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

by Joe Abercrombie

  ‘But it would be wiser counsel for your regular Talinese troops – tried and tested recently in Visserine, then Puranti, committed to their cause, used to victory and with the very firmest of morale – to cross the lower ford and engage the Osprians, supported by your allies of Etrisani and Cesale, and so forth.’ He waved his flask towards the river, a far more useful implement to his mind than a baton, since a baton makes no man drunk. ‘The Thousand Swords would be far better deployed concealed upon the high ground. Waiting to seize the moment! To drive across the upper ford, with dash and vigour, and take the enemy in the rear!’

  ‘Best place to take an enemy,’ muttered Andiche. Victus sniggered.

  Cosca finished with a flourish of his flask. ‘Thus, your earthy courage and our fiery passion are used where they are best suited. Songs will be sung, glory will be seized, history will be made, Orso will be king . . .’ He gave Foscar a gentle bow. ‘And yourself, your Highness, in due course.’

  Foscar frowned towards the fords. ‘Yes. Yes, I see. The thing is, though—’

  ‘Then we are agreed!’ Cosca flung an arm around his shoulders and guided him back towards the tent. ‘Was it Stolicus who said great men march often in the same direction? I believe it was! Let us march now towards dinner, my friends!’ He pointed one finger back towards the darkening mountains, where Ospria glimmered in the sunset. ‘I swear, I am so hungry I could eat a city!’ Warm laughter accompanied him back into the tent.

  Politics

  Shivers sat there frowning, and drank. Duke Rogont’s great dining hall was the grandest room he’d ever got drunk in by quite a stretch. When Vossula told him Styria was packed with wonders it was this type of thing, rather than the rotting docks of Talins, that Shivers had in mind. It must’ve had four times the floor of Bethod’s great hall in Carleon and a ceiling three times as high or more. The walls were pale marble with stripes of blue-black stone through it, all fretted with veins of glitter, all carved with leaves and vines, all grown up and crept over with ivy so the real plants and the sculpted tangled together in the dancing shadows. Warm evening breezes washed in through open windows wide as castle gates, made the orange flames of a thousand hanging lamps flicker and sway, striking a precious gleam from everything.

  A place of majesty and magic, built by gods for the use of giants.

  Shame the folk gathered there fell a long way short of either. Women in gaudy finery, brushed, jewelled and painted to look younger, or thinner, or richer than they were. Men in bright-coloured jackets who wore lace at their collars and little gilded daggers at their belts. They looked at him first with mild disdain on their powdered faces, like he was made of rotting meat. Then, once he’d turned the left side of his face forwards, with a sick horror that gave him three parts grim satisfaction and one part sick horror of his own.

  Always at every feast there’s some stupid, ugly, mean bastard got a big score to settle with no one in particular, drinks way too much and makes the night a worry for everyone. Seemed tonight it was him, and he was taking to the part with a will. He hawked up phlegm and spat it noisily across the gleaming floor.

  A man at the next table in a yellow coat with long tails to it looked round, the smallest sneer on his puffed-up lips. Shivers leaned towards him, grinding the point of his knife into the polished table-top. ‘Something to say to me, piss-coat?’ The man paled and turned back to his friends without a word. ‘Bunch o’ bastard cowards,’ Shivers growled into his quickly emptying wine-cup, good and loud enough to be heard three tables away. ‘Not a single bone in the whole fucking crowd!’

  He thought about what the Dogman might’ve made of this crew of tittering dandies. Or Rudd Threetrees. Or Black Dow. He gave a grim snort to think of it, but his laughter choked off short. If there was a joke, it was on him. Here he was, in the midst of ’em, after all, leaning on their charity without a friend to his name. Or so it seemed.

  He scowled towards the high table, up on a raised dais at the head of the room. Rogont sat in the midst of his most favoured guests, grinning around as though he was a star shining from the night sky. Monza sat beside him. Hard to tell from where Shivers was, specially with everything smeared up with anger and too much wine, but he thought he saw her laughing. Enjoying herself, no doubt, without her one-eyed errand boy to drag her down.

  He was a fine-looking bastard, the Prince of Prudence. Had both his eyes, anyway. Shivers would’ve liked to break his smooth, smug face open. With a hammer, like Monza had broken Gobba’s head. Or just with his fists. Crush it in his hands. Pound it to red splinters. He gripped his knife trembling tight, spinning out a whole mad story of how he’d go about it. Picking over all the bloody details, shifting them about until they made him look as big a man as possible, Rogont wailing for mercy and pissing himself, twisting it into crazy shapes where Monza wanted him more’n ever at the end of it. And all the while he watched the two of ’em through one twitching, narrowed eye.

  He goaded himself with the notion they were laughing at him, but he knew that was foolishness. He didn’t matter enough to laugh at, and that made him stew hotter than ever. He was still clinging to his pride, after all, like a drowning man to a twig way too small to keep him afloat. He was a maimed embarrassment, after he’d saved her life how many times? Risked his life how many times? And after all the bloody steps he’d climbed to get to the top of this bastard mountain too. Might’ve hoped for something better’n scorn at the end of it.

  He jerked his knife from the split wood. The knife Monza had given him the first day they met. Back when he had both his eyes and a lot less blood on his hands. Back when he had it in mind to leave killing behind him, and be a good man. He could hardly remember what that had felt like.

  Monza sat there frowning, and drank.

  She hadn’t much taste for food lately, had less for ceremony, and none at all for tonguing arses, so Rogont’s banquet of the doomed came close to a nightmare. Benna had been the one for feasting, form and flattery. He would have loved this – pointing, laughing, slapping backs with the worst of them. If he’d found a moment clear of soaking up the flattery of people who despised him, he would have leaned over, and touched her arm with a soothing hand, and whispered in her ear to grin and take it. Baring her teeth in a rictus snarl was about as close as she could come.

  She had a bastard of a headache, pulsing away down the side where the coins were screwed, and the genteel rattle of cutlery might as well have been nails hammered into her face. Her guts seemed to have been cramping up ever since she left Faithful drowned on the millwheel. It was the best she could do not to turn to Rogont and spew, and spew, and spew all over his gold-embroidered white coat.

  He leaned towards her with polite concern. ‘Why so glum, General Murcatto?’

  ‘Glum?’ She swallowed the rising acid enough to speak. ‘Orso’s army are on their way.’

  Rogont turned his wine glass slowly round and round by the stem. ‘So I hear. Ably assisted by your old mentor Nicomo Cosca. The scouts of the Thousand Swords have already reached Menzes Hill, overlooking the fords.’

  ‘No more delays, then.’

  ‘It would appear not. My designs on glory will soon be ground into the dust. As such designs often are.’

  ‘You sure the night before your own destruction is the best time to celebrate?’

  ‘The day after might be too late.’

  ‘Huh.’ True enough. ‘Perhaps you’ll get a miracle.’

  ‘I’ve never been a great believer in divine intervention.’

  ‘No? What are they here for, then?’ Monza jerked her head towards a knot of Gurkish just below the high table, dressed in the white robes and skullcaps of the priesthood.

  The duke peered down at them. ‘Oh, their help goes well beyond the spiritual. They are emissaries of the Prophet Khalul. Duke Orso has his allies in the Union, the backing of their banks. I must find friends of my own. And even the Emperor of Gurkhul kneels before the Prophet.’

  ‘Everyone kneels
to someone, eh? I guess Emperor and Prophet can console each other after their priests bring news of your head on a spike.’

  ‘They’ll soon get over it. Styria is a sideshow to them. I daresay they’re already preparing the next battlefield.’

  ‘I hear the war never ends.’ She drained her glass and slung it rattling back across the wood. Maybe they pressed the best wine in the world in Ospria, but it tasted of vomit to her. Everything did. Her life was made of sick. Sick and frequent, painful, watery shits. Raw-gummed, saw-tongued, rough-toothed, sore-arsed. A horse-faced servant in a powdered wig flowed around her shoulder and let fall a long stream of wine into the empty glass, as though flourishing the bottle as far above her as possible would make it taste better. He retreated with consummate ease. Retreat was the speciality down in Ospria, after all. She reached for the glass again. The most recent smoke had stopped her hand shaking, but nothing more.

  So she prayed for mindless, shameful, stupefying drunkenness to swarm over and blot out the misery.

  She let her eyes crawl over Ospria’s richest and most useless citizens. If you really looked for it, the banquet had an edge of shrill hysteria. Drinking too much. Talking too fast. Laughing too loud. Nothing like a dash of imminent annihilation to lower the inhibitions. The one consolation of Rogont’s coming rout was that a good number of these fools would lose everything along with him.

  ‘You sure I should be up here?’ she grunted.

  ‘Someone has to be.’ Rogont glanced sideways at the girlish Countess Cotarda of Affoia without great enthusiasm. ‘The noble League of Eight, it seems, has become a League of Two.’ He leaned close. ‘And to be entirely honest I’m wondering if it’s not too late for me to get out of it. The sad fact is I’m running short of notable guests.’

  ‘So I’m an exhibit to stiffen your wilting prestige, am I?’

  ‘Exactly so. A perfectly charming one, though. And those stories about my wilting are all scurrilous rumours, I assure you.’ Monza couldn’t find the strength even to be irritated, let alone amused, and settled for a weary snort. ‘You should eat something.’ He gestured at her untouched plate with his fork. ‘You look thin.’

  ‘I’m sick.’ That and her right hand hurt so badly she could scarcely hold the knife. ‘I’m always sick.’

  ‘Really? Something you ate?’ Rogont forked meat into his mouth with all the relish of a man likely to live out the week. ‘Or something you did?’

  ‘Maybe it’s just the company.’

  ‘I wouldn’t be at all surprised. My Aunt Sefeline was always revolted by me. She was a woman much prone to nausea. You remind me of her in a way. Sharp mind, great talents, will of iron, but a weaker stomach than might have been expected.’

  ‘Sorry to disappoint you.’ The dead knew she disappointed herself enough.

  ‘Me? Oh, quite the reverse, I assure you. We are none of us made from flint, eh?’

  If only. Monza gagged down more wine and scowled at the glass. A year ago, she’d had nothing but contempt for Rogont. She remembered laughing with Benna and Faithful over what a coward he was, what a treacherous ally. Now Benna was dead, she’d murdered Faithful and she’d run to Rogont for shelter like a wayward child to her rich uncle. An uncle who couldn’t even protect himself, in this case. But he was far better company than the alternative. Her eyes were dragged reluctantly towards the bottom of the long table on the right, where Shivers sat alone.

  The hard fact was he sickened her. It was an effort just to stand beside him, let alone touch him. It was far more than the simple ugliness of his maimed face. She’d seen enough that was ugly, and done enough too, to have no trouble at least pretending to be comfortable around it. It was the silences, when before she couldn’t shut him up. They were full of debts she couldn’t pay. She’d see that skewed, dead ruin of an eye and remember him whispering at her, It should’ve been you. And she’d know it should have been. When he did talk he said nothing about doing the right thing any more, nothing about being a better man. Maybe it should have pleased her to have won that argument. She’d tried hard enough. But all she could think was that she’d taken a halfway decent man and somehow made a halfway evil one. She wasn’t only rotten herself, she rotted everything she touched.

  Shivers sickened her, and the fact she was disgusted when she knew she should have been grateful only sickened her even more.

  ‘I’m wasting time,’ she hissed, more at her glass than anyone else.

  Rogont sighed. ‘We all are. Just passing the ugly moments until our ignominious deaths in the least horrible manner we can find.’

  ‘I should be gone.’ She tried to make a fist of her gloved hand, but the pain only made her weaker now. ‘Find a way . . . find a way to kill Orso.’ But she was so tired she could hardly find the strength to say it.

  ‘Revenge? Truly?’

  ‘Revenge.’

  ‘I would be crushed if you were to leave.’

  She could hardly be bothered to take care what she said. ‘Why the hell would you want me?’

  ‘I, want you?’ Rogont’s smile slipped for a moment. ‘I can delay no longer, Monzcarro. Soon, perhaps tomorrow, there will be a great battle. One that will decide the fate of Styria. What could be more valuable than the advice of one of Styria’s greatest soldiers?’

  ‘I’ll see if I can find you one,’ she muttered.

  ‘And you have many friends.’

  ‘Me?’ She couldn’t think of a single one alive.

  ‘The people of Talins love you still.’ He raised his eyebrows at the gathering, some of them still glowering at her with scant friendliness. ‘Less popular here, of course, but that only serves to prove the point. One man’s villain is another’s hero, after all.’

  ‘They think I’m dead in Talins, and don’t care into the bargain.’ She hardly cared herself.

  ‘On the contrary, agents of mine are in the process of making the citizens well aware of your triumphant survival. Bills posted at every crossroads dispute Duke Orso’s story, charge him with your attempted murder and proclaim your imminent return. The people care deeply, believe me, with that bottomless passion common folk sometimes have for great figures they have never met, and never will. If nothing else, it turns them further against Orso, and gives him difficulties at home.’

  ‘Politics, eh?’ She drained her glass. ‘Small gestures, when war is knocking at your gates.’

  ‘We all make the gestures we can. But in war and politics both you are still an asset to be courted.’ His smile was back now, and broader than ever. ‘Besides, what extra reason should a man require to keep cunning and beautiful women close at hand?’

  She scowled sideways. ‘Fuck yourself.’

  ‘When I must.’ He looked straight back at her. ‘But I’d much rather have help.’

  ‘You look almost as bitter as I feel.’

  ‘Eh?’ Shivers prised his scowl from the happy couple. ‘Ah.’ There was a woman talking to him. ‘Oh.’ She was very good to look at, so much that she seemed to have a glow about her. Then he saw everything had a glow. He was drunk as shit.

  She seemed different from the rest, though. Necklace of red stones round her long neck, white dress that hung loose, like the ones he’d seen black women wearing in Westport, but she was very pale. There was something easy in the way she stood, no stiff manners to her. Something open in her smile. For a moment, it almost had him smiling with her. First time in a while.

  ‘Is there space here?’ She spoke Styrian with a Union accent. An outsider, like him.

  ‘You want to sit . . . with me?’

  ‘Why not, do you carry the plague?’

  ‘With my luck I wouldn’t be surprised.’ He turned the left side of his face towards her. ‘This seems to keep most folk well clear o’ me by itself, though.’

  Her eyes moved over it, then back, and her smile didn’t flicker. ‘We all have our scars. Some of us on the outside, some of us—’

  ‘The ones on the inside don’t take quite such a
toll on the looks, though, eh?’

  ‘I’ve found that looks are overrated.’

  Shivers looked her slowly up and down, and enjoyed it. ‘Easy for you to say, you’ve plenty to spare.’

  ‘Manners.’ She puffed out her cheeks as she looked round the hall. ‘I’d despaired of finding any among this crowd. I swear, you must be the only honest man here.’

  ‘Don’t count on it.’ Though he was grinning wide enough. There was never a bad time for flattery from a fine-looking woman, after all. He had his pride. She held out one hand to him and he blinked at it. ‘I kiss it, do I?’

  ‘If you like. It won’t dissolve.’

  It was soft and smooth. Nothing like Monza’s hand – scarred, tanned, calloused as any Named Man’s. Even less like her other one, twisted as a nettle root under that glove. Shivers pressed his lips to the woman’s knuckles, caught a giddy whiff of scent. Like flowers, and something else that made the breath sharpen in his throat.

  ‘I’m, er . . . Caul Shivers.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘You do?’

  ‘We’ve met before, though briefly. Carlot dan Eider is my name.’

  ‘Eider?’ Took him a moment to place it. A half-glimpsed face in the mist. The woman in the red coat, in Sipani. Prince Ario’s lover. ‘You’re the one that Monza—’

  ‘Beat, blackmailed, destroyed and left for dead? That would be me.’ She frowned up towards the high table. ‘Monza, is it? Not only first-name terms, but an affectionate shortening. The two of you must be very close.’

  ‘Close enough.’ Nowhere near as close as they had been, though, in Visserine. Before they took his eye.

  ‘And yet she sits up there, with the great Duke Rogont, and you sit down here, with the beggars and the embarrassments.’

  Like she knew his own thoughts. His fury flickered up again and he tried to steer the talk away from it. ‘What brings you here?’

  ‘After the carnage in Sipani I had no other choices. Duke Orso is doubtless offering a pretty price for my head. I’ve spent the last three months expecting every person I passed to stab me, poison me, throttle me, or worse.’