Joe Abercrombie - Half the World

“Meaning not at all.”

The Prince of Kalyiv smiled, and it chilled Thorn even more than his frown. “You are known as a deep-cunning man, Father Yarvi. I am sure you need no help to sift out my meaning. You know where I sit. Between the Horse People and the great forests. Between the High King and the empress. At the crossroads of the world and with perils all about me.”

“We all have perils to contend with.”

“But a prince of Kalyiv must have friends in the east, and the west, and the north, and the south. A prince of Kalyiv thrives on balance. A prince of Kalyiv must keep a foot over every threshold.”

“How many feet do you have?”

The dog pricked up its ears and gave another growl. Varoslaf’s smile faded as slowly as melting snow. “A word of advice. Stop this talk of war, Father Yarvi. Return to Gettland and smooth the way for Father Peace, as I understand a wise minister should.”

“I and my crew are free to leave Kalyiv, great prince?”

“Force Uthil’s minister to stay against his will? That would not be politic either.”

“Then I thank you humbly for your hospitality and for your advice, well meant and gratefully received. But we cannot turn back. We must go on with all haste to the First of Cities, and seek help there.”

Thorn glanced across at Brand, and saw him swallow. To go on to the First of Cities, half the world away from home. She felt a flicker of excitement at that thought. And a flicker of fear.

Varoslaf merely snorted his disdain. “I wish you luck. But I fear you will get nothing from the empress. She has grown ever more devout in her old age, and will have no dealings with those who do not worship her One God. The only thing she hungers after more than priest-babble is spilled blood. That and elf-relics. But it would take the greatest ever unearthed as a gift to win her favor.”

“Oh, great prince, wherever would I find such a thing?” Father Yarvi bowed low, all innocence and humility.

But Thorn saw the deep-cunning smile at the corner of his mouth.

The gods knew, there’d been a stack of disappointments on that journey high as Brand’s head. Plenty of things sadly different from the tales whispered and the songs sung back in Thorlby. And plenty of things folk tended to leave out altogether.

The vast bogs about the mouth of the Denied, for one-clouds of stinging insects haunting banks of stinking sludge where they’d woken to gray mornings soaked with marshwater and bloated with itching bites.

The long coast of the Golden Sea, for another-mean little villages in mean little fences where Father Yarvi argued in strange tongues with shepherds whose faces were tanned to leather by the sun. Beaches of pebbles where the crew pitched rings of spitting torches and lay watching the night, startling at every sound, sure bandits were waiting just beyond the light.

The memory of the battle with the Horse People prowled in their wake, the face of the man Brand killed haunting his thoughts, the hammering of steel on wood finding him in his sleep.

“Your death comes!”

Jerking awake in the sticky darkness to nothing but the quick thud of his heart and the slow chirp of crickets. There was nothing in the songs about regrets.

The songs were silent on the boredom too. The oar, the oar, and the buckled shoreline grinding by, week after week. The homesickness, the worry for his sister, the weepy nostalgia for things he’d always thought he hated. Skifr’s endless barking and Thorn’s endless training and the endless beatings she gave out to every member of the crew and Brand especially. Father Yarvi’s endless answers to Koll’s endless questions about plants, and wounds, and politics, and history, and the path of Father Moon across the sky. The chafing, the sickness, the sunburn, the heat, the flies, the thirst, the stinking bodies, the worn-through seat of his trousers, Safrit’s rationing, Dosduvoi’s toothache, the thousand ways Fror got his scar, the bad food and the running arses, the endless petty arguments, the constant fear of every person they saw and, worst of all, the certain knowledge that, to get home, they’d have to suffer through every mile of it again the other way.

Yes, there’d been a stack of frustrations, hardships, hurts, and disappointments on that journey.

But the First of Cities exceeded every expectation.

It was built on a wide promontory that jutted miles out into the straits, covered from sea to sea with buildings of white stone, with proud towers and steep roofs, with lofty bridges and strong walls within strong walls. The Palace of the Empress stood on the highest point, gleaming domes clustered inside a fortress so massive it could have held the whole of Thorlby with room for two Roystocks left over.

The whole place blazed with lights, red and yellow and white, so many they tinged the blue evening clouds with welcoming pink and set a thousand thousand reflections dancing in the sea, where ships from every nation of the world swarmed like eager bees.

Perhaps they’d seen greater buildings up there on the silence of the Divine, but this was no elf-ruin but the work of men alone, no crumbling tomb to lost glories but a place of high hopes and mad dreams, bursting with life. Even this far distant Brand could hear the city’s call. A hum at the edge of his senses that set his very fingertips tingling.

Koll, who’d swarmed up the half-carved mast to cling to the yard for the best view, started flailing his arms and whooping like a madman. Safrit clutched her head below muttering, “I give up. I give up. He can plunge to his death if he wants to. Get down from there, you fool!”

“Did you ever see anything like it?” Brand whispered.

“There is nothing like it,” said Thorn, a crazy grin on a face grown leaner and tougher than ever. She had a long pale scar through the stubble on the shorn side of her head, and rings of red gold to go with the silver in her tangled hair, clipped from the coin Varoslaf had given her. A hell of an indulgence to wear gold on your head, Rulf had said, and Thorn had shrugged and said it was as good a place to keep your money as any.

Brand kept his own in a pouch around his neck. It was a new life for Rin, and he didn’t plan on losing that for anything.

“There she is, Rulf!” called Father Yarvi, clambering between the smiling oarsmen toward the steering platform. “I’ve a good feeling.”

“Me too,” said the helmsman, a cobweb of happy lines cracking the skin at the corners of his eyes.

Skifr frowned up at the wheeling birds. “Good feelings, maybe, but poor omens.” Her mood had never quite recovered from the battle on the Denied.

Father Yarvi ignored her. “We will speak to Theofora, the Empress of the South, and we will give her Queen Laithlin’s gift, and we shall see what we shall see.” He turned to face the crew, spreading his arms, tattered coat flapping in the breeze. “We’ve come a long and dangerous way, my friends! We’ve crossed half the world! But the end of the road is ahead!”

“The end of the road,” murmured Thorn as the crew gave a cheer, licking her cracked lips as if she was a drunk and the First of Cities a great jug of ale on the horizon.

Brand felt a childish rush of excitement and he splashed water from his flask all over them, spray sparkling as she slapped it away and shoved him off his sea-chest with her boot. He punched her on the shoulder, which these days was like punching a firmly-held shield, and she caught a fistful of his frayed shirt, the two of them falling in a laughing, snarling, sour-smelling wrestle in the bottom of the boat.

“Enough, barbarians,” said Rulf, wedging his foot between them and prying them apart. “You are in a civilized place, now! From here on we expect civilized behavior.”