Joe Abercrombie - Before They Are Hanged

She lowered the bow, frowning towards the Shanka. None of them moved.

“Shit,” breathed Logen. “Bayaz is right. You are a devil.”

“Was right,” grunted Ferro. The chances were good that those creatures had him by now, and it was abundantly clear that they ate men. Luthar, and Longfoot, and Quai as well, she guessed. A shame.

But not a big one.

She shouldered her bow and crept cautiously into the cavern, keeping low, her boot crunching down in the hill of bones. She wobbled out further, arms spread wide for balance, half-walking, half-wading, up to her knees in places, bones cracking and scraping around her legs. She made it down onto the cavern floor and knelt there, staring round and licking her lips.

Nothing moved. The three Shanka lay still, dark blood pooling on the stone underneath their bodies.

“Gah!” Ninefingers tumbled down the slope, clattering splinters flying up around him, rolling over and over. He crashed down on his face in the midst of a rattling slide of bones and scrambled up. “Shit! Ugh!” He shook half a dusty rib-cage off his arm and flung it away.

“Quiet, fool!” hissed Ferro, dragging him down beside her, staring across the cavern towards a rough archway in the far wall, expecting hordes of those things to come pouring in at any moment, keen to add their bones to the rest. But nothing came. She gave him a dark look but he was too busy nursing his bruises, so she left him be and crept over to the three corpses.

They had been gathered round a leg. A woman’s leg, Ferro guessed, from the lack of hair on it. A stub of bone poked out of dry, withered flesh round the severed thigh. One of them had been going at it with a knife and it still lay nearby, the bright blade shining in the shaft of light from high above. Ninefingers stooped and picked it up.

“You can never have too many knives.”

“No? What if you fall in a river and can’t swim for all that iron?”

He looked puzzled for a moment, then he shrugged and put it carefully back down on the ground. “Fair point.”

She slipped her own blade out from her belt. “One knife will do well enough. If you know where to stick it.” She dug the blade into one of the Flatheads’ backs and started to cut out her arrow. “What are these things anyway?” She worked the shaft out, intact, and rolled the Flathead over with her boot. It stared up at her, piggy black eyes unseeing under a low, flat forehead, lips curled back from a wide maw full of bloody teeth. “They’re even uglier than you, pink.”

“Very good. They’re Shanka. Flatheads. Kanedias made them.”

“Made them?” The next arrow snapped off as she tried to twist it out.

“So Bayaz said. As a weapon, to use in a war.”

“I thought he died.”

“Seems his weapons lived on.”

The one she shot through the neck had fallen on the shaft and broken it near the head. Useless, now. “How does a man make one of these things?”

“You think I’ve got the answers? They’d come across the sea, every summer, when the ice melted, and there’d always be work fighting ’em. Lots of work.” She hacked out the last shaft, bloody but sound. “When I was young they started coming more and more often. My father sent me south, over the mountains, to get help with the fighting of ’em…” He trailed off. “Well. That’s a long story. The High Valleys are swarming with Flatheads now.”

“It hardly matters,” she grunted, standing up and sliding the two good arrows carefully back into her quiver, “as long as they die.”

“Oh, they die. Trouble is there’s always more to kill.” He was frowning down at the three dead things, frowning down hard with a cold look in his eye. “There’s nothing left now, north of the mountains. Nothing and no one.”

Ferro did not much care about that. “We need to move.”

“All back to the mud,” he growled, as though she had not spoken, his frown growing harder all the time.

She stepped up in front of his face. “You hear me? We need to move, I said.”

“Eh?” He blinked at her for a moment, then he scowled. The muscles round his jaw tightened rigid under his skin, the scars stretching and shifting, face tipped forward, eyes lost in hard shadow from the light overhead. “Alright. We move.”

Ferro frowned at him as a trickle of blood crept down from his hair and across the greasy, stubbly side of his face. He no longer looked like anyone she would trust.

“Not planning to go strange on me, are you, pink? I need you to stay cold.”

“I am cold,” he whispered.

Logen was hot. His skin prickled under his dirty clothes. He felt strange, dizzy, his head full of the stink of Shanka. He could hardly breathe for their smell. The hallway seemed to move under his feet, shifting before his eyes. He winced and hunched over, sweat running down his face, dripping onto the tipping stone below.

Ferro whispered something at him, but he couldn’t make sense of the words—they echoed from the walls and round his face, but wouldn’t go in. He nodded and flapped one hand at her, struggled on behind. The hallway was growing hotter and hotter, the blurry stone had taken on an orange glow. He blundered into Ferro’s back and nearly fell, crawled forwards on his sore knees, gasping hard.

There was a huge cavern beyond. Four slender columns rose up in the centre, up and up into the shifting darkness far above. Beneath them fires burned. Many fires, printing white images into Logen’s stinging eyes. Coals crackled and cracked and spat out smoke. Sparks came up in stinging showers, steam came up in hissing gouts. Globs of melted iron dripped from crucibles, spattering the ground with glowing embers. Molten metal ran through channels in the floor, striking lines of red and yellow and searing white into the black stone.

The yawning space was full of Shanka, ragged shapes moving through the boiling darkness. They worked at the fires, and the bellows, and the crucibles like men, a score of them, or more. There was a furious din. Hammers clanged, anvils rang, metal clattered, Flatheads squawked and shrieked to each other. Racks stood against the distant walls, dark racks stacked with bright weapons, steel glittering in all the colours of fire and fury.

Logen blinked and stared, head pounding, arm throbbing, the heat pressing onto his face, wondering if he could believe his eyes. Perhaps they had walked into the forge of hell. Perhaps Glustrod had opened a gate beneath the city after all. A gate to the Other Side, and they had passed through it without ever guessing.

He was breathing fast, in ragged gasps, and couldn’t make them slow, and every breath he took was full of the sting of smoke and the stink of Shanka. His eyes were bulging, his throat was burning, he could not swallow. He wasn’t sure when he had drawn the Maker’s sword, but now the orange light flashed and flickered on the bare dark metal, his right hand bunched into a fist around the grip, painful tight. He couldn’t make the fingers open. He stared at them, glowing orange and black, pulsing as if they were on fire, veins and tendons starting from the taut skin, knuckles pale with furious pressure.

Not his hand.

“We’ll have to go back,” Ferro was saying, pulling at his arm, “find another way.”

“No.” The voice was harsh as a hammer falling, rough as a whetstone turning, sharp as a drawn blade in his throat.

Not his voice.

“Get behind me,” he managed to whisper, grabbing hold of Ferro’s shoulder and dragging himself past her.

There could be no going back now…

…and he could smell them. He tipped his head up and sucked in hot air through his nose. His head was full of the reek of them and that was good. Hatred was a powerful weapon, in the right hands. The Bloody-Nine hated everything. But his oldest-buried, and his deepest-rooted, and his hottest-burning hatred, that was for the Shanka.