Day kicked his hand away with the toe of one shoe. “Doomed to be misunderstood?” Her face was twisted with contempt. With hatred, even. The pleasing mask of obedience, of admiration, of innocence too, finally dropped. “What do you think there is to understand about you, you swollen-headed parasite? You’re thin as tissue paper!” There was the deepest cut of all-ingratitude, after all he had given her! His knowledge, his money, his… fatherly affection! “The personality of a baby in the body of a murderer! Bully and coward in one. Castor Morveer, greatest poisoner in the world? Greatest bore in the world, maybe, you-”
He sprang forwards with consummate nimbleness, nicked her ankle with his scalpel as he passed, rolled under the table and came up on the other side, grinning at her through the complexity of apparatus, the flickering flames of the burners, the distorting shapes of twisted tubes, the glinting surfaces of glass and metal.
“Ha ha!” He shouted, entirely alert and not dying in the least. “ You, poison me? The great Castor Morveer, undone by his assistant? I think not!” She stared down at her bleeding ankle, and then up at him, eyes wide. “There is no King of Poisons, fool!” he cackled. “The method I showed you, that produces a liquid that smells, tastes and looks like water? It makes water! Entirely harmless! Unlike the concoction with which I just now pricked you, which was enough to kill a dozen horses!”
He slipped his hand inside his shirt, deft fingertips unerringly selecting the correct vial and sliding it out into the light. Clear fluid gleamed inside. “The antidote.” She winced as she saw it, made to dive one way around the table then came the other, but her feet were clumsy and he evaded her with negligible effort. “ Most undignified, my dear! Chasing each other around our apparatus, in a barn, in the middle of rural Styria! Most terribly undignified!”
“Please,” she hissed at him. “Please, I’ll… I’ll-”
“Don’t embarrass us both! You have displayed your true nature now, you… you ingrate harpy! You are unmasked, you treacherous cuckoo!”
“I didn’t want to take the blame is all! Murcatto said sooner or later you’d go over to Orso! That you’d want to use me as the scapegoat! Murcatto said-”
“Murcatto? You listen to Murcatto over me? That degenerate, husk-addled and notorious butcher of the bloody battlefield? Oh, commendable guiding light! Curse me for an imbecile to trust either one of you! It seems you were correct, at least, that I am like to a baby. All unspoiled innocence! All undeserved mercy!” He flicked the vial through the air at Day. “Let it never again be said,” as he watched her fumbling through the straw for it, “that I am not,” as she clawed it up and ripped out the cork, “as generous, merciful and forgiving as any poisoner,” as she sucked down the contents, “within the entire Circle of the World.”
Day wiped her mouth and took a shuddering breath. “We need… to talk.”
“We certainly do. But not for long.” She blinked, then a strange spasm passed over her face. Just as he had known it would. He wrinkled his nose as he tossed his scalpel clattering across the table. “The blade carried no poison, but you have just consumed a vial of undiluted Leopard Flower.”
She flopped over, eyes rolling back, skin turning pink, began to jerk around in the straw, froth gurgling from her mouth.
Morveer stepped forwards, leaned down over her, baring his teeth, stabbing at his chest with a clawing finger. “Kill me, would you? Poison me? Castor Morveer?” The heels of her shoes drummed out a rapid beat on the hard-packed earth, sending up puffs of straw-dust. “ I am the only King of Poisons, you… you child-faced fool!” Her thrashing became a locked-up trembling, back arched impossibly far. “The simple insolence of you! The arrogance! The insult! The, the, the…” He fumbled breathlessly for the right word, then realised she was dead. There was a long, slow silence as her corpse gradually relaxed.
“Shit!” he barked. “Entirely shit!” The scant satisfaction of victory was already fast melting, like an unseasonable flurry of snow on a warm day, before the crushing disappointment, wounding betrayal and simple inconvenience of his new, assistant-less, employer-less situation. For Day’s final words had left him in no doubt that Murcatto was to blame. That after all his thankless, selfless toil on her behalf she had plotted his death. Why had he not anticipated this development? How could he not have expected it, after all the painful reverses he had suffered in his life? He was simply too soft a personage for this harsh land, this unforgiving epoch. Too trusting and too comradely for his own good. He was prone to see the world in the rosy tones of his own benevolence, cursed always to expect the best from people.
“Thin as paper, am I? Shit! You… shit!” He kicked Day’s corpse petulantly, his shoe thudding into her body over and over and making it shudder again. “ Swollen-headed? ” He near shrieked it. “ Me? Why, I am humility… its… fucking… self!” He realised suddenly that it ill befit a man of his boundless sensitivity to kick a person already dead, especially one he had cared for almost as a daughter. He felt a sudden bubbling-up of melodramatic regret.
“I’m sorry! So sorry.” He knelt beside her, gently pushed her hair back, touched her face with trembling fingers. That vision of innocence, never more to smile, never more to speak. “I’m so sorry, but… but why? I will always remember you, but-Oh… urgh!” There was a sharp smell of urine. The corpse voiding itself, an inevitable side effect of a colossal dose of Leopard Flower that a man of his experience really should have seen coming. The pool had already spread out through the straw and soaked the knees of his trousers. He tottered up, wincing with disgust.
“Shit! Shit!” He snatched up a flask and flung it against the wall in a fury, fragments of glass scattering. “Bully and coward in one?” He gave Day’s body another petulant kick, bruised his toes and set off limping around the barn at a great pace.
“Murcatto!” That evil witch had incited his apprentice to treachery. The best and most loved apprentice he had trained since he was obliged to pre-emptively poison Aloveo Cray back in Ostenhorm. He knew he should have killed Murcatto in his orchard, but the scale, the importance and the apparent impossibility of the work she offered had appealed to his vanity. “Curse my vanity! The one flaw in my character!”
But there could be no vengeance. “ No. ” Nothing so base and uncivilised, for that was not Morveer’s way. He was no savage, no animal like the Serpent of Talins and her ilk, but a refined and cultured gentleman of the highest ethical standards. He was considerably out of pocket, now, after all his hard and loyal work, so he would have to find a proper contract. A proper employer and an entirely orderly and clean-motived set of murders, resulting in “a proper, honest profit.”
And who would pay him to murder the Butcher of Caprile and her barbaric cronies? The answer was not so very difficult to fathom.
He faced a window and practised his most sycophantic bow, the one with the full finger twirl at the end. “Grand Duke Orso, an incom… parable honour.” He straightened, frowning. At the top of the long rise, silhouetted against the grey dawn, were several dozen riders.
For honour, glory and, above all, a decent pay-off!” A scattering of laughter as Faithful drew his sword and held it up high. “Let’s go!” And the long line of horsemen started moving, keeping loosely together as they thrashed through the wheat and out into the paddock, upping the pace to a trot.
Shivers went along with ’em. There wasn’t much choice since Faithful was right at his side. Hanging back would’ve seemed poor manners. He would’ve liked his axe to hand, but hoping for a thing often brought on the opposite. Besides, as they picked up speed to a healthy canter, keeping both hands on the reins seemed like an idea with some weight to it.
Maybe a hundred strides out now, and all still looking peaceful. Shivers frowned at the farmhouse, at the low wall, at the barn, gathering himself, making ready. It all seemed like a bad plan, now. It had seemed a bad plan at the time, but having to do it made it seem a whole lot worse. The ground rushed past hard under his horse’s hooves, the saddle jolted at his sore arse, the wind nipped at his narrowed eye, tickled at the raw scars on the other side of his face, bitter cold without the bandages. Faithful rode on his right, sitting up tall, cloak flapping behind him, sword still raised, shouting, “Steady! Steady!” On his left the line shifted and buckled, eager faces of men and horses in a twisting row, spears jolting up and down at all angles. Shivers worked his boots free of the stirrups.
Then the shutters of the farmhouse flew open all together with an echoing bang. Shivers saw the Osprians at the windows, first light glinting on their steel caps as a long row of ’em came up from behind the wall together, flatbows levelled. Comes a time you just have to do a thing, shit on the consequences. The air whooped in his
