Joe Abercrombie - Half the World

The docks were one vast riot.

Folk shoved and tugged and tore at each other, lit by garish torchlight, the crowd surging like a thing alive as fights broke out, fists and even blades flashing above the crowd. Before a gate a ring of warriors stood, dressed in odd mail like fishes’ scales, snarling at the mob and occasionally beating at them with the butts of their spears.

“Thought this was a civilized place?” muttered Brand as Rulf guided the South Wind toward a wharf.

“The most civilized place in the world,” murmured Father Yarvi. “Though that mostly means folk prefer to stab each other in the back than the front.”

“Less chance of getting blood on your fine robe that way,” said Thorn, watching a man hurry down a wharf on tiptoe holding his silken skirts above his ankles.

A huge, fat boat, timbers green with rot, was listing badly in the harbor, half its oars clear of the water, evidently far overloaded and with panicked passengers crammed at its rail. While Brand pulled in his oar two jumped-or were pushed-and tumbled flailing into the sea. There was a haze of smoke on the air and a smell of charred wood, but stronger still was the stink of panic, strong as hay-reek and catching as the plague.

“This has the feel of poor luck!” called Dosduvoi as Brand clambered onto the wharf after Thorn.

“I’m no great believer in luck,” said Father Yarvi. “Only in good planning and bad. Only in deep cunning and shallow.” He strode to a grizzled northerner with a beard forked and knotted behind his neck, frowning balefully over the loading of a ship much like theirs.

“A good day to-” the minister began.

“I don’t think so!” the man bellowed over the din. “And you won’t find many who do!”

“We’re with the South Wind, ” said Yarvi, “come down the Denied from Kalyiv.”

“I’m Ornulf, captain of the Mother Sun .” He nodded toward his weatherbeaten vessel. “Came down from Roystock two years hence. We were trading with the Alyuks in spring, and had as fine a cargo as you ever saw. Spices, and bottles, and beads, and treasures our womenfolk would’ve wept to see.” He bitterly shook his head. “We had a storehouse in the city and it was caught up in the fire last night. All gone. All lost.”

“I’m sorry for that,” said the minister. “Still, the gods left you your lives.”

“And we’re quitting this bloody place before we lose those too.”

Yarvi frowned at a particularly blood-curdling woman’s shriek. “Are things usually like this?”

“You haven’t heard?” asked Ornulf. “The Empress Theofora died last night.”

Brand stared at Thorn, and she gave a grimace and scratched at the scar on her scalp.

The news sucked a good deal of the vigor from Father Yarvi’s voice. “Who rules, then?”

“I hear her seventeen-year-old niece Vialine was enthroned as thirty-fifth Empress of the South this morning.” Ornulf snorted. “But I received no invitation to the happy event.”

“Who rules, then?” asked Yarvi, again.

The man’s eyes swiveled sideways. “For now, the mob. Folk taking it upon themselves to settle scores while the law sleeps.”

“Folk love a good score down here, I understand,” said Rulf.

“Oh, they hoard ’em up for generations. That’s how that fire got started, I hear, some merchant taking vengeance on another. I swear they could teach Grandmother Wexen a thing or two about old grudges here.”

“I wouldn’t bet on that,” muttered Father Yarvi.

“The young empress’s uncle, Duke Mikedas, is having a stab at taking charge. The city’s full of his warriors. Here to keep things calm, he says. While folk adjust.”

“To having him in power?”

Ornulf grunted. “I thought you were new here.”

“Wherever you go,” murmured the minister, “the powerful are the powerful.”

“Perhaps this duke’ll bring order,” said Brand, hopefully.

“Looks like it’d take five hundred swords just to bring order to the docks,” said Thorn, frowning toward the chaos.

“The duke has no shortage of swords,” said Ornulf, “but he’s no lover of northerners. If you’ve a license from the High King you’re among the flowers but the rest of us are getting out before we’re taxed to a stub or worse.”

Yarvi pressed his thin lips together. “The High King and I are not on the best of terms.”

“Then head north, friend, while you still can.”

“Head north now you’ll find yourself in Prince Varoslaf’s nets,” said Brand.

“He’s still fishing for crews?” Ornulf grabbed his forked beard with both fists as though he’d tear it from his jaw. “Gods damn it, so many wolves! How’s an honest thief to make a living?”

Yarvi passed him something and Brand saw the glint of silver. “If he has sense, he presents himself to Queen Laithlin of Gettland, and says her minister sent him.”

Ornulf stared down at his palm, then at Yarvi’s shrivelled hand, then up, eyes wide. “You’re Father Yarvi?”

“I am.” The line of warriors had begun to spread out from their gate, shoving folk ahead of them though there was nowhere to go. “And I have come for an audience with the empress.”

Rulf gave a heavy sigh. “Unless Theofora can hear you through the Last Door, it’ll have to be this Vialine we speak to.”

“The empress dies the very day we turn up,” Brand leaned close to mutter. “What do you think about luck now?”

Father Yarvi gave a long sigh as he watched a loaded cart heaved off the docks and into the sea, the uncoupled horse kicking out wildly, eyes rolling with terror. “I think we could use some.”

“I look like a clown,” snapped Thorn, as she wove through the teeming streets after Father Yarvi.

“No, no,” he said. “Clowns make people smile.”

He’d made her wash, and put some bitter-smelling herb in the searing water to kill off her lice, and she felt as raw under her chafing new clothes as the skinned men on the docks of Kalyiv. Safrit had clipped half her hair back to stubble, then hacked at the matted side with a bone comb but given up in disgust once she broke three teeth off it. She’d given Thorn a tunic of some blood-colored cloth with gold stitching about the collar, so fine and soft it felt as if you were wearing nothing, then when Thorn demanded her old clothes back Safrit had pointed out a heap of burning rags in the street and asked if she was sure.

Thorn might’ve been a head taller but Safrit was as irresistible as Skifr in her way and would not be denied. She had ended up with jingling silver rings on her arms and a necklace of red glass beads wound around and around her neck. The sort of things that would have made her mother clasp her hands with pride to see her daughter wearing, but had always felt as comfortable as slave’s chains to Thorn.

“People here expect a certain …” Yarvi waved his crippled hand at a group of black-skinned men whose silks were set with flashing splinters of mirror. “Theater. They will find you fascinatingly fearsome. Or fearsomely fascinating. You look just right.”

“Huh.” Thorn knew she looked an utter fool because when she finally emerged in all her perfumed absurdity Koll had sniggered, and Skifr had puffed out her cheeks, and Brand had just stared at her in silence as if he’d seen the dead walk. Thorn’s face had burned with the humiliation and had hardly stopped burning since.

A man in a tall hat gaped at her as she passed. She would have liked to show him her father’s sword but foreigners weren’t allowed to carry weapons in the First of Cities. So she leaned close and snapped her teeth at him instead, which proved more than enough armament to make him squeak in fear and scurry off.