Joe Abercrombie - Half a War

But Rakki was dead.

‘Where have you been?’

He jerked around. The door was open a crack and Skara was looking out at him, hair a mass of dark curls, wild and tangled from her bed like it had been the first day he saw her.

‘Sorry,’ he stammered out, shaking off his blanket. He gave a grunt of pain as he stood, clutching at the wall to steady himself.

Suddenly she’d slipped into the corridor and taken his elbow. ‘Are you all right?’

He was a proven warrior, sword-bearer to Grom-gil-Gorm. He was a killer, carved from the stone of Vansterland. He felt no pain and no pity. Only the words wouldn’t come. He was too hurt. Hurt to his bones.

‘No,’ he whispered.

He looked up then and saw she was wearing just her shift, realized with the torchlight he could see her lean shape through it.

He forced his eyes up to her face but that was worse. There was something in the way she was looking at him, fierce and fixed as a wolf at a carcass, made him suddenly hot all over. He could hardly see for her eyes on him. He could hardly breathe for the scent of her. He made the feeblest effort to pull his arm away and only pulled her closer, right against him. She pressed him back, sliding one hand around his sore ribs and making him gasp, putting the other on his face and pulling it down towards her.

She kissed him and not gently, sucking at his mouth, her teeth scraping his split lip. He opened his eyes and she was looking at him, like she was judging the effect she’d had, her thumb pressing hard at his cheek.

‘Shit,’ he whispered. ‘I mean … my queen-’

‘Don’t call me that. Not now.’ She slipped her hand up behind his head, gripping him tight, brushed her nose up along the side of his, down the other, kissed him again and left his head light as a drunkard’s.

‘Come with me,’ she whispered, breath burning on his cheek, and she drew him towards her door, nearly dragged him right over, blanket still tangled around his legs.

Rakki had always told him he was no lover. Raith wondered what he’d have to say when he heard about this-

But Rakki was dead.

He stopped short. ‘I need to tell you something …’ That he’d just been crying in someone else’s bed? That she was promised to Grom-gil-Gorm? That he’d nearly killed her a few nights before and still had the poison in his pocket? ‘More’n one thing, really-’

‘Later.’

‘Later might be too late-’

She caught a fistful of his shirt and dragged him towards her, and he was helpless as a rag doll in her hands. She was far stronger than he’d thought. Or maybe he was just far weaker. ‘I’ve done enough talking,’ she hissed at him. ‘I’ve done enough of the proper thing. We might all be dead tomorrow. Now come with me.’

They might all be dead tomorrow. If Rakki had one last lesson to teach him, surely that was it. And men rarely win fights they want to lose, after all. So he pushed his fingers into the soft cloud of her hair, kissed at her, bit at her lips, felt her tongue in his mouth, and nothing else seemed all that pressing. He was here and she was here, now, in the darkness. Mother Scaer, and the Breaker of Swords, and Rin, and even Rakki seemed a long way off with the dawn.

She kicked his blanket against the wall, and pulled him through her door, and slid the bolt.

‘This is the place,’ said Skifr.

It was a wide hall with a balcony high up, scattered with broken chairs, dim for the dirt crusted to the windows. A curved table faced the door with a thing above it like a great coin, ringed by elf-letters. There had been a wall of glass beyond but it was shattered, splinters crunching under Koll’s boots as he stepped towards an archway, one door fallen, the other hanging by broken hinges. The hall beyond was soon lost in darkness, water dripping in the shadows.

‘We could use some light,’ he murmured.

‘Of course.’ There was a click, and in an instant the whole chamber was flooded with brightness. There was a hiss as Father Yarvi whipped out the curved sword he wore and Koll shrank against the wall, feeling for his knife.

But Skifr only chuckled. ‘There is nothing here to fight but ourselves, and in that endless war blades cannot help.’

‘Where does the light come from?’ murmured Koll. Tubes on the ceiling were burning too bright to look at, as though pieces of Mother Sun had been caught in bottles.

Skifr shrugged as she sauntered past him into the hall. ‘Magic.’

The ceiling had collapsed, more tubes hanging by tangled wires, light flickering and popping, flaring across the tight-drawn faces of the two ministers as they crept after Skifr. Paper was scattered everywhere. Sliding piles of it ankle deep, sodden but unrotted, scrawled with words upon words upon words.

‘The elves thought they could catch the world in writing,’ said Skifr. ‘That enough knowledge would set them above God.’

‘Look upon the wages of their arrogance,’ muttered Mother Scaer.

They passed through an echoing hall filled with benches, each with a strange box of glass and metal on top, drawers torn out and cabinets thrown over and more papers vomiting from them in heaps.

‘Thieves were here before us,’ said Koll.

‘Other thieves,’ said Scaer.

‘There is no danger in the world so fearsome that someone will not brave it for a profit.’

‘Such wisdom in one so young,’ said Skifr. ‘Though I think all these thieves stole was death. This way.’

Stairs dropped down, lit in red, a humming from far below. A chilly breath of air upon his face as Koll leaned over the rail and saw their square spiral dropping into infinite depth. He leaned away, suddenly giddy. ‘A long way down,’ he croaked.

‘Then we had better begin,’ said Father Yarvi, taking the steps two at a time, his withered hand hissing upon the rail.

They did not speak. Each of them too crowded by their own fears to make space for anyone else. The deeper they went the louder their heavy footsteps echoed, the louder that strange humming within the walls, within the very earth, until it made Koll’s teeth rattle in his head. Down they went, and down, into the very bowels of Strokom, past warnings painted on the smooth elf-stone in red elf-letters. Koll could not read them, but he guessed at their meaning.

Go back. Abandon this madness. It is not too late.

He could hardly have said how long they went down, but the stairs ended, as all things must. Another hallway stretched away at the bottom, gloomy, chill and bare but for a red arrow pointing down the floor. Guiding them on towards a door. A narrow door of dull metal, and beside it on the wall a studded panel.

‘What is this place?’ murmured Mother Scaer.

Something in the terrible solidity of that door reminded Koll of the one in Queen Laithlin’s counting house, behind which she was said to keep her limitless wealth. ‘A vault,’ he murmured.

‘An armoury.’ And Skifr began to sing. Soft and low, to begin with, in the tongue of elves, then higher, and faster, as she had on the steppe above the Denied when the Horse People came for their blood. Father Yarvi’s eyes were hungry-bright. Mother Scaer turned her head and spat with disgust. Then Skifr made a sign above the panel with her left hand, and with her right began to press the studs in a pattern not even Koll’s sharp eyes could follow.

A green jewel above the door suddenly burned bright. There was a clunk as of bolts released. Koll took a step back, almost stumbled into Mother Scaer as the door came ajar with a breath of air like a long-sealed bottle opened. Smirking over her shoulder, Skifr hauled it wide.

Beyond was a hallway lined with racks. They reminded Koll of the ones he’d made to hold spears in the citadel of Thorlby. Upon the racks, gleaming darkly in the half-light, were elf-relics. Dozens of them. Hundreds. Hundreds upon hundreds, racks stretching away into the distance as more lights flared up, one by one.