Sharp Ends: Stories from the World of The First Law (6 page)

‘Shit,’ said Shev as flames shot up the flimsy hangings. She grabbed the water jug but its meagre contents made scarcely any difference. Fire had already spread to the next curtain, shreds of burning ash fluttering down.

‘Best vacate the premises,’ said Javre, and she took Shev under the arm with a grip that was not to be resisted and marched her smartly out through the door, leaving four dead men scattered about the burning room.

The one who’d had his hands in his pockets was leaning against the wall in the street, clutching at his own knife stuck in his thigh.

‘Wait—’ he said as Javre caught him by the collar, and with a flick of her wrist sent him reeling across the street to crash head first into a wall.

Severard was running up, staring at the building, flames already licking around the doorframe. Javre caught him and guided him away. ‘Nothing to be done. Bad choice of décor in a place with naked flames.’ As if to underscore the point, the window shattered, fire gouting into the street, and Severard ducked with his hands over his head.

‘What the hell happened?’ he moaned.

‘Went bad,’ whispered Shev, clutching at her side. ‘Went bad.’

‘You call that bad?’ Javre scraped the dirty red hair out of her battered face and grinned at the ruin of Shev’s hopes as though it looked a good enough day’s work to her. ‘I say it could have been far worse!’

‘How?’ snapped Shev. ‘How could it be fucking worse?’

‘We might both be dead.’ She gave a sharp little laugh. ‘Come out alive, it is a victory.’

‘This is what happens,’ said Severard, his eyes shining with reflected fire as the building burned brighter. ‘This is what happens when you do a kindness.’

‘Ah, stop crying, boy. Kindness brings kindness in the long run. The Goddess holds our just rewards in trust! I am Javre, by the way.’ And she clapped him on the shoulder and near knocked him over. ‘Do you have an older brother, by any chance? Fighting always gets me in the mood.’

‘What?’

‘Brothers, maybe?’

Shev clutched at her head. Felt like it was going to burst. ‘I killed Crandall,’ she whispered. ‘I bloody killed him. They’ll come after me now! They’ll never stop coming!’

‘Pffffft.’ Javre put one great, muscled, bruised arm around Shev’s shoulders. Strangely reassuring and smothering at once. ‘You should see the bastards coming after me. Now, about stealing back this sword of mine …’

East of the Crinna,
Autumn 574

C
raw chewed the hard skin around his nails, just like he always did. They hurt, just like they always did. He thought to himself that he really had to stop doing that. Just like he always did.

‘Why is it,’ he muttered under his breath, and with some bitterness too, ‘I always get stuck with the fool jobs?’

The village squatted in the fork of the river, a clutch of damp thatch roofs, scratty as an idiot’s hair, a man-high fence of rough-cut logs ringing it. Round wattle huts and three long halls dumped in the muck, ends of the curving wooden uprights on the biggest badly carved like dragons’ heads, or wolves’ heads, or something that was meant to make men scared but only made Craw nostalgic for decent carpentry. Smoke limped up from chimneys in muddy smears. Half-bare trees still shook browning leaves. In the distance the reedy sunlight glimmered on the rotten fens, like a thousand mirrors stretching off to the horizon. But without the romance.

Wonderful stopped scratching at the long scar through her shaved-stubble hair long enough to make a contribution. ‘Looks to me,’ she said, ‘like a confirmed shit-hole.’

‘We’re way out east of the Crinna, no?’ Craw worked a speck of skin between teeth and tongue and spat it out, wincing at the pink mark left beside his nail, way more painful than it had any right to be. ‘Nothing but hundreds of miles of shit-hole in every direction. You sure this is the place, Raubin?’

‘I’m sure. She was most specifical.’

Craw frowned. He weren’t sure if he’d taken such a pronounced dislike to Raubin ’cause he was the one that brought the jobs and the jobs were usually cracked, or if he’d taken such a pronounced dislike to Raubin ’cause the man was a weasel-faced arsehole. Bit of both, maybe. ‘The word is “specific”, half-head.’

‘Got my meaning, no? Village in a fork in the river, she said, south o’ the fens, three halls, biggest one with uprights carved like fox heads.’

‘Aaaah.’ Craw snapped his fingers. ‘They’re meant to be foxes.’

‘Fox Clan, these crowd.’

‘Are they?’

‘So she said.’

‘And this thing we’ve got to bring her. What sort of a thing is it, exactly?’

‘Well, it’s a thing,’ said Raubin.

‘That much we know.’

‘Sort of … this long, I guess. She didn’t say, precisely.’

‘Unspecifical, was she?’ asked Wonderful, grinning with every tooth.

‘She said it’d have a kind of a light about it.’

‘A light?’ asked Craw. ‘What? Like a magic bloody candle?’

All Raubin could do was shrug, which weren’t a scrap of use to no one. ‘I don’t know. She said you’d know it when you saw it.’

‘Oh, nice.’ Craw hadn’t thought his mood could drop much lower. Now he knew better. ‘That’s real nice. So you want me to bet my life, and the lives o’ my crew, on knowing it when I see it?’ He shoved himself back off the rocks on his belly, out of sight of the village, clambered up and brushed the dirt from his coat, muttering darkly to himself since it was a new one and he’d been taking some trouble to keep it clean. Should’ve known that’d be a waste of effort, what with the shitty jobs he always ended up in to his neck. He started back down the slope, shaking his head, striding through the trees towards the others. A good, confident stride. A leader’s stride. It was important, Craw reckoned, for a chief to walk like he knew where he was going.

Especially when he didn’t.

Raubin hurried after him, whiny voice picking at his back. ‘She didn’t precisely say. About the thing, you know. I mean, she don’t, always. She just looks at you, with those eyes …’ He gave a shudder. ‘And says, fetch me this thing, and where from. And what with the paint, and that voice o’ hers, and that sweat o’ bloody fear you get when she looks at you …’ Another shudder, hard enough to rattle his rotten teeth. ‘I ain’t asking no questions, I can tell you that. I’m just looking to run out fast so I don’t piss myself on the spot. Run out fast, and fetch whatever thing she’s after—’

‘Well, that’s real sweet for you,’ said Craw, ‘except insofar as actually getting this thing goes.’

‘As far as getting the thing goes,’ mused Wonderful, splashes of light and shadow swimming across her bony face as she looked up into the branches, ‘the lack of detail presents serious difficulties. All manner of things in a village that size. Which one, though? Which thing, is the question.’ Seemed she was in a thoughtful mood. ‘One might say the voice, and the paint, and the aura of fear are, in the present case … self-defeating.’

‘Oh no,’ said Craw. ‘Self-defeating would be if she was the one who ended up way out past the Crinna with her throat cut, on account of some blurry details on the minor point of the actual job we’re bloody here to do.’ And he gave Raubin a hard glare as he strode out of the trees and into the clearing.

Scorry was sitting sharpening his knives, eight blades neatly laid out on the patchy grass in front of his crossed legs, from a little pricker no longer’n Craw’s thumb to a hefty carver just this side of a short-sword. The ninth he had in his hands, whetstone working at steel, squick, scrick, marking the rhythm to his soft, high singing. He had a wonder of a singing voice, did Scorry Tiptoe. No doubt he would’ve been a bard in a happier age, but there was a steadier living in sneaking up and knifing folk these days. A sad fact, Craw reckoned, but those were the times.

Brack-i-Dayn was sat beside Scorry, lips curled back, nibbling at a stripped rabbit bone like a sheep nibbling at grass. A huge, very dangerous sheep. The little thing looked like a toothpick in his great tattooed blue lump of a fist. Jolly Yon frowned down at him as if he was a great heap of shit, which Brack might’ve been upset by if it hadn’t been Yon’s confirmed habit to look at everything and everyone that way. He properly looked like the least jolly man in all the North at that moment. It was how he’d come by the name, after all.

Whirrun of Bligh was kneeling on his own on the other side of the clearing, in front of his great long sword, leaned up against a tree for the purpose. He had his hands clasped in front of his chin, hood drawn down over his head, just the sharp end of his nose showing. Praying, by the look of him. Craw had always been a bit worried by men who prayed to gods, let alone swords. But those were the times, he guessed. In bloody days, swords were worth more than gods. They certainly had ’em outnumbered. Besides, Whirrun was a valley-man, from way out north and west, across the mountains near the White Sea, where it snowed in summer and no one with the slightest sense would ever choose to live. Who knew how he thought?

‘Told you it was a real piss-stain of a village, didn’t I?’ Never was in the midst of stringing his bow. He had that grin he tended to have, like he’d made a joke on everyone else and no one but him had got it. Craw would’ve liked to know what it was, he could’ve done with a laugh. The joke was on all of ’em, far as he could see.

‘Reckon you had the right of it,’ said Wonderful as she strutted past into the clearing. ‘Piss. Stain.’

‘Well, we didn’t come to settle down,’ said Craw, ‘we came to get a thing.’

Jolly Yon achieved what many might’ve thought impossible by frowning deeper, black eyes grim as graves, dragging his thick fingers through his thick tangle of a beard. ‘What sort of a thing, exactly?’

Craw gave Raubin another look. ‘You want to dig that one over?’ The fixer only spread his hands, helpless. ‘I hear we’ll know it when we see it.’

‘Know it when we see it? What kind of a—’

‘Tell it to the trees, Yon, the task is the task.’

‘And we’re here now, aren’t we?’ said Raubin.

Craw sucked his teeth at him. ‘Brilliant fucking observation. Like all the best ones, it’s true whenever you say it. Yes, we’re here.’

‘We’re here,’ sang Brack-i-Dayn in his up-and-down Hillman accent, sucking the last shred o’ grease from his bone and flicking it into the bushes. ‘East of the Crinna where the moon don’t shine, a hundred miles from a clean place to shit and with wild, crazy bastards dancing all around think it’s a good idea to put bones through their own faces.’ Which was a little rich, considering he was so covered in tattoos he was more blue than white. There’s no style of contempt like the stuff one kind of savage has for another, Craw guessed.

‘Can’t deny they’ve got some funny ideas east of the Crinna.’ Raubin shrugged. ‘But here’s where the thing is, and here’s where we are, so why don’t we just get the fucking thing and back fucking home?’

‘Why don’t you get the fucking thing, Raubin?’ growled Jolly Yon.

‘’Cause it’s my fucking job to fucking tell you to get the fucking thing is why, Yon fucking Cumber.’

There was a long, ugly pause. Uglier than the child of a man and a sheep, as the Hillmen have it. Then Yon talked in his quiet voice, the one that still gave Craw prickles up his arms, even after all these years. ‘I hope I’m wrong. By the dead, I hope I’m wrong. But I’m getting this feeling …’ He shifted forward, and it was awfully clear all of a sudden just how many axes he was carrying, ‘like I’m being disrespected.’

‘No, no, not at all, I didn’t mean—’

‘
Respect
, Raubin. That shit costs nothing, but it can spare a man from trying to hold his brains in all the way back home. Am I clear enough?’

‘Course you are, Yon, course you are. I’m over the line. I’m all over it on both sides of it, and I’m sorry. Didn’t mean no disrespect. Lot o’ pressure, is all. Lot o’ pressure for everyone. It’s my neck on the block, just like yours. Not down there, maybe, but back home, you can be sure o’ that, if she don’t get her way …’ Raubin shuddered again, worse’n ever.

‘A touch of respect don’t seem too much to ask—’

‘Enough.’ Craw waved the pair of ’em down. ‘We’re all sinking on the same leaky bloody skiff, there’s no help arguing about it. We need every man to a bucket, and every woman, too.’

‘I’m always helpful,’ said Wonderful, all innocence.

‘If only.’ Craw squatted, pulling out a blade and starting to scratch a map of the village in the dirt. The way Threetrees used to do a long, low time ago. ‘We might not know exactly what this thing is, but we know where it is, at least.’ Knife scraped through earth as the others gathered, kneeling, sitting, squatting, looking on. ‘A big hall in the middle, with uprights on it carved like foxes’ heads. They’re dragons, you ask me, but, you know, that’s another story. There’s a fence around the outside, two gates, north and south. Houses and huts over here. A pigpen there, I think. That’s a forge, maybe.’

‘How many do we reckon might be down there?’ asked Yon.

Wonderful rubbed at the scar on her scalp, face twisted as she glanced up towards the pale sky. ‘Could be fifty, sixty fighting men? A few elders, few dozen women and children, too. Some o’ those might hold a blade.’

‘Women fighting.’ Never grinned. ‘A disgrace, is that.’

Wonderful bared her teeth back at him. ‘Get those bitches to the cook-fire, eh?’

‘Oh, the cook-fire …’ Brack stared up into the cloudy sky like it was packed with happy memories.

‘Sixty warriors? And we’re but seven – plus the baggage.’ Jolly Yon curled his tongue and blew spit over Raubin’s boots in a neat arc. ‘Shit on that. We need more men.’

‘Wouldn’t be enough food then.’ Brack-i-Dayn laid a sad hand on his belly. ‘There’s hardly enough as it—’

Craw cut him off. ‘Maybe we should stick to plans using the number we’ve got, eh? Plain as plain, sixty’s way too many to fight fair.’ Not that anyone had joined his crew for a fair fight, of course. ‘We need to draw some off.’

Never winced. ‘Any point asking why you’re looking at me?’

‘Because ugly men hate nothing worse than handsome men, pretty boy.’

‘It’s a fact I can’t deny.’ Never sighed, flicking his long hair back. ‘I’m cursed with a fine face.’

‘Your curse my blessing.’ Craw jabbed at the north end of his dirt-plan, where a wooden bridge crossed a stream. ‘You’ll take your unmatched beauty in towards the bridge. They’ll have guards posted, no doubt. Mount a diversion.’

‘Shoot one of ’em, you mean?’

‘Shoot near ’em, maybe. Let’s not kill anyone we don’t have to, eh? They might be nice enough folks under different circumstances.’

Never sent up a dubious eyebrow. ‘You reckon?’

Craw didn’t, particularly, but he’d no desire to weight his conscience down any further. It didn’t float too well as it was. ‘Just lead ’em a little dance, that’s all.’

Wonderful clapped a hand to her chest. ‘I’m so sorry I’ll miss it. No one dances prettier than our Never when the music gets going.’

Never grinned at her. ‘Don’t worry, sweetness, I’ll dance for you later.’

‘Promises, promises.’

‘Yes, yes.’ Craw shut the pair of ’em up with another wave. ‘You can make us all laugh when this fool job’s done with, if we’re still breathing.’

‘Maybe we’ll make you laugh, too, eh, Whirrun?’ said Wonderful.

The valley-man sat cross-legged, sword across his knees, and shrugged. ‘Maybe.’

‘We’re a tight little group, us lot, we like things friendly.’

Whirrun’s eyes slid across to Jolly Yon’s black frown, and back. ‘I see that.’

‘We’re like brothers,’ said Brack, grinning all over his tattooed face. ‘We share the risks, we share the food, we share the rewards, and from time to time we even share a laugh.’

‘Never got on too well with my brothers,’ said Whirrun.

Wonderful snorted. ‘Well, aren’t you blessed, boy? You’ve been given a second chance at a loving family. You last long enough, you’ll learn how it works.’

The shadow of Whirrun’s hood crept up and down his face as he slowly nodded. ‘Every day should be a new lesson.’

‘Good advice,’ said Craw. ‘Ears open, then, one and all. Soon as Never’s drawn a few off, we creep in at the south gate.’ And he put a cross in the dirt to show where it was. ‘Two groups, one each side o’ the main hall there, where the thing is. Where the thing’s meant to be, leastways. Me, Yon and Whirrun on the left.’ Yon spat again, Whirrun gave the slightest nod. ‘Wonderful, take Brack and Scorry down the right.’

‘Right y’are, Chief,’ said Wonderful.

‘Right for us,’ sang Brack.

‘So, so, so,’ said Scorry, which Craw took for a yes.