Joe Abercrombie - Best Served Cold

She gave a croaking scream, bucked and twisted. Agony flashed up every limb and made her squirm the more, shudder, retch, but she was held fast. Her host watched her struggle, waxy face empty as a blank page. She sagged back, spitting and moaning as the pain grew worse and worse, gripping her like a giant vise, steadily tightened.

“Anger solves nothing.”

All she could do was growl, snatched breaths slurping through her gritted teeth.

“I imagine you are in some pain, now.” He pulled open a drawer in the cupboard and took out a long pipe, bowl stained black. “I would try to get used to it, if you can.” He stooped and fished a hot coal from the fire with a set of tongs. “I fear that pain will come to be your constant companion.”

The worn mouthpiece loomed at her. She’d seen husk-smokers often enough, sprawling like corpses, withered to useless husks themselves, caring for nothing but the next pipe. Husk was like mercy. A thing for the weak. For the cowardly.

He smiled his dead-man’s smile again. “This will help.”

Enough pain makes a coward of anyone.

The smoke burned at her lungs and made her sore ribs shake, each choke sending new shocks to the tips of her fingers. She groaned, face screwing up, struggling again, but more weakly, now. One more cough, and she lay limp. The edge was gone from the pain. The edge was gone from the fear and the panic. Everything slowly melted. Soft, warm, comfortable. Someone made a long, low moan. Her, maybe. She felt a tear run down the side of her face.

“More?” This time she held the smoke as it bit, blew it tickling out in a shimmering plume. Her breath came slower, and slower, the surging of blood in her head calmed to a gentle lapping.

“More?” The voice washed over her like waves on the smooth beach. The bones were blurred now, glistening in haloes of warm light. The coals in the grate were precious jewels, sparkling every colour. There was barely any pain, and what there was didn’t matter. Nothing did. Her eyes flickered pleasantly, then even more pleasantly drifted shut. Mosaic patterns danced and shifted on the insides of her eyelids. She floated on a warm sea, honey sweet…

–

B ack with us?” His face flickered into focus, hanging limp and white as a flag of surrender. “I was worried, I confess. I never expected you to wake, but now that you have, it would be a shame if-”

“Benna?” Monza’s head was still floating. She grunted, tried to work one ankle, and the grinding ache brought the truth back, crushed her face into a hopeless grimace.

“Still sore? Perhaps I have a way to lift your spirits.” He rubbed his long hands together. “The stitches are all out, now.”

“How long did I sleep?”

“A few hours.”

“Before that?”

“Just over twelve weeks.” She stared back, numb. “Through the autumn, and into winter, and the new year will soon come. A fine time for new beginnings. That you have woken at all is nothing short of miraculous. Your injuries were… well, I think you will be pleased with my work. I know I am.”

He slid a greasy cushion from under the bench and propped her head up, handling her as carelessly as a butcher handles meat, bringing her chin forwards so she could look down at herself. So there was no choice but to. Her body was a lumpy outline under a coarse grey blanket, three leather belts across chest, hips and ankles.

“The straps are for your own protection, to prevent you rolling from the bench while you slept.” He hacked out a sudden chuckle. “We wouldn’t want you breaking anything, would we? Ha… ha! Wouldn’t want to break anything.” He unbuckled the last of the belts, took the blanket between thumb and forefinger while she stared down, desperate to know, and desperate not to know at once.

He whipped it away like a showman displaying his prize exhibit.

She hardly recognised her own body. Stark naked, gaunt and withered as a beggar’s, pale skin stretched tight over ugly knobbles of bone, stained all over with great black, brown, purple, yellow blooms of bruise. Her eyes darted over her own wasted flesh, steadily widening as she struggled to take it in. She was slit all over with red lines. Dark and angry, edged with raised pink flesh, stippled with the dots of pulled stitches. There were four, one above the other, following the curves of her hollow ribs on one side. More angled across her hips, down her legs, her right arm, her left foot.

She’d started to tremble. This butchered carcass couldn’t be her body. Her breath hissed through her rattling teeth, and the blotched and shrivelled ribcage heaved in time. “Uh…” she grunted. “Uh…”

“I know! Impressive, eh?” He leaned forwards over her, following the ladder of red marks on her chest with sharp movements of his hand. “The ribs here and the breastbone were quite shattered. It was necessary to make incisions to repair them, you understand, and to work on the lung. I kept the cutting to the minimum, but you can see that the damage-”

“Uh…”

“The left hip I am especially pleased with.” Pointing out a crimson zigzag from the corner of her hollow stomach down to the inside of her withered leg, surrounded on both sides by trails of red dots. “The thighbone, here, unfortunately broke into itself.” He clicked his tongue and poked a finger into his clenched fist. “Shortening the leg by a fraction, but, as luck would have it, your other shin was shattered, and I was able to remove the tiniest section of bone to make up the difference.” He frowned as he pushed her knees together, then watched them roll apart, feet flopping hopelessly outwards. “One knee slightly higher than the other, and you won’t stand quite so tall but, considering-”

“Uh…”

“Set, now.” He grinned as he squeezed gently at her shrivelled legs from the tops of her thighs down to her knobbly ankles. She watched him touching her, like a cook kneading at a plucked chicken, and hardly felt it. “All quite set, and the screws removed. A wonder, believe me. If the doubters at the academy could see this now they wouldn’t be laughing. If my old master could see this, even he-”

“Uh…” She slowly raised her right hand. Or the trembling mockery of a hand that dangled from the end of her arm. The palm was bent, shrunken, a great ugly scar where Gobba’s wire had cut into the side. The fingers were crooked as tree roots, squashed together, the little one sticking out at a strange angle. Her breath hissed through gritted teeth as she tried to make a fist. The fingers scarcely moved, but the pain still shot up her arm and made bile burn the back of her throat.

“The best I could do. Small bones, you see, badly damaged, and the tendons of the little finger were quite severed.” Her host seemed disappointed. “A shock, of course. The marks will fade… somewhat. But really, considering the fall… well, here.” The mouthpiece of the husk-pipe came towards her and she sucked on it greedily. Clung to it with her teeth as if it was her only hope. It was.

–

H e tore a tiny piece from the corner of the loaf, the kind you might feed birds with. Monza watched him do it, mouth filling with sour spit. Hunger or sickness, there wasn’t much difference. She took it dumbly, lifted it to her lips, so weak that her left hand trembled with the effort, forced it between her teeth and down her throat.

Like swallowing broken glass.

“Slowly,” he murmured, “very slowly, you have eaten nothing but milk and sugar-water since you fell.”

The bread caught in her craw and she retched, gut clamping up tight around the knife-wound Faithful had given her.

“Here.” He slid his hand round her skull, gentle but firm, lifted her head and tipped a bottle of water to her lips. She swallowed, and again, then her eyes flicked towards his fingers. She could feel unfamiliar lumps there, down the side of her head. “I was forced to remove several pieces of your skull. I replaced them with coins.”