Best Served Cold

Monza took hold of the corner of her mask with her ruined right hand as Ario drew her closer still. “Know me?” She slid her other fist gently behind her back, found the grip of one of the knives. “Of course you know me.”

She pulled her mask away. Ario’s smile lingered for a moment longer as his eyes flickered over her face. Then they went staring wide.

“Somebody-!”

– 

A hundred scales on this next throw!” Crescent Moon bellowed, holding the dice up high. The room grew quiet as people turned to watch.

“A hundred scales.” It meant nothing to Friendly. None of it was his money, and money only interested him as far as counting it went. Losses and gains were exactly the same.

Crescent Moon rattled the dice in his hand. “Come on, you shits!” The man flung them recklessly across the table, bouncing and tumbling.

“Five and six.”

“Hah!” Moon’s friends whooped, chuckled, slapped him on the back as though he had achieved something fine by throwing one number instead of another.

The one with the mask like a ship threw his arms in the air. “Have that!”

The one with the fox mask made an obscene gesture.

The candles seemed to have grown uncomfortably bright. Too bright to count. The room was very hot, close, crowded. Friendly’s shirt was sticking to him as he scooped up the dice and tossed them gently back. A few gasps round the table. “Five and six. House wins.” People often forgot that any one score is just as likely as any other, even the same score. So it was not entirely a shock that Crescent Moon lost his sense of perspective.

“You cheating bastard!”

Friendly frowned. In Safety he would have cut a man who spoke to him like that. He would have had to, so that others would have known not to try. He would have started cutting him and not stopped. But they were not in Safety now, they were outside. Control, he had been told. He made himself forget the warm handle of his cleaver, pressing into his side. Control. He only shrugged. “Five and six. The dice don’t lie.”

Crescent Moon grabbed hold of Friendly’s wrist as he began to sweep up the counters. He leaned forwards and poked him in the chest with a drunken finger. “I think your dice are loaded.”

Friendly felt his face go slack, the breath hardly moving in his throat, it had constricted so painfully tight. He could feel every drop of sweat tickling at his forehead, at his back, at his scalp. A calm, cold, utterly unbearable rage seared through every part of him. “You think my dice are what?” he could barely whisper.

Poke, poke, poke. “Your dice are liars.”

“My dice… are what?” Friendly’s cleaver split the crescent mask in half and the skull underneath it wide open. His knife stabbed the man with the ship over his face through his gaping mouth and the point emerged from the back of his head. Friendly stabbed him again, and again, squelch, squelch, the grip of the blade turning slippery. A woman gave a long, shrill scream.

Friendly was vaguely aware that everyone in the hall was gaping at him, four times three times four of them, or more, or less. He flung the dice table over, sending glasses, counters, coins flying. The man with the fox mask was staring, eyes wide inside the eyeholes, spatters of dark brains across his pale cheek.

Friendly leaned forwards into his face. “Apologise!” he roared at the very top of his lungs. “Apologise to my fucking dice!”

– 

S omebody-!”

Ario’s cry turned to a breathy wheeze of an in-breath. He stared down, and she did too. Her knife had gone in the hollow where his thigh met his body, just beside his wilting cock, and was buried in him to the grip, blood running out all over her fist. For the shortest moment he gave a hideous, high-pitched shriek, then the point of Monza’s other knife punched in under his ear and slid out of the far side of his neck.

Ario stayed there, eyes bulging, one hand plucking weakly at her bare shoulder. The other crept trembling up and fumbled at the handle of the blade. Blood leaked out of him thick and black, oozing between his fingers, bubbling down his legs, running down his chest in dark, treacly streaks, leaving his pale skin all smeared and speckled with red. His mouth yawned, but his scream was nothing but a soft farting sound, breath squelching around the wet steel in his throat. He tottered back, his other arm fishing at the air, and Monza watched him, fascinated, his white face leaving a bright trace across her vision.

“Three dead,” she whispered. “Four left.”

His bloody thighs slapped against the windowsill and he fell, head smashing against the stained glass and knocking the window wide. He tumbled through and out into the night.

–