“I will count it and laugh, while considering how a rich man need not answer the questions of idiots. You will find no employer, anywhere, unsatisfied with my work.” Shenkt moved his eyes slowly to the half-circle of scum at his back. “You can pay less to lesser men, if you please.”

“I will,” said Orso. “If one of them should find the killers first.”

“I would accept no other arrangement, your Excellency.”

“Good,” growled the duke. “Go, then. All of you, go! Bring… me… revenge!”

“You are dismissed!” screeched the chamberlain. There was a rustling, rattling, clattering as the assassins rose to leave the great chamber. Shenkt turned and walked back down the carpet towards the great doors, without undue speed, looking neither right nor left.

One of the killers blocked his path, a dark-skinned man of average height but wide as a door, lean slabs of muscle showing through the gap in his brightly coloured shirt. His thick lip curled. “You are Shenkt? I expected more.”

“Pray to whatever god you believe in that you never see more.”

“I do not pray.”

Shenkt leaned close, and whispered in his ear. “I advise you to start.”

Although a large room by most standards, General Ganmark’s study felt cluttered. An oversized bust of Juvens frowned balefully from above the fireplace, his stony bald spot reflected in a magnificent mirror of coloured Visserine glass. Two monumental vases loomed either side of the desk almost to shoulder height. The walls were crowded with canvases in gilded frames, two of them positively vast. Fine paintings. Far too fine to be squeezed.

“A most impressive collection,” said Shenkt.

“That one is by Coliere. It would have burned in the mansion in which I found it. And these two are Nasurins, that by Orhus.” Ganmark pointed them out with precise jabs of his forefinger. “His early period, but still. Those vases were made as tribute to the first Emperor of Gurkhul, many hundreds of years ago, and somehow found their way to a rich man’s house outside Caprile.”

“And from there to here.”

“I try to rescue what I can,” said Ganmark. “Perhaps when the Years of Blood end, Styria will still have some few treasures worth keeping.”

“Or you will.”

“Better I have them than the flames. The campaign season begins, and I will be away to Visserine in the morning, to take the city under siege. Skirmishes, sacks and burnings. March and counter-march. Famine and pestilence, naturally. Maim and murder, of course. All with the awful randomness of a stroke from the heavens. Collective punishment. Of everyone, for nothing. War, Shenkt, war. And to think I once dreamed of being an honourable man. Of doing good.”

“We all dream of that.”

The general raised one eyebrow. “Even you?”

“Even me.” Shenkt slid out his knife. A Gurkish butcher’s sickle, small but sharp as fury.

“I wish you joy of it, then. The best I can do is strive to keep the waste to the merely… epic.”