Best Served Cold

by Джо Аберкромби

  “Not a worry. Anything I can do, Chief, just let me know.”

  When he turned his head she was looking right at him, lips pressed together in a hard line, eyes fixed on his, that way she had, like she was working out how much he was worth. “There is one other thing.”

  * * *

  Morveer pushed the last lips of lead into position with consummate delicacy and stowed his glazing tools.

  “Will that do?” asked Day.

  “I doubt it will deflect a rainstorm, but it will serve until tomorrow. By then I suspect they will have considerably greater worries than a leaking window.” He rolled the last smudges of putty away from the glass, then followed his assistant across the rooftop to the parapet. Friendly had already negotiated the cord, a squat shape on the other side of a chasm of empty air. Morveer peered over the edge. Beyond the spikes and the ornamental carvings, the smooth stone pillar dropped vertiginously to the cobbled lane. One of the groups of guards slogged past it, lamps bobbing.

  “What about the rope?” Day hissed once they were out of earshot. “When the sun comes up someone will-”

  “No detail overlooked.” Morveer grinned as he produced the tiny vial from an inside pocket. “A few drops will burn through the knot some time after we have crossed. We need only wait at the far side and reel it in.”

  As far as could be ascertained by darkness, his assistant appeared unconvinced. “What if it burns more quickly than-”

  “It will not.”

  “Seems like an awful chance, though.”

  “What do I never take, my dear?”

  “Chances, but-”

  “You go first, then, by all means.”

  “You can count on it.” Day swung quickly under the rope and swarmed across, hand over hand. It took her no longer than a count of thirty to make it to the other side.

  Morveer uncorked the little bottle and allowed a few drops to fall onto the knots. Considering it, he allowed a few more. He had no desire to wait until sunup for the cursed thing to come apart. He allowed the next patrol to pass below, then clambered over the parapet with, it had to be admitted, a good deal less grace than his assistant had displayed. Still, there was no need for undue haste. Caution first, always. He took the rope in his gloved hands, swung beneath it, hooked one shoe over the top, lifted the other There was a harsh ripping sound, and the wind blew suddenly cold about his knee.

  Morveer peered down. His trouser-leg had caught upon a spike bent upwards well above the others, and torn almost as far as his rump. He thrashed his foot, trying to untangle it, but only succeeded in entrapping it more thoroughly.

  “Damn it.” Plainly, this had not been part of the plan. Faint smoke was curling now from the balustrade around which the rope was knotted. It appeared the acid was acting more swiftly than anticipated.

  “Damn it.” He swung himself back to the roof of the bank and perched beside the smoking knot, gripping the rope with one hand. He slid his scalpel from an inside pocket, reached forwards and cut the flapping cloth away from the spike with a few deft strokes. One, two, three and it was almost done, neat as a surgeon. The final stroke and “Ah!” He realised with annoyance, then mounting horror, that he had nicked his ankle with the blade. “Damn it!” The edge was tainted with Larync tincture and, since the stuff had always given him a swell of nausea in the mornings, he had allowed his resistance to it to fade. It would not be fatal. Not of itself. But it might cause him to drop off a rope, and he had developed no immunity to a flailing plunge onto hard, hard cobblestones. The irony was bitter indeed. Most practitioners of his profession were killed, after all, by their own agents.

  He pulled one glove off with his teeth and fumbled through his many pockets for that particular antidote, gurgling curses around the leather, swaying this way and that as the chill wind gusted up and spread gooseflesh all the way down his bare leg. Tiny tubes of glass rattled against his fingertips, each one etched with a mark that enabled him to identify it by touch.

  Under the circumstances, though, the operation was still a testing one. He burped and felt a rush of nausea, a sudden painful shifting in his stomach. His fingers found the right mark. He let the glove fall from his mouth, pulled the phial from his coat with a trembling hand, dragged the cork out with his teeth and sucked up the contents.

  He gagged on the bitter extract, spluttered sour spit down onto the faraway cobbles. He clung tight to the rope, fighting dizziness, the black street seeming to tip round and round him. He was a child again, and helpless. He gasped, whimpered, clung on with both hands. As desperately as he had clung to his mother’s corpse when they came to take him.

  Slowly the antidote had its effect. The dark world steadied, his stomach ceased its mad churning. The lane was beneath him, the sky above, back in their customary positions. His attention was drawn sharply to the knots again, smoking more than ever now and making a slight hissing sound. He could distinctly smell the acrid odour as they burned through.

  “Damn it!” He hooked both legs over the rope and set off, pitifully weak from the self-administered dose of Larync. The air hissed in his throat, tightened now by the unmistakable grip of fear. If the cord burned through before he reached the other side, what then? His guts cramped up and he had to pause for a moment, teeth gritted, wobbling up and down in empty air.

  On again, but he was lamentably fatigued. His arms trembled, his hands shuffled, bare palm and bare leg burning from friction. Well beyond halfway now, and creeping onwards. He let his head hang back, sucking in air for one more effort. He saw Friendly, an arm out towards him, big hand no more than a few strides distant. He saw Day, staring, and Morveer wondered with some annoyance if he could detect the barest hint of a smile on her shadowy face.

  Then there was a faint ripping sound from the far end of the rope.

  The bottom dropped out of Morveer’s stomach and he was falling, falling, swinging downwards, chill air whooshing in through his gaping mouth. The side of the crumbling building plunged towards him. He started to let go a mad wail, just like the one he made when they tore him from his mother’s dead hand. There was a sickening impact that drove his breath out, cut his scream off, tore the cord from his grasping hands.

  There was a crashing, a tearing of wood. He was falling, clawing at the air, mind a cauldron of mad despair, eyes bulging sightless. Falling, arms flailing, legs kicking helplessly, the world reeling around him, wind rushing at his face. Falling, falling… no further than a stride or two. His cheek slapped against floorboards, fragments of wood clattering down around him

  “Eh?” he muttered.

  He was shocked to find himself snatched around the neck, dragged into the air and rammed against a wall with bowel-loosening force, breath driven out in a long wheeze for the second time in a few moments.

  “You! What the fuck?” Shivers. The Northman was, for some reason still obscure, entirely naked. The grubby room behind him was dimly lit by some coals banked up in a grate. Morveer’s eyes wandered down to the bed. Murcatto was in it, propped up on her elbows, rumpled shirt hanging open, breasts flattened against her ribs. She peered at him with no more than a mild surprise, as if she’d opened her front door to see a visitor she had not been expecting until later.

  Morveer’s mind clicked into place. Despite the embarrassment of the position, the residual pulsing of mortal terror and the tingling scratches on his face and hands, he began to chuckle. The rope had snapped ahead of time and, by some freak but hugely welcome chance, he had swung down in a perfect arc and straight through the rotten shutters of one of the rooms in the crumbling house. One had to appreciate the irony.

  “It seems there is such a thing as a happy accident after all!” he cackled.

  Murcatto squinted over from the bed, eyes somewhat unfocused. She had a set of curious scars, he noticed, following the lines of her ribs on one side.

  “Why you smoking?” she croaked.

  Morveer’s eyes slid to the husk-pipe on the boards beside the bed, a ready ex
planation for her lack of surprise at the unorthodox manner of his entrance. “You are confused, but it is easy to see why. I believe it is you that has been smoking. That stuff is absolute poison, you realise. Absolute-”

  Her arm stretched out, limp finger pointing towards his chest. “Smoking, idiot.” He looked down. A few acrid wisps were curling up from his shirt.

  “Damn it!” he squeaked as Shivers took a shocked step back and let him fall. He tore his jacket off, fragments of glass from the shattered acid bottle tinkling to the boards. He scrabbled with his shirt, the front of which had begun to bubble, ripped it open and flung it on the floor. It lay there, smoking noticeably and filling the grubby chamber with a foul reek. The three of them stared at it, by a turn of fate that surely no one could have anticipated, all now at least half-naked.

  “My apologies.” Morveer cleared his throat. “Plainly, this was not part of the plan.”

  Repaid in Full

  Monza frowned at the bed, and she frowned at Shivers in it. He lay flat out, blanket rumpled across his stomach. One big long arm hung off the edge of the mattress, white hand lying limp on its back against the floorboards. One big foot stuck from under the blanket, black crescents of dirt under the nails. His face was turned towards her, peaceful as a child’s, eyes shut, mouth slightly open. His chest, and the long scar across it, rose and fell gently with his breathing.

  By the light of day, it all seemed like a serious error.

  She tossed the coins at Shivers and they jingled onto his chest and scattered across the bed. He jerked awake, blinking around.

  “Whassis?” He stared blearily down at the silver stuck to his chest.

  “Five scales. More than a fair price for last night.”

  “Eh?” He pushed sleep out of his eye with two fingers. “You’re paying me?” He shoved the coins off his skin and onto the blanket. “I feel something like a whore.”

  “Aren’t you one?”

  “No. I’ve got some pride.”

  “So you’ll kill a man for money, but you won’t suck a cunt for it?” She snorted. “There’s morals for you. You want my advice? Take the five and stick to killing in future. That you’ve got a talent for.”

  Shivers rolled over and dragged the blanket up around his neck. “Shut the door on your way out, eh? It’s dreadful cold in here.”

  * * *

  The blade of the Calvez slashed viciously at the air. Cuts left and right, high and low. She spun in the far corner of the courtyard, boots shuffling across the broken paving, lunging with her left arm, bright point darting out chest-high. Her quick breath smoked around her face, shirt stuck to her back in spite of the cold.

  Her legs were a little better each day. They still burned when she moved quickly, were stiff as old twigs in the morning and ached like fury by evening time, but at least she could almost walk without grimacing. There was some spring in her knees even, for all their clicking. Her shoulder and her jaw were loosening. The coins under her scalp barely hurt when she pressed them.

  Her right hand was as ruined as ever, though. She tucked Benna’s sword under her arm and pulled the glove off. Even that was painful. The twisted thing trembled, weak and pale, the scar from Gobba’s wire lurid purple round the side. She winced as she forced the crooked fingers closed, little one still stubbornly straight. The thought that she’d be cursed with this hideous liability for the rest of her life brought on a sudden rush of fury.

  “Bastard,” she hissed through gritted teeth, and dragged the glove back on. She remembered her father giving her a sword to hold for the first time, no more than eight years old. She remembered how heavy it had felt, how strange and unwieldy in her right hand. It hardly felt much better now, in her left. But she had no choice but to learn.

  To start from nothing, if that was what it took.

  She faced a rotten shutter, blade out straight towards it, wrist turned flat to the ground. She snapped out three jabs and the point tore three slats from the frame, one above the other. She snarled as she twisted her wrist and slashed downwards, splitting it clean in two, splinters flying.

  Better. Better each day.

  “ Magnificent. ” Morveer stood in a doorway, a few fresh scratches across one cheek. “There is not a shutter in Styria that will dare oppose us.” He ambled forwards into the courtyard, hands clasped behind him. “I daresay you were even more impressive when your right hand still functioned.”

  “I’ll worry about that.”

  “A great deal, I should think. Recovered from your… exertions of last night with our Northern acquaintance?”

  “My bed, my business. And you? Recovered from your little drop through my window?”

  “No more than a scratch or two.”

  “Shame.” She slapped the Calvez back into its sheath. “Is it done?”

  “It will be.”

  “He’s dead?”

  “He will be.”

  “When?”

  Morveer grinned up at the square of pale sky above them. “Patience is the first of virtues, General Murcatto. The bank has only just opened its doors, and the agent I used takes some time to work. Jobs done well are rarely done quickly.”

  “But it will work?”

  “Oh, absolutely so. It will be… masterful.”

  “I want to see it.”

  “Of course you do. Even in my hands the science of death is never utterly precise, but I would judge about an hour’s time to be the best moment. I strongly caution you to touch nothing within the bank, however.” He turned away, wagging one finger at her over his shoulder. “And take care you are not recognised. Our work together is only just commencing.”

  * * *

  The banking hall was busy. Dozens of clerks worked at heavy desks, bent over great ledgers, their pens scratching, rattling, scratching again. Guards stood bored about the walls, watching half-heartedly or not watching at all. Monza weaved between primped and pretty groups of wealthy men and women, slid between their oiled and bejewelled rows, Shivers shouldering his way through after. Merchants and shopkeepers and rich men’s wives, bodyguards and lackeys with strongboxes and money bags. As far as she could tell it was an ordinary day’s monumental profits for the Banking House of Valint and Balk.

  The place Duke Orso got his money.

  Then she caught a glimpse of a lean man with a hook nose, speaking to a group of fur-trimmed merchants and with a clerk flanking him on either side, ledgers tucked under their arms. That vulture face sprang from the crowds like a spark in a cellar, and set a fire in her. Mauthis. The man she’d come to Westport to kill. And it hardly needed saying that he looked very much alive.

  Somebody called out over in the corner of the hall but Monza’s eyes were fixed ahead, jaw suddenly clenched tight. She started to push through the queues towards Orso’s banker.

  “What’re you doing?” Shivers hissed in her ear, but she shook him off, shoved a man in a tall hat out of her way.

  “Give him some air!” somebody shouted. People were looking around, muttering, craning up to see something, the orderly queues starting to dissolve. Monza kept going, closer now, and closer. Closer than was sensible. She had no idea what she’d do when she got to Mauthis. Bite him? Say hello? She was less than ten paces away-as near as she’d been when he peered down at her dying brother.

  Then the banker gave a sudden wince. Monza slowed, easing carefully through the crowd. She saw Mauthis double over as if he’d been punched in the stomach. He coughed, and again-hard, retching coughs. He took a lurching step and clutched at the wall. People were moving all around, the place echoing with curious whispers, the odd strange shout.

  “Stand back!”

  “What is it?”

  “Turn him over!”

  Mauthis’ eyes shimmered with wet, veins bulging from his thin neck. He clawed at one of the clerks beside him, knees buckling. The man staggered, guiding his master slowly to the floor.

  “Sir? Sir?”

  An atmosphere of breathless fascin
ation seemed to have gripped the whole hall, teetering on the brink of fear. Monza edged closer, peering over a velvet-clad shoulder. Mauthis’ starting eyes met hers, and they stared straight at each other. His face was stretched tight, skin turning red, fibres of muscle standing rigid. One quivering arm raised up towards her, one bony finger pointing.

  “Muh,” he mouthed. “Muh… Muh…”

  His eyes rolled back and he started to dance, legs flopping, back arching, jerking madly around on the marble tiles like a landed fish. The men about him stared down, horrified. One of them was doubled up by a sudden coughing fit. People were shouting all over the banking hall.

  “Help!”

  “Over here!”

  “Somebody!”

  “Some air, I said!”

  A clerk lurched up from his desk, chair clattering over, hands at his throat. He staggered a few steps, face turning purple, then crashed down, a shoe flying off one kicking foot. One of the clerks beside Mauthis was on his knees, fighting for breath. A woman gave a piercing scream.

  “By the dead-” came Shivers’ voice.

  Pink foam frothed from the banker’s wide-open mouth. His thrashing settled to a twitching. Then to nothing. His body sagged back, empty eyes goggling up over Monza’s shoulder, towards the grinning busts ranged round the walls.

  Two dead. Five left.

  “Plague!” somebody shrieked, and as if a general had roared for the charge on a battlefield, the place was plunged instantly into jostling chaos. Monza was nearly barged over as one of the merchants who’d been talking to Mauthis turned to run. Shivers stepped up and gave him a shove, sent him sprawling on top of the banker’s corpse. A man with skewed eyeglasses clutched at her, bulging eyes horribly magnified in his pink face. She punched on an instinct with her right hand, gasped as her twisted knuckles jarred against his cheek and sent a jolt of pain to her shoulder, chopped at him with the heel of her left and knocked him over backwards.