Best Served Cold

T he wound in Monza’s shoulder burned. The one through her left hand burned far worse. Her palm, her fingers, sticky with blood. She could barely make a fist, let alone grip a blade. No choice, then. She dragged the glove from her right hand with her teeth, reached out and took hold of the Calvez’ hilt with it, feeling the crooked bones shift as her twisted fingers closed around the grip, little one still painfully straight.

“Ah. Right-handed?” Ganmark flicked his sword spinning into the air, snatched it back with his own right hand as nimbly as a circus trickster. “I always did admire your determination, if not the goals on which you trained it. Revenge, now, eh?”

“Revenge,” she snarled.

“Revenge. If you could even get it, what good would it do you? All this expenditure of effort, pain, treasure, blood, for what? Who is ever left better off for it?” His sad eyes watched her slowly stand. “Not the avenged dead, certainly. They rot on, regardless. Not those who are avenged upon, of course. Corpses all. And what of the ones who take vengeance, what of them? Do they sleep easier, do you suppose, once they have heaped murder on murder? Sown the bloody seeds of a hundred other retributions?” She circled around, trying to think of some trick to kill him with. “All those dead men at that bank in Westport, that was your righteous work, I suppose? And the carnage at Cardotti’s, a fair and proportionate reply?”

“What had to be done!”

“Ah, what had to be done. The favourite excuse of unexamined evil echoes down the ages and slobbers from your twisted mouth.” He danced at her, their swords rang together, once, twice. He jabbed, she parried and jabbed back. Each contact sent a jolt of pain up her arm. She ground her teeth together, forced the scowl to stay on her face, but there was no disguising how much it hurt her, or how clumsy she was with it. If she’d had small chances with her left, she had none at all with her right, and he knew it already.

“Why the Fates chose you for saving I will never guess, but you should have thanked them kindly and slunk away into obscurity. Let us not pretend you and your brother did not deserve precisely what you received.”

“Fuck yourself! I didn’t deserve that!” But even as she said it, she had to wonder. “My brother didn’t!”

Ganmark snorted. “No one is quicker to forgive a handsome man than I, but your brother was a vindictive coward. A charming, greedy, ruthless, spineless parasite. A man of the very lowest character imaginable. The only thing that lifted him from utter worthlessness, and utter inconsequence, was you.” He sprang at her with lethal speed and she reeled away, fell against a cherry tree with a grunt and stumbled back through the shower of white blossom. He could surely have spitted her but he stayed still as a statue, sword at the ready, smiling faintly as he watched her thrash her way clear.

“And let us face the facts, General Murcatto. You, for all your undeniable talents, have hardly been a paragon of virtue. Why, there must be a hundred thousand people with just reasons to fling your hated carcass from that terrace!”

“Not Orso. Not him!” She came low, jabbing sloppily at his hips, wincing as he flicked her sword aside and jarred the grip in her twisted palm.

“If that’s a joke, it’s not a funny one. Quibble with the judge, when the sentence is self-evidently more than righteous?” He placed his feet with all the watchful care of an artist applying paint to a canvas, steering her back onto the cobbles. “How many deaths have you had a hand in? How much destruction? You are a bandit! A glorified profiteer! You are a maggot grown fat on the rotting corpse of Styria!” Three more blows, rapid as a sculptor’s hammer on his chisel, snapping her sword this way and that in her aching grip. “Did not deserve, you say to me, did not deserve? That excuse for a right hand is embarrassing enough. Pray do not shame yourself further.”

She made a tired, pained, clumsy lunge. He deflected it disdainfully, already stepping around her and letting her stumble past. She expected his sword in her back; instead she felt his boot thud into her arse and send her sprawling across the cobbles, Benna’s sword bouncing from her numb fingers one more time. She lay there a moment, panting for breath, then slowly rolled over, came up to her knees. There hardly seemed much point standing. She’d be back here soon enough, once he ran her through. Her right hand throbbed, trembled. The shoulder of her stolen uniform was dark with blood, the fingers of her left hand were dripping with it.

Ganmark flicked his wrist, whipped the head from a flower and into his waiting palm. He lifted it to his face and breathed in deep. “A beautiful day, and a good place to die. We should have finished you up at Fontezarmo, along with your brother. But now will do.”