The Collected Joe Abercrombie (324 page)

‘No more delays, then.’

‘It would appear not. My designs on glory will soon be ground into the dust. As such designs often are.’

‘You sure the night before your own destruction is the best time to celebrate?’

‘The day after might be too late.’

‘Huh.’ True enough. ‘Perhaps you’ll get a miracle.’

‘I’ve never been a great believer in divine intervention.’

‘No? What are they here for, then?’ Monza jerked her head towards a knot of Gurkish just below the high table, dressed in the white robes and skullcaps of the priesthood.

The duke peered down at them. ‘Oh, their help goes well beyond the spiritual. They are emissaries of the Prophet Khalul. Duke Orso has his allies in the Union, the backing of their banks. I must find friends of my own. And even the Emperor of Gurkhul kneels before the Prophet.’

‘Everyone kneels to someone, eh? I guess Emperor and Prophet can console each other after their priests bring news of your head on a spike.’

‘They’ll soon get over it. Styria is a sideshow to them. I daresay they’re already preparing the next battlefield.’

‘I hear the war never ends.’ She drained her glass and slung it rattling back across the wood. Maybe they pressed the best wine in the world in Ospria, but it tasted of vomit to her. Everything did. Her life was made of sick. Sick and frequent, painful, watery shits. Raw-gummed, saw-tongued, rough-toothed, sore-arsed. A horse-faced servant in a powdered wig flowed around her shoulder and let fall a long stream of wine into the empty glass, as though flourishing the bottle as far above her as possible would make it taste better. He retreated with consummate ease. Retreat was the speciality down in Ospria, after all. She reached for the glass again. The most recent smoke had stopped her hand shaking, but nothing more.

So she prayed for mindless, shameful, stupefying drunkenness to swarm over and blot out the misery.

She let her eyes crawl over Ospria’s richest and most useless citizens. If you really looked for it, the banquet had an edge of shrill hysteria. Drinking too much. Talking too fast. Laughing too loud. Nothing like a dash of imminent annihilation to lower the inhibitions. The one consolation of Rogont’s coming rout was that a good number of these fools would lose everything along with him.

‘You sure I should be up here?’ she grunted.

‘Someone has to be.’ Rogont glanced sideways at the girlish Countess Cotarda of Affoia without great enthusiasm. ‘The noble League of Eight, it seems, has become a League of Two.’ He leaned close. ‘And to be entirely honest I’m wondering if it’s not too late for me to get out of it. The sad fact is I’m running short of notable guests.’

‘So I’m an exhibit to stiffen your wilting prestige, am I?’

‘Exactly so. A perfectly charming one, though. And those stories about my wilting are all scurrilous rumours, I assure you.’ Monza couldn’t find the strength even to be irritated, let alone amused, and settled for a weary snort. ‘You should eat something.’ He gestured at her untouched plate with his fork. ‘You look thin.’

‘I’m sick.’ That and her right hand hurt so badly she could scarcely hold the knife. ‘I’m always sick.’

‘Really? Something you ate?’ Rogont forked meat into his mouth with all the relish of a man likely to live out the week. ‘Or something you did?’

‘Maybe it’s just the company.’

‘I wouldn’t be at all surprised. My Aunt Sefeline was always revolted by me. She was a woman much prone to nausea. You remind me of her in a way. Sharp mind, great talents, will of iron, but a weaker stomach than might have been expected.’

‘Sorry to disappoint you.’ The dead knew she disappointed herself enough.

‘Me? Oh, quite the reverse, I assure you. We are none of us made from flint, eh?’

If only. Monza gagged down more wine and scowled at the glass. A year ago, she’d had nothing but contempt for Rogont. She remembered laughing with Benna and Faithful over what a coward he was, what a treacherous ally. Now Benna was dead, she’d murdered Faithful and she’d run to Rogont for shelter like a wayward child to her rich uncle. An uncle who couldn’t even protect himself, in this case. But he was far better company than the alternative. Her eyes were dragged reluctantly towards the bottom of the long table on the right, where Shivers sat alone.

The hard fact was he sickened her. It was an effort just to stand beside him, let alone touch him. It was far more than the simple ugliness of his maimed face. She’d seen enough that was ugly, and done enough too, to have no trouble at least pretending to be comfortable around it. It was the silences, when before she couldn’t shut him up. They were full of debts she couldn’t pay. She’d see that skewed, dead ruin of an eye and remember him whispering at her, It should’ve been you. And she’d know it should have been. When he did talk he said nothing about doing the right thing any more, nothing about being a better man. Maybe it should have pleased her to have won that argument. She’d tried hard enough. But all she could think was that she’d taken a halfway decent man and somehow made a halfway evil one. She wasn’t only rotten herself, she rotted everything she touched.

Shivers sickened her, and the fact she was disgusted when she knew she should have been grateful only sickened her even more.

‘I’m wasting time,’ she hissed, more at her glass than anyone else.

Rogont sighed. ‘We all are. Just passing the ugly moments until our ignominious deaths in the least horrible manner we can find.’

‘I should be gone.’ She tried to make a fist of her gloved hand, but the pain only made her weaker now. ‘Find a way . . . find a way to kill Orso.’ But she was so tired she could hardly find the strength to say it.

‘Revenge? Truly?’

‘Revenge.’

‘I would be crushed if you were to leave.’

She could hardly be bothered to take care what she said. ‘Why the hell would you want me?’

‘I, want you?’ Rogont’s smile slipped for a moment. ‘I can delay no longer, Monzcarro. Soon, perhaps tomorrow, there will be a great battle. One that will decide the fate of Styria. What could be more valuable than the advice of one of Styria’s greatest soldiers?’

‘I’ll see if I can find you one,’ she muttered.

‘And you have many friends.’

‘Me?’ She couldn’t think of a single one alive.

‘The people of Talins love you still.’ He raised his eyebrows at the gathering, some of them still glowering at her with scant friendliness. ‘Less popular here, of course, but that only serves to prove the point. One man’s villain is another’s hero, after all.’

‘They think I’m dead in Talins, and don’t care into the bargain.’ She hardly cared herself.

‘On the contrary, agents of mine are in the process of making the citizens well aware of your triumphant survival. Bills posted at every crossroads dispute Duke Orso’s story, charge him with your attempted murder and proclaim your imminent return. The people care deeply, believe me, with that bottomless passion common folk sometimes have for great figures they have never met, and never will. If nothing else, it turns them further against Orso, and gives him difficulties at home.’

‘Politics, eh?’ She drained her glass. ‘Small gestures, when war is knocking at your gates.’

‘We all make the gestures we can. But in war and politics both you are still an asset to be courted.’ His smile was back now, and broader than ever. ‘Besides, what extra reason should a man require to keep cunning and beautiful women close at hand?’

She scowled sideways. ‘Fuck yourself.’

‘When I must.’ He looked straight back at her. ‘But I’d much rather have help.’

‘You look almost as bitter as I feel.’

‘Eh?’ Shivers prised his scowl from the happy couple. ‘Ah.’ There was a woman talking to him. ‘Oh.’ She was very good to look at, so much that she seemed to have a glow about her. Then he saw everything had a glow. He was drunk as shit.

She seemed different from the rest, though. Necklace of red stones round her long neck, white dress that hung loose, like the ones he’d seen black women wearing in Westport, but she was very pale. There was something easy in the way she stood, no stiff manners to her. Something open in her smile. For a moment, it almost had him smiling with her. First time in a while.

‘Is there space here?’ She spoke Styrian with a Union accent. An outsider, like him.

‘You want to sit . . . with me?’

‘Why not, do you carry the plague?’

‘With my luck I wouldn’t be surprised.’ He turned the left side of his face towards her. ‘This seems to keep most folk well clear o’ me by itself, though.’

Her eyes moved over it, then back, and her smile didn’t flicker. ‘We all have our scars. Some of us on the outside, some of us—’

‘The ones on the inside don’t take quite such a toll on the looks, though, eh?’

‘I’ve found that looks are overrated.’

Shivers looked her slowly up and down, and enjoyed it. ‘Easy for you to say, you’ve plenty to spare.’

‘Manners.’ She puffed out her cheeks as she looked round the hall. ‘I’d despaired of finding any among this crowd. I swear, you must be the only honest man here.’

‘Don’t count on it.’ Though he was grinning wide enough. There was never a bad time for flattery from a fine-looking woman, after all. He had his pride. She held out one hand to him and he blinked at it. ‘I kiss it, do I?’

‘If you like. It won’t dissolve.’

It was soft and smooth. Nothing like Monza’s hand – scarred, tanned, calloused as any Named Man’s. Even less like her other one, twisted as a nettle root under that glove. Shivers pressed his lips to the woman’s knuckles, caught a giddy whiff of scent. Like flowers, and something else that made the breath sharpen in his throat.

‘I’m, er . . . Caul Shivers.’

‘I know.’

‘You do?’

‘We’ve met before, though briefly. Carlot dan Eider is my name.’

‘Eider?’ Took him a moment to place it. A half-glimpsed face in the mist. The woman in the red coat, in Sipani. Prince Ario’s lover. ‘You’re the one that Monza—’

‘Beat, blackmailed, destroyed and left for dead? That would be me.’ She frowned up towards the high table. ‘Monza, is it? Not only first-name terms, but an affectionate shortening. The two of you must be very close.’

‘Close enough.’ Nowhere near as close as they had been, though, in Visserine. Before they took his eye.

‘And yet she sits up there, with the great Duke Rogont, and you sit down here, with the beggars and the embarrassments.’

Like she knew his own thoughts. His fury flickered up again and he tried to steer the talk away from it. ‘What brings you here?’

‘After the carnage in Sipani I had no other choices. Duke Orso is doubtless offering a pretty price for my head. I’ve spent the last three months expecting every person I passed to stab me, poison me, throttle me, or worse.’

‘Huh. I know that feeling.’

‘Then you have my sympathy.’

‘The dead know I could do with some.’

‘You can have all mine, for what that’s worth. You’re just as much a piece in this sordid little game as I am, no? And you’ve lost even more than I. Your eye. Your face.’

She didn’t seem to move, but she seemed to keep getting closer. Shivers hunched his shoulders. ‘I reckon.’

‘Duke Rogont is an old acquaintance. A somewhat unreliable man, though undoubtedly a handsome one.’

‘I reckon,’ he managed to grate out.

‘I was forced to throw myself upon his mercy. A hard landing, but some succour, for a while. Though it seems he has found a new diversion now.’

‘Monza?’ The fact he’d been thinking it himself all night didn’t help any. ‘She ain’t like that.’

Carlot dan Eider gave a disbelieving snort. ‘Really? Not a treacherous, murdering liar who’ll use anyone and anything to get her way? She betrayed Nicomo Cosca, no, and stole his chair? Why do you think Duke Orso tried to kill her? Because it was his chair she was planning to steal next.’ The drink had made him half-stupid, he couldn’t think of a thing to say to it. ‘Why not use Rogont to get her way? Or is she in love with someone else?’

‘No,’ he growled. ‘Well . . . how would I know—Fucking no! You’ve got it twisted!’

She touched one hand to her pale chest. ‘I have it twisted? There’s a reason why they call her the Snake of Talins! A snake loves nothing but itself!’

‘You’d say anything. She used you in Sipani. You hate her!’

‘I’d shed no tears over her corpse, that’s true. The man who put a blade in her could have my gratitude and more besides. But that doesn’t make me a liar.’ She was halfway to whispering in his ear. ‘Monzcarro Murcatto, the Butcher of Caprile? They murdered children there.’ He could almost feel her breath on him, his skin tingling with having her so near, anger and lust all mangled hot together. ‘Murdered! In the streets! She wasn’t even faithful to her brother, from what I hear—’

‘Eh?’ Shivers wished he’d drunk less, the hall was getting some spin to it.

‘You didn’t know?’

‘Know what?’ An odd mix of curiosity, and fear, and disgust creeping up on him.

Eider laid one hand on his arm, close enough that he caught another waft of scent – sweet, dizzying, sickening. ‘She and her brother were lovers.’ She purred the last word, dragging it out long.