“Victarine dan Teufel.” Savine’s face might have been softened by her condition but her smile had a harder, hungrier edge than ever. “Unless I’m much mistaken.”
Broad’s heavy brows knitted with suspicion. “The two o’ you know each other?”
While Vick tried to plot a safe path through the swamp of truths and falsehoods these three knew about her, she met one question with another. “The two of you know each other?”
“Master Broad saved my life during the uprising in Valbeck,” said Savine. “And I shared the carriage there with Inquisitor Teufel.”
“Inquisitor?” Broad’s wide eyes looked strangely small through his lenses. “Thought you grew up in the camps?”
“I did. But Arch Lector Glokta offered me a way out.” Vick met Broad’s eye and told all the truth she could. “Bringing the Breakers to justice.”
“You were working for Old Sticks all that time?”
“My father once described Inquisitor Teufel as his most loyal servant.” Savine sipped delicately from a teacup, but the stare she gave Vick over the rim was flinty. “So I must say I’m surprised to see you swagger into my parlour with a message from one rebel to another.”
There was a weighty silence, then, while everyone frowned at Vick, and Broad slowly unclasped his big hands, that Ladderman’s tattoo squirming as he made fists of them. She knew it was one of those moments when her life hung by a thread. But it was hardly her first.
“Everyone’s loyalties are a touch tangled these days.” She hooked out the chair at the head of the table with her foot and dropped into it, meeting Savine’s eye. “I like to think I never let your father down. He got me out of the camps. I owed him. But he’s gone now.”
A flicker of doubt crossed Savine’s well-powdered face. “Gone?”
She didn’t know. That was useful. A surprise might put her off balance. “Your father had to resign. Once news got out of this little… escapade. Retired to his country estates to write a book about fencing. Your mother thought the air would be good for his health. Or that’s what she said she thought.” It rang true because it was true, and Vick took a fork and leaned across to spear a sausage from a dish. “It’s Arch Lector Pike, now.”
She noticed the muscles squirm in Broad’s jaw. Saw his big fists tighten further. That was useful, too. His anger and Savine’s guilt could keep them distracted, while Vick swaggered past in plain sight.
“I owed your father,” she said, “but I don’t owe Pike a thing. Lord Marshal Brint needed someone to carry a message. Someone who could slip through the lines. Someone comfortable with a lie or two.” She waved towards the window with her fork. “Judging by all the men I passed on the way here, we may have a change in government soon enough.” She bit into the sausage and smiled as she chewed. “If I learned one thing in the camps, it’s always eat when food’s on offer. But if I learned another, it’s that you stand with the winners.”
She was bringing them round, she could feel it. And once you’ve got someone to believe, it takes a jolt to shift them. Accepting you swallowed a lie means accepting you’re a fool, after all. Who wants to think that?
“You’re right to be suspicious, though,” she said. “There’s a hell of a lot at stake. That’s why the lord marshal gave me this.” And she twisted Brint’s ring from her finger and tossed it into the dish with the sausages.
Savine held it frowning to the light, with the air of a woman who’s assessed a lot of jewellery. “It’s a lady’s ring.”
“He said it belonged to his wife. The one lost at the Battle of Osrung.”
There’s nothing like a prop to shore up a lie. Something you can touch. Something with a story. Even if, when you really thought about it, she could’ve stolen it from a one-armed man in a bathhouse.
“Aliz dan Brint… my mother was taken hostage with her!” Brock sat eagerly forward. “What’s the message?”
And now to forget about the truth altogether and bury the bastards in a great cargo of lies. Lies they could build all their plans out of. Lies that’d crumble as soon as any weight was put on them. “Orso is marching against you with every man he can find, but he can’t find many. He’s sent for the King’s Own, but they’re scattered across the Union, and Brint stopped most of the orders going out. The Closed Council were taken by surprise, are off balance and all looking to save themselves. There’s no help coming to the king. No friends and no reinforcements.” As she spoke, the smile spread across Brock’s face, and she knew she had him. “What are your numbers?”
“Perhaps twenty thousand,” he breathed. “There are still men coming in.”
Worse than she’d feared. The rebels might outnumber the loyalists two to one. She smiled as though it was better than she’d hoped. “You might outnumber him four to one.”
Leo dan Brock eagerly clenched his fist. “We have him.”
“Take nothing for granted,” said Savine, but Vick caught the relief in her voice, the flush of triumph on her cheek. The look of a gambler who has gone all in, then been dealt the final card of a winning hand. Lady Brock was a formidable liar herself, of course. Used to flipping investors about her knuckles like a magician flips a coin. But she was nowhere near as good as she thought she was.
Vick had been staking her life on her lies for years. She’d tricked Risinau and his people, tricked Sibalt and his people, tricked Solumeo Shudra in Westport, even tricked the Minister of Whispers herself, for a few days, all while death breathed on her neck. She popped the last bit of sausage in her mouth.
“Lord Marshal Brint asked me to bring a message back. He needs to know your plans.” And she held out her hand for his ring. “What shall I tell him?”
You Asked for Killers
“Well, here’s a mess,” said Clover, wearily puffing out his cheeks.
“Just went wrong, is all.” Dancer knelt in the muddy yard with wrists tied behind him to his ankles. Not the most comfortable position, but he’d no one else to blame. His fat friend was similarly tied but he’d got knocked over when Downside slapped him and couldn’t find a way to wriggle back to his knees, or maybe he’d thought better of trying. Now he was sobbing away softly on his side, one pink cheek caked in muck and the other streaked with tears. Flick, meanwhile, was being sick behind the shed. That boy could never get enough to eat, but somehow he never ran out of sick, neither.
“Just went wrong.”
“Wrong?” barked Downside, stabbing angrily at the woman’s corpse with a pointed finger and making Dancer and the rest of ’em cringe. For a man who made so many corpses, he could get quite upset over the ones other people made. “That all you got to say? Wrong?”
“We just wanted the sheep!” One of ’em bleated from the pen, as if to lend support to that part of Dancer’s story if no other. “We even asked nicely.”
Clover rubbed at his temples. Had a bit of a headache. Thinking about it, he’d had a headache for weeks. “If those sheep were all you had in the world, would asking nicely get you to hand ’em over?”