Joe Abercrombie - Half the World

Everyone’s got a plan until they start bleeding and she was bleeding now. Her leg was hot with it, her face sticky with it. No plans any more. She snorted and blew a red mist.

She caught the grip and dragged the dagger out of her face. Came out easy enough. Might have been a tooth came with it, though. Gods, she was dizzy. Her leg had stopped throbbing. Just numb. Numb and wet and her knee trembling. She could hear it flapping inside her blood-soaked trousers.

Drowsy.

She shook her head, trying to shake the dizziness out but it only made things worse, the blurry gardens tipping one way then back the other.

Duke Mikedas had drawn his sword, was dragging the corpse of the thick-necked man away so he could get at the empress.

Thorn waved the knife around but it was so heavy. As if there was an anvil hanging off the point. The torches flashed and flickered and danced.

“Come on,” she croaked, but her tongue was all swollen, couldn’t get the words around it.

The Vansterman smiled as he herded her back toward the fountain.

She tripped, clutched at something, knee buckling, just staying upright.

Kneeling in water. Fish flitting in the darkness.

Vialine screamed again. Her voice was getting hoarse from it.

The Vansterman wafted his ax back and forward and the big blade caught the light and left orange smears across Thorn’s blurred sight.

The empress said don’t kneel but she couldn’t get up.

She could hear her own breath, wheezing, wheezing.

Didn’t sound too good.

Gods, she was tired.

“Brand,” she mumbled.

He came up the steps running.

Caught a glimpse of a darkened garden, a path of white stones between flowering trees, and statues, and dead men scattered in the shadows about a torchlit fountain-

He saw Thorn kneeling in it, clutching at wet stone carved like snakes, a dagger in her other hand. Her face was tattered red and her clothes torn and stuck to her dark and the water pink with blood.

A man stood over her with an ax in his hand. The Vansterman from the market.

Brand made a sound like a boiling kettle. A sound he never made before and never heard a man make.

He tore down that path like a charging bull and as the Vansterman turned, eyes wide, Brand caught him, snatched him off his feet like the north gale snatches up a leaf and rammed him at a full sprint into a statue.

They hit it so hard the world seemed to shake. So hard it rattled Brand’s teeth in his head. So hard the statue broke at the waist and the top fell in dusty chunks across the grass.

Brand might’ve heard the Vansterman’s shattered groan if it wasn’t for the blood pounding in his skull like Mother Sea on a storm day, blinding him, deafening him. He seized the Vansterman’s head with both hands and rammed it into the marble pedestal, two times, three, four, chips of stone flying until his skull was bent and dented and flattened and Brand flung him down ruined onto the path.

Thorn was slumped against the fountain, her face all the wrong colors, skin waxy pale and streaked with blood and her torn cheeks and her mouth and her chin all clotted black.

“Stay back!” someone shrieked. An older man in a gilded breastplate with a sheen of sweat across his face. He had the Empress Vialine about the neck, a jewelled sword to her throat, but it was too long for the task. “I am Duke Mikedas!” he bellowed, as if the name was a shield.

But a name’s just a name. Brand’s lips curled back and he took a step forwards, the growling in his throat hot as dragon’s fire, kicking a corpse out of his way.

The duke whipped the sword from Vialine’s neck and pointed it wobbling towards Brand. “I’m warning you, stay-”

The empress grabbed his hand and bit it, twisting free as he screamed. He raised his sword but Brand was on him, making that sound again, that shrieking, keening, gurgling sound, not thinking of doing good, or of standing in the light, or anything but breaking this man apart with his hands.

The sword grazed his head and bounced off his shoulder. Maybe it cut him and maybe it didn’t and Brand didn’t care. His arms closed tight about the duke like a lock snapping shut. He was a big man, but Brand once held the weight of a ship across his shoulders. He hoisted Duke Mikedas into the air as if he was made of straw.

Four charging steps he took, thudding across the dark lawn, lifting the duke higher and higher.

“You can’t-” he screeched, then Brand flung him into space. Over the stone rail he tumbled. He seemed to hang there for a moment against the dusky sky, astonished, sword still in his hand. His screech turned to a coughing gurgle and he plummeted flailing out of sight.

“God,” croaked Vialine.

There was a crunch far below as her uncle hit the ground. Then a long clatter.

Then silence.

Thorn’s eyes opened and it was dark.

The darkness beyond the Last Door?

She tried to move, and gasped at the pain.

Surely the one good thing about death was that the pain stopped?

She felt bandages across her face, remembered the jolt as Duke Mikedas’s knife punched through her mouth, gave a rusty groan, her throat dry as old bones.

She squinted toward a slit of brightness, fumbled back blankets and slowly, ever so slowly, swung her legs down, everything bruised and battered and stabbed through with cramps. She moaned as she tried to put weight on her left leg, pain catching fire in her thigh, creeping up into her back, down through her knee.

She hopped and she shuffled, clutching at the wall. Gods, the pain in her leg, but when she winced at that, gods, the pain in her face, and when she whimpered at that, gods, the pain in her chest, up her throat, in her eyes as the tears flowed, and she made it to that strip of light, the light under a door, and pawed it open.

She shuffled forward with one hand up to shield her sore eyes, like staring into the blinding sun even though it was only a single candle. A thick candle with long, jewelled pins stuck into the wax. She saw crumbling plaster, fallen clothes casting long shadows across the boards, the dark folds on a rumpled bed-

She froze. A dark-skinned back, a bare back, lean muscles shifting. She heard a slow grunting, a woman’s voice and a man’s, together, and Thorn saw a pale arm slip up that back, a long, wasted arm and on the end was a shrivelled hand with just one stump of a finger.

“Uh,” she croaked, eyes wide, and the woman’s head jerked around. Black hair across her face, and a scar through her top lip, and a notch of white tooth showing. Sumael, and with Father Yarvi underneath her.

“Uh.” Thorn couldn’t go forward, couldn’t go back, and she stared at the floor, burning with pain and embarrassment, trying to swallow but feeling as if she’d never have spit again in the aching hole of her mouth.

“You’re awake.” Father Yarvi scrambled from the bed and into his trousers.

“Am I?” she wanted to ask, but it came out, “Uh.”

“Back to bed before you set that leg bleeding.” And the minister slipped his arm around her and started helping her to hop and shuffle back toward the dark doorway.

Thorn couldn’t help glancing over her shoulder as they passed the threshold, saw Sumael stretched out naked as though nothing could be more ordinary, looking sideways at her through narrowed eyes.

“In pain?” asked Father Yarvi as he lowered her onto the bed.

“Uh,” she grunted.

Water sloshed into a cup, a spoon rattled as he mixed something in. “Drink this.”

It tasted beyond foul and her ripped mouth and her swollen tongue and her dry throat burned from it, but she fought it down, and at least she could make words afterward.