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if he had an arse suspended from his magnificent moustache.
He had affected buff leather gauntlets reaching almost to the elbow, probably intended to give the impression of a man of action, but which put Gorst in mind of the gloves a farmer might wear to wind a troubled cow.
    Mitterick cocked an eyebrow at Gorst’s mud-crusted uniform. ‘More heroics, Colonel Gorst?’ he asked, accompanied by some light sniggering.
    Ram it up your chin-arse, you cow-winding bladder of vanity.
The words tickled Gorst’s lips. But in his falsetto, whatever he said the joke would be on him. He would rather have faced a thousand Northmen than this ordeal by conversation. So he turned the first sound into a queasy grin, and smiledalong with his humiliation as he always did. He found the gloomiest corner, crossed his arms over his filthy jacket and dampened his fury by imagining the smirking heads of Mitterick’s staff impaled on the pikes of Black Dow’s army. Not the most patriotic pastime, perhaps, but among his most satisfying.
    It’s an upside-down sham of a world in which men like these, if they can be called men at all, can look down on a man like me. I am worth twice the lot of you. And this is the best the Union has to offer? We deserve to lose.
    ‘Can’t win a war without getting your hands dirty.’
    ‘What?’ Gorst frowned sideways. The Dogman was leaning beside him in his battered coat, a look of world-weary resignation on his no less battered face.
    The Northman let his head tip back until it bumped gently against the peeling wall. ‘Some folk would rather keep clean, though, eh? And lose.’
    Gorst could ill afford to strike up an alliance with the one man even more of an outsider than himself. He slipped into his accustomed silence like a well-worn suit of armour, and turned his attention to the nervous chatter of the officers.
    ‘When are they getting here?’
    ‘Soon.’
    ‘How many of them?’
    ‘I heard three.’
    ‘Only one. It only takes one member of the Closed Council.’
    ‘The Closed Council?’ squeaked Gorst, voice driven up almost beyond the range of human hearing by a surge of nerves. A nauseating after-taste of the horror he had felt the day those horrible old men had stripped him of his position.
Squashing my dreams as carelessly as a boy might squash a beetle.
‘And next …’ as he was ushered into the hallway and the black doors were shut on him like coffin lids.
No longer commander of the king’s guards. No longer a Knight of the Body. No longer anything but a squealing joke, my name made a byword for failure and disgrace.
He could see that panel of creased and sagging sneers still. And at the head of the table the king’s pale face, jaw clenched, refusing to meet Gorst’s eye.
As though the ruin of his most loyal servant was no more than an unpleasant chore …
    ‘Which of them will it be?’ Felnigg was asking. ‘Do we know?’
    ‘It hardly matters.’ Kroy looked towards the window. Beyond the half-open shutters the rain was getting heavier. ‘We already know what they will say. The king demands a great victory, at twice the speed and half the cost.’
    ‘As always!’ Mitterick crowed with the regularity of an overeager cockerel. ‘Damn politicians, sticking their noses into our business! I swear those swindlers on the Closed Council cost us more lives than the bloody enemy ever—’
    The doorknob turned with a loud rattle and a heavy-set old man entered the room, entirely bald with a short grey beard. He gave no immediateimpression of supreme power. His clothes were only slightly less rain-soaked and mud-spattered than Gorst’s own. His staff was of plain wood shod with steel, more walking stick than rod of office. But still, though he and the single, unassuming servant who scraped in after him were outnumbered ten to one by some of the finest peacocks in the army, it was the officers who held their breath. The old man carried about him an air of untouchable confidence,