‘I’ll kill them.’
She made herself see their faces, one by one. Gobba, the fat hog, lounging in the shadows. A waste of decent flesh. Her face twitched as she saw his boot stomp down across her hand, felt the bones splinter. Mauthis, the banker, his cold eyes staring down at her brother’s corpse. Inconvenienced. Faithful Carpi. A man who’d walked beside her, eaten beside her, fought beside her, year upon year. I really am sorry. She saw his arm go back, ready to stab her through, felt the wound niggling at her side, pressed at it through her wet shirt, dug her fingers into it back and front until it burned like fury.
‘I’ll kill them.’
Ganmark. She saw his soft, tired face. Flinched as his sword punched through Benna’s body. That’s that. Prince Ario, lounging in his chair, wine glass dangling. His knife cut Benna’s neck open, blood bubbling between his fingers. She made herself see each detail, remember each word said. Foscar, too. I’ll have no part of this. But that changed nothing.
‘I’ll kill them all.’
And Orso, last. Orso, who she’d fought for, struggled for, killed for. Grand Duke Orso, Lord of Talins, who’d turned on them over a rumour. Murdered her brother, left her broken for nothing. For a fear they’d steal his place. Her jaw ached, her teeth were clenched so hard. She felt his fatherly hand on her shoulder and her shivering flesh crawled. She saw his smile, heard his voice echoing in her pounding skull.
What would I do without you?
Seven men.
She dragged herself up, chewing at her sore lip, and lurched off through the dark trees, water trickling from her sodden hair and down her face. The pain gnawed through her legs, her sides, her hand, her skull, but she bit down hard and forced herself on.
‘I’ll kill them . . . I’ll kill them . . . I’ll kill them . . .’
It hardly needed to be said. She was done with crying.
The old track was grown over, almost past recognition. Branches thrashed at Monza’s aching body. Brambles snatched at her burning legs. She crept through a gap in the overgrown hedgerow and frowned down at the place where she’d been born. She wished she’d been able to make the stubborn soil bear a crop as well as it bloomed thorn and nettle now. The upper field was a patch of dead scrub. The lower was a mass of briar. The remains of the mean farmhouse peered sadly over from the edge of the woods, and she peered sadly back.
It seemed that time had given both of them a kicking.
She squatted, gritting her teeth as her withered muscles stretched around her crooked bones, listening to a few birds cawing at the sinking sun, watching the wind twitch the wild grass and snatch at the nettles. Until she was sure the place was every bit as abandoned as it looked. Then she gently worked the life back into her battered legs and limped for the buildings. The house where her father died was a tumbled-down shell and a rotted beam or two, its outline so small it was hard to believe she could ever have lived there. She, and her father, and Benna too. She turned her head and spat into the dry dirt. She hadn’t come here for bitter-sweet remembrances.
She’d come for revenge.
The shovel was where she’d left it two winters ago, blade still bright under some rubbish in the corner of the roofless barn. Thirty strides into the trees. Hard to imagine how easily she’d taken those long, smooth, laughing steps as she waddled through the weeds, spade dragging behind her. Into the quiet woods, wincing at every footfall, broken patterns of sunlight dancing across the fallen leaves as the evening wore down.
Thirty strides. She hacked the brambles away with the edge of the shovel, finally managed to drag the rotten tree-trunk to one side and began to dig. It would’ve been some task with both her hands and both her legs. As she was now, it was a groaning, sweating, teeth-grinding ordeal. But Monza had never been one to give up halfway, whatever the costs. You have a devil in you, Cosca used to tell her, and he’d been right. He’d learned it the hard way.
Night was coming on when she heard the hollow clomp of metal against wood. She scraped the last soil away, prised the iron ring from the dirt with broken fingernails. She strained, growled, stolen clothes stuck cold to her scarred skin. The trapdoor came open with a squealing of metal and a black hole beckoned, a ladder half-seen in the darkness.
She worked her way down, painstakingly slow since she’d no interest in breaking any more bones. She fumbled in the black until she found the shelf, wrestled with the flint in her bad joke of a hand and finally got the lamp lit. Light flared out weakly around the vaulted cellar, glittering along the metal edges of Benna’s precautions, sitting safe, just as they’d left them.
He always had liked to plan ahead.
Keys hung from a row of rusted hooks. Keys to empty buildings, scattered across Styria. Places to hide. A rack along the left-hand wall bristled with blades, long and short. She opened a chest beside it. Clothes, carefully folded, never worn. She doubted they’d even fit her wasted body now. She reached out to touch one of Benna’s shirts, remembering him picking out the silk for it, caught sight of her own right hand in the lamplight. She snatched up a pair of gloves, threw one away and shoved the maimed thing into the other, wincing as she worked the fingers, the little one still sticking out stubbornly straight.
Wooden boxes were stacked at the back of the cellar, twenty of them all told. She hobbled to the nearest one and pushed back the lid. Hermon’s gold glittered at her. Heaps of coins. A small fortune in that box alone. She touched her fingertips gingerly to the side of her skull, felt the ridges under her skin. Gold. There’s so much more you can do with it than just hold your head together.
She dug her hand in and let coins trickle between her fingers. The way you somehow have to if you find yourself alone with a box of money. These would be her weapons. These, and . . .
She let her gloved hand trail across the blades on the rack, stopped and went back one. A long sword of workmanlike grey steel. It didn’t have much in the way of ornamental flourishes, but there was a fearsome beauty about it still, to her eye. The beauty of a thing fitted perfectly to its purpose. It was a Calvez, forged by the best swordsmith in Styria. A gift from her to Benna, not that he’d have known the difference between a good blade and a carrot. He’d worn it for a week then swapped it for an overpriced length of scrap metal with stupid gilt basketwork.
The one he’d been trying to draw when they killed him.
She curled her fingers round the cold grip, strange in her left hand, and slid a few inches of steel from the sheath. It shone bright and eager in the lamplight. Good steel bends, but never breaks. Good steel stays always sharp and ready. Good steel feels no pain, no pity and, above all, no remorse.
She felt herself smile. The first time in months. The first time since Gobba’s wire hissed tight around her neck.
Vengeance, then.
Fish out of Water
The cold wind swept in from the sea and gave the docks of Talins a damn good blasting. Or a damn bad one, depending how well dressed you were. Shivers weren’t that well dressed at all. He pulled his thin coat tight round his shoulders, though he might as well not have bothered, for all the good it did him. He narrowed his eyes and squinted miserably into the latest gust. He was earning his name today, alright. He had been for weeks.
He remembered sitting warm by the fire, up in the North in a good house in Uffrith, with a belly full of meat and a head full of dreams, talking to Vossula about the wondrous city of Talins. He remembered it with some bitterness, because it was that bloody merchant, with his dewy eyes and his honey tales of home, who’d talked him into this nightmare jaunt to Styria.
Vossula had told him that the sun always shone in Talins. That was why Shivers had sold his good coat before he set off. Didn’t want to end up sweating, did he? Seemed now, as he shivered like a curled-up autumn leaf only just still clinging to its branch, that Vossula had been doing some injury to the truth.
Shivers watched the restless waves chew at the quay, throwing icy spray over the few rotting skiffs stirring at their rot
ting wharves. He listened to the hawsers creaking, to the ill seabirds croaking, to the wind making a loose shutter rattle, to the grunts and grumbles of the men around him. All of ’em huddled on the docks for the sniff of a chance at work, and there’d never been in one place such a crowd of sad stories. Grubby and gaunt, ragged clothes and pinched-in faces. Desperate men. Men just like Shivers, in other words. Except they’d been born here. He’d been stupid enough to choose this.
He slid the last hard heel of bread from his inside pocket as carefully as a miser breaking out his hoard, took a nibble from the end, making sure to taste every crumb of it. Then he caught the man nearest to him staring, licking his pale lips. Shivers felt his shoulders slump, broke some off and handed it over.
‘Thanks, friend,’ as he wolfed it down.
‘No bother,’ said Shivers, though he’d spent hours chopping logs for it. Quite a lot of painful bother, in fact. The rest of ’em were all looking now, big sad eyes like pups needed feeding. He threw up his hands. ‘If I had bread for everyone, why the fuck would I be stood here?’
They turned away grumbling. He snorted cold snot up and spat it out. Aside from some stale bread it was the only thing to have passed his lips that morning, and going in the wrong direction. He’d come with a pocketful of silver, and a faceful of smiles, and a swelling chestful of happy hope. Ten weeks in Styria, and all three of those were emptied to the bitter dregs.
Vossula had told him the people of Talins were friendly as lambs, welcomed foreigners like guests. He’d found nothing but scorn, and a lot of folk keen to use any rotten trick to relieve him of his dwindling money. They weren’t just handing out second chances on the street corners here. No more’n they had been in the North.
A boat had come in now, was tying off at the quay, fishers scurrying over and around it, hauling at ropes and cursing at sailcloth. Shivers felt the rest of the desperate perking up, wondering if there might be a shift of work for one of ’em. He felt a dismal little flair of hope in his own chest, however hard he tried to keep it down, and stood up keen on tiptoes to watch.
Fish slid from the nets onto the dockside, squirming silver in the watery sun. It was a good, honest trade, fishing. A life on the salty brine where no sharp words are spoken, all men set together against the wind, plucking the shining bounty from the sea, and all that. A noble trade, or so Shivers tried to tell himself, in spite of the stink. Any trade that’d have him seemed pretty noble about then.
A man weathered as an old gatepost hopped down from the boat and strutted over, all self-importance, and the beggars jostled each other to catch his eye. The captain, Shivers guessed.
‘Need two hands,’ he said, pushing his battered cap back and looking those hopeful, hopeless faces over. ‘You, and you.’
Hardly needed saying Shivers weren’t one of ’em. His head sagged along with the rest as he watched the lucky pair hurrying back to the boat after its captain. One was the bastard he gave his bread to, didn’t so much as look round, let alone put in a word for him. Maybe it was what you gave out that made a man, not what you got back, like Shivers’ brother used to say, but getting back’s a mighty good thing to stop you starving.
‘Shit on this.’ And he started after them, picking his way between the fishers sorting their flapping catch into buckets and barrows. Wearing the friendliest grin he could muster, he walked up to where the captain was busying himself on the deck. ‘Nice boat you got here,’ he tried, though it was a slimy tub of shit far as he could see.
‘And?’
‘Would you think of taking me on?’
‘You? What d’you know about fish?’
Shivers was a proven hand with axe, blade, spear and shield. A Named Man who’d led charges and held lines across the North and back. Who’d taken a few bad wounds and given out a lot of worse. But he was set on doing better’n that, and he was clinging to the notion tight as a drowning man to driftwood.
‘I used to fish a lot, when I was a boy. Down by the lake, with my father.’ His bare feet crunching in the shingle. The light glistening on the water. His father’s smile, and his brother’s.
But the captain didn’t come over nostalgic. ‘Lake? Sea-fishing’s what we do, boy.’
‘Sea-fishing, I’ve got to say, I’ve had no practice at.’
‘Then why you wasting my bloody time? I can get plenty of Styrian fishers for my measure, the best hands, all with a dozen years at sea.’ He waved at the idle men lining the dock, looked more like they’d spent a dozen years in an ale-cup. ‘Why should I give work to some Northern beggar?’
‘I’ll work hard. Had some bad luck is all. I’m just asking for a chance.’
‘So are we all, but I’m not hearing why I should be the one to give it you.’
‘Just a chance is—’
‘Away from my boat, you big pale bastard!’ The captain snatched up a length of rough wood from the deck and had himself a step forwards, as if he was set to beat a dog. ‘Get off, and take your bad luck with you!’
‘I may be no kind of fisher, but I’ve always had a talent for making men bleed. Best put that stick down before I make you fucking eat it.’ Shivers gave a look to go with the warning. A killing look, straight out of the North. The captain faltered, stopped, stood there grumbling. Then he tossed his stick away and started shouting at one of his own people.
Shivers hunched his shoulders and didn’t look back. He trudged to the mouth of an alley, past the torn bills pasted on the walls, the words daubed over ’em. Into the shadows between the crowded buildings, and the sounds of the docks went muffled at his back. It had been the same story with the smiths, and with the bakers, and with every damn trade in this damn city. There’d even been a cobbler who’d looked like a good enough sort until he told Shivers to fuck himself.
Vossula had said there was work everywhere in Styria, all you had to do was ask. It seemed, for reasons he couldn’t fathom, that Vossula had been lying out of his arse the whole way. Shivers had asked him all kinds of questions. But it occurred to him now, as he sank down on a slimy doorstep with his worn-out boots in the gutter and some fish-heads for company, he hadn’t asked the one question he should’ve. The one question staring him in the face ever since he got here.
Tell me, Vossula – if Styria’s such a slice of wonder, why the hell are you up here in the North?
‘Fucking Styria,’ he hissed in Northern. He had that pain behind his nose meant he was close to weeping, and he was that far gone he was scarcely even shamed. Caul Shivers. Rattleneck’s son. A Named Man who’d faced death in all weathers. Who’d fought beside the biggest names in the North – Rudd Threetrees, Black Dow, the Dogman, Harding Grim. Who’d led the charge against the Union near the Cumnur. Who’d held the line against a thousand Shanka at Dunbrec. Who’d fought seven days of murder up in the High Places. He almost felt a smile tugging at his mouth to think of the wild, brave times he’d come out alive from. He knew he’d been shitting himself the whole way, but what happy days those seemed now. Least he hadn’t been alone.
He looked up at the sound of footsteps. Four men were ambling into the alley from the docks, the way he’d come. They had that sorry look men can get when they’ve got mischief in mind. Shivers hunched into his doorway, hoping whatever mischief they were planning didn’t include him.
His heart took a downward turn as they gathered in a half-circle, standing over him. One had a bloated-up red nose, the kind you get from too much drinking. Another was bald as a boot-toe, had a length of wood held by his leg. A third had a scraggy beard and a mouthful of brown teeth. Not a pretty set of men, and Shivers didn’t reckon they had anything pretty in mind.
The one at the front grinned down, a nasty-looking bastard with a pointed rat-face. ‘What you got for us?’
‘I wish I’d something worth the taking. But I’ve not. You might as well just go your way.’
Rat Face frowned at his bald mate, annoyed they might get nothing. ‘Your boots, then.’
‘In
this weather? I’ll freeze.’
‘Freeze. See if I care a shit. Boots, now, before we give you a kicking for the sport of it.’
‘Fucking Talins,’ mouthed Shivers under his breath, the ashes of self-pity in his throat suddenly flaring up hot and bloody. It gnawed at him to come this low. Bastards had no use for his boots, just wanted to make themselves feel big. But it’d be a fool’s fight four against one, and with no weapon handy. A fool’s choice to get killed for some old leather, however cold it was.
He crouched down, muttering as he started to pull his boots off. Then his knee caught Red Nose right in his fruits and doubled him over with a breathy sigh. Surprised himself as much as he did them. Maybe going bare-foot was more’n his pride would stretch to. He smashed Rat Face on the chin, grabbed him by the front of his coat and rammed him back into one of his mates, sent them sprawling over together, yelping like cats in a rainstorm.
Shivers dodged the bald bastard’s stick as it came down and shrugged it off his shoulder. The man came stumbling past, off balance, mouth wide open. Shivers planted a punch right on the point of his hanging chin and snapped his head up, then hooked his legs away with one boot, sent him squawking onto his back and followed him down. Shivers’ fist crunched into his face – two, three, four times, and made a right mess of it, spattering blood up the arm of Shivers’ dirty coat.
He scrambled away, leaving Baldy spitting teeth into the gutter. Red Nose was still curled up wailing with his hands between his legs. But the other two had knives out now, sharp metal glinting. Shivers crouched, fists clenched, breathing hard, eyes flicking from one of ’em to the other and his anger wilting fast. Should’ve just given his boots over. Probably they’d be prising them off his cold, dead feet in a short and painful while. Bloody pride, that rubbish only did a man harm.
Rat Face wiped blood from under his nose. ‘Oh, you’re a dead man now, you Northern fuck! You’re good as a—’ His leg suddenly went from underneath him and he fell, shrieking, knife bouncing from his hand.
The Great Leveller Page 6
