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

‘Oh God, oh God, oh God …’

But things had not been better here. There was no work. People spat at them in the street. They had gone from one town to another, and the little money that had not been stolen from them by the sailors on the voyage had gradually leaked away. They had heard there was work in Valbeck, so they had banded together with a dozen other Kantics for safety on the road. It had been a hard journey, only to find there was no work in Valbeck, either. Not for pale faces, let alone for dark. People looked at them like they were rats. And now everything had gone mad. She did not understand what had happened. She did not even know who had hit her father, or why.

‘Oh God, oh God …’

The priests said if she prayed every morning and every night and was pure within then good things would happen. She had prayed every night and every morning. Had she done it wrong? Was she rotten inside, that God should punish her?

‘Oh God,’ she whimpered, shaking her father’s shoulder. ‘Please wake up!’

She did not know what to do. There was no one here she knew. They had taken her father’s shoes. His shoes, God help her, his bare feet flopped out sideways, and she touched one of them gently with a trembling hand, tears in her eyes.

‘Oh God,’ she whispered. What should she do?

She heard scraping footsteps. Someone had edged around the wall into the doorway, hunched over in a ragged coat missing an arm, staring fearfully out into the square where figures writhed and lurched to the deranged music.

Hessel crouched, showing her teeth, not sure whether to fight or to cry. Sometimes, the priests had said, one must rely on the kindness of strangers.

‘Please,’ she said. It came out a desperate squeak.

The beggar spun about. It was a woman. A pale woman with a shaved head. She looked mad. Streaks of dried blood from a scab on her scalp, dark paint smeared from one staring, red-rimmed eye.

‘My father … won’t wake up,’ said Hessel, the unfamiliar words clumsy in her mouth.

‘I’m sorry.’ The woman’s bloody neck shifted as she swallowed. ‘There’s nothing I can do.’

‘Please!’

‘You have to be quiet!’ hissed the woman, eyes sliding terrified towards the square.

‘Please!’ shouted Hessel, grabbing at her bare arm. ‘Please! Please!’ She started to scream it, louder and louder, she could not stop herself. She was not even sure if she was saying it in the Union tongue or the Kantic.

The beggar pulled away, dragging Hessel after her.

‘Please! Please! Please!’

‘Shut your mouth!’ shrieked the woman, and flung her against the wall, and Hessel heard her scramble away, out into the square.

She picked herself up, rubbing at the sore spot where her head had struck the stone. She crawled over to her father and touched him gently on the arm.

‘Father,’ she begged. ‘ Please wake up.’

Something of Ours

Savine stumbled from the alleyway. Behind her, the child was still wailing.

The music had screeched to a halt. The dancing, too. Eyes turned towards her. Black eyes, glinting with flames in the darkness.

She saw the outline of the tall man with the tall hat, a burning torch in one hand, his other raised to point at her.

‘Bring me that one!’

She fled, forcing her trembling legs to another effort, ducked down a side street, slid in filth, went over in the gutter and scrambled up again. She plunged past a staring old woman, through a court crammed between tiny houses, a great heap of ash and dung and bones piled in the midst, crawling with vermin.

Shouts behind her, jagged shouts and jagged laughter, slapping footfalls echoing off the peeling walls. She flung herself desperately at doors as she passed, locked, locked, locked, then one flew open and she tumbled through the guts of a squalid building.

A room with a sagging ceiling where rags were heaped, people stretched out sleeping. Drunk, husk-addled, half-dressed, mouths hanging heedlessly open, spilling drool. The stench was indescribable. Someone had broken a hole in the floor and used it for a privy, flies crawling. Savine retched as she staggered between the bodies, hand over her mouth, blundered through a door at the back and into an alleyway.

‘There you are.’ Two men ahead of her. She reeled away, boots skittering on the cobbles, and found herself facing a dead end. A blank wall of mouldy brick, not even a door to try. She slowly turned, breath crawling in her throat. They closed in with the cocky swagger of men who know they’ve won. One had an ugly squint and a stick with a nail through it. The other had a cap drawn low over a bent face.

‘Get back!’ hissed Savine, holding up her hand. It might have been more impressive had it not been trembling so badly.

‘It’s a woman,’ said Squinty, starting to grin.

The one with the cap peered down his bent nose at her coat, held tight over her sword. ‘What’re you hiding?’

‘None of your business.’ Savine tried to make her voice effortlessly confident, the way it used to be. Sound in command, you’re halfway to being there. It came out a quavering croak. But her accent was plain, even so.

Squinty’s smile spread further. ‘Not just a woman. A real lady .’ And he slapped his stick gently into his palm, fingered at that nail through it. ‘Fallen on hard times?’

‘Lot of ladies have, today,’ said the one with the cap, easing forwards.

Savine shuffled back in a crouch, eyes darting between them. ‘I’m warning you—’

Squinty had turned thoughtful. ‘Might be it’s her.’

‘Her? Who her?’

‘Savine dan—’

‘Shut your mouth !’ she shrieked. Her eyes went wide. She realised she had run him neatly through the chest with her sword. A textbook lunge Bremer dan Gorst could have been proud of.

‘Fuck,’ said the one with the cap, stepping back, eyes wide.

Squinty gave a strangled cough, dropped his stick and pawed at his chest where the blade was. He tried to say something but had no breath.

She pulled the sword back and it sliced a deep gash through the side of his hand. Blood welled, a black stain spreading down his jacket.

The one with the cap reeled away and Savine darted forward, slashing him across the back of the thigh. She fumbled the sword and it caught him with the flat, didn’t even cut through his ragged trousers, but it was enough to make him stumble and he sprawled in the gutter.

‘Please!’ he squeaked, wriggling up onto his hands, staring over his shoulder, as scared as Savine had been a moment before. ‘Please!’

He gave a little whoop as the blade punched through his ribs, arched back, squirmed over, face twisting in agony. Savine knelt on top of him, trying to drag her sword free, but it was stuck right through him and he was wriggling, groaning, wriggling. She heard shouting up the street. Echoing footfalls.

She let go of her sword and ran, every muscle aching now, her lungs on fire. She snatched a look back. Figures in the murk, huge, distorted. Whoops and laughter, like huntsmen after a fox. A great shape loomed ahead, a monster with a thousand bristling limbs, and she skittered to a halt. A barricade, thrown up across the street, the limbs the legs of chairs, and desks, and tangled timbers. A man stood on it. A huge man with hardly any neck, hair clipped to stubble, features hidden but for lenses flashing orange, the new kind, mounted in thin wire, tiny on his heavy, stubbled face.

‘Help me!’ Holding out her bloody hand, her voice a desperate squeak. ‘I’m begging you!’

He folded Savine’s wrist in an irresistible grip. For a terrible moment, she wondered if she had made the worst mistake of her life.

He hoisted her effortlessly up beside him. She saw torch flames bobbing, could hardly breathe for fear, hardly move for it. She shrank down trembling behind a broken chest of drawers, clung to a chair leg.