Best Served Cold

The words froze on his lips and he stood, spear limp, as she rode past. On into the camp, men going about their morning rituals, eating their breakfasts, getting ready to march. A few looked up as she and Shivers passed on the track, or at any rate the widest stretch of mud between the tents. A few of them started staring. Then a few more, watching, following at a distance, gathering along the way.

“It’s her.”

“Murcatto.”

“She’s alive?”

She rode through them the way she used to, shoulders back, chin up, sneer locked on her mouth, not even bothering to look. As if they were nothing to her. As if she was a better kind of animal than they were. And all the while she prayed silently they didn’t work out what they’d never worked out yet, but what she was always afraid to the pit of her stomach they would.

That she didn’t know what the hell she was doing, and a knife would kill her just as dead as anyone else.

But none of them spoke to her, let alone tried to stop her. Mercenaries are cowards, on the whole, even more so than most people. Men who’ll kill because it’s the easiest way they’ve found to make a living. Mercenaries have no loyalty in them, on the whole, by definition. Not much to their leaders, even less to their employers.

That was what she was counting on.

The captain general’s tent was pitched on a rise in a big clearing, red pennant hanging limp from its tallest pole, well above the jumble of badly pitched canvas around it. Monza kicked her horse up, making a couple of men scurry out of her way, trying not to let the nerves that were boiling up her throat show. It was a long enough gamble as it was. Show one grain of fear and she’d be done.

She swung down from her horse, tossed the reins carelessly round a sapling trunk. She had to sidestep a goat someone had tethered there, then strode up towards the flap. Nocau, the Gurkish outcast who’d guarded the tent during the daylight since way back in Sazine’s time, stood staring, his big scimitar not even drawn.

“You can shut your mouth now, Nocau.” She leaned in close and pushed his slack jaw shut with her gloved finger so his teeth snapped together. “Wouldn’t want a bird nesting in there, eh?” And she pushed through the flap.

The same table, even if the charts on it were of a different stretch of ground. The same flags hanging about the canvas, some of them that she’d added, won at Sweet Pines and the High Bank, at Musselia and Caprile. And the same chair, of course, that Sazine had supposedly stolen from the Duke of Cesale’s dining table the day he formed the Thousand Swords. It stood empty on a pair of crates, waiting for the arse of the new captain general. For her arse, if the Fates were kind.

Though she had to admit they weren’t usually.

The three most senior captains left in the great brigade stood close to the improvised dais, muttering to each other. Sesaria, Victus, Andiche. The three Benna had persuaded to make her captain general. The three who’d persuaded Faithful Carpi to take her place. The three she needed to persuade to give it back to her. They looked up, and they saw her, and they straightened.

“Well, well,” rumbled Sesaria.

“Well, well, well,” muttered Andiche. “If it isn’t the Serpent of Talins.”

“The Butcher of Caprile herself,” whined Victus. “Where’s Faithful?”

She looked him right in the eye. “Not coming. You boys need a new captain general.”

The three of them swapped glances, and Andiche sucked noisily at his yellowed teeth. A habit Monza had always found faintly disgusting. One of many disgusting things about the lank-haired rat of a man. “As it happens, we’d reached the same conclusion on our own.”

“Faithful was a good fellow,” rumbled Sesaria.

“Too good for the job,” said Victus.

“A decent captain general needs to be an evil shit at best.”

Monza showed her teeth. “Any one of you three is more than evil enough, I reckon. There aren’t three bigger shits in Styria.” It was no kind of joke. She should’ve murdered these three rather than Faithful. “Too big a set of shits to work for each other, though.”

“True enough,” said Victus sourly.

Sesaria tipped his head back and stared at her down his flat nose. “We need someone new.”

“Or someone old,” said Monza.

Andiche grinned at his two fellows. “As it happens, we’d reached the same conclusion on our own,” he said again.

“Good for you.” This was going more smoothly even than she’d hoped. Eight years she’d led the Thousand Swords, and she knew how to handle the likes of these three. Greed, nice and simple. “I’m not the type to let a little bad blood get in the way of a lot of good money, and I damn well know that none of you are.” She held Ishri’s coin up to the light, a Gurkish double-headed coin, Emperor on one side, Prophet on the other. She flicked it to Andiche. “There’ll be plenty more like that, to go over to Rogont.”

Sesaria stared at her from under his thick grey brows. “Fight for Rogont, against Orso?”