Joe Abercrombie - Half a War

Skara raised a brow. ‘What about a vasty weight of dirt falling on your head?’

‘Oh, Father Earth fashioned me too large to squeeze into Yilling’s mine. Others will go delving while I guard the entrance. But you must learn to rejoice at the risks.’

Skara looked more likely to be sick at them. ‘Why?’

‘Without Death, war would be a dull business.’ Gorm slipped his great chain over his head and offered it to her. ‘Would you honour me by keeping this safe until the task is done? I would hate for its rattling to catch Death’s ear.’

As their owner swaggered away Skara blinked down at the pommels draped over her hands, silver and gold and precious stones shining with the torchlight.

‘Each of these is a dead man, then,’ she murmured, pale as if she stared into their faces. ‘Dozens of them.’

‘And that’s not counting all those he’s killed that didn’t have swords. Or all those that had no weapons at all.’

Time was Raith had looked at that chain and swelled with pride that he followed so great a warrior. Time was he’d dreamed of forging his own. Now he wondered how long a chain he might’ve forged already, and the thought made him feel almost as queasy as Skara seemed when she looked up.

‘I didn’t choose this.’

Gods, she was beautiful. It was like there was a light in her, and the darker things got the brighter she seemed to shine. He wondered, and not for the first time, what might’ve happened if they were different people, in a different place, at a different time. If she wasn’t a queen and he wasn’t a killer. But you can’t choose who you are.

‘Who’d choose this?’ he croaked out.

‘It’s time.’ Gorm took a prim little nibble from the last loaf, passed it on and stooped to fit his great frame into the narrow passageway.

Each man took his own bite as he followed, each no doubt wondering if it truly would be his last. Raith came at the back, took his mouthful and crumbled the rest in his fist, tossed it behind him as a gift for Mother War’s children, the crows. He might be no great believer in luck, but he knew they’d need every bit they could get.

Down the passage through the elf-walls, echoing with their quick breath. The same one Raith had come charging up a few weeks before with no doubts and no fears, burning with battle-joy. Blue Jenner stood beside the hand-thick door, ready to triple bolt it after them, slapping each man on the back as they slipped past.

‘Come back alive,’ hissed the old raider. ‘That’s all that matters.’ And he pushed Raith through the archway and out into the chill night.

A shroud of fog had drifted in from Mother Sea and Raith muttered his thanks to her. He reckoned it a gift that tripled his chances of living out the night. The fires of Bright Yilling’s men were gloomy smears in the murk on their left. The walls of Bail’s Point a black mass on their right.

They wore no mail so they’d run the swifter, all bent double and black as coal, ghosts in the darkness, quick and silent. Raith’s every sense was sharpened double-keen by the whetstone of danger, every grunt and footfall seeming loud as a drum-beat, his nose full of the damp night and the distant campfires.

One after another they slid into the ditch, picking their way along the boggy bottom. Raith’s boot hit something hard and he realized it was a corpse. They were everywhere, unclaimed, unburned, unburied, tangled with the shattered remains of ladders, rocks flung from above, dead men’s fallen shields.

He saw Gorm’s smiling teeth in the darkness, leaning towards Soryorn, heard him whisper, ‘Here was Mother War’s good work done.’

The last loaf had left Raith’s mouth sour and he spat as they struggled up from the ditch, men silently offering their hands to help each other climb, hissing curses as they slipped and slid, boots mashing the earth to sticky mud.

On they went, over ground prickled everywhere with arrows, the harvest of Bright Yilling’s failed attacks, dense as the wind-slanted sedge on the high moors of Vansterland. Raith heard shouting in the distance as they left the fortress behind, the clashing of steel. King Uthil was sallying from the main gate, hoping to draw Bright Yilling’s attention from his mine.

Shapes shifted in the mist, whipped into tricking shadows by the hurrying men. Snakes, twisting together and breaking apart. Wolf faces. Man faces. The faces of those he’d killed, shrieking silently for vengeance. Raith wafted them away with his shield but they formed anew. He tried to tell himself the dead are dead, but he knew Jenner had been right. Their ghosts stick in the minds of those that knew them, loved them, hated them. Those that killed them most of all.

The sharpened stakes loomed from the murk and Raith slipped sideways between them and crouched in the darkness beyond, straining into the night.

He saw the humps of the fresh barrows, or at any rate the spoil of Yilling’s mines, firelight at their edges. Gorm pointed with his sword and the men split, scuttling silently around the nearest hillock. Not a word spoken. Not a word needed to be spoken. They all knew their work.

Two men sat beside a campfire. The way Raith and Rakki used to sit. One working on a belt with a needle, the other with a blanket around his shoulders, frowning off towards the faint sounds of Uthil’s diversion. He turned as Raith rushed up.

‘What are-’

Soryorn’s arrow took him silently through the mouth. The other man started to scramble up, tangled with his belt. Gorm’s ash-black blade hissed and the warrior’s head spun away into the darkness.

Raith sprang over his body as it toppled, slithered down into a trench between heaps of spoil, squatting beside a dark entrance flanked by torches.

‘Go!’ whispered Gorm, as his warriors spread out to form a crescent. Rakki muttered a quick prayer to She Who Lights the Way, then he was down into Father Earth’s guts with the jar of southern fire over his shoulder, Soryorn and Raith just behind him.

Darkness, and the flickering shadows of the crooked logs that held up the earth above, roots brushing at Raith’s hair. He was no miner but he could tell it had been dug hastily, trickles of soil falling as they worked their way down the passage, his eyes fixed on Soryorn’s bent back.

‘Gods,’ he whispered, ‘this is apt to fall without our help.’

Hot, and growing hotter, sweat trickling from Raith’s brows, sticky under his clothes as he laboured on. He slid his axe through the loop at his belt and drew his dagger. If it came to a fight down here there was no room to swing. They’d settle it close enough to smell your enemy’s breath.

They scrambled into a chamber lit by one guttering lamp. The earthen floor was scattered with picks and shovels and barrows, roof held up with a clumsy tangle of timbers, others stacked in heaps. Two more shadowy tunnels went deeper, towards the roots of Gudrun’s Tower, no doubt, and Raith hurried over to one, peering into the darkness.

Could he hear scraping somewhere in there? Digging? Rakki was already fumbling the stopper from his jar, starting to slosh what was inside over anything made of wood.

‘Careful o’ that flame!’ snapped Raith at Soryorn, who’d brushed the flickering lamp and set it swinging on its hook. ‘One slip and we’re all buried.’

‘Fair point,’ croaked out the standard-bearer, tipping up his own deadly jar in the crook of one long arm, other hand across his face. Gods, the stuff stank in the stillness, a burning stink that set them all to coughing. Raith stumbled to the other tunnel, rubbing the tears from his stinging eyes on his forearm, looked up to see two men staring at him. One held a pick, the other a shovel, both stripped to the waist and smeared with grime.