Joe Abercrombie - Half a King

“Talk only makes problems.” Nothing lifted the sword. “Steel is always the answer.” And he spun it in his hand so the blade caught the light and danced red and white and yellow and all the colors of fire. “Steel does not flatter or compromise. Steel tells no lies.”

“Just give me a chance!” whined Trigg, water pouring over the sides of the ship now, flooding among the benches.

“Why?”

“I’ve got dreams! I’ve got plans! I’ve got-”

With a hollow click the sword split Trigg’s skull down to his nose. His mouth kept making words for a moment, but no breath came to give them sound. He flopped back, kicking a little, and Yarvi tore free of his limp hand, gasping in air, and coughing, and trying to drag his collar free so he could breathe.

“Perhaps I shouldn’t,” said Nothing, twisting the sword from Trigg’s head, “but I feel much better.”

All around them men were screaming. If any guards survived they’d preferred the sea to Nothing’s sword. Some slaves were trying to clamber over their sinking benches to drier ones behind, others straining at their chains as the water surged higher and higher, others with faces only just showing, mouths sucking at the air and their eyes bulging with horror. Still others, Yarvi knew, must already be below the black surface, holding their breath for a few more moments while they struggled hopelessly at their locks.

He dropped to his hands and knees, retching, head spinning, digging at Trigg’s bloody clothes for his key, struggling not to look at his split face but catching a glimpse anyway of features distorted and fleshy pulp gleaming inside the great wound and he swallowed vomit, rooting again for the key, the wails of the trapped slaves loud in his ears.

“Leave it.” Nothing stood over him, standing far taller than Yarvi had ever imagined he might, blood-spotted sword hanging from one hand.

Yarvi blinked up at him, and then down the tipping deck towards the drowning slaves. “But they’ll die.” His voice was a tiny croak.

“Death waits for us all.”

Nothing caught Yarvi by his thrall-collar, hefted him into the air and over the rail, and once again Mother Sea took him in her icy embrace.

Someone slapped Yarvi’s face. He saw the hand, heard the noise, but hardly felt it.

“Run,” hissed Jaud’s voice.

The closest Yarvi could manage was a shivering shamble, his flapping chain and his soaked clothes dragging him down with every step, the shingle clutching at his waterlogged boots. He tripped often, but whenever he fell strong arms would be there to haul him up, to haul him on into the darkness.

“Go,” grunted Rulf.

Near the snow-covered top of the beach Yarvi snatched one look back, and forced out, “Gods,” through his rattling teeth.

Mother Sea was hungrily swallowing the South Wind . The forecastle was wreathed in fire, rigging made lines of flame, the top of the mast, where Sumael used to perch, ablaze. The benches where Yarvi had struggled were flooded, tangled oars sticking up helplessly like the legs of a turned-over woodlouse. Only one corner of the aftcastle still showed above waters alive with the reflections of fire. The hold, the stores and the captain’s cabin were drowned in the silence beneath.

There were black figures on the shore, on the jetty, staring. Guards who had escaped Nothing’s sword? Slaves who had somehow got free of their chains? Yarvi wondered if he could hear faint cries above the keening of the wind. Faint screams above the crackling of the flames. There was no way to know who luck had saved from that ordeal of fire and water, who was living and who dead, and Yarvi was too cold to be glad he had survived one more disaster, let alone to be sad that anyone else had not. No doubt the regrets would come soon enough.

If he lived out the night.

“Move,” said Sumael.

They bundled him over the crest and he tumbled down the far side, came to rest on his back in a drift, skin on fire with the cold, each icy gasp like a knife in his throat. He saw Rulf’s broad face with a glimmer of orange down one cheek, Sumael’s gaunt and twitching in the light of Father Moon.

“Leave me,” he tried to say, but his mouth was too numb to make the words, his teeth chilled to the roots, and all that came was a weak puff of smoke.

“We go together,” said Sumael. “Wasn’t that the deal?”

“I thought it was finished when Trigg started throttling me.”

“Oh, you won’t wriggle out of it that easily.” She caught him by his crooked wrist. “Get up.”

He had been betrayed by his own family, his own people, and found loyalty among a set of slaves who owed him nothing. He was so pathetically glad of it he wanted to weep. But he had a feeling he would need his tears later.

With Sumael’s help he managed to get up. With Rulf’s and Jaud’s to flounder on, hardly thinking about the course except to keep the sinking South Wind somewhere at his back. The icy wetness squelched in his boots, the wind cut through his soaked and chafing clothes as though he wore nothing.

“Did you have to pick the coldest place the gods have made for your escape?” growled Rulf. “And the coldest time of year?”

“I had a better plan.” Sumael sounded less than delighted with the total ruin of it, too. “But it sunk with the South Wind .”

“Plans must sometimes bend with circumstance,” said Jaud.

“Bend?” growled Rulf. “This one’s snapped in pieces.”

“Over there.” Yarvi pointed with the frozen stub of his finger. Up ahead a stunted tree clawed at the night, each branch picked out on top in white, underneath in the faintest flickering of orange. He hardly dared believe his own eyes but he started towards it as fast as he could even so, half walking, half crawling, all desperate. At that moment, even a dream of fire seemed better than nothing.

“Wait!” hissed Sumael, “we don’t know who-”

“We don’t care,” said Rulf, floundering past.

The fire had been built in a hollow beneath that twisted tree where there was some shelter from the wind, the fragments of a broken crate carefully arranged, the smallest flame flickering in their midst. Hunched over it, coaxing it into life with his smoking breath, was Ankran.

Had Yarvi made the choice of who to save Ankran’s name would have been far from the first on his lips. But freeing Rulf and Jaud meant freeing their oarmate, and Yarvi would have thrown himself at Odem’s feet right then had he offered warmth. He flopped onto his knees, holding his shaking hands towards the flames.

Jaud planted his fists on his hips. “You made it, then.”

“Some turds float,” said Rulf.

Ankran only rubbed at his crooked nose. “If my stench bothers you, you could find your own fire.”

A hatchet slid silently from Sumael’s sleeve, the dangling blade gleaming. “I like this one.”

The ex-storekeeper shrugged. “Then far be it from me to turn the desperate away. Welcome one and all to my mansion!”

Sumael had already shinned up the frozen rocks to the tree and neatly lopped off a branch. Now she wedged it in the ground so its twigs were towards the fire. She snapped her fingers at Yarvi. “Get your clothes off.”

“Romance yet survives!” said Rulf, fluttering his lashes at the sky.

Sumael ignored him. “Wet clothes will kill you in the night sure as any enemy.”

Now the cold was loosening its grip Yarvi was feeling his bruises-every muscle aching and his head sore and his neck throbbing from Trigg’s hands. Even had he wanted to, he lacked the strength to object. He peeled off his soaked clothes, some of the hems already stiff with ice, and huddled as close to the fire as he dared, near naked but for collar and chain.