Joe Abercrombie - Sharp Ends

‘Get it, did yer?’ asked Old Green.

‘Course,’ said Sifkiss with a toss of his head, knocked his hat against a low beam and cursed as he fumbled it back into place. He tossed the package sourly down on the tabletop.

‘Get you gone, then,’ snapped Green.

Sifkiss looked surly, like he’d a mind to answer back. He was getting altogether too much mind, that boy, and Green had to show him the knobby-knuckled back of her hand ’fore he sloped off.

‘So here you have it, as promised.’ She pointed to that leather bundle in the pool of lamplight on her ancient table, its top cracked and stained and its gilt all peeling but still a fine piece of furniture with plenty of years left. Like to Old Green in that respect, if she did think so herself.

‘Seems a little thing for such a lot of fuss,’ said Fallow, wrinkling his nose, and he tossed a purse onto the table with that lovely clink of money. Old Green clawed it up and clawed it open and straight off set to counting it.

‘Where’s your girl Kiam?’ asked Fallow. ‘Where’s little Kiam, eh?’

Old Green’s shoulders stiffened but she kept counting. She could’ve counted through a storm at sea. ‘Out working.’

‘When’s she getting back? I like her.’ Fallow came a bit closer, voice going hushed. ‘I could get a damn fine price for her.’

‘But she’s my best earner!’ said Green. ‘There’s others you could take off my hands. How’s about that lad Sifkiss?’

‘What, the sour-face brought the luggage?’

‘He’s a good worker. Strong lad. Lots of grit. He’d pull a good oar on a galley, I’d say. Maybe a fighter, even.’

Fallow snorted. ‘In a pit? That little shit? I don’t think so. And he’d need some whipping to pull an oar, I reckon.’

‘Well? They got whips, don’t they?’

‘Suppose they do. I’ll take him if I must. Him and three others. I’m off to the market in Westport tomorrow week. You pick, but don’t give me none o’ your dross.’

‘I don’t keep no dross,’ said Old Green.

‘You got nothing but dross, you bloody swindler. And what’ll you tell the rest o’ your brood, eh?’ Fallow put on a silly la-di-da voice. ‘That they’ve gone off to be servants to gentry, or to live with the horses on a farm, or adopted by the fucking Emperor of Gurkhul or some such, eh?’ Fallow chuckled, and Old Green had a sudden urge to make that knife of hers available, but she’d better sense these days, all learned the hard way.

‘I tell ’em what I need to,’ she grunted, still working her fingers around the coins. Bloody fingers weren’t half as quick as they once were.

‘You do that, and I’ll come back for Kiam another day, eh?’ And Fallow winked at her.

‘Whatever you want,’ said Green, ‘whatever you say.’ She was bloody well keeping Kiam, though. She couldn’t save many, she wasn’t fool enough to think that, but maybe she could save one, and on her dying day she could say she done that much. Probably no one would be listening, but she’d know. ‘It’s all there. Package is yours.’

Fallow picked up the luggage and was out of that stinking fucking place. Reminded him too much of prison. The smell of it. And the eyes of the children, all big and damp. He didn’t mind buying and selling ’em, but he didn’t want to see their eyes. Does the slaughterman want to look at the sheep’s eyes? Maybe the slaughterman don’t care. Maybe he gets used to it. Fallow cared too much, that’s what it was. Too much heart.

His guards were lounging by the front door and he waved them over and set off, walking in the middle of the square they made.

‘Successful meeting?’ Grenti tossed over his shoulder.

‘Not bad,’ grunted Fallow, in such a way as to discourage further conversation. Do you want friends or money? he’d once heard Kurrikan say and the phrase had stuck with him.

Sadly, Grenti was by no means discouraged. ‘Going straight over to Kurrikan’s?’

‘Yes,’ said Fallow, sharply as he could.

But Grenti loved to flap his mouth. Most thugs do, in the end. All that time spent doing nothing, maybe. ‘Lovely house, though, ain’t it, Kurrikan’s? What do you call those columns on the front of it?’

‘Pilasters,’ grunted one of the other thugs.

‘No, no, I know pilasters, no. I mean to say the name given to that particular style of architecture, with the vine-leaves about the head there?’

‘Rusticated?’

‘No, no, that’s the masonry work, all dimpled with the chisel, it’s the overall design I’m discussing- Hold up.’

For a moment, Fallow was mightily relieved at the interruption. Then he was concerned. A figure was occupying the fog just ahead. Occupying the hell out of it. The beggars and revellers and scum scattered around these parts had all slipped out of their way like soil around the plough ’til now. This one didn’t move. He was a tall bastard, tall as Fallow’s tallest guard, with a white coat on, hood up. Well, it weren’t white no more. Nothing stayed white long in Sipani. It was grey with damp and black-spattered about the hem.

‘Get him out of the way,’ he snapped.

‘Get out of the fucking way!’ roared Grenti.

‘You are Fallow?’ The man pulled his hood back.

‘It’s a woman,’ said Grenti. And indeed it was, for all her neck was thickly muscled, her jaw angular and her red hair clipped close to her skull.

‘I am Javre,’ she said, raising her chin and smiling at them. ‘Lioness of Hoskopp.’

‘Maybe she’s a mental,’ said Grenti.

‘Escaped from that madhouse up the way.’

‘I did once escape from a madhouse,’ said the woman. She had a weird accent, Fallow couldn’t place it. ‘Well … it was a prison for wizards. But some of them had gone mad. A fine distinction, most wizards are at least eccentric. That is beside the point, though. You have something I need.’

‘That so?’ said Fallow, starting to grin. He was less worried now. One, she was a woman, two, she obviously was a mental.

‘I know not how to convince you for I lack the sweet words – it is a long-standing deficiency. But it would be best for us all if you give it to me willingly.’

‘I’ll give you something willingly,’ said Fallow, to sniggers from the others.

The woman didn’t snigger. ‘It is a parcel, wrapped in leather, about …’ She held up one big hand, thumb and forefinger stretched out. ‘Five times the length of your cock.’

If she knew about the luggage, she was trouble. And Fallow had no sense of humour about his cock, to which none of the ointments had made the slightest difference. He stopped grinning. ‘Kill her.’

She struck Grenti somewhere around the chest, or maybe she did, it was all a blur. His eyes popped wide and he made a strange whooping sound and stood there frozen, quivering on his tiptoes, sword halfway drawn.

The second guard – a Union man big as a house – swung his mace at her but it just caught her flapping coat. An instant later there was a surprised yelp and he was flying across the street upside down and crashing into the wall, tumbling to the ground in a shower of dust, sheets of broken plaster dropping from the shattered brickwork on top of his limp body.

The third guard – a nimble-fingered Osprian – whipped out a throwing knife but before he could loose it, the mace twittered through the air and bounced from his head. He dropped soundlessly, arms outstretched.

‘They are called Anthiric columns.’ The woman put her forefinger against Grenti’s forehead and gently pushed him over. He toppled and lay there on his side in the muck, still stiff, still trembling, still with eyes bulgingly focused on nothing.

‘That was with one hand.’ She held up the other big fist, and had produced from somewhere a sheathed sword, gold glittering on the hilt. ‘Next I draw this sword, forged in the Old Time from the metal of a fallen star. Only six living people have seen the blade. You would find it extremely beautiful. Then I would kill you with it.’