Best Served Cold

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

“How do they know who’s on whose side?” hissed Friendly.

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

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

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

“Are you laughing?”

The old mercenary wiped his eyes with a sooty finger. “What’s the alternative?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Swiftly, my friend, before those sewer rats return.”

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

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

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

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

“Why that way?”

“Why not that way?”

Friendly could not move. His knees were trembling. “I don’t want to go.”

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

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

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

Mercy and Cowardice

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