while she prayed silently they didn’t work out what they’d never worked out yet, but what she was always afraid to the pit of her stomach they would.
That she didn’t know what the hell she was doing, and a knife would kill her just as dead as anyone else.
But none of them spoke to her, let alone tried to stop her. Mercenaries are cowards, on the whole, even more so than most people. Men who’ll kill because it’s the easiest way they’ve found to make a living. Mercenaries have no loyalty in them, on the whole, by definition. Not much to their leaders, even less to their employers.
That was what she was counting on.
The captain general’s tent was pitched on a rise in a big clearing, red pennant hanging limp from its tallest pole, well above the jumble of badly pitched canvas around it. Monza kicked her horse up, making a couple of men scurry out of her way, trying not to let the nerves that were boiling up her throat show. It was a long enough gamble as it was. Show one grain of fear and she’d be done.
She swung down from her horse, tossed the reins carelessly round a sapling trunk. She had to sidestep a goat someone had tethered there, then strode up towards the flap. Nocau, the Gurkish outcast who’d guarded the tent during the daylight since way back in Sazine’s time, stood staring, his big scimitar not even drawn.
“You can shut your mouth now, Nocau.” She leaned in close and pushed his slack jaw shut with her gloved finger so his teeth snapped together. “Wouldn’t want a bird nesting in there, eh?” And she pushed through the flap.
The same table, even if the charts on it were of a different stretch of ground. The same flags hanging about the canvas, some of them that she’d added, won at Sweet Pines and the High Bank, at Musselia and Caprile. And the same chair, of course, that Sazine had supposedly stolen from the Duke of Cesale’s dining table the day he formed the Thousand Swords. It stood empty on a pair of crates, waiting for the arse of the new captain general. For her arse, if the Fates were kind.
Though she had to admit they weren’t usually.
The three most senior captains left in the great brigade stood close to the improvised dais, muttering to each other. Sesaria, Victus, Andiche. The three Benna had persuaded to make her captain general. The three who’d persuaded Faithful Carpi to take her place. The three she needed to persuade to give it back to her. They looked up, and they saw her, and they straightened.
“Well, well,” rumbled Sesaria.
“Well, well, well,” muttered Andiche. “If it isn’t the Serpent of Talins.”
“The Butcher of Caprile herself,” whined Victus. “Where’s Faithful?”
She looked him right in the eye. “Not coming. You boys need a new captain general.”
The three of them swapped glances, and Andiche sucked noisily at his yellowed teeth. A habit Monza had always found faintly disgusting. One of many disgusting things about the lank-haired rat of a man. “As it happens, we’d reached the same conclusion on our own.”
“Faithful was a good fellow,” rumbled Sesaria.
“Too good for the job,” said Victus.
“A decent captain general needs to be an evil shit at best.”
Monza showed her teeth. “Any one of you three is more than evil enough, I reckon. There aren’t three bigger shits in Styria.” It was no kind of joke. She should’ve murdered these three rather than Faithful. “Too big a set of shits to work for each other, though.”
“True enough,” said Victus sourly.
Sesaria tipped his head back and stared at her down his flat nose. “We need someone new.”
“Or someone old,” said Monza.
Andiche grinned at his two fellows. “As it happens, we’d reached the same conclusion on our own,” he said again.
“Good for you.” This was going more smoothly even than she’d hoped. Eight years she’d led the Thousand Swords, and she knew how to handle the likes of these three. Greed, nice and simple. “I’m not the type to let a little bad blood get in the way of a lot of good money, and I damn well know that none of you are.” She held Ishri’s coin up to the light, a Gurkish double-headed coin, Emperor on one side, Prophet on the other. She flicked it to Andiche. “There’ll be plenty more like that, to go over to Rogont.”
Sesaria stared at her from under his thick grey brows. “Fight for Rogont, against Orso?”
“Fight all the way back across Styria?” The chains round Victus’ neck rattled as he tossed his head. “The same ground we’ve fought over the past eight years?”
Andiche looked up from the coin to her, and puffed out his acne-scarred cheeks. “Sounds like an awful lot of fighting.”
“You’ve won against longer odds, with me in charge.”
“Oh, that’s a fact.” Sesaria gestured at the tattered flags. “We’ve won all kinds of glory with you in the chair, all kinds of pride.”
“But try paying a whore with that.” Victus was grinning, and that weasel never grinned. Something was wrong about their smiles, something mocking in them.
“Look.” Andiche rested one lazy hand on the arm of the captain general’s chair and dusted the seat off with the other. “We don’t doubt for a moment that when it comes to a fight, you’re the best damn general a man could ask for.”
“Then what’s the problem?”
Victus’ face twisted into a snarl. “We don’t want to fight! We want to make… fucking… money!”
“Who ever brought you more money than me?”
“Ahem,” came a voice right in her ear. Monza jerked round, and froze, hand halfway to the hilt of her sword. Standing just behind her, with a faintly embarrassed smile, was Nicomo Cosca.
He’d shaved off his moustache, and all his hair besides, left only a black and grey stubble over his knobbly skull, his sharp jaw. The rash had faded to a faint pink splash up the side of his neck. His eyes were less sunken, his face no longer trembling or beaded with sweat. But the smile was the same. The faint little smile and the playful gleam in his dark eyes. The same he used to have, when she first met him.
“A delight to see you both well.”
“Uh,” grunted Shivers. Monza found she’d made a kind of strangled cough, but no words came with it.
“I am in resplendent health, your concern for my welfare is most touching.” Cosca strolled past, slapping a puzzled-looking Shivers on the back, more captains of the Thousand Swords pushing their way through the flap after him and spreading out around the edges of the tent. Men whose names, faces, qualities, or lack of them, she knew well. A thick-set man with a stoop, a worn coat and almost no neck came at the rear. He raised his heavy brows at her as he passed.
“Friendly?” she hissed. “I thought you were going back to Talins!”
He shrugged, as if it was nothing. “Didn’t make it all the way.”
“So I fucking see!”
Cosca stepped up onto the packing cases and turned to the assembly with a self-satisfied flourish. He’d acquired a grand black breastplate with golden scrollwork from somewhere, a sword with a gilded hilt, fine black boots with shining buckles. He settled himself into the captain general’s chair with as much pomp as an Emperor into his throne, Friendly standing watchful beside the cases, arms crossed. As Cosca’s arse touched the wood the tent broke into polite applause, every captain tapping their fingers against their palms as daintily as fine ladies attending the theatre. Just as they had for Monza, when she stole the chair. If she hadn’t felt suddenly so sick she might almost have laughed.
Cosca waved away the applause while obviously encouraging it. “No, no, really, entirely undeserved. But it’s good to be back.”
“How the hell-”
“Did I survive? The wound, it appears, was not quite so fatal as we all supposed. The Talinese took me, on account of my uniform, for one of their own, and bore me directly to an excellent surgeon, who was able to staunch the bleeding. I was two weeks abed, then slipped out of a window. I made contact in Puranti with my old friend Andiche, who I had gathered might be desirous of a change in command. He was, and so were all his noble fellows.” He gestured to the captains scattered about the tent, then to himself. “And here I am.”
Monza snapped her mouth shut. There was no planning for this. Nicomo Cosca, the very definition of an
