Joe Abercrombie - Red Country

Grega Cantliss, for instance.

Papa Ring looked sourly sideways. Here he was, three days late as always, slumped on Ring’s balcony as if he had no bones in him and picking his teeth with a splinter. In spite of a new suit he looked sick and old and had fresh scratches on his face and a stale smell about him. Some men use up fast. But he’d brought what he owed plus a healthy extra for the favour. That was why he was still breathing. Ring had given his word, after all.

The fighters were coming out now with an accompanying rise in the mood of the mob. Golden’s big shaved head bobbed above the crowd, a knot of Ring’s men around him clearing folks away as they headed for the theatre, old stones lit up orange in the fading light. Ring hadn’t mentioned the woman to Golden. He might be a magician with his fists but that man had a bad habit of getting distracted. So Ring had just told him to let the old man live if he got the chance, and considered that a promise kept. A man’s got to keep his word but there has to be some give in it or you’ll get nothing done.

He saw Lamb now, coming down the steps of the Mayor’s place between the ancient columns, his own entourage of thugs about him. Ring fussed with his ear again. He’d a worry the old Northman was one of those bastards you couldn’t trust to do the sensible thing. A right wild card, and Papa Ring liked to know what was in the deck. Specially when the stakes were high as this.

‘I don’t like the looks of that old bastard,’ Cantliss said.

Papa Ring frowned at him. ‘Do you know what? Neither do I.’

‘You sure Golden’ll take him?’

‘Golden’s taken everyone else, hasn’t he?’

‘I guess. Got a sad sort o’ look to him though, for a winner.’

Ring could’ve done without this fool picking at his worries. ‘That’s why I had you steal the woman, isn’t it? Just in case.’

Cantliss rubbed at his stubbly jaw. ‘Still seems a hell of a risk.’

‘One I wouldn’t have had to take if you hadn’t stole that old bastard’s children and sold ’em to the savage.’

Cantliss’ head jerked around with surprise.

‘I can add two and two,’ growled Ring, and felt a shiver like he was dirty and couldn’t clean it off. ‘How much lower can a man stoop? Selling children?’

Cantliss looked deeply wounded. ‘That’s so fucking unfair! You just said get the money by winter or I’d be a dead man. You didn’t concern yourself with the source. You want to give me the money back, free yourself of its base origins?’

Ring looked at the old box on the table, and thought about that bright old gold inside, and frowned back out into the street. He hadn’t got where he’d got by giving money back.

‘Didn’t think so.’ Cantliss shook his head like stealing children was a fine business scheme for which he deserved the warmest congratulation. ‘How was I to know this old bastard would wriggle out the long grass?’

‘Because,’ said Ring, speaking very slow and cold, ‘you should have learned by now there’s consequences when you fucking do a thing, and a man can’t wander through life thinking no further ahead than the end of his cock!’

Cantliss worked his jaw and muttered, ‘So fucking unfair,’ and Ring was forced to wonder when was the last time he’d punched a man in the face. He was sorely, sorely tempted. But he knew it would solve nothing. That’s why he’d stopped doing it and started paying other people to do it for him.

‘Are you a child yourself, to whine about what’s fair?’ he asked. ‘You think it’s fair I have to stand up for a man can’t tell a good hand of cards from a bad but still has to bet an almighty pile of money he don’t have on the outcome? You think it’s fair I have to threaten some girl’s life to make sure of a fight? How does that reflect on me, eh? How’s that for the start of my new era? You think it’s fair I got to keep my word to men don’t care a damn about theirs? Eh? What’s God-fucked fair about all that? Go and get the woman.’

‘Me?’

‘Your bloody mess I’m aiming to clean up, isn’t it? Bring her up here so our friend Lamb can see Papa Ring’s a man of his word.’

‘I might miss the start,’ said Cantliss, like he couldn’t believe he’d be inconvenienced to such an extent by a pair of very likely deaths.

‘You keep talking you’ll be missing the rest of your fucking life, boy. Get the woman.’

Cantliss stomped for the door and Ring thought he heard him mutter, ‘Ain’t fair.’

He gritted his teeth as he turned back towards the theatre. That bastard made trouble everywhere he went and had a bad end coming, and Ring was starting to hope it’d come sooner rather than later. He straightened his cuffs, and consoled himself with the thought that once the Mayor was beaten the bottom would fall right out of the henchman market and he could afford to hire himself a better class of thug. The crowd was falling silent now, and Ring reached for his ear then stopped himself, stifling another swell of nerves. He’d made sure the odds were all stacked on his side, but the stakes had never been higher.

‘Welcome all!’ bellowed Camling, greatly relishing the way his voice echoed to the very heavens, ‘To this, the historic theatre of Crease! In the many centuries since its construction it can rarely have seen so momentous an event as that which will shortly be played out before your fortunate eyes!’

Could eyes be fortunate independently of their owners? This question gave Camling an instant’s pause before he dismissed it. He could not allow himself to be distracted. This was his moment, the torchlit bowl crammed with onlookers, the street beyond heaving with those on tiptoe for a look, the trees on the valley side above even carrying cargoes of intrepid observers in their upper branches, all hanging upon his every word. Noted hotelier he might have been, but he was without doubt a sad loss to the performing arts.

‘A fight, my friends and neighbours, and what a fight! A contest of strength and guile between two worthy champions, to be humbly refereed by myself, Lennart Camling, as a respected neutral party and long-established leading citizen of this community!’

He thought he heard someone call, ‘Cockling!’ but ignored it.

‘A contest to settle a dispute between two parties over a claim, according to mining law—’

‘Get the fuck on with it!’ someone shouted.

There was a scattering of laughs, boos and jeers. Camling gave a long pause, chin raised, and treated the savages to a lesson in cultured gravity. The type of lesson he had been hoping Iosiv Lestek might administer, what a farce that had turned out to be. ‘Standing for Papa Ring, a man who needs no introduction—’

‘Why give him one, then?’ More laughter.

‘—who has forged a dread name for himself across the fighting pits, cages and Circles of the Near and Far Countries ever since he left his native North. A man undefeated in twenty-two encounters.

Glama… Golden!’

Golden shouldered his way into the Circle, stripped to the waist, his huge body smeared with grease to frustrate an opponent’s grasp, great slabs of muscle glistening white by torchlight and reminding Camling of the giant albino slugs he sometimes saw in his cellar and was irrationally afraid of. With his skull shaved, the Northman’s luxuriant moustache looked even more of an absurd affectation, but the volume of the crowd’s bellows only increased. A breathless frenzy had descended upon them and they no doubt would have cheered an albino slug if they thought it might bleed for their entertainment.

‘And, standing for the Mayor, his opponent… Lamb.’ Much less enthusiastic cheering as the second fighter stepped into the Circle to a last frantic round of betting. He was likewise shaved and greased, his body so covered with a multitude of scars that, even if he had no fame as a fighter, his familiarity with violence was not to be doubted.