The Great Leveller

by Joe Abercrombie

  She realised the door was open still and kicked out at it but judged the distance all wrong and kicked a hole in the plaster beside the frame instead, started laughing again. Got the door shuddering shut with the next kick and he had her shirt open now and was kissing at her chest which felt all right actually if a bit ticklish, her own body looking all pale and strange to her and she was wondering when was the last time she did anything like this and deciding it was way too long. Then he’d stopped and was staring down in the darkness, eyes just a pair of glimmers.

  ‘Are we doing the right thing?’ he asked, so comic serious for a moment she wanted to laugh again.

  ‘How the fuck should I know? Get your trousers off.’

  She was trying to wriggle free of her own but still had her boots on and was getting more and more tangled, knew she should’ve taken the boots off first but it was a bit late now and she grunted and kicked and her belt thrashed about like a snake cut in half, her knife flopping off the end of it and clattering against the wall, until she got one boot off and one trouser-leg and that seemed good enough for the purpose.

  They’d made it to the bed somehow and were tangled up with each other more naked than not, warm and pleasantly wriggling, his hand between her legs and her shoving her hips against it, both laughing less and grunting more, slow and throaty, bright dots fizzing on the inside of her closed lids so she had to open her eyes so she didn’t feel like she’d fall right off the bed and out the ceiling. Eyes open was worse, the room turning around her loud with her breath and her thudding heartbeat and the warm rubbing of skin on skin and the springs in the old mattress shrieking with complaint but no one giving too much of a shit for their objections.

  Something about her brother and sister niggled at her, and Gully swinging, and Lamb and a fight, but she let it all drift past like smoke and spin away with the spinning ceiling.

  How long since she had some fun, after all?

  ‘Oh,’ groaned Temple. ‘Oh no.’

  He moaned a piteous moan as of the cursed dead in hell, facing an eternity of suffering and regretting most bitterly their lives wasted in sin.

  ‘God help me.’

  But God had the righteous to assist and Temple could not pretend to be in that category. Not after last night’s fun.

  Everything hurt him. The blanket across his bare legs. A fly buzzing faintly up near the ceiling. The sun sneaking around the edges of the curtains. The sounds of Crease life and Crease death beyond them. He remembered now why he had stopped drinking. What he could not remember was why it had felt like a good idea to start again.

  He winced at the hacking, gurgling noise that had woken him, managed to lift his head a few degrees and saw Shy kneeling over the night pot. She was naked except for one boot and her trousers tangled around that ankle, ribs standing stark as she retched. A strip of light from the window cut over one shoulder-blade bright, bright, and found a big scar, a burn like a letter upside down.

  She rocked back, turned eyes sunken in dark rings on him and wiped a string of spit from the corner of her mouth. ‘Another kiss?’

  The sound he made was indescribable. Part laugh, part belch, part groan. He could not have made it again in a year of trying. But why would he have wanted to?

  ‘Got to get some air.’ Shy dragged up her trousers but left the belt dangling and they sagged off her arse as she tottered to the window.

  ‘Don’t do it,’ moaned Temple, but there was no stopping her. Not without moving, and that was inconceivable. She hauled the curtains away and pushed the window wide, while he struggled feebly to shield his eyes from the merciless light.

  Shy was cursing as she fished around under the other bed. He could hardly believe it when she came up with a quarter-full bottle, pulled the cork with her teeth and sat there gathering her courage, like a swimmer staring into an icy pool.

  ‘You’re not going to—’

  She tipped the bottle up and swallowed, clapped the back of her hand to her mouth, stomach muscles fluttering, and burped, and grimaced, and shivered, and offered it to him.

  ‘You?’ she asked, voice wet with rush back.

  He wanted to be sick just looking. ‘God, no.’

  ‘It’s the only thing’ll help.’

  ‘Is the cure for a stab-wound really another one?’

  ‘Once you set to stabbing yourself it can be hard to stop.’

  She shrugged her shirt over that scar, and after doing a couple of buttons realised she had them in the wrong holes and the whole front twisted, gave up and slumped down on the other bed. Temple wasn’t sure he’d ever seen anyone look so worn out and defeated, not even in the mirror.

  He wondered whether he should put his clothes on. Some of the muddy rags scattered across the boards bore a faint resemblance to part of his new suit, but he could not be sure. Could not be sure of anything. He forced himself to sit, dragging his legs off the bed as if they were made of lead. When he was sure his stomach would not immediately rebel, he looked at Shy and said, ‘You’ll find them, you know.’

  ‘How do I know?’

  ‘Because no one deserves a good turn of the card more.’

  ‘You don’t know what I deserve.’ She slumped back on her elbows, head sinking into her bony shoulders. ‘You don’t know what I’ve done.’

  ‘Can’t be worse than what you did to me last night.’

  She didn’t laugh. She was looking past him, eyes focused far away. ‘When I was seventeen I killed a boy.’

  Temple swallowed. ‘Well, yes, that is worse.’

  ‘I ran off from the farm. Hated it there. Hated my bitch mother. Hated my bastard stepfather.’

  ‘Lamb?’

  ‘No, the first one. My mother got through ’em. I had some fool notion I’d open a store. Things went wrong right off. Didn’t mean to kill that boy, but I got scared and I cut him.’ She rubbed absently under her jaw with a fingertip. ‘He wouldn’t stop bleeding.’

  ‘Did he have it coming?’

  ‘Guess he must’ve. Got it, didn’t he? But he had a family, and they chased me, and I ran, and I got hungry so I started stealing.’ She droned it all out in a dead monotone. ‘After a while I got to thinking no one gives you a fair chance and taking things is easier than making ’em. I fell in with some low company and dragged ’em lower. More robbing, and more killings, and maybe some had it coming, and maybe some didn’t. Who gets what they deserve?’

  Temple thought of Kahdia. ‘I’ll admit God can be a bit of a shit that way.’

  ‘In the end there were bills up over half the Near Country for my arrest. Smoke, they called me, like I was something to be scared of, and put a price on my head. About the only time in my life I was thought worth something.’ She curled her lips back from her teeth. ‘They caught some woman and hanged her in my place. Didn’t even look like me, but she got killed and I got away with it and I don’t know why.’

  There was a heavy silence, then. She raised the bottle and took a couple of good, long swallows, neck working with the effort, and she came up gasping for air with eyes watering hard. That was an excellent moment for Temple to mumble his excuses and run. A few months ago, the door would have been swinging already. His debts were settled, after all, which was better than he usually managed on his way out. But he found this time he did not want to leave.

  ‘If you want me to share your low opinion of yourself,’ he said, ‘I’m afraid I can’t oblige. Sounds to me like you made some mistakes.’

  ‘You’d call all that mistakes?’

  ‘Some pretty stupid ones, but yes. You never chose to do evil.’

  ‘Who chooses evil?’

  ‘I did. Pass me that bottle.’

  ‘What’s this?’ she asked as she tossed it across. ‘A shitty-past competition?

  ‘Yes, and I win.’ He closed his eyes and forced down a swallow, burning and choking all the way. ‘After my wife died, I spent a year as the most miserable drunk you ever saw.’

  ‘I’ve seen some pretty
fucking miserable ones.’

  ‘Then picture worse. I thought I couldn’t get any lower, so I signed up as lawyer for a mercenary company, and found I could.’ He raised the bottle in salute. ‘The Company of the Gracious Hand, under Captain General Nicomo Cosca! Oh, noble brotherhood!’ He drank again. It felt good in a hideous way, like picking at a scab.

  ‘Sounds fancy.’

  ‘That’s what I thought.’

  ‘Wasn’t fancy?’

  ‘A worse accumulation of human scum you never saw.’

  ‘I’ve seen some pretty fucking bad ones.’

  ‘Then picture worse. To begin with I believed there were good reasons for what they did. What we did. Then I convinced myself there were good reasons. Then I knew there weren’t even good excuses, but did it anyway because I was too coward not too. We were sent to the Near Country to root out rebels. A friend of mine tried to save some people. He was killed. And them. They killed each other. But I squirmed away, as always, and I ran like the coward I am, and I fell in a river and, for reasons best known only to Himself, God sent a good woman to fish my worthless carcass out.’

  ‘As a point of fact, God sent a murdering outlaw.’

  ‘Well, His ways are damned mysterious. I can’t say I took to you right away, that’s true, but I’m starting to think God sent exactly what I needed.’ Temple stood. It wasn’t easy, but he managed it. ‘I feel like all my life I’ve been running. Maybe it’s time for me to stick. To try it, at least.’ He sank down beside her, the creaking of the bedsprings going right through him. ‘I don’t care what you’ve done. I owe you. Only my life, now, but still. Let me stick.’ He tossed the empty bottle aside, took a deep breath, licked his finger and thumb-tip and smoothed down his beard. ‘God help me, but I’ll take that kiss now.’

  She squinted at him, every colour in her face wrong – skin a little yellow, eyes a little pink, lips a little blue. ‘You serious?’

  ‘I may be a fool, but I’m not letting a woman who can fill a sick pot without spilling pass me by. Wipe your mouth and come here.’

  He shifted towards her, someone clattering in the corridor outside, and her mouth twitched up in a smile. She leaned towards him, hair tickling his shoulder, and her breath smelled foul and he did not care. The doorknob turned and rattled, and Shy bellowed at the door, so close and broken-voiced it felt like a hatchet blow in Temple’s forehead, ‘You got the wrong fucking room, idiot!’

  Against all expectation, the door lurched open anyway and a man stepped in. A tall man with close-cropped fair hair and sharp clothes. He had a sharp expression too as his eyes wandered unhurried about the place, as if this was his room and he was both annoyed and amused to find someone else had been fucking in it.

  ‘I think I got it right,’ he said, and two other men appeared in the doorway, and neither looked like men you’d be happy to see anywhere, let alone uninvited in your hotel room. ‘I heard you been looking for me.’

  ‘Who the fuck are you?’ growled Shy, eyes flickering to the corner where her knife was lying sheathed on the floor.

  The newcomer smiled like a conjuror about to pull off the trick you won’t believe. ‘Grega Cantliss.’

  Then a few things happened at once. Shy flung the bottle at the doorway and dived for her knife. Cantliss dived for her, the other two tangled in the doorway behind him.

  And Temple dived for the window.

  Statements about sticking notwithstanding, before he knew it he was outside, air whooping in his throat in a terrified squeal as he dropped, then rolling in the cold mud, then floundering up and sprinting naked across the main street, which in most towns would have been considered poor form but in Crease was not especially remarkable. He heard someone bellow and forced himself on, slipping and sliding and his heart pounding so hard he thought he might have to hold his skull together, the Mayor’s Church of Dice lurching closer.

  When the guards at the door saw him they smiled, then they frowned, then they caught hold of him as he scrambled up the steps.

  ‘The Mayor’s got a rule about trousers—’

  ‘Got to see Lamb. Lamb!’

  One of them punched him in the mouth, snapped his head back and sent him stumbling against the door-frame. He knew he deserved it more than ever, but somehow a fist in the face always came as a surprise.

  ‘Lamb!’ he screeched again, covering his head as best he could. ‘La—ooof.’ The other’s fist sank into his gut and doubled him up, drove his wind right out and dropped him to his knees, blowing bloody bubbles. While he was considering the stones under his face in breathless silence, one of the guards grabbed him by the hair and started dragging him up, raising his fist high.

  ‘Leave him be.’ To Temple’s great relief, Savian caught that fist before it came down with one knobbly hand. ‘He’s with me.’ He grabbed Temple under the armpit with the other and dragged him through the doorway, shrugging off his coat and throwing it around Temple’s shoulders. ‘What the hell happened?’

  ‘Cantliss,’ croaked Temple, limping into the gaming hall, waving a weak arm towards the hostelry, only able to get enough breath for one wheezing word at a time. ‘Shy—’

  ‘What happened?’ Lamb was thumping down the steps from the Mayor’s room, barefooted himself and with his shirt half-buttoned, and for a moment Temple was wondering why he came that way, and then he saw the drawn sword in Lamb’s fist and felt very scared, and then he saw something in Lamb’s face that made him feel more scared still.

  ‘Cantliss . . . at Camling’s . . .’ he managed to splutter.

  Lamb stood a moment, eyes wide, then he strode for the door, brushing the guards out of his way, and Savian strode after.

  ‘Everything all right?’ The Mayor stood on the balcony outside her rooms in a Gurkish dressing gown, a pale scar showing in the hollow between her collar bones. Temple blinked up, wondering if Lamb had been in there with her, then pulled his borrowed coat around him and hurried after the others without speaking. ‘Put some trousers on!’ she called after him.

  When Temple struggled up the steps of the hostelry, Lamb had Camling by the collar and had dragged him most of the way over his own counter with one hand, sword in the other and the proprietor desperately squealing, ‘They just dragged her out! The Whitehouse, maybe, I have no notion, it was none of my doing!’

  Lamb shoved Camling tottering away and stood, breath growling in his throat. Then he put the sword carefully on the counter and his palms flat before it, fingers spreading out, the wood gleaming in the space where the middle one should have been. Savian walked around behind the counter, shouldering Camling out of the way, took a glass and bottle from a high shelf, blew out one then pulled the cork from the other.

  ‘You need a hand, you got mine,’ he grunted as he poured.

  Lamb nodded. ‘You should know lending me a hand can be bad for your health.’

  Savian coughed as he nudged the glass across. ‘My health’s a mess.’

  ‘What are you going to do?’ asked Temple.

  ‘Have a drink.’ And Lamb picked up the glass and drained it, white stubble on his throat shifting. Savian tipped the bottle to fill it again.

  ‘Lamb!’ Lord Ingelstad walked in somewhat unsteadily, his face pale and his waistcoat covered in stains. ‘He said you’d be here!’

  ‘Who said?’

  Ingelstad gave a helpless chuckle as he tossed his hat on the counter, a few wisps of stray hair left standing vertically from his head. ‘Strangest thing. After that fun at Majud’s place, I was playing cards over at Papa Ring’s. Entirely lost track of time and I was somewhat behind financially, I’ll admit, and a gentleman came in to tell Papa something, and he told me he’d forget my debt if I brought you a message.’

  ‘What message?’ Lamb drank again, and Savian filled his glass again.

  Ingelstad squinted at the wall. ‘He said he’s playing host to a friend of yours . . . and he’d very much like to be a gracious host . . . but you’ll have to kiss the mud tomorrow
night. He said you’ll be dropping anyway, so you might as well drop willingly and you can both walk out of Crease free people. He said you have his word on that. He was very particular about it. You have his word, apparently.’

  ‘Well, ain’t I the lucky one,’ said Lamb.

  Lord Ingelstad squinted over at Temple as though only just noticing his unusual attire. ‘It appears some people have had an even heavier night than I.’

  ‘Can you take a message back?’ asked Lamb.

  ‘I daresay a few more minutes won’t make any difference to Lady Ingelstad’s temper at this point. I am doomed whatever.’

  ‘Then tell Papa Ring I’ll keep his word safe and sound. And I hope he’ll do the same for his guest.’

  The nobleman yawned as he jammed his hat back on. ‘Riddles, riddles.

  Then off to bed for me!’ And he strutted back out into the street.

  ‘What are you going to do?’ whispered Temple.

  ‘There was a time I’d have gone charging over there without a thought for the costs and got bloody.’ Lamb lifted the glass and looked at it for a moment. ‘But my father always said patience is the king of virtues. A man has to be realistic. Has to be.’

  ‘So what are you going to do?’

  ‘Wait. Think. Prepare.’ Lamb swallowed the last measure and bared his teeth at the glass. ‘Then get bloody.’

  High Stakes

  ‘A trim?’ asked Faukin, directing his blank, bland, professional smile towards the mirror. ‘Or something more radical?’

  ‘Shave it all off, hair and beard, close to the skull as you can get.’

  Faukin nodded as though that would have been his choice. The client always knows best, after all. ‘A wet shave of the pate, then.’