The man leaves Raghnailt’s house, and, around him, the street is empty and all the doors are closed. These few houses are squat, crooked, their ugliness exposed by the full light of summer. The town’s only movement comes from his horse flicking its tail to remove a fly from itself, and then, for a moment, everything is still. He stops to take it all in, his dominance of this place, his total victory over it, but everything is so ragged and fractured that it feels like no achievement at all; it almost feels like a defeat. Such a scraggly place, he thinks. There are bodies by the monastery and bodies by the forge, and there were bodies where he slept this morning, too. The whole town is overflowing with death.

‘This is sloppily done,’ he says.

Putting his fingers to his throat, he feels the rawness the chain left upon it. That, too, he thinks, was sloppily done. This is happening because he is drunk. De Fonteroy had warned him about alcohol; and if he remembers correctly, he had told him those very words in a tavern.

‘There is a kind of awareness necessary to stay alive that is blunted by the sweetness of alcohol,’ de Fonteroy had said. ‘One must perceive what is, but when drunk one feels like everything is possible, and that is never true. Is everything wrong, or is just one thing wrong? You must be able to tell, or any whore can cut your face open and steal your purse. Everything feels like doom, and, of course, everything is, but the problem is if you do not mind it. You must be the one who creates the littler and more immediate doom about people, and then weave the consequent sense out of it; that is the only doom worth a damn. And I do not work with drinking men.’

De Fonteroy had taught him everything over the course of that one night, and by dawn they had gone into business together. At first, they had made a fortune taking bodies from towns abandoned by the sheriffs and the nobility, and within three weeks, almost by accident, they had slipped into managing the towns themselves, selling them off part by part, or claiming them for themselves using different names. In some of the towns, no one was left who could read, and they had made off with all its properties and lands in less than an hour by showing some few survivors a faded vellum that detailed how one made a salve from honey and lavender, claiming it was a writ from the king.

But de Fonteroy had been gone for some days now, and it is so hard to maintain sanity on your own. Colca was worse than no company, and just a little alcohol made it all feel so easy, made the violence around him seem much more necessary and natural.