“Heretics lie,” Dreadaeleon said. “Heretics always lie. That’s what makes them heretics.”
“Heretics must be punished for the crime of heresy,” Cesta said. The death of a chuckle escaped her lips. “Just like he said. We kill them for thinking the wrong things, saying the wrong words.”
“The wrong words, from us, can kill,” Dreadaeleon said. “We’re not children, like you said. We’re wizards.” He shook his head. “If you’re worried about this, ask Vemire. He’ll be here and he’ll—”
“Why would he tell me the truth, Dread?” She clenched her teeth. “If I was taken . . . if I was made, like a tool or a horseshoe, why would he tell me? Why wouldn’t he just lie?” She turned. “I have to go, Dread. I have to find out for myself.”
“What? Find out what?”
“I . . . don’t know. Lathrim said he found out. There has to be a way.”
“How are you going to find it? The Venarium will be after you. You’ll be a heretic, Cesta. Listen to reason.”
“Reason is a matter of debate, discussion,” she said. “The Venarium does not allow that. There is only law.”
“Law that protects us. Law that keeps us together.” His voice cracked. He didn’t care. “Cesta, we’re supposed to stay together! We’re supposed to . . . to . . .”
“I know.”
She took another step.
“I’m sorry.”
And another. She shed hesitation, began a full stride away from him, disappearing into the night.
“What do I tell the Venarium, then?” he called after her. “What do I tell Vemire?”
If she answered, he was too far away to hear her. If she looked back, it was too dark to see him. If either of them had any thing they could have said to stop this, to bring her back, to bring him with her, it went unspoken.
And he was left, once again, with silence.
“Don’t blame yourself.”
He looked up. When Vemire had arrived, he couldn’t say. When his eyes had begun to sting with tears, he didn’t know. But as he looked up through bleary vision, Vemire did not look back at him. His eyes were out over the darkness into which she had disappeared.
“Perhaps it’s my fault,” the Lector sighed. “I didn’t teach you the lessons you should have learned. You came away from my tutelage with the knowledge of the law, that discipline and power are intertwined. But what I never told you . . .”
He looked down at Dreadaeleon and frowned.
“Is that everything is a test to see if we are prepared for the burden of that.”
“A test?” he asked. “This was a test?”
“I arrived hours ago. I have been observing you since then. You conducted yourself as well as you could have been expected to, appre—” He caught himself, considered. “Dreadaeleon.”
Dreadaeleon looked out over the darkness. “What’s going to happen to Cesta?”
Vemire did not say anything for a time. “To us, knowledge is everything, Dreadaeleon. Everything. And I can give you that knowledge, if you’d like.” He closed his eyes, folded his hands behind his back. “But if you’d rather not hear me say it . . . I would not blame you.”
And, alone in a thoughtless silence, Dreadaeleon did not speak another word.
He simply stood there and stared into a darkness where there had been a girl he had once known.
Small Kindnesses
Joe Abercrombie
When Shev arrived to open up that morning, there were a pair of big, dirty bare feet sticking out of the doorway of her Smoke House.
That would once have caused her quite the shock, but over the last couple of years Shev had come to consider herself past shocking.
“Oy!” she shouted, striding up with her fists clenched.
Whoever it was on their face in the doorway either chose not to move or was unable. She saw the long legs the feet were attached to, clad in trousers ripped and stained, then the ragged mess of a torn and filthy coat. Finally, wedged into the grubby corner against Shev’s door, a tangle of long red hair, matted with twigs and dirt.
A big man, without a doubt. The one hand Shev could see was as long as her foot, netted with veins, filthy and scabbed across the knuckles. There was a strange shape to it, though. Slender.
“Oy!” She jabbed the toe of her boot into the coat around where she judged the man’s arse to be. Still nothing.
She heard footsteps behind her. “Morning, boss.” Severard turning up for the day. Never late, that boy. Not the most careful in his work but for punctuality you couldn’t knock him. “What’s this you’ve caught?”
“A strange fish, all right, to wash up in my doorway.” Shev scraped some of the red hair back, wrinkled her nose as she realised it was clotted with blood.
“Is he drunk?”
“She.” It was a woman’s face under there. Strong-jawed and strong-boned, pale skin crowded with black scab, red graze, and purple bruise to make Shev wince, even if she rarely saw anyone who wasn’t carrying a wound or two.
Severard gave a soft whistle. “That’s a lot of she.”
“And someone’s given her a lot of a beating too.” Shev leaned close to put her cheek near the woman’s battered mouth, heard the faintest whistling of breath. “Alive, though.” And she rocked away and squatted there, wrists on her knees and her hands dangling, wondering what to do. She seemed to spend half her time wondering what to do these days. Time was she just dived into whatever messes she pleased without a backward glance, but somehow the consequences always seemed nearer to hand than they used to. She puffed her cheeks out and gave the weariest of sighs.
“Well, it happens,” said Severard.
“Sadly, yes.”
“Not our problem, is it?”
“Happily, no.”
“Want me to drag her into the street?”
“Yes, I want that quite a lot.” And Shev rolled her eyes skyward and gave another sigh, maybe even wearier than the last. “But we’d best drag her inside, I reckon.”
“You sure, boss? You remember the last time we helped someone out—”
“Sure? No.” Shev wasn’t sure why, after all the shit that had been done to her, she still felt the need to do small kindnesses. Maybe because of all the shit that had been done to her. Maybe there was some stubborn stone in her, like the stone in a date, that refused to let all the shit that had been done to her make her into shit. She turned the key and elbowed the door wobbling open. “You get her feet.”
When you run a Smoke House you’d better get good at shifting limp bodies, but the latest recipient of Shev’s half-arsed charity proved quite the challenge.
“Bloody hell,” grunted Severard, eyes popping as they manhandled the woman down the stale-smelling corridor, her backside scuffing the boards. “What’s she made of, anvils?”
“Anvils are lighter,” groaned Shev through her gritted teeth, waddling from side to side under the dead weight of her, bouncing off the peeling walls. She gasped as she kicked open the door to her office—or the broom-cupboard she called an office. She strained with every burning muscle as she hauled the woman up, knocked her limp head on the doorframe as she wrestled her through, then tripped on a mop, and with a despairing squawk toppled back onto the cot with the woman on top of her.
In bed under a redhead was nothing to object to, but Shev preferred them at least partly conscious. Preferred them sweeter-smelling too, at least when they got into bed. This one stank like sour sweat and rot and the very end of things.
“That’s where kindness gets you,” said Severard, chuckling away to himself. “Wedged under a mighty weight of trouble.”
“You going to giggle or help me out, you bastard?” snarled Shev, slack springs groaning as she struggled from underneath, then hauled the woman’s legs onto the bed, feet dangling well off the end. It wasn’t a big bed, but it looked like a child’s with her on it. Her ragged coat had fallen open and the stained leather vest she wore had got dragged right up.
When She
v spent a year tumbling with that travelling show there’d been a strongman called himself the Amazing Zaraquon, though his real name had been Runkin. Used to strip to the waist and oil himself up and lift all kinds of heavy things for the crowd, though once he was off-stage and towelled down you couldn’t get the lazy oaf to lift a thimble for you. His stomach had been all jutting knots of muscle as if beneath his tight-stretched skin he was made of wood rather than meat.
This woman’s pale midriff reminded Shev of the Amazing Zaraquon’s, but narrower, longer, and even leaner. You could see all the little sinews in between her ribs shifting with each shallow breath. But instead of oil her stomach was covered in black and blue and purple bruises, plus a great red welt looked like it had been left by a most unfriendly axe-handle.
Severard gave a gentle whistle. “They really did give her a beating didn’t they?”
“Aye, they did.” Shev knew well enough what that felt like, and she winced as she twitched the woman’s vest down, then dragged the blanket up and laid it over her. Tucked it in a little around her neck, though she felt a fool doing it, and the woman mumbled something and twisted onto her side, matted hair fluttering over her mouth as she started to snore.
“Sweet dreams,” Shev muttered, not that she ever got any herself. Wasn’t as if she really needed a bed here, but when you’ve spent a few years with nowhere safe to sleep, you tend to make a bed in every halfway safe place you can find. She shook the memories off and herded Severard back into the corridor. “Best get the doors open. We aren’t pulling in so much business we can let it slip by.”
“Folk really after husk at this time in the morning?” asked Severard, trying to wipe a smear of the woman’s blood off his hand.
“If you want to forget your troubles, why live with them till the afternoon?”
By daylight the smoking room was far from the alluring little cave of wonders Shev had dreamed of making when she bought the place. She planted her hands on her hips as she looked around, and gave that weary sigh again. Fact was it bore more than a passing resemblance to an utter shit-hole. The boards were split and stained and riddled with splinters and the cushions greasy as a Baolish kitchen and one of the cheap hangings had come away to show the mould-blooming plaster behind. The prayer bells on the shelf were the only things that lent the faintest touch of class, and Shev gave the big one an affectionate stroke, then went up on tip-toe to pin the corner of that hanging back where it belonged, so at least the mould was hidden from her eyes, even if her nose was still well aware of it, the smell of rotten onions all-pervasive.
Even a liar as practised as Shev couldn’t have convinced a fool as gullible as Shev that it wasn’t a shit-hole. But it was her shit-hole. It was a start. And she had plans to improve it. She always had plans.
“You clean the pipes?” she asked as Severard stomped back from opening the doors, brushing the curtain away.
“The folk who come here don’t care about clean pipes, boss.”
Shev frowned. “I care. We may not have the biggest place, or the most comfortable, or the best husk,” she raised her brows at Severard’s spotty face, “or the prettiest folk to light it for you, so what’s our advantage over our competitors?”
“We’re cheap?”
“No, no, no.” She thought about that. “Well, yes. But what else?”
Severard sighed. “Customer service?”
“Ding,” said Shev, flicking the biggest prayer bell and making it give off that heavenly song. “So clean the pipes you lazy shit, and get some coals lit.”
Severard puffed out his cheeks, patched with the kind of downy beard that’s meant to make a boy look manly but actually makes him look all the more boyish. “Yes, boss.”
As he went out the back Shev heard footsteps coming in the front, and she propped her hands on the counter—or the hacked-up piece of butcher’s block she’d salvaged off a rubbish heap and polished up—and put on her professional manner. She’d copied it off Gusman the carpet-seller, who was the best damn merchant she knew. He had a way of looking like a carpet might just be the answer to all your problems.
The professional manner slid off straight away when Shev saw who came strutting into her place.
“Carcolf,” she breathed.
God, Carcolf was trouble. Tall, blond, beautiful trouble. Sweet-smelling, sweet-smiling, quick-thinking, quick-fingered trouble as subtle as the rain and as trustworthy as the wind. Shev looked her up and down. Her eyes didn’t give her much choice in the matter. “Well my day’s looking better,” she muttered.
“Mine too,” said Carcolf, brushing past the curtain so the daylight shone through her hair from behind. “It’s been too long, Shevedieh.”
The room seemed vastly improved with Carcolf in it. You wouldn’t find a better ornament than her in any bazaar in Westport. Her clothes weren’t tight but they stuck in all the right places, and she had this way of cocking her hips. God, those hips. They went all over the place, like they weren’t attached to a spine like everyone else’s. Shev heard she’d been a dancer. The day she quit had been a loss to dancing and a gain to fraud, without a doubt.
“Come for a smoke?” asked Shev.
Carcolf smiled. “I like to keep a clear head. How can you enjoy life otherwise?”
“Guess it depends whether your life’s enjoyable or not.”
“Mine is,” she said, prancing around the place like it was hers and Shev was a valued guest. “What do you think of Talins?”
“Never liked it,” muttered Shev.
“I’ve got a job there.”
“Always loved the place.”
“I need a partner.” The prayer bells weren’t all that low down. Even so, Carcolf bent over to get a good look at them. Entirely innocently, it would appear. But Shev doubted Carcolf ever did an innocent thing in her life. Especially bend over. “I need someone I can trust. Someone to watch my arse.”
Shev’s voice came hoarse. “If that’s what you want you’ve come to the right girl, but . . .” And she tore her eyes away as her mind came knocking like an unwelcome visitor. “That’s not all you’re after, is it? I daresay it wouldn’t hurt if this partner of yours could pick a lock or a pocket either.”
Carcolf grinned as if the idea had only just come to her. “It wouldn’t hurt. Be good if she could keep her mouth shut too.” And she drifted over to Shev, looking down at her, since she was a good few inches taller. Most people were. “Except when I wanted her mouth open, of course . . .”
“I’m not an idiot.”
“You’d be no use to me if you were.”
“I go with you I’ll likely end up abandoned in some alley with nothing but the clothes I’m standing in.”
Carcolf leaned even closer to whisper, Shev’s head full of the scent of her, which was a far stretch more appealing than rotten onions or sweaty redhead. “I’m thinking of you lying down. And without your clothes.”
Shev made a squeak like a rusty hinge. But she forced herself not to grab hold of Carcolf like a drowning girl to a beautiful, beautiful log. She’d been thinking between her legs too long. Time to think between her ears.
“I don’t do that kind of work anymore. I’ve got this place to worry about. And Severard to look after, I guess . . .”
“Still trying to set the world to rights, eh?”
“Not all of it. Just the bit at my elbow.”
“You can’t make every stray your problem, Shevedieh.”
“Not every stray. Just this one.” She thought of the great big woman in her bed. “Just a couple of ’em . . .”
“You know he’s in love with you.”
“All I did was help him out.”
“That’s why he’s in love with you. No one else has.” Carcolf reached out and gently brushed a stray strand of hair out of Shev’s face with a fingertip, and gave a sigh. “Is that boy knocking at the wrong gate, poor thing.”
Shev caught her wrist and guided it away. Being small didn’t mean you could let folk j
ust walk all over you. “He’s not the only one.” She held Carcolf’s eye, made her voice calm and level. “I enjoy the act. God knows I enjoy it, but I’d rather you stopped. If you want me just for me, my door’s always open and my legs shortly after. If you want me so you can squeeze me out like a lemon and toss my empty skin aside in Talins, well, no offence but I’d rather not.”
Carcolf winced down at the floor. Not so pretty as the smile, but a lot more honest. “Not sure you’d like me without the act.”
“Why don’t we try it and see?”
“Too much to lose,” muttered Carcolf, and she twisted her hand free, and when she looked up the act was on again. “Well. If you change your mind . . . it’ll be too late.” And with a smile over her shoulder deadly as a knife blade, Carcolf walked out. God, that walk she had. Flowing like syrup on a warm day. How did she get it? Did she practice in front of a mirror? Hours every day, more than likely.
The door shut, and the spell was broken, and Shev let go that weary sigh again.
“Was that Carcolf?” asked Severard.
“It was,” murmured Shev, all wistful, a trace of that heavenly scent still battling the mould in her nostrils.
“I don’t trust that bitch.”
Shev snorted. “Fuck no.”
“How do you know her?”
“From around.” From all around Shev’s bed and never quite in it.
“The two o’ you seem close,” said Severard.
“Not half as close as I’d like to be,” she muttered. “You clean the pipes?”
“Aye.”
Shev heard the door again, turned with a smile stuck half way between carpet seller and needy lover. Maybe it was Carcolf come back, decided she wanted Shev just for Shev—
“Oh, God,” she muttered, face falling. Usually took her at least a little longer than that to regret a decision.
“Morning, Shevedieh,” said Crandall. He was trouble of an altogether less pleasant variety. A rat-faced little nothing, thin at the shoulders and slender in the wits, pink at the eyes and runny at the nose, but he was Horald the Finger’s son, and that made him a whole lot of something in this town. A rat-faced little nothing with power he hadn’t had to earn, which made him tetchy brutal, and prickly spiteful, and jealous of anything anyone had that he didn’t. And everyone had something he didn’t, even if it was just talent, or looks, or a shred of self-respect.
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