Joe Abercrombie - Red Country

He was the one man who showed no sign of nervousness. A big Northman indeed, hair hanging about his face and mingling with a patchy fur across his shoulders. He sniffed, and calmly chewed, a plate of meat and eggs before him, a fork held clumsily in his left fist in a strangely childlike manner. His right fist held a knife in a much more practised style. It was pressed against the throat of Captain Dimbik, whose bulge-eyed face was squashed helpless into the tabletop.

Sworbreck snatched a breath. Here, if not heroism, was certainly fearlessness. He had himself published controversial material on occasion, and that took admirable strength of will, but he could scarcely understand how a man could so coolly face such odds as these. To be brave among friends was nothing. To have the world against you and pick your path regardless—there is courage. He licked his pencil to scribble out a note to that effect. The Northman looked over at him and Sworbreck noticed something gleam through the lank hair. He felt a freezing shock. The man’s left eye was made of metal, glimmering in the gloom of the benighted eatery, his face disfigured by a giant scar. The other eye held only a terrible willingness. As though he could hardly stop himself from cutting Dimbik’s throat just to find out what would happen.

‘Well, I never did!’ Cosca threw up his arms. ‘Sergeant Friendly, it’s our old companion-in-arms!’

‘Caul Shivers,’ said Friendly quietly, never taking his eyes from the Northman. Sworbreck was reasonably sure that looks cannot kill, but even so he was very glad he was not standing between them.

Without taking the blade from Dimbik’s throat, Shivers clumsily forked up some eggs, chewed as though none of those present had anything better to do, and swallowed. ‘Fucker tried to take my eggs,’ he said in a grinding whisper.

‘You unmannerly brute, Dimbik!’ Cosca righted one of the chairs and dropped into it opposite Shivers, wagging a finger in the captain’s flushed face. ‘I hope this is a lesson to you. Never take eggs from a metal-eyed man.’

Sworbreck wrote that down, although it struck him as an aphorism of limited application. Dimbik tried to speak, perhaps to make that exact point, and Shivers pressed knuckles and knife a little harder into his throat, cutting him off in a gurgle.

‘This a friend of yours?’ grunted the Northman, frowning down at his hostage.

Cosca gave a flamboyant shrug. ‘Dimbik? He’s not without his uses, but I’d hardly say he’s the best man in the Company.’

It was difficult for Captain Dimbik to make his disagreement known with the Northman’s fist pressed so firmly into his throat he could scarcely breathe, but he did disagree, and most profoundly. He was the only man in the Company with the slightest care for discipline, or dignity, or proper behaviour, and look where it had landed him. Throttled by a barbarian in a wilderness slop-house.

To make matters worse, or at any rate no better, his commanding officer appeared perfectly willing to trade carefree smalltalk with his assailant. ‘Whatever are the chances?’ Cosca was asking. ‘Running into each other after all these years, so many hundreds of miles from where we first met. How many miles, would you say, Friendly?’

Friendly shrugged. ‘Wouldn’t like to guess.’

‘I thought you went back to the North?’

‘I went back. I came here.’ Evidently Shivers was not a man to embroider the facts.

‘Came for what?’

‘Looking for a nine-fingered man.’

Cosca shrugged. ‘You could cut one off Dimbik and save yourself a search.’

Dimbik spluttered and twisted, tangled with his own sash, and Shivers ground the point of the knife into his neck and forced him helplessly back against the tabletop.

‘It’s one particular nine-fingered man I’m after,’ came his gravelly voice, without the least hint of excitement at the situation. ‘Heard a rumour he might be out here. Black Calder’s got a score to settle with him. And so have I.’

‘You didn’t see enough scores settled back in Styria? Revenge is bad for business. And for the soul, eh, Temple?’

‘So I hear,’ said the lawyer, just visible out of the corner of Dimbik’s eye. How Dimbik hated that man. Always agreeing, always confirming, always looking like he knew better, but never saying how.

‘I’ll leave the souls to the priests,’ came Shivers’ voice, ‘and the business to the merchants. Scores I understand. Fuck!’ Dimbik whimpered, expecting the end. Then there was a clatter as the Northman’s fumbled fork fell on the table, egg spattering the floor.

‘You might find that easier with both hands.’ Cosca waved at the mercenaries around the walls. ‘Gentlemen, stand down. Shivers is an old friend and not to be harmed.’ The various bows, blades and cudgels drifted gradually from readiness. ‘Do you suppose you could release Captain Dimbik now? One dies and all the others get restless. Like ducklings.’

‘Ducklings got more fight in ’em than this crowd,’ said Shivers.

‘They’re mercenaries. Fighting is the last thing on their minds. Why don’t you fall in with us? It would be just like old times. The camaraderie, the laughter, the excitement!’

‘The poison, the treachery, the greed? I’ve found I work better alone.’ The pressure on Dimbik’s neck was suddenly released. He was taking a whooping breath when he was lifted by the collar and flung reeling across the room. His legs kicked helplessly as he crashed into one of his fellows, the two of them going down tangled with a table.

‘I’ll let you know if I run into any nine-fingered men,’ said Cosca, pressing hands to knees, baring his yellowed teeth and levering himself to his feet.

‘Do that.’ Shivers calmly turned the knife that had been at the point of ending Dimbik’s life to cutting his meat. ‘And shut the door on your way out.’

Dimbik slowly stood, breathing hard, one hand to the sore graze left on his throat, glaring at Shivers. He would have greatly liked to kill this animal. Or at any rate to order him killed. But Cosca had said he was not to be harmed and Cosca, for better or worse, though mostly worse, was his commanding officer. Unlike the rest of this chaff, Dimbik was a soldier. He took such things as respect, and obedience, and procedure seriously. Even if no one else did. It was especially important that he take them seriously because no one else did. He wriggled his rumpled sash back into position, noting with disgust that the worn silk was now sullied with egg. What a fine sash it had been once. One would never know. How he missed the army. The real army, not this twisted mockery of the military life.

He was the best man in the Company, and he was treated with scorn. Given the smallest command, the worst jobs, the meanest share of the plunder. He jerked his threadbare uniform smooth, produced his comb and rearranged his hair, then strode from the scene of his shame and out into the street with the stiffest bearing he could manage.

In the lunatic asylum, he supposed, the one sane man looks mad.

Sufeen could smell burning on the air. It put him in mind of other battles, long ago. Battles that had needed fighting. Or so it seemed, now. He had gone from fighting for his country, to fighting for his friends, to fighting for his life, to fighting for a living, to… whatever this was. The men who had been trying to demolish the watchtower had abandoned the project and were sitting around it with bad grace, passing a bottle. Inquisitor Lorsen stood near them, with grace even poorer.

‘Your business with the merchant is concluded?’ asked Cosca as he came down the steps of the inn.

‘It has,’ snapped Lorsen.

‘And what discoveries?’

‘He died.’

A pause. ‘Life is a sea of sorrows.’