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

by Joe Abercrombie

  ‘Well?’ asked Majud. ‘Do we have a deal?’

  ‘They’re thinking it over,’ said Lamb, bringing up the rear.

  ‘What did you offer? What happened, damn it?’

  ‘He killed them,’ muttered Shy.

  There was a moment of confused silence. ‘Who killed who?’ squeaked Lord Ingelstad.

  ‘Lamb killed the Ghosts.’

  ‘Don’t overstate it,’ said Sweet. ‘He let one go.’ And he pushed back his hat and sagged against a wagon tyre.

  ‘Sangeed?’ grunted Crying Rock. Sweet shook his head. ‘Oh,’ said the Ghost.

  ‘You . . . killed them?’ asked Temple.

  Lamb shrugged. ‘Out here when a man tries to murder you, maybe you pay him for the favour. Where I come from we got a different way of doing things.’

  ‘He killed them?’ asked Buckhorm, eyes wide with horror.

  ‘Good!’ shouted his wife, shaking one small fist. ‘Good someone had the bones to do it! They got what they had coming! For my two dead boys!’

  ‘We’ve got eight still living to think about!’ said her husband.

  ‘Not to mention every other person in this Fellowship!’ added Lord

  Ingelstad.

  ‘He was right to do it,’ growled Savian. ‘For those that died and those that live. You trust those fucking animals out there? Pay a man to hurt you, all you do is teach him to do it again. Better they learn to fear us.’

  ‘So you say!’ snapped Hedges.

  ‘That I do,’ said Savian, flat and cold. ‘Look on the upside – we might’ve saved a great deal of money here.’

  ‘Scant comfort if it cuh . . . if it costs us all our lives!’ snapped Buckhorm.

  The financial argument looked to have gone a long way towards bringing Majud around, though. ‘We should have made the choice together,’ he said.

  ‘A choice between killing and dying ain’t no choice at all.’ And Lamb brushed through the gathering as though they were not there and to an empty patch of grass beside the nearest fire.

  ‘Hell of a fucking gamble, ain’t it?’

  ‘A gamble with our lives!’

  ‘A chance worth taking.’

  ‘You are the expert,’ said Majud to Sweet. ‘What do you say to this?’

  The old scout rubbed at the back of his neck. ‘What’s to be said? It’s done. Ain’t no undoing it. Less your niece is so good a healer she can stitch Sangeed’s head back on?’

  Savian did not answer.

  ‘Didn’t think so.’ And Sweet climbed back up onto Majud’s wagon and perched in his place behind his arrow-prickled crate, staring out across the black plain, distinguishable from the black sky now only by its lack of stars.

  Temple had suffered some long and sleepless nights during his life. The night the Gurkish had finally broken through the walls and the Eaters had come for Kahdia. The night the Inquisition had swept the slums of Dagoska for treason. The night his daughter died, and the night not long after when his wife followed. But he had lived through none longer than this.

  People strained their eyes into the inky nothing, occasionally raising breathless alarms at some imagined movement, the bubbling cries of one of the prospectors who had an arrow-wound in his stomach, and who Corlin did not expect to last until dawn, as the backdrop. On Savian’s order, since he had stopped making suggestions and taken unquestioned command, the Fellowship lit torches and threw them out into the grass beyond the wagons. Their flickering light was almost worse than darkness because, at its edges, death always lurked.

  Temple and Shy sat together in silence, with a palpable emptiness where Leef’s place used to be, Lamb’s contented snoring stretching out the endless time. In the end Shy nodded sideways, and leaned against him, and slept. He toyed with the idea of shouldering her off into the fire, but decided against. It could well have been his last chance to feel the touch of another person, after all. Unless he counted the Ghost who would kill him tomorrow.

  As soon as there was grey light enough to see by, Sweet, Crying Rock and Savian mounted up and edged towards the trees, the rest of the Fellowship gathered breathless on the wagons to watch, hollow-eyed from fear and lack of sleep, clutching at their weapons or at each other. The three riders came back into view not long after, calling out that in the lee of the timber there were fires still smoking on which the Ghosts had burned their dead.

  But they were gone. It turned out they were practical thinkers after all.

  Now the enthusiasm for Lamb’s courage and swift action was unanimous. Luline Buckhorm and her husband were both tearful with gratitude on behalf of their dead sons. Gentili would have done just the same in his youth, apparently. Hedges would have done it if it weren’t for his leg, injured in the line of duty at the Battle of Osrung. Two of the whores offered a reward in kind, which Lamb looked minded to accept until Shy declined on his behalf. Then Lestek clambered on a wagon and suggested in quavering tones that Lamb be rewarded with four hundred marks from the money saved, which he looked minded to refuse until Shy accepted on his behalf.

  Lord Ingelstad slapped Lamb on the back, and offered him a swig from his best bottle of brandy, aged for two hundred years in the family cellars in faraway Keln which were now, alas, the property of a creditor.

  ‘My friend,’ said the nobleman, ‘you’re a bloody hero!’

  Lamb looked at him sideways as he raised the bottle. ‘I’m bloody, all right.’

  The Fair Price

  It was cold as hell up in them hills. The children all cold, and scared, huddling together at night close to the fires with cheeks pinched and pinked and their breath smoking in each other’s faces. Ro took Pit’s hands and rubbed them between hers and breathed on them and tried to wrap the bald furs tighter against the dark.

  Not long after they got off the boat, a man had come and said Papa Ring needed everyone and Cantliss had cursed, which never took much, and sent seven of his men off. That left just six with that bastard Blackpoint but no one spoke of running now. No one spoke much at all, as if with each mile poled or rode or trod the spirit went out of them, then the thought, and they became just meat on the hoof, trailing slack and wretched to whatever slaughterhouse Cantliss had in mind.

  The woman called Bee had been sent off, too, and she’d cried and asked Cantliss, ‘Where you taking the children?’ And he’d sneered, ‘Get back to Crease and mind your business, damn you.’ So it was up to Ro and the boy Evin and a couple of the other older ones to see to the blisters and fears of the rest.

  High they went into the hills, and higher, twisting by scarce-trodden ways cut by the water of long ago. They camped among great rocks that had the feel of buildings fallen, buildings ancient as the mountains. The trees grew taller and taller until they were pillars of wood that seemed to pierce the sky, their lowest branches high above, creaking in the silent forest bare of brush, without animals, without insects.

  ‘Where you taking us?’ Ro asked Cantliss for the hundredth time, and for the hundredth time he said, ‘On,’ jerking his unshaved face towards the grey outlines of the peaks beyond, his fancy clothes worn out to rags.

  They passed through some town, all wood-built and not built well, and a lean dog barked at them but there were no people, not a one. Blackpoint frowned up at the empty windows and licked at the gap in his teeth and said, ‘Where did they all go to?’ He spoke in Northern but Lamb had taught Ro enough to understand. ‘I don’t like it.’

  Cantliss just snorted. ‘You ain’t meant to.’

  Up, and on, and the trees withered to brown and stunted pine then twisted twig then there were no trees. It turned from icy cold to strangely warm, the soft breeze across the mountainside like breath, and then too hot, too hot, the children toiling on, pink faces sweat-beaded, up bare slopes of rock yellow with crusted sulphur, the ground warm to touch as flesh, the very land alive. Steam popped and hissed from cracks like mouths and in cupped stones lay salt-crusted pools, the water bubbling with stinking gas, frothing with multico
loured oils and Cantliss warned them not to drink for it was poison.

  ‘This place is wrong,’ said Pit.

  ‘It’s just a place.’ But Ro saw the fear in the eyes of the other children, and in the eyes of Cantliss’ men, and felt it, too. It was a dead place.

  ‘Is Shy still following?’

  ‘Course she is.’ But Ro didn’t think she could be, not so far as this, so far it seemed they weren’t in the world any more. She could hardly remember what Shy looked like, or Lamb, or the farm as it had been. She was starting to think all that was gone, a dream, a whisper, and this was all there was.

  The way grew too steep for horses, then for mules, so one man was left waiting with the animals. They climbed a deep, bare valley where the cliffs were riddled with holes too square for nature to have made, heaped mounds of broken rock beside the way that put Ro in mind of the spoil of mines. But what ancient miners had delved here and for what excavated in this blasted place she could not guess.

  After a day breathing its ugly fume, noses and throats raw from the stink, they came upon a great needle of rock set on its end, pitted and stained by weather and time but bare of moss or lichen or plant of any kind. As they came close in a group all tattered reluctance, Ro saw it was covered with letters, and though she couldn’t read them knew it for a warning. In the rocky walls above, the blue sky so far away, were more holes, many more, and towering, creaking scaffolds of old wood held platforms, ropes and buckets and evidence of fresh diggings.

  Cantliss held up his open hand. ‘Stop here.’

  ‘What now?’ asked Blackpoint, fingering the hilt of his sword.

  ‘Now we wait.’

  ‘How long?’

  ‘Not long, brother.’ A man leaned against a rock, quite at his ease. How Ro had missed him there she could not tell because he was by no means small. Very tall, and dark-skinned, head shaved to the faintest silver stubble, and he wore a simple robe of undyed cloth. In the crook of one heavy-muscled arm he had a staff as tall as he was, in the other hand a small and wrinkled apple. Now he bit into it and said, ‘Greetings,’ with his mouth half-full, and he smiled at Cantliss, and at Blackpoint and the other men, his face alive with friendly creases unfitting to these grim surroundings, and he smiled at the children, and at Ro in particular, she thought. ‘Greetings, children.’

  ‘I want my money,’ said Cantliss.

  The smile did not leave the old man’s face. ‘Of course. Because you have a hole in you and you believe gold will fill it.’

  ‘Because I got a debt, and if I don’t pay I’m a dead man.’

  ‘We are all dead men, brother, in due course. It is how we get there that counts. But you will have your fair price.’ His eyes moved over the children. ‘I count but twenty.’

  ‘Long journey,’ said Blackpoint, one hand resting on his sword. ‘Bound to be some wastage.’

  ‘Nothing is bound to be, brother. What is so is so because of the choices we make.’

  ‘I ain’t the one buys children.’

  ‘I buy them. I do not kill them. Is it the hurting of weak things that fills the hole in you?’

  ‘I ain’t got no hole in me,’ said Blackpoint.

  The old man took a last bite from his apple. ‘No?’ And he tossed the core to Blackpoint. The Northman reached for it on an instinct, then grunted. The old man had covered the ground between them in two lightning steps and struck him in the chest with the end of his staff.

  Blackpoint shuddered, letting fall the core and fumbling for his sword but he had no strength left to draw it, and Ro saw it was not a staff but a spear, the long blade sticking bloody from Blackpoint’s back. The old man lowered him to the ground, put a gentle hand on his face and closed his eyes.

  ‘It is a hard thing to say, but I feel the world is better without him.’

  Ro looked at the Northman’s corpse, clothes already dark with blood, and found that she was glad, and did not know what that meant.

  ‘By the dead,’ breathed one of Cantliss’ men, and looking up Ro saw many figures had come silent from the mines and out onto the scaffolds, looking down. Men and women of all races and ages, but all wearing the same brown cloth and all with heads shaved bald.

  ‘A few friends,’ said the old man, standing.

  Cantliss’ voice quavered, thin and wheedling. ‘We did our best.’

  ‘It saddens me, that this might be your best.’

  ‘All I want is the money.’

  ‘It saddens me, that money might be all a man wants.’

  ‘We had a deal.’

  ‘That also saddens me, but so we did. Your money is there.’ And the old man pointed out a wooden box sitting on a rock they had passed on the way. ‘I wish you joy of it.’

  Cantliss snatched up the box and Ro saw the glitter of gold inside. He smiled, dirty face warm with the reflected glow. ‘Let’s go.’ And he and his men backed off.

  One of the little children started snivelling then, because little children will come to love even the hateful if that is all they have, and Ro put a hand on her shoulder and said, ‘Shhh,’ and tried to be brave as the old man walked up to stand towering over her.

  Pit clenched his little fists and said, ‘Don’t hurt my sister!’

  The man swiftly knelt so that his bald head was level with Ro’s, huge-looking so close, and he put one great hand gently upon Ro’s shoulder and one upon Pit’s and he said, ‘Children, my name is Waerdinur, the thirty-ninth Right Hand of the Maker, and I would never harm either one of you, nor allow anyone else so to do. I have sworn it. I have sworn to protect this sacred ground and the people upon it with my last blood and breath and only death will stop me.’

  He brought out a fine chain and hung it around Ro’s neck, and strung upon it, resting on her chest, was a piece of dull, grey metal in the shape of a teardrop.

  ‘What’s this?’ she asked.

  ‘It is a dragon’s scale.’

  ‘A real one?’

  ‘Yes, a real one. We all have them.’ He reached into his robe and pulled out his own to show to her.

  ‘Why do I have one?’

  He smiled, eyes glimmering with tears. ‘Because you are my daughter now.’ And he put his arms around her and held her very tight.

  Hell on the Cheap

  Crease at night?

  Picture hell on the cheap. Then add more whores.

  The greatest settlement of the new frontier, that prospector’s paradise, the Fellowship’s long-anticipated destination, was wedged into a twisting valley, steep sides dotted with the wasted stumps of felled pines. It was a place of wild abandon, wild hope, wild despair, everything at extremes and nothing in moderation, dreams trodden into the muck and new ones sucked from bottles to be vomited up and trodden down in turn. A place where the strange was commonplace and the ordinary bizarre, and death might be along tomorrow so you’d best have all your fun today

  At its muddy margins, the city consisted mostly of wretched tents, scenes better left unwitnessed by mankind assaulting the eye through wind-stirred flaps. Buildings were botched together from split pine and high hopes, held up by the drunks slumped against both sides, women risking their lives to lean from wonky balconies and beckon in the business.

  ‘It’s got bigger,’ said Corlin, peering through the jam of wet traffic that clogged the main street.

  ‘Lot bigger,’ grunted Savian.

  ‘I’d have trouble saying better, though.’

  Shy was trying to imagine worse. A parade of crazed expressions reeled at them through the litter-strewn mud. Faces fit for some nightmare stage show. A demented carnival permanently in town. Off-key giggling split the jagged night and moans of pleasure or horror, the calls of pawnbrokers and the snorts of livestock, the groaning of ruined bedsteads and the squeaking of ruined violins. All composing a desperate music together, no two bars alike, spilling into the night through ill-fitting doors and windows, roars of laughter at a joke or a good spin of the gaming wheel hardly to be told from roars of a
nger at an insult or the bad turn of a card.

  ‘Merciful heaven,’ muttered Majud, one sleeve across his face against the ever-shifting stench.

  ‘Enough to make a man believe in God,’ said Temple. ‘And that He’s somewhere else.’

  Ruins loomed from the wet night. Columns on inhuman scale towered to either side of the main street, so thick three men couldn’t have linked their arms around them. Some were toppled short, some sheared off ten strides up, some still standing so high the tops were lost to the dark above, the shifting torchlight picking out stained carvings, letters, runes in alphabets centuries forgotten, mementoes of ancient happenings, winners and losers a thousand years dust.

  ‘What did this place used to be?’ muttered Shy, neck aching from looking up.

  ‘Cleaner, at a guess,’ said Lamb.

  Shacks had sprouted around those ancient columns like unruly fungi from the trunks of dead trees. Folk had built teetering scaffolds up them, and chiselled bent props into them, and hung ropes from the tops and even slung walkways between, until some were entirely obscured by incompetent carpentry, turned to nightmare ships run thousands of miles aground, decked out in torches and lanterns and garish advertising for every vice imaginable, the whole so precarious you could see the buildings shifting when the breeze got stiff.

  The valley opened up as the remnants of the Fellowship threaded its way further and the general mood intensified to something between orgy, riot and an outbreak of fever. Wild-eyed revellers rushed at it all open-mouthed, fixed on ripping through a lifetime of fun before sunup, as if violence and debauch wouldn’t be there on the morrow.

  Shy had a feeling they would.

  ‘It’s like a battle,’ grunted Savian.

  ‘But without any sides,’ said Corlin.

  ‘Or any victory,’ said Lamb.

  ‘Just a million defeats,’ muttered Temple.

  Men tottered and lurched, limped and spun with gaits grotesque or comical, drunk beyond reason, or crippled in head or body, or half-mad from long months spent digging alone in high extremities where words were a memory. Shy directed her horse around a man making a spatter all down his own bare legs, trousers about ankles in the muck, cock in one wobbling hand while he slobbered at a bottle in the other.