the roof and lowered himself into the alley at the side of the tavern. Inside, he was urging Urik to rise, to gather himself enough to move on. Late as the hour was, and dark the night, there was still too many people abroad here. Even now, he could hear laughter out in the street, some little band mocking Urik’s state. Ammen silently cursed whoever it was, hating them for interfering, for coming between him and the man who had killed his father. Soon enough the merry voices drifted away, and the only sounds he could hear were Urik coughing and spitting and the slopping of mud as he tried to rise. Ammen went out into the street. Urik was a stumbling shape reeling off down the long slope towards the sea. There was no sign of anyone else, but Ammen kept to the darkest places as he followed the Wardcaptain. It mattered greatly to him that he should not be caught, if only because he had other business to attend to once Urik was done with.
After Ammen had acquired his little knife a year ago, his father had told him often how to kill a man, demonstrating with sharp movements, clenched fists. Not the heart: too well-guarded by ribs. The throat, perhaps, or the groin, where the blood would pour like a fountain. With a bigger blade, you could try to open a man’s guts or spear his liver, but Ammen’s knife was too small for him to be sure of such a result. The throat might be the best, the surest, now that Urik was too drunk to resist.
Ammen had not had cause to use the knife in anger since that night a year ago in the darkened alley. For all his pride in bearing it, and in the manner of his winning it, he had never been one to seek out confrontation. His father had taught him that the best victory was the one gained before violence became necessary. In the long run, it was almost always better to use intimidation, bribery, deceit than your fists to bend a man to your will: their effects were, Ochan had always maintained, more reliable and long-lasting.
Urik had come to a halt. He was leaning against a stall, his feet sliding out from under him in small increments so that he sank slowly towards the ground. Ammen Sharp crouched down in the doorway of a basket- maker’s shop. The darkness pooled there was deep enough to hide him from any casual eye. Glancing up and down the street, he saw no one. He could hear only distant voices; nothing of immediate concern. He watched Urik, wondering if the Wardcaptain had gone as far as he could go.
Ochan’s insistence that violence was to be avoided had its exceptions, of course. Sometimes, Ammen had come to understand, there was no choice other than to unsheathe a blade or tighten a garrotte. If a man would not step aside, would not listen to reason or threat or the tempting song of coin, then his challenge must be answered in other ways. That was the nature of the world.
“There’s none to look after us, boy,” Ochan the Cook had muttered to his son once, while they stood together before the body of a man who had just been strangled on his orders. “Some folk say that when there were Gods in the world, everything was all light and warmth and loving. Everyone was kind and noble, and everything was all orderly and peaceable. Doubt it myself, but even if it’s true that’s not the world as it is now. That’s not the world we live in.”
He pointed at the sagging corpse in front of them. The man’s hands and feet had been tied to the chair, his head hooded with a burlap sack. The knotted rope was still taut around his livid neck.
“We’re not much more than dogs on two feet, boy, and don’t you forget it. Sooner or later, you might have to fight for what you want. The ones who know how to fight come out on top, the ones who don’t.. well, there. You can see. They end up tied to chairs with bags over their heads.”
Now, edging out from his hiding place into the street, Ammen Sharp knew that the world did not even adhere to the simple rules that his father had set out. Sometimes the ones who knew how to fight ended up dead anyway, their heads smashed in on the floor of someone else’s warehouse. It was not only the Gods that had abandoned the world, but all sense, all justice. If even men such as Ochan, strong and powerful men who understood the pattern of things, could come to such an end, what was there left to believe in, to hope for? Not much. But there was revenge. Punishment.
Ammen edged up behind Urik. The Wardcaptain was retching. In a moment or two he would probably be on his knees, emptying his stomach. His entire attention, drunken and dislocated as it might be, was focused on the rebelliousness of his own body. Ammen took one last look up and down the length of the street: empty. Silent. He grasped Urik’s greasy hair with his left hand, pulled the Wardcaptain’s head up and back and stabbed him in the side of the neck.
Urik made a stupid, incoherent noise and tried to turn around. He was pawing the air. Ammen Sharp stabbed him again, and a made a couple of quick sawing motions with the blade. Blood was pulsing out in thick black splashes. That was enough to tell Ammen the wound would be fatal. He stamped hard on the back of Urik’s knee, knocking him down. The Guardsman twisted as he fell and landed on his back, staring vacantly up into Ammen’s face.
“For Ochan the Cook,” Ammen hissed, and spat on the bridge of Urik’s nose. He jammed the knife in again, into the front of Urik’s throat. Part of him would have liked to stay, to watch the Wardcaptain’s last breaths rattling bloodily out, but the pleasure of savouring those moments did not outweigh the risk of being caught. It would be ill-disciplined, silly, to ruin everything now by being captured.
Ammen Sharp ran this time. He went as fast as he could in the dark of the city’s narrow ways, following one of the possible routes he had plotted in his mind during those long hours of waiting on the tavern’s roof. He did not need the light of day, here amongst the alleys that had once been his father’s domain. Down, down towards the harbour he ran, cutting this way and that, back and forth amongst the crowded ramshackle houses of poor fishermen and shore-scavengers. The bolt-hole he had found for himself, an abandoned kiln in a workshop long ago ruined by fire, awaited him: safe and secret. And as he ran, his mind raced too. He was done with Urik, but a further task remained to him. One more death was required in answer to what had happened in Polochain’s warehouse, and he already knew it would be far more difficult to contrive than Urik’s had been. It might even be beyond him; attempting it might achieve nothing but his own death. Nevertheless, he would try. It was the least his father deserved.
So, somehow, Ammen Sharp would find a way to kill the Shadowhand.
IV
“I heard you had a disagreement with Aewult’s whore.” Roaric nan Kilkry-Haig had an unpleasant, bitter smile on his face as he spoke.
Anyara avoided his gaze. “I thought she was a singer or something,” she said.
“A dancer, once upon a time I think. Still, she loves his wealth, his glory, not him,” Roaric said with a shrug. “Makes her something of a whore, doesn’t it?”
Lheanor’s son made Anyara uncomfortable. He meant well, she knew. He thought himself a friend and ally of her Blood, and no doubt she could trust him in that. His anger was so raw, though, his character so veined with hostility, that it coloured his every conversation. Anyara suspected that what she saw in him was a distorted reflection of herself as she might have been, had she not learned to hold back bitterness and sorrow by strength of will. She found it ugly.
They rode together down towards the harbour. Coinach was, as always now, at Anyara’s side. Roaric’s Shield boasted half a dozen burly members, and they had taken the lead, barging a path through the crowds of Sea Street. A sealer’s boat had arrived that morning, carrying sick and exhausted survivors of the fall of Glasbridge. Their own flimsy vessel had been driven ashore on Il Anaron’s bleak northern coastline, after drifting, without stores of food or water, for a long time. Roaric meant to see to their care himself, and had invited Anyara to come with him.
“Anyway, I was pleased to hear you had put her in her place,” the Bloodheir continued. “She imagines herself untouchable merely because she shares Aewult’s bed. As if such things counted for anything here. She’d do well to learn a little discretion.”
“I was told Aewult is leaving, in any case,” said Anyara. She had no wish to dwell on her encounter with Ishbel. Even the memory of it made her angry, at both Ishbel and herself. It had been an act of weakness to so deliberately pick an argument with the woman.
“It’s true,” Roaric said, and his pleasure was obvious. “The advance companies of his army have already marched. He’s out at the camp himself, trying to herd the rest into some kind of order. I’ve not seen such a mess of an army in a long time. At least Gryvan knows how to command a host. He didn’t see fit to share that wisdom with his heir, apparently.”
