Sharp Ends: Stories from the World of The First Law

by Joe Abercrombie

  Javre had a little smile at the corner of her mouth as she glanced down at her. ‘You and I, side by side?’

  ‘That’s where a sidekick belongs, no? You can do the fighting, I can do the complaining.’

  ‘Just the way it has always been.’

  ‘How else would it be?’

  Javre’s smile curled up a little further. ‘I appreciate the offer, Shevedieh. It means … more than you can know. But you have earned the chance at something better. Some things one has to do alone.’

  ‘Javre—’

  ‘If I die, drowned in some bog, or spitted by some guard, or roasted by some wizard’s Art, well, it will be some consolation to know that my partner lived to be old and shrivelled, still telling tall tales of our high adventures together.’

  Shev blinked. Strange, how a day before all she could think of were the bad times. The thousand hurts, the million arguments, the nights spent on the stony ground. Now all the good came up at once and choked her. The laughter, the songs, the knowing there was always, always someone at her back. She tried to smile but her sight was swimming. ‘It’s been something, though, hasn’t it?’

  ‘It has,’ said Javre, glancing over to Carcolf. ‘Look after her.’

  Carcolf swallowed. ‘I’ll try.’

  ‘Fail, and there will be no place in the Circle of the World where you will be safe from me.’ She laid that great, heavy, comforting hand on Shev’s shoulder one more time. ‘Fare you well, my friend.’ And she turned away, towards her mother.

  ‘Fare you well,’ whispered Shev, wiping her eyes.

  Carcolf took her gently by the shoulders from behind and drew her close. ‘Let’s go home.’

  ‘You should come talk to me!’ called Horald after her. ‘I can always find work for the best thief in—’

  ‘Go fuck yourself, Horald,’ said Shev.

  When they got back there, her place was still killed.

  ‘Nothing broken that can’t be fixed.’ Carcolf righted Shev’s ruined table and brushed some broken plaster off it with the back of her hand. ‘We’ll get it all put right in no time. I know people.’

  ‘Seems you know everyone,’ muttered Shev, numbly, tossing down her bag.

  ‘We’ll take a trip. Just you and me. Change of scene.’ Carcolf had hardly stopped talking since they rowed away from Carp Island. As if she was worried by what might be said if she left a gap. ‘Jacra, maybe. Or the Thousand Isles? I’ve never been. You always said the Isles are beautiful.’

  ‘Javre thought so,’ muttered Shev.

  Carcolf paused, then pressed on as if the name hadn’t been mentioned at all. ‘When we get back it’ll all be so much better. You’ll see. Let me change. Then we’ll go out. We’ll do something fun.’

  ‘Fun.’ Shev flopped onto the one intact chair. She was the one who really needed to change but she couldn’t be bothered. She hardly had the strength to stand.

  ‘You remember what it is?’

  Shev forced out a weak grin. ‘Maybe you can remind me.’

  ‘Of course I can.’ Carcolf smiled. ‘Fun’s my middle name.’

  ‘Oh? So it’s just your first name I’m missing.’

  ‘What kind of a mysterious beauty would I be without any mysteries?’ And Carcolf consummately acted the part of a mysterious beauty over her shoulder as the bedroom door swung shut.

  Shev winced, bruised side aching as she squirmed out of her coat, tools clattering as it dropped to the floor, a loose smoke bomb rolling free through the mess. She slumped down, elbows on her knees, chin on her hands.

  Javre was out of her life. Carcolf was in it. She was square with Horald the Finger. Everything she’d wanted, wasn’t it?

  So why did she feel so bloody miserable?

  There was a soft knock at the door and Shev frowned as she looked up. Another knock. She slid out her sword-eater, held it down by her right side as she stood, and with her left hand nudged the door open a crack.

  There was a twitchy youth out in the stairwell with big ears and a rash of spots around his mouth.

  ‘You Carcolf?’ He squinted through the gap. ‘You’re shorter than I thought you’d be.’

  ‘I’m shorter than I hoped I’d be,’ snapped Shev. ‘Reckon my height’s a disappointment to us both.’

  The lad shrugged. ‘Disappointment’s part of life.’ And he held out a folded paper between two fingers.

  ‘Everyone’s a fucking philosopher.’ Shev opened the door wide enough to pluck it free, then shouldered it shut and turned the key. A letter, with Carcolf written on the front in a slanted hand. Something familiar about the writing. Something that picked at her.

  She tossed it down on the scarred tabletop and frowned at it while Carcolf started singing in the bedroom. Bloody hell, she even sang well.

  If you want to be a fine new person with a fine new life you’ve got to put the person you were behind you, like a snake sheds its skin. You’ve got to stop picking through your hoard of hurts and grievances like a miser with his coins, set ’em down and allow yourself to go free. You’ve got to forgive and you’ve got to trust, not because anyone else deserves it, but because you do.

  Shev took a hard breath and turned away from the letter.

  Then she turned back, snatched it up and slashed it wide open with the sword-eater.

  No one changes that much. Not all at once.

  She knew the hand, now she saw more of it. The same one that had written the note Horald the Finger had put his mark to. The note that had been left here in her ruined place. The note that had drawn her and Javre out to Burroia’s Fort.

  Carcolf, my old friend

  Just wanted to thank you again for your help. No one spins a story like you. Pleasure to watch you work, as always. If you come through Westport again I’ll have more for you, and well paid. I’ve always got things that need taking from here to there.

  Hope it all went well with my father in Talins. I swear, you’re the one woman he holds in higher regard than me.

  Stay careful,

  Leanda

  Shev’s eyes went wider and wider as she read, the cogs upstairs spinning at triple speed.

  Leanda. Horald’s oh-so-competent daughter running things in Westport.

  My old friend. Carcolf might know everyone, but these were tighter ties than she’d ever given a hint of.

  Hope it all went well with my father in Talins. Shev looked up and saw Carcolf standing in the doorway in her underwear. A sight she would’ve swum oceans for once. It gave her scant happiness now.

  Carcolf blinked from Shev’s stricken face to the letter, and back, and slowly held up a calming palm, as if Shev was a skittish pony that a sudden move might startle. ‘Now, listen to me. This isn’t what it looks like.’

  ‘No?’ Shev slowly turned the letter around. ‘Because it looks like you’re about as tight as can be with Horald and his family, and this whole fucking business was your idea!’

  Carcolf gave a guilty little grin. A toddler caught with stolen jam all around her face. ‘Then, maybe … it is what it looks like.’

  Shev just stood and stared. Again. The old violinist chose that moment to strike up in the square outside, overplaying the hell out of a plaintive little piece, but Shev didn’t feel like dancing to it, and like laughing at it even less. Seemed a fitting accompaniment to the collapse of her pathetic little self-deceptions. God, why did she insist on demanding from people what she knew they could never give her? Why did she insist on making the same mistakes over and over? Why was she fooled so easily, every time?

  Because she wanted to be fooled.

  You’ve got to be realistic, that old Northman on the farm near Squaredeal used to tell her. Got to be realistic. And she’d leaned on the fence with a stalk of grass in her teeth and nodded sagely along. And yet, in spite of all she’d seen and all she’d suffered, she was still the least realistic fool in the Circle of the World.

  ‘Look, Shevedieh …’ Carcolf’s voice was smooth and calm and reason
able, a politician explaining their great plans for the nation. ‘I can see how you might feel … a little bit deceived.’

  ‘A little bit?’ squeaked Shev, her voice going high with disbelief.

  ‘I just wanted …’ Carcolf looked down, prodding at a bent teaspoon with one pointed toe, and glanced up shyly under her lashes, trying on the innocent new bride for size, ‘… to know that you cared.’

  Shev’s eyes went even wider. She positively goggled. ‘So … it was all a fucking test?’

  ‘No! Well, yes. I wanted to know we’ve got something … that can last, is all. That didn’t come out right!’

  ‘How could that come out right?’

  ‘Because you passed! You passed and then some!’ Carcolf padded towards her. That walk she had. God, that walk. ‘You came for me. I never thought you would. My hero, eh? Heroine. Whichever.’

  ‘You could’ve just asked me!’

  Carcolf crushed her face up as she came closer. ‘But … you know … people say all kinds of things in bed that it’s probably not best to put to too hard a test later on—’

  ‘So I’m beginning to fucking see!’

  Carcolf’s brows drew in a touch. An impatient mother, frustrated that her daughter’s tantrum won’t subside. ‘Look. I know it’s been a hard night for everyone but it all turned out for the best. Now you’re square with Horald, and I’m square with Horald, and we can—’

  Shev felt a sudden cold twinge in her stomach. ‘What do you mean, you’re square with Horald?’

  ‘Well …’ A flicker of annoyance across Carcolf’s face that she’d let something slip, then she started flapping her hands around like a circus magician disguising a trick. ‘I had a little debt of my own, as it happens, and he had the debt to the High Priestess, so, you know, favours for favours, we could help each other out. It’s the Styrian way, Shev, isn’t it? But that’s not the point—’

  ‘So you sold my friend to settle your debt?’

  If Shev had been hoping Carcolf would sag like a punctured wineskin with the weight of her shame, she was disappointed. ‘Javre’s a fucking menace!’ Carcolf stepped closer with a stabbing finger. ‘As long as she was here you’d just have got sucked back into her madness like you always do! You had to get free of her. We had to get free of her. You told me so, in this room!’

  Shev winced. ‘But I didn’t mean it! I mean, I did mean it but … not this way—’

  ‘What way, then?’ asked Carcolf. ‘You were never going to do it. You know it now. You knew it then. That’s why you said it. I had to do it for you.’

  ‘So … you’ve done me a favour?’

  ‘I think so.’ Carcolf stepped closer. Fair now, humble, a merchant offering the deal of a lifetime. ‘And I think … when you’ve had time to think about it … you’ll think so, too.’

  She smiled down, taller than Shev even without her shoes. A winning smile. Point proved. Argument won.

  She took horrified silence for agreement, reached out and cupped Shev’s face in her hands. The sensitive lover, whose only joy was her partner’s happiness.

  ‘Just us,’ she whispered, leaning close. ‘Better than ever.’

  Carcolf sucked at Shev’s top lip. Then she nipped the bottom one with her teeth, pulled it back, almost painful, and let it go with the faintest flapping sound. Shev’s head was full of that scent, but there was no sweetness in it any more. It was just sour. Gaudy. Sickening.

  ‘Now let me get dressed, and we’ll go have fun.’

  ‘Fun’s your middle name,’ whispered Shev, wanting to shove her off. To shove her off and punch her in the face besides.

  Shev didn’t much like to be honest with herself. Who does? But if she accepted the pain of it for just a moment, it wasn’t Carcolf’s treachery that truly hurt. You can’t bed a snake then complain when you get bit. It was that Shev had suddenly realised there was no secret self hidden under Carcolf’s smirking mask. There was just another mask, and another. Whatever role it suited her to play. Whatever got her what she wanted. If Carcolf had anything underneath, it was hard and shiny as a flint.

  She had no first name to learn.

  A few hours ago Shev had been willing to kill for this woman. Willing to die for her. Now she didn’t feel love, or lust, or even much anger. She just felt sad. Sad and bruised and so, so disappointed.

  She made herself smile. ‘All right.’ She made herself put her hand on Carcolf’s cheek, brush a strand of golden hair back behind her ear. ‘You get dressed. But I promise you it won’t be for long.’

  ‘Oh, promises make me nervous.’ Carcolf brushed the tip of Shev’s nose with her fingertip as she let her go. ‘I never know whether to trust them.’

  ‘You’re the one who lies for a living. I just steal for one.’

  Carcolf grinned back at her from the bedroom doorway, calm and beautiful as ever. ‘True enough.’

  The moment she was gone, Shev snatched up her bag and walked out.

  She didn’t even shut the door.

  A note from the publisher

  Following his death at the age of ninety-five, this fragment was discovered, crumpled, stained and almost worn through, plugging a hole in the sole of an ancient boot belonging to Spillion Sworbreck, the noted biographer, epicurean and poet widely known for, among a bibliography of daunting scale, his eighteen-volume The Life of Dab Sweet, Scourge of the Wild Frontier, and The Grand Duchess of Villainy, his romantic reimagining of the career of Monzcarro Murcatto presented in epic verse.

  Fact? Whimsy? Satire? The origins and purpose of the writing remain entirely a mystery, but it is now published for the first time, along with its peculiar footnote, written in a different hand from the author’s, florid and sharply angled. A reader’s observation? A critic’s opinion? An editor’s verdict? Only you, dear reader, can be the judge …

  Being an absolutely true account of the

  liberation of the town of Averstock from the grip of the incorrigible rebel menace by the Company of the Gracious Hand under the Famous Nicomo Cosca penned by your humble servant Spillion Sworbreck.

  Averstock, Summer 590

  What can my unworthy pen set down upon the subject of that great heart, that good friend, that magnificent presence, that dauntless explorer, proud statesman, peerless swordsman, accomplished lover, occasional sea captain, amateur sculptor of renown, noted connoisseur, champion short-distance swimmer and warrior poet, the famous soldier of fortune, Nicomo Cosca?

  He was a man of great parts, of extraordinary abilities both mental and physical, of a keen mind and a quickness to action characteristic of the fox, but with a sensitivity and mercy of which the gentlest dove would have been envious. He was a giving friend, quick to laugh and generous to a fault, but an implacable enemy, loved and feared equally across the Circle of the World, none of the diverse lands of which were unknown to him. And yet, in spite of grand achievements at his back to fill five famous lifetimes, he held not a trace of arrogance or vanity, was always challenging himself to do better, to reach further, to aim higher, and, though his conduct had in the main, across his dozens of successful campaigns, been unimpeachable, was frequently troubled by what he saw as the regrets and disappointments of the past. ‘Regrets,’ as he once told this unworthy reporter, with a boundless sadness plainly stamped into that noble visage, ‘are the cost of the business.’

  Though he was, at the time I was fortunate enough to make his acquaintance, approaching a full sixty years of age, he showed no sign of infirmity. A lifetime in the saddle, breathing the clean air and living a life free of low habits made him appear no older than a hale and athletic thirty-seven, with as full and lustrous a raven-black head of hair as any boy of sixteen could boast. According to the reports of womenfolk, who – gentle creatures! – must be taken as better judges of such matters than your humble servant, he was possessed of an extremely handsome face and a goodly frame entirely undiminished by the years in power and muscularity. He took drink but rarely and only in the strictest mode
ration, for the awful depravities he had seen visited by drunken soldiers upon an innocent populace during his long career were terrible, and, as he once told me, ‘No devil is more dangerous to a soldier than that which occupies the bottle.’

  On the occasion the details of which I am about to relate, and which well illustrates the character of the man, Nicomo Cosca and his Company of the Gracious Hand had been employed by that noted servant of His August Majesty, Superior Pike, to root out the ringleaders of the vile rebellion in Starikland which culminated in the horrifying massacre at Rostod. To this righteous purpose, the Company, numbering some five hundred brave souls, was now sworn, and, having sworn, they would achieve or die in the attempt. Perhaps you have heard lurid tales of the faithlessness of the mercenary kind? Banish such thoughts from your minds, dear readers, at least in so far as they bear upon the happy brotherhood presided over by the famous Nicomo Cosca! For these men, though born under diverse skies, speaking diverse tongues, coming from high and low, near and far, representing every colour and creed to be found within the Circle of the World, were as faithful and loyal to one another, and to their employers, as any tight-knit band of countrymen. Once their notary had prepared a paper of engagement and the noble Cosca set his flourishing signature upon it, they put aside by one accord all other considerations and were bound to the mission as staunchly as the Knights of the Body are bound to the defence of His August Majesty’s royal person, and no entreaty, no offers of golden hoard, land or title, no rewards earthly or divine could persuade them to deviate from their promised purpose.

  The town of Averstock was one of those pioneer settlements that, like a seed taken root in stony ground, was at that time flourishing in the lawless land of the Near Country, close to the civilising border of the Union. It was well built of firm timber and, though simple and lacking any ornament, was cunningly situated, clean and orderly, pleasing to the eye, and ringed by a stout palisade constructed by the good townsfolk as protection against the dread Ghosts, who had for some years previous visited terrible slaughter upon the defenceless settlers.