“Fucking pointless,” hissed Leo, kicking Gorst’s short steel skittering into the sea with a swing of his iron leg. There’d been a time when he’d admired that man more than anyone. When he’d wanted to be just like him. “Goes to show,” he grunted, “you have to be your own hero.” He limped on towards the gangplank, past the corpses and the sobbing man still trying to hold his guts in.

“Well?” he shouted as Glaward stuck his head over the ship’s rail.

“The captain says he’s got no passengers and his ship hasn’t been chartered. Not by the Lady Regent. Not by anyone. A cargo of cloth and buttons bound for Westport, that’s all.”

“By the dead. Rip this fucking boat apart! Down to the last timber.”

Jurand stood with his flatbow resting on his shoulder, hair stirred by the sea breeze about his thoughtful frown. “He was never here.” And he offered Leo his cane.

“No.” Leo shut his eyes and tried to bring his anger under control. If he’d thought for a moment, he’d have realised it was very unlike Savine to wave so obvious a clue right under his nose. It seemed he could still be reckless, offered the right bait.

“The charter was a fake. This was a distraction.” It took Leo an embarrassingly long time to sheathe his sword with only one hand, fishing around with the point for the mouth of the scabbard and near stabbing himself in the hip. “Savine bloody tricked us!” He finally slapped it back and snatched his cane from Jurand’s hand, frowning at Gorst’s body. “I want every loyal man out on the streets. I want every ship, cart and person in or out of the city searched and—”

“I gave the orders as soon as we found Orso wasn’t in his cell,” said Jurand. “There’s a company at every gate, Arnault’s Wall and Casamir’s. Others out combing the streets. A rat won’t leave Adua without us knowing.”

Leo closed his eyes and gave a sigh of relief. He would’ve hugged Jurand if he’d had the limbs to do it. What madness had made him send away his best friend? “What the bloody hell would I do without you?” he asked.

The hooves of the blinkered old boathorse clopped sleepily on the towpath. The water slapped gently against the sides of the barge. A breeze sighed peacefully down the canal, wafting away the worst of the vapours. From time to time, the bargemen would make some growling utterance to labourers, or washerwomen, or ragged children on the banks. Orso could not understand a word. His own subjects, in theory, and it seemed they spoke a different tongue.

Tunny had lit a pipe, shoved it among his unkempt grey whiskers and was calmly puffing away. Hildi had pulled her cap down low and set her mouth hard, glancing inconspicuously about and looking every bit a river rat born at the prow of a barge.

“Can’t we go any faster?” murmured Orso. When he’d fantasised about escape it had been thundering from the city among fluttering flatbow bolts on the back of a black charger, hair ripped by the wind of his daring. Not hiding in a greasy coal-heap and floating to safety at a snail’s pace. But there was the difference between fantasy and reality, he supposed. A gulf he should have been familiar with by now.