Joe Abercrombie - Sharp Ends

Shev hardly knew how she felt to see her. Relieved that she hadn’t left the city. Guilty at the state she’d made of herself. Ashamed to be asking for her help. Angry at she hardly knew what any more. A slow accumulation of years of hurts and frustrations, little things added up day after day to a burden she could not stand to carry. But, as always, she had no other choices. She peeled the hand from her mouth and padded over.

Javre stank. Even worse than she had the first time they met, in the door of Shev’s Smoke House. Not long before it burned down, along with her past life. Shev wouldn’t see another life burned down. She couldn’t see it.

‘You stink, Javre,’ she said.

Javre didn’t bother to look around. However carefully you crept up on her, somehow she always knew who was there. ‘Have not washed lately.’

Her words came slurred and Shev’s heart sank. It took days of drinking for Javre to show the slightest sign of being drunk. By then she was colossally, toweringly, heroically drunk. There was nothing Javre did by halves.

‘I have been entirely busy drinking, fucking and fighting.’ She cleared her throat, turned her head and spat noisily and bloodily at Shev’s feet, half of it dangling from her split lip and soaking into her shirt as she turned back to the game. ‘I have been drunk for …’ She raised a bandaged hand, squinting as she clumsily stuck the fingers up one by one. When she stuck the thumb up, her cards fluttered to the floor. Javre frowned at them. ‘I cannot even count any more.’ She started to fish them clumsily up between scabbed fingers, one by one. ‘Drinking, fucking, fighting and losing at cards. Days since I won a hand.’ She burped. Even from this distance, Shev shuddered at the smell of it. ‘Weeks. I hardly know which side up the cards go.’

‘Javre, I need to talk to you-’

‘Let me introduce you!’ Javre swept a loose arm at the Union soldiers and very nearly took the sleeping man’s head off with a backhand. ‘This little beauty is my good old friend Shevedieh! Used to be a henchman of mine.’

‘Javre.’

‘Sidekick, then. Whatever. We travelled half the Circle of the World together! All kinds of adventures.’

‘Javre.’

‘Disasters, then. Whatever. These shits are among the finest soldiers of His August Majesty the High King of the Union. The beardy bastard is Lieutenant Forest.’ He nodded to Shev with a good-natured grin. ‘This stringy one is Lance Corporal Yolk.’ The sleeping man stirred faintly, tongue moving against his cracked lips with vague squelching sounds. ‘And this lucky fucker-’

‘Skilful fucker,’ grunted the ratty man around a chagga pipe gripped in his yellowed teeth.

‘Is Sergeant Tunny.’

‘Corporal,’ he said, peering through his haze of smoke at the cards.

‘Got himself demoted again,’ said Forest. ‘Over a goose and a whore, would you believe.’

‘She was worth it,’ said Tunny. ‘And the whore wasn’t bad, either. Fire, by the way.’ And he laid his cards down with a snap.

‘Tits of the Mother!’ snarled Javre. ‘Again?’

‘There’s a certain spot …’ muttered Tunny, pipe waggling between his teeth, ‘between too drunk and not drunk enough …’ as he scooped up scattered winnings in a dozen different currencies, ‘where I’m a hell of a card player. The trick, as with so much in life, is keeping the balance just right.’

‘Luck,’ mused Javre as she watched him gather the harvest through narrowed, red-rimmed, absurdly bloodshot eyes, ‘has always been the one thing missing from my life.’

‘Javre-’

‘Let me guess!’ Bandages trailed through spilled beer as she flung up a hand. ‘You are dunked to your scrawny neck in some species of shit and have run straight back to me to fetch the shovel.’

Shevedieh opened her mouth to make an elaborate retort, thought a moment, and decided against. ‘Basically, yes. Horald’s taken Carcolf. Now he wants me out on Carp Island.’ She forced the words through clenched teeth. ‘I could really use your help-’

Javre gave a snort so explosive snot spattered down her chapped top lip. She did not appear to notice. ‘See, boys? You give them everything!’ And she beat her chest with a fist so hard it left a great pink mark. ‘You give them your heart and they spit it in your face!’

‘How can you spit a heart?’ asked Shev, but Javre was not interested in unmixing her metaphors.

‘The moment they get in trouble, oh, the fucking moment? Straight back to Mummy!’ She glared unsteadily at Shev. ‘Well, Mummy is fucking busy!’

‘Mummy is fucking embarrassing herself.’

‘That is Mummy’s fucking prerogative. Shuffle those cards, Tunny, you cunny.’ He did no more than raise a brow as he set to shuffling. ‘I thought you were all done with me and had fine new friends. What of the grand duchess, the Snake of Talins, the Butcher of Caprile? Mother to a king, I hear.’

‘Bless his eternal Majesty,’ grunted Tunny out of the corner of his mouth, flicking cards to each of the four players, conscious and otherwise.

‘I only met the woman twice,’ said Shev. ‘I doubt she knows my name.’

‘But her all-powerful Minister of Whispers, Shylo Vitari, surely does. Can she not reach from the shadows and pluck your lover from danger?’

‘She’s on her way south to Sipani.’

‘What of your grinning merchant friend, Majud? He has deep pockets.’

‘It’s getting him to reach into them that’s the problem.’

‘That Northman you were working with, then? The one with the eye. Or … without it.’ Javre accidentally poked herself while waving at her face with her cards, had to clap a hand over her running eye, but at least she accidentally wiped the snot from her lip, too. ‘Trembles?’

‘Shivers.’ Shev gave a little shiver of her own at the memory of that scarred face, the expression on it as he killed those three Sipanese who’d been chasing her. Or the terrible lack of expression. ‘Some help it’s better to do without,’ she muttered.

‘You can do without mine, then.’ Javre raised the glass towards her mouth in a wobbly hand, face fixed in concentration. Shev slapped it from her fingers and it shattered in the corner.

‘I need you sober.’

Javre gave a snort. ‘That is never going to happen, Shevedieh. If I get my way, that is never going to happen again.’

‘Here,’ said Tunny, holding out his own glass, ‘have mine-’

Shev slapped it from his hand and it shattered in almost exactly the same spot as the last one. He frowned, slowly removing the pipe from his mouth for the first time. ‘Bloody hell, girl, I wish you wouldn’t-’

Javre shoved her fist under his nose, cards crushed in it, red eyes bulging, lips curling back and spraying spit. ‘Talk to my friend like that again, you fucking cocksucker, you will be picking your teeth from my knuckles!’

Tunny peered down at that great, scarred hand, one of his eyebrows going up, ever so slowly. ‘Madam, I’m a soldier. The last thing I want is a fight.’

Forest cleared his wet throat and somewhat unsteadily rose. ‘Ladies, with great respect, I think that puts an end to the evening. We’ve an early start tomorrow. Back to Midderland after our defeat, you know.’ He jabbed Yolk with his elbow and the little man started awake.

‘I raise!’ he shouted, staring wildly about. ‘I raise!’ Then he flopped from his chair onto hands and knees and was sick on the floor.

Tunny was already sweeping his winnings into a battered hat. Forest caught Yolk by the belt and began to drag him away, still desperately trying to raise.

‘An honour,’ said Tunny as he backed towards the door through the pool of puke, almost falling over the snoring figure. ‘An absolute fucking honour .’