“You’ll still be looking over your shoulder for Orso,” said Monza.

“Knew it when I took the job. Needed the money.” Vitari held out her open palm. “Talking of which…”

Monza frowned at her hand, then her face. “You’ve only come halfway. Halfway, half what we agreed.”

“Seems fair. All the money and dead is no kind of payment. I’ll settle for half and live.”

“I’d sooner keep you on. I can use you. And you won’t be safe as long as Orso’s alive—”

“Then you’d best get on and kill the bastard, hadn’t you? But without me.”

“Your choice.” Monza reached inside her coat and pulled out a flat leather pouch, a little stained with water. She unfolded it twice and slid a paper from inside, damp at one corner, covered with fancy-looking script. “More than half what we agreed. Five thousand two hundred and twelve scales, in fact.” Shivers frowned at it. He still couldn’t see how you could turn such a weight of silver into a scrap of paper.

“Fucking banking,” he murmured. “Even worse’n science.”

Vitari took the bill from Monza’s gloved hand, gave it a quick look over. “Valint and Balk?” Her eyes went even narrower than usual, which was some achievement. “This paper better pay. If not, there’s no place in the Circle of the World you’ll be safe from—”

“It’ll pay. If there’s one thing I don’t need it’s more enemies.”

“Then let’s part friends.” Vitari folded the paper and pushed it down into her shirt. “Maybe we’ll work together again some time.”

Monza stared right into her face, that way she had. “I’ll count the minutes.”

Vitari backed off for a few steps, then turned towards the sunlit square of the doorway.

“I fell in a river!” Shivers called after her.

“What?”

“When I was young. First time I went raiding. I got drunk, and I went for a piss, and I fell in the river. Current sucked my trousers off, dumped me half a mile downstream. Time I got back to camp I’d more or less turned blue with cold, shivering so bad I near shook my fingers off.”

“And?”

“That’s why they called me Shivers. You asked. Back in Sipani.” And he grinned. Seemed like he could see the funny side of it, these days. Vitari stood there for a moment, a lean black outline, then slid out through the door. “Well, Chief, looks like it’s just you and me—”

“And me!” He snapped round, reaching for his axe. Beside him Monza crouched, sword already half-drawn, both straining into the darkness. Ishri’s grinning face hung on one side, over the edge of the hayloft. “And a fine afternoon to my two heroes.” She slid down the ladder face first, as smooth as if her bandaged body had no bones in it. Up onto her feet, looking impossibly thin without her coat, and she sauntered across the straw towards Day’s corpse. “One of your killers killed the other. There’s killers for you.” She looked at Shivers, eyes black as coal, and he gripped his axe tight.