The Great Leveller: Best Served Cold, The Heroes and Red Country

by Joe Abercrombie

  She leaned down over Gobba and lashed petulantly at him with the hammer, suddenly, stupidly angry she’d embarrassed herself. ‘Bastard! Bastard!’ He grunted and gurgled as the steel head thudded into his ribs. He tried to curl up and half-dragged her over on top of him, twisting her leg.

  Pain lanced up her hip and made her screech. She dug at the side of his head with the haft of the hammer until she’d torn his ear half-off. Shivers took a step forwards but she’d already wrenched herself free. Gobba blubbered, somehow dragged himself up to sitting, back against a big water butt. His hands had swollen up to twice the size they had been. Purple, flopping mittens.

  ‘Beg!’ she hissed. ‘Beg, you fat fucker!’

  But Gobba was too busy staring at the mincemeat on the end of his arms, and screaming. Hoarse, short, slobbery screams.

  ‘Someone might hear.’ Friendly looked like he didn’t care much either way.

  ‘Better shut him up, then.’

  The convict leaned over the barrel from behind with a wire between his fists, hooked Gobba under the neck and dragged him up hard, cutting his bellows down to slippery splutters.

  Monza squatted in front of him so their faces were level, her knees burning as she watched the wire cut into his fat neck. Just the way it had cut into hers. The scars it had left on her itched. ‘How does it feel?’ Her eyes flickered over his face, trying to squeeze some sliver of satisfaction from it. ‘How does it feel?’ Though no one knew better than her. Gobba’s eyes bulged, his jowls trembled, turning from pink, to red, to purple. She pushed herself up to standing. ‘I’d say it’s a waste of good flesh. But it isn’t.’

  She closed her eyes and let her head drop back, sucked a long breath in through her nose as she tightened her grip on the hammer, lifted it high.

  ‘Betray me and leave me alive?’

  It came down between Gobba’s piggy eyes with a sharp bang like a stone slab splitting. His back arched, his mouth yawned wide but no sound came out.

  ‘Take my hand and leave me alive?’

  The hammer hit him in the nose and caved his face in like a broken egg. His body crumpled, shattered leg jerking, jerking.

  ‘Kill my brother and leave me alive?’

  The last blow broke his skull wide open. Black blood bubbled down his purple skin. Friendly let go the wire and Gobba slid sideways. Gently, gracefully almost, he rolled over onto his front, and was still.

  Dead. You didn’t have to be an expert to see that. Monza winced as she forced her aching fingers open and the hammer clattered down, its head gleaming red, a clump of hair stuck to one corner.

  One dead. Six left.

  ‘Six and one,’ she muttered to herself. Friendly stared at her, eyes wide, and she wasn’t sure why.

  ‘What’s it like?’ Shivers, watching her from the shadows.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Revenge. Does it feel good?’

  Monza wasn’t sure she felt much of anything beyond the pain pulsing through her burned hand and her broken hand, up her legs and through her skull. Benna was still dead, she was still broken. She stood there frowning, and didn’t answer.

  ‘You want me to get rid of this?’ Friendly waved an arm at the corpse, a heavy cleaver gleaming in his other hand.

  ‘Make sure he won’t be found.’

  Friendly grabbed Gobba’s ankle and started dragging him back towards the anvil, leaving a bloody trail through the sawdust. ‘Chop him up. Into the sewers. Rats can have him.’

  ‘Better than he deserves.’ But Monza felt the slightest bit sick. She needed a smoke. Getting to that time of day. A smoke would settle her nerves. She pulled out a small purse, the one with fifty scales in it, and tossed it to Shivers.

  Coins snapped together inside as he caught it. ‘That’s it?’

  ‘That’s it.’

  ‘Right.’ He paused, as though he wanted to say something but couldn’t think what. ‘Sorry about your brother.’

  She looked at his face in the lamplight. Really looking, trying to guess him out. He knew next to nothing about her or Orso. Next to nothing about anything, at a first glance. But he could fight, she’d seen that. He’d walked into Sajaam’s place alone, and that took courage. A man with courage, with morals, maybe. A man with pride. That meant he might have some loyalty too, if she could get a grip on it. And loyal men were a rare commodity in Styria.

  She’d never spent much time alone. Benna had always been beside her. Or behind her, at any rate. ‘You’re sorry.’

  ‘That’s right. I had a brother.’ He started to turn for the door.

  ‘You need more work?’ She kept her eyes fixed on his as she came forwards, and while she did it she slid her good hand around behind her back and found the handle of the knife there. He knew her name, and Orso’s, and Sajaam’s, and that was enough to get them all killed ten times over. One way or another, he had to stay.

  ‘More work like this?’ He frowned down at the bloodstained sawdust under her boots.

  ‘Killing. You can say it.’ She thought about whether to stab him down into the chest or up under the jaw, or wait until he’d turned and take his back. ‘What did you think it’d be? Milking a goat?’

  He shook his head, long hair swaying. ‘Might sound foolish to you, but I came here to be a better man. You got your reasons, sure, but this feels like a bastard of a stride in the wrong direction.’

  ‘Six more men.’

  ‘No. No. I’m done.’ As if he was trying to convince himself. ‘I don’t care how much—’

  ‘Five thousand scales.’

  His mouth was already open to say no again, but this time the word didn’t come. He stared at her. Shocked at first, then thoughtful. Working out how much money that really was. What it might buy him. Monza had always had a knack for reckoning a man’s price. Every man has one.

  She took a step forwards, looking up into his face. ‘You’re a good man, I see that, and a hard man too. That’s the kind of man I need.’ She let her eyes flick down to his mouth, and then back up. ‘Help me. I need your help, and you need my money. Five thousand scales. Lot easier to be a better man with that much money behind you. Help me. I daresay you could buy half the North with that. Make a king of yourself.’

  ‘Who says I want to be a king?’

  ‘Be a queen, if you please. I can tell you what you won’t be doing, though.’ She leaned in, so close she was almost breathing on his neck. ‘Begging for work. You ask me, it’s not right, a proud man like you in that state. Still.’ And she looked away. ‘I can’t force you.’

  He stood there, weighing the purse. But she’d already taken her hand off her knife. She already knew his answer. Money is a different thing to every man, Bialoveld wrote, but always a good thing.

  When he looked up his face had turned hard. ‘Who do we kill?’

  The time was she’d have smirked sideways to see Benna smirking back at her. We won again. But Benna was dead, and Monza’s thoughts were on the next man to join him. ‘A banker.’

  ‘A what?’

  ‘A man who counts money.’

  ‘He makes money counting money?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Some strange fashions you folk have down here. What did he do?’

  ‘He killed my brother.’

  ‘More vengeance, eh?’

  ‘More vengeance.’

  Shivers gave a nod. ‘Reckon I’m hired, then. What do you need?’

  ‘Give Friendly a hand taking out the rubbish, then we’re gone tonight. No point loitering in Talins.’

  Shivers looked towards the anvil, and he took a sharp breath. Then he pulled out the knife she’d given him, walked over to where Friendly was starting work on Gobba’s corpse.

  Monza looked down at her left hand, rubbed a few specks of blood from the back. Her fingers were trembling some. From killing a man earlier, from not killing one just now, or from needing a smoke, she wasn’t sure.

  All three, maybe.

  II

 
; WESTPORT

  ‘Men become accustomed to poison by degrees’

  Victor Hugo

  The first year they were always hungry, and Benna had to beg in the village while Monza worked the ground and scavenged in the woods. The second year they took a better harvest, and grew roots in a patch by the barn, and got some bread from old Destort the miller when the snows swept in and turned the valley into a place of white silence.

  The third year the weather was fine, and the rain came on time, and Monza raised a good crop in the upper field. As good a crop as her father had ever brought in. Prices were high because of troubles over the border. They would have money, and the roof could be mended, and Benna could have a proper shirt. Monza watched the wind make waves in the wheat, and she felt that pride at having made something with her own hands. That pride her father used to talk about.

  A few days before reaping time, she woke in the darkness and heard sounds. She shook Benna from his sleep beside her, one hand over his mouth. She took her father’s sword, eased open the shutters, and together they stole through the window and into the woods, hid in the brambles behind a tree-trunk.

  There were black figures in front of the house, torches flickering in the darkness.

  ‘Who are they?’

  ‘Shhhh.’

  She heard them break the door down, heard them crashing through the house and the barn.

  ‘What do they want?’

  ‘Shhhh.’

  They spread out around the field and set their torches to it, and the fire ate through the wheat until it was a roaring blaze. She heard someone cheering. Another laughing.

  Benna stared, face dim-lit with shifting orange, tear-tracks glistening on his thin cheeks. ‘But why would they . . . why would they . . . ?’

  ‘Shhhh.’

  Monza watched the smoke rolling up into the clear night. All her work. All her sweat and pain. She stayed there long after the men had gone, and watched it burn.

  In the morning more men came. Folk from around the valley, hard-faced and vengeful, old Destort at their head with a sword at his hip and his three sons behind him.

  ‘Came through here too then, did they? You’re lucky to be alive. They killed Crevi and his wife, up the valley. Their son too.’

  ‘What are you going to do?’

  ‘We’re going to track them, then we’re going to hang them.’

  ‘We’ll come.’

  ‘You might be better—’

  ‘We’ll come.’

  Destort had not always been a miller, and he knew his business. They caught up with the raiders the next night, working their way back south, camped around fires in the woods without even a proper guard. More thieves than soldiers. Farmers among them too, just from one side of the border rather than the other, chosen to settle some made-up grievance while their lords were busy settling theirs.

  ‘Anyone ain’t ready to kill best stay here.’ Destort drew his sword and the others made their cleavers, and their axes, and their makeshift spears ready.

  ‘Wait!’ hissed Benna, clinging at Monza’s arm.

  ‘No.’

  She ran quiet and low, her father’s sword in her hand, fires dancing through the black trees. She heard a cry, a clash of metal, the sound of a bowstring.

  She came out from the bushes. Two men crouched by a campfire, a pot steaming over it. One had a thick beard, a wood-axe in his fist. Before he lifted it halfway Monza slashed him across the eyes and he fell down, screaming. The other turned to run and she spitted him through the back before he got a stride. The bearded man roared and roared, hands clutching at his face. She stabbed him in the chest, and he groaned out a few wet breaths, then stopped.

  She frowned down at the two corpses while the sounds of fighting slowly petered out. Benna crept from the trees, and he took the bearded man’s purse from his belt, and he tipped a heavy wedge of silver coins out into his palm.

  ‘He has seventeen scales.’

  It was twice as much as the whole crop had been worth. He held the other man’s purse out to her, eyes wide. ‘This one has thirty.’

  ‘Thirty?’ Monza looked at the blood on her father’s sword, and thought how strange it was that she was a murderer now. How strange it was that it had been so easy to do. Easier than digging in the stony soil for a living. Far, far easier. Afterwards, she waited for the remorse to come upon her. She waited for a long time.

  It never came.

  Poison

  It was just the kind of afternoon that Morveer most enjoyed. Crisp, even chilly, but perfectly still, immaculately clear. The bright sun flashed through the bare black branches of the fruit trees, found rare gold among dull copper tripod, rods and screws, struck priceless sparks from the tangle of misted glassware. There was nothing finer than working out of doors on a day like this, with the added advantage that any lethal vapours released would harmlessly dissipate. Persons in Morveer’s profession were all too frequently despatched by their own agents, after all, and he had no intention of becoming one of their number. Quite apart from anything else, his reputation would never recover.

  Morveer smiled upon the rippling lamp flame, nodded in time to the gentle rattling of condenser and retort, the soothing hiss of escaping steam, the industrious pop and bubble of boiling reagents. As the drawing of the blade to the master swordsman, as the jingle of coins to the master merchant, so were these sounds to Morveer. The sounds of his work well done. It was with comfortable satisfaction, therefore, that he watched Day’s face, creased with concentration, through the distorting glass of the tapered collection flask.

  It was a pretty face, undoubtedly: heart-shaped and fringed with blonde curls. But it was an unremarkable and entirely unthreatening variety of prettiness, further softened by a disarming aura of innocence. A face that would attract a positive response, but excite little further comment. A face that would easily slip the mind. It was for her face, above all, that Morveer had selected her. He did nothing by accident.

  A jewel of moisture formed at the utmost end of the condenser. It stretched, bloated, then finally tore itself free, tumbled sparkling through space and fell silently to the bottom of the flask.

  ‘Excellent,’ muttered Morveer.

  More droplets swelled and broke away in solemn procession. The last of them clung reluctantly at the edge, and Day reached out and gently flicked the glassware. It fell, and joined the rest, and looked, for all the world, like a little water in the bottom of a flask. Barely enough to wet one’s lips.

  ‘And carefully, now, my dear, so very, very carefully. Your life hangs by a filament. Your life, and mine too.’

  She pressed her tongue into her lower lip, ever so carefully twisted the condenser free and set it down on the tray. The rest of the apparatus followed, piece by slow piece. She had fine, soft hands, Morveer’s apprentice. Nimble yet steady, as indeed they were required to be. She pressed a cork carefully into the flask and held it up to the light, the sunshine making liquid diamonds of that tiny dribble of fluid, and she smiled. An innocent, a pretty, yet an entirely forgettable smile. ‘It doesn’t look much.’

  ‘That is the entire point. It is without colour, odour or taste. And yet the most infinitesimal drop consumed, the softest mist inhaled, the gentlest touch upon the skin, even, will kill a man in minutes. There is no antidote, no remedy, no immunity. Truly . . . this is the King of Poisons.’

  ‘The King of Poisons,’ she breathed, with suitable awe.

  ‘Keep this knowledge close to your heart, my dear, to be used only in the extreme of need. Only against the most dangerous, suspicious and cunning of targets. Only against those intimately acquainted with the poisoner’s art.’

  ‘I understand. Caution first, always.’

  ‘Very good. That is the most valuable of lessons.’ Morveer sat back in his chair, making a steeple of his fingers. ‘Now you know the deepest of my secrets. Your apprenticeship is over, but . . . I hope you will continue, as my assistant.’

  ‘I’d be honou
red to stay in your service. I still have much to learn.’

  ‘So do we all, my dear.’ Morveer jerked his head up at the sound of the gate bell tinkling in the distance. ‘So do we all.’

  Two figures were approaching the house down the long path through the orchard, and Morveer snapped open his eyeglass and trained it upon them. A man and a woman. He was very tall, and powerful-looking with it, wearing a threadbare coat, long hair swaying. A Northman, from his appearance.

  ‘A primitive,’ he muttered, under his breath. Such men were prone to savagery and superstition, and he held them in healthy contempt.

  He trained the eyeglass on the woman, now, though she was dressed much like a man. She looked straight towards the house, unwavering. Straight towards him, it almost seemed. A beautiful face, without doubt, edged with coal-black hair. But it was a hard and unsettling variety of beauty, further sharpened by a brooding appearance of grim purpose. A face that at once issued a challenge and a threat. A face that, having been glimpsed, one would not quickly forget. She did not compare with Morveer’s mother in beauty, of course, but who could? His mother had almost transcended the human in her goodly qualities. Her pure smile, kissed by the sunlight, was etched for ever into Morveer’s memory as if it were a—

  ‘Visitors?’ asked Day.

  ‘The Murcatto woman is here.’ He snapped his fingers towards the table. ‘Clear all this away. With the very greatest care, mark you! Then bring wine and cakes.’

  ‘Do you want anything in them?’

  ‘Only plums and apricots. I mean to welcome my guests, not kill them.’ Not until he had heard what they had to say, at least.

  While Day swiftly cleared the table, furnished it with a cloth and drew the chairs back in around it, Morveer took some elementary precautions. Then he arranged himself in his chair, highly polished knee-boots crossed in front of him and hands clasped across his chest, very much the country gentleman enjoying the winter air of his estate. Had he not earned it, after all?

  He rose with his most ingratiating smile as his visitors came in close proximity to the house. The Murcatto woman walked with the slightest hint of a limp. She covered it well, but over long years in the trade Morveer had sharpened his perceptions to a razor point, and missed no detail. She wore a sword on her right hip, and it appeared to be a good one, but he paid it little mind. Ugly, unsophisticated tools. Gentlemen might wear them, but only the coarse and wrathful would stoop to actually use one. She wore a glove on her right hand, suggesting she had something she was keen to hide, because her left was bare, and sported a blood-red stone big as his thumbnail. If it was, as it certainly appeared to be, a ruby, it was one of promisingly great value.