Sharp Ends: Stories from the World of The First Law (21 page)

Maybe there’d be a serious moment as they looked into each other’s eyes, and Shev would coax her out with just the right soft words like you coax a nervous cat through a gap in a fence. Carcolf would tell her stories of who she really was, and what she really felt, and she’d let that smirking mask slip and give a glimpse of the beautiful, vulnerable secret self that Shev had always been sure was in there. Maybe she’d even whisper her first name. A special name, which only Shev would get to use. Didn’t seem likely, but what’s the point of likely fantasies?

Then they’d kiss, of course, nudging to begin with, nuzzling, nipping, feeling each other out like a pair of master swordsmen fencing. Then hungrily, messily, tongues and teeth, Shev tangling her fingers in Carcolf’s hair and dragging her face down to hers. She was getting pleasantly warm in the trousers thinking about it. The kissing would lead to fumbling, and the fumbling would lead by a trail of shed clothes to the bed, and they’d stay in the bed until the room smelled of fucking, making up for all those wasted years, only getting up for a pinch more dust and maybe to make tea naked with Shev’s very fine tea set, and in the morning …

Her eager hand froze halfway to the doorknob, smile slowly fading and the warmth in her trousers with it.

In the morning, the grey, early morning, while Shev was still sprawled snoozing in the sticky sheets, Carcolf would slip out, pulling the hood down over her smile, probably with Shev’s very fine tea set in a bag over her shoulder – along with any other easily transported valuables – and vanish into the mists, never to be heard from again. Until she needed something.

Shev didn’t much like to be honest with herself. Who does? But if she accepted the pain of it for a moment, that was how things had gone between them down the years. Carcolf had jumped into her arms often enough but just as quickly slipped through her fingers. Usually leaving Shev with a hell of a mess to run away from or, on one memorable occasion, swim away from as a medium-sized merchant vessel capsized behind her.

She swallowed as she frowned down at the doorknob.

This wasn’t fantasies, it was life. And life had a habit of kicking her in the cunt.

But what were her choices? If you want to be a fine new person with a fine new life you’ve got to put the person you were behind you, like a snake sheds its skin. You’ve got to stop picking through your hoard of hurts and grievances like a miser through his coins, set ’em down and allow yourself to go free. You’ve got to forgive and you’ve got to trust, not because anyone else deserves it, but because you do.

So Shev took a deep breath, and forced a smile over her nerves, and shoved the door wide.

‘I’m—’

Her place was a ruin.

The furniture was shattered and axe-hacked, the hangings torn-down and knife-slashed. The shelves had been tipped over, scattering the lovely books that Shev hadn’t read but which made her look quite cultured. Lumps had been knocked from the marble fireplace with a hammer. Carcolf had always insisted that painting of the smirking woman with the ample bosom she’d hung over it was an original Aropella. Shev had always harboured considerable doubts. It was a moot point now, though, as someone had slashed it to flapping shreds, bosom and all.

They hadn’t just flipped the tea set over, they’d made sure every cup was individually broken, every spoon individually bent. Someone had smashed the spout and the handle off the pot and then, it appeared, pissed in it.

Shev’s skin prickled with horror as she walked across the room, splinters crunching under her boots, and pushed back the gouged bedroom door.

Carcolf lay slumped on the floor.

Shev gave a whooping gasp, dashing to her, dropping on her knees—

Just her clothes. Just her clothes dragged from her broken chest, tipped over on its side with the contents spilling out like the offal from a gutted corpse. The false bottom was smashed open, and the false bottom in the false bottom ripped out, forged documents scattered, fake jewels gleaming darkly in the shadows.

The room stank, but not of fucking. Carcolf’s scent bottle had been shattered across the wall, the smell of her almost suffocating, a haunting insult to go with the injury of her absence. The fine mattress Shev had congratulated herself on being worth every stolen copper as she stretched out on it each night was slashed, stabbed, its feathery guts in heaps, flecks of down floating about the room as the breeze stirred the ripped hangings.

Perched on the slaughtered pillows, a sheet of paper. A letter.

Shev scrambled over and snatched it up in trembling fingers. It was written in a sharply slanted hand:

Shev
Been a long time.
Carcolf’s with me, at Burroia’s Fort on Carp Island. Better come quick, before I tire of her conversation. Better come alone, cause I get shy in crowds.
Just want a chat.
To begin with.
Horald

And then that mark. That same bloody idiot’s mark she’d somehow tricked herself into thinking would protect her from all this.

She stood still for a long while. She did not speak, she did not move, she barely even breathed. The loss was like a blade through her guts. The loss of her lover, the loss of her place, the loss of the life of freedom and laughter that’d felt so close she could still almost taste it.

Her worst case had been Carcolf deciding she didn’t want her. Carcolf feeling this was a trap shutting on her rather than a trap finally springing open for both of them. Carcolf running away again. She should’ve known.

There’s always a worse case than your worst case, and more often than not, it happens.

She realised she’d clenched her fingers, crushing the worthless document she’d risked her life for in her fist. She flung it into the ash-scattered fireplace and set her jaw aching tight.

None of it was lost. It was stolen. And Horald the Finger should’ve known better than to steal from the best thief in Styria.

She stalked to the wall beside the chimney breast, picked up the broken bust of Bayaz, hefted it high, and with a shriek smashed his bald head into the plaster.

The wall folded in like cheap board – which indeed it was – leaving a ragged hole. She knocked a few splinters away with Bayaz’s nose, then reached inside, grabbed the rope and dragged it out. Her black bag was on the end, reassuringly weighty, metal clattering as she tossed it down.

Everything she really needed was in that bag. In case she had to run. But Shev had been running half her life, and she was done.

Some things are only ever going to end one way.

It was time to fight.

Oh, yes, Shevedieh had moved among the lost and the fallen.

She’d cut purses in the cheapest brothels of Sipani, anthills of vice where the marsh the city was built on endlessly oozed back into the cellars, where no word for innocence was known, let alone spoken. She’d clawed a living among the beggars in Ul-Khatif, and among the beggars who stole from the beggars, and conned the beggars, and even the ones who begged from beggars more fortunate than they. She’d burrowed out temporary homes in the thieves’ pits, gambling pits and charnel pits in Nicante, in Puranti, in Affoia, in Musselia, and always left with a heavier purse than she’d arrived with. She’d bribed corrupt scum on behalf of corrupt scum on the rotting docks of Visserine, when Nicomo Cosca had seized the grand dukedom of the city and there’d been less law than no law. She’d turned out dead men’s pockets with the bonepickers in war-torn Darmium, in plague-riddled Calcis, in famine-ravaged Daleppa, in fire-swept Dagoska. She’d felt so much at home among the low-rent Smoke Houses of Westport, where the weak came to forget their weakness, that her highest ambition had been to open one herself.

Oh, yes, Shevedieh had moved among the lost and the fallen, but she wasn’t sure she’d ever borne witness to so base a place as when she stepped through the decaying portal of the Duke’s Repose in Talins.

‘Did he repose of the pox?’ she croaked, clapping a hand over her mouth.

It was the stench of bodies unwashed for centuries, or perhaps washed daily but in shit and vinegar. As Shev’s eyes gradually adjusted to the hellish gloom, she saw cursed figures of indeterminate race or gender sprawled punch-drunk, blood-drunk, sorrow-drunk, and simply drunk. Folk tortured each other. Folk tortured themselves. Folk dragged their way towards the release of death with both hands. One lay in their own sick, blowing bubbles with every wet snore while a little dog, or perhaps a large rat, lapped hungrily at the far edge of the puddle. The sound which Shev had assumed was a long drink being poured was in fact a man with trousers around ankles, pissing, apparently endlessly, into a filthy tin bucket while he picked his crooked nose with a crooked finger. In a shadowy corner, two, or perhaps three, others grunted softly under a regularly shifting coat. Shev hoped they were doing nothing worse than fucking, but she would not have liked to bet on it.

It was a long time since she’d entertained high hopes for humanity, but had they still stood intact, they would have crumbled in that instant.

‘God has abandoned us,’ she whispered, narrowing her eyes in the vain hope she might prevent the unholy sights imprinting themselves for ever on her vision.

The prize exhibit in this museum of filth, the chief mourner at this funeral of all that was decent, the High Priestess of this final shrine on a lifelong pilgrimage of self-pity, self-neglect and self-destruction, was none other than Shev’s long-standing best friend and worst enemy: Javre, Lioness of Hoskopp.

She sat at a rickety table infested with empty jugs, half-full bottles, slimy cups and greasy glasses, with coins and counters and overflowing ash-bowls, with several chagga and at least one husk pipe, creased and filthied cards scattered like demented confetti. Opposite her sprawled three Union soldiers, one with a beard and a scar, one with a face almost as trustworthy as the vomit-supping rat’s, and one with his head tipped far, far over the back of his chair, mouth wide open, knobble on his skinny neck standing out painfully sharp and shifting gently as he snored.

Javre’s red hair was a snarled-up tangle, matted with ash, with slime, with food, with things that could not be identified. That should not be identified, lest they offend God to the extent that he felt obliged to end creation. By the look of things she had been fighting in the pit again. Her knuckles flapped with bloodstained bandages, her bare shoulder – for the indescribably stained shirt she wore had lost a sleeve somewhere – was grazed and scabbed, the side of her face smeared with bruises.

Shev hardly knew how she felt to see her. Relieved that she hadn’t left the city. Guilty at the state she’d made of herself. Ashamed to be asking for her help. Angry at she hardly knew what any more. A slow accumulation of years of hurts and frustrations, little things added up day after day to a burden she could not stand to carry. But, as always, she had no other choices. She peeled the hand from her mouth and padded over.

Javre stank. Even worse than she had the first time they met, in the door of Shev’s Smoke House. Not long before it burned down, along with her past life. Shev wouldn’t see another life burned down. She couldn’t see it.

‘You stink, Javre,’ she said.

Javre didn’t bother to look around. However carefully you crept up on her, somehow she always knew who was there. ‘Have not washed lately.’

Her words came slurred and Shev’s heart sank. It took days of drinking for Javre to show the slightest sign of being drunk. By then she was colossally, toweringly, heroically drunk. There was nothing Javre did by halves.

‘I have been entirely busy drinking, fucking and fighting.’ She cleared her throat, turned her head and spat noisily and bloodily at Shev’s feet, half of it dangling from her split lip and soaking into her shirt as she turned back to the game. ‘I have been drunk for …’ She raised a bandaged hand, squinting as she clumsily stuck the fingers up one by one. When she stuck the thumb up, her cards fluttered to the floor. Javre frowned at them. ‘I cannot even count any more.’ She started to fish them clumsily up between scabbed fingers, one by one. ‘Drinking, fucking, fighting and losing at cards. Days since I won a hand.’ She burped. Even from this distance, Shev shuddered at the smell of it. ‘Weeks. I hardly know which side up the cards go.’

‘Javre, I need to talk to you—’

‘Let me introduce you!’ Javre swept a loose arm at the Union soldiers and very nearly took the sleeping man’s head off with a backhand. ‘This little beauty is my good old friend Shevedieh! Used to be a henchman of mine.’

‘Javre.’

‘Sidekick, then. Whatever. We travelled half the Circle of the World together! All kinds of adventures.’

‘Javre.’

‘Disasters, then. Whatever. These shits are among the finest soldiers of His August Majesty the High King of the Union. The beardy bastard is Lieutenant Forest.’ He nodded to Shev with a good-natured grin. ‘This stringy one is Lance Corporal Yolk.’ The sleeping man stirred faintly, tongue moving against his cracked lips with vague squelching sounds. ‘And this lucky fucker—’

‘Skilful fucker,’ grunted the ratty man around a chagga pipe gripped in his yellowed teeth.

‘Is Sergeant Tunny.’

‘Corporal,’ he said, peering through his haze of smoke at the cards.

‘Got himself demoted again,’ said Forest. ‘Over a goose and a whore, would you believe.’

‘She was worth it,’ said Tunny. ‘And the whore wasn’t bad, either. Fire, by the way.’ And he laid his cards down with a snap.

‘Tits of the Mother!’ snarled Javre. ‘Again?’

‘There’s a certain spot …’ muttered Tunny, pipe waggling between his teeth, ‘between too drunk and not drunk enough …’ as he scooped up scattered winnings in a dozen different currencies, ‘where I’m a hell of a card player. The trick, as with so much in life, is keeping the balance
just
right.’

‘Luck,’ mused Javre as she watched him gather the harvest through narrowed, red-rimmed, absurdly bloodshot eyes, ‘has always been the one thing missing from my life.’

‘Javre—’

‘Let me guess!’ Bandages trailed through spilled beer as she flung up a hand. ‘You are dunked to your scrawny neck in some species of shit and have run straight back to me to fetch the shovel.’