Jonathan Strahan - The Best Science Fiction & Fantasy of the Year Volume 5 An anthology of stories

Craw frowned round. He wasn’t sure if he’d taken such a pronounced dislike to Raubin ’cause he was the one that brought the jobs and the jobs were usually cracked, or if he’d taken such a pronounced dislike to Raubin ’cause the man was a weasel-faced arsehole. Bit of both, maybe. “The word is ‘specific,’ half-head.”

“Got my meaning, no? Village in a fork in the river, she said, south o’ the fens, three halls, biggest one with uprights carved like fox heads.”

“Aaaah.” Craw snapped his fingers. “They’re meant to be foxes.”

“Fox Clan, these crowd.”

“Are they?”

“So she said.”

“And this thing we’ve got to bring her. What sort of a thing is it, exactly?”

“Well, it’s a thing,” said Raubin.

“That much we know.”

“Sort of, this long, I guess. She didn’t say, precisely.”

“Unspecifical, was she?” asked Wonderful, grinning with every tooth.

“She said it’d have a kind of a light about it.”

“A light? What? Like a magic bloody candle?”

All Raubin could do was shrug, which wasn’t a scrap of use to no one. “I don’t know. She said you’d know it when you saw it.”

“Oh, nice.” Craw hadn’t thought his mood could drop much lower. Now he knew better. “That’s real nice. So you want me to bet my life, and the lives o’ my crew, on knowing it when I see it?” He shoved himself back off the rocks on his belly, out of sight of the village, clambered up and brushed the dirt from his coat, muttering darkly to himself, since it was a new one and he’d been taking some trouble to keep it clean. Should’ve known that’d be a waste of effort, what with the shitty jobs he always ended up in to his neck. He started back down the slope, shaking his head, striding through the trees towards the others. A good, confident stride. A leader’s stride. It was important, Craw reckoned, for a chief to walk like he knew where he was going.

Especially when he didn’t.

Raubin hurried after him, whiny voice picking at his back. “She didn’t precisely say. About the thing, you know. I mean, she don’t, always. She just looks at you, with those eyes…”He gave a shudder. “And says, get me this thing, and where from. And what with the paint, and that voice o’ hers, and that sweat o’ bloody fear you get when she looks at you…” Another shudder, hard enough to rattle his rotten teeth. “I ain’t asking no questions, I can tell you that. I’m just looking to run out fast so I don’t piss myself on the spot. Run out fast, and get whatever thing she’s after…”

“Well that’s real sweet for you,” said Craw, “except insofar as actually getting this thing.”

“As far as getting the thing goes,” mused Wonderful, splashes of light and shadow swimming across her bony face as she looked up into the branches, “the lack of detail presents serious difficulties. All manner of things in a village that size. Which one, though? Which thing, is the question.” Seemed she was in a thoughtful mood. “One might say the voice, and the paint, and the aura of fear are, in the present case… self-defeating.”

“Oh no,” said Craw. “Self-defeating would be if she was the one who’d end up way out past the Crinna with her throat cut, on account of some blurry details on the minor point of the actual job we’re bloody here to do.” And he gave Raubin a hard glare as he strode out of the trees and into the clearing.

Scorry was sitting sharpening his knives, eight blades neatly laid out on the patchy grass in front of his crossed legs, from a little pricker no longer’n Craw’s thumb to a hefty carver just this side of a short-sword. The ninth he had in his hands, whetstone working at steel, squick, scrick, marking the rhythm to his soft, high singing. He had a wonder of a singing voice, did Scorry Tiptoe. No doubt he would’ve been a bard in a happier age, but there was a steadier living in sneaking up and knifing folk these days. A sad fact, Craw reckoned, but those were the times.

Brack-i-Dayn was sat beside Scorry, lips curled back, nibbling at a stripped rabbit bone like a sheep nibbling at grass. A huge, very dangerous sheep. The little thing looked like a toothpick in his great tattooed blue lump of a fist. Jolly Yon frowned down at him as if he was a great heap of shit, which Brack might’ve been upset by, if it hadn’t been Yon’s confirmed habit to look at everything and everyone that way. He properly looked like the least jolly man in all the North at that moment. It was how he’d come by the name, after all.

Whirrun of Bligh was kneeling on his own on the other side of the clearing, in front of his great long sword, leaned up against a tree for the purpose. He had his hands clasped in front of his chin, hood drawn down over his head and with just the sharp end of his nose showing. Praying, by the look of him. Craw had always been a bit worried by men who prayed to gods, let alone swords. But those were the times, he guessed. In bloody days, swords were worth more than gods. They certainly had ’em outnumbered. Besides, Whirrun was a valley man, from way out north and west, across the mountains near the White Sea, where it snowed in summer and no one with the slightest sense would ever choose to live. Who knew how he thought?

“Told you it was a real piss-stain of a village, didn’t I?” Never was in the midst of stringing his bow. He had that grin he tended to have, like he’d made a joke on everyone else and no one but him had got it. Craw would’ve liked to know what it was, he could’ve done with a laugh. The joke was on all of ’em, far as he could see.

“Reckon you had the right of it,” said Wonderful as she strutted past into the clearing. “Piss. Stain.”

“Well, we didn’t come to settle down,” said Craw, “we came to get a thing.”

Jolly Yon achieved what many might’ve thought impossible by frowning deeper, black eyes grim as graves, dragging his thick fingers through his thick tangle of a beard. “What sort of a thing, exactly?”

Craw gave Raubin another look. “You want to dig that one over?” The fixer only spread his hands, helpless. “I hear we’ll know it when we see it.”

“Know it when we see it? What kind of a—”

“Tell it to the trees, Yon, the task is the task.”

“And we’re here now, aren’t we?” said Raubin.

Craw sucked his teeth at him. “Brilliant fucking observation. Like all the best ones, it’s true whenever you say it. Yes, we’re here.”

“We’re here,” sang Brack-i-Dayn in his up-and-down Hillman accent, sucking the last shred o’ grease from his bone and flicking it into the bushes. “East of the Crinna where the moon don’t shine, a hundred miles from a clean place to shit, and with wild, crazy bastards dancing all around think it’s a good idea to put bones through their own faces.” Which was a little rich, considering he was so covered in tattoos he was more blue than white. There’s no style of contempt like the stuff one kind of savage has for another, Craw guessed.

“Can’t deny they’ve got some funny ideas east of the Crinna.” Raubin shrugged. “But here’s where the thing is, and here’s where we are, so why don’t we just get the fucking thing and go back fucking home?”

“Why don’t you get the fucking thing, Raubin?” growled Jolly Yon.

“’Cause it’s my fucking job to fucking tell you to get the fucking thing is why, Yon fucking Cumber.”

There was a long, ugly pause. Uglier than the child of a man and a sheep, as the hillmen have it. Then Yon talked in his quiet voice, the one that still gave Craw prickles up his arms, even after all these years. “I hope I’m wrong. By the dead, I hope I’m wrong. But I’m getting this feeling…” He shifted forward, and it was awfully clear all of a sudden just how many axes he was carrying, “like I’m being disrespected.”