Joe Abercrombie - Half a King

Empty at the top of its dais the Black Chair stood, in the sight of the Tall Gods, their jewelled eyes agleam. Above them, about the dome, the amber statues of the Small Gods observed the petty doings of humanity without comment, emotion or even much interest.

Odem had only ten men left and those in a sorry state, clustered about the doors as they shook faintly from blows outside. Two were trying to shore them up with spears. Two others had swept the holy offerings from a table shiny with age and were dragging it towards the entrance as a barricade. The rest sat bewildered or stood stunned, not knowing how their king could have been taken unawares by a company of rogues in the heart of his own citadel. Mother Gundring hunched beside Odem, tending to his standard-bearer’s bleeding arm.

“To the king!” he shrieked as he saw Yarvi burst in, and Odem’s men clustered about their master, raising their shields before him, weapons ready. The man with the arrow in his face had snapped it off, the bloody shaft poking from his cheek. He had been leaning groggily on his sword but now he pointed it, wobbling, towards Yarvi.

Nothing rushed up at his left shoulder, Rulf at his right, and those slaves and mercenaries who could still fight spread out about them, bristling with sharpened metal.

They edged around the Black Chair, down the steps of the dais, spitting and rasping curses in half a dozen languages. Odem urged his men forward, the space between them ten strides of stone, then eight, then six, the coming violence hanging heavy as a stormcloud in the still air of the Godshall.

Then Mother Gundring squinted towards Yarvi, and her eyes went wide. “Wait!” she screamed, beating her elf-staff upon the ground and sending crashing echoes bouncing about the dome above. “Wait!”

For a moment the men held, staring, snarling, hands tickling their weapons, and Yarvi leapt into the narrow gap of opportunity the old minister had opened for him.

“Men of Gettland!” he shouted. “You know me! I am Yarvi, son of Uthrik!” And he pointed at Odem with the one stubby finger of his left hand. “This treacherous thing tried to steal the Black Chair, but the gods will not suffer a usurper to sit upon it for long!” He dug his thumb into his chest. “The rightful king of Gettland has returned!”

“The woman’s puppet?” spat Odem at him. “The half-king? The king of cripples?”

Before Yarvi could shriek his reply he felt a strong hand on his shoulder, steering him aside. Nothing stepped past, unbuckling the strap on his helmet. “No,” he said. “The rightful king.” And he pulled it off and tossed it spinning across the floor of the Godshall with a steely clatter.

He had chopped his wild shag of hair to a short gray fuzz, shaved clean his thicket of a beard. The face revealed was all sharp angles and ruthless lines, bones broken and set harder, work- and weather-worn, beating- and battle-scarred. The beggar of twigs and string was gone, and in his place a warrior of oak and iron stood, but his eyes, deep set in hollow sockets, were the same.

Still burning with a fire at the brink of madness. Hotter than ever.

And suddenly Yarvi was no longer sure who this man was that he had traveled beside, fought beside, slept beside. No longer sure what he had brought with him into the citadel of Gettland, right to the Black Chair itself.

He blinked around him, suddenly full of doubt. The young warriors of Gettland still growled their defiance. But on the older men the sight of Nothing’s face worked a strange transformation.

Jaws dropped, blades wavered, eyes widened, even brimmed with tears, breathed oaths drifted from quivering lips. Odem had turned paler even than when he saw Yarvi. The face of a man who looks upon the end of creation.

“What sorcery is this?” whispered Rulf, but Yarvi could not say.

The elf-metal staff slipped from Mother Gundring’s limp fingers and clattered to the floor, the echoes fading into heavy silence.

“Uthil,” she whispered.

“Yes.” And Nothing turned his mad smile on Odem. “Well met, brother.”

And now the name was spoken Yarvi saw how like the two men were, and felt a chill to the tips of his fingers.

His Uncle Uthil, whose matchless skill the warriors toasted before every training, whose drowned body had never been washed from the bitter sea, whose howe above the wind-blasted beach stood empty.

His Uncle Uthil had been standing at his side for months.

His Uncle Uthil stood before him now.

“Here is the reckoning,” said Nothing. Said Uthil. And he stepped forward, sword in hand.

“Blood cannot be shed in the Godshall!” shouted Mother Gundring.

Uthil only smiled. “The gods love nothing better than blood, my minister. What better place to shed it?”

“Kill him!” shrieked Odem, no calm in his voice now, but no one rushed to obey. No one so much as spoke a word. “I am your king!”

But power can be a brittle thing. Slowly, carefully, as though they thought with one mind, the warriors backed away from him to form a crescent.

“The Black Chair is a lonely seat indeed,” said Uthil, glancing up at it, empty on its dais.

The muscles in Odem’s jaw worked as he gazed at the circle of grim faces ranged about him, at those of his guards and those of the hirelings, at Mother Gundring’s and at Yarvi’s, and finally at Uthil’s, so like his own, but passed through twenty years of horrors. He snorted, and spat on the holy stones at his brother’s feet.

“So be it, then.” And Odem snatched his shield from its bearer, gilded and with winking jewels set in its rim, and barged the man away.

Rulf offered out his shield but Nothing shook his head. “Wood has its place, but here steel is the answer.” And he raised his blade, the same simple one he had carried through the wastes, plain steel polished to a frosty shine.

“You have been so long away, brother .” Odem lifted his sword, one forged for Yarvi’s father, pommel of ivory and hilt of gold, runes of blessing worked into the mirror-bright blade. “Let us embrace.”

He darted forward, so scorpion-quick that Yarvi gave a gasp and stumbled back a pace himself, twitching this way and that as he followed his uncles’ movements. Odem thrust, and thrust again, hissed as he slashed high and low with blows to cleave a man in two. But fast and deadly as he was, his brother was faster. Like smoke on a mad wind Uthil drifted, twisted, reeled, while the bright steel carved the air but gave him not a kiss.

“Do you remember when we last saw each other?” Uthil asked as he danced away. “In that storm, at the prow of our father’s ship? Laughing into the gale with my brothers at my back?”

“You never cared for anything but your laughter!” Odem rushed in again, chopping left and right and making the watchful guards lurch back. But Uthil wheeled to safety, not even raising his sword.

“Is that why you and Uthrik together threw me into the bitter sea? Or was it so that he could steal my birthright? And you in turn could steal it from him?”

“The Black Chair is mine!” Odem’s sword was a shining arc over his head. But Uthil caught it on his own with a ringing crash. He caught Odem’s shield as well and for a moment Yarvi’s two uncles were locked together, blades grating. Then Uthil dipped his shoulder and jerked the shield upwards, the rim cracking into Odem’s jaw. He twisted his other shoulder and flung Odem away, heels kicking at the stones, falling in a tangle against the men behind him.

They pushed him off and Odem shrank behind his shield, but Uthil only stood his ground in the center of the circle. “Even though my empty howe stands above the beach, I did not drown. I was plucked from the sea by slavers, and made to fight in a pit. And in those years in the darkness, for the amusement of blood-drunk animals, I killed ninety-nine men.” Uthil pressed a finger to his ear, and for a moment looked like Nothing once again. “I hear them whisper, sometimes. Can you hear them whisper, Odem?”