But they only smiled at him, and at each other, and Sajaam smiled widest of all. “I carry my conscience lightly enough.”
Shenkt’s old master might have said the same. “Some of us do. It is a gift.”
“I tell you what, we’ll toss for it.” Sajaam held his coin up to the light, gold flashing. “Heads, we kill you. Tails, I tell you where Murcatto is…” His smile was all bright teeth in his dark face. “Then we kill you.” There was the slightest ring of metal as he flicked his coin up.
Shenkt sucked in breath through his nose, slow, slow.
The gold crawled into the air, turning, turning.
The clock beat deep and slow as the oars of a great ship.
Boom… boom… boom…
Shenkt’s fist sank into the great gut of the fat man on his right, almost to the elbow. Nothing left to scream with, he gave the gentlest fragment of a sigh, eyes popping. An instant later the edge of Shenkt’s open hand caved his astonished face in and ripped his head half-off, bone crumpling like paper. Blood sprayed across the table, black spots frozen, the expressions of the men around it only now starting to shift from rage to shock.
Shenkt snatched the nearest of them from his chair and flung him into the ceiling. His cry was barely begun as he crashed into a pair of beams, wood bursting, splinters spinning, mangled body falling back down in a languid shower of dust and broken plaster. Long before that one hit the floor, Shenkt had seized the next player’s head and rammed his face through the table, through the floor beneath it. Cards, and broken glasses, chunks of planking, fragments of wood and flesh made a swelling cloud. Shenkt ripped the half-drawn hatchet from his fist as he went down, sent it whirling across the room and into the chest of the tattooed man, halfway up from his cushion and the first note of a war cry throbbing from his lips. It hit him haft first, so hard it scarcely mattered, spun him round and round like a child’s top, ripped wide open, blood gouting from his body in all directions.
The flatbow twanged, deep and distorted, string twisting as it pushed the bolt towards him, swimming slowly through the dust-filled air as if through treacle, shaft flexing lightly back and forth. Shenkt snatched it from its path and drove it clean through a man’s skull, his face folding into itself, meat bursting from torn skin. Shenkt caught him under the jaw and sent his corpse hurtling across the room with a flick of his wrist. He crashed into the archer, the two bodies mashed together, flailing bonelessly into the wall, through the wall, out into the alley on the other side, leaving a ragged hole in the shattered planks behind them.
The guard from the door had his mace raised, mouth open, air rushing in as he made ready to roar. Shenkt leaped the ruins of the table and slapped him backhanded across the chest, burst his ribcage and sent him reeling, twisting up like a corkscrew, mace flying from his lifeless hand. Shenkt stepped forwards and snatched Sajaam’s coin from the air as it spun back down, metal slapping into his palm.
He breathed out, and time flowed again.
The last couple of corpses tumbled across the floor. Plaster dropped, settled. The tattooed man’s left boot rattled against the boards, leg quivering as he died. One of the others was groaning, but not for much longer. The last spots of blood rained softly from the air around them, misting across the broken glass, the broken wood, the broken bodies. One of the cushions had burst, the feathers still fluttering down in a white cloud.
Shenkt’s fist trembled before Sajaam’s slack face. Steam hissed from it, then molten gold, trickling from between his fingers, running down his forearm in shining streaks. He opened his hand and showed it, palm forwards, daubed with black blood, smeared with glowing metal.
“Neither heads nor tails.”
“Fuh… fuh… fuh…” The stuttering man still sat at his place, where the table had been, cards clutched in his rigid hand, every part of him spattered, spotted, sprayed with blood.
“You,” said Shenkt. “Stuttering man. You may live.”
“Fuh… fuh…”
“You alone are spared. Out, before I reconsider.”
The mumbling beggar dropped his cards, fled whimpering for the door and tumbled through it. Shenkt watched him go. A good thing, even to spare one.
As he turned back, Sajaam was swinging his chair over his head. It burst apart across Shenkt’s shoulder, broken pieces bouncing from the floor and clattering away. A futile gesture, Shenkt scarcely even felt it. The edge of his hand chopped into the man’s big arm, snapped it like a dead twig, spun him around and sent him rolling over and over across the floor.
Shenkt walked after him, his scuffed work boots making not the slightest sound as they found the gaps between the debris. Sajaam coughed, shook his head, started to worm away on his back, gurgling through gritted teeth, hand dragging behind him the wrong way up. The heels of his embroidered Gurkish slippers kicked at the floor, leaving stuttering trails through the detritus of blood, dust, feathers and splinters that had settled across the whole room like leaves across a forest floor in autumn.
“A man sleeps through most of his life, even when awake. You get so little time, yet still you spend it utterly oblivious. Angry, frustrated, fixated on meaningless nothings. That drawer does not close flush with the front of my desk. What cards does my opponent hold, and how much money can I win from him? I wish I were taller. What will I have for dinner, for I am not fond of parsnips?” Shenkt rolled a mangled corpse out of his way with the toe of one boot. “It takes a moment like this to jerk us to our senses, to draw our eyes from the mud to the heavens, to root our attention in the present. Now you realise how precious is each moment. That is my gift to you.”
Sajaam reached the back wall and propped himself up against it, worked himself slowly to standing, broken arm hanging limp.
“I despise violence. It is the last tool of feeble minds.” Shenkt stopped a stride away. “So let us have no more foolishness. Where is Monzcarro Murcatto?”
To give the man his due for courage, he made for the knife at his belt.
Shenkt’s pointed finger sank into the hollow where chest met shoulder, just beneath his collarbone. It punched through shirt, skin, flesh, and as the rest of his fist smacked hard against Sajaam’s chest and drove him back against the wall, his fingernail was already scraping against the inside surface of his shoulder blade, buried in his flesh right to the knuckles. Sajaam screamed, knife clattering from his dangling fingers.
“No more foolishness, I said. Where is Murcatto?”
“In Visserine the last I heard!” His voice was hoarse with pain. “In Visserine!”
“At the siege?” Sajaam nodded, bloody teeth clenched tight together. If Visserine had not fallen already, it would have by the time Shenkt got there. But he never left a job half-done. He would assume she was still alive, and carry on the chase. “Who does she have with her?”
“Some Northman beggar, called himself Shivers! A man of mine named Friendly! A convict! A convict from Safety!”
“Yes?” Shenkt twisted his finger in the man’s flesh, blood trickling from the wound and down his hand, around the streaks of gold dried to his forearm, dripping from his elbow, tap, tap, tap.
“Ah! Ah! I put her in touch with a poisoner called Morveer! In Westport, and in Sipani with a woman called Vitari!” Shenkt frowned. “A woman who can get things done!”
“Murcatto, Shivers, Friendly, Morveer… Vitari.”
A desperate nod, spit flying from Sajaam’s gritted teeth with every heaving, agonised breath.
“And where are these brave companions bound next?”
“I’m not sure! Gah! She said seven men! The seven men who killed her brother! Ah! Puranti, maybe! Keep ahead of Orso’s army! If she gets Ganmark, maybe she’ll try for Faithful next, for Faithful Carpi!”
“Maybe she will.” Shenkt jerked his finger free with a faint sucking sound and Sajaam collapsed, sliding down until his rump hit the floor, his shivering, sweat-beaded face twisted with pain.
“Please,” he grunted. “I can help you. I can help you find her.”
Shenkt squatted down in front of him, blood-smeared hands dangling on the knees of his blood-smeared trousers. “But you have helped. You can leave the rest to me.”
“I have money! I have money.”
Shenkt said nothing.
“I was planning on turning her in to Orso, sooner or later, once the price was high enough.”
More nothing.
“That doesn’t make any difference, does it?”
Silence.
