Best Served Cold

“There will be little fighting!” shouted Cosca, as if he could guess her thoughts. “That I promise you! And what there is you will be well paid for thrice over! A scale a week, plus shares of booty! And there will be plenty of booty, lads, believe me! Our cause is just… or just enough, and victory is a certainty.”

“We could do that!” hissed Benna. “You want to go back to tossing mud? Broken down tired every night and dirt under your fingernails? I won’t!”

Monza thought of the work she would have just to clear the upper field, and how much she might make from doing it. A line had formed of men keen to join the Company of the Sun, beggars and farmers mostly. A black-skinned notary took their names down in a ledger.

Monza shoved past them.

“I am Monzcarro Murcatto, daughter of Jappo Murcatto, and this is my brother Benna, and we are fighters. Can you find work for us in your company?”

Cosca frowned at her, and the black-skinned man shook his head. “We need men with experience of war. Not women and boys.” He tried to move her away with his arm.

She would not be moved. “We’ve experience. More than these scrapings.”

“I’ve work for you,” said one of the farmers, made bold by signing his mark on the paper. “How about you suck my cock?” He laughed at that. Until Monza knocked him down in the mud and made him swallow half his teeth with the heel of her boot.

Nicomo Cosca watched this methodical display with one eyebrow slightly raised. “Sajaam, the Paper of Engagement. Does it specify men, exactly? What is the wording?”

The notary squinted at a document. “Two hundred cavalry and two hundred infantry, those to be persons well equipped and of quality. Persons is all it says.”

“And quality is such a vague term. You, girl! Murcatto! You are hired, and your brother too. Make your marks.”

She did so, and so did Benna, and as simply as that they were soldiers of the Thousand Swords. Mercenaries. The farmer clutched at Monza’s leg.

“My teeth.”

“Pick through your shit for them,” she said.

Nicomo Cosca, famed soldier of fortune, led his new hirings from the village to the sound of a merry pipe, and they camped under the stars that night, gathered round fires in the darkness, talking of making it rich in the coming campaign.

Monza and Benna huddled together with their blanket around their shoulders. Cosca came out of the murk, firelight glinting on his breastplate. “Ah! My war-children! My lucky mascots! Cold, eh?” He swept his crimson cloak off and tossed it down to them. “Take this. Might keep the frost from your bones.”

“What d’you want for it?”

“Take it with my compliments, I have another.”

“Why?” she grunted, suspicious.

“ ‘A captain looks first to the comfort of his men, then to his own,’ Stolicus said.”

“Who’s he?” asked Benna.

“Stolicus? Why, the greatest general of history!” Monza stared blankly at him. “An emperor of old. The most famous of emperors.”

“What’s an emperor?” asked Benna.

Cosca raised his brows. “Like a king, but more so. You should read this.” He slid something from a pocket and pressed it into Monza’s hand. A small book, with a red cover scuffed and scarred.

“I will.” She opened it and frowned at the first page, waiting for him to go.

“Neither of us can read,” said Benna, before Monza could shut him up.

Cosca frowned, twisting one corner of his waxed moustache between finger and thumb. Monza was waiting for him to tell them to go back to the farm, but instead he lowered himself slowly and sat cross-legged beside them. “Children, children.” He pointed at the page. “This here is the letter ‘A.’”

Fogs and Whispers

S ipani smelled of rot and old salt water, of coal smoke, shit and piss, of fast living and slow decay. Made Shivers feel like puking, though the smell mightn’t have mattered so much if he could’ve seen his hand before his face. The night was dark, the fog so thick that Monza, walking close enough to touch, weren’t much more than a ghostly outline. His lamp scarcely lit ten cobbles in front of his boots, all shining with cold dew. More than once he’d nearly stepped straight off into water. It was easily done. In Sipani, water was hiding round every corner.

Angry giants loomed up, twisted, changed to greasy buildings and crept past. Figures charged from the mist like the Shanka did at the Battle of Dunbrec, then turned out to be bridges, railings, statues, carts. Lamps swung on poles at corners, torches burned by doorways, lit windows glowed, hanging in the murk, treacherous as marsh-lights. Shivers would set his course by one set, squinting through the mist, only to see a house start drifting. He’d blink, and shake his head, the ground shifting dizzily under his boots. Then he’d realise it was a barge, sliding past in the water beside the cobbled way, bearing its lights off into the night. He’d never liked cities, fog or salt water. The three together were like a bad dream.

“Bloody fog,” Shivers muttered, holding his lamp higher, as though that helped. “Can’t see a thing.”