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

by Joe Abercrombie

  Hedges sidled past into the room, eyes nervously darting. ‘Can’t say I disagree, sir. Might I have a moment?’ Grateful for the distraction, Temple slipped out into the bitter darkness.

  In the camp’s one street, secrecy did not seem a prime concern. Men swathed in coats and furs, swaddled in torn-up blankets and mismatched armour stomped cursing about, churning the snow to black slush, holding rustling torches high, dragging reluctant horses, unloading boxes and barrels from listing wagons, breath steaming from wrappings around their faces.

  ‘Might I accompany you?’ asked Sworbreck, threading after Temple through the chaos.

  ‘If you’re not scared my luck will rub off.’

  ‘It could be no worse than mine,’ lamented the biographer.

  They passed a group huddled in a hut with one missing wall, playing dice for bedding, a man sharpening blades at a shrieking grindstone, sparks showering into the night, three women arguing over how best to get a cook-fire started. None had the answer.

  ‘Do you ever feel . . .’ Sworbreck mused, face squashed down for warmth into the threadbare collar of his coat, ‘as though you have somehow blundered into a situation you never intended to be in, but now cannot see your way clear of?’

  Temple looked sidelong at the writer. ‘Lately, every moment of every day.’

  ‘As if you were being punished, but you were not sure what for.’

  ‘I know what for,’ muttered Temple.

  ‘I don’t belong here,’ said Sworbreck.

  ‘I wish I could say the same. But I fear that I do.’

  Snow had been dug away from one of the barrows and torchlight flickered in its moss-caked archway. One of the pimps was busy hanging a worn hide at the entrance of another, a disorderly queue already forming outside. A shivering pedlar had set up shop between the two, offering belts and boot-polish to the heedless night. Commerce never sleeps.

  Temple caught Inquisitor Lorsen’s grating tones emerging from a cabin’s half-open door, ‘. . . Do you really believe there are rebels in these mountains, Dimbik?’

  ‘Belief is a luxury I have not been able to afford for some time, Inquisitor. I simply do as I’m told.’

  ‘But by whom, Captain, by whom is the question. I, after all, have the ear of Superior Pike, and the Superior has the ear of the Arch Lector himself, and a recommendation from the Arch Lector . . .’ His scheming was lost in the babble.

  In the darkness at the edge of the camp, Temple’s erstwhile fellows were already mounting up. It had begun to snow again, white specks gently settling on the manes of the horses, on Crying Rock’s grey hair and the old flag it was bound up with, across Shy’s shoulders, hunched as she steadfastly refused to look over, on the packages Lamb was busy stowing on his horse.

  ‘Coming with us?’ asked Savian as he watched Temple approach.

  ‘My heart is willing but the rest of me has the good sense to politely decline.’

  ‘Crying Rock!’ Sworbreck produced his notebook with a flourish. ‘It is a most intriguing name!’

  She stared down at him. ‘Yes.’

  ‘I daresay an intriguing story lies behind it.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Would you care to share it?’

  Crying Rock slowly rode off into the gathering darkness.

  ‘I’d call that a no,’ said Shy.

  Sworbreck sighed. ‘A writer must learn to flourish on scorn. No passage, sentence or even word can be to the taste of every reader. Master Lamb, have you ever been interviewed by an author?’

  ‘We’ve run across just about every other kind of liar,’ said Shy.

  The biographer persisted. ‘I’ve heard it said that you have more experience of single combat than any man alive.’

  Lamb pulled the last of the straps tight. ‘You believe everything you hear?’

  ‘Do you deny it, then?’

  Lamb did not speak.

  ‘Have you any insights into the deadly business, for my readers?’

  ‘Don’t do it.’

  Sworbreck stepped closer. ‘But is it true what General Cosca tells me?’

  ‘From what I’ve seen, I wouldn’t rate him the yardstick of honesty.’

  ‘He told me you were once a king.’

  Temple raised his brows. Sweet cleared his throat. Shy burst out laughing, but then she saw Lamb wasn’t, and trailed off.

  ‘He told me you were champion to the King of the Northmen,’ continued Sworbreck, ‘and that you won ten duels in the Circle in his name, were betrayed by him but survived, and finally killed him and took his place.’

  Lamb dragged himself slowly up into his saddle and frowned off into the night. ‘Men put a golden chain on me for a while, and knelt, because it suited ’em. In violent times folk like to kneel to violent men. In peaceful times they remember they’re happier standing.’

  ‘Do you blame them?’

  ‘I’m long past blaming. That’s just the way men are.’ Lamb looked over at Temple. ‘Can we count on your man Cosca, do you reckon?’

  ‘Absolutely not,’ said Temple.

  ‘Had a feeling you’d say that.’ And Lamb nudged his horse uphill into the darkness.

  ‘And they say I’ve got stories,’ grumbled Sweet as he followed.

  Sworbreck stared after them for a moment, then fumbled out his pencil and began to scratch feverishly away.

  Temple met Shy’s eye as she turned her mount. ‘I hope you find them!’ he blurted. ‘The children.’

  ‘We will. Hope you find . . . whatever you’re looking for.’

  ‘I think I did,’ he said softly. ‘And I threw it away.’

  She sat there a moment as though considering what to say, then clicked her tongue and her horse walked on.

  ‘Good luck!’ he called after her. ‘Take care of yourself, among the barbarians!’

  She glanced over towards the fort, from which the sounds of off-key singing were already beginning to float, and raised one eyebrow.

  ‘Likewise.’

  Bait

  The first day they rode through towering forest, trees far bigger’n Shy ever saw, branch upon branch upon branch blocking out the sun so she felt they stole through some giant’s crypt, sombre and sacred. The snow had found its way in still, drifted a stride deep between the crusted trunks, frozen to a sparkling crust that skinned the horse’s legs, so they had to take turns breaking new ground. Here and there a freezing fog had gathered, curling round men and mounts as they passed like spirits jealous of their warmth. Not that there was much of that to be had. Crying Rock gave a warning hiss whenever anyone started in to talk so they just nodded in dumb misery to the crunching of snow and the laboured breaths of the struggling horses, Savian’s coughing and a soft mumbling from Jubair which Shy took for prayers. He was a pious bastard, the big Kantic, that you couldn’t deny. Whether piety made him a safe man to have at your back she profoundly doubted. Folk she’d known to be big on religion had tended to use it as an excuse for doing wrong rather’n a reason not to.

  Only when the light had faded to a twilight glimmer did Sweet lead them to a shallow cave under an overhang and let them stop. By then the mounts and the spare mounts were all blown and shuddering and

  Shy wasn’t in a state much better, her whole body one stiff and aching, numbed and prickling, chafed and stinging competition of complaints.

  No fire allowed, they ate cold meat and hard biscuit and passed about a bottle. Savian put a hard face over his coughing like he did over everything else, but Shy could tell he was troubled with it, bent and hacking and his pale hands clawing his coat shut at his neck.

  One of the mercenaries, a Styrian with a jutting jaw by the name of Sacri, who struck Shy as the sort whose only comfort in life is others’ discomfort, grinned and said, ‘You got a cough, old man. You want to go back?’

  Shy said, ‘Shut your mouth,’ with as much fire as she could muster which right then wasn’t much.

  ‘What’ll you do?’ he sneered at her. ‘Slap me?’


  That struck a hotter spark from her. ‘That’s right. With a fucking axe. Now shut your mouth.’

  This time he did shut it, too, but by the moon’s glimmering she gathered he was working out how to even the score, and reckoned she’d better mind her back even closer than before.

  They kept watch in pairs, one from the mercenaries, one from the Fellowship that had been, and they watched each other every bit as hard as they watched the night for Dragon People. Shy marked time by Sweet’s snoring, and when the moment came she shook Lamb and whispered in his ear.

  ‘Wake up, your Majesty.’

  He gave a grunting sigh. ‘Wondered how long it’d be ’fore that floated up again.’

  ‘Pardon the foolishness of a witless peasant. I’m just overcome at having the King of the Northmen snoring in my blankets.’

  ‘I spent ten times as long poorer’n a beggar and without a friend to my name. Why does no one want to talk about that?’

  ‘In my case ’cause I know well enough what that feels like. I haven’t had occasion to wear a crown that often.’

  ‘Neither have I,’ he said, crawling stiffly clear of the bedding. ‘I had a chain.’

  ‘A golden one?’

  ‘With a diamond like that.’ And he made a shape the size of a hen’s egg with his thumb and forefinger and eyed her through it.

  She still wasn’t sure whether this was all some kind of a joke. ‘You.’

  ‘Me.’

  ‘That got through a whole winter in one pair of trousers.’

  He shrugged. ‘I’d lost the chain by then.’

  ‘Any particular way I should act around royalty?’

  ‘The odd curtsy wouldn’t go amiss.’

  She snorted. ‘Fuck yourself.’

  ‘Fuck yourself, your Majesty.’

  ‘King Lamb,’ she muttered, crawling into the blankets to make the most of his already fading warmth. ‘King Lamb.’

  ‘I had a different name.’

  Shy looked sideways at him. ‘What name?’

  He sat there in the wide mouth of the cave, hunched black against the star-speckled night, and she couldn’t guess at what was on his face. ‘Don’t matter,’ he said. ‘No good ever came of it.’

  Next morning the snow whirled down on a wind that came from every way at once, bitter as a bankrupt. They mounted up with all the joy of folk riding to their own hangings and pressed on, uphill, uphill. The forest thinned out, trees shrinking, withering, twisting like folk in pain. They threaded through bare rocks and the way grew narrow – an old stream bed, maybe, though sometimes it looked more like a man-made stair worn almost smooth by years and weather. Jubair sent one of his men back with the horses and Shy half-wished she was going with him. The rest of them toiled on by foot.

  ‘What the hell are these Dragon bastards doing up here anyhow?’ Shy grunted at Sweet. Didn’t seem like a place anyone in their right mind would want to visit, let alone live in.

  ‘Can’t say I know exactly . . . why they’re up here.’ The old scout had to talk in rushes between his heaving breaths. ‘But they been here a long time.’

  ‘She hasn’t told you?’ asked Shy, nodding at Crying Rock, striding on hard up ahead.

  ‘I reckon it’s on account . . . o’ my reluctance to ask those kind o’ questions . . . she’s stuck with me down the years.’

  ‘Ain’t for your good looks, I can tell you that.’

  ‘There’s more to life than looks.’ He glanced sideways at her. ‘Luckily for us both.’

  ‘What would they want with children?’

  He stopped to take a swallow of water and offered one to her while the mercenaries laboured past under the considerable burden of their many weapons. ‘The way I hear it, no children are born here. Something in the land. They turn barren. All the Dragon People were taken from someone else, one time or another. Used to be that meant Ghosts mostly, maybe Imperials, the odd Northman strayed down from the Sea of Teeth. Looks like since the prospectors drove the Ghosts out they’re casting their net wider. Buying children off the likes of Cantliss.’

  ‘Less talk!’ hissed Crying Rock from above. ‘More walk!’

  The snow came down weightier than ever but didn’t drift as deep, and when Shy peeled the wrappings off her face she found the wind wasn’t half so keen. An hour later the snow was slippery slush on the wet rock, and she pulled her soaked gloves off and could still feel her fingertips. An hour after that the snow still fell but the ground was bare, and Shy was sweating fast enough she had to strip her coat off and wedge it in her pack. The others were doing the same. She bent and pressed her palm to the earth and there was a strange warmth, like it was the wall of a baker’s and the oven was stoked on the other side.

  ‘There is fire below,’ said Crying Rock.

  ‘There is?’ Shy snatched her hand back like flames might pop from the dirt then and there. ‘Can’t say that notion floods a woman with optimism.’

  ‘Better’n freezing the crap up my arse, ain’t it?’ said Sweet, pulling his shirt off to reveal another underneath. Shy wondered how many he had on. Or if he’d keep taking them off until he disappeared altogether.

  ‘Is that why the Dragon People live up here?’ Savian pressed his own palm to the warm dirt. ‘Because of the fire?’

  ‘Or because they live here there is a fire.’ Crying Rock stared up the slope, bare rock and scree now, crusted in places with stains of yellow sulphur, overlooked by a towering bastard of a rock face. ‘This way may be watched.’

  ‘Certainly it will be,’ said Jubair. ‘God sees all.’

  ‘Ain’t God as’ll put an arrow in your arse if we keep on this path,’ said Sweet.

  Jubair shrugged. ‘God puts all things where they must be.’

  ‘What now, then?’ asked Savian.

  Crying Rock was already uncoiling a rope from her pack. ‘Now we climb.’

  Shy rubbed at her temples. ‘Had a nasty feeling she’d say that.’

  Damn it if the climbing wasn’t even harder than the walking and a long drop scarier. Crying Rock swarmed up like a spider and Lamb wasn’t much slower, seeming well at home among the mountains, the two of them getting ropes ready for the rest. Shy brought up the rear with Savian, cursing and fumbling at the slick rock, arms aching from the effort and her hands burning from the hemp.

  ‘Haven’t had the chance to thank you,’ she said as she waited on a ledge.

  He didn’t make a sound but the hissing of the rope through his gnarled hands as he pulled it up behind them.

  ‘For what you did back in Crease.’ Silence. ‘Ain’t had my life saved so often that I overlook it.’ Silence. ‘Remember?’

  She thought he gave the tiniest shrug.

  ‘Get the feeling you’ve been avoiding mention of it.’

  Silence. He avoided mentioning anything wherever possible.

  ‘Probably you ain’t much of a one for taking thanks.’

  More silence.

  ‘Probably I ain’t much of a one for giving ’em.’

  ‘You’re taking your time about it, all right.’

  ‘Thanks, then. Reckon I’d be good and dead if it weren’t for you.’

  Savian pressed his thin lips together even tighter and gave a throaty grunt. ‘Reckon you or your father would’ve done the same for me.’

  ‘He ain’t my father.’

  ‘That’s between you two. But if you were to ask, I’d say you could do worse.’

  Shy snorted. ‘I used to think so.’

  ‘This isn’t what he wanted, you know. Or the way he wanted it.’

  ‘I used to think that, too. Not so sure any more. Family, eh?’

  ‘Family.’

  ‘Where’s Corlin got to?’

  ‘She can look after herself.’

  ‘Oh, no doubt.’ Shy dropped her voice. ‘Look, Savian, I know what you are.’

  He looked up at her hard. ‘That so?’

  ‘I know what you got under there,’ and she moved her eye
s down to his forearms, blue with tattoos, she knew, under his coat.

  ‘Can’t fathom your meaning,’ but tweaking one of his sleeves down even so.

  She leaned closer and whispered, ‘Just pretend you can, then. When Cosca got to talking about rebels, well, my big fucking mouth ran away with me, like always. I meant well, like always, trying to help out . . . but I haven’t, have I?’

  ‘Not a lot.’

  ‘My fault you’re in this fix. If that bastard Lorsen finds out what you got there . . . what I’m saying is, you should go. This ain’t your fight. Naught to stop you slipping away, and no shortage of empty to slip into.’

  ‘And you’d say what? Forgot all about my lost boy, did I? It’d just make ’em curious. Might make trouble for you. Might make trouble for me, in the end. Reckon I’ll just keep my head down and my sleeves down too and stick with you. Best all round.’

  ‘My big fucking mouth,’ she hissed to herself.

  Savian grinned. It might have been the first time she’d ever seen him do it and it was like a lantern uncovered, the lines shifting in his weathered face and his eyes suddenly gleaming. ‘You know what? Your big fucking mouth ain’t to everyone’s taste but I’ve almost got to like it.’ And he put his hand down on her shoulder and gave it a squeeze. ‘You’d best watch out for that prick Sacri, though. Don’t think he sees it that way.’

  Nor did she. Not long after that, a rock came clattering down that missed her head by a whisker. She saw Sacri grinning above and was sure he’d kicked it loose on purpose. Soon as she got the chance she told him so and where she’d stick her knife if another rock came along. The other mercenaries were quite tickled by her language.

  ‘I should teach you some manners, girl,’ snapped Sacri, sticking his jutting jaw out even further, trying to save what face he could.

  ‘You’d have to fucking know some to teach some.’

  He put his hand on his sword, more bluster than meaning to use it, but before he even got the chance Jubair loomed between them.

  ‘There will be weapons drawn, Sacri,’ he said, ‘but when and against whom I say. These are our allies. We need them to show us the way. Leave the woman be or we will quarrel and a quarrel with me is a heavy weight to carry.’