Best Served Cold

They chanted her name, and her brother’s name, and the names of her victories. Afieri. Caprile. Musselia. Sweet Pines. The High Bank. The fords of the Sulva too. She wondered if they knew what they were cheering for. Places she’d left trails of corpses behind her. Cantain’s head rotting on the gates of Borletta. Her knife in Hermon’s eye. Gobba, hacked to pieces, pulled apart by rats in the sewers beneath their feet. Mauthis and his clerks with their poisoned ledgers, poisoned fingers, poisoned tongues. Ario and all his butchered revellers at Cardotti’s, Ganmark and his slaughtered guards, Faithful dangling from the wheel, Foscar’s head broken open on the dusty floor. Corpses by the cartload. Some of it she didn’t regret, some of it she did. But none of it seemed like anything to cheer about. She winced up towards the happy faces at the windows. Maybe that was where she and these folk differed.

Maybe they just liked corpses, so long as they weren’t theirs.

She glanced over her shoulder at her so-called allies, but they hardly gave her comfort. Grand Duke Rogont, the king-in-waiting, smiling to the crowds from a knot of watchful guards, a man whose love would last exactly as long as she was useful. Shivers, steel eye glinting, a man who’d turned under her tender touch from likeable optimist to maimed murderer. Cosca winked back at her-the world’s least reliable ally and most unpredictable enemy, and he could still prove to be either one. Friendly… who knew what went on behind those dead eyes?

Further back rode the other surviving leaders of the League of Eight. Or Nine. Lirozio of Puranti, fine moustaches bristling, who’d slipped nimbly back into Rogont’s camp after the very briefest of alliances with Orso. Countess Cotarda, her watchful uncle never far behind. Patine, First Citizen of Nicante, with his emperor’s bearing and his ragged peasant’s clothes, who had declined to share in the battle at the fords but seemed more than happy to share in the victory. There were even representatives of cities she’d sacked on Orso’s behalf-citizens of Musselia and Etrea, a sly-eyed young niece of Duke Cantain’s who’d suddenly found herself Duchess of Borletta, and appeared to be greatly enjoying the experience.

People she’d thought of as her enemies for so long she was having trouble making the adjustment, and by the looks on their faces when her eyes met theirs, so were they. She was the spider they had to suffer in their larder to rid them of their flies. And once the flies are dealt with, who wants a spider in their salad?

She turned back, sweaty shoulders prickling, tried to fix her eyes ahead. They passed along the endless curve of the seafront, gulls sweeping, circling, calling above. All the way her nose was full of that rotten salt tang of Talins. Past the boatyards, the half-finished hulls of two great warships sitting on the rollers like the skeletons of two beached and rotted whales. Past the rope-makers and the sail-weavers, the lumber-yards and the wood-turners, the brass-workers and the chain-makers. Past the vast and reeking fish-market, its flaking stalls empty, its galleries quiet for the first time maybe since the victory at Sweet Pines last emptied the buildings and filled the streets with savagely happy crowds.

Behind the multicoloured splatters of humanity the buildings were smothered with bills, as they had been in Talins more or less since the invention of the press. Old victories, warnings, incitements, patriotic bluster, endlessly pasted over by the new. The latest set carried a woman’s face-stern, guiltless, coldly beautiful. Monza realised with a sick turning of her guts that it was meant to be hers, and beneath it, boldly printed: Strength, Courage, Glory. Orso had once told her that the way to turn a lie into the truth was to shout it often enough, and here was her self-righteous face, repeated over and over, plastered torn and dog-eared across the salt-stained walls. On the side of the next crumbling facade another set of posters, badly drawn and smudgily printed, had her awkwardly holding high a sword, beneath the legend: Never Surrender, Never Relent, Never Forgive. Daubed across the bricks above them in letters of streaky red paint tall as a man was one simple word:

Vengeance.

Monza swallowed, less comfortable than ever. Past the endless docks where fishing vessels, pleasure vessels, merchant vessels of every shape and size, from every nation beneath the sun, stirred on the waves of the great bay, cobwebs of rigging spotted with sailors up to watch the Snake of Talins take the city for her own.

Just as Orso had feared she would.

– 

C osca was entirely comfortable.