“I know it. I am a weak man, perhaps, and a poor soldier. I have relied on good intentions, fair words and righteous causes, and it seems I and my people now will pay for it.” Or for that and his avarice, betrayals and endless warmongering, at least. Salier examined a sculpture of a muscular boatman. Death poling souls to hell, perhaps. “I could flee the city, by small boat in the hours of darkness. Down the river and away, to throw myself upon the mercy of my ally Grand Duke Rogont.”

“A brief sanctuary,” grunted Monza. “Rogont will be next.”

“True. And a man of my considerable dimensions, fleeing? Terribly undignified. Perhaps I could surrender myself to your good friend General Ganmark?”

“You know what would follow.”

Salier’s soft face turned suddenly hard. “Perhaps Ganmark is not so utterly bereft of mercy as some of Orso’s other dogs have been?” Then he seemed to sink back down, face settling into the roll of fat under his chin. “But I daresay you are right.” He peered significantly sideways at a statue that had lost its head some time during the last few centuries. “My fat head on a spike would be the best that I could hope for. Just like good Duke Cantain and his sons, eh, General Murcatto?”

She looked evenly back at him. “Just like Cantain and his sons.” Heads on spikes, Cosca reflected, were still as fashionable as ever.

Around a corner and into another hall, still longer than the first, walls crowded with canvases. Salier clapped his hands. “Here hang the Styrians! Greatest of our countrymen! Long after we are dead and forgotten, their legacy will endure.” He paused before a scene of a bustling marketplace. “Perhaps I could bargain with Orso? Curry favour by delivering to him a mortal enemy? The woman who murdered his eldest son and heir, perhaps?”

Monza did not flinch. She never had been the flinching kind. “The best of luck.”

“Bah. Luck has deserted Visserine. Orso would never negotiate, even if I could give him back his son alive, and you have put well and truly paid to that possibility. We are left with suicide.” He gestured at a huge, dark-framed effort, a half-naked soldier offering his sword to his defeated general. Presumably so they could make the last sacrifice that honour demanded. That was where honour got a man. “To plunge the mighty blade into my bared breast, as did the fallen heroes of yesteryear!”

The next canvas featured a smirking wine merchant leaning on a barrel and holding a glass up to the light. Oh, a drink, a drink, a drink. “Or poison? Deadly powders in the wine? Scorpion in the bedsheets? Asp down one’s undergarments?” Salier grinned round at them. “No? Hang myself? I understand men often spend, when they are hanged.” And he flapped his hands away from his groin in demonstration, as though they had been in any doubt as to his meaning. “Sounds like more fun than poison, anyway.” The duke sighed and stared glumly at a painting of a woman surprised while bathing. “Let us not pretend I have the courage for such exploits. Suicide, that is, not spending. That I still manage once a day, in spite of my size. Do you still manage it, Cosca?”