A good question. Do I? He looked down at a young man, lying on dirty straw by the wall, wedged in between two others. His face was waxy pale, eyes glassy, lips moving rapidly as he mumbled some meaningless nonsense to himself. His leg was off just above the knee, the stump bound with a bloody dressing, a belt buckled tight round the thigh. His chances of survival? Slim to none. A last few hours in agony and squalor, listening to the groans of his fellows. A young life, snuffed out long before his time, and blah, blah, blah. Glokta raised his eyebrows. He felt nothing but a mild distaste, no more than he might have had the dying man been a heap of rubbish. 'No,' he said.

Kahdia looked down at his own bloody hands. 'Then God has truly blessed you,' he muttered. 'Not everyone has your stomach.'

'I don't know. Your people have been fighting well.'

'Dying well, you mean.'

Glokta's laughter hacked at the heavy air. 'Come now. There's no such thing as dying well.' He glanced round at the endless wounded. 'I'd have thought that you of all people would have learned that by now.'

Kahdia did not laugh. 'How much of this do you think we can stand?'

'Losing heart, eh, Haddish? As with so many things in life, heroic last stands are a great deal more appealing in concept than in reality.' The dashing young Colonel Glokta could have told us that, dragged away from the bridge with the remains of his leg barely attached, his notions of how the world works radically altered.

'Your concern is touching, Superior, but I'm used to disappointments. Believe me, I will live with this one. The question remains. How long can we hold out?'

'If the sea lanes stay open and we can be supplied by ship, if the Gurkish cannot find a way round the land walls, if we can stick together and keep our heads, we could hold out here for weeks.'

'Hold out for what?'

Glokta paused. For what indeed? 'Perhaps the Gurkish will lose heart.'

'Hah!' snorted Kahdia. 'The Gurkish have no hearts! They did not subdue all Kanta with half measures. No. The Emperor has spoken, and will not be denied.'

'Then we must hope that the war will be quickly settled in the North, and that Union forces will come to our aid.' An utterly futile hope. It will be months before matters are settled in Angland. Even when they are, the army will be in no state to fight. We are on our own.

'And when might we expect such help?'