"Once we get to the garden you can have a blade, not—"
Monza saw a hand close around the grip of Langrier's dagger. She started to turn, surprised. "Wha—" The point slid out of the front of her neck. Shivers' face loomed up beside hers, white and wasted, bandages bound tight over one whole side of it, a pale stain through the cloth where his eye used to be. His left arm slid around Langrier's chest from behind and drew her tight against him. Tight as a lover.
"It ain't about you, understand?" He was almost kissing at her ear as blood began to run from the point of the knife and down her neck in a thick black line. "You take my eye, I've got to take your life." She opened her mouth, and her tongue flopped out, and blood started to trickle from the tip of it and down her chin. "I don't like it." Her face turned purple, eyes rolling up. "Just what has to be done." Her legs kicked, her boot heels clattering against the boards as he lifted her up in the air. "Sorry about your neck." The blade ripped sideways and opened her throat up wide, black blood showering out across the bedclothes, spraying up the wall in an arc of red spots.
Shivers let her drop and she crumpled, sprawling face down as if her bones had turned to mud, another gout of blood spurting sideways. Her boots moved, toes scraping. One set of nails scratched at the floor. Shivers took a long breath in through his nose, then he blew it out, and he looked up at Monza, and he smiled. A friendly little grin, as if they'd shared some private joke that Langrier just hadn't got.
"By the dead but I feel better for that. Ganmark's in the city, did she say?"
"Uh." Monza couldn't speak. Her skin was flushed and burning.
"Then I reckon we got work ahead of us." Shivers didn't seem to notice the rapidly spreading slick of blood creep between his toes, around the sides of his big bare feet. He dragged the sack up and peered inside. "Armour in here, then? Guess I'd better get dressed, eh, Chief? Hate to arrive at a party in the wrong clothes."
The garden at the centre of Salier's gallery showed no signs of imminent doom. Water trickled, leaves rustled, a bee or two floated lazily from one flower to another. White blossom occasionally filtered down from the cherry trees and dusted the well-shaved lawns.
Cosca sat cross-legged and worked the edge of his sword with a whetstone, metal softly ringing. Morveer's flask pressed into his thigh, but he felt no need for it. Death was at the doorstep, and so he was at peace. His blissful moment before the storm. He tipped his head back, eyes closed, sun warm on his face, and wondered why he could never feel this way unless the world was burning down around him.
Calming breezes washed through the shadowy colonnades, through doorways into hallways lined with paintings. Through one open window Friendly could be seen, in the armour of a Talinese guardsman, counting every soldier in Nasurin's colossal painting of the Second Battle of Oprile. Cosca grinned. He tried always to be forgiving of other men's foibles. He had enough of his own, after all.
Perhaps a half-dozen of Salier's guards had remained, disguised as soldiers from Duke Orso's army. Men loyal enough to die beside their master at the last. He snorted as he ran the whetstone once more down the edge of his sword. Loyalty had always sat with honour, discipline and self-restraint on his list of incomprehensible virtues.
"Why so happy?" Day sat beside him on the grass, a flatbow across her knees, chewing at her lip. The uniform she wore must have come from some dead drummer-boy, it fit her well. Very well. Cosca wondered if it was wrong of him to find something peculiarly alluring about a pretty girl in a man's clothes. He wondered furthermore if she might be persuaded to give a comrade-in-arms… a little help sharpening his weapon before the fighting started? He cleared his throat. Of course not. But a man could dream.
"Perhaps something is wrong in my head." He rubbed a blemish from the steel with his thumb. "Getting out of bed." Metal rang. "A day of honest work." Whetstone scraped. "Peace. Normality. Sobriety." He held the sword up to the light and watched the metal gleam. "These are the things that terrify me. Danger, by contrast, has long been my only relief. Eat something. You'll need your strength."
"I've no appetite," she said glumly. "I've never faced certain death before."
"Oh, come, come, don't say such a thing." He stood, brushed the blossom from the captain's insignia on the sleeves of his stolen uniform. "If there is one thing I have learned in all my many last stands, it is that death is never certain, only… extremely likely."
"Truly inspirational words."
"I try. Indeed I do." Cosca slapped his sword into its sheath, picked up Monza's Calvez and ambled away towards the statue of The Warrior. His Excellency Duke Salier stood in its muscular shadow, arrayed for a noble death in a spotless white uniform festooned with gold braid.
"How did it end like this?" he was musing. The very same question Cosca had so often asked himself, while sucking the last drop from one cheap bottle or another. Waking baffled in one unfamiliar doorway, or another. Carrying out one hateful, poorly paid act of violence. Or another. "How did it end… like this?"
"You underestimated Orso's venomous ambition and Murcatto's ruthless competence. Don't feel too badly, though, we've all done it."
Salier's eyes rolled sideways. "The question was intended to be rhetorical. But you are right, of course. It seems I have been guilty of arrogance, and the penalty will be harsh. No less than everything. But who could have expected a young woman would win one unlikely victory over us after another? How I laughed when you made her your second, Cosca. How we all laughed when Orso gave her command. We were already planning our triumphs, dividing his lands between us. Our chuckles are become sobs now, eh?"
"I find chuckles have a habit of doing so."
"I suppose that makes her a very great soldier and me a very poor one. But then I never aspired to be a soldier, and would have been perfectly happy as merely a grand duke."
"Now you are nothing, instead, and so am I. Such is life."
"Time for one last performance, though."
"For both of us."
The duke grinned back. "A pair of dying swans, eh, Cosca?"
"A brace of old turkeys, maybe. Why aren't you running, your Excellency?"
"I must confess I am wondering myself. Pride, I think. I have spent my life as the Grand Duke of Visserine, and insist on dying the same way. I refuse to be simply fat Master Salier, once of importance."
"Pride, eh? Can't say I ever had much of the stuff."
"Then why aren't you running, Cosca?"
"I suppose…" Why was he not running? Old Master Cosca, once of importance, who always kept his last thought for his own skin? Foolish love? Mad bravery? Old debts to pay? Or simply so that merciful death could spare him from further shame? "But look!" He pointed to the gate. "Only think of her and she appears."
She wore a Talinese uniform, hair gathered up under a helmet, jaw set hard. Just like a serious young officer, clean-shaven this morning and keen to get stuck into the manly business of war. If Cosca had not known, he swore he would never have guessed. A tiny something in the way she walked, perhaps? In the set of her hips, the length of her neck? Again, the women in men's clothes. Did they have to torture him so?
"Monza!" he called. "I was worried you might not make it!"
"And leave you to die gloriously alone?" Shivers came behind her wearing breastplate, greaves and helmet stolen from a big corpse out near the breach. Bandages stared accusingly from one blind eyehole. "From what I can hear, they're at the palace gate already."
"So soon?" Salier's tongue darted over his plump lips. "Where is Captain Langrier?"
"She ran. Seems glory didn't appeal."
"Is there no loyalty left in Styria?"