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

by Joe Abercrombie

  ‘The breach at Visserine,’ he whispered to himself, framing the scene with his hands and imagining it hanging on some rich man’s wall.

  When two men set out to kill each other, there is a pattern to it. A few men, for that matter. A dozen, even. With a situation like that, Friendly had always been entirely comfortable. There is a form to be followed, and by being faster, stronger, sharper, you can come out alive. But this was otherwise. The mindless press. Who could know when you would be pushed, by the simple pressure of those behind, onto a pike? The awful randomness. How could you predict an arrow, or a bolt, or a falling rock from above? How could you see death coming, and how could you avoid it? It was one colossal game of chance with your life as the stake. And like the games of chance at Cardotti’s House of Leisure, in the long run, the players could only lose.

  ‘Looks like a hot one!’ Cosca screamed in his ear.

  ‘Hot?’

  ‘I’ve been in hotter! The breach at Muris looked like a slaughter yard when we were done!’

  Friendly could hardly bring himself to speak, his head was spinning so much. ‘You’ve been . . . in that?’

  Cosca waved a dismissive hand. ‘A few times. But unless you’re mad you soon tire of it. Looks like fun, maybe, but it’s no place for a gentleman.’

  ‘How do they know who’s on whose side?’ hissed Friendly.

  Cosca’s grin gleamed in his soot-smeared face. ‘Guesswork, mostly. You just try to stay pointed in the right direction and hope for the . . . ah.’ A fragment had broken from the general mêlée and was flowing forwards, bristling with weapons. Friendly could not even tell whether they were the besiegers or the besieged, they hardly seemed like men at all. He turned to see a wall of spears advancing down the street from the opposite direction, shifting light gleaming on dull metal, across stony faces. Not individual men, but a machine for killing.

  ‘This way!’ Friendly felt a hand grab his arm, shove him through a broken doorway in a tottering piece of wall. He stumbled and slipped, pitched over on his side. He half-ran, half-slid down a great heap of rubble, through a cloud of choking ash, and lay on his belly beside Cosca, staring up towards the combat in the street above. Men crashed together, killed and died, a formless soup of rage. Over their screams, their bellows of anger, the clash and squeal of metal, Friendly could hear something else. He stared sideways. Cosca was bent over on his knees, shaking with ill-suppressed mirth.

  ‘Are you laughing?’

  The old mercenary wiped his eyes with a sooty finger. ‘What’s the alternative?’

  They were in a kind of darkened valley, choked with rubble. A street? A drained canal? A sewer? Ragged people picked through the rubbish. Not far away a dead man lay face down. A woman crouched over the corpse with a knife out, in the midst of cutting the fingers from one limp hand for his rings.

  ‘Away from that body!’ Cosca lurched up, drawing his sword.

  ‘This is ours!’ A scrawny man with tangled hair and a club in his hand.

  ‘No.’ Cosca brandished the blade. ‘This is ours.’ He took a step forwards and the scavenger stumbled back, falling through a scorched bush. The woman finally got through the bone with her knife, pulled the ring off and stuffed it in her pocket, flung the finger at Cosca along with a volley of abuse, then scuttled off into the darkness.

  The old mercenary peered after them, weighing his sword in his hand. ‘He’s Talinese. His gear, then!’

  Friendly crept numbly over and began to unbuckle the dead man’s armour. He pulled the backplate away and slid it into his sack.

  ‘Swiftly, my friend, before those sewer rats return.’

  Friendly had no mind to delay, but his hands were shaking. He was not sure why. They did not normally shake. He pulled the soldier’s greaves off, and his breastplate, rattling into the sack with the rest. Four sets, this would be. Three plus one. Three more and they would have one each. Then perhaps they could kill Ganmark, and be done, and he could go back to Talins, and sit in Sajaam’s place, counting the coins in the card game. What happy times those seemed now. He reached out and snapped off the flatbow bolt in the man’s neck.

  ‘Help me.’ Hardly more than a whisper. Friendly wondered if he had imagined it. Then he saw the soldier’s eyes were wide open. His lips moved again. ‘Help me.’

  ‘How?’ whispered Friendly. He undid the hooks and eyes on the man’s padded jacket and, as gently as he could, stripped it from him, dragging the sleeve carefully over the oozing stumps of his severed fingers. He stuffed his clothes into the sack, then gently rolled him back over onto his face, just as he had found him.

  ‘Good!’ Cosca pointed towards a burned-out tower leaning precariously over a collapsed roof. ‘That way, maybe?’

  ‘Why that way?’

  ‘Why not that way?’

  Friendly could not move. His knees were trembling. ‘I don’t want to go.’

  ‘Understandable, but we should stay together.’ The old mercenary turned and Friendly caught his arm, words starting to burble out of his mouth.

  ‘I’m losing count! I can’t . . . I can’t think. What number are we up to, now? What . . . what . . . have I gone mad?’

  ‘You? No, my friend.’ Cosca was smiling as he clapped his hand down on Friendly’s shoulder. ‘You are entirely sane. This. All this!’ He swept his hat off and waved it wildly around. ‘This is insanity!’

  Mercy and Cowardice

  Shivers stood at the window, one half open and the other closed, the frame around him like the frame around a painting, watching Visserine burn. There was an orange edge to his black outline from the fires out towards the city walls – down the side of his stubbly face, one heavy shoulder, one long arm, the twist of muscle at his waist and the hollow in the side of his bare arse.

  If Benna had been there he’d have warned her she was taking some long chances, lately. Well, first he’d have asked who the big naked Northman was, then he’d have warned her. Putting herself in the middle of a siege, death so close she could feel it tickling at her neck. Letting her guard down even this much with a man she was meant to be paying, walking the soft line with those farmers downstairs. She was taking risks, and she felt that tingling mix of fear and excitement that a gambler can’t do without. Benna wouldn’t have liked it. But then she’d never listened to his warnings when he was alive. If the odds stand long against you, you have to take long chances, and Monza had always had a knack for picking the right ones.

  Up until they killed Benna and threw her down the mountain, at least.

  Shivers’ voice came out of the darkness. ‘How’d you come by this place, anyway?’

  ‘My brother bought it. Long time ago.’ She remembered him standing at the window, squinting into the sun, turning to her and smiling. She felt a grin tug at the corner of her own mouth, just for a moment.

  Shivers didn’t turn, now, and he didn’t smile either. ‘You were close, eh? You and your brother.’

  ‘We were close.’

  ‘Me and my brother were close. Everyone that knew him felt close to him. He had that trick. He got killed, by a man called the Bloody-Nine. He got killed when he’d been promised mercy, and his head nailed to a standard.’

  Monza didn’t much care for this story. On the one hand it was boring her, on the other it was making her think of Benna’s slack face as they tipped him over the parapet. ‘Who’d have thought we had so much in common? Did you take revenge?’

  ‘I dreamed of it. My fondest wish, for years. I had the chance, more’n once. Vengeance on the Bloody-Nine. Something a lot of men would kill for.’

  ‘And?’

  She saw the muscles working on the side of Shivers’ head. ‘The first time I saved his life. The second I let him go, and chose to be a better man.’

  ‘And you’ve been wandering round like a tinker with his cart ever since, pedalling mercy to anyone who’ll take? Thanks for the offer, but I’m not buying.’

  ‘Not sure I’m selling any more. I been acting the
good man all this time, talking up the righteous path, hoping to convince myself I done the right thing walking away. Breaking the circle. But I didn’t, and that’s a fact. Mercy and cowardice are the same, just like you told me, and the circle keeps turning, whatever you try. Taking vengeance . . . it might not answer no questions. It sure won’t make the world a fairer place or the sun shine warmer. But it’s better’n not taking it. It’s a damn stretch better.’

  ‘I thought you were all set on being Styria’s last good man.’

  ‘I’ve tried to do the right thing when I could, but you don’t get a name in the North without doing some dark work, and I done my share. I fought beside Black Dow, and Crummock-i-Phail, and the Bloody-Nine his self, for that matter.’ He gave a snort. ‘You think you got cold hearts down here? You should taste the winters where I come from.’ There was something in the set of his face she hadn’t seen before, and hadn’t expected to. ‘I’d like to be a good man, that’s true. But you need it the other way, then I know how.’

  There was silence for a moment, while they looked at each other. Him leaning against the window frame, her sprawled on the bed with one hand behind her head.

  ‘If you really are such a snow-hearted bastard, why did you come back for me? In Cardotti’s?’

  ‘You still owe me money.’

  She wasn’t sure if he was joking. ‘I feel warm all over.’

  ‘That and you’re about the best friend I’ve got in this mad fucking country.’

  ‘And I don’t even like you.’

  ‘I’m still hoping you’ll warm to me.’

  ‘You know what? I might just be getting there.’

  She could see his grin in the light from beyond the window. ‘Letting me in your bed. Letting Furli and the rest stay in your house. If I didn’t know better I’d be thinking I’d pedalled you some mercy after all.’

  She stretched out. ‘Maybe beneath this harsh yet beautiful shell I’m really still a soft-hearted farmer’s daughter, only wanting to do good. You think of that?’

  ‘Can’t say I did.’

  ‘Anyway, what’s my choice? Put them out on the street, they might start talking. Safer here, where they owe us something.’

  ‘They’re safest of all in the mud.’

  ‘Why don’t you go downstairs and put all our minds at rest, then, killer? Shouldn’t be a problem for the hero that used to carry Black Now’s luggage.’

  ‘Dow.’

  ‘Whoever. Best put some trousers on first, though, eh?’

  ‘I’m not saying we should’ve killed ’em or nothing, I’m just pointing out the fact. Mercy and cowardice are the same, I heard.’

  ‘I’ll do what needs doing, don’t worry. I always have. But I’m not Morveer. I’m not murdering eleven farmers just for my convenience.’

  ‘Nice to hear, I guess. All those little people dying in the bank didn’t seem to bother you none, long as one of ’em was Mauthis.’

  She frowned. ‘That wasn’t the plan.’

  ‘Nor the folk at Cardotti’s.’

  ‘Cardotti’s didn’t go quite the way I had in mind either, in case you didn’t notice.’

  ‘I noticed pretty good. The Butcher of Caprile, they call you, no? What happened there?’

  ‘What needed doing.’ She remembered riding up in the dusk, the stab of worry as she saw the smoke over the city. ‘Doing it and liking it are different things.’

  ‘Same results, no?’

  ‘What the hell would you know about it? I don’t remember you being there.’ She shook the memory off and slid from the bed. The careless warmth of the last smoke was wearing through and she felt strangely awkward in her own scarred skin, crossing the room with his eyes on her, stark naked but for the glove still on her right hand. The city, and its towers, and its fires spread out beyond the window, blurred through the bubbly glass panes in the closed half. ‘I didn’t bring you up here to remind me of my mistakes. I’ve made enough of the bastards.’

  ‘Who hasn’t? Why did you bring me up here?’

  ‘Because I’ve an awful weakness for big men with tiny minds, what do you think?’

  ‘Oh, I try not to think much, makes my tiny mind hurt. But I’m starting to get the feeling you might not be quite so hard as you make out.’

  ‘Who is?’ She reached out and touched the scar on his chest. Fingertip trailing through hair, over rough, puckered skin.

  ‘We’ve all got our wounds, I guess.’ He slid his hand down the long scar on her hip bone, and her stomach clenched up tight. That gambler’s mix of fear and excitement still, with a trace of disgust mixed in.

  ‘Some worse than others.’ The words sour in her mouth.

  ‘Just marks.’ His thumb slid across the scars on her ribs, one by one. ‘They don’t bother me any.’

  She pulled the glove off her crooked right hand and stuck it in his face. ‘No?’

  ‘No.’ His big hands closed gently around her ruined one, warm and tight. She stiffened up at first, almost dragged it away, breath catching with ugly shock, as if she’d caught him caressing a corpse. Then his thumbs started to rub at her twisted palm, at the aching ball of her thumb, at her crooked fingers, all the way to the tips. Surprisingly tender. Surprisingly pleasant. She let her eyes close and her mouth open, stretched her fingers out as wide as they’d go, and breathed.

  She felt him closer, the warmth of him, his breath on her face. Not much chance to wash lately and he had a smell – sweat and leather and a hint of bad meat. Sharp, but not entirely unpleasant. She knew she had a smell herself. His face brushed hers, rough cheek, hard jaw, nudging against her nose, nuzzling at her neck. She was half-smiling, skin tingling in the draught from the window, carrying that familiar tickle of burning buildings to her nose.

  One of his hands still held hers, out to the side now, the other slid up her flank, over the knobble of her hip bone, slid under her breast, thumb rubbing back and forth over her nipple, slightly pleasant, slightly clumsy. Her free hand brushed against his cock, already good and hard, up, and down, damp skin sticky on her palm. She lifted one foot, heel scraping loose plaster from the wall, wedged it on the windowsill so her legs were spread wide. His fingers slid back and forth between them with a soft squelch, squelch.

  Her right hand was round under his jaw, twisted fingers pulling at his ear, turning his head sideways, thumb dragging his mouth open so she could push her tongue into it. It tasted of the cheap wine they’d been drinking, but hers probably did too, and who cared a shit anyway?

  She drew him close, pressing up against him, skin sliding against skin. Not thinking about her dead brother, not thinking about her crippled hand, not thinking about the war outside, or needing a smoke, or the men she had to kill. Just his fingers and her fingers, his cock and her cunt. Not much, maybe, but something, and she needed something.

  ‘Get on and fuck me,’ she hissed in his ear.

  ‘Right,’ he croaked at her, hooked her under one knee, lifted her to the bed and dumped her on her back, frame creaking. She wriggled away, making room, and he knelt down between her open knees, working his way forwards, fierce grin on his face as he looked down at her. Same grin she had, keen to get on with it. She felt the end of his cock sliding around between her thighs, one side, then the other. ‘Where the fuck . . .’

  ‘Bloody Northmen, couldn’t find your arse with a chair.’

  ‘My arse ain’t the hole I’m looking for.’

  ‘Here.’ She dragged some spit off her tongue with her fingers, propped herself up on one elbow, reached down and took hold of him, working his cock around until she found the spot.

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘Ah,’ she grunted back. ‘That’s it.’

  ‘Aye.’ He moved his hips in circles, easing deeper with each one. ‘That . . . is . . . it.’ He ran his hands up her thighs, fingers into the short hair, started rubbing at her with his thumb.

  ‘Gently!’ She slapped his hand away and slid her own down in its place, middle finger working
slowly round and round. ‘You’re not trying to crack a nut, fool.’

  ‘Your nut, your business, I reckon.’ His cock slid out as he worked his way forwards, onto his arms above her, but she slid it back in easy enough. They started finding a rhythm, patient but building, bit by bit.

  She kept her eyes open, looking in his face, and she could see the gleam of his in the darkness looking back. Both of them with teeth bared, breathing hard. He opened his mouth to meet hers, then moved his head away as she craned up to kiss him, always just out of reach until she had to slump back flat with a gasp that sent a warm shiver through her.

  She slid her right hand onto his backside, squeezing at one buttock as it tensed and relaxed, tensed and relaxed. Faster now, damp skin slap-slapping, and she pushed her twisted hand round further, down into the crack of his arse. She strained her head up off the bed again, biting at his lips, at his teeth, and he nipped at her, grunting in his throat and her grunting back. He came down onto one elbow, his other hand sliding up over her ribs, squeezing hard at one breast then the other, almost painful.

  Creak, creak, creak, and her feet were off the bed and in the air, his hand tangled in her hair, fingers rubbing at the coins under her skin, dragging her head back, her face up against his, and she sucked his tongue out of his mouth and into hers, bit at it, licked at it. Deep, slobbery, hungry, snarling kisses. Hardly kisses at all. She pushed her finger into his arsehole, up to the first knuckle.

  ‘What the fuck?’ He broke clear of her as if she’d slapped him in the face, stopped moving, still and tense above her. She jerked her right hand back, left still busy between her legs.