared his throat, metal rattling as the mercenaries nervously shifted, took the button at his collar and undid it, then the next, then the next, the fighters and pedlars and whores all watching the drama unfold in silence. Hedges too, Temple noticed, for some reason with a smile of feverish delight on his face. Savian shrugged his shirt off and stood stripped to the waist, and his whole body from his pale neck to his pale hands was covered in writing, in letters large and tiny, in slogans in a dozen languages: Death to the Union, Death to the King. The only good Midderlander is a dead one. Never kneel. Never surrender. No Mercy. No Peace. Freedom. Justice. Blood. He was blue with them.

‘I only asked for the sleeves,’ said Cosca, ‘but I feel the point is made.’

Savian gave the faintest smile. ‘What if I said I’m not Conthus?’

‘I doubt we’d believe you.’ The Old Man looked over at Lorsen, who was staring at Savian with a hungry intensity. ‘In fact, I very much doubt we would. Do you have any objections, Master Sweet?’

Sweet blinked around at all that sharpened metal and opted for the easy way. ‘Not me. I’m shocked as anyone at this surprising turn of events.’

‘You must be quite discomfited to learn you’ve been travelling with a mass-murderer all this time.’ Cosca grinned. ‘Well, two, in fact, eh Master Lamb?’ The Northman still picked at his drumstick as though there was no steel pointed in his direction. ‘Anything to say on behalf of your friend?’

‘Most o’ my friends I’ve killed,’ said Lamb around a mouthful. ‘I came for the children. The rest is mud.’

Cosca pressed one sorry hand to his breastplate. ‘I have stood where you stand, Master Savian, and entirely sympathise. We all are alone in the end.’

‘It’s a hard fucking world,’ said Savian, looking neither right nor left.

‘Seize him,’ growled Lorsen, and his Practicals swarmed forwards like dogs off the leash. For a moment it looked as if Shy’s hand was creeping towards her knife but Lamb held her arm with his free hand, eyes on the ground as the Practicals marched Savian towards the fort. Inquisitor Lorsen followed them inside, smiled grimly out into the camp and slammed the door with a heavy bang.

Cosca shook his head. ‘Not even so much as a thank you. Doing right is a dead end, Temple, as I have often said. Queue up, my boys, it’s time for an accounting!’

Brachio and Dimbik began to circulate, ushering the men into a grumbling queue, the excitement of Savian’s arrest already fading. Temple stared across at Shy, and she stared back at him, but what could either of them do?

‘We will need sacks and boxes!’ Cosca was shouting. ‘Open the wagon and find a table for the count. A door on trestles, then, good enough! Sworbreck? Fetch pen and ink and ledger. Not the writing you came to do, but no less honourable a task!’

‘Deeply honoured,’ croaked the writer, looking slightly sick.

‘We’d best be heading out.’ Dab Sweet had made his way over to the wagon and was looking up. ‘Get the children back to Crease, I reckon.’

‘Of course, my friend,’ said Cosca, grinning down. ‘You will be sorely missed. Without your skills—let alone the fearsome talents of Master Lamb—the task would have been nigh impossible. The tall tales don’t exaggerate in your cases, eh, Sworbreck?’

‘They are legends made flesh, captain general,’ mumbled the writer.

‘We will have to give them a chapter to themselves. Perhaps two! The very best of luck to you and your companions. I will recommend you wherever I go!’ Cosca turned away as though that concluded their business.

Sweet looked to Temple, and Temple could only shrug. There was nothing he could do about this either.

The old scout cleared his throat. ‘There’s just the matter of our share o’ the proceeds. As I recall, we discussed a twentieth—’

‘What about my share?’ Cantliss elbowed his way past Sweet to stare up. ‘It was me told you there’d be rebels up there! Me who found those bastards out!’

‘Why, so you did!’ said Cosca. ‘You are a veritable child-stealing Prophet and we owe you all our success!’

Cantliss’ bloodshot eyes lit with a fire of greed. ‘So… what am I due?’

Friendly stepped up from behind, innocuously slipped a noose over his head, and as Cantliss glanced around, Jubair hauled with all his considerable weight on the rope, which had been looped over a beam projecting from the side of the broken tower. Hemp grated as the bandit was hoisted off his feet. One kicking foot knocked a black spray of ink across Sworbreck’s ledger and the writer stumbled up, ashen-faced, as Cantliss pawed feebly at the noose with his broken hand, eyes bulging.

‘Paid in full!’ shouted Cosca. Some of the mercenaries half-heartedly cheered. A couple laughed. One threw an apple core and missed. Most barely raised an eyebrow.

‘Oh God,’ whispered Temple, picking at the stitching on his buttons and staring at the tarred planks under his feet. But he could still see Cantliss’ squirming shadow there. ‘Oh God.’

Friendly wound the rope about a tree-stump and tied it off. Hedges, who’d been shoving his way towards the wagon, cleared his throat and carefully retreated, smiling no longer. Shy spat through the gap in her front teeth, and turned away. Lamb stood watching until Cantliss stopped twisting about, one hand resting slack on the hilt of the sword he had taken from the Dragon People. Then he frowned towards the door through which Savian had been taken, and flicked his stripped chicken bone into the mud.

‘Seventeen times,’ said Friendly, frowning up.

‘Seventeen times what?’ asked Cosca.

‘He kicked. Not counting that last one.’

‘That last one was more of a twitch,’ said Jubair.

‘Is seventeen a lot?’ asked the Old Man.

Friendly shrugged. ‘About average.’

Cosca looked down at Sweet, grey brows high. ‘You were saying something about a share, I think?’

The old scout watched Cantliss creaking back and forth, with a hooked finger gently loosened his collar and opted for the easy way again. ‘Must’ve misremembered. Reckon I’ll just be heading on back to Crease, if that’s all the same with you.’

‘As you wish.’ Below them, the first man in line upended his pack and sent gold and silver sliding across the table in a glittering heap. The captain general plumped his hat back on and flicked the feather. ‘Happy journey!’

Going Back

‘That fucking old shit-fucker!’ snarled Sweet, slashing with a stick at a branch that hung across the road and showering snow all over himself. ‘Prickomo fucking Cocksca! That bastard old arsehole-fucker!’

‘You said that one already, as I recall,’ muttered Shy.

‘He said old arsehole bastard-fucker,’ said Crying Rock.

‘My mistake,’ said Shy. ‘That’s a whole different thing.’

‘Ain’t fucking disagreeing, are you?’ snapped Sweet.

‘No I’m not,’ said Shy. ‘He’s a hell of a fucker, all right.’

‘Shit… fuck… shit… fuck…’ And Sweet kicked at his horse and whipped at the tree-trunks in a rage as he passed. ‘I’ll get even with that maggot-eaten bastard, I can tell you that!’

‘Let it be,’ grunted Lamb. ‘Some things you can’t change. You got to be realistic.’

‘That was my damn retirement got stole there!’

‘Still breathing, ain’t you?’

‘Easy for you to say! You didn’t lose no fortune!’

Lamb gave him a look. ‘I lost plenty.’

Sweet worked his mouth for a moment, then shouted, ‘Fuck!’ one last time and flung his stick away into the trees.

A cold and heavy quiet, then. The iron tyres of Majud’s wagon scrape-scraping and some loose part in Cursnbick’s apparatus in the back clank-clanking under its canvas cover and the horse’s hooves crunch-crunching in the snow on the road, rutted from the business flowing up from Crease. Pit and Ro lay in the back under a blanket, faces pressed up against each other, peaceful now in sleep. Shy watched them rocking gently as the axles shifted.

‘I guess we did it,’ she said.

‘Aye,’ said Lamb, but looking a long stretch short of a celebration. ‘Guess so.’

They rounded another long bend, road switching back one last time as it dropped down steep off the hills, the stream beside half-frozen, white ice creeping out jagged from each bank to almost meet in the middle.

Shy didn’t want to say anything. But once a thought was in her head she’d never been much good at keeping it there, and this thought had been pricking at her ever since they left Beacon. ‘They’re going to be cutting into him, ain’t they? Asking questions.’

‘Savian?’

‘Who else?’

The scarred side of Lamb’s face twitched a little. ‘That’s a fact.’

‘Ain’t a pretty one.’

‘Facts don’t tend to be.’

‘He saved me.’

‘Aye.’

‘He saved you.’

‘True.’

‘We really going to fucking leave him, then?’

Lamb’s face twitched again, jaw-muscles working as he frowned out hard across the country ahead. The trees were thinning as they dropped out of the mountains, the moon fat and full in a clear sky star-dusted, spilling light over the high plateau. A great flat expanse of dry dirt and thorny scrub looked like it could never have held life, all half carpeted now with sparkling snow. Through the midst, straight as a sword-cut, the white strip of the old Imperial Road, a scar through the country angling off towards Crease, wedged somewhere in the black rumour of hills on the horizon.

Lamb’s horse slowed to a walk, then stopped.

‘Shall we halt?’ asked Majud.

‘You told me you’d be my friend for life,’ said Lamb.

The merchant blinked. ‘And I meant it.’

‘Then keep on.’ Lamb turned in his saddle to look back. Behind them, somewhere high up in the folded, forested ridges there was a glow. The great bonfire the mercenaries had stacked high in the middle of Beacon to light their celebrations. ‘Got a good road here and a good moon to steer by. Keep on all night, quick and steady, you might make Crease by dark tomorrow.’

‘Why the rush?’

Lamb took a long breath, looked to the starry sky and breathed out smoke in a grumbling sigh. ‘There’s going to be trouble.’

‘We going back?’ asked Shy.

‘You’re not.’ The shadow of his hat fell across his face as he looked at her so his eyes were just two gleams. ‘I am.’

‘What?’

‘You’re taking the children. I’m going back.’

‘You always were, weren’t you?’

He nodded.

‘Just wanted to get us far away.’

‘I’ve only had a few friends, Shy. I’ve done right by even fewer. Could count ’em on one hand.’ He turned his left hand over and looked at the stump of his missing finger. ‘Even this one. This is how it has to be.’

‘Ain’t nothing has to be. I ain’t letting you go alone.’

‘Yes y’are.’ He eased his horse closer, looking her in the eye. ‘Do you know what I felt, when we came over that hill and saw the farm all burned out? The first thing I felt, before the sorrow and the fear and the anger caught up?’

She swallowed, her mouth all sticky-dry, not wanting to answer, not wanting to know the answer.

‘Joy,’ whispered Lamb. ‘Joy and relief. ’Cause I knew right off what I’d have to do. What I’d have to be. Knew right off I could put an end on ten years of lying. A man’s got to be what he is, Shy.’ He looked back at his hand and made a three-fingered fist of it. ‘I don’t… feel evil. But the things I done. What else can you call ’em?’

‘You ain’t evil,’ she whispered. ‘You’re just…’

‘If it hadn’t been for Savian I’d have killed you in them caves. You and Ro.’

Shy swallowed. She knew it well enough. ‘If it hadn’t been for you, we’d never have got the children back.’

Lamb looked at the pair of ’em, Ro with her arm over Pit. Stubble of hair showing dark now, almost grown over the scratch down her scalp. Both so changed. ‘Did we get ’em back?’ he asked, and his voice was rough. ‘Sometimes I think we just lost us, too.’

‘I’m who I was.’

Lamb nodded, and it seemed he had the glimmer of tears in his eyes. ‘You are, maybe. But I don’t reckon there’s any going back for me.’ He leaned from his saddle then and hugged her tight. ‘I love you. And them. But my love ain’t a weight anyone should have to carry. Best of luck, Shy. The very best.’ And he let her go, and turned his horse, and he rode away, following their tracks back towards the trees, and the hills, and the reckoning beyond.

‘What the hell happened to being realistic?’ she called after him.

He stopped just a moment, a lonely figure in all that moonlit white. ‘Always sounded like a good idea but, being honest? It never worked for me.’

Slow, and numb, Shy turned her back on him. Turned her back and rode on across the plateau, after the wagon and Majud’s hired men, after Sweet and Crying Rock, staring at the white road ahead but seeing nothing, tongue working at the gap between her teeth and the night air cold, cold in her chest with each breath. Cold and empty. Thinking about what Lamb had said to her. What she’d said to Savian. Thinking about all the long miles she’d covered the last few months and the dangers she’d faced to get this far, and not knowing what she could do. This was how it had to be.

Except when folk told Shy how things had to be, she started thinking on how to make ’em otherwise.

The wagon hit a lump and with a clatter Pit got jolted awake. He sat up, and he stared blinking about him, and said, ‘Where’s Lamb?’ And Shy’s hands went slack on the reins, and she let her horse slow, then stop, and she sat there solemn.

Majud looked over his shoulder. ‘Lamb said keep on!’

‘You got to do what he tells you? He ain’t your father, is he?’

‘I suppose not,’ said the merchant, pulling up the horses.

‘He’s mine,’ muttered Shy. And there it was. Maybe he wasn’t the father she’d want. But he was still the only one she’d got. The only one all three of ’em had got. She’d enough regrets to live with.

‘I’ve got to go back,’ she said.

‘Madness!’ snapped Sweet, sitting his horse not far off. ‘Bloody madness!’

‘No doubt. And you’re coming with me.’

A silence. ‘You know there’s more’n a hundred mercenaries up there, don’t you? Killers, every man?’

‘The Dab Sweet I heard stories of wouldn’t take fright at a few mercenaries.’

‘Don’t know if you noticed, but the Dab Sweet you heard stories of ain’t much like the one wearing my coat.’

‘I hear you used to be.’ She rode up to him and reined in close. ‘I hear you used to be quite a man.’

Crying Rock slowly nodded. ‘That is true.’

Sweet frowned at the old Ghost woman, and frowned at Shy, and finally frowned at the ground, scratching at his beard and bit by bit slumping down in his saddle. ‘Used to be. You’re young and got dreams ahead of you still. You don’t know how it is. One day you’re something, so promising and full o’ dares, so big the world’s too small a place to hold you. Then, ’fore you know it, you’re old, and you realise all them things you had in mind you’ll never get to. All them doors you felt too big to fit through have already shut. Only one left open and it leads to nothing but nothing.’ He pulled his hat off and scrubbed at his white hair with his dirty nails. ‘You lose your nerve. And once it’s gone where do you find it? I got scared, Shy South. And once you get scared there ain’t no going back, there just ain’t no—’

Shy caught a fist of his fur coat and dragged him close. ‘I ain’t giving up this way, you hear me? I just ain’t fucking having it! Now I need that bastard who killed a red bear with his hands up at the source of the Sokwaya, whether it bloody well happened or not. You hear me, you old shit?’

He blinked at her for a moment. ‘I hear you.’

‘Well? You want to get even with Cosca or you just want to swear about it?’

Crying Rock had brought her horse close. ‘Maybe do it for Leef,’ she said. ‘And those others buried on the plains.’

Sweet stared at her weather-beaten face for a long moment, for some reason with the strangest, haunted look in his eye. Then his mouth twitched into a smile. ‘How come after all this time you’re still so damn beautiful?’ he asked.

Crying Rock just shrugged, like facts were facts, and stuck her pipe between her teeth.

Sweet reached up and brushed Shy’s hand away. He straightened his fur coat. He leaned from his saddle and spat. He looked with narrowed eyes up towards Beacon and set his jaw. ‘If I get killed I’m going to haunt your skinny arse for life.’

‘If you get killed I doubt my life’ll be too long a stretch.’ Shy slipped down from her saddle and crunched stiff-legged to the wagon, stood looking down at her brother and sister. ‘Got something to take care of,’ she said, putting a gentle hand on each of them. ‘You go on with Majud. He’s a little on the stingy side but he’s one of the good ones.’

‘Where you going?’ asked Pit.

‘Left something behind.’

‘Will you be long?’

She managed to smile. ‘Not long. I’m sorry, Ro. I’m sorry for everything.’

‘So am I,’ said Ro. Maybe that was something. For sure it was all she’d get.

She touched Pit’s cheek. Just a brush with her fingertips. ‘I’ll see you two in Crease. You’ll hardly notice I’m gone.’

Ro sniffed, sleepy and sullen, and wouldn’t meet her eye, and Pit stared at her, face all tracked with tears. She wondered if she really would see them in Crease. Madness, like Sweet said, to come all this way just to let them go. But there was no point to long goodbyes. Sometimes it’s better to do a thing than live with the fear of it. That’s what Lamb used to say.

‘Go!’ she shouted at Majud, before she had the chance to change her mind. He nodded to her, and snapped the reins, and the wagon rolled on.

‘Better to do it,’ she whispered at the night sky, and she clambered back into her saddle, turned her horse about, and gave it her heels.

Answered Prayers

Temple drank. He drank like he had after his wife died. As if there was something at the bottom of the bottle he desperately needed. As if it was a race he had bet his life on. As if drinking was a profession he planned on rising right to the top of. Tried most of the others, hadn’t he?

‘You should stop,’ said Sworbreck, looking worried.

‘You should start,’ said Temple, and laughed, even if he’d never felt like laughing less. Then he burped and there was some sick in it, and he washed the taste away with another swallow.

‘You have to pace yourself,’ said Cosca, who was not pacing himself in the least. ‘Drinking is an art, not a science. You caress the bottle. You tease it. You romance it. A drink… a drink… a drink…’ kissing at the air with each repetition, eyelids flickering. ‘Drinking is like… love.’

‘What the fuck do you know about love?’

‘More than I’d like,’ answered the Old Man, a faraway look in his yellowed eye, and he gave a bitter laugh. ‘Despicable men still love Temple. Still feel pain. Still nurse wounds. Despicable men most of all, maybe.’ He slapped Temple on the back, sent a searing swig the wrong way and induced a painful coughing fit. ‘But let’s not be maudlin! We’re rich, boy! All rich. And rich men need make no apologies. To Visserine for me. Take back what I lost. What was stolen.’

‘What you threw away,’ muttered Temple, quietly enough not to be heard over the racket.

‘Yes,’ mused Cosca. ‘Soon there’ll be space for a new captain general.’ He took in the noisy, crowded, sweltering room with a sweep of his arm. ‘All this will be yours.’

It was quite a scene of debauch to cram into a one-roomed hovel, lit by a single guttering lamp and hazy with chagga smoke, noisy with laughter and conversations in several languages. Two big Northmen were wrestling, possibly in fun, possibly with the intention of killing each other, people occasionally lurching out of their way. Two natives of the Union and an Imperial bitterly complained as their table was jogged in the midst of a card-game, bottles tottering on top. Three Styrians had shared a husk-pipe and were blissfully lounging on a burst mattress in one corner, somewhere between sleep and waking. Friendly was sitting with legs crossed and rolling his dice between them, over and over and over, frowning down with furious concentration as though the answers to everything would soon appear on their dozen faces.

‘Hold on,’ muttered Temple, his pickled mind only now catching up. ‘Mine?’

‘Who better qualified? You’ve learned from the best, my boy! You’re a lot like me, Temple, I’ve always said so. Great men march often in the same direction, did Stolicus say?’

‘Like you?’ whispered Temple.

Cosca tapped his greasy grey hair. ‘Brains, boy, you’ve got the brains. Your morals can be stiff at times but they’ll soon soften up once you have to make the tough choices. You can talk well, know how to spot people’s weaknesses, and above all you understand the law. The strong-arm stuff’s all going out of fashion. I mean, there’ll always be a place for it, but the law, Temple, that’s where the money’s going to be.’

‘What about Brachio?’

‘Family in Puranti.’

‘Really?’ Temple blinked across the room at Brachio, who was in a vigorous embrace with a large Kantic woman. ‘He never mentioned them.’

‘A wife and two daughters. Who talks about their family with scum like us?’

‘What about Dimbik?’

‘Pah! No sense of humour.’

‘Jubair?’

‘Mad as a plum jelly.’

‘But I’m no soldier. I’m a fucking coward!’

‘Admirable thing in a mercenary.’ Cosca stretched forward his chin and scratched at his rashy neck with the backs of his yellowed nails. ‘I’d have done far better with a healthy respect for danger. It’s not as if you’ll be swinging the steel yourself. The job’s all talk. Blah, blah, blah and big hats. That and knowing when not to keep your word.’ He wagged a knobbly finger. ‘I was always too bloody emotional. Too bloody loyal. But you? You’re a treacherous bastard, Temple.’

‘I am?’

‘You abandoned me when it suited and found new friends, then when it suited you abandoned them and sauntered straight back without so much as a by-your-leave!’

Temple blinked at that. ‘I rather had the feeling you’d have killed me otherwise.’

Cosca waved it away. ‘Details! I’ve had you marked as my successor for some time.’

‘But… no one respects me.’

‘Because you don’t respect yourself. Doubt, Temple. Indecision. You simply worry too much. Sooner or later you have to do something, or you’ll never do anything. Overcome that, you could be a wonderful captain general. One of the greats. Better than me. Better than Sazine. Better than Murcatto, even. You might want to cut down on the drinking, though.’ Cosca tossed his empty bottle away, pulled the cork from another with his teeth and spat it across the room. ‘Filthy habit.’

‘I don’t want to do this any more,’ Temple whispered.

Cosca waved that away, too. ‘You say that all the time. Yet here you are.’

Temple lurched up. ‘Got to piss.’

The cold air slapped him so hard he nearly fell against one of the guards, sour-faced from having to stay sober. He stumbled along the wooden side of Superior Pike’s monstrous wagon, thinking how close his palm was to a fortune, past the stirring horses, breath steaming out of their nosebags, took a few crunching steps into the trees, sounds of revelry muffled behind him, shoved his bottle down in the frozen snow and unlaced with drunken fingers. Bloody hell, it was cold still. He leaned back, blinking at the sky, bright stars spinning and dancing beyond the black branches.

Captain General Temple. He wondered what Haddish Kahdia would have thought of that. He wondered what God thought of it. How had it come to this? He’d always had good intentions, hadn’t he? He’d always tried to do his best.

It’s just that his best had always been shit.

‘God?’ he brayed at the sky. ‘You up there, you bastard?’ Perhaps He was the mean bully Jubair made Him out to be, after all. ‘Just… give me a sign, will you? Just a little one. Just steer me the right way. Just… just give me a nudge.’

‘I’ll give you a nudge.’

He froze for a moment, still dripping. ‘God? Is that you?’

‘No, fool.’ There was a crunch as someone pulled his bottle out of the snow.

He turned. ‘I thought you left.’

‘Came back.’ Shy tipped the bottle up and took a swig, one side of her face all dark, the other lit by the flickering bonfire in the camp. ‘Thought you’d never come out o’ there,’ she said, wiping her mouth.

‘Been waiting?’

‘Little while. Are you drunk?’

‘Little bit.’

‘That works for us.’

‘It works for me.’

‘I see that,’ she said, glancing down.

He realised he hadn’t laced-up yet and started fumbling away. ‘If you wanted to see my cock that badly, you could just have asked.’

‘No doubt a thing o’ haunting beauty but I came for something else.’

‘Got a window needs jumping through?’

‘No. I might need your help.’

‘Might?’

‘Things run smooth you can just creep back to drowning your sorrows.’

‘How often do things run smooth for you?’

‘Not often.’

‘Is it likely to be dangerous?’

‘Little bit.’

‘Really a little bit?’

She drank again. ‘No. A lot.’

‘This about Savian?’

‘Little bit.’

‘Oh God,’ he muttered, rubbing at the bridge of his nose and willing the dark world to be still. Doubt, that was his problem. Indecision. Worrying too much. He wished he was less drunk. Then he wished he was more. He’d asked for a sign, hadn’t he? Why had he asked for a sign? He’d never expected to get one.

‘What do you need?’ he muttered, his voice very small.

Sharp Ends

Practical Wile slid a finger under his mask to rub at the little chafe marks. Not the worst part of the job, but close.

‘There it is, though,’ he said, rearranging his cards, as if that made his hand any less rotten, ‘I daresay she’s found someone else by now.’

‘If she’s got any sense,’ grunted Pauth.

Wile nearly thumped the table, then worried that he might hurt his hand and stopped short. ‘This is what I mean by undermining! We’re supposed to look out for each other but you’re always talking me down!’

‘Weren’t nothing in the oaths I swore about not talking you down,’ said Pauth, tossing a couple of cards and sliding a couple more off the deck.

‘Loyalty to his Majesty,’ threw out Bolder, ‘and obedience to his Eminence and the ruthless rooting out of treasons, but nothing about looking out for no one.’

‘Doesn’t mean it’s a bad idea,’ grumbled Wile, rerearranging his rotten hand.

‘You’re confusing how you’d like the world to be with how it is,’ said Bolder. ‘Again.’

‘A little solidarity is all I’m asking. We’re all stuck in the same leaky boat.’

‘Start baling and stop bloody moaning, then.’ Pauth had a good scratch under his own mask. ‘All the way out here you’ve done nothing but moan. The food. The cold. Your mask sores. Your sweetheart. My snoring. Bolder’s habits. Lorsen’s temper. It’s enough to make a man quite aggravated.’

‘Even if life weren’t aggravating enough to begin with,’ said Ferring, who was out of the game and had been sitting with his boots up on the table for the best part of an hour. Ferring had the most unnatural patience with doing nothing.

Pauth eyed him. ‘Your boots are pretty damn aggravating.’

Ferring eyed him back. Those sharp blue eyes of his. ‘Boots is boots.’

‘Boots is boots? What does that even mean? Boots is boots?’

‘If you’ve nothing worth saying, you two might consider not saying it.’ Bolder nodded his lump of a head towards the prisoner. ‘Take a page out of his book.’ The old man hadn’t said a word to Lorsen’s questions. Hadn’t done much more than grunt even when they burned him. He just watched, eyes narrowed, raw flesh glistening in the midst of his tattoos.

Ferring’s eyes shifted over to Wile’s. ‘You think you’d take a burning that well?’

Wile didn’t reply. He didn’t like thinking about taking a burning. He didn’t like giving one to someone else, whatever oaths he’d sworn, whatever treasons, murders or massacres the man was meant to have masterminded. One thing holding forth about justice at a thousand miles removed. Another having to press metal into flesh. He just didn’t like thinking about it at all.

It’s a steady living, the Inquisition, his father had told him. Better asking the questions than giving the answers anyway, eh? And they’d laughed together at that, though Wile hadn’t found it funny. He used to laugh a lot at unfunny things his father said. He wouldn’t have laughed now. Or maybe that was giving himself too much credit. He’d a bad habit of doing that.

Sometimes Wile wondered whether a cause could be right that needed folk burned, cut and otherwise mutilated. Hardly the tactics of the just, was it, when you took a step back? Rarely seemed to produce any truly useful results either. Unless pain, fear, hate and mutilation were what you were after. Maybe it was what they were after.

Sometimes Wile wondered whether the torture might cause the very disloyalty the Inquisition was there to stop, but he kept that notion very much to himself. Takes courage to lead a charge, but you’ve got people behind you there. Takes a different and rarer kind to stand up all alone and say, ‘I don’t like the way we do things.’ Especially to a set of torturers. Wile didn’t have either kind of courage. So he just did as he was told and tried not to think about it, and wondered what it would be like to have a job you believed in.

Ferring didn’t have that same problem. He liked the work. You could see it in those blue, blue eyes of his. He grinned over at the tattooed old man now and said, ‘Doubt he’ll be taking a burning that well by the time he gets back to Starikland.’ The prisoner just sat and watched, blue-painted ribs shifting with his crackly breathing. ‘Lot of nights between here and there. Lot of burnings, maybe. Yes, indeedy. Reckon he’ll be good and talkative by—’

‘I already suggested you shut up,’ said Bolder. ‘Now I’m thinking o’ making it an instruction. What do you—’

There was a knock at the door. Three quick knocks, in fact. The Practicals looked at each other, eyebrows up. Lorsen back with more questions. Once Lorsen had a question in mind, he wasn’t a man to wait for an answer.

‘You going to get that?’ Pauth asked Ferring.

‘Why would I?’

‘You’re closest.’

‘You’re shortest.’

‘What’s that got to fucking do with anything?’

‘It amuses me.’

‘Maybe my knife up your arse will amuse me!’ And Pauth slipped his knife out of his sleeve, blade appearing as if by magic. He loved to do that. Bloody show-off.

‘Will you two infants please shut up?’ Bolder chucked down his cards, levered his bulk from his chair and slapped Pauth’s knife aside. ‘I came out here to get a break from my bloody children, not to mind three more.’

Wile rearranged his cards again, wondering if there was some way he could win. One win, was that too much to ask? But such a rotten hand. His father had always said there are no rotten hands, only rotten players, but Wile believed otherwise.

Another insistent knocking. ‘All right, I’m coming!’ snapped Bolder, dragging back the bolts. ‘It’s not as if—’

There was a clatter, and Wile looked up to see Bolder lurching against the wall looking quite put out and someone barging past. Seemed a bit strong even if they’d taken a while to answer the door. Bolder obviously agreed, because he opened his mouth to complain, then looked surprised when he gurgled blood everywhere instead. That was when Wile noticed there was a knife-handle sticking from his fat throat.

He dropped his cards.

‘Eh?’ said Ferring, trying to get up, but his boots were tangled with the table. It wasn’t Lorsen who’d been knocking, it was the big Northman, the one with all the scars. He took a stride into the room, teeth bared, and crunch! Left a knife buried in Ferring’s face to the cross-piece, his nose flattened under it and blood welling and Ferring wheezed and arched back and kicked the table over, cards and coins flying.

Wile stumbled up, the Northman turning to look at him, blood dotting his face and pulling another knife from inside his coat, and—

‘Stop!’ hissed Pauth. ‘Or I kill him!’ Somehow he’d got to the prisoner, kneeling behind the chair he was roped to, knife blade pressed against his neck. Always been a quick thinker, Pauth. Good thing someone was.

Bolder had slid to the floor, was making a honking sound and drooling blood into a widening pool.

Wile realised he was holding his breath and took a great gasp.

The scarred Northman looked from Wile, to Pauth, and back, lifted his chin slightly, then gently lowered his blade.

‘Get help!’ snapped Pauth, and he tangled his fingers in the prisoner’s grey hair and pulled his head back, tickling his stubbled neck with the point of his knife. ‘I’ll see to this.’

Wile circled the Northman, his knees all shaky, pushing aside one of the leather curtains that divided up the fort’s downstairs, trying to keep as safe a distance as possible. He slithered in Bolder’s blood and nearly went right over, then dived out of the open door and was running.

‘Help!’ he screeched. ‘Help!’

One of the mercenaries lowered a bottle and stared at him, cross-eyed. ‘Wha?’ The celebrations were still half-heartedly dragging on, women laughing and men singing and shouting and rolling in a stupor, none of them enjoying it but going through the motions anyway like a corpse that can’t stop twitching, all garishly lit by the sizzling bonfire. Wile slid over in the mud, staggered up, dragging down his mask so he could shout louder.

‘Help! The Northman! The prisoner!’

Someone was pointing at him and laughing, and someone shouted at him to shut up, and someone was sick all over the side of a tent, and Wile stared about for anyone who might exert some control over this shambles and suddenly felt somebody clutch at his arm.

‘What are you jabbering about?’ None other than General Cosca, dewy eyes gleaming with the firelight, lady’s white powder smeared across one hollow, rash-speckled cheek.

‘That Northman!’ squealed Wile, grabbing the captain general by his stained shirt. ‘Lamb! He killed Bolder! And Ferring!’ He pointed a trembling finger towards the fort. ‘In there!’

To give him his due, Cosca needed no convincing. ‘Enemies in the camp!’ he roared, flinging his empty bottle away. ‘Surround the fort! You, cover the door, make sure no one leaves! Dimbik, get men around the back! You, put that woman down! Arm yourselves, you wretches!’

Some snapped to obey. Two found bows and pointed them uncertainly towards the door. One accidentally shot an arrow into the fire. Others stared baffled, or continued with their revelry, or stood grinning, imagining that this was some elaborate joke.

‘What the hell happened?’ Lorsen, black coat flapping open over his nightshirt, hair wild about his head.

‘It would appear our friend Lamb attempted a rescue of your prisoner,’ said Cosca. ‘Get away from that door, you idiots—do you think this is a joke?’

‘Rescue?’ muttered Sworbreck, eyebrows raised and eyeglasses skewed, evidently having recently crawled from his bed.

‘Rescue?’ snapped Lorsen, grabbing Wile by the collar.

‘Pauth took the prisoner… prisoner. He’s seeing to it—’

A figure lurched from the fort’s open door, took a few lazy steps, eyes wide above his mask, hands clasped to his chest. Pauth. He pitched on his face, blood turning the snow around him pink.

‘You were saying?’ snapped Cosca. A woman shrieked, stumbled back with a hand over her mouth. Men started to drag themselves from tents and shacks, bleary-eyed, pulling on clothes and bits of armour, fumbling with weapons, breath smoking in the cold.

‘Get more bows up here!’ roared Cosca, clawing at his blistered neck with his fingernails. ‘I want a pincushion of anything that shows itself! Clear the bloody civilians away!’

Lorsen was hissing in Wile’s face. ‘Is Conthus still alive?’

‘I think so… he was when I… when I—’

‘Cravenly fled? Pull your mask up, damn it, you’re a disgrace!’

Probably the Inquisitor was right, and Wile was a disgraceful Practical. He felt strangely proud of that possibility.

‘Can you hear me, Master Lamb?’ called Cosca, as Sergeant Friendly helped him into his gilded, rusted breastplate, a combination of pomp and decay that rather summed up the man.

‘Aye,’ came the Northman’s voice from the black doorway of the fort. The closest thing to silence had settled over the camp since the mercenaries returned in triumph the previous day.

‘I am so pleased you have graced us with your presence again!’ The captain general waved half-dressed bowmen into the shadows around the shacks. ‘I wish you’d sent word of your coming, though, we could have prepared a more suitable reception!’

‘Thought I’d surprise you.’

‘We appreciate the gesture! But I should say I have some hundred and fifty fighting men out here!’ Cosca took in the wobbling bows, dewy eyes and bilious faces of his Company. ‘Several of them are very drunk, but still. Long established admirer though I am of lost causes I really don’t see the happy ending for you!’

‘I’ve never been much for happy endings,’ came Lamb’s growl. Wile didn’t know how a man could sound so steady under these circumstances.

‘Nor me, but perhaps we can engineer one between us!’ With a couple of gestures Cosca sent more men scurrying down either side of the fort and ordered a fresh bottle. ‘Now why don’t you two put your weapons down and come out, and we can all discuss this like civilised men!’

‘Never been much for civilisation either,’ called Lamb. ‘Reckon you’ll have to come to me.’

‘Bloody Northmen,’ muttered Cosca, ripping the cork from his latest bottle and flinging it away. ‘Dimbik, are any of your men not drunk?’

‘You wanted them as drunk as possible,’ said the captain, who had got himself tangled with his bedraggled sash as he tried to pull it on.

‘Now I need them sober.’

‘A few who were on guard, perhaps—’

‘Send them in.’

‘And we want Conthus alive!’ barked Lorsen.

Dimbik bowed. ‘We will do our best, Inquisitor.’

‘But there can be no promises.’ Cosca took a long swallow from his bottle without taking his eyes from the house. ‘We’ll make that Northern bastard regret coming back.’

‘You shouldn’t have come back,’ grunted Savian as he loaded the flatbow.

Lamb edged the door open to peer through. ‘Regretting it already.’ A thud, splinters, and the bright point of a bolt showed between the planks. Lamb jerked his head back and kicked the door wobbling shut. ‘Hasn’t quite gone the way I’d hoped.’

‘You could say that about most things in life.’

‘In my life, no doubt.’ Lamb took hold of the knife in the Practical’s neck and ripped it free, wiped it on the front of the dead man’s black jacket and tossed it to Savian. He snatched it out of the air and slid it into his belt.

‘You can never have too many knives,’ said Lamb.

‘It’s a rule to live by.’

‘Or die by,’ said Lamb as he tossed over another. ‘You need a shirt?’

Savian stretched out his arms and watched the tattoos move. The words he’d tried to live his life by. ‘What’s the point in getting ’em if you don’t show ’em off? I’ve been covering up too long.’

‘Man’s got to be what he is, I reckon.’

Savian nodded. ‘Wish we’d met thirty years ago.’

‘No you don’t. I was a mad fucker then.’

‘And now?’

Lamb stuck a dagger into the tabletop. ‘Thought I’d learned something.’ He thumped another into the doorframe. ‘But here I am, handing out knives.’

‘You pick a path, don’t you?’ Savian started drawing the string on the other flatbow. ‘And you think it’s just for tomorrow. Then thirty years on you look back and see you picked your path for life. If you’d known it then, you’d maybe have thought more carefully.’

‘Maybe. Being honest, I’ve never been much for thinking carefully.’

Savian finally fumbled the string back, glancing at the word freedom tattooed around his wrist like a bracelet. ‘Always thought I’d die fighting for the cause.’

‘You will,’ said Lamb, still busy scattering weapons around the room. ‘The cause of saving my fat old arse.’

‘It’s a noble calling.’ Savian slipped a bolt into place. ‘Reckon I’ll get upstairs.’

‘Reckon you’d better.’ Lamb drew the sword he’d taken from Waerdinur, long and dull with that silver letter glinting. ‘We ain’t got all night.’

‘You’ll be all right down here?’

‘Might be best if you just stay up there. That mad fucker from thirty years ago—sometimes he comes visiting.’

‘Then I’ll leave the two of you to it. You shouldn’t have come back.’ Savian held out his hand. ‘But I’m glad you did.’

‘Wouldn’t have missed it.’ Lamb took a grip on Savian’s hand and gave it a squeeze, and they looked each other in the eye. Seemed in that moment they had as good an understanding between them as if they had met thirty years ago. But the time for friendship was over. Savian had always put more effort into his enemies, and there was no shortage outside. He turned and took the stairs three at a time, up into the garret, a flatbow in each hand and the bolts over his shoulder.

Four windows, two to the front, two to the back. Straw pallets around the walls and a low table with a lit lamp, and in its flickering pool of light a hunting bow and a quiver of arrows, and a spiked mace, too, metal gleaming. One handy thing about mercenaries, they leave weapons lying about wherever they go. He slipped in a crouch to the front, propped one of the flatbows carefully under the left-hand window and then scurried over to the right with the other, hooking the shutters open and peering out.

There was a fair bit of chaos under way outside, lit by the great bonfire, sparks whirling, folk hurrying this way and that on the far side. Seemed some of those who’d come to get rich on the Company’s scraps hadn’t reckoned on getting stuck in the middle of a fight. The corpse of one of the Practicals was stretched out near the door but Savian shed no tears for him. He’d cried easily as a child, but his eyes had good and dried up down the years. They’d had to. With what he’d seen, and what he’d done, too, there wouldn’t have been enough salt water in the world.

He saw archers, squatting near the shacks, bows trained towards the fort, made a quick note of the positions, of the angles, of the distances. Then he saw men hurrying forward, axes at the ready. He snatched the lamp off the table and tossed it spinning through the dark, saw it shatter on the thatch roof of one of the shacks, streaks of fire shooting hungrily out.

‘They’re coming for the door!’ he shouted.

‘How many?’ came Lamb’s voice from downstairs.

‘Five, maybe!’ His eyes flickered across the shadows down there around the bonfire. ‘Six!’ He worked the stock of the flatbow into his shoulder, settling down still and steady around it, warm and familiar as curling around a lover’s back. He wished he’d spent more of his time curled around a lover and less around a flatbow, but he’d picked his path and here was the next step along it. He twitched the trigger and felt the bow jolt and one of the axemen took a tottering step sideways and sat down.

‘Five!’ shouted Savian as he slipped away from the window and over to another, setting down the first bow and hefting the second. Heard arrows clatter against the frame behind, one spinning into the darkness of the room. He levelled the bow, caught a black shape against the fire and felt the shot, a mercenary staggered back and tripped into the flames and even over the racket Savian could hear him screaming as he burned.

He slid down, back against the wall under the window. Saw an arrow flit through above him and shudder into a rafter. He was caught for a moment with a coughing fit, managed to settle it, breath rasping, the burns around his ribs all stinging fresh. Axes at the door, now, he could hear them thudding. Had to leave that to Lamb. Only man alive he’d have trusted alone with that task. He heard voices at the back, quiet, but he heard them. Up onto his feet and he scuttled to the back wall, taking up the hunting bow, no time to buckle the quiver, just wedging it through his belt.

He dragged in a long, crackling breath, stifled a cough and held it, nocked an arrow, drew the string, in one movement poked the limb of the bow behind the shutters and flicked them open, stood, leaned out and pushed the air slow through his pursed lips.

Men crouched in the shadows against the foot of the back wall. One looked up, eyes wide in his round face, and Savian shot him in his open mouth no more than a stride or two away. He nocked another shaft. An arrow whipped past him, flicking his hair. He drew the bow, calm and steady. He could see light gleam on the archer’s arrowhead as he did the same. Shot him in the chest. Drew another arrow. Saw a man running past. Shot him too and saw him crumple in the snow. Crunching of footsteps as the last of them ran away. Savian took a bead and shot him in the back, and he crawled and whimpered and coughed, and Savian nocked an arrow and shot him a second time, elbowed the shutters closed and breathed in again.

He was caught with a coughing fit and stood shuddering against the wall. He heard a roar downstairs, clash of steel, swearing, crashing, ripping, fighting.

He stumbled to the front window again, nocking an arrow, saw two men rushing for the door, shot one in the face and his legs went from under him. The other skidded to a stop, scuttled off sideways. Arrows were frozen in the firelight, clattering against the front of the building as Savian twisted away.

A crack and the shutters in the back window swung open showing a square of night sky. Savian saw a hand on the sill, let fall the bow and snatched up the mace as he went, swinging it low and fast to miss the rafters and smashing it into a helmeted head as it showed itself, knocking someone tumbling out into the night.

He spun, black shape in the window as a man slipped into the attic, knife in his teeth. Savian lunged at him but the haft of the mace glanced off his shoulder and they grappled and struggled, growling at each other. Savian felt a burning in his gut, fell back against the wall with the man on top of him, reached for the knife at his belt. He saw one half of the mercenary’s snarling face lit by firelight and Savian stabbed at it, ripped it open, black pulp hanging from his head as he stumbled, thrashing blindly around the attic. Savian clawed his way up and fell on him, dragged him down and stabbed and coughed and stabbed until he stopped moving, knelt on top of him, each cough ripping at the wound in his guts.

A bubbling scream had started downstairs, and Savian heard someone squealing, ‘No! No! No!’ slobbering, desperate, and he heard Lamb growl, ‘Yes, you fucker!’ Two heavy thuds, then a long silence.

Lamb gave a kind of groan downstairs, another crash like he was kicking something over.

‘You all right?’ he called, his own voice sounding tight and strange.

‘Still breathing!’ came Lamb’s, even stranger. ‘You?’

‘Picked up a scratch.’ Savian peeled his palm away from his tattooed stomach, blood there gleaming black. Lot of blood.

He wished he could talk to Corlin one last time. Tell her all those things you think but never say because they’re hard to say and there’ll be time later. How proud he was of what she’d become. How proud her mother would’ve been. To carry on the fight. He winced. Or maybe to give up the fight, because you only get one life and do you want to look back on it and see just blood on your hands?

But it was too late to tell her anything. He’d picked his path and here was where it ended. Hadn’t been too poor a showing, all told. Some good and some bad, some pride and some shame, like most men. He crawled coughing to the front, took up one of the flatbows and started wrestling at the string with sticky hands. Damn hands. Didn’t have the strength they used to.

He stood up beside the window, men still moving down there, and the shack he threw the lamp on sending up a roaring blaze now, and he bellowed out into the night. ‘That the best you can do?’

‘Sadly for you,’ came Cosca’s voice. ‘No!’

Something sparked and fizzled in the darkness, and there was a flash like daylight.

It was a noise like to the voice of God, as the scriptures say, which levelled the city of the presumptuous Nemai with but a whisper. Jubair peeled his hands from his ears, all things still ringing even so, and squinted towards the fort as the choking smoke began to clear.

Much violence had been done to the building. There were holes finger-sized, and fist-sized, and head-sized rent through the walls of the bottom floor. Half of the top floor had departed the world, splintered planks smouldering in places, three split beams still clinging together at one corner as a reminder of the shape of what had been. There was a creaking and half the roof fell in, broken shingles clattering to the ground below.

‘Impressive,’ said Brachio.

‘The lightning harnessed,’ murmured Jubair, frowning at the pipe of brass. It had nearly leaped from its carriage with the force of the blast and now sat skewed upon it, smoke still issuing gently from its blackened mouth. ‘Such a power should belong only to God.’

He felt Cosca’s hand upon his shoulder. ‘And yet He lends it to us to do His work. Take some men in there and find those two old bastards.’

‘I want Conthus alive!’ snapped Lorsen.

‘If possible.’ The Old Man leaned close to whisper. ‘But dead is just as good.’

Jubair nodded. He had come to a conclusion long years before that God sometimes spoke through the person of Nicomo Cosca. An unlikely prophet, some might say—a treacherous, lawless pink drunkard who had never uttered a word of prayer in all his long life—but from the first moment Jubair had seen him in battle, and known he had no fear, he had sensed in him some splinter of the divine. Surely he walked in God’s shadow, as the Prophet Khalul had walked naked through a rain of arrows with only his faith to protect him and emerged untouched, and so forced the Emperor of the Gurkish to honour his promise and abase himself before the Almighty.

‘You three,’ he said, picking out some of his men with a finger, ‘on my signal go in by the door. You three, come with me.’

One of them, a Northman, shook his head with starting eyes round as full moons. ‘It’s… him,’ he whispered.

‘Him?’

‘The… the…’ And in dumbstruck silence he folded the middle finger on his left hand back to leave a gap.

Jubair snorted. ‘Stay then, fool.’ He trotted around the side of the fort, through shadow and deeper shadow, all the same to him for he carried the light of God within. His men peered up at the building, breathing hard, afraid. They supposed the world was a complicated place, full of dangers. Jubair pitied them. The world was simple. The only danger was in resisting God’s purpose.

Fragments of timber, rubbish and dust were scattered across the snow behind the building. That and several arrow-shot men, one sitting against the wall and softly gurgling, hand around a shaft through his mouth. Jubair ignored them and quietly scaled the back wall of the fort. He peered into the ruined loft, furniture ripped apart, a mattress spilling straw, no signs of life. He brushed some embers away and pulled himself up, slid out his sword, metal glinting in the night, fearless, righteous, godly. He eased forward, watching the stairwell, black with shadows. He heard a sound from down there, a regular thump, thump, thump.

He leaned out at the front of the building and saw his three men clustered below. He hissed at them, and the foremost kicked the door wide and plunged inside. Jubair pointed the other two to the stairwell. He felt something give beneath the sole of his boot as he turned. A hand. He bent and dragged a timber aside.

‘Conthus is here!’ he shouted.

‘Alive?’ came Lorsen’s shrill bleat.

‘Dead.’

‘Damn it!’

Jubair gathered up what was left of the rebel and rolled it over the ragged remnant of the wall, tumbling down the snow drifted against the side of the building to lie broken and bloody, tattoos ripped with a score of wounds. Jubair thought of the parable of the proud man. God’s judgement comes to great and small alike, all equally powerless before the Almighty, inevitable and irreversible, and so it was, so it was. Now there was only the Northman, and however fearsome he might be, God had a sentence already in mind—

A scream split the night, a crashing below, roars and groans and a metal scraping, then a strange hacking laugh, another scream. Jubair strode to the stairs. A wailing below, now, as horrible as the sinful dead consigned to hell, blubbering off into silence. The point of Jubair’s sword showed the way. Fearless, righteous… He hesitated, licking at his lips. To feel fear was to be without faith. It is not given to man to understand God’s design. Only to accept his place in it.

And so he clenched his jaw tight, and padded down the steps.

Black as hell below, light shining in rays of flickering red, orange, yellow, through the holes in the front wall, casting strange shadows. Black as hell and like hell it reeked of death, so strong the stench it seemed a solid thing. Jubair half-held his breath as he descended, step by creaking step, eyes adjusting to the darkness by degrees.

What revelation?

The leather curtains that had divided up the space hung torn, showered and spotted with black, stirred a little as if by wind though the space was still. His boot caught something on the bottom step and he looked down. A severed arm. Frowning, he followed its glistening trail to a black slick, flesh humped and mounded and inhumanly abused, hacked apart and tangled together in unholy configurations, innards dragged out and rearranged and unwound in glistening coils.

In the midst stood a table and upon the table a pile of heads, and as the light shifted from the flames outside they looked upon Jubair with expressions awfully vacant, madly leering, oddly questioning, angrily accusatory.

‘God…’ he said. Jubair had done butchery in the name of the Almighty and yet he had seen nothing like this. This was written in no scripture, except perhaps in the forbidden seventh of the seven books, sealed within the tabernacle of the Great Temple in Shaffa, in which were recorded those things that Glustrod brought from hell.

‘God…’ he muttered. And jagged laughter bubbled from the shadows, and the skins flapped, and rattled the rings they hung upon. Jubair darted forward, stabbed, cut, slashed at darkness, caught nothing but dangling skin, blade tangled with leather and he slipped in gore, and fell, and rose, turning, turning, the laughter all around him.

‘God?’ mumbled Jubair, and he could hardly speak the holy word for a strange feeling, beginning in his guts and creeping up and down his spine to set his scalp to tingle and his knees to shake. All the more terrible for being only dimly remembered. A childish recollection, lost in darkness. For as the Prophet said, the man who knows fear every day becomes easy in its company. The man who knows not fear, how shall he face this awful stranger?

‘God…’ whimpered Jubair, stumbling back towards the steps, and suddenly there were arms around him.

‘Gone,’ came a whisper. ‘But I am here.’

‘Damn it!’ snarled Lorsen again. His long-cherished dream of presenting the infamous Conthus to the Open Council, chained and humbled and plastered with tattoos that might as well have read give Inquisitor Lorsen the promotion he has so long deserved, had gone up in smoke. Or down in blood. Thirteen years minding a penal colony in Angland, for this. All the riding, all the sacrifice, all the indignity. In spite of his best efforts the entire expedition had devolved into a farce, and he had no doubt upon which undeserving head would be heaped the blame. He slapped at his leg in a fury. ‘I wanted him alive!’

‘So did he, I daresay.’ Cosca stared narrow-eyed through the haze of smoke towards the ruined fort. ‘Fate is not always kind to us.’

‘Easy for you to say,’ snapped Lorsen. To make matters worse—if that were possible—he had lost half his Practicals in one night, and that the better half. He frowned over at Wile, still fussing with his mask. How was it possible for a Practical to look so pitiably unthreatening? The man positively radiated doubt. Enough to plant the seeds of doubt in everyone around him. Lorsen had entertained doubts enough over the years but he did what one was supposed to, and kept them crushed into a tight little packet deep inside where they could not leak out and poison his purpose.

The door slowly creaked open and Dimbik’s archers shifted nervously, flatbows all levelled towards that square of darkness.

‘Jubair?’ barked Cosca. ‘Jubair, did you get him? Answer me, damn it!’

Something flew out, bounced once with a hollow clonk and rolled across the snow to rest near the fire.

‘What is that?’ asked Lorsen.

Cosca worked his mouth. ‘Jubair’s head.’

‘Fate is not always kind,’ murmured Brachio.

Another head arced from the doorway and bounced into the fire. A third landed on the roof of one of the shacks, rolled down it and lodged in the gutter. A fourth fell among the archers and one of them let his bow off as he stumbled away from it, the bolt thudding into a barrel nearby. More heads, and more, hair flapping, tongues lolling, spinning, and dancing, and scattering spots of blood.

The last head bounced high and rolled an elliptical course around the fire to stop just next to Cosca. Lorsen was not a man to be put off by a little gore, but even he had to admit to being a little unnerved by this display of mute brutality.

Less squeamish, the captain general stepped forward and angrily kicked the head into the flames. ‘How many men have those two old bastards killed between them?’ Though the Old Man was no doubt a good deal older than either.

‘About twenty, now,’ said Brachio.

‘We’ll fucking run out at this rate!’ Cosca turned angrily upon Sworbreck, who was frantically scratching away in his notebook. ‘What the hell are you writing for?’

The author looked up, reflected flames dancing in his eyeglasses. ‘Well, this is… rather dramatic.’

‘Do you find?’

Sworbreck gestured weakly towards the ruined fort. ‘He came to the rescue of his friend against impossible odds—’

‘And got him killed. Is not a man who takes on impossible odds generally considered an incorrigible idiot rather than a hero?’

‘The line between the two has always been blurry…’ murmured Brachio.

Sworbreck raised his palms. ‘I came for a tale to stir the blood—’

‘And I’ve been unable to oblige you,’ snapped Cosca, ‘is that it? Even my bloody biographer is deserting me! No doubt I’ll end up the villain in the book I commissioned while yonder decapitating madman is celebrated to the rafters! What do you make of this, Temple? Temple? Where’s that bloody lawyer got to? What about you, Brachio?’

The Styrian wiped fresh tears from his weepy eye. ‘I think the time has come to put an end to the ballad of the nine-fingered Northman.’

‘Finally some sense! Bring up the other tube. I want that excuse for a fort levelled to a stump. I want that meddling fool made mush, do you hear? Someone bring me another bottle. I am sick of being taken fucking lightly!’ Cosca slapped Sworbreck’s notebook from his hands. ‘A little respect, is that too much to ask?’ He slapped the biographer to boot and the man sat down sharply in the snow, one hand to his cheek in surprise.

‘What’s that noise?’ said Lorsen, holding up a palm for silence. A thumping and rumbling spilled from the darkness, rapidly growing louder, and he took a nervous step towards the nearest shack.

‘Bloody hell,’ said Dimbik.

A horse came thundering from the night, eyes wild, and a moment later dozens more, surging down the slope towards the camp, snow flying, a boiling mass of animals, a flood of horseflesh coming at the gallop.

Men flung their weapons down and ran, dived, rolled for any cover. Lorsen tripped over his flapping coat-tail and sprawled in the mud. He heard a whooping and caught a glimpse of Dab Sweet, mounted at the rear of the herd, grinning wildly, lifting his hat in salute as he skirted the camp. Then the horses were among the buildings and all was a hell of milling, kicking, battering hooves, of screaming, thrashing, rearing beasts, and Lorsen flattened himself helplessly against the nearest hovel, clinging with his fingernails to the rough-sawn wood.

Something knocked his head, almost sent him down, but he clung on, clung on, while a noise like the end of the world broke around him, the very earth trembling under the force of all those maddened animals. He gasped and grunted and squeezed his teeth and eyes together so hard they hurt, splinters and dirt and stones stinging his cheek.

Then suddenly there was silence. A throbbing, ringing silence. Lorsen unpeeled himself from the side of the shack and took a wobbling step or two through the hoof-hammered mud, blinking into the haze of smoke and settling dirt.

‘They stampeded the horses,’ he muttered.

‘Do you fucking think so?’ shrieked Cosca, tottering from the nearest doorway.

The camp was devastated. Several of the tents had ceased to be, the canvas and their contents—both human and material—trampled into the snow. The ruined fort continued to smoulder. Two of the shacks were thoroughly aflame, burning straw fluttering down and leaving small fires everywhere. Bodies were humped between the buildings, trampled men and women in various states of dress. The injured howled or wandered dazed and bloodied. Here and there a wounded horse lay, kicking weakly.

Lorsen touched one hand to his head. His hair was sticky with blood. A trickle tickling his eyebrow.

‘Dab fucking Sweet!’ snarled Cosca.

‘I did say he had quite a reputation,’ muttered Sworbreck, fishing his tattered notebook from the dirt.

‘Perhaps we should have paid him his share,’ mused Friendly.

‘You can take it to him now if you please!’ Cosca pointed with a clawing finger. ‘It’s in… the wagon.’ He trailed off into a disbelieving croak.

The fortified wagon that had been Superior Pike’s gift, the wagon in which the fire tubes had been carried, the wagon in which the Dragon People’s vast treasure had been safely stowed…

The wagon was gone. Beside the fort there was only a conspicuously empty patch of darkness.

‘Where is it?’ Cosca shoved Sworbreck out of the way and ran to where the wagon had stood. Clearly visible in the snowy mud among the trampled hoof-prints were two deep wheel-ruts, angling down the slope towards the Imperial Road.

‘Brachio,’ Cosca’s voice rose higher and higher until it was a demented shriek, ‘find some fucking horses and get after them!’

The Styrian stared. ‘You wanted all the horses corralled together. They’re stampeded!’

‘Some must have broken from the herd! Find half a dozen and get after those bastards! Now! Now! Now!’ And he kicked snow at Brachio in a fury and nearly fell over. ‘Where the hell is Temple?’

Friendly looked up from the wagon-tracks and raised an eyebrow.

Cosca closed his hands to trembling fists. ‘Everyone who can, get ready to move!’

Dimbik exchanged a worried look with Lorsen. ‘On foot? All the way to Crease?’

‘We’ll gather mounts on the way!’

‘What about the injured?’

‘Those who can walk are welcome. Any who cannot mean greater shares for the rest of us. Now get them moving, you damned idiot!’

‘Yes, sir,’ muttered Dimbik, pulling off and sourly flinging away his sash which, already a ruin, had become thoroughly besmirched with dung when he dived for cover.

Friendly nodded towards the fort. ‘And the Northman?’

‘Fuck the Northman,’ hissed Cosca. ‘Soak the building with oil and burn it. They’ve stolen our gold! They’ve stolen my dreams, do you understand?’ He frowned off down the Imperial Road, the wagontracks vanishing into the darkness. ‘I will not be disappointed again.’

Lorsen resisted the temptation to echo Cosca’s sentiments that fate is not always kind. Instead, as the mercenaries scrambled over each other in their preparations to leave, he stood looking down at Conthus’ forgotten body, lying broken beside the fort.

‘What a waste,’ he muttered. In every conceivable sense. But Inquisitor Lorsen had always been a practical man. A man who did not balk at hardship and hard work. He took his disappointment and crushed it down into that little packet along with his doubts, and turned his thoughts to what could be salvaged.

‘There will be a price for this, Cosca,’ he muttered at the captain general’s back. ‘There will be a price.’

Nowhere Fast

Every bolt, bearing, plank and fixing in that monster of a wagon banged, clattered or screeched in an insane cacophony so deafening that Temple could scarcely hear his own squeals of horror. The seat hammered at his arse, bounced him around like a heap of cheap rags, threatening to rattle the teeth right out of his head. Tree-limbs came slicing from the darkness, clawing at the wagon’s sides, slashing at his face. One had snatched Shy’s hat off and now her hair whipped around her staring eyes, fixed on the rushing road, lips peeled back from her teeth as she yelled the most blood-curdling abuse at the horses.

Temple dreaded to imagine the weight of wood, metal and above all gold they were currently hurtling down a mountainside on top of. Any moment now, the whole, surely tested beyond the limits of human engineering, would rip itself apart and the pair of them into the bargain. But dread was a fixture of Temple’s life, and what else could he do now but cling to this bouncing engine of death, muscles burning from fingertips to armpits, stomach churning with drink and terror. He hardly knew whether eyes closed or eyes open was the more horrifying.

‘Hold on!’ Shy screamed at him.

‘What the fuck do you think I’m—’

She dragged back on the brake lever, boots braced against the footboard and her shoulders against the back of the seat, fibres starting from her neck with effort. The tyres shrieked like the dead in hell, sparks showering up on both sides like fireworks at the Emperor’s birthday. Shy hauled on the reins with her other hand and the whole world began to turn, then to tip, two of the great wheels parting company with the flying ground.

Time slowed. Temple screamed. Shy screamed. The wagon screamed. Trees off the side of the bend hurtled madly towards them, death in their midst. Then the wheels jolted down again and Temple was almost flung over the footboard and among the horses’ milling hooves, biting his tongue and choking on his own screech as he was tossed back into the seat.

Shy let the brake off and snapped the reins. ‘Might’ve taken that one a little too fast!’ she shouted in his ear.

The line between terror and exultation was ever a fine one and Temple found, all of a sudden, he had broken through. He punched at the air and howled, ‘Fuck you, Coscaaaaaaaa!’ into the night until his breath ran out and left him gasping.

‘Feel better?’ asked Shy.

‘I’m alive! I’m free! I’m rich!’ Surely there was a God. A benevolent, understanding, kindly grandfather of a God and smiling down indulgently upon him even now. ‘Sooner or later you have to do something, or you’ll never do anything,’ Cosca had said. Temple wondered if this was what the Old Man had in mind. It did not seem likely. He grabbed hold of Shy and half-hugged her and shouted in her ear, ‘We did it!’

‘You sure?’ she grunted, snapping the reins again.

‘Didn’t we do it?’

‘The easy part.’

‘Eh?’

‘They won’t just be letting this go, will they?’ she called over the rushing wind as they picked up pace. ‘Not the money! Not the insult!’

‘They’ll be coming after us,’ he muttered.

‘That was the whole point o’ the exercise!’

Temple cautiously stood to look behind them, wishing he was less drunk. Nothing but snow and dirt spraying up from the clattering back wheels and the trees to either side vanishing into the darkness.

‘They’ve got no horses, though?’ His voice turning into a hopeful little whine at the end.

‘Sweet slowed ’em down, but they’ll still be coming! And this contraption ain’t the fastest!’

Temple took another look back, wishing he was more drunk. The line between exultation and terror was ever a fine one and he was rapidly crossing back over. ‘Maybe we should stop the wagon! Take two of the horses! Leave the money! Most of the money, anyway—’

‘We need to give Lamb and Savian time, remember?’

‘Oh, yes. That.’ The problem with courageous self-sacrifice was the self-sacrifice part. It had just never come naturally to him. The next jolt brought a wash of scalding vomit to the back of Temple’s mouth and he tried to swallow it, choked, spluttered and felt it burning all the way up his nose with a shiver. He looked up at the sky, stars vanished now and shifting from black to iron-grey as the dawn came on.

‘Woah!’ Another bend came blundering from the gloom and Shy dragged the shrieking brakes on again. Temple could hear the cargo sliding and jingling behind them as the wagon bounded around the corner, the earnest desire of all that weight to plunge on straight and send them tumbling down the mountainside in ruin.

As they clattered back onto the straight there was an almighty cracking and Shy reeled in her seat, one leg kicking, yelling out as she started to tumble off the wagon. Temple’s hand snapped closed around her belt and hauled her back, the limb of the bow over her shoulder nearly taking his eye out as she fell against him, reins flapping.

She held something up. The brake lever. And decidedly no longer attached. ‘That’s the end of that, then!’

‘What do we do?

She tossed the length of wood over her shoulder and it bounced away up the road behind them. ‘Not stop?’

The wagon shot from the trees and onto the plateau. The first glimmer of dawn was spilling from the east, a bright shaving of sun showing over the hills, starting to turn the muddy sky a washed-out blue, the streaked clouds a washed-up pink, setting the frozen snow that blanketed the flat country to glitter.

Shy worked the reins hard and insulted the horses again, which felt a little unfair to Temple until he remembered how much better insults had worked on him than encouragement. Their heads dipped and manes flew and the wagon picked up still more speed, wheels spinning faster on the flat, and faster yet, the snowy scrub whipping past and the wind blasting at Temple’s face and plucking at his cheeks and rushing in his cold nose.

Far ahead he could see horses scattering across the plateau, Sweet and Crying Rock no doubt further off with most of the herd. No dragon’s hoard to retire on, but they’d cash in a decent profit on a couple of hundred mounts. When it came to stock, people out here were more concerned with price than origin.

‘Anyone following?’ called Shy, without taking her eyes off the road.

Temple managed to pry his hand from the seat long enough to stand and look behind them. Just the jagged blackness of the trees, and a rapidly growing stretch of flat whiteness between them and the wagon.

‘No!’ he shouted, confidence starting to leak back. ‘No one… wait!’ He saw movement. A rider. ‘Oh God,’ he muttered, confidence instantly draining. More of them. ‘Oh God!’

‘How many?’

‘Three! No! Five! No! Seven!’ They were still a few hundred strides behind, but they were gaining. ‘Oh God,’ he said again as he dropped back down into the shuddering seat. ‘Now what’s the plan?’

‘We’re already off the end of the plan!’

‘I had a nasty feeling you’d say that.’

‘Take the reins!’ she shouted, thrusting them at him.

He jerked his hands away. ‘And do what?’

‘Can’t you drive?’

‘Badly!’

‘I thought you’d done everything?’

‘Badly!’

‘Shall I stop and give you a fucking lesson? Drive!’ She pulled her knife from her belt and offered that to him as well. ‘Or you could fight.’

Temple swallowed. Then he took the reins. ‘I’ll drive.’ Surely there was a God. A mean little trickster laughing His divine arse off at Temple’s expense. And hardly for the first time.

Shy wondered how much of her life she’d spent regretting her last decision. Too much, that was sure. Looked like today was going to plough the same old furrow.

She dragged herself over the wooden parapet and onto the wagon’s tar-painted roof, bucking under her feet like a mean bull trying to toss a rider. She lurched to the back, shrugged her bow off into her hand, clawed away her whipping hair and squinted across the plateau.

‘Oh, shit,’ she muttered.

Seven riders, just like Temple said, and gaining ground. All they had to do was get ahead of the wagon, bring down a horse or two in the team and that’d be that. They were out of range still, specially shooting from what might as well have been a raft in rapids. She wasn’t bad with a bow but she was no miracle-worker either. Her eyes went to the hatch on the roof, and she tossed the bow down and slithered over to it on her hands and knees, drew her sword and jammed it into the hasp the padlock was on. Way too strong and heavy. The tar around the hinges was carelessly painted, though, the wood more’n halfway rotten. She jammed the point of the sword into it, twisted, gouged, working out the fixings, digging at the other hinge.

‘Are they still following?’ she heard Temple shriek.

‘No!’ she forced through her gritted teeth as she wedged her sword under the hatch and hauled back on it. ‘I’ve killed them all!’

‘Really?’

‘No, not fucking really!’ And she went skittering over on her arse as the hatch ripped from its hinges and flopped free. She flung the sword away, thoroughly bent, dragged the hatch open with her fingertips, started clambering down into the darkness. The wagon hit something and gave a crashing jolt, snatched the ladder from her hands and flung her on her face.

Light spilled in from above, through cracks around the shutters of the narrow windows. Heavy gratings down both sides, padlocked and stacked with chests and boxes and saddlebags bouncing and thumping and jingling, treasure spilling free, gold gleaming, gems twinkling, coins sliding across the plank floor, five king’s ransoms and change left over for a palace or two. There were a couple of sacks under her, too, crunchy with money. She stood, bouncing from the gratings to either side as the wagon twitched left and right on its groaning springs, started dragging the nearest sack towards the bright line between the back doors. Heavy as all hell but she’d hauled a lot of sacks in her time and she wasn’t about to let this one beat her. Shy had taken beatings enough but she’d never enjoyed them.

She fumbled the bolts free, cursing, sweat prickling her forehead, then, holding tight to the grate beside her, booted the doors wide. The wind whipped in, the bright, white emptiness of the plateau opening up, the clattering blur of the wheels and the snow showering from them, the black shapes of the riders following, closer now. Much closer.

She whipped her knife out and hacked the sack gaping open, dug her fist in and threw a handful of coins out the back, and another, and the other hand, and then both, flinging gold like she was sowing seed on the farm. It came to her then how hard she’d fought as a bandit and slaved as a farmer and haggled as a trader for a fraction of what she was flinging away with every movement. She jammed the next fistful down into her pocket ’cause—well, why not die rich? Then she scooped more out with both hands, threw the empty bag away and went back for seconds.

The wagon hit a rut and tossed her in the air, smashed her head into the low ceiling and sent her sprawling. Everything reeled for a moment, then she staggered up and clawed the next sack towards the swinging, banging doors, growling curses at the wagon, and the ceiling, and her bleeding head. She braced herself against the grate and shoved the sack out with her boot, bursting open in the snow and showering gold across the empty plain.

A couple of the riders had stopped, one already off his horse and on his hands and knees after the coins, dwindling quickly into the distance. But the others came on regardless, more determined than she’d hoped. That’s hopes for you. She could almost see the face of the nearest mercenary, bent low over his horse’s dipping head. She left the doors banging and scrambled back up the ladder, dragged herself out onto the roof.

‘They still following?’ shrieked Temple.

‘Yes!’

‘What are you doing?’

‘Having a fucking lie down before they get here!’

The wagon was hurtling into broken land, the plateau folded with little streams, scattered with boulders and pillars of twisted rock. The road dropped down into a shallow valley, steep sides blurring past, wheels rattling harder than ever. Shy wiped blood from her forehead with the back of her hand, slithered across the shuddering roof to the rear, scooping up the bow and drawing an arrow. She squatted there for a moment, breathing hard.

Better to do it than live with the fear of it. Better to do it.

She came up. The nearest rider wasn’t five strides back from the swinging doors. He saw her, eyes going wide, yellow hair and a broad chin and cheeks pinked from the wind. She thought she’d seen him writing a letter back in Beacon. He’d cried while he did it. She shot his horse in the chest. Its head went back, it caught one hoof with the other and horse and rider went down together, tumbling over and over, straps and tackle flapping in a tangle, the others swerving around the wreckage as she ducked back down to get another arrow, thought she could hear Temple muttering something.

‘You praying?’

‘No!’

‘Better start!’ She came up again and an arrow shuddered into the wood just beside her. A rider, black against the sky on the valley’s edge, drawing level with them, horse’s hooves a blur, standing in his stirrups with masterful skill and already pulling back his string again.

‘Shit!’ She dropped down and the shaft flitted over her head and clicked into the parapet on the other side. A moment later another joined it. She could hear the rest of the riders now, shouting to each other just at the back of the wagon. She put her head up to peer over and a shaft twitched into the wood, point showing between two planks not a hand’s width from her face, made her duck again. She’d seen some Ghosts damn good at shooting from horseback, but never as good as this. It was bloody unfair, that’s what it was. But fair has never been an enforceable principle in a fight to the death.

She nocked her shaft, took a breath and stuck her bow up above the parapet. Right away an arrow flitted between the limb and the string, and up she came. She knew she was nowhere near as good with a bow as he was, but she didn’t have to be. A horse is a pretty big target.

Her shaft stuck to the flights in its ribs and it lost its footing right off, fell sideways, rider flying from his saddle with a howl, his bow spinning up in the air and the pair of them tumbling down the side of the valley behind.

Shy shouted, ‘Ha!’ and turned just in time to see a man jump over the parapet behind her.

She got a glimpse of him. Kantic, with eyes narrowed and his teeth showing in a black beard, a hooked blade in each hand he must’ve used for climbing the side of the speeding wagon, an endeavour she’d have greatly admired if he hadn’t been fixed on killing her. The threat of murder surely can cramp your admiration for a body.

She threw her bow at him and he knocked it away with one arm while he swung at her overhand with the other. She twisted to the side and the blade thudded into the parapet. She caught his other arm as it came at her and punched him in the ribs as she slipped around him. The wagon jolted and ditched her on her side. He twisted his curved blade but couldn’t get it free of the wood, jerked his hand out of the thong around his wrist. By then she was up in a crouch and had her knife out, drawing little circles in the air with the point, circles, circles, and they watched each other, both with boots planted wide and knees bent low and the juddering wagon threatening to shake them off their feet and the wind threatening to buffet them right over.

‘Hell of a spot for a knife-fight,’ she muttered.

The wagon bumped and he stumbled a little, took his eye off her just long enough. She sprang at him, raising the knife like she’d stab him overhand, then whipped down low and past, slashing at his leg as she went, turning to stab him in the back, but the wagon jumped and spun her all the way round and grunting into the parapet.

When she turned he was coming at her roaring, cutting at the wind and her jerking back from the first slash and weaving away from the second, roof of the wagon treacherous as quicksand under her bootheels and her eyes crossed on that blur of metal. She caught the third cut on her own blade, steel scraping on steel and off and slitting her left forearm, ripped sleeve flapping.

They faced each other again, both breathing hard, both a little bit knifed but nothing too much changed. Her arm sang as she squeezed her bloody fingers but they still worked. She feinted, and a second, trying to draw him into a mistake, but he kept watching, swishing that hooked knife in front of him as if he was trying to snag a fish, the broken valley still thundering past on both sides.

The wagon bounced hard and Shy was off her feet a moment, yelping as she toppled sideways. He slashed at her and missed, she stabbed at him and the blade just grazed his cheek. Another jolt flung them together and he caught her wrist with his free hand, tried to stab at her but got his knife tangled in her coat and she grabbed his wrist, twisted it up, not that she wanted the fucking thing but there was no letting go of it now, their knives both waggling hopelessly at the sky, streaked with each other’s blood as they staggered around the bucking roof.

She kicked at his knee and made it buckle but he had the strength, and step by wobbling step he wrestled her to the parapet and started to bend her over it, his weight on top of her. He twisted his knife, twisting her grip loose, getting it free, both of them snarling spit at each other, wood grinding into her back and the wagon’s wheels battering the ground not so far behind her head, specks of dirt stinging her cheek, his snarling face coming closer and closer and closer—

She darted forwards and sank her teeth into his nose, biting, biting, her mouth salty with blood and him roaring and twisting and pulling away and suddenly she was right over backwards, breath whooping in as she tumbled over the parapet, plummeted down and smashed against the side of the wagon, breath groaning out, her fallen knife pinging from the road and somehow holding on by one clutching hand, all the fibres in her shoulder strained right to the point of tearing.

She swung wriggling around, road rushing underneath her, honking mad sounds through gritted teeth, legs milling at the air as she tried to get her other hand onto the parapet. Made a grab and missed and swung away and the whirling wheel clipped her boot and near snatched her off. Made another grab and got her fingertips over, worked her hand, groaning and whimpering and almost out of effort, everything numb, but she wouldn’t be beaten and she growled as she dragged herself back over.

The mercenary was staggering about with an arm around his neck Temple’s face next to his, both of them grunting through bared teeth. She lunged at him, half-falling, grabbed hold of his knife-arm in both hands and twisted it, twisted it down, both arms straining, and his jowls were trembling, torn nose oozing blood, eyes rolling towards the point of his knife as she forced it down towards him. He said something in Kantic, shaking his head, the same word over and over, but she wasn’t in a mood to listen even if she’d understood. He wheezed as the point cut through his shirt and into his chest, mouth going wide open as the blade slid further, right to the cross-piece, and she fell on top of him, blood slicking the roof of the wagon.

There was something in her mouth. The tip of his nose. She spat it out and mumbled at Temple, ‘Who’th driving?’

The wagon tipped, there was a grinding jolt, and Shy was flying.

Temple groaned as he rolled over to lie staring at the sky, arms out wide, the snow pleasantly cool against his bare neck—

‘Uh!’ He sat up, wincing at a range of stabbing pains, and stared wildly about.

A shallow canyon with walls of streaked stone and earth and patched snow, the road down the centre, the rest strewn with boulders and choked with thorny scrub. The wagon lay on its side a dozen strides away, one door ripped off and the other hanging wide, one of the uppermost wheels gone and the other still gently turning. The tongue had sheared through and the horses were still going, no doubt delighted by their sudden liberation, already a good way down the road and dwindling into the distance.

The sun was just finding its way into the bottom of the canyon, making gold glitter, a trail of treasure spilled from the back of the stricken wagon and for thirty strides or so behind. Shy sat in the midst of it.

He started running, immediately fell and took a mouthful of snow, spat out a tiny golden coin and floundered over. She was trying to stand, torn coat tangled in a thorn bush, and sank back down as he got there.

‘My leg’s fucked,’ she forced through gritted teeth, hair matted and face streaked with blood.

‘Can you use it?’

‘No. Hence fucked.’

He hooked an arm around her, managed with an effort to get them both to standing, her on one good leg, him on two shaky ones. ‘Got a plan yet?’

‘Kill you and hide in your body?’

‘Better than anything I’ve got.’ He looked about the canyon sides for some means of escape, started tottering over to the most promising place with Shy hopping beside him, both of them wheezing with pain and effort. It might almost have been comical had he not known his erstwhile colleagues must be near. But he did know. So it wasn’t.

‘Sorry I got you into this,’ she said.

‘I got myself into this. A long time ago.’ He grabbed at a trailing bush but it came free and tumbled hopelessly down in a shower of earth, most of which went straight into his mouth.

‘Leave me and run,’ said Shy.

‘Tempting…’ He cast about for another way up. ‘But I already tried that and it didn’t work out too well.’ He picked at some roots, brought down some gravel, the slope as unreliable as he’d been down the years. ‘I’m trying not to make the same mistakes over and over these days…’

‘How’s that going for you?’ she grunted.

‘Right now it could be better.’ The lip was only a couple of strides above his hand but it might as well have been a mile distant, there was no—

‘Hey, hey, Temple!’

A single horseman came up the road at an easy walk, between the two ruts the wagon-wheels had left. Everyone else was thinner than when they left Starikland, but somehow not Brachio. He stopped not far away, leaning his bulk over his saddle horn and speaking in Styrian. ‘That was quite a chase. Didn’t think you had it in you.’

‘Captain Brachio! What a pleasure!’ Temple twisted around to put himself between Shy and the mercenary. A pathetic effort at gallantry, he was almost embarrassed to have made it. He felt her take his hand, though, fingers sticky with blood, and was grateful, even if it was just to keep her balance.

Some more earth slid down behind and, looking around, he saw another rider above them, loaded flatbow loose in his hands. Temple realised his knees were shaking. God, he wished he was a brave man. If only for these last few moments.

Brachio nudged his horse lazily forward. ‘I told the Old Man you couldn’t be trusted, but he always had a blind spot for you.’

‘Well, good lawyers are hard to find.’ Temple stared around as though the means of their salvation might suddenly present themselves. They did not. He struggled to put some confidence in his creaking voice. ‘Take us back to Cosca and maybe I can tidy this up—’

‘Not this time.’ Brachio drew his heavy sword, steel scraping, and Shy’s fingers tightened around Temple’s. She might not have understood the words but a naked blade never needs translating. ‘Cosca’s on his way, and I think he’ll want everything tidy when he gets here. That means you dead, in case you were wondering.’

‘Yes, I’d gathered,’ croaked Temple. ‘When you drew the sword. But thanks for the explanation.’

‘Least I could do. I like you, Temple. I always have. You’re easy to like.’

‘But you’re going to kill me anyway.’

‘You say it like there’s a choice.’

‘I blame myself. As always. Just…’ Temple licked his lips, and twisted his hand free of Shy’s, and looked Brachio in his tired eyes, and tried to conjure up that earnestness. ‘Maybe you could let the girl go? You could do that.’

Brachio frowned at Shy for a moment, who’d sunk back against the bank and was sitting silent. ‘I’d like to. Believe it or not, I get no pleasure from killing women.’

‘Of course not. You wouldn’t want to take a thing like that back to your daughters.’ Brachio worked his shoulders uncomfortably, knives shifting across his belly, and Temple felt a crack there that he could work at. He dropped on his knees in the snow, and he clasped his hands, and he sent up a silent prayer. Not for him, but for Shy. She actually deserved saving. ‘It was all my idea. All me. I talked her into it. You know I’m awful that way, and she’s gullible as a child, poor thing. Let her go. You’ll feel better about it in the long run. Let her go. I’m begging you.’

Brachio raised his brows. ‘That is quite moving, in fact. I was expecting you to blame her for the whole thing.’

‘I’m somewhat moved,’ agreed the man with the flatbow.

‘We’re none of us monsters.’ And Brachio reached up and dabbed some tears from his leaky eye. The other one stayed dry, however. ‘But she tried to rob us, whoever’s idea it was, and the trouble her father caused… No. Cosca wouldn’t understand. And it isn’t as if you’ll be repaying the favour, is it?’

‘No,’ muttered Temple. ‘No, I wouldn’t have thought so.’ He floundered for something to say that might at least delay the inevitable. That might borrow him a few more moments. Just an extra breath. Strange. It was hardly as though he was enjoying himself all that much. ‘Would it help if I said I was very drunk?’

Brachio shook his head. ‘We all were.’

‘Shitty childhood?’

‘Mummy used to leave me in a cupboard.’

‘Shitty adulthood?’

‘Whose isn’t?’ Brachio nudged his horse forward again, its great shadow falling over Temple. ‘Stand up, then, eh? I’d rather get it done quick.’ He worked the shoulder of his sword-arm. ‘Neither one of us wants me hacking away at you.’

Temple looked back at Shy, sitting there bloody and exhausted. ‘What did he say?’ she asked.

He gave a tired shrug. She gave a tired nod. It looked like even she had run out of fight. He blinked up at the sky as he got to his feet. An unremarkable, greyish sky. If there was a God, He was a humourless banker. A bloodless pedant, crossing off His debts in some cosmic ledger. All take their loan and, in the end, all must repay.

‘Nothing personal,’ said Brachio.

Temple closed his eyes, the sun shining pink through the lids. ‘Hard not to take it personally.’

‘I guess so.’

There was a rattling sound. Temple winced. He’d always dreamed of facing death with some dignity, the way Kahdia had. But dignity requires practice and Temple had none. He couldn’t stop himself cringing. He wondered how much it would hurt, having your head cut off. Did you feel it? He heard a couple of clicks, and a grunt, and he cringed even more. How could you not feel it? Brachio’s horse snuffled, pawing the ground, then the metallic clatter of a sword falling.

Temple prised one eye open. Brachio was looking down, surprised. There was an arrow through his neck and two others in his chest. He opened his mouth and blathered blood down his shirt, then slowly tipped from the saddle and crumpled face down on the ground next to Temple’s boots, one foot still tangled in its stirrup.

Temple looked around. The man with the flatbow had vanished. His mount stood peacefully riderless at the top of the canyon wall.

‘Here’s a surprise,’ croaked Shy.

A horse was approaching. In the saddle, hands crossed over the horn and the breeze stirring her short hair about her sharp-boned frown, sat Corlin. ‘A pleasant one, I hope.’

‘Little late.’ Shy took hold of Temple’s limp hand and used it to drag herself wincing up. ‘But I guess we’ll live with the timing.’

Horses appeared at the valley sides, and riders on the horses, perhaps three dozen of them, all well armed and some armoured. There were men and women, old and young, some faces Temple recognised from Crease, others strange to him. Three or four held half-drawn bows. They weren’t pointed right at Temple. But they weren’t pointed far away either. Some had forearms showing, and on the forearms were tattoos. Doom to the Union. Death to the King. Rise up!

‘Rebels,’ whispered Temple.

‘You always did have a talent for stating the obvious.’ Corlin slid from the saddle, kicked Brachio’s boot from his stirrup and rolled his corpse over with her foot, leaving him goggling at the sky, fat face caked with dirt. ‘That arm all right?’

Shy pulled her ripped sleeve back with her teeth to show a long cut, still seeping, blood streaked down to her fingertips. The sight of it made Temple’s knees weak. Or even weaker. It was a surprise he was still standing, all in all. ‘Bit sore,’ she said.

Corlin pulled a roll of bandage from her pocket. ‘Feels as if we’ve been here before, doesn’t it?’ She turned her blue, blue eyes on Temple as she started to unroll it around Shy’s arm. She never seemed to blink. Temple would have found that unnerving if he’d had any nerves left. ‘Where’s my uncle?’

‘In Beacon,’ he croaked, as the rebels dismounted and began to lead their horses down the steep sides of the canyon, scattering dirt.

‘Alive?’

‘We don’t know,’ said Shy. ‘They found out he was Conthus.’

‘That so?’ Corlin took Temple’s limp hand and clamped it around Shy’s wrist. ‘Hold that.’ She started to unbutton her coat.

‘Lamb went back for him but they ran into some trouble. That’s when we took the wagon. Sweet stampeded the horses, to give them some… time…’

Corlin shrugged off her coat and tossed it over her horse’s neck, her sinewy arms blue with letters, words, slogans from shoulder to wrist.

‘I’m Conthus,’ she said, pulling a knife from her belt.

There was a pause.

‘Oh,’ said Temple.

‘Ah,’ said Shy.

Corlin, or Conthus, cut the bandage with one quick movement then pushed a pin through it. Her narrowed eyes moved towards the wreckage of the wagon, calmly taking in the gold twinkling in the snow. ‘Looks like you came into some money.’

Temple cleared his throat. ‘Little bit. Lawyers’ fees have been shooting up lately—’

‘We could use a couple of horses.’ Shy twisted her bandaged forearm free of Temple’s grip and worked the fingers. ‘Nicomo Cosca won’t be far behind us.’

‘You just can’t stay clear of trouble, can you?’ Corlin patted Brachio’s mount on the neck. ‘We have two spare, as it goes. But it’ll cost.’

‘Don’t suppose you feel like haggling?’

‘With you? I don’t think so. Let’s just call it a generous contribution to the liberation of Starikland.’ She jerked her head at her fellows and they hurried forward, sacks and saddlebags at the ready. One big lad nearly knocked Temple over with a shoulder in his hurry. Some started rooting on hands and knees, scooping up the gold scattered about the wreck. Others wriggled inside and soon could be heard smashing the gratings and breaking open the boxes to steal the dragon’s hoard for a third time that week.

A few moments ago, Temple had been rich beyond the hopes of avarice, but since a few moments later he had been on the point of losing his head, it felt rude to complain about this outcome.

‘A noble cause,’ he whispered. ‘Do help yourselves.’

Times Change

The Mayor stood in her accustomed position at her balcony, hands at their familiar, polished places on the rail, and watched Curnsbick’s men hard at work on his new manufactory. The huge frame already towered over the amphitheatre, the new over the ancient, cobwebbed with scaffolding on the site Papa Ring’s Whitehouse had once occupied. That had been a repugnant building in every sense. A building towards which for years she had directed all her hatred, cunning and fury. And how she missed it.

Never mind Mayor, she had been Queen of the Far Country when Ring stopped swinging, but no sooner had she clutched the garland of triumph than it had withered to wretched stalks. The violence and the fires drove off half the population. Whispers mounted that the gold was running dry. Then word came of a strike to the south near Hope and suddenly people were pouring out of Crease by the hundred. With no one left to fight she had dismissed most of her men. Disgruntled, they had dabbled in arson on their way out of town and burned down a good part of what remained. Even so there were buildings empty, and no rents coming in. Lots in town and claims in the hills that men had killed for lost all value overnight. The gaming halls and the bawdy houses were mostly boarded up, only a trickle of passing custom below her in the Church of Dice, where once she had coined money as though she ran a mint.

Crease was her sole dominion. And it was next to worthless.

Sometimes the Mayor felt she had spent her life building things, with painstaking sweat and blood and effort, only to watch them destroyed. Through her own hubris, and others’ vindictiveness, and the fickle thrashings of that blind thug fate. Fleeing one debacle after another. Abandoning even her name, in the end. Even now, she always kept a bag packed. She drained her glass and poured herself another.

That’s what courage is. Taking your disappointments and your failures, your guilt and your shame, all the wounds received and inflicted, and sinking them in the past. Starting again. Damning yesterday and facing tomorrow with your head held high. Times change. It’s those that see it coming, and plan for it, and change themselves to suit that prosper. And so she had struck her deal with Curnsbick, and split her hard-won little empire again without so much as a harsh word spoken.

By that time his small manufactory, which had looked pretty damn big when he converted it from an empty brothel, was already belching black smoke from its two tin chimneys, then from three brick ones, which smogged the whole valley on a still day and chased the few whores still plying a threadbare trade off their balconies and back indoors.

By the looks of it, his new manufactory would have chimneys twice the size. The biggest building within a hundred miles. She hardly even knew what the place was for, except that it had something to do with coal. The hills had hidden little gold in the end but they were surrendering the black stuff in prodigious quantities. As the shadows of the manufactory lengthened, the Mayor had started to wonder whether she might have been better off with Ring across the street. Him, at least, she had understood. But Ring was gone, and the world they had fought over was gone with him, drifted away like smoke on the breeze. Curnsbick was bringing men in to build, and dig, and stoke his furnaces. Cleaner, calmer, more sober men than Crease was used to, but they still needed to be entertained.

‘Times change, eh?’ She held her drink up in salute to no one. To Papa Ring, maybe. Or to herself, when she still had a name. She caught something through the distorting window of her glass, and lowered it. Two riders were coming down the main street, looking as if they’d been going hard, one cradling an injured arm. It was that girl Shy South. Her and Temple, the lawyer.

The Mayor frowned. After twenty years dodging catastrophes she could smell danger at a thousand paces, and her nose was tickling something fierce as those two riders reined in at her front door. Temple slithered from his horse, fell in the mud, stumbled up and helped down Shy, who was limping badly.

The Mayor drained her glass and sucked the liquor from her teeth. As she crossed her rooms, buttoning her collar tight, she glanced at the cupboard where she kept that packed bag, wondering if today would be its day.

Some people are trouble. Nicomo Cosca was one. Lamb was another. Then there are people who, without being troublesome in themselves, always manage to let trouble in when they open your door. Temple, she had always suspected, was one of those. Looking at him now as she swept down the stairs, leaning against the counter in her sadly deserted gaming hall, she was sure of it. His clothes were torn and bloodied and caked in dust, his expression wild, his chest heaving.

‘You look as if you’ve come in a hurry,’ she said.

He glanced up, the slightest trace of guilt in his eye. ‘You might say that.’

‘And ran into some trouble on the way.’

‘You might say that, too. Might I ask you for a drink?’

‘Can you pay for it?’

‘No.’

‘I’m no charity. What are you doing here?’

He took a moment to prepare and then produced, like a magician’s trick, an expression of intense earnestness. It put her instantly on her guard. ‘I have nowhere else to go.’

‘Are you sure you’ve tried hard enough?’ She narrowed her eyes. ‘Where’s Cosca?’

He swallowed. ‘Funny you should ask.’

‘I’m not laughing.’

‘No.’

‘So it’s not funny?’

‘No.’ He visibly abandoned earnestness and settled for simple fear. ‘I would guess he’s no more than a few hours behind us.’

‘He’s coming here?’

‘I expect so.’

‘With all his men?’

‘Those that remain.’

‘Which is how many?’

‘Some died in the mountains, a lot deserted—’

‘How many?’

‘I would guess at least a hundred still.’

The Mayor’s nails dug at her palms as she clenched her fists. ‘And the Inquisitor?’

‘Very much present, as far as I am aware.’

‘What do they want?’

‘The Inquisitor wants to torture his way to a brighter tomorrow.’

‘And Cosca?’

‘Cosca wants a fortune in ancient gold that he stole from the Dragon People, and that…’ Temple picked nervously at his frayed collar. ‘I stole from him.’

‘And where is this twice-stolen fortune now?’

Temple grimaced. ‘Stolen. The woman Corlin took it. She turns out to be the rebel leader Conthus. It’s been a day of surprises,’ he finished, lamely.

‘So… it… appears,’ whispered the Mayor. ‘Where is Corlin?’

Temple gave that helpless shrug of which he was so fond. ‘In the wind.’

The Mayor was less fond of that shrug. ‘I have not the men to fight them,’ she said. ‘I have not the money to pay them off. I have no ancient hoard for Nicomo bloody Cosca and for damn sure no brighter tomorrow for Inquisitor fucking Lorsen! Is there any chance your head will pacify them?’

Temple swallowed. ‘I fear not.’

‘So do I. But in the absence of a better suggestion I may have to make the offer.’

‘As it happens…’ Temple licked his lips. ‘I have a suggestion.’

The Mayor took a fistful of Temple’s shirt and dragged him close. ‘Is it a good one? Is it the best suggestion I ever heard?’

‘I profoundly doubt it, but, circumstances being what they are… do you have that treaty?’

‘I’m tired,’ said Corporal Bright, glancing unimpressed at the piled-up hovels of Crease.

‘Aye,’ grunted Old Cog in reply. He kept having to force his eyelids up, they were that heavy from last night’s revelry, then the terror o’ the stampede, then a healthy trek on foot and a hard ride to follow.

‘And dirty,’ said Bright.

‘Aye.’ The smoke of last night’s fires, and the rolling through the brush running from stomping horses, then the steady showering of dirt from the hooves of the galloping mounts in front.

‘And sore,’ said Bright.

‘No doubt.’ Last night’s revelry again, and the riding again, and Cog’s arm still sore from the fall in the mountains and the old wound in his arse always aching. You wouldn’t think an arrow in the arse would curse you all your days but there it is. Arse armour. That was the key to the mercenary life.

‘It’s been a testing campaign,’ said Cog.

‘If you can apply the word to half a year’s hard riding, hard drinking, killing and theft.’

‘What else would y’apply it to?’

Bright considered that a moment. ‘True. Have you seen a worse, though? You been with Cosca for years.’

‘The North was colder. Kadir was dustier. That last Styrian mess was bloodier. Full-on revolt in the Company at one point.’ He shifted the manacles at his belt. ‘Gave up on using chains and had to go with hangings for every infraction. But all considered, no. I ain’t seen a worse.’ Cog sniffed up some snot, worked it thoughtfully about his mouth, gathering a good sense of its consistency, then leaned back and spat it arcing through a hovel’s open window.

‘Never saw a man could spit like you,’ said Bright.

‘It’s all about putting the practice in,’ said Cog. ‘Like anything else.’

‘Keep moving!’ roared Cosca over his shoulder, up at the head of the column. If you could call eighteen men a column. Still, they were the lucky ones. The rest of the Company were most likely still slogging across the plateau on foot. The ones that were still alive, anyway.

Bright’s thoughts were evidently marching in the same direction. ‘Lost a lot o’ good men these last few weeks.’

‘Good might be stretching it.’

‘You know what I mean. Can’t believe Brachio’s gone.’

‘He’s a loss.’

‘And Jubair.’

‘Can’t say I’m sorry that black bastard’s head ain’t attached no more.’

‘He was a strange one, right enough, but a good ally in a tough corner.’

‘I’d rather stay out o’ the tough corners.’

Bright looked sideways at him, then dropped his horse back a stretch so the others up front wouldn’t mark him. ‘Couldn’t agree more. I want to go home, is what I’m saying.’

‘Where’s home to men like us?’

‘I want to go anywhere but here, then.’

Cog glanced about at the tangled mass of wood and ruins that was Crease, never a place to delight a cultured fellow and less so than ever now by the looks of things, parts of it burned out and a lot of the rest near deserted. Those left looked like the ones who couldn’t find a way to leave, or were too far gone to try. A beggar of truly surpassing wretchedness hobbled after them for a few strides with his hand out before falling in the gutter. On the other side of the street a toothless old woman laughed, and laughed, and laughed. Mad. Or heard something real funny. Mad seemed likelier.

‘I take your point,’ said Cog. ‘But we’ve got that money to find.’ Even though he weren’t entirely sure he wanted to find it. All his life he’d been clutching at every copper he could get his warty fingers around. Then suddenly he had so much gold none of it seemed worth anything any more. So much the world seemed to make no sense in the light of it.

‘Didn’t you keep a little back?’

‘O’ course. A little.’ More than a little, in fact, the pouch under his armpit was heavy with coins. Not so much it made him sweat, but a tidy haul.

‘We all did,’ muttered Bright. ‘So it’s Cosca’s money we’re after really, ain’t it?’

Cog frowned. ‘There’s the principle ’n all.’

‘Principle? Really?’

‘Can’t let folks just up and rob you.’

‘We robbed it ourselves, didn’t we?’ said Bright, an assertion Cog could by no means deny. ‘I’m telling you, it’s cursed. From the moment we laid our hands on it things have gone from shit to shitter.’

‘No such thing as curses.’

‘Tell it to Brachio and Jubair. How many of us set off from Starikland?’

‘More’n four hundred, according to Friendly, and Friendly don’t get a count wrong.’

‘How many now?’

Cog opened his mouth, then closed it. The point was obvious to all.

‘Exactly,’ said Bright. ‘Hang around out here much longer we’ll be down to none.’

Cog sniffed, and grunted, and spat again, right into a first-floor window this time around. An artist has to challenge himself, after all. ‘Been with Cosca a long time.’

‘Times change. Look at this place.’ Bright nodded towards the vacant hovels that a month or two before had boiled over with humanity. ‘What’s that stink, anyway?’

Cog wrinkled his nose. The place had always stunk, o’ course, but that healthy, heartening stench of shit and low living that had always smelled like home to him. There was an acrid sort of a flavour on the air now, a pall of brownish smoke hanging over everything. ‘Don’t know. Can’t say I care for it one bit.’

‘I want to go home,’ said Bright, miserably.

The column was coming to the centre of town now, in so far as the place had one. They were building something on one side of the muddy street, teetering scaffold and lumber stacked high. On the other side the Church of Dice still stood, where Cog had spent several very pleasant evenings a month or two before. Cosca held up his fist for a halt in front of it and with the help of Sergeant Friendly disentangled himself from the saddle and clambered stiffly down.

The Mayor stood waiting on the steps in a black dress buttoned to the neck. What a woman that was. A lady, Cog would almost have said, dusting the word off in the deepest recesses of his memory.

‘General Cosca,’ she said, smiling warmly. ‘I did not think—’

‘Don’t pretend you’re surprised!’ he snapped.

‘But I am. You come at a rather inopportune time, we are expecting—’

‘Where is my gold?’

‘I’m sorry?’

‘By all means play the wide-eyed innocent. But we both know better. Where is my damned notary, then?’

‘Inside, but—’

The Old Man shouldered past her and limped grumbling up the steps, Friendly, Sworbreck, and Captain Dimbik following.

The Mayor caught Lorsen’s arm with a gentle hand. ‘Inquisitor Lorsen, I must protest.’

He frowned back. ‘My dear Lady Mayor, I’ve been protesting for months. Much good it has done me.’

Cosca had seemed heedless of the half dozen frowning thugs lounging on either side of the door. But Cog noted them well enough as he climbed the steps after the others, and from the worried look on Bright’s face he did too. Might be that the Company had the numbers, and more coming across the plateau as fast as they could walk, but Cog didn’t fancy fighting right then and there.

He didn’t fancy fighting one bit.

Captain Dimbik straightened his uniform. Even if the front was crusted with dirt. Even if it was coming apart at the seams. Even if he no longer even belonged to any army, had no nation, fought for no cause or principle a sane man could believe in. Even if he was utterly lost and desperately concealing a bottomless hatred and pity for himself, even then.

Better straight than crooked.

The place had changed since last he visited. The gaming hall had been largely cleared to leave an expanse of creaking boards, the dice-and card-tables shifted against the walls, the women ushered away, the clients vanished. Only ten or so of the Mayor’s thugs remained, noticeably armed and scattered watchfully about under the empty alcoves in the walls, a man wiping glasses behind the long counter, and in the centre of the floor a single table, recently polished but still showing the stains of hard use. Temple sat there before a sheaf of papers, peculiarly unconcerned as he watched Dimbik’s men tramp in to surround him.

Could you even call them men? Ragged and haggard beyond belief and their morale, never the highest, ebbed to a sucking nadir. Not that they had ever been such very promising examples of humanity. Dimbik had tried, once upon a time, to impose some discipline upon them. After his discharge from the army. After his disgrace. He remembered, dimly, as if seen through a room full of steam, that first day in uniform, so handsome in the mirror, puffed up on stories of derring-do, a bright career at his fingertips. He miserably straightened the greasy remnants again. How could he have sunk so low? Not even scum. Lackey to scum.

He watched the infamous Nicomo Cosca pace across the empty floor, bent spurs jingling, his eyes fixed upon Temple and his rat-like face locked in an expression of vengeful hatred. To the counter, he went, of course, where else? He took up a bottle, spat out its cork and swallowed a good quarter of the contents in one draught.

‘So here he is!’ grated the Old Man. ‘The cuckoo in the nest! The serpent in the bosom! The… the…’

‘Maggot in the shit?’ suggested Temple.

‘Why not, since you mention it? What did Verturio say? Never fear your enemies, but your friends, always. A wiser man than I, no doubt! I forgave you! Forgave you and how am I repaid? I hope you’re taking notes, Sworbreck! You can prepare a little parable, perhaps, on the myth of redemption and the price of betrayal.’ The author scrambled to produce his pencil as Cosca’s grim smile faded to leave him simply grim. ‘Where is my gold, Temple?’

‘I don’t have it.’ The notary held up his sheaf of papers. ‘But I do have this.’

‘It better be valuable,’ snapped Cosca, taking another swallow. Sergeant Friendly had wandered to one of the dice-tables and was sorting dice into piles, apparently oblivious to the escalating tension. Inquisitor Lorsen gave Dimbik a curt nod as he entered. Dimbik respectfully returned it, licked a finger and slicked his front hairs into position, wondering if the Inquisitor had been serious about securing him a new commission in the King’s Own when they returned to Adua. Most likely not, but we all need pretty dreams to cling to. The hope of a second chance, if not the chance itself…

‘It is a treaty.’ Temple spoke loudly enough for the whole room to hear. ‘Bringing Crease and the surrounding country into the Empire. I suspect his Radiance the Emperor will be less than delighted to find an armed party sponsored by the Union has encroached upon his territory.’

‘I’ll give you an encroachment you won’t soon forget.’ Cosca let his left hand rest on the hilt of his sword. ‘Where the hell is my gold?’

With a draining inevitability, the atmosphere ratcheted towards bloodshed. Coats were flicked open, itchy fingers crept to ready grips, blades were loosened in sheaths, eyes were narrowed. Two of Dimbik’s men eased the wedges from the triggers of their loaded flatbows. The glass-wiper had put a surreptitious hand on something beneath the counter, and Dimbik did not doubt it would have a point on the end. He watched all this with a helpless sense of mounting horror. He hated violence. It was the uniforms he’d become a soldier for. The epaulettes, and the marching, and the bands—

‘Wait!’ snapped Lorsen, striding across the room. Dimbik was relieved to see that someone in authority still had a grip on their reason. ‘Superior Pike said most clearly there were to be no Imperial entanglements!’ He snatched the treaty from Temple’s hand. ‘This expedition has been enough of a disaster without our starting a war!’

‘You cannot mean to dignify this charade,’ sneered Cosca. ‘He lies for a living!’

‘Not this time.’ The Mayor glided into the room with another pair of her men, one of whom had lost an eye but in so doing gained considerably in menace. ‘That document is endorsed by elected representatives of the townspeople of Crease and is fully binding.’

‘I consider it my best work.’ If he was lying, Temple was even more smug about it than usual. ‘It makes use of the principle of inviolate ownership enshrined at the formation of the Union, refers back to the earliest Imperial claim on the territory, and is even fully binding under mining law. I feel confident you will find it incontestable in any court.’

‘Alas, my lawyer departed my service under something of a cloud,’ forced Cosca through gritted teeth. ‘If we contest your treaty it will have to be in the court of sharp edges.’

Lorsen snorted. ‘It’s not even signed.’ And he tossed the document flapping onto the table.

Cosca narrowed his bloodshot eyes. ‘What if it were? You of all people should know, Temple, that the only laws that matter are those backed by force. The nearest Imperial troops are weeks away.’

Temple’s smile only widened. ‘Oh, they’re a little closer than that.’

The doors were suddenly flung wide and, under the disbelieving eyes of the heavily armed assembly, soldiers tramped into the Church of Dice. Imperial troops, in gilded greaves and breastplates, with broad-bladed spears in their fists and short-bladed swords at their hips, with round shields marked with the hand of Juvens, and the five thunderbolts, and the sheaf of wheat, and all looking as if they had marched straight from antiquity itself.

‘What the shit…’ muttered Cosca.

In the centre of this bizarre honour guard strode an old man, his short beard white as snow, his gilded helm adorned with a tall plume. He walked slowly, deliberately, as though it caused him pain, yet perfectly erect. He looked neither to the left nor to the right, as if Cosca and his men, the Mayor and her men, Temple and Lorsen and everyone else were all insects utterly beneath his notice. As if he were a god obliged for this moment to walk among the filth of humanity. The mercenaries edged nervously away, repelled not so much by fear of the Emperor’s legions as by this old man’s aura of untouchable command.

The Mayor prostrated herself at his feet in a rustling of skirts. ‘Legate Sarmis,’ she breathed. ‘Your Excellency, we are inexpressibly honoured by your presence…’

Dimbik’s jaw dropped. Legate Sarmis, who had crushed the Emperor’s enemies at the Third Battle of Darmium and ordered every prisoner put to death. Who across the Circle of the World was famous for his military brilliance and infamous for his ruthlessness. Who they had all supposed was many hundreds of miles away to the south. Standing before them now, in the flesh. Dimbik somehow felt he had seen that magnificent face before, somewhere. On a coin, perhaps.

‘You are honoured,’ pronounced the old man, ‘for my presence is the presence of his Radiance, the Emperor, Goltus the First.’ The Legate’s body might have been withered by age but his voice, seasoned with the slightest Imperial accent, was that of a colossus, booming from the lofty rafters, as awe-inspiring as deep thunder close at hand. Dimbik’s knees, always weakened by authority, positively itched to bend.

‘Where is the instrument?’ intoned the Legate.

The Mayor rose and abjectly indicated the table, on which Temple had arranged pen and document. Sarmis grunted as he stiffly leaned over it.

‘I sign with the name Goltus, for this hand is the hand of the Emperor.’ With a flourish that would have been outrageous under any other circumstances, he signed. ‘And so it is done. You stand now upon Imperial soil, and are Imperial subjects under the protection of his Radiance! Warmed by his bounty. Humbled beneath his law.’ The ringing echoes faded and he frowned, as though he had only just become aware of the mercenaries. His merciless gaze swept over them and Dimbik felt a chill to his very core.

Sarmis formed his words with fearsome precision. ‘Who are these… people?’

Even Cosca had been silenced by the theatre of the moment, but now, much to everyone’s dismay, he found his voice again. It sounded cracked, weak, almost ridiculous after the Legate’s, but he found it nonetheless, waving his half-emptied bottle for added emphasis. ‘I am Nicomo Cosca, Captain General of the Company of the Gracious Hand, and—’

‘And we were just leaving!’ snapped Lorsen, seizing Cosca’s elbow.

The Old Man refused to be moved. ‘Without my gold? I hardly think so!’

Dimbik did not care in the least for the way things were going. Probably no one did. There was a gentle rattle as Friendly threw his dice. The Mayor’s one-eyed thug suddenly had a knife in his hand. That did not strike him as a positive development.

‘Enough!’ hissed Lorsen, halfway now to wrestling the Old Man by his armpit. ‘When we reach Starikland every man will get a bonus! Every man!’

Sworbreck was crouching against the counter, apparently trying to vanish into the floor while madly scribbling in his notebook. Sergeant Cog was edging towards the doorway, and he had good instincts. The odds had changed, and not for the better. Dimbik had begged Cosca to wait for more men, the old fool, but he might as well have argued with the tide. And now all it would take was a loose trigger and there would be a bloodbath.

Dimbik held one hand up to the flatbowmen as to a skittish horse. ‘Easy…’

‘I shit on your bonus!’ snarled Cosca, struggling with scant dignity to shake Lorsen off. ‘Where’s my fucking gold?’

The Mayor was backing away, one pale hand against her chest, but Sarmis only appeared to grow in stature, his white brows drawing inwards. ‘What is this impertinence?’

‘I can only apologise,’ blathered Temple, ‘we—’

Sarmis struck him across the face with the back of his hand and knocked him to the floor. ‘Kneel when you address me!’

Dimbik’s mouth was dry, the pulse pounding in his head. That he would have to die for Cosca’s absurd ambitions seemed horribly unfair. His sash had already given its life for the dubious cause and that seemed more than sacrifice enough. Dimbik had once been told that the best soldiers are rarely courageous. That was when he had been sure it was the career for him. He started to slide one hand towards his sword, far from sure what he would do with it once it reached the hilt.

‘I will not be disappointed again!’ shrieked the Old Man, struggling to reach his own hilt with Lorsen restraining him and a half-full bottle still clutched in his other fist. ‘Men of the Gracious Hand! Draw your—’

‘No!’ Lorsen’s voice barked out like a slamming door. ‘Captain General Dimbik, take the traitor Nicomo Cosca under arrest!’

There was the very slightest pause.

Probably no more than a breath, for all it felt far longer. While everyone assessed the odds and the outcomes. While everyone judged just where the shifting power sat. While everything dropped into place in Dimbik’s mind and, no doubt, the minds of every other person present. Just a breath, and everything was rearranged.

‘Of course, Inquisitor,’ said Dimbik. The two flatbowmen raised their weapons to point them at Cosca. They looked slightly surprised that they were doing it, but they did it nonetheless.

Friendly looked up from his dice and frowned slightly. ‘Two,’ he said.

Cosca gazed slack-jawed at Dimbik. ‘So that’s how it is?’ The bottle dropped from his nerveless fingers, clattered to the floor and rolled away, dribbling liquor. ‘That’s how it is, is it?’

‘How else would it be?’ said Dimbik. ‘Sergeant Cog?’

That venerable soldier stepped forward, for once, with an impressive degree of military snap. ‘Sir?’

‘Please disarm Master Cosca, Master Friendly, and Master Sworbreck.’

‘Place them in irons for the trip,’ said Lorsen. ‘They will face trial on our return.’

‘Why me?’ squeaked Sworbreck, eyes wide as saucers.

‘Why not you?’ Corporal Bright looked the author over and, finding no weapon, he jerked the pencil from his hand, tossed it on the floor and made great show of grinding it under his heel.

‘Prisoner?’ muttered Friendly. For some reason he had the faintest smile on his face as the manacles were snapped around his wrists.

‘I’ll be back!’ snarled the Old Man, spraying spit over his shoulder as Cog dragged him wriggling away, empty scabbard flapping. ‘Laugh while you can, because Nicomo Cosca always laughs last! I’ll be revenged on the whole pack of you! I will not be disappointed again! I will—’ The door swung shut upon him.

‘Who was that drunkard?’ asked Sarmis.

‘Nicomo Cosca, your Excellency,’ muttered Temple, still on his knees and with one hand pressed to his bloody mouth. ‘Infamous soldier of fortune.’

The Legate grunted. ‘Never heard of him.’

Lorsen placed one hand upon his breast and bowed low. ‘Your Excellency, I pray that you accept my apologies for any and all inconveniences, trespasses and—’

‘You have eight weeks to leave Imperial territory,’ said Sarmis. ‘Any of you found within our borders after that time will be buried alive.’ He slapped dust from his breastplate. ‘Have you such a thing as a bath?’

‘Of course, your Excellency,’ murmured the Mayor, virtually grovelling. ‘We will do the very best we can.’ She turned her eyes to Dimbik as she ushered the Legate towards the stairs. ‘Get out,’ she hissed.

The brand-new captain general was by no means reluctant to oblige. With the greatest of relief, he and his men spilled into the street and prepared their tired mounts for the trip out of town. Cosca had been manhandled into his saddle, sparse hair in disarray, gazing down at Dimbik with a look of stunned upset.

‘I remember when I took you on,’ he muttered. ‘Drunk, and spurned, and worthless. I graciously offering my hand.’ He attempted to mime the offering of his hand but was prevented by his manacles.

Dimbik smoothed down his hair. ‘Times change.’

‘Here is justice, eh, Sworbreck? Here is loyalty! Take a good look, all of you, this is where charity gets you! The fruits of polite behaviour and thought for your fellow man!’

‘For pity’s sake, someone shut him up,’ snapped Lorsen, and Cog leaned from his saddle and stuffed a pair of socks in Cosca’s mouth.

Dimbik leaned closer to the Inquisitor. ‘It might be best if we were to kill them. Cosca still has friends among the rest of the Company, and—’

‘A point well made and well taken, but no. Look at him.’ The infamous mercenary did indeed present a most miserable picture, sitting hunched on horseback with hands manacled behind him, his torn and muddied cloak all askew, the gilt on his breastplate all peeling and rust showing beneath, his wrinkled skin blotchy with rash, one of Cog’s socks dangling from his mouth. ‘Yesterday’s man if ever there was one. And in any case, my dear Captain General…’ Dimbik stood tall and straightened his uniform at the title. He very much enjoyed the ring of it. ‘We need someone to blame.’

In spite of the profound pain in his stomach, the ache in his legs, the sweat spreading steadily under his armour, he remained resplendently erect upon the balcony, rigid as a mighty oak, until long after the mercenaries had filed away into the haze. Would the great Legate Sarmis, ruthless commander, undefeated general, right hand of the Emperor, feared throughout the Circle of the World, have allowed himself to display the least trace of weakness, after all?

It felt an age of agony before the Mayor stepped out onto the balcony with Temple behind her, and spoke the longed for words ‘They’re gone.’

Every part of him sagged and he gave a groan from the very bottom of his being. He removed that ridiculous helmet, wiping the sweat from his forehead with a trembling hand. He could scarcely recall having donned a more absurd costume in all his many years in the theatre. No garlands of flowers flung by an adoring audience, perhaps, as had littered the broad stage of Adua’s House of Drama after his every appearance as the First of the Magi, but his satisfaction was no less complete.

‘I told you I had one more great performance in me!’ said Lestek.

‘And so you did,’ said the Mayor.

‘You both provided able support, though, for amateurs. I daresay you have a future in the theatre.’

‘Did you have to hit me?’ asked Temple, probing at his split lip.

‘Someone had to,’ muttered the Mayor.

‘Ask yourself rather, would the terrible Legate Sarmis have struck you, and blame him for your pains,’ said Lestek. ‘A performance is all in the details, my boy, all in the details! One must inhabit the role entirely. Which occurs to me, do thank my little legion before they disperse, it was an ensemble effort.’

‘For five carpenters, three bankrupt prospectors, a barber and a drunk, they made quite an honour guard,’ said Temple.

‘That drunk scrubbed up surprisingly well,’ said Lestek.

‘A good find,’ added the Mayor.

‘It really worked?’ Shy South had limped up to lean against the door frame.

‘I told you it would,’ said Temple.

‘But you obviously didn’t believe it.’

‘No,’ he admitted, peering up at the skies. ‘There really must be a God.’

‘Are you sure they’ll believe it?’ asked the Mayor. ‘Once they’ve joined up with the rest of their Company and had time to think it over?’

‘Men believe what they want to,’ said Temple. ‘Cosca’s done. And those bastards want to go home.’

‘A victory for culture over barbarity!’ said Lestek, flicking the plume on the helmet.

‘A victory for law over chaos,’ said Temple, fanning himself with his worthless treaty.

‘A victory for lying,’ said the Mayor, ‘and only by the narrowest of margins.’

Shy South shrugged and said, with her talent for simplicity, ‘A win’s a win.’

‘All too true!’ Lestek took a long breath through his nose and, even with the pain, even though he knew he did not have long left, perhaps because he knew it, he breathed out with the deepest fulfilment. ‘As a young man I found happy endings cloying but, call me soppy, with age, I have come to appreciate them more and more.’

The Cost

Shy scooped up water and splashed it on her face, and groaned at the cold of it, just this side of ice. She worked her fingertips into her sore eyelids, and her aching cheeks, and her battered mouth. Stayed there, bent over the basin, her faint reflection sent scattering by the drops from her face. The water was pink with blood. Hard to say where from exactly. The last few months had left her beaten as a prizefighter. Just without the prize.

There was the long rope-burn coiling around one forearm and the new cut down the other, blood spotted through the bandage. Her hands were ripped up front and back, crack-nailed and scab-knuckled. She picked at the scar under her ear, a keepsake from that Ghost out on the plains. He’d almost got the whole ear to remember her by. She felt the lumps and scabs on her scalp, the nicks on her face, some of them she couldn’t even remember getting. She hunched her shoulders and wriggled her spine and all the countless sores and grazes and bruises niggled at her like a choir of ugly little voices.

She looked down into the street and watched the children for a moment. Majud had found them some new clothes—dark suit and shirt for Pit, green dress with lace at the sleeves for Ro. Better than Shy had ever been able to buy them. They might’ve passed for some rich man’s children if it hadn’t been for their shaved heads, the dark fuzz just starting to grow back. Curnsbick was pointing to his vast new building, talking with big, enthusiastic gestures, Ro watching and listening solemnly, taking it all in, Pit kicking a stone about the mud.

Shy sniffed, and swallowed, and splashed more water on her face. Couldn’t be crying if her eyes were wet already, could she? She should’ve been leaping with joy. In spite of the odds, the hardships, the dangers, she’d got them back.

But all she could think of was the cost.

The people killed. A few she’d miss and a lot she wouldn’t. Some she’d even have called evil, but no one’s evil to themselves, are they? They were still people dead, could do no good now, could make no amends and right no wrongs, people who’d taken a lifetime to make, plucked out from the world and turned to mud. Sangeed and his Ghosts. Papa Ring and his crooks. Waerdinur and his Dragon People. Leef left under the dirt out on the plains, and Grega Cantliss doing the hanged man’s dance, and Brachio with the arrows in him, and—

She stuck her face in the cloth and rubbed, hard, like she could rub them all away, but they were stuck tight to her. Tattooed into her sure as the rebel slogans into Corlin’s arms.

Was it her fault? Had she set it all rolling when she came out here like the kicked pebble that starts the landslide? Or was it Cantliss’ fault, or Waerdinur’s, or Lamb’s? Was it everyone’s? Her head hurt from trying to pull apart the tapestry of everything happened and follow her own nasty little thread through it, sifting for blame like a fevered miner dredging at a stream-bed. No point picking at it any more than at a scab. But still, now it was behind her, she couldn’t stop looking back.

She limped to the bed and sat with a groaning of old springs, arms around herself, wincing and twitching at flashes of things happened like they were happening now.

Cantliss smashing her head against a table leg. Her knife sliding into flesh. Grunting in her face. Things she’d had to do. Wrestling with a crazy Ghost. Leef without his ears. Sangeed’s head coming off, thud. It had been them or her. Looking down at that girl she’d shot, not much older’n Ro. Arrow in a horse and the rider tumbling. No choice, she’d had no choice. Lamb flinging her against the wall, Waerdinur’s skull split, click, and she was flying from the wagon, and over, and over, and over—

She jerked her head up at a knock, wiped her eyes on her bandage. ‘Who’s there?’ Doing her best to sound like it was any other morning.

‘Your lawyer.’ Temple swung the door open, that earnest look on his face which she could never quite be sure was genuine. ‘Are you all right?’

‘I’ve had easier years.’

‘Anything I can do?’

‘Guess it’s a little late to ask you to keep that wagon on the road.’

‘A little.’ He came and sat down on the bed next to her. Didn’t feel uncomfortable. You go through what they’d been through together, maybe uncomfortable goes off the menu. ‘The Mayor wants us gone. She says we’re bad luck.’

‘Hard to argue with her. I’m surprised she hasn’t killed you.’

‘I suppose she still might.’

‘Just need to wait a little longer.’ Shy grunted as she wormed her foot into her boot, trying to work out how bad the ankle hurt. Bad enough she stopped trying. ‘Just ’til Lamb comes back.’

There was a silence then. A silence in which Temple didn’t say, ‘Do you really think he’s coming back?’ Instead he just nodded, as if Lamb coming was as sure as tomorrow, and she was grateful for that much. ‘Then where are you heading?’

‘That’s a question.’ New lives out west didn’t look much different to the old ones. No short cuts to riches, leastways, or none a sane woman might want to take. And it was no place for children neither. She’d never thought farming would look like the comfortable option, but now she shrugged. ‘The Near Country for me, I reckon. It’s no easy life but I’ve spotted nothing easier.’

‘I hear Dab Sweet and Crying Rock are putting together a Fellowship for the trip back. Majud’s going along, aiming to make some deals in Adua. Lord Ingelstad too.’

‘Any Ghosts turn up his wife can frown ’em to death.’

‘She’s staying. I hear she bought Camling’s Hostelry for a song.’

‘Good for her.’

‘The rest will be heading east within the week.’

‘Now? ’Fore the weather breaks?’

‘Sweet says now’s the time, before the meltwater swells the rivers and the Ghosts get tetchy again.’

She took a long breath. Could’ve done with a year or two in bed but life hadn’t often served her what she ordered. ‘Might be I’ll sign up.’

Temple looked across from under his brows. Nervous, almost. ‘Maybe… I’ll tag on?’

‘Can’t stop you, can I?’

‘Would you want to?’

She thought about that. ‘No. Might need someone to ride drag. Or jump out of a window. Or drive a wagon full of gold off a road.’

He puffed himself up. ‘As it happens, I am expert in all three. I’ll talk to Sweet and let him know we’ll be joining up. I suppose it’s possible he won’t value my skills as highly as you do, though… I might have to buy my way in.’

They looked at each other for a moment. ‘You coming up a little short?’

‘You didn’t exactly give me time to pack. I’ve nothing but the clothes I’m wearing.’

‘Lucky for you I’m always willing to help out.’ She reached into her pocket and drew out a few of the ancient coins she’d taken while the wagon sped across the plateau. ‘Will that cover it?’

‘I’d say so.’ He took them between finger and thumb but she didn’t let go.

‘Reckon that’s about two hundred marks you owe.’

He stared at her. ‘Are you trying to upset me?

‘I can do that without trying.’ And she let go the coins.

‘I suppose a person should stick to what they’re good at.’ He smiled, and flicked one of the coins spinning up and snatched it from the air. ‘Seems I’m at my best in debt.’

‘Tell you what.’ She grabbed a bottle from the table by her bed and wedged it in her shirt pocket. ‘I’ll pay you a mark to help me downstairs.’

Outside a sleety drizzle had set in, falling brown around Curnsbick’s belching chimneys, his workmen struggling in the mush on the far side of the street. Temple helped her to the rail and she leaned against it, watching. Funny thing. She didn’t want to let go of him.

‘I’m bored,’ said Pit.

‘One day, young man, you will learn what a luxury it is to be bored.’ Temple offered him his hand. ‘Why not help me seek out that noted scout and frontiersman, Dab Sweet? There may even be gingerbread in it for you. I have recently come into some money.’

‘All right.’ Temple lifted the boy onto his shoulders and they set off down the rattling porches at half a jog, Pit laughing as he bounced.

He had a touch with the children, had Temple. More than she had, now, it seemed. Shy hopped to the bench against the front of the house and dropped onto it, stretched her hurt leg out in front of her and eased back. She grunted as she let her muscles go soft by slow degrees, and finally pulled the cork from her bottle with that echoing thwop that sets your mouth watering. Oh, the simple joy of doing nothing. Thinking nothing. She reckoned she could allow herself a rest.

It had been hard work, the last few months.

She lowered that bottle, looking up the street, liquor burning at the cuts in her mouth in a way that wasn’t entirely unpleasant. There was a rider coming through the murk of smoke and drizzle. A particularly slouching rider coming at a slow walk, taking shape as he came closer—big, and old, and battered. His coat was torn, and dirtied, and ash-smeared. He’d lost his hat, short scrub of grey hair matted with blood and rain, face streaked with dirt, mottled with bruise, scabbed and grazed and swollen.

She took another sip from her bottle. ‘I was wondering when you’d turn up.’

‘You can stop,’ grunted Lamb, stopping himself, his old horse looking like it didn’t have another stride in it. ‘The children all right?’

‘They’re as well as they were.’

‘How about you?’

‘Don’t know when I was last all right, but I’m still just about alive. You?’

‘Just about.’ He clambered down from his horse, teeth gritted, not even bothering to tie it up. ‘Say one thing for me… say I’m a survivor.’ He held his ribs as he limped up the steps and onto the porch. He looked at the bench, then his sword, realised he wouldn’t be able to sit with it on, started struggling with the buckle on the belt, his knuckles scabbed raw and two of the fingers he still had bandaged together and held stiff.

‘By… the… fucking—’

‘Here.’ She leaned and flicked the buckle open and he pulled the sword off, belt dangling, cast about for somewhere to put it, then gave up and dropped it on the boards, sank down beside her and slowly, slowly stretched his legs out next to hers.

‘Savian?’ she asked.

Lamb shook his head a little. Like shaking it a lot would hurt him. ‘Where’s Cosca?’

‘Gone.’ She passed him the bottle. ‘Temple lawyered him off.’

‘Lawyered him?’

‘With a little help from the Mayor and a final performance of remarkable quality.’

‘Well, I never did.’ Lamb took a long swig and wiped his scabbed lips, looking across the street at Curnsbick’s manufactory. A couple of doors down, above an old card-hall, they were hauling up a sign reading Valint and Balk, Bankers. Lamb took another swallow. ‘Times sure are changing.’

‘Feel left out?’

He rolled one eye to her, half-swollen shut and all blown and bloodshot, and offered the bottle back. ‘For a while now.’

They sat there, looking at each other, like two survivors of an avalanche. ‘What happened, Lamb?’

He opened his mouth, as if he was thinking about where to start, then just shrugged, looking even more tired and hurt than she did. ‘Does it matter?’

If there’s nothing needs saying, why bother? She lifted the bottle. ‘No. I guess not.’

Last Words

‘Just like old times, eh?’ said Sweet, grinning at the snow-patched landscape.

‘Colder,’ said Shy, wriggling into her new coat.

‘Few more scars,’ said Lamb, wincing as he rubbed gently at the pinked flesh around one of his face’s recent additions.

‘Even bigger debts,’ said Temple, patting his empty pockets.

Sweet chuckled. ‘Bunch o’ bloody gripers. Still alive, ain’t you, and found your children, and got the Far Country spread out ahead? I’d call that a fair result.’

Lamb frowned off towards the horizon. Shy grumbled her grudging agreement. Temple smiled to himself, and closed his eyes, and tipped his face back to let the sun shine pink through his lids. He was alive. He was free. His debts were deeper than ever, but still, a fair result. If there was a God, He was an indulgent father, who always forgave no matter how far His children strayed.

‘Reckon our old friend Buckhorm’s prospered,’ said Lamb, as they crested a rise and looked down on his farmstead.

It had been carefully sited beside a stream, a set of solid-looking cabins arranged in a square, narrow windows facing outwards, a fence of sharpened logs closing up the gaps and a wooden tower twice a man’s height beside the gate. A safe, and civilised, and comfortable-looking place, smoke slipping gently up from a chimney and smudging the sky. The valley around it, as far as Temple could see, was carpeted with tall green grass, patched white with snow in the hollows, dotted brown with cattle.

‘Looks like he’s got stock to trade,’ said Shy.

Sweet stood in his stirrups to study the nearest cow. ‘Good stock, too. I look forward to eating ’em.’ The cow peered suspiciously back, apparently less enamoured of that idea.

‘Maybe we should pick up some extra,’ said Shy, ‘get a herd together and drive ’em back to the Near Country.’

‘Always got your eyes open for a profit, don’t you?’ asked Sweet.

‘Why close your eyes to one? Specially when we’ve got one of the world’s foremost drag riders sitting idle.’

‘Oh God,’ muttered Temple.

‘Buckhorm?’ bellowed Sweet as the four of them rode up. ‘You about?’ But there was no reply. The gate stood ajar, a stiff hinge faintly creaking as the breeze moved it. Otherwise, except for the cattle lowing in the distance, all was quiet.

Then the soft scrape as Lamb drew his sword. ‘Something ain’t right.’

‘Aye,’ said Sweet, laying his flatbow calmly across his knees and slipping a bolt into place.

‘No doubt.’ Shy shrugged her own bow off her shoulder and jerked an arrow from the quiver by her knee.

‘Oh God,’ said Temple, making sure he came last as they eased through the gateway, hooves of their horses squelching and crunching in the half-frozen mud. Was there no end to it? He peered at the doors and into the windows, grimacing with anticipation, expecting any and every horror from a welter of bandits, to a horde of Ghosts, to Waerdinur’s vengeful dragon erupting from the earth to demand its money back.

‘Where’s my gold, Temple?’

The dragon would have been preferable to the awful phantom that now stooped beneath the low lintel of Buckhorm’s house and into the light. Who else but that infamous soldier of fortune, Nicomo Cosca?

His once-fine clothes were reduced to muddy rags, corroded breastplate lost and his filthy shirt hanging by two buttons, one trouser-leg torn gaping and a length of scrawny, trembling white calf exposed. His magnificent hat was a memory, the few strands of grey hair he had so carefully cultivated to cross his liver-spotted pate now floating about his skull in a grease-stiffened nimbus. His rash had turned crimson, scabbed with nail marks and, like mould up a cellar wall, spread flaking up the side of his head to speckle his waxy face. His hand quivered on the door, his gait was uncertain, he looked like nothing so much as a corpse exhumed, brought to a mockery of life by sorcerous intervention.

He turned his mad, bright, feverish eyes on Temple and slapped the hilt of his sword. One trapping of glory he had managed to retain. ‘Like the ending of a cheap storybook, eh, Sworbreck?’ The writer crept from the darkness behind Cosca, equally filthy and with bare feet to add to his wretchedness, one lens of his eyeglasses cracked, his empty hands fussing with each other. ‘One final appearance for the villains!’

Sworbreck licked his lips, and remained silently loitering. Perhaps he could not tell who were the villains in this particular metaphor.

‘Where’s Buckhorm?’ snapped Shy, training her drawn bow on Cosca and prompting his biographer to cower behind him for cover.

The Old Man was less easily rattled. ‘Driving some cattle down to Hope with his three eldest sons, I understand. The lady of the house is within but, alas, cannot see visitors just at present. Ever so slightly tied up.’ He licked at his chapped lips. ‘I don’t suppose any of you have a drink to hand?’

‘Left mine over the rise with the rest of the Fellowship.’ Shy jerked her head towards the west. ‘I find if I have it, I drink it.’

‘I’ve always had the very same problem,’ said Cosca. ‘I would ask one of my men to pour me a glass, but thanks to Master Lamb’s fearsome talents and Master Temple’s underhanded machinations, my Company is somewhat reduced.’

‘You played your own hand in that,’ said Temple.

‘Doubtless. Live long enough, you see everything ruined. But I still hold a few cards.’ Cosca gave a high whistle.

The doorway of the barn banged open and several of Buckhorm’s younger children shuffled through into the courtyard, wide-eyed and fearful, some of their faces streaked with tears. Sergeant Friendly was their shepherd, an empty manacle swinging by the chain, the other still locked around his thick wrist. The blade of his cleaver glimmered briefly in the sun.

‘Hello, Temple,’ he said, showing as little emotion as if they’d been reunited at a tavern counter.

‘Hello,’ croaked Temple.

‘And Master Hedges was good enough to join us.’ Cosca pointed past them, finger shaking so badly it was hard at first to tell at what. Looking around, Temple saw a black outline appear at the top of the little turret by the gate. The self-professed hero of the Battle of Osrung, and pointing a flatbow down into the yard.

‘Real sorry about this!’ he shouted.

‘You’re that sorry, you can drop the bow,’ growled Shy.

‘I just want what I’m owed!’ he called back.

‘I’ll give you what you’re fucking owed, you treacherous—’

‘Perhaps we can establish exactly what everyone is owed once the money is returned?’ suggested Cosca. ‘As a first step, I believe throwing down your weapons would be traditional?’

Shy spat through the gap in her front teeth. ‘Fuck yourself.’ The point of her arrow did not deviate by a hair.

Lamb stretched his neck out one way, then the other. ‘We don’t hold much with tradition.’

Cosca frowned. ‘Sergeant Friendly? If they do not lay down their arms within the count of five, kill one of the children.’

Friendly shifted his fingers around the grip of his cleaver. ‘Which one?’

‘What do I care? You pick.’

‘I’d rather not.’

Cosca rolled his eyes. ‘The biggest one, then, and work your way down. Must I manage every detail?’

‘I mean I’d rather not—’

‘One!’ snapped the Old Man.

Nobody gave the slightest impression of lowering their weapons. Quite the reverse. Shy stood slightly in her stirrups, scowling down her arrow. ‘One o’ those children dies, you’re next.’

‘Two!’

‘Then you!’ For that of a war hero, Hedges’ voice had risen to a decidedly unheroic register.

‘Then the fucking lot of you,’ growled Lamb, hefting his heavy sword.

Sworbreck stared at Temple around Cosca’s shoulder, palms open, as though to say, What can reasonable men do under such circumstances?

‘Three!’

‘Wait!’ shouted Temple. ‘Just… wait, damn it!’ And he scrambled down from his horse.

‘What the hell are you doing?’ Shy snarled around the flights of her arrow.

‘Taking the hard way.’

Temple began to walk slowly across the courtyard, mud and straw squelching under his boots, the breeze stirring his hair, the breath cold in his chest. He did not go with a smile, as Kahdia had gone to the Eaters when they padded into the Great Temple, black figures in the darkness, giving his life for the lives of his students. It took a mighty effort, wincing as if he was walking into a gale. But he went.

The sun found a chink in the clouds and glinted on the drawn steel, each edge and point picked out with painful brightness. He was scared. He wondered if he might piss himself with each step. This was not the easy way. Not the easy way at all. But it was the right way. If there is a God, He is a solemn judge, and sees to it that each man receives his rightful deservings. So Temple knelt in the dung before Nicomo Cosca, and looked up into his bloodshot eyes, wondering how many men he had killed during that long career of his.

‘What do you want?’ he asked.

The ex-captain general frowned. ‘My gold, of course.’

‘I’m sorry,’ said Temple. He even was a little. ‘But it’s gone. Conthus has it.’

‘Conthus is dead.’

‘No. You got the wrong man. Conthus took the money and it isn’t coming back.’ He did not try to be earnest. He simply gazed into Cosca’s worn-out face and told the truth. In spite of the fear, and the high odds on his imminent death, and the freezing water leaking through the knees of his trousers, it felt good.

There was a pause pregnant with doom. Cosca stared at Temple, and Shy at Cosca, and Hedges at Shy, and Sweet at Hedges, and Friendly at Sweet, and Lamb at Friendly, and Sworbreck at everyone. All poised, all ready, all holding their breath.

‘You betrayed me,’ said Cosca.

‘Yes.’

‘After all I did for you.’

‘Yes.’

The Old Man’s wriggling fingers drifted towards his sword hilt. ‘I should kill you.’

‘Probably,’ Temple was forced to admit.

‘I want my money,’ said Cosca, but the slightest plaintive note had crept into his voice.

‘It isn’t your money. It never was. Why do you even want it?’

Cosca blinked, hand hovering uncertainly. ‘Well… I can use it to take back my dukedom—’

‘You didn’t want the dukedom when you had it.’

‘It’s… money.’

‘You don’t even like money. When you get it you throw it away.’

Cosca opened his mouth to refute that statement, then had to accept its obvious truth. He stood there, rashy, quivering, hunched, aged even beyond his considerable years, and looked down at Temple as though he was seeing him for the first time. ‘Sometimes,’ he muttered, ‘I think you’re hardly like me at all.’

‘I’m trying not to be. What do you want?’

‘I want…’ Cosca blinked over at the children, Friendly with one hand on the shoulder of the eldest and his cleaver in the other. Then at Lamb, grim as a gravedigger with his sword drawn. Then at Shy, bow trained on him, and at Hedges, bow trained on her. His bony shoulders sagged.

‘I want a chance to do it all again. To do it… right.’ Tears showed in the Old Man’s eyes. ‘How ever did it go so wrong, Temple? I had so many advantages. So many opportunities. All squandered. All slipped away like sand through a glass. So many disappointments…’

‘Most of them you brought on yourself.’

‘Of course.’ Cosca gave a ragged sigh. ‘But they’re the ones that hurt the worst.’ And he reached for his sword.

It was not there. He frowned down, puzzled. ‘Where’s my—uh?’

The blade slid out of his chest. He and Temple both stared at it, equally shocked, sun glinting on the point, blood spreading quickly out into his filthy shirt. Sworbreck let go of the hilt and stepped back, mouth hanging open.

‘Oh,’ said Cosca, dropping to his knees. ‘There it is.’

Behind him Temple heard a flatbow go off and, almost simultaneously, another. He spun clumsily about, falling in the muck on one elbow.

Hedges gave a cry, bow tumbling from his hand. There was a bolt through the palm of the other. Sweet lowered his own bow, at first looking shocked, then rather pleased with himself.

‘I stabbed him,’ muttered Sworbreck.

‘Am I shot?’ asked Shy.

‘You’ll live,’ said Lamb, flicking at the flights of Hedges’ bolt. It was stuck through her saddle horn.

‘My last words…’ With a faint groan, Cosca toppled onto his side in the mud next to Temple. ‘I had some wonderful ones… worked out. What were they now?’ And he broke out into that luminous smile of which only he was capable, good humour and good intentions radiating from his deep-lined face. ‘Ah! I remember…’

Nothing more. He was still.

‘He’s dead,’ said Temple, voice flat. ‘No more disappointments.’

‘You were the last,’ said Friendly. ‘I told him we’d be better off in prison.’ He tossed his cleaver in the muck and patted Buckhorm’s eldest son on the shoulder. ‘You four can go inside to your mother.’

‘You shot me!’ shrieked Hedges, clutching at his skewered hand.

Sworbreck adjusted his broken eyeglasses as though he could scarcely credit the evidence of his senses. ‘Astonishing skill!’

‘I was aiming for his chest,’ said the scout, under his breath.

The author stepped gingerly around Cosca’s corpse. ‘Master Sweet I wonder whether I might speak to you about a book I have in mind.’

‘Now? I really don’t see—’

‘A generous share of the profits would be forthcoming.’

‘—any way I could turn you down.’

Cold water was leaking through the seat of Temple’s trousers, gripping his arse in its icy embrace, but he found he could not move. Facing death certainly can take it out of you. Especially if you’ve spent most of your life doing your best to avoid facing anything.

He realised Friendly was standing next to him, frowning down at Cosca’s body. ‘What do I do now?’ he asked.

‘I don’t know,’ said Temple. ‘What does anyone do?’

‘I plan an authentic portrait of the taming and settlement of the Far Country,’ Sworbreck was blathering. ‘A tale for the ages! One in which you have played a pivotal role.’

‘I’m pivotal, all right,’ said Sweet. ‘What’s pivotal?’

‘My hand!’ shrieked Hedges.

‘You’re lucky it’s not through your face,’ said Lamb.

Somewhere inside, Temple could hear the tearful sounds of the Buckhorm children being reunited with their mother. Good news, he supposed. A fair result.

‘My readers will thrill to your heroic exploits!’

‘I’ve certainly thrilled to ’em,’ snorted Shy. ‘The heroic scale of your digestive gases would never be believed back east.’

Temple looked up, and watched the clouds moving. If there was a God, the world seemed exactly the way it would be if there wasn’t one.

‘I must insist on absolute honesty. I will entertain no more exaggeration! Truth, Master Sweet, is at the heart of all great works of art.’

‘No doubt at all. Which makes me wonder—have you heard of the time I killed a great red bear with naught but these two hands…’

Some Kind of Coward

Nothing was quite the way she remembered it. All small. All drab. All changed.

Some new folks had happened by and built a house where theirs had stood, and a new barn, too. Couple of fields tilled and coming up nice, by all appearances. Flowers blooming around the tree they’d hanged Gully from. The tree Ro’s mother was buried under.

They sat there, on horseback, frowning down, and Shy said, ‘Somehow I thought it’d be the way we left it.’

‘Times move on,’ said Lamb.

‘It’s a nice spot,’ said Temple.

‘No it’s not,’ said Shy.

‘Shall we go down?’

Shy turned her horse away. ‘Why?’

Ro’s hair was grown back to a shapeless mop. She’d taken Lamb’s razor one morning meaning to shave it off again, and sat there by still water, holding her dragon scale and thinking of Waerdinur. Couldn’t picture his face no more. Couldn’t remember his voice or the Maker’s lessons he’d so carefully taught her. How could it all have washed away so fast? In the end she just put the razor back and let her hair grow.

Times move on, don’t they?

They’d moved on in Squaredeal, all right, lots of land about cleared and drained and put under the plough, and new buildings sprung up all over and new faces everywhere passing through or stopping off or settling down to all sorts of business.

Not everything had prospered. Clay was gone and there was a drunk idiot running his store and it had no stock and half the roof had fallen in. Shy argued him down to one Imperial gold piece and a dozen bottles of cheap spirit and bought the place as a going concern. Nearly going, at least. They all set to work next morning like it was the last day of creation, Shy haggling merciless as a hangman for stock, Pit and Ro laughing as they swept dust over each other, Temple and Lamb hammering away at the carpentry, and it weren’t long before things got to feel a bit like they used to. More than Ro had ever thought they would.

Except sometimes she’d think of the mountains and cry. And Lamb still wore a sword. The one he’d taken from her father.

Temple took a room over the road and put a sign above the door saying Temple and Kahdia: Contracts, Clerking and Carpentry.

Ro said to him, ‘This Kahdia ain’t around much, is he?’

‘Nor will he be,’ said Temple. ‘But a man should have someone to blame.’

He started doing law work, which might as well have been magic far as most folk around there were concerned, children peering in at his window to watch him write by candlelight. Sometimes Ro went over there and listened to him talk about the stars, and God, and wood, and the law, and all kinds of faraway places he’d been on his travels, and in languages she’d never even heard before.

‘Who needs a teacher?’ Shy asked. ‘I was taught with a belt.’

‘Look how that turned out,’ said Ro. ‘He knows a lot.’

Shy snorted. ‘For a wise man he’s a hell of a fool.’

But once Ro woke in the night and came down, restless, and saw them out the back together, kissing. There was something in the way Shy touched him made it seem she didn’t think he was quite the fool she said he was.

Sometimes they went out around the farmsteads, more buildings springing up each week that passed, buying and selling. Pit and Ro swaying on the seat of the wagon next to Shy, Lamb riding along beside, always frowning hard at the horizon, hand on that sword.

Shy said to him, ‘There’s naught to worry about.’

And without looking at her he said, ‘That’s when you’d better worry.’

They got in one day at closing time, the long clouds pinking overhead as the sun sank in the west and the lonely wind sighing up and sweeping dust down the street and setting that rusty weathervane to squeak. No Fellowships coming through and the town quiet and still, some children laughing somewhere and a grandmother creaking in her rocker on her porch and just one horse Ro didn’t know tied up at the warped rail.

‘Some days work out,’ said Shy, looking at the back of the wagon, just about empty.

‘Some don’t,’ Ro finished for her.

Calm inside the store, just Wist soft snoring in his chair with his boots up on the counter. Shy slapped ’em off and woke him with a jolt. ‘Everything good?’

‘Slow day,’ said the old man, rubbing his eyes.

‘All your days are slow,’ said Lamb.

‘Like you’re so bloody quick. Oh, and there’s someone been waiting for you. Says you and him got business.’

‘Waiting for me?’ asked Shy, and Ro heard footsteps in the back of the store.

‘No, for Lamb. What did you say your name was?’

A man pushed a hanging coil of rope aside and came into the light. A great, tall man, his head brushing the low rafters, a sword at his hip with a grip of scored grey metal, just like Lamb’s. Just like her father’s. He had a great scar angled across his face and the guttering candle-flame twinkled in his eye. A silver eye, like a mirror.

‘My name’s Caul Shivers,’ he said, voice quiet and all croaky soft and every hair Ro had stretched up.

‘What’s your business?’ muttered Shy.

Shivers looked down at Lamb’s hand, and the stump of the missing finger there, and he said, ‘You know my business, don’t you?’

Lamb just nodded, grim and level.

‘You’re after trouble, you can fucking ride on!’ Shy’s voice, harsh as a crow’s. ‘You hear me, bastard? We’ve had all the trouble we—’

Lamb put his hand on her forearm. The one with the scar coiling around it. ‘It’s all right.’

‘It’s all right if he wants my knife up his—’

‘Stay out of it, Shy. It’s an old debt we got. Past time it was paid.’ Then he spoke to Shivers in Northern. ‘Whatever’s between me and you, it don’t concern these.’

Shivers looked at Shy, and at Ro, and it seemed to her there was no more feeling in his living eye than in his dead. ‘It don’t concern these. Shall we head outside?’

They walked down the steps in front of the store, not slow and not fast, keeping a space between them, eyes on each other all the way. Ro, and Shy, and Pit, and Wist edged after them onto the porch, watching in a silent group.

‘Lamb, eh?’ said Shivers.

‘One name’s good as another.’

‘Oh, not so, not so. Threetrees, and Bethod, and Whirrun of Bligh, and all them others forgotten. But men still sing your songs. Why’s that, d’you reckon?’

‘’Cause men are fools,’ said Lamb.

The wind caught a loose board somewhere and made it rattle. The two Northmen faced each other, Lamb’s hand dangling loose at his side, stump of the missing finger brushing the grip of his sword, and Shivers gently swept his coat clear of his own hilt and held it back out of the way.

‘That my old sword you got there?’ asked Lamb.

Shivers shrugged. ‘Took it off Black Dow. Guess it all comes around, eh?’

‘Always.’ Lamb stretched his neck out one way, then the other. ‘It always comes around.’

Time dragged, dragged. Those children were still laughing somewhere, and maybe the echoing shout of their mother calling them in. That old woman’s rocker softly creak, creaking on the porch. That weathervane squeak, squeaking. A breeze blew up then and stirred the dust in the street and flapped the coats of the two men, no more than four or five strides of dirt between them.

‘What’s happening?’ whispered Pit, and no one answered.

Shivers bared his teeth. Lamb narrowed his eyes. Shy’s hand gripped almost painful hard at Ro’s shoulder, the blood pounding now in her head, the breath crawling in her throat, slow, slow, the rocker creaking and that loose board rattling and a dog barking somewhere.

‘So?’ growled Lamb.

Shivers tipped his head back, and his good eye flickered over to Ro. Stayed on her for a long moment. And she bunched her fists, and clenched her teeth, and she found herself wishing he’d kill Lamb. Wishing it with all her being. The wind came again and stirred his hair, flicked it around his face.

Squeak. Creak. Rattle.

Shivers shrugged. ‘So I’d best be going.’

‘Eh?’

‘Long way home for me. Got to tell ’em that nine-fingered bastard is back to the mud. Don’t you think, Master Lamb?’

Lamb curled his left hand into a fist so the stump didn’t show, and swallowed. ‘Long dead and gone.’

‘All for the best, I reckon. Who wants to run into him again?’ And just like that Shivers walked to his horse and mounted up. ‘I’d say I’ll be seeing you but… I think I’d best not.’

Lamb still stood there, watching. ‘No.’

‘Some men just ain’t stamped out for doing good.’ Shivers took a deep breath, and smiled. A strange thing to see on that ruined face. ‘But it feels all right, even so. To let go o’ something.’ And he turned his horse and headed east out of town.

They all stood stock still a while longer, with the wind, and the creaking rocker, and the sinking sun, then Wist gave a great rattling sigh and said, ‘Bloody hell I near shit myself!’

It was like they could all breathe again, and Shy and Pit hugged each other, but Ro didn’t smile. She was watching Lamb. He didn’t smile either. Just frowned at the dust Shivers left behind him. Then he strode back to the store, and up the steps, and inside without a word. Shy headed after. He was pulling things down from the shelves like he was in a hurry. Dried meat, and feed, and water, and a bedroll. All the things you’d need for a trip.

‘What’re you doing, Lamb?’ asked Shy.

He looked up for a moment, guilty, and back to his packing. ‘I always tried to do the best I could for you,’ he said. ‘That was the promise I made your mother. The best I can do now is go.’

‘Go where?’

‘I don’t know.’ He stopped for a moment, staring at the stump of his middle finger. ‘Someone’ll come, Shy. Sooner or later. Got to be realistic. You can’t do the things I’ve done and walk away smiling. There’ll always be trouble at my back. All I can do is take it with me.’

‘Don’t pretend this is for us,’ said Shy.

Lamb winced. ‘A man’s got to be what he is. Got to be. Say my goodbyes to Temple. Reckon you’ll do all right with him.’

He scooped up those few things and back out into the street, wedged them into his saddlebags and like that he was ready.

‘I don’t understand,’ said Pit, tears on his face.

‘I know.’ Lamb knelt in front of him, and it seemed his eye was wet too. ‘And I’m sorry. Sorry for everything.’ He leaned forward and gathered the three of them in an awkward embrace.

‘The dead know I’ve made mistakes,’ said Lamb. ‘Reckon a man could steer a perfect course through life by taking all the choices I didn’t. But I never regretted helping raise you three. And I don’t regret that I brought you back. Whatever it cost.’

‘We need you,’ said Shy.

Lamb shook his head. ‘No you don’t. I ain’t proud o’ much but I’m proud o’ you. For what that’s worth.’ And he turned away, and wiped his face, and hauled himself up onto his horse.

‘I always said you were some kind of coward,’ said Shy.

He sat looking at them for a moment, and nodded. ‘I never denied it.’

Then he took a breath, and headed off at a trot towards the sunset. Ro stood there on the porch, Pit’s hand in her hand, and Shy’s on her shoulder, and they watched him.

Until he was gone.