Best Served Cold

“They say you burned her, drowned her, cut her into quarters and tossed them from your balcony, but she was stitched back together and lived again. They say she killed two hundred men at the fords of the Sulva. That she charged alone into your ranks and scattered them like chaff on the wind.”

“The stamp of Rogont’s theatrics,” hissed the duke through gritted teeth. “That bastard was born to be an author of cheap fantasies rather than a ruler of men. We will hear next that Murcatto has sprouted wings and given birth to the second coming of Euz!”

“I wouldn’t be at all surprised. Bills are posted on every street corner proclaiming her an instrument of the Fates, sent to deliver Styria from your tyranny.”

“Tyrant, now?” The duke barked a grim chuckle. “How quickly the wind shifts in the modern age!”

“They say she cannot be killed.”

“Do… they… indeed?” Orso’s red-rimmed eyes swivelled to Morveer. “What do you say, poisoner?”

“Your Excellency,” and he plunged down into the lowest of bows once more, “I have fashioned a successful career upon the principle that there is nothing that lives that cannot be deprived of life. It is the remarkable ease of killing, rather than the impossibility of it, that has always caused me astonishment.”

“Do you care to prove it?”

“Your Excellency, I humbly entreat only the opportunity.” Morveer swept out another bow. It was his considered opinion that one could never bow too much to men of Orso’s stamp, though he did reflect that persons of huge ego were a great drain on the patience of bystanders.

“Then here it is. Kill Monzcarro Murcatto. Kill Nicomo Cosca. Kill Countess Cotarda of Affoia. Kill Duke Lirozio of Puranti. Kill First Citizen Patine of Nicante. Kill Chancellor Sotorius of Sipani. Kill Grand Duke Rogont, before he can be crowned. Perhaps I will not have Styria, but I will have revenge. On that you can depend.”

Morveer had been warmly smiling as the list began. By its end he was smiling no longer, unless one could count the fixed rictus he maintained across his trembling face only by the very greatest of efforts. It appeared his bold gambit had spectacularly oversucceeded. He was forcibly reminded of his attempt to discomfort four of his tormentors at the orphanage by placing Lankam salts in the water, which had ended, of course, with the untimely deaths of all the establishment’s staff and most of the children too.

“Your Excellency,” he croaked, “that is a significant quantity of murder.”

“And some fine names for your little list, no? The rewards will be equally significant, on that you can rely, will they not, Master Sulfur?”

“They will.” Sulfur’s eyes moved from his fingernails to Morveer’s face. Different-coloured eyes, Morveer now noticed, one green, one blue. “I represent, you see, the Banking House of Valint and Balk.”

“Ah.” Suddenly, and with profound discomfort, Morveer placed the man. He had seen him talking with Mauthis in the banking hall in Westport but a few short days before he had filled the place with corpses. “Ah. I really had not the slightest notion, you understand…” How he wished now that he had not killed Day. Then he could have noisily denounced her as the culprit and had something tangible with which to furnish the duke’s dungeons. Fortunately, it seemed Master Sulfur was not seeking scapegoats. Yet.

“Oh, you were but the weapon, as you say. If you can cut as sharply on our behalf you have nothing to worry about. And besides, Mauthis was a terrible bore. Shall we say, if you are successful, the sum of one million scales?”

“One… million?” muttered Morveer.

“There is nothing that lives that cannot be deprived of life.” Orso leaned forwards, eyes fixed on Morveer’s face. “Now get about it!”

– 

N ight was falling when they came to the place, lamps lit in the grimy windows, stars spilled out across the soft night sky like diamonds on a jeweller’s cloth. Shenkt had never liked Affoia. He had studied there, as a young man, before he ever knelt to his master and before he swore never to kneel again. He had fallen in love there, with a woman too rich, too old and far too beautiful for him, and been made a whining fool of. The streets were lined not only with old pillars and thirsty palms, but with the bitter remnants of his childish shame, jealousy, weeping injustice. Strange, that however tough one’s skin becomes in later life, the wounds of youth never close.

Shenkt did not like Affoia, but the trail had led him here. It would take more than ugly memories to make him leave a job half-done.

“That is the house?” It was buried in the twisting backstreets of the city’s oldest quarter, far from the thoroughfares where the names of men seeking public office were daubed on the walls along with their great qualities and other, less complimentary words and pictures. A small building, with slumping lintels and a slumping roof, squeezed between a warehouse and a leaning shed.

“That’s the house.” The beggar’s voice was soft and stinking as rotten fruit.