Joe Abercrombie - The Blade Itself

Jezal watched the King slowly take his hand from his face and lean down toward his Lord Chamberlain. “When are the Northmen getting here?” he whispered.

Logen breathed in deep, enjoying the unfamiliar feel of the cool breeze on his fresh-shaved jaw, and took in the view. It was the beginning of a clear day. The dawn mist was almost gone, and from the balcony outside Logen’s room, high up on the side of one of the towers of the library, you could see for miles. The great valley was spread out before him, split into stark layers. On top was the grey and puffy white of the cloudy sky. Then there was the ragged line of black crags that ringed the lake, and the dim brown suggestion of others beyond. Next came the dark green of the wooded slopes, then the thin, curving line of grey shingle on the beach. All was repeated in the still mirror of the lake below—another, shadowy world, upside down beneath his own.

Logen looked down at his hands, fingers spread out on the weathered stone of the parapet. There was no dirt, no dried blood under his cracked fingernails. They looked pale, soft, pinkish, strange. Even the scabs and scrapes on his knuckles were mostly healed. It was so long since Logen had been clean that he’d forgotten what it felt like. His new clothes were coarse against his skin, robbed of its usual covering of dirt and grease and dry sweat.

Looking out at the still lake, clean and well fed, he felt a different man. For a moment he wondered how this new Logen might turn out, but the bare stone of the parapet stared back at him where his missing finger used to be. That could never heal. He was Ninefingers still, the Bloody-Nine, and always would be. Unless he lost any more fingers. He did smell better though, that had to be admitted.

“Did you sleep well, Master Ninefingers?” Wells was in the doorway, peering out onto the balcony.

“Like a baby.” Logen didn’t have the heart to tell the old servant that he’d slept outside. The first night he’d tried the bed, rolling and wriggling, unable to come to terms with the strange comfort of a mattress and the unfamiliar warmth of blankets. Next he’d tried the floor. That had been an improvement. But the air had still seemed close, flat, stale. The ceiling had hung over him, seeming to creep ever lower, threatening to crush him with the weight of stone above. It was only when he’d lain down on the hard flags of the balcony, with his old coat spread over him and just the clouds and the stars above, that sleep had come. Some habits are hard to break.

“You have a visitor,” said Wells.

“Me?”

Malacus Quai’s head appeared around the door frame. His eyes were a little less sunken, the bags underneath them a little less dark. There was some colour to his skin, and some flesh on his bones. He no longer looked like a corpse, just gaunt and sick, as he had done when Logen first met him. He guessed that was about as healthy as Quai ever looked.

“Hah!” laughed Logen. “You survived!”

The apprentice gave a series of tired nods as he shambled across the room. He was swathed in a thick blanket which trailed on the floor and made it difficult for him to walk properly. He shuffled out of the door to the balcony and stood there, sniffing and blinking in the chill morning air.

Logen was more pleased to see him than he’d expected. He clapped him on the back like an old friend, perhaps a little too warmly. The apprentice stumbled, blanket tangled round his feet, and would have fallen if Logen hadn’t put out an arm to steady him.

“Still not quite in fighting shape,” muttered Quai, with a weak grin.

“You look a deal better than when I last saw you.”

“So do you. You lost the beard I see, and the smell too. A few less scars and you’d look almost civilised.”

Logen held his hands up. “Anything but that.”

Wells ducked through the doorway into the bright morning light. He had a roll of cloth and a knife in his hand. “Could I see your arm, Master Ninefingers?”

Logen had almost forgotten about the cut. There was no new blood on the bandage, and when he unwound it there was a long, red-brown scab underneath, running almost all the way from wrist to elbow, surrounded by fresh pink skin. It hardly hurt any more, just itched. It crossed two other, older scars. One, a jagged grey effort near his wrist, he thought he might have got in the duel with Threetrees, all those years ago. Logen grimaced as he remembered the battering they’d given each other. The second scar, fainter, higher up, he wasn’t sure about. Could’ve come from anywhere.

Wells bent down and tested the flesh round the wound while Quai peered cautiously over his shoulder. “It’s mending well. You’re a fast healer.”

“Lots of practice.”

Wells looked up at Logen’s face, where the cut on his forehead had already faded to one more pink line. “I can see. Would it be foolish to advise you to avoid sharp objects in the future?”

Logen laughed. “Believe it or not, I always did my best to avoid them in the past. But they seem to seek me out, despite my efforts.”

“Well,” said the old servant, cutting off a fresh length of cloth and winding it carefully round Logen’s forearm, “I hope this is the last bandage you ever need.”

“So do I,” said Logen, flexing his fingers. “So do I.” But he didn’t think it would be.

“Breakfast will be ready soon.” And Wells left the two of them alone on the balcony.

They stood there in silence for a moment, then the wind blew up cold from the valley. Quai shivered and pulled his blanket tight around him. “Out there… by the lake. You could have left me. I would have left me.”

Logen frowned. Time was he’d have done it and never given it a second thought, but things change. “I’ve left a lot of people, in my time. Reckon I’m sick of that feeling.”

The apprentice pursed his lips and looked out at the valley, the woods, the distant mountains. “I never saw a man killed before.”

“You’re lucky.”

“You’ve seen a lot of death, then?”

Logen winced. In his youth, he would have loved to answer that very question. He could have bragged, and boasted, and listed the actions he’d been in, the Named Men he’d killed. He couldn’t say now when the pride had dried up. It had happened slowly. As the wars became bloodier, as the causes became excuses, as the friends went back to the mud, one by one. Logen rubbed at his ear, felt the big notch that Tul Duru’s sword had made, long ago. He could have stayed silent. But for some reason, he felt the need to be honest.

“I’ve fought in three campaigns,” he began. “In seven pitched battles. In countless raids and skirmishes and desperate defences, and bloody actions of every kind. I’ve fought in the driving snow, the blasting wind, the middle of the night. I’ve been fighting all my life, one enemy or another, one friend or another. I’ve known little else. I’ve seen men killed for a word, for a look, for nothing at all. A woman tried to stab me once for killing her husband, and I threw her down a well. And that’s far from the worst of it. Life used to be cheap as dirt to me. Cheaper.

“I’ve fought ten single combats and I won them all, but I fought on the wrong side and for all the wrong reasons. I’ve been ruthless, and brutal, and a coward. I’ve stabbed men in the back, burned them, drowned them, crushed them with rocks, killed them asleep, unarmed, or running away. I’ve run away myself more than once. I’ve pissed myself with fear. I’ve begged for my life. I’ve been wounded, often, and badly, and screamed and cried like a baby whose mother took her tit away. I’ve no doubt the world would be a better place if I’d been killed years ago, but I haven’t been, and I don’t know why.”