The Collected Joe Abercrombie (210 page)

Then two sharp claps echoed from the buildings.

The scout by the trough was just filling his flask when Ferro’s shaft sank into his chest. The canteen tumbled from his hand, shining drops spilling from the neck. Flatbows rattled in the windows. Scouts yelled and stared. One horse stumbled sideways and fell, puffs of dust rising from its flailing hooves, crushing its rider screaming underneath it.

Union soldiers charged from the buildings, shouting, spears ready. One of the riders had his sword half-drawn when he was nailed with a flatbow bolt, fell lolling from the saddle. Ferro’s second arrow took another in the back. The one who had been picking his fingernails was dumped from his horse, stumbled up in time to see a Union soldier coming at him with a spear. He threw down his knife and held his arms up too late, was run through anyway, the spear point sticking bloody out of his back as he fell.

Two of them made a dash the way they had come. Ferro took aim at one, but as they reached the narrow lane a rope was pulled tight across the gap. The pair of them were snatched from their saddles, dragging a Union soldier yelping from a building, bouncing along a few strides on his face, rope stuck tight round his arm. One of Ferro’s arrows caught a scout between his shoulder-blades as he tried to push himself up from the dust. The other dragged himself a groggy few strides before a Union soldier hit him in the head with a sword and left the back of his skull hanging off.

Of the dozen, only the leader got away from the village. He spurred his horse for a narrow fence between two buildings, jumping it with hooves clattering against the top rail. He galloped off across the coarse stubble of a harvested field, pressed low into his saddle, jerking his heels into his horse’s flanks.

Ferro took a long, slow aim, feeling the smile tugging at the corners of her face. All in a moment she judged the way he was sitting the saddle, the speed of the horse, the height of the tower, felt the wind on her face, the weight of the shaft, the tension in the wood, the string biting into her lip. She watched the arrow fly, a spinning black splinter against the grey sky, and the horse rushed forwards to meet it.

Sometimes, God is generous.

The leader arched his back and tumbled from the saddle, rolling over and over on the dusty earth, specks of mud and cut stalks flying up around him. His cry of agony came to Ferro’s ear a moment later. Her lips curled back further from her teeth.

‘Hah!’ She threw the bow over her shoulder, slid down the ladder, vaulted through the back window and dashed out across the field. Her boots thudded in the soft soil between the clumps of stubble, her hand tightened around the grip of her sword.

The man mewled in the dirt as he tried to drag himself towards his horse. He got one desperate finger hooked over the stirrup as he heard Ferro’s quick footsteps behind, but fell back with a squeal when he tried to lift himself. He lay on his side as she ran up, the blade hissing angry from its wooden sheath. His eyes rolled towards her, wild with pain and fear.

A dark face, like her own.

An unexceptional face of forty years old, with a patchy beard and a pale birth-mark on one cheek, dust caked to the other, beads of shining sweat across his forehead. She stood over him, and sunlight glinted on the edge of the curved sword.

‘Give me a reason not to do it,’ she found she had said. Strange, that she had said it, and to a soldier in the Emperor’s army, of all people. In the heat and dust of the Badlands of Kanta she had not been in the habit of offering chances. Perhaps something had changed in her, out there in the wet and ruined west of the world.

He stared up for a moment, his lip trembling. ‘I . . .’ he croaked, ‘my daughters! I have two daughters. I pray to see them married . . .’

Ferro frowned. She should not have let him start talking. A father, with daughters. Just as she had once had a father, been a daughter. This man had done her no harm. He was no more Gurkish than she was. He had not chosen to fight, most likely, or had any choice but to do as the mighty Uthman-ul-Dosht commanded.

‘I will go . . . I swear to God . . . I will go back to my wife and my daughters . . .’

The arrow had taken him just under the shoulder and gone clean through, snapped off when he hit the ground. She could see the splintered shaft under his arm. It had missed his lung, by the way he was talking. It would not kill him. Not right away, at least. Ferro could help him onto his horse and he would be gone, with a chance to live.

The scout held up a trembling hand, a spatter of blood on his long thumb. ‘Please . . . this is not my war I—’

The sword carved a deep wound out of his face, through his mouth, splitting his lower jaw apart. He made a hissing moan. The next blow cut his head half off. He rolled over, dark blood pouring out into the dark earth, clutching at the stubble of the shorn crop. The sword broke the back of his skull open and he was still.

It seemed that Ferro was not in a merciful mood that day.

The butchered scout’s horse stared dumbly at her. ‘What?’ she snapped. Perhaps she had changed, out there in the west, but no one changes that much. One less soldier in Uthman’s army was a good thing, wherever he came from. She had no need to make excuses for herself. Especially not to a horse. She grabbed at its bridle and gave it a yank.

Vallimir might have been a pink fool, but Ferro had to admit that he had managed the ambush well. Ten scouts lay dead in the village square, their torn clothes flapping in the breeze, their blood smeared across the dusty ground. The only Union casualty was the idiot who had been jerked over by his own rope, covered in dust and scratches.

A good day’s work, so far.

A soldier poked at one of the corpses with his boot. ‘So this is what the Gurkish look like, eh? Not so fearsome now.’

‘These are not Gurkish,’ said Ferro. ‘Kadiri scouts, pressed into service. They did not want to be here any more than you wanted them here.’ The man stared back at her, puzzled and annoyed. ‘Kanta is full of people. Not everyone with a brown face is Gurkish, or prays to their God, or bows to their Emperor.’

‘Most do.’

‘Most have no choice.’

‘They’re still the enemy,’ he sneered.

‘I did not say we should spare them.’ She shouldered past, back through the door into the building with the bell tower. It seemed Vallimir had managed to take a prisoner after all. He and some others were clustered nervously around one of the scouts, on his knees with his arms bound tightly behind him. He had a bloody graze down one side of his face, staring up with that look that prisoners tend to have.

Scared.

‘Where . . . is . . . your . . . main . . . body?’ Vallimir was demanding.

‘He does not speak your tongue, pink,’ snapped Ferro, ‘and shouting it will not help.’

Vallimir looked angrily round at her. ‘Perhaps we should have brought someone with us who speaks Kantic,’ he said with heavy irony.

‘Perhaps.’

There was a long pause, while Vallimir waited for her to say more, but she said nothing. Eventually, he gave a long sigh. ‘Do you speak Kantic?’

‘Of course.’

‘Then would you be so kind as to ask him some questions for us?’

Ferro sucked her teeth. A waste of her time, but if it had to be done, it was best done quickly. ‘What shall I ask him?’

‘Well . . . how far away the Gurkish army is, how many are in it, what route they are taking, you know—’

‘Huh.’ Ferro squatted down in front of the prisoner and looked him squarely in the eyes. He stared back, helpless and frightened, no doubt wondering what she was doing with these pinks. She wondered herself.

‘Who are you?’ he whispered.

She drew her knife and held it up. ‘You will answer my questions, or I will kill you with this knife. That is who I am. Where is the Gurkish army?’

He licked his lips. ‘Perhaps . . . two days march away, to the south.’

‘How many?’

‘More than I could count. Many thousands. People of the deserts, and the plains, and the—’

‘What route are they taking?’

‘I do not know. We were only told to ride to this village, and see whether it was empty.’ He swallowed, the lump on the front of his sweaty throat bobbing up and down. ‘Perhaps my Captain knows more—’

‘Ssss,’ hissed Ferro. His Captain would be telling nobody anything now she had carved up his head. ‘A lot of them,’ she snapped at Vallimir, in common, ‘and many more to come, two days’ march behind. He does not know their route. What now?’

Vallimir rubbed at the light stubble on his jaw. ‘I suppose . . . we should take him back to the Agriont. Deliver him to the Inquisition.’

‘He knows nothing. He will only slow us down. We should kill him.’

‘He surrendered! To kill him would be no better than murder, war or no war.’ Vallimir beckoned to one of the soldiers. ‘I won’t have that on my conscience.’

‘I will.’ Ferro’s knife slid smoothly into the scout’s heart, and out. His mouth and his eyes opened up very wide. Blood bubbled through the split cloth on his chest, spread out quickly in a dark ring. He gawped at it, making a long sucking sound.

‘Glugh . . .’ His head dropped back, his body sagged. She turned to see the soldiers staring at her, pale faces puffed up with shock. A busy day for them, maybe. A lot to learn, but they would soon get used to it.

That, or the Gurkish would kill them.

‘They want to burn your farms, and your towns, and your cities. They want to make slaves of your children. They want everyone in the world to pray to God in the same way they do, with the same words they use, and for your land to be a province of their Empire. I know this.’ Ferro wiped the blade of her knife on the sleeve of the dead man’s tunic. ‘The only difference between war and murder is the number of the dead.’

Vallimir stared down at the corpse of his prisoner for a moment, his lips thoughtfully pursed. Ferro wondered if he had more backbone than she had given him credit for. Finally, he turned towards her. ‘What do you suggest?’

‘We could wait for more here. Perhaps even get some real Gurkish this time. But that might mean too many for we few.’

‘So?’

‘East, or north, and set another trap like this one.’

‘And defeat the Emperor’s army a dozen men at a time? Small steps.’

Ferro shrugged. ‘Small steps in the right direction. Unless you’ve seen enough, and want to go back to your walls.’

Vallimir gave her a long frown, then he turned to one of his men, a heavy-built veteran with a scar on his cheek. ‘There is a village just east of here, is there not, Sergeant Forest?’

‘Yes, sir. Marlhof is no more than ten miles distant.’

‘Will that suit you?’ asked Vallimir, raising one eyebrow at Ferro.

‘Dead Gurkish suit me. That is all.’

Leaves on the Water

‘C
arleon,’ said Logen. ‘Aye,’ said Dogman. It squatted there, in the fork of the river, under the brooding clouds. Hard shapes of tall walls and towers on the sheer bluff above the fast-flowing water, up where Skarling’s hall used to stand. Slate roofs and stone buildings squashed in tight on the long downward slope, clustered in round the foot of the hill and with another wall outside, everything leant a cold, sharp shine from the rain just finished falling. Dogman couldn’t say he was glad to see the place again. Every visit yet had turned out badly.

‘It’s changed some, since the battle, all them years ago.’ Logen was looking down at his spread-out hand, waggling the stump of his missing finger.

‘There weren’t no walls like that round it then.’

‘No. But there weren’t no Union army round it neither.’

Dogman couldn’t deny it was a comforting fact. The Union pickets worked their way through the empty fields about the city, a wobbly line of earthworks, and stakes, and fences, with men moving behind ’em, dull sunlight catching metal now and then. Thousands of men, well-armed and vengeful, keeping Bethod penned up.

‘You sure he’s in there?’

‘Don’t see where else he’s got to go. He lost most of his best boys up in the mountains. No friends left, I reckon.’

‘We’ve all got less than we used to,’ Dogman muttered. ‘I guess we just sit here. We got time, after all. Lots of it. We sit here and watch the grass grow, and we wait for Bethod to give up.’

‘Aye.’ But Logen didn’t look like he believed it.

‘Aye,’ said Dogman. But just giving up didn’t sound much like the Bethod he knew.

He turned his head at the sound of hooves fast on the road, saw one of those messengers with a helmet like an angry chicken race from the trees and towards West’s tent, horse well-lathered from hard riding. He reined up in a fumbling hurry, near fell out of his saddle in his rush to get down, wobbled past a few staring officers and in through the flap. Dogman felt that familiar weight of worry in his gut. ‘That’s got the taste o’ bad news.’

‘What other kind is there?’

There was some flutter down there now, soldiers shouting, throwing their arms around. ‘Best go and see what’s happened,’ muttered Dogman, though he’d much rather have walked the other way. Crummock was stood near the tent, frowning at the commotion.

‘Something’s up,’ said the hillman. ‘But I don’t understand a thing these Southerners say or do. I swear, they’re all mad.’