Joe Abercrombie - Red Country

Then the weight was off and she saw Temple wrestling with the Ghost, both gripping a red knife and she clambered up, slow as corn growing, fumbled her sword free and took a step through the rocking world and stabbed the Ghost, realised it was Temple she’d stabbed they were so tangled. She caught the Ghost around the throat and clutched him close and pushed the sword into his back, dragged at it and shoved at it, scraping on bone until she had it all the way into him, hand slippery hot.

Arrows fluttered down, gentle as butterflies, and fell among the cattle and they snorted their upset, some feathered and bloodied. They jostled unhappily at each other and one of Gentili’s old cousins knelt on the ground with two arrows in his side, one dangling broken.

‘There! There!’ And she saw something slithering in under a wagon, a clawing hand, and she stomped on it with her boot and nearly fell, and one of the miners was beside her hacking with a shovel and some of the whores stabbing at something with spears, screaming and stabbing like they were chasing a rat.

Shy caught sight of a gap between the wagons and beyond the Ghosts flooding up on foot in a gibbering crowd, and she heard Temple breathe something in some tongue of his own and a woman near her moan—or was it her voice? The heart went out of her and she took a cringing step back, as though an extra stride of mud would be a shield, all thoughts of standing far in a vanished past as the first Ghost loomed up, an antique greatsword brown with rust clutched in painted fists and a man’s skull worn over its face as a mask.

Then with a roar that was half a laugh Lamb was in their midst, twisted face a grinning mockery of the man she knew, more horrible to her than any mask a Ghost might wear. His swung sword was a blur and the skull-face burst in a spray of black, body sagging like an empty sack. Savian was stabbing from a wagon with a spear, stabbing into the shrieking mass and Crying Rock beating with her club and others cutting at them and mouthing curses in every language in the Circle of the World, driving them back, driving them out. Lamb swung again and folded a ragged shape in half, kicked the corpse away, opened a great wound in a back, white splinters in red, hacking and chopping and he lifted a wriggling Ghost and dashed its head against the rim of a barrel. Shy knew she should help but instead she sat down on a wagon-wheel and was sick while Temple watched her, lying on his side, clutching at his rump where she’d stabbed him.

She saw Corlin stitching up a cut in Majud’s leg, thread in her teeth, cool as ever though with sleeves red speckled to the elbow from the wounds she’d tended. Savian was already shouting out, voice gravelly hoarse, to close up the wagons, plug that gap, toss the bodies out, show ’em they were ready for more. Shy didn’t reckon she was ready for more. She sat with hands braced against her knees to stop everything from shaking, blood tickling at the side of her face, sticky in her hair, staring at the corpse of the Ghost she’d killed.

They were just men, like Savian said. Now she got a proper look, she saw this one was a boy no older than Leef. No older than Leef had been. Five of the Fellowship were killed. Gentili’s cousin shot with arrows, and two of Buckhorm’s children found under a wagon with their ears cut off, and one of the whores had been dragged away and no one knew how or when.

There weren’t many who didn’t have some cuts or scrapes and none who wouldn’t start when they heard a wolf howl for all their days. Shy couldn’t make her hands stop trembling, ear burning where the Ghost had made a start at claiming it for a prize. She wasn’t sure whether it was just a nick or if her ear was hanging by a flap and hardly dared find out.

But she had to get up. She thought of Pit and Ro out in the far wilderness, scared as she was, and that put the heat into her and got her teeth gritted and her legs moving and she growled as she dragged herself up onto Majud’s wagon.

She’d half-expected the Ghosts would have vanished, drifted away like smoke on the wind, but they were there, still of this world and this time even if Shy could hardly believe it, milling in chaos or rage away across the grass, singing and wailing to each other, steel still winking.

‘Kept your ears, then?’ asked Sweet, and frowned as he pressed his thumb against the cut and made her wince. ‘Just about.’

‘They’ll be coming again,’ she muttered, forcing herself to look at those nightmare shapes.

‘Maybe, maybe not. They’re just testing us. Figuring whether they want to give us a proper try.’

Savian clambered up beside him, face set even harder and eyes even narrower than usual. ‘If I was them I wouldn’t stop until we were all dead.’

Sweet kept staring out across the plain. Seemed he was a man made for that purpose. ‘Luckily for us, you ain’t them. Might look a savage but he’s a practical thinker, your average Ghost. They get angry quick but they hold no grudges. We prove hard to kill, more’n likely they’ll try to talk. Get what they can by way of meat and money and move on to easier pickings.’

‘We can buy our way out of this?’ asked Shy.

‘Ain’t much God’s made can’t be bought out of if you’ve got the coin,’ said Sweet, and added in a mutter, ‘I hope.’

‘And once we’ve paid,’ growled Savian, ‘what’s to stop them following on and killing us when it suits?’

Sweet shrugged. ‘You wanted predictable, you should’ve stayed in Starikland. This here is the Far Country.’

And at that moment the axe-scarred door of Lestek’s wagon banged open and the noted actor himself struggled out, in his nightshirt, rheumy eyes wild and sparse white hair in disarray. ‘Bloody critics!’ he boomed, shaking an empty can at the distant Ghosts.

‘It will be all right,’ Temple said to Buckhorm’s son. His second son, he thought. Not one of the dead ones. Of course not one of them, because it would not be all right for them, they already had lost everything. That thought was unlikely to comfort their brother, though, so Temple said, ‘It will be all right,’ again, and tried to make it earnest, though the painful pounding of his heart, not to mention of his wounded buttock, made his voice wobble. It sounds funny, a wounded buttock. It is not.

‘It will be all right,’ he said, as if the emphasis made it a cast-iron fact. He remembered Kahdia saying the same to him when the siege had begun, and the fires burned all across Dagoska, and it was painfully clear that nothing would be all right. It had helped, to know that someone had the strength to tell the lie. So Temple squeezed the shoulder of Buckhorm’s second son and said, ‘It… will be… all right,’ his voice surer this time, and the boy nodded, and Temple felt stronger himself, that he could give strength to someone else. He wondered how long that strength would last when the Ghosts came again.

Buckhorm thrust his shovel into the dirt beside the graves. He still wore his old chain-mail shirt, still with the buckles done up wrong so it was twisted at the front, and he wiped his sweaty forehead with the back of his hand and left a smear of dirt across it.

‘It’d mean a lot to us if you’d suh… say something.’

Temple blinked at him. ‘Would it?’ But perhaps worthwhile words could come from worthless mouths, after all.

The great majority of the Fellowship were busy strengthening the defences, such as they were, or staring at the horizon while they chewed their fingernails bloody, or too busy panicking about the great likelihood of their own deaths to concern themselves with anyone else’s. In attendance about the five mounds of earth were Buckhorm, his stunned and blinking wife and their remaining brood of eight, who ranged from sorrow to terror to uncomprehending good humour; two of the whores and their pimp, who had been nowhere to be seen during the attack but had at least emerged in time to help with the digging; Gentili and two of his cousins; and Shy, frowning down at the heaped earth over Leef ’s grave, shovel gripped white-knuckle hard in her fists. She had small hands, Temple noticed suddenly, and felt a strange welling of sympathy for her. Or perhaps that was just self-pity. More than likely the latter.