Like a man plunging through thin ice, the room was sucked into sudden, awful silence. That heavy quiet before the heavens split. That pregnant stillness, bulging with the inevitable.
“The Snake of Talins is dead,” murmured Sajaam, eyes narrowing.
Shenkt felt the slow movement of the men around him. Their smiles creeping off, their feet creeping to the balance for killing, their hands creeping to their weapons. “She is alive and you know where. I want only to talk to her.”
“Who the shuh, shit does this bastard thuh, think he is?” asked the scrawny card player, and some of the others laughed. Tight, fake laughs, to hide their tension.
“Only tell me where she is. Please. Then no one’s conscience need grow any heavier today.” Shenkt did not mind pleading. He had given up his vanity long ago. He looked each man in the eyes, gave each a chance to give him what he needed. He gave everyone a chance, where he could. He wished more of them took it.
But they only smiled at him, and at each other, and Sajaam smiled widest of all. “I carry my conscience lightly enough.”
Shenkt’s old master might have said the same. “Some of us do. It is a gift.”
“I tell you what, we’ll toss for it.” Sajaam held his coin up to the light, gold flashing. “Heads, we kill you. Tails, I tell you where Murcatto is…” His smile was all bright teeth in his dark face. “Then we kill you.” There was the slightest ring of metal as he flicked his coin up.
Shenkt sucked in breath through his nose, slow, slow.
The gold crawled into the air, turning, turning.
The clock beat deep and slow as the oars of a great ship.
Boom… boom… boom…
Shenkt’s fist sank into the great gut of the fat man on his right, almost to the elbow. Nothing left to scream with, he gave the gentlest fragment of a sigh, eyes popping. An instant later the edge of Shenkt’s open hand caved his astonished face in and ripped his head half-off, bone crumpling like paper. Blood sprayed across the table, black spots frozen, the expressions of the men around it only now starting to shift from rage to shock.
Shenkt snatched the nearest of them from his chair and flung him into the ceiling. His cry was barely begun as he crashed into a pair of beams, wood bursting, splinters spinning, mangled body falling back down in a languid shower of dust and broken plaster. Long before that one hit the floor, Shenkt had seized the next player’s head and rammed his face through the table, through the floor beneath it. Cards, and broken glasses, chunks of planking, fragments of wood and flesh made a swelling cloud. Shenkt ripped the half-drawn hatchet from his fist as he went down, sent it whirling across the room and into the chest of the tattooed man, halfway up from his cushion and the first note of a war cry throbbing from his lips. It hit him haft first, so hard it scarcely mattered, spun him round and round like a child’s top, ripped wide open, blood gouting from his body in all directions.
The flatbow twanged, deep and distorted, string twisting as it pushed the bolt towards him, swimming slowly through the dust-filled air as if through treacle, shaft flexing lightly back and forth. Shenkt snatched it from its path and drove it clean through a man’s skull, his face folding into itself, meat bursting from torn skin. Shenkt caught him under the jaw and sent his corpse hurtling across the room with a flick of his wrist. He crashed into the archer, the two bodies mashed together, flailing bonelessly into the wall, through the wall, out into the alley on the other side, leaving a ragged hole in the shattered planks behind them.
The guard from the door had his mace raised, mouth open, air rushing in as he made ready to roar. Shenkt leaped the ruins of the table and slapped him backhanded across the chest, burst his ribcage and sent him reeling, twisting up like a corkscrew, mace flying from his lifeless hand. Shenkt stepped forwards and snatched Sajaam’s coin from the air as it spun back down, metal slapping into his palm.
He breathed out, and time flowed again.
The last couple of corpses tumbled across the floor. Plaster dropped, settled. The tattooed man’s left boot rattled against the boards, leg quivering as he died. One of the others was groaning, but not for much longer. The last spots of blood rained softly from the air around them, misting across the broken glass, the broken wood, the broken bodies. One of the cushions had burst, the feathers still fluttering down in a white cloud.
Shenkt’s fist trembled before Sajaam’s slack face. Steam hissed from it, then molten gold, trickling from between his fingers, running down his forearm in shining streaks. He opened his hand and showed it, palm forwards, daubed with black blood, smeared with glowing metal.
“Neither heads nor tails.”
“Fuh… fuh… fuh…” The stuttering man still sat at his place, where the table had been, cards clutched in his rigid hand, every part of him spattered, spotted, sprayed with blood.
“You,” said Shenkt. “Stuttering man. You may live.”
“Fuh… fuh…”
