Joe Abercrombie: Sharp Ends

Only then did he allow himself to breathe. He placed the package reverently upon his desk. Now he had it, he felt the need to stretch out the moment of triumph. To weigh it down with the proper gravitas. He went to his drinks cabinet and unlocked it, took his grandfather’s bottle of Shiznadze from the place of honour. That man had lived his whole life waiting for a moment worthy of opening that bottle. Pombrine smiled as he reached for the corkscrew, trimming away the lead from the neck.

How long had he worked to secure that cursed package? Circulating rumours of his business failings when in fact he had never been so successful. Placing himself in Carcolf’s way again and again until finally they appeared to happen upon each other by chance. Wriggling himself into a position of trust while the idiot courier thought him a brainless stooge, clambering by minuscule degrees to a perch from which he could get his eager hands around the package, and then … unhappy fate! Carcolf had slipped free, the cursed bitch, leaving Pombrine with nothing but ruined hopes. But now … happy fate! The thuggery of that loathsome woman Javre had by some fumbling miracle succeeded where his genius had been so unfairly thwarted.

What did it matter how he had come by it, though? His smile grew wider as he eased the cork free. He had the package. He turned to gaze upon his prize again.

Pop! An arc of fizzy wine missed his glass and spurted across his Kadiri carpet. He stared open-mouthed. The package was hanging in the air from a hook. Attached to the hook was a gossamer thread. The thread disappeared through a hole in the glass roof high above where he now saw a black shape spreadeagled.

Pombrine made a despairing lunge, bottle and glass tumbling to the floor and spraying wine, but the package slipped through his clutching fingers and was whisked smoothly upwards out of his reach.

‘Guards!’ he roared, shaking his fist. ‘Thief!’

A moment later he realised, and his rage turned in a flash to withering horror.

Ishri would soon be on her way.

With a practised jerk of her wrist, Shev twitched the parcel up and into her waiting glove.

‘What an angler,’ she whispered as she thrust it into her pocket and was away across the steeply pitched roof, knee pads sticky with tar doing most of the work. Astride the ridge and she scuttled to the chimney, flicked the rope into the street below, was over the edge in a twinkling and swarming down. Don’t think about the ground, never think about the ground. It’s a nice place to be but you wouldn’t want to get there too quickly …

‘What a climber,’ she whispered as she passed a large window, a garishly decorated and gloomily lit salon coming into view, and-

She gripped tight to the rope and stopped dead, gently swinging.

She really did have a pressing engagement with not being caught by Pombrine’s guards, but inside the room was one of those sights one couldn’t simply slide past. Four, possibly five or even six naked bodies had formed, with most impressive athleticism, a kind of human sculpture – a grunting tangle of gently shifting limbs. While she was turning her head sideways on to make sense of it, the lynchpin of the arrangement, who Shev took at first glance for a red-haired strongman, looked straight at her.

‘Shevedieh?’

Decidedly not a man, but very definitely strong. Even with hair clipped close there was no mistaking her.

‘Javre? What the hell are you doing here?’

She raised a brow at the naked bodies entwined about her. ‘Is that not obvious?’

Shev was brought to her senses by the rattle of guards in the street below. ‘You never saw me!’ And she slid down the rope, hemp hissing through her gloves, hit the ground hard and sprinted off just as a group of men with weapons drawn came barrelling around the corner.

‘Stop, thief!’

‘Get him!’

And, particularly shrill, Pombrine desperately wailing, ‘My package!’

Shev jerked the cord at the small of her back and felt the pouch split, the caltrops scattering in her wake, heard the shrieks as a couple of the guards went tumbling. Sore feet they’d have in the morning. But there were still more following.

‘Cut him off!’

‘Shoot him!’

She took a sharp left, heard the flatbow string an instant later, the twitter as the bolt glanced from the wall beside her and away into the night. She peeled off her gloves as she ran, one smoking from the friction, and flung them over her shoulder. A quick right, the route well planned in advance, of course, and she sprang up onto the tables outside Verscetti’s, bounding from one to the next with great strides, sending cutlery and glassware flying, the patrons floundering up, tumbling in their shock, a ragged violinist flinging himself for cover.

‘What a runner,’ she whispered, and leaped from the last table, over the clutching hands of a guard diving from her left and a reveller from her right, catching the little cord behind the sign that said Verscetti’s as she fell and giving it a good tug.

There was a flash like lightning as she rolled, an almighty bang as she came up, the murky night at once illuminated, the frontages of the buildings ahead picked out white. There were screams and squeals and a volley of detonations. Behind her, she knew, blossoms of purple fire would be shooting across the street, showers of golden sparks, a display suitable for a baron’s wedding.

‘That Qohdam certainly can make fireworks,’ she whispered, resisting the temptation to stop and watch the show and instead slipping down a shadowy snicket, shooing away a mangy cat, scurrying on low for three-dozen strides and ducking into the narrow garden, struggling to keep her quick breath quiet. She ripped open the packet she’d secured among the roots of the dead willow, unfurling the white robe and wriggling into it, pulling up the cowl and waiting in the shadows, the big votive candle in one hand, ears sifting at the night.

‘Shit,’ she muttered. As the last echoes of her fiery diversion faded she could hear, faintly but coming closer, the calls of Pombrine’s searching guards, doors rattling as they tried them one by one.

‘Where did he go?’

‘I think this way!’

‘Bloody firework burned my hand! I’m really burned, you know!’

‘My package!’

‘Come on, come on,’ she muttered. To be caught by these idiots would be among the most embarrassing moments of her career. That time she’d been stuck in a marriage gown halfway up the side of the Mercers’ guildhall in Adua with flowers in her hair but no underwear and a steadily growing crowd of onlookers below would take some beating, but still. ‘Come on, come on, come-’

Now, from the other direction, she heard the chanting and grinned. The Sisters were always on time. She heard their feet now, the regular tramping blotting out the shouting of Pombrine’s guards and the wailing of a woman temporarily deafened by the fireworks. Louder the feet, louder the heavenly song, and the procession passed the garden, the women all in white, all hooded, lit candles held stiffly before them, ghostly in the gloom as they marched by in unison.

‘What a priestess,’ Shev whispered to herself, and threaded from the garden, jostling her way into the midst of the procession. She tipped her candle to the left so its wick touched that of her neighbour. The woman frowned across and Shev winked back.

‘Give a girl a light, would you?’

With a fizzle it caught and she fell into step, adding her own joyous note to the chant as they processed down Caldiche Street and over the Fintine Bridge, the masked revellers parting respectfully to let them through. Pombrine’s place, and the increasingly frantic searching of his guards, and the furious growling of a pair of savagely arguing Northmen dwindled sedately into the mists behind.