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

by Joe Abercrombie

  ‘This is good,’ gurgled Day, around a mouthful. ‘This is excellent. Is there more?’

  ‘Where did you learn to cook, my friend?’ Cosca asked.

  ‘I spent three years in the kitchens in Safety. The man who taught me used to be head cook to the Duke of Borletta.’

  ‘What was he doing in prison?’

  ‘He killed his wife, and chopped her up, and cooked her in a stew, and ate it.’

  There was quiet around the table. Cosca noisily cleared his throat. ‘No one’s wife in this stew, I trust?’

  ‘The butcher said it was lamb, and I’ve no reason to doubt him.’ Friendly picked up his fork. ‘No one sells human meat that cheap.’

  There was one of those uncomfortable silences that Friendly always seemed to produce when he said more than three words at once. Then Cosca gave a gurgling laugh. ‘Depends on the circumstances. Reminds me of when we found those children, do you remember, Monza, after the siege at Muris?’ Her scowl grew even harder than usual, but there was no stopping him. ‘We found those children, and we wanted to sell them on to some slavers, but you thought we could—’

  ‘Of course!’ Morveer almost shrieked. ‘Hilarious! What could possibly be more amusing than orphan children sold into slavery?’

  There was another awkward silence while the poisoner and the mercenary gave each other a deadly glare. Friendly had seen men exchange that very look in Safety. When new blood came in, and prisoners were forced into a cell together. Sometimes two men would just catch each other wrong. Hate each other from the moment they met. Too different. Or too much the same. Things were harder to predict out here, of course. But in Safety, when you saw two men look at each other that way you knew, sooner or later, there would be blood.

  A drink, a drink, a drink. Cosca’s eyes lurched from that preening louse Morveer and down to the poisoner’s full wine glass, around the glasses of the others, reluctantly back to his own sickening mug of water and finally to the wine bottle on the table, where his gaze was gripped as if by burning pincers. A quick lunge and he could have it. How much could he swallow before they wrestled it from his hands? Few men could drink faster when circumstances demanded—

  Then he noticed Friendly watching him, and there was something in the convict’s sad, flat eyes that made him think again. He was Nicomo Cosca, damn it! Or he had been once, at least. Cities had trembled, and so on. He had spent too many years never thinking beyond his next drink. It was time to look further. To the drink after next, at any rate. But change was not easy.

  He could almost feel the sweat springing out of his skin. His head was pulsing, booming with pain. He clawed at his itchy neck but that only made it itch the more. He was smiling like a skull, he knew, and talking far too much. But it was smile, and talk, or scream his exploding head off.

  ‘. . . saved my life at the siege of Muris, eh, Monza? At Muris, was it?’ He hardly even knew how his cracking voice had wandered onto the subject. ‘Bastard came at me out of nowhere. A quick thrust!’ He nearly knocked his water cup over with a wayward jab of his finger. ‘And she ran him through! Right through the heart, I swear. Saved my life. At Muris. Saved my . . . life . . .’

  And he almost wished she had let him die. The kitchen seemed to be spinning, tossing, tipping wildly like the cabin of a ship in a fatal tempest. He kept expecting to see the wine slosh from the glasses, the stew spray from the bowls, the plates slide from the see-sawing table. He knew the only storm was in his head, yet still found himself clinging to the furniture whenever the room appeared to heel with particular violence.

  ‘. . . wouldn’t have been so bad if she hadn’t done it again the next day. I took an arrow in the shoulder and fell in the damn moat. Everyone saw, on both sides. Making me look a fool in front of my friends is one thing, but in front of my enemies—’

  ‘You’ve got it wrong.’

  Cosca squinted up the table at Monza. ‘I have?’ Though he had to admit he could hardly remember his last sentence, let alone the events of a siege a dozen drunken years ago.

  ‘It was me in the moat, you that jumped in to pull me out. Risked your life, and took an arrow doing it.’

  ‘Seems astoundingly unlikely I’d have done a thing like that.’ It was hard to think about anything beyond his violent need for a drink. ‘But I’m finding it somewhat difficult to recall the details, I must confess. Perhaps if one of you could just see your way to passing me the wine I could—’

  ‘Enough.’ She had that same look she always used to have when she dragged him from one tavern or another, except even angrier, even sharper and even more disappointed. ‘I’ve five men to kill, and I’ve no time to be saving anyone any more. Especially from their own stupidity. I’ve no use for a drunk.’ The table was silent as they all watched him sweat.

  ‘I’m no drunk,’ croaked Cosca. ‘I simply like the taste of wine. So much so that I have to drink some every few hours or become violently ill.’ He clung to his fork while the room swayed around him, fixed his aching smile while they chuckled away. He hoped they enjoyed their laughter while they could, because Nicomo Cosca always laughed last. Provided he wasn’t being sick, of course.

  Morveer was feeling left out. He was a scintillating conversationalist face to face, it hardly needed to be said, but had never been at his ease in large groups. This scenario reminded him unpleasantly of the dining room in the orphanage, where the larger children had amused themselves by throwing food at him, a terrifying prelude to the whisperings, beatings, dunkings and other torments in the nocturnal blackness of the dormitories.

  Murcatto’s two new assistants, on the hiring of whom he had not been given even the most superficial consultation, were far from putting his mind at ease. Shylo Vitari was a torturer and broker in information, highly competent but possessed of an abrasive personality. He had collaborated with her once before, and the experience had not been a happy one. Morveer found the whole notion of inflicting pain with one’s own hands thoroughly repugnant. But she knew Sipani, so he supposed he could suffer her. For now.

  Nicomo Cosca was infinitely worse. A notoriously destructive, treacherous and capricious mercenary with no code or scruple but his own profit. A drunkard, dissipater and womaniser with all the self-control of a rabid dog. A self-aggrandising backslider with an epically inflated opinion of his own abilities, he was everything Morveer was not. But now, as well as taking this dangerously unpredictable element into their confidence and involving him intimately in their plans, the group seemed to be paying court to the trembling shell. Even Day, his own assistant, was chortling at his jokes whenever she did not have her mouth full, which, admittedly, was but rarely.

  ‘. . . a group of miscreants hunched around a table in an abandoned warehouse?’ Cosca was musing, bloodshot eyes rolling round the table, ‘talking of masks, and disguises, and weaponry? I cannot imagine how a man of my high calibre ended up in such company. One would think there was some underhand business taking place!’

  ‘My own thoughts exactly!’ Morveer shrilly interjected. ‘I could never countenance such a stain upon my conscience. That is why I applied an extract of Widow’s Blossom to your bowls. I hope you all enjoy your last few agonising moments!’

  Six faces frowned back at him, entirely silent.

  ‘A jest, of course,’ he croaked, realising instantly that his conversational foray had suffered a spectacular misfire. Shivers exhaled long and slow. Murcatto curled her tongue sourly around one canine tooth. Day was frowning down at her bowl.

  ‘I’ve taken more amusing punches in the face,’ said Vitari.

  ‘Poisoners’ humour.’ Cosca glowered across the table, though the effect was somewhat spoiled by the rattling of his fork against his bowl as his right hand vibrated. ‘A lover of mine was murdered by poison. I have had nothing but disgust for your profession ever since. And all its members, naturally.’

  ‘You can hardly expect me to take responsibility for the actions of every person in my line of work.’ Morveer tho
ught it best not to mention that he had, in fact, been personally responsible, having been hired by Grand Duchess Sefeline of Ospria to murder Nicomo Cosca some fourteen years before. It was becoming a matter of considerable annoyance that he had missed the mark and killed his mistress instead.

  ‘I crush wasps whenever I find them, whether they have stung me or not. To my mind you people – if I can call you people – are all equally worthy of contempt. A poisoner is the filthiest kind of coward.’

  ‘Second only to a drunkard!’ returned Morveer with a suitable curling of his upper lip. ‘Such human refuse might almost evoke pity were they not so utterly repellent. No animal is more predictable. Like a befouled homing pigeon, the drunk returns ever to the bottle, unable to change. It is their one route of escape from the misery they leave in their wake. For them the sober world is so crowded with old failures and new fears that they suffocate in it. There is a true coward.’ He raised his glass and took a long, self-satisfied gulp of wine. He was unused to drinking rapidly and felt, in fact, a powerful urge to vomit, but forced a queasy smile onto his face nonetheless.

  Cosca’s thin hand clutched the table with a white-knuckled intensity as he watched Morveer swallow. ‘How little you understand me. I could stop drinking whenever I wish. In fact, I have already resolved to do so. I would prove it to you.’ The mercenary held up one wildly flapping hand. ‘If I could just get half a glass to settle these damn palsies!’

  The others laughed, the tension diffused, but Morveer caught the lethal glare on Cosca’s face. The old soak might have seemed harmless as a village dunce, but he had once been counted among the most dangerous men in Styria. It would have been folly to take such a man lightly, and Morveer was nobody’s fool. He was no longer the orphan child who had blubbered for his mother while they kicked him.

  Caution first, each and every time.

  Monza sat still, said no more than she had to and ate less, gloved hand painfully clumsy with the knife. She left herself out, up here at the head of the table. The distance a general needs to keep from the soldiers, an employer from the hirelings, a wanted woman from everyone, if she’s got any sense. It wasn’t hard to do. She’d been keeping her distance for years and leaving Benna to do the talking, and the laughing, and be liked. A leader can’t afford to be liked. Especially not a woman. Shivers kept glancing up the table towards her, and she kept not meeting his eye. She’d let things slip in Westport, made herself look weak. She couldn’t let that happen again.

  ‘The pair o’ you seem pretty familiar,’ Shivers was saying now, eyes moving between her and Cosca. ‘Old friends, are you?’

  ‘Family, rather!’ The old mercenary waved his fork wildly enough to have someone’s eye out. ‘We fought side by side as noble members of the Thousand Swords, most famous mercenary brigade in the Circle of the World!’ Monza frowned sideways at him. His old bloody stories were bringing back things done and choices made she’d sooner have left in the past. ‘We fought across Styria and back, while Sazine was captain general. Those were the days to be a mercenary! Before things started to get . . . complicated.’

  Vitari snorted. ‘You mean bloody.’

  ‘Different words for the same thing. People were richer back then, and scared more easily, and the walls were all lower. Then Sazine took an arrow in the arm, then lost the arm, then died, and I was voted to the captain general’s chair.’ Cosca poked his stew around. ‘Burying that old wolf, I realised that fighting was too much hard work, and I, like most persons of quality, wished to do as little of it as possible.’ He gave Monza a twitchy grin. ‘So we split the brigade in two.’

  ‘You split the brigade in two.’

  ‘I took one half, and Monzcarro and her brother Benna took the other, and we spread a rumour we’d had a falling out. We hired ourselves out to both sides of every argument we could find – and we found plenty – and . . . pretended to fight.’

  ‘Pretended?’ muttered Shivers.

  Cosca’s trembling knife and fork jabbed at each other in the air. ‘We’d march around for weeks at a time, picking the country clean all the while, mount the odd harmless skirmish for the show of it, then leave off at the end of each season a good deal richer but with no one dead. Well, a few of the rot, maybe. Every bit as profitable as having at the business in earnest, though. We even mounted a couple of fake battles, didn’t we?’

  ‘We did.’

  ‘Until Monza took an engagement with Grand Duke Orso of Talins, and decided she was done with fake battles. Until she decided to mount a proper charge, with swords well sharpened and swung in earnest. Until you decided to make a difference, eh, Monza? Shame you never told me we weren’t faking any more. I could’ve warned my boys and saved some lives that day.’

  ‘Your boys.’ She snorted. ‘Let’s not pretend you ever cared for anyone’s life but your own.’

  ‘There have been a few others I valued higher. I never profited by it, though, and neither did they.’ Cosca hadn’t taken his bloodshot eyes from Monza’s. ‘Which of your own people turned on you? Faithful Carpi, was it? Not so faithful in the end, eh?’

  ‘He was as faithful as you could wish for. Right up until he stabbed me.’

  ‘And now he’s taken the captain general’s chair, no doubt?’

  ‘I hear he’s managed to wedge his fat arse into it.’

  ‘Just as you slipped your skinny one into it after mine. But he couldn’t have taken anything without the consent of some other captains, could he? Fine lads, those. That bastard Andiche. That big leech Sesaria. That sneering maggot Victus. Were those three greedy hogs still with you?’

  ‘They still had their faces in the trough. All of them turned on me, I’m sure, just the way they turned on you. You’re telling me nothing I don’t know.’

  ‘No one thanks you, in the end. Not for the victories you bring them. Not for the money you make them. They get bored. And the first sniff of something better—’

  Monza was out of patience. A leader can’t afford to look soft. Especially not a woman. ‘For such an expert on people, it’s a wonder you ended up a friendless, penniless drunk, eh, Cosca? Don’t pretend I didn’t give you a thousand chances. You wasted them all, like you wasted everything else. The only question that interests me is – are you set on wasting this one too? Can you do as I fucking tell you? Or are you set on being my enemy?’

  Cosca only gave a sad smile. ‘In our line of work, enemies are things to be proud of. If experience has taught the two of us anything, it’s that your friends are the ones you need to watch. My congratulations to the cook.’ He tossed his fork down in his bowl, got up and strutted from the kitchen in almost a straight line. Monza frowned at the sullen faces he left around the table.

  Never fear your enemies, Verturio wrote, but your friends, always.

  A Few Bad Men

  The warehouse was a draughty cavern, cold light finding chinks in the shutters and leaving bright lines across the dusty boards, across the empty crates piled up in one corner, across the old table in the middle of the floor. Shivers dropped into a rickety chair next to it, felt the grip of the knife Monza had given him pressing at his calf. A sharp reminder of what he’d been hired for. Life was getting way more dark and dangerous than back home in the North. As far as being a better man went, he was going backwards, and quicker every day.

  So why the hell was he still here? Because he wanted Monza? He had to admit it, and the fact she’d been cold with him since Westport only made him want her more. Because he wanted her money? That too. Money was a damn good thing for buying stuff. Because he needed the work? He did. Because he was good at the work? He was.

  Because he enjoyed the work?

  Shivers frowned. Some men aren’t stamped out for doing good, and he was starting to reckon he might be one of ’em. He was less and less sure with every day that being a better man was worth all the effort.

  The sound of a door banging tugged him from his thoughts, and Cosca came down the creaking wooden steps from t
he rooms where they were sleeping, scratching slowly at the splatter of red rash up the side of his neck.

  ‘Morning.’

  The old mercenary yawned. ‘So it seems. I can barely remember the last one of these I saw. Nice shirt.’

  Shivers twitched at his sleeve. Dark silk, with polished bone buttons and clever stitching round the cuff. A good stretch fancier than he’d have picked out, but Monza had liked it. ‘Hadn’t noticed.’

  ‘I used to be one for fine clothes myself.’ Cosca dropped into a rickety chair next to Shivers. ‘So did Monza’s brother, for that matter. He had a shirt just like that one, as I recall.’

  Shivers weren’t sure what the old bastard was getting at, but he was sure he didn’t like it. ‘And?’

  ‘Spoken much about her brother, has she?’ Cosca had a strange little smile, like he knew something Shivers didn’t.

  ‘She told me he’s dead.’

  ‘So I hear.’

  ‘She told me she’s not happy about it.’

  ‘Most decidedly not.’

  ‘Something else I should know?’

  ‘I suppose we could all be wiser than we are. I’ll leave that up to her, though.’

  ‘Where is she?’ snapped Shivers, patience drying up.

  ‘Monza?’

  ‘Who else?’

  ‘She doesn’t want anyone to see her face that doesn’t have to. But not to worry. I have hired fighting men all across the Circle of the World. And my fair share of entertainers too, as it goes. Do you have any issue with my taking charge of the proceedings?’