Evil Friends

It had been Benna's favourite place in Westport. He'd dragged her there twice a week while they were in the city. A shrine of mirrors and cut glass, polished wood and glittering marble. A temple to the god of male grooming. The high priest—a small, lean barber in a heavily embroidered apron—stood sharply upright in the centre of the floor, chin pointed to the ceiling, as though he'd been expecting them that very moment to enter.

“Madam! A delight to see you again!” He blinked for a moment. “Your husband is not with you?”

“My brother.” Monza swallowed. “And no, he … won't be back. I've an altogether tougher challenge for you—”

Shivers stepped through the doorway, gawping about as fearfully as a sheep in a shearing pen. She opened her mouth to speak but the barber cut her off. “I believe I see the problem.” He made a sharp circuit of Shivers while the Northman frowned down at him. “Dear, dear. All off?”

“What?”

“All off,” said Monza, taking the barber by the elbow and pressing a quarter into his hand. “Go gently, though. I doubt he's used to this and he might startle.” She realised she was making him sound like a horse. Maybe that was giving him too much credit.

“Of course.” The barber turned, and gave a sharp intake of breath. Shivers had already taken his new shirt off and was looming pale and sinewy in the doorway, unbuckling his belt.

“He means your hair, fool,” said Monza, “not your clothes.”

“Uh. Thought it was odd, but, well, Southern fashions …” Monza watched him as he sheepishly buttoned his shirt back up. He had a long scar from his shoulder across his chest, pink and twisted. She might've thought it ugly once, but she'd had to change her opinions on scars, along with a few other things.

Shivers lowered himself into the chair. “Had this hair all my life.”

“Then it is past time you were released from its suffocating embrace. Head forwards, please.” The barber produced his scissors with a flourish and Shivers lurched out of his seat.

“You think I'm letting a man I never met near my face with a blade?”

“I must protest! I trim the heads of Westport's finest gentlemen!”

“You.” Monza caught the barber's shoulder as he backed away and marched him forwards. “Shut up and cut hair.” She slipped another quarter into his apron pocket and gave Shivers a long look. “You, shut up and sit still.”

He sidled back into the chair and clung so tight to its arms that the tendons stood from the backs of his hands. “I'm watching you,” he growled.

The barber gave a long sigh and with lips pursed began to work.

Monza wandered around the room while the scissors snip-snipped behind her. She walked along a shelf, absently pulling the stoppers from the coloured bottles, sniffing at the scented oils inside. She caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror. A hard face, still. Thinner, leaner, sharper even than she used to be. Eyes sunken from the nagging pain up her legs, from the nagging need for the husk that made the pain go away.

You look especially beautiful this morning, Monza …

The idea of a smoke stuck in her mind like a bone in her craw. Each day the need crept up on her earlier. More time spent sick, sore and twitchy, counting the minutes until she could creep off and be with her pipe, sink back into soft, warm nothingness. Her fingertips tingled at the thought, tongue working hungrily around her dry mouth.

“Always worn it long. Always.” She turned back into the room. Shivers was wincing like a torture victim as tufts of cut hair tumbled down and built up on the polished boards under the chair. Some men clam up when they're nervous. Some men blather. It seemed Shivers was in the latter camp. “Guess my brother had long hair and I went and did the same. Used to try and copy him. Looked up to him. Little brothers, you know … What was your brother like?”

She felt her cheek twitch, remembering Benna's grinning face in the mirror, and hers behind it. “He was a good man. Everyone loved him.”

“My brother was a good man. Lot better'n me. My father thought so, anyway. Never missed a chance to tell me … I mean, just saying, nothing strange 'bout long hair where I come from. Folk got other things to cut in a war than their hair, I guess. Black Dow used to laugh at me, 'cause he'd always hacked his right off, so as not to get in the way in a fight. But then he'd give a man shit about anything, Black Dow. Hard mouth. Hard man. Only man harder was the Bloody-Nine his self. I reckon—”

“For someone with a weak grip on the language, you like to talk, don't you? You know what I reckon?”

“What?”

“People talk a lot when they've nothing to say.”

Shivers heaved out a sigh. “Just trying to make tomorrow that bit better than today is all. I'm one of those … you've got a word for it, don't you?”

“Idiots?”

He looked sideways at her. “It was a different one I had in mind.”

“Optimists.”

“That's the one. I'm an optimist.”

“How's it working out for you?”

“Not great, but I keep hoping.”

“That's optimists. You bastards never learn.” She watched Shivers' face emerging from that tangle of greasy hair. Hard-boned, sharp-nosed, with a nick of a scar through one eyebrow. It was a good face, in so far as she cared. She found she cared more than she'd thought she would. “You were a soldier, right? What do they call them up in the North … a Carl?”

“I was a Named Man, as it goes,” and she could hear the pride in his voice.

“Good for you. So you led men?”

“I had some looking to me. My father was a famous man, my brother too. A little some of that rubbed off, maybe.”

“So why throw it away? Why come down here to be nothing?”

He looked at her in the mirror while the scissors clicked round his face. “Morveer said you were a soldier yourself. A famous one.”

“Not that famous.” It was only half a lie. Infamous was closer to it.

“That'd be a strange job for a woman, where I come from.”

She shrugged. “Easier than farming.”

“So you know war, am I right?”

“Yes.”

“Daresay you've seen some battles. You've seen men killed.”

“Yes.”

“Then you've seen what goes with it. The marches, the waiting, the sickness. Folk raped, robbed, crippled, burned out who've done nought to deserve it.”

Monza thought of her own field burning, all those years ago. “You've got a point, you can out and say it.”

“That blood only makes more blood. That settling one score only starts another. That war gives a bastard of a sour taste to any man that's not half-mad, and it only gets worse with time.” She didn't disagree. “So you know why I'd rather be free of it. Make something grow. Something to be proud of, instead of just breaking. Be … a good man, I guess.”

Snip, snip. Hair tumbled down and gathered on the floor. “A good man, eh?”

“That's right.”

“So you've seen dead men yourself?”

“I've seen my share.”

“You've seen a lot together?” she asked. “Stacked up after the plague came through, spread out after a battle?”

“Aye, I've seen that.”

“Did you notice some of those corpses had a kind of glow about them? A sweet smell like roses on a spring morning?”

Shivers frowned. “No.”

“The good men and the bad, then—all looked about the same, did they? They always did to me, I can tell you that.” It was his turn to stay quiet. “If you're a good man, and you try to think about what the right thing is every day of your life, and you build things to be proud of so bastards can come and burn them in a moment, and you make sure and say thank you kindly each time they kick the guts out of you, do you think when you die, and they stick you in the mud, you turn into gold?”

“What?”

“Or do you turn to fucking shit like the rest of us?”

He nodded slowly. “You turn to shit, alright. But maybe you can leave something good behind you.”

She barked empty laughter at him. “What do we leave behind but things not done, not said, not finished? Empty clothes, empty rooms, empty spaces in the ones who knew us? Mistakes never made right and hopes rotted down to nothing?”

“Hopes passed on, maybe. Good words said. Happy memories, I reckon.”

“And all those dead men's smiles you've kept folded up in your heart, they were keeping you warm when I found you, were they? How did they taste when you were hungry? They raise a smile, even, when you were desperate?”

Shivers puffed out his cheeks. “Hell, but you're a ray of sunshine. Might be they did me some good.”

“More than a pocketful of silver would've?”

He blinked at her, then away. “Maybe not. But I reckon I'll try to keep thinking my way, just the same.”

“Hah. Good luck, good man.” She shook her head as if she'd never heard such stupidity. Give me only evil men for friends, Verturio wrote. Them I understand.

A last quick clicking of the scissors and the barber stepped away, dabbing at his own sweaty brow with the back of one sleeve. “And we are all finished.”

Shivers stared into the mirror. “I look a different man.”

“Sir looks like a Styrian aristocrat.”

Monza snorted. “Less like a Northern beggar, anyway.”

“Maybe.” Shivers looked less than happy. “I daresay that's a better-looking man there. A cleverer man.” He ran one hand through his short dark hair, frowning at his reflection. “Not sure if I trust that bastard, though.”

“And to finish …” The barber leaned forwards, a coloured crystal bottle in his hands, and squirted a fine mist of perfume over Shivers' head.

The Northman was up like a cat off hot coals. “What the fuck?” he roared, big fists clenched, shoving the man away and making him totter across the room with a squeal.

Monza burst out laughing. “Looks of a Styrian nobleman, maybe.” She pulled out a couple more quarters and tucked them into the gaping barber's apron pocket. “The manners might be a while coming, though.”

It was getting dark when they came back to the crumbling mansion, Monza with her hood drawn up and Shivers striding proudly along in his new coat. A cold rain flitted down into the ruined courtyard, a single lamp burned in a window on the first floor. She frowned towards it, and then at Shivers, found the grip of the knife in the back of her belt with her left hand. Best to be ready for every possibility. Up the creaking stairs a peeling door stood ajar, light spilling out across the boards. She stepped up and poked it open with her boot.

A pair of burning logs in the soot-blackened fireplace barely warmed the chamber on the other side. Friendly stood beside the far window, peering through the shutters towards the bank. Morveer had some sheets of paper spread out on a rickety old table, marking his place with an ink-spotted hand. Day sat on the tabletop with her legs crossed, peeling an orange with a dagger. “Definite improvement,” she grunted, giving Shivers a glance.

“Oh, I cannot but agree.” Morveer grinned. “A dirty, long-haired idiot left the building this morning. A clean, short-haired idiot has returned. It must be magic.”

Monza let go the grip of her knife while Shivers muttered angrily to himself in Northern. “Since you're not crowing your own praises, I'm guessing the job's not done.”

“Mauthis is a most cautious and well-protected man. The bank is far too heavily guarded during the day.”

“On his way to the bank, then.”

“He leaves by an armoured carriage with a dozen guards in attendance. To try and intercept them would be too great a risk.”

Shivers tossed another log on the fire and held his palms out towards it. “At his house?”

“Pah,” sneered Morveer. “We followed him there. He lives on a walled island in the bay where several of the city's Aldermen have their estates. The public are not admitted. We have no method of gaining advance access to the building even if we can deduce which one is his. How many guards, servants, family members would be in attendance? All unknown. I flatly refuse to attempt a job of this difficulty on conjecture. What do I never take, Day?”

“Chances.”

“Correct. I deal in certainties, Murcatto. That is why you came to me. I am hired for a certain man most certainly dead, not for a butcher's mess and your target slipped away in the chaos. We are not in Caprile, now—”

“I know where we are, Morveer. What's your plan, then?”

“I have gathered the necessary information and devised a sure means of achieving the desired effect. I need only gain access to the bank during the hours of darkness.”

“And how do you plan to do that?”

“How do I plan to do that, Day?”

“Through the rigorous application of observation, logic and method.”

Morveer flashed his smug little smile again. “Precisely so.”

Monza glanced sideways at Benna. Except Benna was dead, and Shivers was in his place. The Northman raised his eyebrows, blew out a long sigh and looked back to the fire. Give me only evil men for friends, Verturio wrote. But there had to be a limit.