Joe Abercrombie: Sharp Ends

A big man, without a doubt. The one hand Shev could see was as long as her foot, netted with veins, filthy and scabbed across the knuckles. There was a strange shape to it, though. Slender.

‘Oy!’ She jabbed the toe of her boot into the coat around where she judged the man’s arse to be. Still nothing.

She heard footsteps behind her. ‘Morning, boss.’ Severard turning up for the day. Never late, that boy. Not the most careful in his work but for punctuality you couldn’t knock him. ‘What’s this you’ve caught?’

‘A strange fish, all right, to wash up in my doorway.’ Shev scraped some of the red hair back, wrinkled her nose as she realised it was clotted with blood.

‘Is he drunk?’

‘She.’ It was a woman’s face under there. Strong-jawed and strong-boned, pale skin crowded with enough black scab, red graze and purple bruise to make Shev wince, even if she rarely saw anyone who wasn’t carrying a wound or two.

Severard gave a soft whistle. ‘That’s a lot of she.’

‘And someone’s given her a lot of a beating, too.’ Shev leaned close to put her cheek near the woman’s battered mouth, heard the faintest wheezing of breath. ‘Alive, though.’ Then she rocked away and squatted there, wrists on her knees and her hands dangling, wondering what to do. There’d been a time she just dived into whatever messes presented themselves without a backward glance, but somehow the consequences always lurked nearer to hand than they used to. She puffed her cheeks out and gave the weariest of sighs.

‘Well, it happens,’ said Severard.

‘Sadly, yes.’

‘Not our problem, is it?’

‘Happily, no.’

‘Want me to drag her into the street?’

‘Yes, I want that quite a lot.’ And Shev rolled her eyes skywards and gave another sigh, maybe even wearier than the last. ‘But we’d best drag her inside, I reckon.’

‘You sure, boss? You remember the last time we helped someone out-’

‘Sure? No.’ Shev didn’t know, after all the shit that had been done to her, why she still felt the need to do small kindnesses. Maybe because of all the shit that had been done to her. Maybe there was some stubborn stone in her, like the stone in a date, that refused to let all the shit that had been done to her make her into shit. She turned the key and elbowed the door wobbling open. ‘You get her feet.’

When you run a Smoke House you’d better get good at shifting limp bodies, but the latest recipient of Shev’s half-arsed charity proved quite the challenge.

‘Bloody hell,’ grunted Severard, eyes popping as they manhandled the woman down the stale-smelling corridor, her backside scuffing the boards. ‘What’s she made of, anvils?’

‘Anvils are lighter,’ groaned Shev through her gritted teeth, waddling from side to side under the dead weight of her, bouncing off the peeling walls. She gasped as she kicked open the door to her office – or the broom-cupboard she called an office. She strained with every burning muscle as she hauled the woman up, knocked her limp head on the doorframe as she wrestled her through, then tripped on a mop and with a despairing squawk toppled back onto the cot with the woman on top of her.

In bed under a redhead was nothing to object to, but Shev preferred them at least partly conscious. Preferred them sweeter-smelling, too, at least when they got into bed. This one stank like sour sweat and rot and the very end of things.

‘That’s where kindness gets you,’ said Severard, chuckling away to himself. ‘Wedged under a mighty weight of trouble.’

‘You going to giggle or help me out, you bastard?’ snarled Shev, slack springs groaning as she struggled from underneath, then hauled the woman’s legs onto the bed, feet dangling well off the end. It wasn’t a big bed, but it looked like a child’s with her on it. Her ragged coat had fallen open and the stained leather vest she wore beneath it had got dragged right up.

When Shev spent a year tumbling with that travelling show there’d been a strongman called himself the Amazing Zaraquon, though his real name had been Runkin. Used to strip to the waist and oil himself up and lift all kinds of heavy things for the crowd, though once he was offstage and towelled down you couldn’t get the lazy oaf to lift a thimble for you. His stomach had been all jutting knots of muscle as if beneath his tight-stretched skin he was made of wood rather than meat.

This woman’s pale midriff reminded Shev of the Amazing Zaraquon’s, but narrower, longer and even leaner. You could see all the little sinews in between her ribs shifting with each shallow breath. But instead of oil her stomach was covered in black and blue and purple bruises, plus a great red welt that looked like it had been left by a most unfriendly axe-handle.

Severard whistled softly. ‘They really did give her a beating, didn’t they?’

‘Aye, they did.’ Shev knew well enough what that felt like, and she winced as she twitched the woman’s vest down, then dragged the blanket up and laid it over her. Tucked it in a little around her neck, though she felt a fool doing it, and the woman mumbled something and twisted onto her side, matted hair fluttering over her mouth as she started to snore.

‘Sweet dreams,’ Shev muttered, not that she ever got any herself. Wasn’t as if she really needed a bed here, but when you’ve spent a few years with nowhere safe to sleep, you tend to make a bed in every halfway safe place you can find. She shook the memories off and herded Severard back into the corridor. ‘Best get the doors open. We aren’t pulling in so much business we can let it slip by.’

‘Folk really after husk at this time in the morning?’ asked Severard, trying to wipe a smear of the woman’s blood off his hand.

‘If you want to forget your troubles, why live with them till lunchtime?’

By daylight the smoking room was far from the alluring little cave of wonders Shev had dreamed of making when she bought the place. She planted her hands on her hips as she looked around and gave that weary sigh again. Fact was it bore more than a passing resemblance to an utter shit-hole. The boards were split and stained and riddled with splinters and the cushions greasy as a Baolish kitchen and one of the cheap hangings had come away to show the mould-blooming plaster behind. The Prayer Bells on the shelf were the only things that lent the faintest touch of class, and Shev gave the big one an affectionate stroke, then went up on tiptoe to pin the corner of that hanging back where it belonged, so at least the mould was hidden from her eyes even if her nose was still well aware of it, the smell of rotten onions all-pervasive.

Even a liar as practised as Shev couldn’t have convinced a fool as gullible as Shev that it wasn’t a shit-hole. But it was her shit-hole. And she had plans to improve it. She always had plans.

‘You clean the pipes?’ she asked as Severard stomped back from opening the doors, brushing the curtain aside.

‘The folk who come here don’t care about clean pipes, boss.’

Shev frowned. ‘ I care. We may not have the biggest place, or the most comfortable, or the best husk -’ she raised her brows at Severard’s spotty face ‘- or the prettiest folk to light it for you, so what’s our advantage over our competitors?’

‘We’re cheap?’

‘No, no, no.’ She thought about that. ‘Well, yes. But what else?’

Severard sighed. ‘Customer service?’

‘Ding,’ said Shev, flicking the biggest Prayer Bell and making it give off that heavenly song. ‘So clean the pipes, you lazy shit, and get some coals lit.’

Severard puffed out his cheeks, patched with the kind of downy beard that’s meant to make a boy look manly but actually makes him look all the more boyish. ‘Yes, boss.’