Joe Abercrombie - Before They Are Hanged

They all looked at each other. It was a terrible risk, but Dogman had no doubts it was worth the trying. Wasn’t a one of them hadn’t dreamed of sending Bethod back to the mud.

“Put a blade in him, the bastard,” muttered Tul, and he had a smile right across his face.

“Uh,” grunted Grim.

“That’s a task worth doing,” hissed Dow. “That’s real work!”

Dogman nodded, looking down at all them fires. “No doubt.” Noble work. Work for Named Men like them, or like they used to be, maybe. There’d be some songs about that, alright. Dogman’s blood was rushing at the thought, skin prickling on his hands, but Threetrees was having none of it.

“No. We can’t risk it. We got to go back and tell the Union. Tell ’em they got guests coming. Bad guests, and in numbers.” He tugged at his beard, and Dogman could tell he didn’t like it, backing off. None of ’em did, but they knew he was right, even Dow. Chances were they’d never get to Bethod, and if they did they’d never get out.

“We got to go back,” said Dogman.

“Fair enough,” said Dow. “We go back. Shame though.”

“Aye,” said Threetrees. “Shame.”

“By the dead.”

Ferro said nothing, but for the first time since Logen met her, the scowl had slipped off. Her face was slack, mouth hanging slightly open. Luthar, on the other hand, was grinning like a fool.

“You ever see anything like that?” he shouted over the noise, pointing out at it with a trembling hand.

“There is nothing else like that,” said Bayaz.

Logen had to admit that he’d been wondering what all the fuss was about when it came to crossing a river. Some of the bigger ones in the North could be a problem, especially in the wrong season and with a lot of gear to carry. But if there was no bridge, you found a good ford, held your weapons over your head, and sloshed across. Might take a while for your boots to dry out, and you had to keep your eyes well opened for an ambush, but otherwise there was nothing much to fear from a river. Good place to fill your water-skin.

Filling your skin at the Aos would have been a dangerous business, at least without a hundred strides of rope.

Logen had once stood on the cliffs near Uffrith, and watched the waves crash against the rocks far below, the sea stretching away, grey and foaming out of sight. A dizzy, and a humbling, and a worrying place to stand. The feeling at the brink of the great river’s canyon was much the same, except that a quarter mile away or so another cliff rose up from the water. The far bank, if you could use the word about a towering rock face.

He shuffled up gingerly to the very edge, prodding at the soft ground with the toes of his boots, and peered over the brink. Not a good idea. The red earth overhung slightly, bound up with white grass roots, and then the jagged rocks dropped away, almost sheer. Where the frothing water slapped against them, far below, it sent great plumes of bright spray into the air, clouds of damp mist that Logen could almost feel on his face. Tufts of long grass clung to the cracks and the ledges, and birds flitted between them, hundreds of small white birds. Logen could just make out their twittering calls over the mighty rumble of the river.

He thought on being dropped into that thundering weight of dark water—sucked, and whirled, and ripped around like a leaf in the storm. He swallowed, and shuffled cautiously back from the edge, looking around for something to cling on to. He felt tiny, and weightless, as if a strong gust of wind might snatch him away. He could almost feel the water moving through his boots, the surging, rolling, unstoppable power of it, making the very earth tremble.

“So you can see why a bridge might be such a good idea!” shouted Bayaz in his ear.

“How can you even build a bridge across that?”

“At Aostum the river splits in three, and the canyon is much less deep. The Emperor’s architects built islands, and made their bridges of many small arches. Even so, it took them twelve years to build. The bridge at Darmium is the work of Kanedias himself, a gift to his brother Juvens when they were yet on good terms. It crosses the river in a single span. How he did it, none now can say.” Bayaz turned for the horses. “Get the others, we should keep moving!”

Ferro was already walking back from the brink. “So much rain.” She looked over her shoulder, frowned and shook her head.

“Don’t get rivers like that where you come from, eh?”

“Out in the Badlands, water is the most precious thing you can have. Men kill over a bottle of it.”

“That’s where you were born? The Badlands?” A strange name for a place, but it sounded about right for her.

“There are no births in the Badlands, pink. Only deaths.”

“Harsh land, eh? Where were you born, then?”

She scowled. “What do you care?”

“Just trying to be friendly.”

“Friends!” she sneered, brushing past him towards the horses.

“Why? You got so many out here you couldn’t use another?”

She stopped, half turned, and looked at him through narrowed eyes. “My friends don’t last, pink.”

“Nor do mine, but I reckon I’ll take the risk if you will.”

“Alright,” she said, but there was nothing friendly in her face. “The Gurkish conquered my home when I was a child, and they took me for a slave. They took all the children.”

“A slave?”

“Yes, fool, a slave! Bought and sold like meat by the butcher! Owned by someone else, and they do as they please with you, like they would with a goat, or a dog, or the dirt in their gardens! That what you want to know, friend?”

Logen frowned. “We don’t have that custom in the North.”

“Ssss,” she hissed, lip curling with scorn. “Good for fucking you!”

The ruin loomed over them. A forest of shattered pillars, a maze of broken walls, the ground around it strewn with fallen blocks as long as a man was tall. Crumbling windows and empty doorways yawned like wounds. A ragged black outline, chopped out from the flying clouds like a giant row of broken teeth.

“What city was this?” asked Luthar.

“No city,” said Bayaz. “At the height of the Old Time, at the greatest extent of the Emperor’s power, this was his winter palace.”

“All this?” Logen squinted at the sprawling wreck. “One man’s house?”

“And not even the whole year round. Most of the time, the court would stay in Aulcus. In winter, when the cold snows swept down off the mountains, the Emperor would bring his retinue here. An army of guardsmen, of servants, of cooks, of officials, of princes, and children, and wives, making their way across the plain ahead of the cold winds, taking up residence here for three short months in the echoing halls, the beautiful gardens, the gilded chambers.” Bayaz shook his bald head. “In times long past, before the war, this place glittered like the sea beneath the rising sun.”

Luthar sniffed. “So Glustrod tore it down, I suppose?”

“No. It was not in that war, but another that it fell, many years later. A war fought by my order, after the death of Juvens, against his eldest brother.”

“Kanedias,” muttered Quai, “the Master Maker.”

“A war just as bitter, just as brutal, just as merciless as the one before. And even more was lost. Juvens and Kanedias both, in the end.”

“Not a happy family,” muttered Logen.

“No.” Bayaz frowned up at the mighty wreckage. “With the death of the Maker, the last of the four sons of Euz, the Old Time ended. We are left only with the ruins, and the tombs, and the myths. Little men, kneeling in the long shadows of the past.”

Ferro stood up in her stirrups. “There are riders,” she barked, staring off at the horizon. “Forty or more.”