Kroy charged boldly into the ensuing silence. ‘This is my chief of staff, Colonel Felnigg, and this the leader of those Northmen who oppose Black Dow and fight alongside us, the Dogman.’
‘Ah, yes!’ Bayaz raised his brows. ‘I believe we had a mutual friend in Logen Ninefingers.’
The Dogman stared evenly back, the one man in the room who showed no sign of being overawed. ‘I’m a long way from sure he’s dead.’
‘If anyone can cheat the Great Leveller it was – or is – he. Either way, he is a loss to the North. To the world. A great man, and much missed.’
Dogman shrugged. ‘A man, anyway. Some good and some bad in him, like most. As for much missed, depends on who you ask, don’t it?’
‘True.’ Bayaz gave a rueful smile, and spoke a few words in fluent Northern: ‘You have to be realistic about these things.’
‘You do,’ replied the Dogman. Gorst doubted whether anyone else in the room had understood their little exchange. He was not entirely sure he had, for all he knew the language.
Kroy tried to usher things on. ‘And this is—’
‘Bremer dan Gorst, of course!’ Bayaz shocked Gorst to his boots by warmly shaking his hand. For a man of his years, he had quite the grip. ‘I saw you fence against the king, how long ago, now? Five years? Six?’
Gorst could have counted the hours since. And it says a great deal for my shadow of a life that my proudest moment is still being humiliated in a fencing match. ‘Nine.’
‘Nine, imagine that! The decades flit past me like leaves on the wind, I swear. No man ever deserved the title more.’
‘I was fairly beaten.’
Bayaz leaned close. ‘You were beaten, anyway, which is all that really counts, eh?’ And he slapped Gorst on the arm as if they had shared a private joke, though if they had it was private to Bayaz alone. ‘I thought you were with the Knights of the Body? Were you not guarding the king at the Battle of Adua?’
Gorst felt himself colouring. I was, as everyone here well knows, but now I am nothing but a wretched scapegoat, used and discarded like some stuttering serving girl by his lordship’s caddish youngest son. Now I am—
‘Colonel Gorst is here as the king’s observer,’ ventured Kroy, seeing his discomfort.
‘Of course!’ Bayaz snapped his fingers. ‘After that business in Sipani.’
Gorst’s face burned as though the city’s very name was a slap. Sipani. And as simply as that the best part of him was where he spent so much of his time: four years ago, back in the madness of Cardotti’s House of Leisure. Stumbling through the smoke, searching desperately for the king, reaching the staircase, seeing that masked face – and then the long, bouncing trip down the stairs, into unjust disgrace. He saw smirks among the over-bright smear of faces the room had suddenly become. He opened his dry mouth but, as usual, nothing of any use emerged.
