by Jude Fisher
‘We could try our luck in Cera.’
‘We could.’ Joz ran the whetstone down the edge of the Dragon of Wen, then rubbed the blade with his oiled cloth and sat back and admired Katla Aransen’s artistry for the thousandth time.
‘I heard the Duke was assembling troops.’
‘He won’t take Eyran mercenaries since Cob Merson turned tail on him and took the Duke of Gila’s coin at Calastrina.’
Mam considered this. ‘Further south, then, maybe? Where there’s less competition?’
‘Less money, too. Though Jetra might be worth a visit.’
‘I wouldn’t mind visiting the Eternal City again.’
To Joz’s sensitive ear, Mam sounded almost wistful. He glanced up and saw that her eyes had become unfocused, as if they gazed on something far beyond the inn room in which they sat. ‘It’s a curious place, Jetra,’ he said carefully. ‘Full of odd folk passing through.’
Mam sighed. ‘I suppose they do pass through and rarely stay,’ she said at last. She smiled brightly at him, without showing the dreadful teeth. ‘Long way to go on a chance, though we’d best move on from Forent, I’d say. I would not trust the lord here as far as I can throw him.’
Joz grinned. ‘Still, we got paid, and that’s more than I’d expected, given the circumstances. You’re a wonder, Mam, for truth.’
Mam tapped the side of her nose. ‘I know more than he would like me to know,’ she said cryptically, ‘and that’s what keeps us safe.’ She got up, crossed the room and looked out of the window onto the streets below. Outside, revellers wandered unsteadily up and down with flagons in their hands and coin in their purses. ‘Should be a good night for the whores,’ she said tightly. ‘Looks as if most of their customers’ll be too addled to get their wicks stiff enough to use ’em.’
Joz grimaced. ‘I could sink a few jugs of ale myself. Why don’t we take ourselves downstairs and carry on our discussions in the snug?’
Mam folded her arms. ‘And who guards the money if we get legless?’
‘We could take it with us.’
‘We might as well hang a banner out of the window inviting every thief in Forent to help himself as clank through the bar with this lot.’
The mounds of cantari they had accumulated in the past few months – by fair means or foul – lay in a large, Eyran-made wooden coffer. It now contained almost two dozen bags of coin: far more than the two of them could carry without drawing considerable attention to themselves, even if they used all the moneybelts and the cloaks with the hidden pockets.
‘Tell you what,’ Mam said after a while. ‘Why don’t you break into the funds and go down and buy us a few jugs of that good red wine they make round here and bring it back up? A meat pie wouldn’t go amiss, either.’
Joz got to his feet with alacrity. He opened the coffer, helped himself to a handful of coin and was out of the door before she could change her mind. The Dragon of Wen lay on the bench where he had left it, gleaming in the candlelight.
As the door swung closed, Mam turned and surveyed the town of Forent again. It was not a bad place, she thought. The food was good, and its ambience was a little less stuffy than some Istrian cities, though she did not like its lord, and keeping track of the lads in a town that contained quite so many distractions could prove to be something of a problem. But they’d be out of here tomorrow, and maybe it was time to head south and confront the demon she had encountered in Jetra: if indeed he was still there.
Her reverie was broken by the creak of a floorboard in the room behind her. It was far too soon for Joz to be returning. She whirled around, knife in hand, but the assassin’s blade took her in the side of the neck all the same.
Knobber, Doc and Dogo crossed the market square, and took the second turning on the left past a pair of drunken brawlers. It seemed the lighterman had not yet made it to Tiger Alley to ignite the dozen sconces there, for the street was dark and gloomy, although the Tower of Earthly Delights was apparent about halfway down on the right-hand side where pale porticoes marked its entrance. Knobber ran a hand nervously through his hair.
‘Dark,’ he noted laconically.
Doc laughed. ‘Bet you can find your way blindfold – you’ve been here every night since we arrived, haven’t you?’
‘D’you think Mam would let me bring her with us?’
‘Gia? You’re joking! What can she do, other than f—’
‘She’s not a whore by choice,’ Knobber interrupted grimly. ‘She had a decent life before her bastard husband got fed up with her and paid one of his slaves to say she took him as a lover and cast her off by law. If she hadn’t got to Forent, she’d have been burned.’
‘They’ve all got some sob-story. There’s always some web of lies they’ve concocted to appeal to your better nature and get a bit more money out of you, and this Gia sounds like she’s spun you up as cosy as a she-spider. Just nod and smile and get back to work on her, that’s what I say,’ Dogo grinned. ‘But don’t believe it for a second, or you’re a bigger fool than you look.’
Knobber stopped dead. When he turned around, moonlight fell full upon the broad bones of his face. ‘Say another word about her and you’ll be skipping with your guts.’
Dogo shrugged. Then his eyes flickered away from his companion and his face became a mask of ferocity. Snarling with fury, he drew one of the blades strapped to his leg and leapt away from Knobber, who stared at him in bemusement.
It was the last thing he did. A moment later, his face met the cobbled street with a sickening thud and he died wondering what had caused the sudden burning pain in his back and whether Gia would think him disrespectful for turning up with mud on his shirt.
The moodstone on the pendant around his neck changed in swift succession from green to cloudy grey to unsullied white, as if its colour had drained out of it to meet the dark pool that spread out from Knobber’s body. Neither of his comrades remarked upon it, for they were fighting for their lives.
When Joz shoved open the door to their common room, his hands wrapped around a trayful of bread and meat and broth, and with two capped flasks of the innkeeper’s best wine balanced precariously under each arm, it took him several seconds to make sense of what he saw. Mam was on her knees in the middle of the chamber in front of a wiry, dark man who had her hair caught in his fist, forcing her head back. For an insane moment, Joz wondered whether his troop leader was engaged in an unthinkable sexual act; then he saw the bright gore leaking from her neck and the sheen of a silver blade in the man’s right hand. With a roar, he hurled the victuals at the intruder. The tray skimmed Mam’s head, raining bread and broth down on her. One of the wine flasks flew wide, but the other caught the man a glancing blow, shattered against the wall behind him and spewed its deep red liquid down the plaster like blood.
Staggering away from her attacker, Mam rounded on Joz, hand clamped to her neck. Blood leaked through her fingers. Broth leaked from her hair. ‘What the fuck do you think you’re doing?’ she croaked. ‘Don’t try to drown the bastard – stick him with your sword!’
The Dragon of Wen lay glittering on the bench beside the door where Joz had left it. He could feel the tug of the metal like the breathing presence of a live thing behind him. And he could see how the black eyes of the assassin slid for an instant towards the blade. In that instant, Joz moved: not for Katla Aransen’s finest work, but straight at the hillman, taking him fast and low in the gut with his head in a time-honoured and hardly subtle Eyran wrestling manoeuvre. His left hand clamped itself around the man’s wrist, twisted mercilessly. Bones crunched; the assassin screamed. The curved southern blade clattered to the floor and spun harmlessly away. Carried backwards by Joz Bearhand’s powerful momentum, the hillman lost his balance and fell heavily beneath the mercenary. Joz clamped his knees down on the man’s shoulders and prepared to squeeze the life out of him; then a moment later found himself falling sideways, propelled by an insistent kick. By the time he had come to his feet, the man was dead. Bre
athing raggedly, Mam stood over the fallen assassin, propped up by the greatsword which she had driven so hard through the hillman’s chest that it was buried to the depth of half a hand in the wooden boards. Fingers caressing the dying wolf that lay strangling in the coils of the intricately carved dragon etched into the hilt, she stared down at the foe who had so nearly taken her life, a strange little half-smile on her broth-and-blood-smeared face. In the preternatural silence that followed the death, Joz could hear the steady drip from Mam’s wound onto the floor.
‘You’d better bind that—’ he started, but she put her finger to her lips.
Footsteps sounded on the stairs below, heavy and awkward.
With terrifying determination, Mam set her foot on the dead assassin’s chest and dragged at the Dragon of Wen with what little strength remained to her, working the blade back and forth so that metal grated repulsively on bone, but it remained stuck fast. Joz extended his short sword towards her, hilt first. Mam gave him a mulish look. Then with a shrug she took the weapon from him and stepped away. Joz wrenched the Dragon free in a moment and took up his stance facing the door.
A moment later, Dogo appeared, prodding a tall, cloaked man with a tattooed face before him with his dagger. He was followed by Doc, a body slung over his shoulder.
Mam’s legs suddenly gave way beneath her and she crumpled to the floor. Joz was at her side at once; but it appeared it was not solely the loss of blood that had caused her collapse.
‘Persoa,’ she breathed. ‘I thought you were dead.’
The cloaked assassin smiled thinly.
‘Several times,’ he said in heavily accented Eyran. ‘Just like the proverbial Bast, I seem to have nine lives.’
‘Must have reached your ninth, then,’ Doc growled, dropping Knobber’s corpse onto the floor. The dead sell-sword fell with a thud to lie between them like an accusation. The pendant on its leather thong swung clear of the body to rattle on the wooden boards, and its stone as empty as his gaze. ‘I thought you might care to question this bastard yourself, since he claims to know you,’ he said, turning to Mam. His eyes became round at the sight of her blood-soaked tunic and gaping neck. ‘By the seven hells what happened here?’ He had never seen his leader wounded before: it shook his faith in the rightness of the world.
Mam gave him her ghastly smile, made all the more ghoulish by the blood on her teeth. Then she wound a kerchief tightly around her neck and crawled over to Knobber. Head on one side, she scrutinised his corpse. ‘No swordbelt?’ she asked at last.
‘He said Gia was scared of his weapon.’
Dogo stifled a tasteless chuckle.
Mam glanced at him sharply, then ran her fingers gently over the dead mercenary’s face. When she withdrew her hand, Knobber’s eyelids were closed. ‘Why’d you bring him back here?’
‘I thought you’d want to question him,’ Doc repeated. ‘Find out who paid him.’
Mam rolled her eyes. ‘Not him, you fool: Knobber.’
Doc exchanged appalled glances with Joz. ‘Couldn’t just leave him out in the street . . . it wasn’t right.’
The mercenary leader levered herself upright and thrust her face at him. ‘Right? Since when have we been interested in what’s right? We’re sell-swords – and Knobber died because he forgot that small fact. No sword – he dies. Simple as that. You die as a sell-sword, you get left where you fall. We don’t do funerals: we kill people.’ She leaned down and unhooked the pendant from around Knobber’s neck, weighed it in her palm, then pocketed it. ‘Waste not, want not.’
The hillman made a superstitious gesture. ‘Unlucky,’ he said.
Mam eyed him with hostility. ‘I don’t ever remember you having such scruples in your previous life. In fact, I’d go so far as to say you’re the least principled man I ever met. Which is saying something. You and Rui Finco make a good team.’
Persoa grinned. Except for the ritual tattoos of his tribe, which ran in complicated whorls and flourishes from chin to brow, he had the face of a young man – smooth skin stretching over strong cheekbones, a disingenuous expression. Laughter lines ran from his engaging smile to the corners of his wide-set brown eyes. The tattoos tended to frighten people, so he had learned early in life how to make people trust him: as a weapon it was more useful than even the best Forent steel. But his eyes were a hundred years old: those eyes had witnessed and stored away sights that would set weaker souls to gibbering. ‘I never could fool you.’
‘You did pretty well in Jetra.’
‘Who was fooling whom? I was enchanted, enraptured; bewitched.’
Mam coloured.
Dogbreath grimaced at Joz Bearhand, who winked. Doc gawped from the prisoner to the mercenary leader, hardly believing his eyes or his ears. Mam and this . . . southerner? Mam . . . bewitching?
‘So enraptured that you went out one morning to fetch us bread and kaffee and never came back,’ she croaked.
Persoa’s eyes went solemn. ‘I had no choice.’
‘And did you have a choice about taking on this little commission from our Lord of Forent?’
‘Had I known—’
‘Oh, you knew,’ Mam stated grimly. ‘You always know.’ Persoa acknowledged the fact with a tilt of the head and a barely perceptible shrug.
‘I hope Rui paid you damn well,’ Mam snarled.
‘He did.’ Doc held up a heavy belt lined with bags of coin. He hefted it consideringly. ‘I made him take us to this. Haven’t had a chance to count the contents, but I’d say there’s at least four thousand cantari in here.’
The hillman made a face. ‘I would not have accepted less for such a . . . challenge.’
Mam laughed, then winced. ‘Didn’t have the nerve to take me on yourself, then.’
‘Perhaps I did not wish to see you die.’
‘I’m so touched.’
‘Hami never was as accomplished as he liked to think.’
The fallen assassin’s blood had crept across the floor in an ever-expanding puddle. Under the dark tan of his skin, Hami’s face had already begun to take on its death-pallor, the cheeks shrinking in on themselves, the eyes staring hollowly up into the rafters. All five sell-swords regarded the corpse dispassionately.
‘He nearly took me out,’ Mam said softly. ‘I must be getting slow and deaf in my old age.’ She removed the dagger she wore strapped to her left thigh and tested the blade on her thumb. A thin red line appeared in the skin. She sucked the beads of blood away, looking thoughtful.
‘To me, you look as young and as beautiful as you always did,’ Persoa said gallantly.
Dogbreath guffawed, then tried to disguise his lapse in social etiquette as a cough.
‘Well that’s an accurate enough statement, even if it was phrased as slimily as by a southern lord, since I never did look young or beautiful.’
‘To me you did.’
‘Are you really so desperate to save your neck?’ Mam asked curiously, placing the point of the blade under the hillman’s chin and pressing hard enough that he was forced to raise his head to expose the entire length of his throat. The tail end of the left tattoo that marked him as one of the Catro clan from the south-east quarter of the Farem Heights curled lazily past his ear and disappeared from view amid the folds of his cloak. Mam ran the blade lightly down his neck, tracing the line of the pattern. The dagger tickled the skin, then reached the fabric of the cloak and slipped abruptly sideways and down. Sheared from its fastening, the cloak slid to the floor around Persoa’s feet. Little beads of perspiration popped out onto his brow. Mam grinned. The blade wavered, then continued its journey along the inked design where it ran down the throat and came to rest at the collarbone in a curlicue that completed itself with a delicate bifurcation and three elongated dots. ‘I always did like your tattoos,’ she said nostalgically.
‘I remember,’ Persoa said, looking distinctly nervous.
‘Do you still have the others?’
It was a pointless question. Once marked by the tribe l
eader, nothing less than flaying was going to remove a Farem tattoo. The assassin nodded. Mam raised an eyebrow, then slit his shirt fastenings till the fabric gaped open to the waist. Joz whistled. Where above the markings had appeared abstract and stylised, those covered by the man’s clothing were figurative and extraordinarily detailed. They depicted a scene from mountain legend: the imprisonment of the god Sirio beneath the Red Peak and the flight of his sibling, the goddess Falla. The tail and hindquarters of her magical cat, Bast, could just be seen disappearing into the waistband of Persoa’s leggings. Mam knew the markings well: she had spent many hours tracing them across the hillman’s smooth, dark skin. She knew exactly what lay between the cat’s forepaws. Ah yes, she remembered that all too well . . .
‘Why, Persoa, you remain a work of art,’ she smiled. ‘It would be a shame to lay such craft to waste.’
The assassin breathed a sigh of relief.
‘Though of course I could simply carve the skin from you as a keepsake, to remind me of . . . interesting times.’ She looked away from his alarmed face, took in the curious expressions of her troop. ‘Shall I spare him, lads, now that we’re one down?’
Doc stared hard at the corpse he’d carried back from Tiger Alley. ‘I’d sooner run him through and have done with this sorry place,’ he said shortly.
Dogbreath polished his knife on his leg. ‘I’d be happy to oblige.’
Joz’s face remained stony. ‘Knobber’s dead and there’s nothing that’ll bring him back. But I guess Persoa was doing the job he was paid to do, same as us: we’ve all taken the Lord of Forent’s money and done worse.’