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

by Joe Abercrombie

  ‘The dead know I don’t like this bastard any, but he’s got a point.’ Shivers’ brother’s head peered down at him from its place nailed to Bethod’s standard. ‘You need to toughen up. Mercy and cowardice are the same. You reckon you could get this nail out?’

  ‘You’re a fucking embarrassment!’ His father, slack face streaked with tears, waving his jug around. ‘Why couldn’t you be the one dead, and your brother lived? You useless little fuck! You useless, gutless, disappointing speck o’ shit!’

  ‘This is rubbish,’ snarled Shivers through gritted teeth, sitting down on his crossed legs by the fire. His whole head was pulsing. ‘This is just . . . just rubbish!’

  ‘What’s rubbish?’ gurgled Tul Duru, blood leaking from his cut throat as he spoke.

  ‘All this. Faces from the past, saying meaningful stuff. Bit fucking obvious, ain’t it? Couldn’t you do better’n this shit?’

  ‘Uh,’ said Grim.

  Black Dow looked a bit put out. ‘Don’t blame us, boy. Your dream, no? You cut your hair?’

  Dogman shrugged. ‘If you was cleverer, maybe you’d have cleverer dreams.’

  He felt himself grabbed from behind, face twisted round. The Bloody-Nine was there beside him, hair plastered to his head with blood, scarred face all dashed with black. ‘If you was cleverer, maybe you wouldn’t have got your eye burned out.’ And he ground his thumb into Shivers’ eye, harder and harder. Shivers thrashed, and twisted, and screamed, but there was no way free. It was already done.

  He woke up screaming, ’course. He always did now. You could hardly call it a scream any more, his voice was worn down to a grinding stub, gravel in his raw throat.

  It was dark. Pain tore at his face like a wolf at a carcass. He thrashed free of the blankets, reeled to nowhere. Like the iron was still pressed against him, burning. He crashed into a wall, fell on his knees. Bent over, hands squeezing the sides of his skull like they might stop his head from cracking open. Rocking, every muscle flexed to bursting. He groaned and moaned, whimpered and snarled, spat and blubbered, drooled and gibbered, mad from it, mindless with it. Touch it, press it. He held his quivering fingers to the bandages.

  ‘Shhhh.’ He felt a hand. Monza, pawing at his face, pushing back his hair.

  Pain split his head where his eye used to be like an axe splitting a log, split his mind too, broke it open, thoughts all spilling out in a mad splatter. ‘By the dead . . . make it stop . . . shit, shit.’ He grabbed her hand and she winced, gasped. He didn’t care. ‘Kill me! Kill me. Just make it stop.’ He wasn’t even sure what tongue he was talking. ‘Kill me. By the . . .’ He was sobbing, tears stinging the eye he still had. She tore her hand away and he was rocking again, rocking, pain ripping through his face like a saw through a tree-stump. He’d tried to be a good man, hadn’t he?

  ‘I tried, I fucking tried. Make it stop . . . please, please, please, please—’

  ‘Here.’ He snatched hold of the pipe and sucked at it, greedy as a drunkard at the bottle. He hardly even marked the smoke biting, just heaved in air until his lungs were full, and all the while she held him, arms tight around him, rocking him back and forward. The darkness was full of colours, now. Covered with glittering smears. The pain was a step away, ’stead of pressed burning against him. His breathing had softened to a whimper, aching body all washed out.

  She helped him up, dragging him to his feet, pipe clattering from his limp hand. The open window swayed, a painting of another world. Hell maybe, red and yellow spots of fire leaving long brushstrokes through the dark. The bed came up and swallowed him, sucked him down. His face throbbed still, pulsed a dull ache. He remembered, remembered why.

  ‘The dead . . .’ he whispered, tears running down his other cheek. ‘My eye. They burned my eye out.’

  ‘Shhhh,’ she whispered, gently stroking the good side of his face. ‘Quiet now, Caul. Quiet.’

  The darkness was reaching for him, wrapping him up. Before it took him he twisted his fingers clumsily in her hair and dragged her face towards his, close enough almost to kiss his bandages.

  ‘Should’ve been you,’ he whispered at her. ‘Should’ve been you.’

  Other People’s Scores

  ‘That’s his place,’ said the one with the sore on his cheek. ‘Sajaam’s place.’ A stained door in a stained wall, pasted with fluttering old bills decrying the League of Eight as villains, usurpers and common criminals. A pair of caricature faces stared from each one, a bloated Duke Salier and a sneering Duke Rogont. A pair of common criminals stood at the doorway, scarcely less caricatures themselves. One dark-skinned, the other with a heavy tattoo down one arm, both sweeping the street with identical scowls.

  ‘Thank you, children. Eat, now.’ Shenkt pressed a scale into each grubby hand, twelve pairs of eyes wide in smudged faces to have so much money. Once a few days had passed, let alone a few years, he knew it would have done them little good. They were the beggars, thieves, whores, early dead of tomorrow. But Shenkt had done much harm in his life, and so he tried, wherever possible, to be kind. It put nothing right, he knew that. But perhaps a coin could tip the scales of life by that vital degree, and one among them would be spared. It would be a good thing, to spare even one.

  He hummed quietly to himself as he crossed the street, the two men at the door frowning at him all the way. ‘I am here to speak to Sajaam.’

  ‘You armed?’

  ‘Always.’ He and the dark-skinned guard stared at each other for a moment. ‘My ready wit could strike at any moment.’

  Neither one of them smiled, but Shenkt had not expected them to, and did not care into the bargain. ‘What’ve you got to say to Sajaam?’

  ‘ “Are you Sajaam?” That shall be my opening gambit.’

  ‘You mocking us, little man?’ The guard put one hand on the mace hanging at his belt, no doubt thinking himself fearsome.

  ‘I would not dare. I am here to enjoy myself, and have money to spend, nothing more.’

  ‘Maybe you came to the right place after all. With me.’

  He led Shenkt through a hot, dim room, heavy with oily smoke and shadows. Lit blue, green, orange, red by lamps of coloured glass. Husk-smokers sprawled around it, pale faces twisted with smiles, or hanging slack and empty. Shenkt found that he was humming again, and stopped himself.

  A greasy curtain pushed aside into a large back room that smelled of unwashed bodies, smoke and vomit, rotten food and rotten living. A man covered in tattoos sat cross-legged upon a sweat-stained cushion, an axe leaning against the wall beside him. Another man sat on the other side of the room, digging at an ugly piece of meat with a knife, a loaded flatbow beside his plate. Above his head an old clock hung, workings dangling from its underside like the intestines from a gutted corpse, pendulum swinging, tick, tick, tick.

  Upon a long table in the centre of the room were the chattels of a card game. Coins and counters, bottles and glasses, pipes and candles. Men sat about it, six of them in all. A fat man at Shenkt’s right hand, a scrawny one at the left, stuttering out a joke to his neighbour.

  ‘. . . he fuh, fuh, fucked her!’

  Harsh laughter, harsh faces, cheap lives of cheap smoke, cheap drink, cheap violence. Shenkt’s guide walked around to the head of the table, leaned down to speak to a broad-shouldered man, black-skinned, white-haired, with the smile of comfortable ownership on his lined face. He toyed with a golden coin, flipping it glinting across the tops of his knuckles.

  ‘You are Sajaam?’ asked Shenkt.

  He nodded, entirely at his ease. ‘Do I know you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘A stranger, then? We do not entertain many strangers here, do we, my friends?’ A couple of them grinned half-heartedly. ‘Most of my customers are well known to us. What can Sajaam do for you, stranger?’

  ‘Where is Monzcarro Murcatto?’

  Like a man plunging through thin ice, the room was sucked into sudden, awful silence. That heavy quiet before the heavens split. That pregnant stillness,
bulging with the inevitable.

  ‘The Snake of Talins is dead,’ murmured Sajaam, eyes narrowing.

  Shenkt felt the slow movement of the men around him. Their smiles creeping off, their feet creeping to the balance for killing, their hands creeping to their weapons. ‘She is alive and you know where. I want only to talk to her.’

  ‘Who the shuh, shit does this bastard thuh, think he is?’ asked the scrawny card player, and some of the others laughed. Tight, fake laughs, to hide their tension.

  ‘Only tell me where she is. Please. Then no one’s conscience need grow any heavier today.’ Shenkt did not mind pleading. He had given up his vanity long ago. He looked each man in the eyes, gave each a chance to give him what he needed. He gave everyone a chance, where he could. He wished more of them took it.

  But they only smiled at him, and at each other, and Sajaam smiled widest of all. ‘I carry my conscience lightly enough.’

  Shenkt’s old master might have said the same. ‘Some of us do. It is a gift.’

  ‘I tell you what, we’ll toss for it.’ Sajaam held his coin up to the light, gold flashing. ‘Heads, we kill you. Tails, I tell you where Murcatto is . . .’ His smile was all bright teeth in his dark face. ‘Then we kill you.’ There was the slightest ring of metal as he flicked his coin up.

  Shenkt sucked in breath through his nose, slow, slow.

  The gold crawled into the air, turning, turning.

  The clock beat deep and slow as the oars of a great ship.

  Boom . . . boom . . . boom . . .

  Shenkt’s fist sank into the great gut of the fat man on his right, almost to the elbow. Nothing left to scream with, he gave the gentlest fragment of a sigh, eyes popping. An instant later the edge of Shenkt’s open hand caved his astonished face in and ripped his head half-off, bone crumpling like paper. Blood sprayed across the table, black spots frozen, the expressions of the men around it only now starting to shift from rage to shock.

  Shenkt snatched the nearest of them from his chair and flung him into the ceiling. His cry was barely begun as he crashed into a pair of beams, wood bursting, splinters spinning, mangled body falling back down in a languid shower of dust and broken plaster. Long before he hit the floor, Shenkt had seized the next player’s head and rammed his face through the table, through the floor beneath it. Cards, and broken glasses, chunks of planking, fragments of wood and flesh made a swelling cloud. Shenkt ripped the half-drawn hatchet from his fist as he went down, sent it whirling across the room and into the chest of the tattooed man, halfway up from his cushion and the first note of a war cry throbbing from his lips. It hit him haft first, so hard it scarcely mattered, spun him round and round like a child’s top, ripped wide open, blood gouting from his body in all directions.

  The flatbow twanged, deep and distorted, string twisting as it pushed the bolt towards him, swimming slowly through the dust-filled air as if through treacle, shaft flexing lightly back and forth. Shenkt snatched it from its path and drove it clean through a man’s skull, his face folding into itself, meat bursting from torn skin. Shenkt caught him under the jaw and sent his corpse hurtling across the room with a flick of his wrist. He crashed into the archer, the two bodies mashed together, flailing bonelessly into the wall, through the wall, out into the alley on the other side, leaving a ragged hole in the shattered planks behind them.

  The guard from the door had his mace raised, mouth open, air rushing in as he made ready to roar. Shenkt leaped the ruins of the table and slapped him backhanded across the chest, burst his ribcage and sent him reeling, twisting up like a corkscrew, mace flying from his lifeless hand. Shenkt stepped forwards and snatched Sajaam’s coin from the air as it spun back down, metal slapping into his palm.

  He breathed out, and time flowed again.

  The last couple of corpses tumbled across the floor. Plaster dropped, settled. The tattooed man’s left boot rattled against the boards, leg quivering as he died. One of the others was groaning, but not for much longer. The last spots of blood rained softly from the air around them, misting across the broken glass, the broken wood, the broken bodies. One of the cushions had burst, the feathers still fluttering down in a white cloud.

  Shenkt’s fist trembled before Sajaam’s slack face. Steam hissed from it, then molten gold, trickling from between his fingers, running down his forearm in shining streaks. He opened his hand and showed it, palm forwards, daubed with black blood, smeared with glowing metal.

  ‘Neither heads nor tails.’

  ‘Fuh . . . fuh . . . fuh . . .’ The stuttering man still sat at his place, where the table had been, cards clutched in his rigid hand, every part of him spattered, spotted, sprayed with blood.

  ‘You,’ said Shenkt. ‘Stuttering man. You may live.’

  ‘Fuh . . . fuh . . .’

  ‘You alone are spared. Out, before I reconsider.’

  The mumbling beggar dropped his cards, fled whimpering for the door and tumbled through it. Shenkt watched him go. A good thing, even to spare one.

  As he turned back, Sajaam was swinging his chair over his head. It burst apart across Shenkt’s shoulder, broken pieces bouncing from the floor and clattering away. A futile gesture, Shenkt scarcely even felt it. The edge of his hand chopped into the man’s big arm, snapped it like a dead twig, spun him around and sent him rolling over and over across the floor.

  Shenkt walked after him, his scuffed work boots making not the slightest sound as they found the gaps between the debris. Sajaam coughed, shook his head, started to worm away on his back, gurgling through gritted teeth, hand dragging behind him the wrong way up. The heels of his embroidered Gurkish slippers kicked at the floor, leaving stuttering trails though the detritus of blood, dust, feathers and splinters that had settled across the whole room like leaves across a forest floor in autumn.

  ‘A man sleeps through most of his life, even when awake. You get so little time, yet still you spend it utterly oblivious. Angry, frustrated, fixated on meaningless nothings. That drawer does not close flush with the front of my desk. What cards does my opponent hold, and how much money can I win from him? I wish I were taller. What will I have for dinner, for I am not fond of parsnips?’ Shenkt rolled a mangled corpse out of his way with the toe of one boot. ‘It takes a moment like this to jerk us to our senses, to draw our eyes from the mud to the heavens, to root our attention in the present. Now you realise how precious is each moment. That is my gift to you.’

  Sajaam reached the back wall and propped himself up against it, worked himself slowly to standing, broken arm hanging limp.

  ‘I despise violence. It is the last tool of feeble minds.’ Shenkt stopped a stride away. ‘So let us have no more foolishness. Where is Monzcarro Murcatto?’

  To give the man his due for courage, he made for the knife at his belt.

  Shenkt’s pointed finger sank into the hollow where chest met shoulder, just beneath his collarbone. It punched through shirt, skin, flesh, and as the rest of his fist smacked hard against Sajaam’s chest and drove him back against the wall, his fingernail was already scraping against the inside surface of his shoulder blade, buried in his flesh right to the knuckles. Sajaam screamed, knife clattering from his dangling fingers.

  ‘No more foolishness, I said. Where is Murcatto?’

  ‘In Visserine the last I heard!’ His voice was hoarse with pain. ‘In Visserine!’

  ‘At the siege?’ Sajaam nodded, bloody teeth clenched tight together. If Visserine had not fallen already, it would have by the time Shenkt got there. But he never left a job half-done. He would assume she was still alive, and carry on the chase. ‘Who does she have with her?’

  ‘Some Northman beggar, called himself Shivers! A man of mine named Friendly! A convict! A convict from Safety!’

  ‘Yes?’ Shenkt twisted his finger in the man’s flesh, blood trickling from the wound and down his hand, around the streaks of gold dried to his forearm, dripping from his elbow, tap, tap, tap.

  ‘Ah! Ah! I put her in touch with
a poisoner called Morveer! In Westport, and in Sipani with a woman called Vitari!’ Shenkt frowned. ‘A woman who can get things done!’

  ‘Murcatto, Shivers, Friendly, Morveer . . . Vitari.’

  A desperate nod, spit flying from Sajaam’s gritted teeth with every heaving, agonised breath.

  ‘And where are these brave companions bound next?’

  ‘I’m not sure! Gah! She said seven men! The seven men who killed her brother! Ah! Puranti, maybe! Keep ahead of Orso’s army! If she gets Ganmark, maybe she’ll try for Faithful next, for Faithful Carpi!’

  ‘Maybe she will.’ Shenkt jerked his finger free with a faint sucking sound and Sajaam collapsed, sliding down until his rump hit the floor, his shivering, sweat-beaded face twisted with pain.

  ‘Please,’ he grunted. ‘I can help you. I can help you find her.’

  Shenkt squatted down in front of him, blood-smeared hands dangling on the knees of his blood-smeared trousers. ‘But you have helped. You can leave the rest to me.’

  ‘I have money! I have money.’

  Shenkt said nothing.

  ‘I was planning on turning her in to Orso, sooner or later, once the price was high enough.’

  More nothing.

  ‘That doesn’t make any difference, does it?’

  Silence.

  ‘I told that bitch she’d be the death of me.’

  ‘You were right. I hope that is a comfort.’

  ‘Not much of one. I should have killed her then.’

  ‘But you saw money to be made. Have you anything to say?’

  Sajaam stared at him. ‘What would I say?’

  ‘Some people want to say things, at the end. Do you?’

  ‘What are you?’ he whispered.

  ‘I have been many things. A student. A messenger. A thief. A soldier in old wars. A servant of great powers. An actor in great events. Now?’ Shenkt puffed out an unhappy breath as he gazed around at the mangled corpses hunched, sprawled, huddled across the room. ‘Now, it seems, I am a man who settles other people’s scores.’