Джо Аберкромби - A Little Hatred - Book One (The Age of Madness)

‘Sorry!’

He nearly fell as his bare foot slid on the other side, tottered a few steps and was charging on, through the Northmen’s campsite, smoky fires and the smell of cooking and someone singing in a rumbling bass as he pissed into the trees.

‘Where’s Isern-i-Phail?’ he screeched. ‘Isern-i-Phail!’

He followed a pointed hand towards a tent, hardly even knowing whose hand it was, lashed at the flap and ripped his way through.

He’d half-expected to find her bent over a cauldron, but the hillwoman was sitting in her tent in a tattered Gurkish dressing gown, her bandaged leg propped on an old crate, a smoking chagga pipe in one hand and a jug of last night’s ale in the other.

She glanced at him as he tried to catch his breath. ‘I rarely turn down a half-naked man first thing in the morning, but—’

‘She’s having a fit!’ he wheezed out.

Isern dropped the pipe in the jug with a hiss, hauled her injured leg off the crate and stiffly stood. ‘Show me.’

There she lay, not thrashing like she had been but still squirming and making that wheezing moan, spit around the dowel turned to froth and flecked across her twisted face. She must’ve caught her head against the wall, there was blood in her hair.

‘By the dead,’ grunted Isern, kneeling beside her and putting a hand on her shoulder. ‘Help me hold her, then!’ And Leo knelt, too, one hand on Rikke’s arm and one on her knee while Isern rooted through her hair to look at the cut. It was then he realised Rikke was stark naked and he wasn’t far off.

‘We were just …’ Maybe Antaup could’ve pulled out an innocent explanation. He’d had the practice. But Leo had never been much of a liar and this needed a true master of the art. ‘We were just …’

‘I am a woman of the world.’ Isern-i-Phail didn’t even bother to look at him. ‘I can hazard a mad guess at what you were about, boy.’ She leaned down over Rikke, wiping the froth away with her fingers, smoothing her hair back from her face. ‘Shhhh,’ she breathed. Sang it, almost. ‘Shhhhh.’

Ever so gently she held her. Ever so softly she spoke. More gently and more softly than Leo would’ve thought that hard-faced hillwoman could have.

‘Come back, Rikke. Come on back.’

Rikke gave a feeble grunt, a last flurry of twitches running through her legs and up to her shoulders. She groaned, slowly pushed the spitty dowel out of her mouth with her tongue.

‘Fuck,’ she croaked.

‘There’s my girl!’ said Isern, the edge back on her voice. Leo closed his eyes and gave a sigh of relief. She was all right. And he realised he was still gripping her tight even though she’d stopped jerking, and he let go quickly, saw the marks of his fingers pink on her arm.

Isern was already working Rikke’s trousers over her limp feet and up her legs. ‘Help me get her dressed.’

‘Not sure I know—’

‘Got her undressed, didn’t you? Same thing, d’you see, but in reverse.’

Rikke gave a long groan as she slowly sat up, clutching at her bloody head.

‘What did you see?’ asked Isern, wrapping Rikke’s shirt around her shoulders and squatting beside her.

‘I saw a bald weaver with a purse that never emptied.’ Rikke’s voice sounded strange. Rough, hollow. Not like her voice at all. It made Leo feel a little afraid, somehow. And a little excited.

‘What else?’ asked Isern.

‘I saw an old woman whose head was stitched together with golden wire.’

‘Huh. What else?’

‘I saw a lion … and a wolf … fight in a circle of blood. They fought tooth and claw and the wolf had the best of it …’ She stared up at Leo. ‘The wolf had the best of it … but the lion was the winner.’ She caught him by the hand, staring into his face, dragging him close with a shocking strength. ‘The lion was the winner!’

Till that moment, Leo had been sure it was all guff. The Long Eye. Old tales and superstitions. What else could it be? But looking into Rikke’s wild, wet eyes, pupils swollen up so big there was no iris left at all but only black pits with no bottom, he felt the hairs on his neck rise and the skin on his spine tingle. Suddenly he began to doubt.

Or maybe he began to believe.

‘Am I the lion?’ he whispered.

But she’d closed her eyes, sagged back in the straw, her limp hand dropping from his.

‘Out you go, now, boy,’ said Isern, shoving his boots and his shirt into his arms.

‘Am I the lion?’ he called again, for some reason desperate to know.

‘Lion?’ Isern laughed as she pushed him out into the yard. ‘Ass, maybe.’ And she kicked the door shut.

No Unnecessary Sentiment

‘My father thinks very highly of you.’

Inquisitor Teufel’s permanently narrowed eyes swivelled from the sunny country slipping past the window to Savine, but she said nothing. To have called her hard-looking would have been an epic understatement. She appeared to be chiselled from flint. Her chin and cheekbones jutted, her nose was blunt and slightly bent with two marked creases above the bridge from constant frowning, her dark hair was shot with grey and bound back tightly as a murderer’s shackles.

Savine flashed her artfully constructed artless smile, the one people usually could not help returning. ‘And he’s not a man who gives praise lightly.’

Teufel acknowledged that with the faintest nod, but kept her silence. Compliments can coax more from some people than torture, and Savine had found compliments relayed from some respected third party most effective of all. But Teufel’s locks were not so easily picked. She swayed faintly with the jolting of the carriage, face as guarded as a bank vault.

Savine could not help shifting at a sudden pang. With impeccable timing, her menses were starting early, the familiar dull ache through her belly and down the backs of her thighs with an occasional sharp twinge into her arse by way of light relief. As usual, she struggled with every muscle to look perfectly relaxed and forced her grimace into an ever-brighter smile.

‘He tells me you were raised in Angland,’ she said, trying a different tack.

Finally, Teufel spoke, but only the minimum. ‘I was, my lady.’ She reminded Savine of one of Curnsbick’s engines: stripped back, angular and unapologetic. No unnecessary flesh, no unnecessary ornament, and for damn sure no unnecessary sentiment.

‘You worked in a coal mine.’

‘I did.’ And had not changed her clothes since, by the look of it. A worn shirt with sleeves rolled up to the elbows and those leather braces workmen wear. Coarse trousers tucked into tightly laced work boots, one of which was thrust defiantly out into the centre of the carriage floor, as if staking a claim to the territory. Scarcely a gesture towards femininity anywhere. Had there ever been a woman who took less care over her appearance? Savine subtly shifted her new dress in a vain attempt to move a chafing seam away from her damp armpit. She would never have admitted it but, hell, how she envied her, especially in this heat.

‘Coal is changing the world,’ she observed, nudging the window down to get a little more air in and swishing her fan a touch faster.

‘I heard.’

‘Is it changing it for the better, though?’ muttered the boy, wistfully. ‘That’s the question.’

He glanced up, and a flush spread across his pale cheeks, and his big, sad, frog-like eyes flickered over to Teufel. She gave him the same calm, critical stare she gave Savine. A look that let him judge for himself whether he should have opened his mouth. The lad looked at the floor and folded his arms even tighter about himself.

They certainly made an odd couple. The woman of flint and the boy of wax. She not showing a hint of feeling, he with every emotion written right across his face. They seemed the very last people one would suspect of being agents of the Inquisition. But Savine supposed that was rather the point.