Joe Abercrombie - Half a King

Jaud’s forehead wrinkled with disbelief. “You were a king’s champion?” Looking at him it was hard to imagine, but Yarvi had watched great warriors in the training square, and never seen the like of Nothing’s blade-work.

“Our flagship was aflame.” The old man’s knuckles were white about his sword’s grip as he remembered. “Roped by a dozen galleys, slick with the blood of the fallen, crawling with the soldiers of the empress when Shadikshirram and I first fought. I was tired from battle and sore with wounds and unused to the shifting deck. She played the helpless woman, and in my pride I believed her and she made me bleed. So I came to be her slave. The second time we fought I was weak from hunger, and she had steel in her hand and strong men at her back and I stood alone with only an eating knife. She made me bleed a second time, but in her pride she let me live.” His mouth twisted into that mad smile and made flecks of spit as he barked the words. “Now we shall meet a third time, and I have no pride to weigh me down, and the ground shall be of my choosing, and she shall bleed for me. Yes, Shadikshirram!”

He raised his sword high, cracked voice echoing from the bare rocks, bouncing about the valley. “The day is here! The time is now! The reckoning comes!”

“Could it come after I’m safely back in Thorlby?” asked Yarvi.

Sumael grimly tightened her belt a notch. “We have to move.”

“What have we been doing?”

“Dawdling.”

“What’s your plan?” asked Rulf.

“Kill you and leave your corpse as a peace offering?”

“Don’t think she’s come all this way for peace, do you?”

Sumael’s jaw muscles worked. “Sadly, no. My plan is to reach Vansterland ahead of them.” And she started down the slope, gravel trickling from every footstep.

The ordeal by steam was almost worse than the ordeal by ice had been. Though the snow was falling it grew hotter and hotter, and layer by layer they stripped off their jealously-hoarded clothes until they were slogging along half-naked, sweat-soaked, dust-smeared as labourers emerging from a mine. Thirst took the place of hunger, Ankran rationing out the cloudy, foul-tasting water in their two bottles more stingily than ever he had the stores on the South Wind .

There had been fear before. Yarvi could not remember the last time he had been without it. But it had been the slow fear of cold and hunger and exhaustion. Now it was a crueller spur. The fear of sharpened steel, the sharp teeth of the Banyas’ dogs, the even sharper vengeance of their owner.

They struggled on until it was so dark Yarvi could scarcely see his withered hand before his face, Father Moon and all his stars lost in the gloom, and they crawled in silence into a hollow in the rocks. He fell into an ugly mockery of sleep and was shaken awake what felt like moments later, bruised and aching at the first gray glimmer of dawn, to struggle on again with the splinters of his nightmares still niggling at him.

To keep ahead was all they thought of. The world became no bigger than the stretch of bare rock between their heels and their pursuers, a space ever shrinking. For a while Rulf dragged a pair of sheepskins after them on ropes: an old poacher’s trick to put off the dogs. The dogs were not fooled. Soon enough they were all bruised, grazed, bloodied from a hundred slips and falls, but with only one good hand Yarvi did worse than the others. Yet each time he went down Ankran was there with a steadying hand, to help him up, to help him on.

“Thanks,” said Yarvi, once he had lost count of his falls.

“You’ll get your chance to repay me,” said Ankran. “In Thorlby, if not before.”

For a moment they scrambled on in awkward silence, then Yarvi said, “I’m sorry.”

“For falling?”

“For what I did on the South Wind . For telling Shadikshirram …” He winced at the memory of the wine bottle cracking into Ankran’s head. The heel of the captain’s boot crunching into his face.

Ankran grimaced, tongue wedged into the hole in his front teeth. “What I hated most about that ship wasn’t what was done to me, but what I was made to do. No. What I chose to do.” He stopped for a moment, bringing Yarvi to a halt and looking him in the eye. “I used to think I was a good man.”

Yarvi put a hand on his shoulder. “I used to think you were a bastard. Now I’m starting to have some doubts.”

“You can weep over each other’s hidden nobility when we’re safe!” called Sumael, a black outline on a boulder above them, pointing off into the misty gray. “For now, we have to turn south. If we reach the river ahead of them we’ll need some way to cross. We won’t make a raft from stones and steam.”

“Will we make it to the river before we die of thirst?” asked Rulf, licking the last drops from one of the bottles and peering hopefully into it as though some might be stuck in there.

“Thirst.” Nothing barked out a chuckle. “It’s a Banya spear in your back you need to worry about.”

They slid down endless slopes of scree, hopped between boulders as big as houses, clambered down spills of black rock like waterfalls frozen. They crossed valleys where the ground was painful to touch it was so hot, choking steam hissing from cracks like devil’s mouths, skirting pools of bubbling water slick with many-colored oil. They toiled upward, sending stones clattering down dizzy drops, clinging with cut fingertips, Yarvi pawing at cracks with his useless hand, finally looking back from the heights …

To see those black dots through Sumael’s eyeglass still following, and always slightly closer than before.

“Do they never tire?” asked Jaud, wiping the sweat from his face. “Will they never stop?”

Nothing smiled. “They will stop when they are dead.”

“Or we are,” said Yarvi.

They heard the river before they saw it, a whisper through the woods that put a little lost spring in Yarvi’s ruined legs and a little lost hope in his aching heart. The whisper became a growl, then a surging roar as they finally burst from the trees, all filthy with sweat, dust, ash. Rulf flung himself down the shingle onto his face and started lapping up water like a dog. The rest of them were not far behind him.

When the burning thirst of a day’s hard scrambling was quenched, Yarvi sat back and stared across the river to the trees on the far side, so like the ones about them, yet so different.

“Vansterland,” muttered Yarvi. “Thank the gods!”

“Thank ’em once we’re across,” said Rulf, clean mouth and patch of beard pale in his ash-streaked face. “That doesn’t look like friendly water to this sailor.”

Nor did it to Yarvi. His relief was already turning to dread as he took in the width of the Rangheld, the steep far bank perhaps twice bowshot away, the river high with meltwater from the burning land at their backs. On the black surface patterns of frothing white showed swift currents and ripping eddies and hinted at hidden rocks, deadly as traitor’s knives.

“Can you build a raft to cross this?” he muttered.

“My father was the foremost shipwright in the First of Cities,” said Sumael, peering into the woods. “He could pick the best keel from a forest with one look.”

“Doubt we’ll have time for a carved figurehead,” said Yarvi.

“Maybe we could mount you on the front,” said Ankran.

“Six small trunks for the raft, then a larger one cut in half for crossbeams.” Sumael hurried to a nearby fir, running her hand up the bark. “This will do for one. Jaud, you hold it, I’ll chop.”

“I’ll keep watch for our old mistress and her friends.” Rulf shrugged the bow from his shoulder and turned back the way they came. “How far back do we reckon ’em now?”