He glanced over his shoulder, wincing as his neck clicked. Another man, much like the first, was creeping up from that direction. Glokta raised his eyebrows. 'Thugs? How very unoriginal.'

'Unoriginal, perhaps, but I think you will find them quite effective.'

'So I'm to be slaughtered in the slaughterhouse, eh, Morrow? Butchered at the butchers! Sand dan Glokta, breaker of hearts, winner of the Contest, hero of the Gurkish war, shat out the arses of a dozen different pigs!' He snorted with laughter and had to wipe some snot off his top lip.

'I'm so glad you enjoy the irony,' muttered Morrow, looking slightly put out.

'Oh, I do. Fed to the swine. So obvious I can honestly say it's not what I expected.' He gave a long sigh. 'But not expected and not planned for are two quite different things.'

The bowstring made no sound over the clamour of the hogs. The thug seemed at first to slip, to drop his shining knife and fall on his side for no reason. Then Glokta saw the bolt poking from his side. Not too great a surprise, of course, and yet it always seems like magic.

The hired man at the other end of the warehouse took a shocked step back, never seeing Practical Vitari slip silently over the rail of the empty pen behind him. There was a flash of metal in the darkness as she slashed the tendons at the back of his knee and brought him down, his cry quickly shut off as she pulled her chain tight round his neck.

Severard dropped down easily from the rafters off to Glokta's left and squelched into the muck. He sauntered over, flatbow across his shoulder, kicked the fallen knife off into the darkness and looked down at the man he had shot. 'I owe you five marks,' he called to Frost. 'Missed his heart, damn it. Liver, maybe?'

'Lither,' grunted the albino, emerging from the shadows at the far end of the warehouse. The man struggled up to his knees, clutching at the shaft through his side, twisted face half crusted with filth. Frost lifted his stick as he passed and dealt him a crunching blow on the back of the head, putting a sharp end to his cries and knocking him face down in the muck. Vitari, meanwhile, had wrestled her man onto the floor and was kneeling on his back, dragging at the chain round his neck. His struggling grew weaker, and weaker, and stopped. A little more dead meat on the floor of the slaughterhouse.

Glokta looked back to Morrow. 'How quickly things can change, eh, Harlen? One minute everyone wants to know you. The next?' He tapped sadly at his useless foot with the filthy toe of his cane. 'You're fucked. It's a tough lesson.' I should know.

Marovia's secretary backed away, tongue darting over his lips, one hand held out in front of him. 'Now hold on—'

'Why?' Glokta pushed out his bottom lip. 'Do you really think we can grow to love each other again after all this?'