Joe Abercrombie - Sharp Ends

Kurtis dropped to his knees, his hands clasped, the big man’s face faintly swimming through the tears in his aching eyes. He did not care about the shame of it. The Quarryman had taken the last of his pride many visits before. ‘Just leave me something,’ he whispered. ‘Just … something.’

The man stared back at him with his dead-fish eyes. ‘Why?’

Friendly took the sword, too, but there was nothing else of value. ‘I will come back next week,’ he said.

It had not been meant as a threat, merely a statement of fact, and an obvious one at that since it had always been the arrangement, but Kurtis dan Broya’s head slowly dropped, and he began to shudder with sobs.

Friendly considered whether to try and comfort him, but decided not to. He was often misinterpreted.

‘You should, perhaps, not have borrowed the money.’ Then he left.

It always surprised him that people did not do the sums when they took a loan. Proportions, and time, and the action of interest, it was not so very difficult to fathom. But perhaps they were prone always to overestimate their income, to poison themselves by looking on the bright side. Happy chances would occur, and things would improve, and everything would turn out well, because they were special. Friendly had no illusions. He knew he was but one unexceptional cog in the elaborate workings of life. To him, facts were facts.

He walked, counting off the paces to the Quarryman’s place. One hundred and five, one hundred and four, one hundred and three …

Strange how small the city was when you measured it out. All those people, and all their desires, and scores, and debts, packed into this narrow stretch of reclaimed swamp. By Friendly’s reckoning, the swamp was well on the way to taking large sections of it back. He wondered if the world would be better when it did.

… seventy-six, seventy-five, seventy-four …

Friendly had an extra shadow. Pickpocket, maybe. He took a careless look at a stall by the way and caught her out of the corner of his eye. A girl with dark hair gathered into a cap and a jacket too big for her. Hardly more than a child. Friendly took a few steps down a narrow snicket and turned, blocking the way, pushing back his coat to show the grips of four of his six weapons. His shadow rounded the corner, and he looked at her. Just looked. First she froze, then swallowed, then turned one way, then the other, then backed off and lost herself in the crowds. So that was the end of that episode.

… thirty-one, thirty, twenty-nine …

Sipani, and most especially its moist and fragrant Old Quarter, was full of thieves. They were a constant annoyance, like midges in summer. Also muggers, robbers, burglars, cutpurses, cut-throats, thugs, murderers, strong-arm men, swindlers, gamblers, fences, moneylenders, rakes, beggars, tricksters, pimps, pawnshop owners, crooked merchants, not to mention accountants and lawyers. Lawyers were the worst of the crowd, as far as Friendly was concerned. Sometimes it seemed that no one in Sipani made anything, exactly. They were all working their hardest to rip it from someone else.

But then Friendly supposed he was no better.

… four, three, two, one, and down the twelve steps, past the three guards, and through the double doors into the Quarryman’s place.

It was hazy with smoke inside, confusing with the light of coloured lamps, hot with breath and chafing skin, thick with the babble of hushed conversation, of secrets traded, reputations ruined, confidences betrayed. It was as all such places always are.

Two Northmen were wedged behind a table in the corner. One, with sharp teeth and long, lank hair, had tipped his chair all the way back and was slumped in it, smoking. The other had a bottle in one hand and a tiny book in the other, staring at it with brow well furrowed.

Most of the patrons Friendly knew by sight. Regulars. Some come to drink. Some to eat. Most of them fixed on the games of chance. The clatter of dice, the twitch and flap of the playing cards, the eyes of the hopeless glittering as the lucky wheel spun.

The games were not really the Quarryman’s business, but the games made debts, and debts were the Quarryman’s business. Up the twenty-three steps to the raised area, the guard with the tattoo on his face waving Friendly past.

Three of the other collectors were seated there, sharing a bottle. The smallest grinned at him, and nodded, perhaps trying to plant the seeds of an alliance. The biggest puffed himself up and bristled, sensing competition. Friendly ignored them equally. He had long ago given up trying even to understand the unsolvable mathematics of human relationships, let alone to participate. Should that man do more than bristle, Friendly’s cleaver would speak for him. That was a voice that cut short even the most tedious of arguments.

Mistress Borfero was a fleshy woman with dark curls spilling from beneath a purple cap, small eyeglasses that made her eyes look large, and a smell about her of lamp oil. She haunted the anteroom before the Quarryman’s office at a low desk stacked with ledgers. On Friendly’s first day she had gestured towards the ornate door behind her and said, ‘I am the Quarryman’s right hand. He is never to be disturbed. Never. You speak to me.’

Friendly, of course, knew as soon as he saw her mastery of the numbers in those books that there was no one in the office and that Borfero was the Quarryman, but she seemed so pleased with the deception that he was happy to play along. Friendly had never liked to rock boats unnecessarily. That’s how people ended up drowned. Besides, it somehow helped to imagine that the orders came from somewhere else, somewhere unknowable and irresistible. It was nice to have an attic in which to stack the blame. Friendly looked at the door of the Quarryman’s office, wondering if there even was an office, or if it opened on blank stones.

‘What was today’s take?’ she asked, flipping open a ledger and dipping her pen. Straight to business without so much as a how do you do. He greatly liked and admired that about her, though he would never have said so. His compliments had a way of causing offence.

Friendly slipped the coins out in stacks, then let them drop, one by one, in rattling rows by debtor and denomination. Mostly base metals, leavened with a sprinkling of silver.

Borfero sat forward, wrinkling her nose and pushing her eyeglasses up onto her forehead, eyes looking now extra small without them.

‘A sword, as well,’ said Friendly, leaning it up against the side of the desk.

‘A disappointing harvest,’ she murmured.

‘The soil is stony hereabouts.’

‘Too true.’ She dropped the eyeglasses back and started to scratch orderly figures in her ledger. ‘Tough times all over.’ She often said that. As though it stood as explanation and excuse for anything and everything.

‘Kurtis dan Broya asked me when the debt would be paid.’

She peered up, surprised by the question. ‘When the Quarryman says it’s paid.’

‘That’s what I told him.’

‘Good.’

‘You asked me to be on the lookout for … a package.’ Friendly placed it on the desk before her. ‘Broya had it.’

It did not seem so very important. It was less than a foot long, wrapped in very ancient stained and balding animal skin, and with a letter, or perhaps a number, burned into it with a brand. But not a number that Friendly recognised.

Mistress Borfero snatched up the package, then immediately cursed herself for looking too eager. She knew no one could be trusted in this business. That brought a rush of questions to her mind. Suspicions. How could that worthless Broya possibly have come by it? Was this some ruse? Was Friendly a plant of the Gurkish? Or perhaps of Carcolf’s? A double bluff? There was no end to the webs that smug bitch spun. A triple bluff? But where was the angle? Where the advantage?