Sharp Ends: Stories from the World of The First Law

by Joe Abercrombie

  There’s always a worse case than your worst case, and more often than not, it happens.

  She realised she’d clenched her fingers, crushing the worthless document she’d risked her life for in her fist. She flung it into the ash-scattered fireplace and set her jaw aching tight.

  None of it was lost. It was stolen. And Horald the Finger should’ve known better than to steal from the best thief in Styria.

  She stalked to the wall beside the chimney breast, picked up the broken bust of Bayaz, hefted it high, and with a shriek smashed his bald head into the plaster.

  The wall folded in like cheap board – which indeed it was – leaving a ragged hole. She knocked a few splinters away with Bayaz’s nose, then reached inside, grabbed the rope and dragged it out. Her black bag was on the end, reassuringly weighty, metal clattering as she tossed it down.

  Everything she really needed was in that bag. In case she had to run. But Shev had been running half her life, and she was done.

  Some things are only ever going to end one way.

  It was time to fight.

  Oh, yes, Shevedieh had moved among the lost and the fallen.

  She’d cut purses in the cheapest brothels of Sipani, anthills of vice where the marsh the city was built on endlessly oozed back into the cellars, where no word for innocence was known, let alone spoken. She’d clawed a living among the beggars in Ul-Khatif, and among the beggars who stole from the beggars, and conned the beggars, and even the ones who begged from beggars more fortunate than they. She’d burrowed out temporary homes in the thieves’ pits, gambling pits and charnel pits in Nicante, in Puranti, in Affoia, in Musselia, and always left with a heavier purse than she’d arrived with. She’d bribed corrupt scum on behalf of corrupt scum on the rotting docks of Visserine, when Nicomo Cosca had seized the grand dukedom of the city and there’d been less law than no law. She’d turned out dead men’s pockets with the bonepickers in war-torn Darmium, in plague-riddled Calcis, in famine-ravaged Daleppa, in fire-swept Dagoska. She’d felt so much at home among the low-rent Smoke Houses of Westport, where the weak came to forget their weakness, that her highest ambition had been to open one herself.

  Oh, yes, Shevedieh had moved among the lost and the fallen, but she wasn’t sure she’d ever borne witness to so base a place as when she stepped through the decaying portal of the Duke’s Repose in Talins.

  ‘Did he repose of the pox?’ she croaked, clapping a hand over her mouth.

  It was the stench of bodies unwashed for centuries, or perhaps washed daily but in shit and vinegar. As Shev’s eyes gradually adjusted to the hellish gloom, she saw cursed figures of indeterminate race or gender sprawled punch-drunk, blood-drunk, sorrow-drunk, and simply drunk. Folk tortured each other. Folk tortured themselves. Folk dragged their way towards the release of death with both hands. One lay in their own sick, blowing bubbles with every wet snore while a little dog, or perhaps a large rat, lapped hungrily at the far edge of the puddle. The sound which Shev had assumed was a long drink being poured was in fact a man with trousers around ankles, pissing, apparently endlessly, into a filthy tin bucket while he picked his crooked nose with a crooked finger. In a shadowy corner, two, or perhaps three, others grunted softly under a regularly shifting coat. Shev hoped they were doing nothing worse than fucking, but she would not have liked to bet on it.

  It was a long time since she’d entertained high hopes for humanity, but had they still stood intact, they would have crumbled in that instant.

  ‘God has abandoned us,’ she whispered, narrowing her eyes in the vain hope she might prevent the unholy sights imprinting themselves for ever on her vision.

  The prize exhibit in this museum of filth, the chief mourner at this funeral of all that was decent, the High Priestess of this final shrine on a lifelong pilgrimage of self-pity, self-neglect and self-destruction, was none other than Shev’s long-standing best friend and worst enemy: Javre, Lioness of Hoskopp.

  She sat at a rickety table infested with empty jugs, half-full bottles, slimy cups and greasy glasses, with coins and counters and overflowing ash-bowls, with several chagga and at least one husk pipe, creased and filthied cards scattered like demented confetti. Opposite her sprawled three Union soldiers, one with a beard and a scar, one with a face almost as trustworthy as the vomit-supping rat’s, and one with his head tipped far, far over the back of his chair, mouth wide open, knobble on his skinny neck standing out painfully sharp and shifting gently as he snored.

  Javre’s red hair was a snarled-up tangle, matted with ash, with slime, with food, with things that could not be identified. That should not be identified, lest they offend God to the extent that he felt obliged to end creation. By the look of things she had been fighting in the pit again. Her knuckles flapped with bloodstained bandages, her bare shoulder – for the indescribably stained shirt she wore had lost a sleeve somewhere – was grazed and scabbed, the side of her face smeared with bruises.

  Shev hardly knew how she felt to see her. Relieved that she hadn’t left the city. Guilty at the state she’d made of herself. Ashamed to be asking for her help. Angry at she hardly knew what any more. A slow accumulation of years of hurts and frustrations, little things added up day after day to a burden she could not stand to carry. But, as always, she had no other choices. She peeled the hand from her mouth and padded over.

  Javre stank. Even worse than she had the first time they met, in the door of Shev’s Smoke House. Not long before it burned down, along with her past life. Shev wouldn’t see another life burned down. She couldn’t see it.

  ‘You stink, Javre,’ she said.

  Javre didn’t bother to look around. However carefully you crept up on her, somehow she always knew who was there. ‘Have not washed lately.’

  Her words came slurred and Shev’s heart sank. It took days of drinking for Javre to show the slightest sign of being drunk. By then she was colossally, toweringly, heroically drunk. There was nothing Javre did by halves.

  ‘I have been entirely busy drinking, fucking and fighting.’ She cleared her throat, turned her head and spat noisily and bloodily at Shev’s feet, half of it dangling from her split lip and soaking into her shirt as she turned back to the game. ‘I have been drunk for …’ She raised a bandaged hand, squinting as she clumsily stuck the fingers up one by one. When she stuck the thumb up, her cards fluttered to the floor. Javre frowned at them. ‘I cannot even count any more.’ She started to fish them clumsily up between scabbed fingers, one by one. ‘Drinking, fucking, fighting and losing at cards. Days since I won a hand.’ She burped. Even from this distance, Shev shuddered at the smell of it. ‘Weeks. I hardly know which side up the cards go.’

  ‘Javre, I need to talk to you—’

  ‘Let me introduce you!’ Javre swept a loose arm at the Union soldiers and very nearly took the sleeping man’s head off with a backhand. ‘This little beauty is my good old friend Shevedieh! Used to be a henchman of mine.’

  ‘Javre.’

  ‘Sidekick, then. Whatever. We travelled half the Circle of the World together! All kinds of adventures.’

  ‘Javre.’

  ‘Disasters, then. Whatever. These shits are among the finest soldiers of His August Majesty the High King of the Union. The beardy bastard is Lieutenant Forest.’ He nodded to Shev with a good-natured grin. ‘This stringy one is Lance Corporal Yolk.’ The sleeping man stirred faintly, tongue moving against his cracked lips with vague squelching sounds. ‘And this lucky fucker—’

  ‘Skilful fucker,’ grunted the ratty man around a chagga pipe gripped in his yellowed teeth.

  ‘Is Sergeant Tunny.’

  ‘Corporal,’ he said, peering through his haze of smoke at the cards.

  ‘Got himself demoted again,’ said Forest. ‘Over a goose and a whore, would you believe.’

  ‘She was worth it,’ said Tunny. ‘And the whore wasn’t bad, either. Fire, by the way.’ And he laid his cards down with a snap.

  ‘Tits of the Mother!’ snarled Javre.
‘Again?’

  ‘There’s a certain spot …’ muttered Tunny, pipe waggling between his teeth, ‘between too drunk and not drunk enough …’ as he scooped up scattered winnings in a dozen different currencies, ‘where I’m a hell of a card player. The trick, as with so much in life, is keeping the balance just right.’

  ‘Luck,’ mused Javre as she watched him gather the harvest through narrowed, red-rimmed, absurdly bloodshot eyes, ‘has always been the one thing missing from my life.’

  ‘Javre—’

  ‘Let me guess!’ Bandages trailed through spilled beer as she flung up a hand. ‘You are dunked to your scrawny neck in some species of shit and have run straight back to me to fetch the shovel.’

  Shevedieh opened her mouth to make an elaborate retort, thought a moment, and decided against. ‘Basically, yes. Horald’s taken Carcolf. Now he wants me out on Carp Island.’ She forced the words through clenched teeth. ‘I could really use your help—’

  Javre gave a snort so explosive snot spattered down her chapped top lip. She did not appear to notice. ‘See, boys? You give them everything!’ And she beat her chest with a fist so hard it left a great pink mark. ‘You give them your heart and they spit it in your face!’

  ‘How can you spit a heart?’ asked Shev, but Javre was not interested in unmixing her metaphors.

  ‘The moment they get in trouble, oh, the fucking moment? Straight back to Mummy!’ She glared unsteadily at Shev. ‘Well, Mummy is fucking busy!’

  ‘Mummy is fucking embarrassing herself.’

  ‘That is Mummy’s fucking prerogative. Shuffle those cards, Tunny, you cunny.’ He did no more than raise a brow as he set to shuffling. ‘I thought you were all done with me and had fine new friends. What of the grand duchess, the Snake of Talins, the Butcher of Caprile? Mother to a king, I hear.’

  ‘Bless his eternal Majesty,’ grunted Tunny out of the corner of his mouth, flicking cards to each of the four players, conscious and otherwise.

  ‘I only met the woman twice,’ said Shev. ‘I doubt she knows my name.’

  ‘But her all-powerful Minister of Whispers, Shylo Vitari, surely does. Can she not reach from the shadows and pluck your lover from danger?’

  ‘She’s on her way south to Sipani.’

  ‘What of your grinning merchant friend, Majud? He has deep pockets.’

  ‘It’s getting him to reach into them that’s the problem.’

  ‘That Northman you were working with, then? The one with the eye. Or … without it.’ Javre accidentally poked herself while waving at her face with her cards, had to clap a hand over her running eye, but at least she accidentally wiped the snot from her lip, too. ‘Trembles?’

  ‘Shivers.’ Shev gave a little shiver of her own at the memory of that scarred face, the expression on it as he killed those three Sipanese who’d been chasing her. Or the terrible lack of expression. ‘Some help it’s better to do without,’ she muttered.

  ‘You can do without mine, then.’ Javre raised the glass towards her mouth in a wobbly hand, face fixed in concentration. Shev slapped it from her fingers and it shattered in the corner.

  ‘I need you sober.’

  Javre gave a snort. ‘That is never going to happen, Shevedieh. If I get my way, that is never going to happen again.’

  ‘Here,’ said Tunny, holding out his own glass, ‘have mine—’

  Shev slapped it from his hand and it shattered in almost exactly the same spot as the last one. He frowned, slowly removing the pipe from his mouth for the first time. ‘Bloody hell, girl, I wish you wouldn’t—’

  Javre shoved her fist under his nose, cards crushed in it, red eyes bulging, lips curling back and spraying spit. ‘Talk to my friend like that again, you fucking cocksucker, you will be picking your teeth from my knuckles!’

  Tunny peered down at that great, scarred hand, one of his eyebrows going up, ever so slowly. ‘Madam, I’m a soldier. The last thing I want is a fight.’

  Forest cleared his wet throat and somewhat unsteadily rose. ‘Ladies, with great respect, I think that puts an end to the evening. We’ve an early start tomorrow. Back to Midderland after our defeat, you know.’ He jabbed Yolk with his elbow and the little man started awake.

  ‘I raise!’ he shouted, staring wildly about. ‘I raise!’ Then he flopped from his chair onto hands and knees and was sick on the floor.

  Tunny was already sweeping his winnings into a battered hat. Forest caught Yolk by the belt and began to drag him away, still desperately trying to raise.

  ‘An honour,’ said Tunny as he backed towards the door through the pool of puke, almost falling over the snoring figure. ‘An absolute fucking honour.’

  ‘I will see you on the battlefield!’ shouted Javre.

  Tunny winced and waved one finger round and round. ‘Let’s say nearby!’ And he was gone into the smoky murk.

  ‘You have spoiled my fun, Shevedieh, as always.’ Javre uncurled her fingers. A couple of the ruined cards dropped out. A couple of others were stuck to her palm and she had to shake them off. ‘I trust you are bloody well pleased with yourself.’

  ‘You’ve spoiled your own fun, as always, and I’m about as far from pleased as it’s possible to be, since you ask.’ She slid into Yolk’s chair. ‘No one else is going to help me, Javre. They don’t trust Carcolf. They don’t want Horald to kill them.’

  Javre gave another snort and had to wipe more snot from under her scabbed nose with her scabbed knuckles. ‘On the Great Leveller I am ambivalent, as you know, but if you think I trust that wiggling snake any more than the plague—’

  ‘I don’t think we’re ever going to see eye to eye on her, do you?’

  ‘It is hard to see eye to eye with someone a foot shorter than you. She looks like a snake, moves like a snake, thinks like a snake. She saw you coming, Shevedieh, just like she always does, and she thought dinner. In spite of all the wrongs she has made you lick up down the years, she only had to swagger that round arse past you once and you were hooked all over again. She sank that ship with you on it, lest we forget!’

  ‘It’s different this time,’ muttered Shev, not sure whether the words hurt so much because they were false, or because they were true.

  ‘It is never different. Nothing ever is. How can a woman as clever as you not see it?’

  ‘I do fucking see it!’ screamed Shev, thumping the table and making the bottles rattle. ‘But I don’t care any more! I have to make the best of it. I have to have … something, before it’s too late!’ She felt tears stinging her eyes, her voice going high and warbly, but she couldn’t stop it. ‘I can’t run any more, Javre! I can’t run. I’m tired, and I need your help. Please. Help me.’

  Javre stared at her for a long moment. Then she jerked up, barging the table over and sending its cargo of glasses, pots, bottles, pipes scattering, shattering, clattering across the filthy floor.

  ‘Cunt of the Goddess, Shevedieh, you know you only had to ask!’ She stabbed Shev painfully in the tit with one inept finger. ‘My sword is yours, always!’ Her brow knitted with puzzlement, then she stared wildly around. ‘Where is my sword?’

  Shev sighed and nudged it from under Javre’s chair with the toe of her boot.

  It was dark, down on this quietest part of the docks. The sea flapped and slopped at the mossy stones of the quay, and the warped supports of the wharves, and the slimy flanks of the moored boats. The reflections of the few lamps, torches and candles that still burned danced and broke in the restless water.

  A gust of wind fluttered the ragged papers on the warehouse wall. Bills celebrating young King Jappo’s coronation pasted over bills celebrating the victory at Sweet Pines pasted over bills condemning Union aggression pasted over bills revelling in the ascension of Monzcarro Murcatto pasted over bills announcing the death of Monzcarro Murcatto pasted over bills trumpeting victories and defeats of enemies and rulers long forgotten. Probably it was only the ancient crust of bills that kept the warehouse standing.

  Shev
frowned out across the bay. In the distance she could just see a few faint points of light, flickering ghostly.

  ‘Carp Island,’ muttered Javre, planting a hand on her hip and nearly missing, she was that drunk.

  Shev puffed out her cheeks. ‘And on Carp Island, Burroia’s Fort.’

  ‘And in Burroia’s Fort, Horald the Finger.’

  ‘And with Horald the Finger …’ Shev trailed off. God, she hoped Carcolf was still alive.

  ‘Once we are there,’ murmured Javre, leaning close enough that Shev almost gagged on the boozy reek of her breath, ‘what’s your plan?’

  She wished she had time to get Javre sober. Or at least clean. But she did not. ‘Rescue Carcolf. Kill Horald. Don’t get killed ourselves.’

  A pause, while Javre pushed the greasy hair out of her face then flicked something that had been stuck in it off her fingers. ‘I think you will agree that it is lacking detail.’

  Shev took a glance up and down the quay. The thief’s glance, which looks without seeming to look. ‘You never complained about charging into the jaws of death before. Without plans, without weapons … without clothes, on more than one occasion.’

  ‘On clothes I am ambivalent, as you know, but I have always hated plans.’

  ‘Then why are you worried now?’

  ‘Because I always knew you would have one.’

  ‘Welcome to my life of constant doubt, anxiety and occasional sudden and unpredictable horror, Javre. I hope you enjoy your fucking visit.’ And she walked across the empty quay and down the steps to the nearest wharf. The thief’s walk, neither striding boldly nor scurrying crouched. The walk of someone forgettable going about their boring business. A walk that raises no eyebrows and no alarms.

  A good thief goes unseen. A truly great one merely goes unnoticed.

  She stopped by a boat that suited, checked the oars were in the bottom, then winced at a loud clatter, turned to see that Javre had stumbled into a set of fishing nets on a frame and was now tangled with them, desperately trying to stop them falling. She finally got them settled, shrugged at Shev, then strode down the wharf towards her, about the most conspicuous woman who ever drew breath.