His feet were clipped out from under him and he fell hard: numbing shock from one shoulder and his hip. Bellam Nom stood over him, breathing hard but grinning. ‘Nice try,’ he said.

‘Mew and Hinty! You left them-’

‘Locked up, yes. That’s what slowed me down.’ And he reached down, grasped Snell’s arm and yanked him to his feet, twisting hard enough to make him yelp in pain.

Bellam dragged Snell back the way he’d come.

‘I’m going to kill you one day,’ Snell said, then winced as Bellam’s grip tightened on his arm.

‘It’s what people like you rely on, isn’t it?’

‘What?’

‘That none of us are as nasty as you. That we’ll have qualms about, say, skinning you alive. Or shattering your kneecaps. Gouging out your eyes. You want to kill me? Fine, just don’t be surprised if I get to you first, Snell.’

‘You can’t murder-’

‘Can’t I? Why not? You seem to think you can, whenever you like, whenever the chance arises. Well, I’m not Stonny Menackis. I’m not Murillio, either. They’re… civilized folk. No, Snell, I’m more like you, only I’m older and better at it.’

‘If you did anything to me, Murillio would have to go after you. Like you say, he’s not like us. Or Stonny. She’d cut you to pieces. Yes, it’d be Stonny, once Da asked her to, and he would.’

‘You’re making a big assumption, Snell.’

‘What?’

‘That they’d ever figure out it was me.’

‘I’ll warn them-as soon as they come back-I’ll warn them about you-’

‘Before or after you make your confession? About what you did to poor Harllo?’

‘That was different! I didn’t do nothing on purpose-’

‘You hurt him, probably killed him, and left his body for the birds. You kept it all a secret, Snell. Hood knows, if I asked nicely enough, your da might just hand you over to me and good riddance to you.’

Snell said nothing. There was true terror inside him now. So much terror itfilled him up, spilled out through his pores, and out from between his legs. This Bellam was a monster. He didn’t feel anything for nobody. He just wanted to hurt Snell. A monster. A vicious demon, yes, a demon. Bellam was everything that was wrong with… with… everything.

‘I’ll,be good,’ Snell whimpered. ‘You’ll see. I’ll make it right, all of it.’

But these were lies, and both of them knew it. Snell was what he was, and no amount of cuddling and coddling would change that. He stood, there in the mind, as if to say: we are in your world. More of us than you imagine. If you knew how many of us there are, you’d be very, very frightened. We are here. Now, what are you going to do with us? Snell was what he was, yes, and so, too, was Bellam Nom.

When he was dragged in through the narrow door of a nondescript shop at the near end of Twisty Alley, Snell suddenly recoiled-he knew this place. He knew-

‘What you got yourself there, Bellam?’

‘A fresh one, Goruss, and I’ll let him go cheap.’

‘Wait!’ Snell shrieked, and then a heavy hand clamped over his mouth and he was pulled into the gloom, smelling rank sweat, feeling a breath on his cheek as the ogre named Goruss leaned in close.

‘A screamer, iz he?’

‘A nasty little shit, in fact.’

‘We’ll work that outer ’im.’

‘Not this one. He’d stab his mother just to watch the blood flow. ‘Sprobably left a trail of tortured small animals ten leagues long, buried in little holes in every back yard of the neighbourhood. This is one of those, Goruss.’

‘Eighteen silver?’

‘Slivers?’

‘Yah.’

‘All right.’

Snell thrashed about as he was carried off into a back room, then down steps and into an unlit cellar that smelled of piss-soaked mud. He was gagged and bound and thrown into a low iron cage. Goruss then went back up the stairs, leaving Snell alone.

In the front room, Goruss sat down across from Bellam. ‘Ale, nephew?’

‘Too early for me, Uncle.’

‘How long you want me to hold him?’

‘Long enough to shit everything out of him. I want him so scared he breaks inside.’

‘Give him a night, then. Enough to run through all his terrors, but not so much he gets numb. Shit, nephew, I don’t deal in anybody under, oh, fifteen years old, and we do careful interviewing and observing, and only the completely hopeless ones get shipped to the rowing benches. And even then, they get paid and fed and signed out after five years-and most of them do good after that.’

‘I doubt Snell knows any of that, Uncle. Just that children are dragged into this shop and they don’t come back out.’’Must look that way.’

Bellam smiled. ‘Oh, it does, Uncle, it does.’

‘Not seen him in days.’

Barathol just nodded, then walked over to the cask of water to wash the grime off his forearms and hands. Chaur sat on a crate nearby, eating some local fruit with a yellow skin and pink, fleshy insides. Juice dribbled down his stubbled chin.

Scillara gave him a bright smile as she wandered into the front room. The air smelled brittle and acrid, the way it does in smithies, and she thought now that, from this moment on, the scent would accompany her every recollection of Barathol, this large man with the gentle eyes. ‘Had any more trouble with the Guilds?’ she asked.

He dried himself off and flung the cloth to one side. ‘They’re making it hard, but I expected that. We’re surviving.’

‘So I see.’ She kicked at a heap of iron rods. ‘New order?’

‘Swords. The arrival of the Malazan embassy’s garrison has triggered a new fad among the nobles. Imperial longswords. Gave trouble to most of the local sword-smiths.’ He shrugged. ‘Not me, of course.’

Scillara settled down in the lone chair and began scraping out her pipe. ‘What’s so special about Malazan longswords?’

‘The very opposite, actually. The local makers haven’t quite worked out that they have to reverse engineer to get them right.’

‘Reverse engineer?’

‘The Malazan longsword’s basic design and manufacture is originally Untan, from the imperial mainland. Three centuries old, at least, maybe older. The empire still uses the Untan foundries and they’re a conservative bunch.’

‘Well, if the damned things do what they’re supposed to do, why make changes?’

‘That seems to be the thinking, yes. The locals have gone mad folding and refolding, trying to capture that rough solidity, but the Untan smiths are in the habit of working iron not hot enough. It’s also red iron that they’re using-the Untan Hills are rotten with it even though it’s rare everywhere else.’ He paused, watching as she lit her pipe. ‘This can’t be of any real interest to you, Scillara.’

‘Not really, but I do like the sound of your voice.’ And she looked up at him through the smoke, her eyes half veiled.

‘Anyway, I can make decent copies and the word’s gone out. Eventually, some swordsmith will work things out, but by then I’ll have plenty of satisfied customers and even undercutting me won’t be too damaging.’

‘Good,’ she said.

He studied her for a moment, and then said, ‘So, Cutter’s gone missing, has he?’

‘I don’t know about that. Only that I’ve not seen him in a few days.’

‘Are you worried?’She thought about it, and then thought some more, ‘ Barathol, that wasn’t my reason for visiting you. I wasn’t looking for someone to charge in as if Cut-ter’s been kidnapped or something. I’m here because I wanted to see you. I’m lonely-oh, I don’t mean anybody’ll do, either, when I say that. I just wanted to see you, that’s all.’

After a moment, he shrugged and held out his hands. ‘Here I am.’

‘You won’t make it easy, will you?’

‘Scillara, look at me. Please, look. Carefully. You’re too fast for me. Cutter, that historian, even that Bridgeburner, you leave them all spinning in your wake. Given my choice, I’d rather go through the rest of my life beneath the notice of everyone. I’m not interested in drama, or even excitement.’

She stretched out her legs. ‘And you think I am?’