She turned back to face him, reached behind her head, took hold of the straps of her mask, and pulled it off. There was a sharp tan line underneath: brown round her eyes, her forehead, her neck, white round her mouth with a pink mark across the bridge of her nose. Her face was far softer, much younger, more ordinary than he had expected. She no longer looked fearsome. She looked scared and desperate. Glokta felt suddenly, ludicrously awkward, as though he had blundered into a room and caught someone naked. He almost had to look away as she kneeled down level with him.

'Please.' Her eyes looked moist, dewy, her lip trembling as if she was on the very point of weeping. A glimpse at the secret hopes beneath the vicious shell? Or just a good act? Glokta felt his eyelid fluttering. 'It's not for myself,' she almost whispered. 'Please. I'm begging you.'

He rubbed his hand thoughtfully across his neck. When he took it away there was blood on his fingertip. The faintest brown smear. A nick. A graze. Just a hair's breadth further, and I'd be pumping blood all over the lovely carpet right now. Only a hair's breadth. Lives turn on such chances. Why should I save her?

But he knew why. Because I don't save many.

He turned painfully round on the box so his back was to her and sat there, kneading at the dead flesh of his left leg. He took a deep breath. 'Alright,' he snapped.

'You won't regret it.'

'I regret it already. Damn but I'm a fool for crying women! And you can carry your own damn luggage!' He looked round, raising a finger, but Vitari already had the mask back on. Her eyes were dry, and narrow, and fierce. They look like eyes that couldn't shed a tear in a hundred years.

'Don't worry.' She jerked on the chain round her wrist and the cross-shaped blade sprang from the lid of the box and slapped into her waiting palm. 'I travel light.'

Glokta watched the flames reflected in the calm surface of the bay. Shifting fragments, red, yellow, sparkling white in the black water. Frost pulled at the oars, smoothly, evenly, his pale face half lit by the flickering fires in the city, expressionless. Severard sat behind him, hunched over, glowering out across the water. Vitari was beyond, in the prow, her head no more than a spiky outline. The blades dipped into the sea and feathered the water with barely a sound. It hardly seemed that the boat moved. Rather the dark outline of the peninsula slipped slowly away from them, into the darkness.