'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?'

'Perhaps we can come to some—'

'I'm not upset that you tried to kill me. But to make such a pathetic effort at it? We're professionals, Morrow. It's an insult, that you thought this might work.'

'I'm hurt,' muttered Severard.

'Wounded,' sang Vitari, chain jingling in the darkness.

'Deethly othended,' grunted Frost, herding Morrow back towards the pen.

'You should have stuck to licking Hoffs big drunk arse. Or maybe you should have stayed on the farm, with your pigs. Tough work, perhaps, in the early morning, and so on. But it's a living.'

'Just wait! Just wuurgh—'

Severard grabbed Morrow's shoulder from behind, stabbed him through the side of his neck and chopped his throat out as calmly as if he was gutting a fish.

Blood showered over Glokta's boots and he stumbled back, wincing as pain shot up his ruined leg. 'Shit!' he hissed through his gums, nearly stumbling and falling on his arse in the filth, only managing to stay upright by clinging desperately to the fence beside him. 'Couldn't you just have strangled him?'

Severard shrugged. 'Same result, isn't it?' Morrow slid to his knees, eye-glasses skewed across his face, one hand clutching at his cut neck while blood bubbled out into his shirt collar.

Glokta watched the clerk tip onto his back, one leg kicking at the floor, his scraping heel leaving long streaks in the stinking muck. Alas for the pigs on the farm. They will never now see young master Morrow coming back over the hill, returned from his brave life in the glittering city, his breath smoking in the cold, cold morning…