A Little Hatred

by Joe Abercrombie

  Fan snapped, whip cracked and the carriage lurched on towards Valbeck. Tallow watched it go in sad silence, shading his eyes against the midday glare. Vick shook her hair out, stuck her hand in the ditch beside the road and made sure she combed dirty water through to the ends.

  “You really have to do that?” asked Tallow.

  “We’re among the desperate now, boy,” she said, putting some labourer’s gravel in her voice. “Need to look like it.” And she reached out and smeared mud down his cheek.

  He sighed as Savine’s carriage was lost behind some trees, that fancy box still clasped tight.

  “Never met anyone like her,” he whispered.

  “No.” Vick slapped some life into her stiff leg, sniffed, hawked and spat on the road. Then she snapped her fingers at Tallow. “Give us one of those sweets, then.”

  Friends Like These

  The Vallimir residence, high on the hill where most of the affluent citizens of Valbeck had their houses, was a lesson in the dangers of excessive wealth and inadequate taste. Everything—furniture, cutlery and guests most of all—was too weighty, too fancy, too shiny. Mistress Vallimir’s dress was a misjudged purple, the curtains a garish turquoise, the soup a lurid yellow. The colour of urine with a taste not far removed.

  “I’ve never known such a hot spell!” clucked the lady of the house, fanning herself ever more vigorously.

  “Oppressive,” said Superior Risinau, head of Valbeck’s Inquisition, dabbing a dewy sweat from his plump cheeks that instantly sprang back. “Even for the season.”

  It was very far from helping that Savine’s menses were now in full and particularly brutal first-day flow. Drawers like a battlefield, as her mother delighted in saying. Even bundled in a triple napkin, she would not have been at all surprised, on getting up, to find she had left a great bloody smear across the Vallimirs’ tasteless upholstery. A contribution to the party to live long in the memory. She had to suppress a wince at a particularly sharp pang, set down her overembellished spoon and slid her bowl away.

  “Not hungry, Lady Savine?” asked Colonel Vallimir, peering down from the head of the table.

  “Everything is delicious but, alas, as I get older, I must take ever greater pains over my figure.”

  Risinau gurgled out a chuckle. “Not a consideration I trouble myself with!”

  Savine plastered a smile over her disgust as she watched him slurp from his spoon like a hog from a trough. “How fortunate for you.” And how repugnant for everyone else.

  Lord Parmhalt, the city’s mayor, teetered on the verge of slumber. Mistress Vallimir pretended not to notice as he drifted towards her, in imminent danger of slumping into her lap. The draught from her fan had loosened some strands of grey hair previously plastered across his bald pate and they now floated from his head to an impressive height. For the tenth time that evening, Savine wished she had stayed in Adua. Probably curled up in an aching ball with the curtains closed, giving vent to a torrent of obscenities. But she flatly refused to be a slave to her tyrant of a womb. Business came first. Business always came first.

  “And how is business?” she asked.

  “Positively booming,” said Vallimir. “The third shed is up and running and the mill working at full capacity. Costs down, profits up.”

  “The very directions for costs and profits that I like.”

  Vallimir gave something between a cough and a chuckle. He was a man with a fragile sense of humour. “All good news. As I told you in my letter. Nothing to worry about.”

  “Oh, I can always find something to keep me awake at night,” said Savine. Even if it was only a constant grinding ache through her stomach and down the backs of her legs.

  Perhaps it was her presence, but there was a nervous edge to the gathering. The talk too urgent, the laughter too shrill, the staff twitchy as they whisked the soups away. Savine’s eye was caught by the glint of metal at the window: a pair of guards patrolling the grounds. There had been four of them at the door when she arrived, accompanied by a sullen monster of a dog.

  “Are all the armed men really necessary?” she asked.

  She was gratified to note the twitch of dismay on Vallimir’s face. As if he had sat on a pin. “Given your position in society, given the envy that might be directed towards you, given… who your father is, I thought we could not be too careful.”

  “One can never be too careful,” echoed Superior Risinau, leaning close to touch Savine’s shoulder with entirely too much familiarity. “But you need have no fear, Lady Savine.”

  “Oh, I am not easily intimidated. I receive at least a dozen threats a day. The most vivid fantasies of my degradation and violent murder. Angry competitors, jealous rivals, disgruntled workers, scorned business partners, disappointed suitors. If there was money in threats, I would be…” She paused a moment to consider it. “Even richer, I suppose. I swear, I receive more venom even than my father. It has made me realise there is only one thing men hate more than other men.”

  There was an expectant pause. “Which is?” asked Mistress Vallimir.

  “Women,” said Savine, shifting in her uncomfortable chair. If a man was struck in the balls during a fencing match, he would be expected to howl and weep and roll around, while his opponent gave him all the time he needed and the crowd murmured their sympathy. If, during days of monthly agonies, a woman once let her smile sour, it would be considered a disgrace. She forced her own smile wider while the sweat sprang out of her. “I suppose the bars on the windows were installed for my benefit, too?”

  “Here on the hill…” Mistress Vallimir leaned around the nodding mayor, picking her words as carefully as mossy stepping stones on the way across a river, “we are all obliged to take great care over our security.”

  “Three weeks ago,” squeaked Condine dan Sirisk, mousy wife of a mill owner kept away by business, “a factory owner was killed. Murdered in his own house!”

  “A robbery.” Risinau licked his lips as little purple jellies began to be delivered to the far end of the table. “A botched burglary, plain and simple.” He leaned across to give Savine a reassuring pat on the forearm, enveloping her in his rosewater and sour-sweat scent. “We’ll ferret out the perpetrators, don’t worry about that.”

  “So… there are no Breakers in Valbeck?”

  Every face turned towards Savine, then silence, the only movement the wobbling of those horrible little jellies.

  “Only a few weeks ago, a plot was foiled in Adua to blow up a foundry using Gurkish Fire,” she went on. Mistress Sirisk pressed a hand to her chest and gasped. Less fear at the news, by the look of things, than near-sexual delight at the prospect of sharing it with her entire social circle by noon tomorrow. Savine gave her a conspiratorial wink. “I have some contacts in the Inquisition.”

  “Well,” grumbled Vallimir, looking rather put out. He appeared to be one of those men who was put out whenever a woman opened her mouth. “We have no troubles of that kind here in Valbeck.”

  “None,” frothed Risinau, dabbing a new sheen of sweat from his forehead. He was quite obviously hiding something. “There are no Breakers, no Burners—”

  “Burners?” asked Savine.

  Vallimir and his wife exchanged a worried glance. “Worse scum even than the Breakers,” said the master of the house, reluctantly. “Madmen and fanatics, delighting in destruction. The Breakers desire…” and he wrinkled his lip with disgust, “to reorder the Union. The Burners desire to destroy it.”

  “Even if you believe such monsters exist, you will find none here,” said Risinau. “The workers of Valbeck are without grievances.”

  “In my experience, workers can weave a grievance from the most unpromising thread,” said Savine, “and you have a vast number of workers here. Can a city grow so fast without troubles?”

  Lord Parmhalt jolted awake. Possibly as a result of Mistress Vallimir’s carefully applied elbow. “Great strides have been made, Lady Savine. Thanks in part to generous loans from the banking
house of Valint and Balk. Recently opened a new branch in the city, you know.” He shook himself, then began once more to sag towards slumber. “You should visit… the new part of town.”

  “New streets,” said Vallimir.

  “Model streets,” said Risinau.

  “Closed-in drains,” said the mayor, rousing himself for another heroic effort, “and running water to every house, and all manner… of innovations.”

  “In Gurkhul, they build temples,” observed Savine, “in Styria, palaces. Here we build drains.” There was a round of polite laughter. She glanced up at the maid, just manoeuvring a jelly into place before her with desperate concentration. “Might I ask your name, my dear?”

  She blinked at Savine, then at Mistress Vallimir, then blushed bright pink and tidied a loose strand of hair behind her ear. “May, my lady. May Broad.”

  “Tell me, May, do you like Valbeck?”

  “Tolerably well, my lady. I’m still… getting used to the air.”

  “The air can be terribly harsh, away from the hill. Worse vapours even than in Adua.”

  May swallowed. “So I’m told, my lady.”

  “Don’t worry, you can speak your mind,” said Savine, “I insist on it. There’s really no point otherwise, is there?”

  “Well… my family have a good place on the slope of the hill, now. Very grateful for it.”

  “And what about the old town?”

  May nervously cleared her throat. “We were there when we first arrived. The old town’s very full, begging your pardon. There are families of six to a cellar.”

  “Six to a cellar?” Savine glanced at Vallimir, and he gave that wince again.

  “And the walls running with damp, and children playing in the open sewers, and pigs kept in the alleys, and the water from the pumps is far from healthy.” She was warming to it now, waving her arms in jerky gestures. “More people come in every day, and there isn’t work for all of them, and prices for everything are high—”

  Her hand caught Savine’s glass, sent it teetering. She shot her hand out as though jabbing with a short steel and caught it before it fell.

  The maid stared down in horror. “I’m… I’m so sorry—”

  “No harm done. Thank you so much. You can go.”

  “Foolish, wayward girl,” snapped Mistress Vallimir, the moment she had pulled the overpolished door shut, her fanning turned positively savage.

  “Nonsense,” said Savine, “it was entirely my fault.”

  “Loose hands and a looser tongue. I will let her go in the morning.”

  Savine’s voice had a sudden sharpness. “I would rather you did not.”

  Mistress Vallimir bristled. “Pardon me, Lady Savine, but in my own house—”

  “A beautiful house in which I am honoured to be a guest. But I asked for honesty. I will not see her punished for it.” The pain had quite ground away Savine’s patience. She set her smile aside for once, and made sure she held Vallimir’s eye. “Please don’t make me insist. Not when we are having such a lovely evening. If I had been punished every time I spoke truth to an investor, why, I would never have been able to make you so rich.”

  There was a long silence, then Risinau leaned close to Savine and put his fat, moist hand on hers. It was like having one’s fingers smothered in old dough. “Lady Savine, I give you my personal guarantee, the workers are content and there is nothing to worry about.”

  It was his bad luck that this patronising reassurance coincided with a particularly savage cramp, as if there was a fist clenching around her guts. Savine leaned towards him, cupping her mouth to keep anyone else from hearing, and whispered in his ear. “Touch me again and I will stab you with my fork. In your fat fucking neck. Do you understand?”

  The Superior swallowed and carefully peeled his hand from hers. Savine looked back to Vallimir. “You said business is good at the mill?”

  “It is.”

  “Then I would very much like to look at the books. I so enjoy the successful ones.”

  Vallimir gave that twitch again. “I will have them brought to you.”

  “Better if I go to them. Having come all this way, I must see the improvements you have made first hand.”

  “A visit in person…” ventured Vallimir, wincing.

  Risinau took up the challenge. “It might not be the best—”

  “You’ll hardly know I’m there.” And their wanting her to stay away meant she absolutely had to go. “I find, when it comes to business, there is nothing like the personal touch.” She took up the absurdly long spoon, delved deep into the jelly and slurped it through pursed lips with great relish.

  “My compliments, Mistress Vallimir, such a delicious jelly.” It was a vile jelly. Perhaps the worst Savine had ever had the misfortune to consume. She weathered another stab in her belly and presented the gathering with her most glittering smile. “You simply must give my maid the recipe.”

  Sinking Ships

  They ate in an overpriced chophouse where the windows were thick with sooty grime and the plates hardly cleaner. Tallow wolfed his meat and gravy down then watched as Vick ate hers, only just short of drooling like a hungry dog. She didn’t like eating with those big sad eyes on her, but she took time cleaning her plate even so. Another habit from the camps. A habit from never having enough.

  Relish every mouthful, it feels like it goes further.

  They waited for dusk, though with the smoke over Valbeck it wasn’t much darker than day and felt even hotter, the sunset an angry, molten-metal smear behind the great chimneys they were building in the west. Then they worked their way into the teeming, steaming backstreets like rats into a dungheap, asking roundabout questions, trying to winkle out hints of where the Breakers might be.

  Vick had picked over her story a hundred times. Picked over Tallow’s, too, until the lies were like a second skin, more familiar than the truth. She had an answer for every question, a story for every suspicion, a set of excuses that left her looking good but not too good. The one thing she hadn’t been prepared for was the one thing she found.

  “The Breakers?” said a boy-whore, not even bothering to lower his voice. “Expect you’ll find ’em meeting on that little alley off Ramnard Street.” He called out to a girl-whore busy arranging the straps of her dress over a bare shoulder dotted with pox-marks. “What’s the name o’ that alley where the Breakers meet?”

  “Don’t know that it’s got a name.” And she went back to smiling for the passing trade.

  All careless as if the Breakers were a sewing circle rather than a mob of renegades ripping up the fabric of society. Old Sticks had called Superior Risinau a fat man prone to folly, with no imagination but plenty of loyalty. From the careless way folk spoke of treason here, he’d let things get far out of hand in Valbeck.

  The whores nodded them towards a smirking pimp. After a little bargaining, the pimp pointed out a beggar with one arm. For a few bits, the beggar sent them to an out-of-work smith selling matches from a stall on wheels. The smith nodded them down an alleyway towards an old warehouse. A big man stood outside its door, light from an upstairs window reflected in a pair of round eye-lenses that looked tiny on his broad skull.

  Vick knew right off he could be trouble. The size of him, yes, almost a head taller than her, and his threadbare jacket stretched tight over great brawny shoulders. But it was more the look he had when he saw her coming. Apologetic, almost. None of that peacock strut men who think themselves hard put on. That hint of guilt the really dangerous ones tend to have.

  She knew it from the mirror, on her bad days.

  And if she’d had any doubts, there was the tattoo on his fist, before he twisted it up into his sleeve. Axe and lightning, crossed over a shattered gatehouse. Blue stars on the knuckles. On all the knuckles. So he’d been a Ladderman. First up the walls in a siege. Front of the storming party. He’d done it five times and lived to tell the tales. Or, more likely, to never speak of it again.

  It was a habit from th
e camps to think about how she’d bring a man down. This one you’d make sure was on your side. Or run away from him, fast as you could. Whole thing felt like a trap to Vick. But then everything did, and she told herself that was a good thing. It’s the moment you feel safe that you make your last mistake.

  “My name’s Vick. This is Tallow.” The Breakers kept to first names, in the main.

  The big man looked them over, those guilty eyes made small by his lenses. “I’m Gunnar.”

  “We’ve come from Adua.” She leaned close to murmur, “We were friends of Collem Sibalt.”

  “All right.” He looked more puzzled than suspicious, as if it wasn’t really his business. “Good for you.”

  “Aren’t you guarding the door?”

  “Just came out for some air. Getting too hot for me in there.” And he tugged at his collar. “That Judge woman makes me…” He paused, mouth open, like he couldn’t quite work out what this Judge woman made him. “Well, can’t say I like the way things are. Wouldn’t be here otherwise. But I can’t see her making ’em better.”

  Vick leaned close to him, dropping her voice. “Aren’t you worried about the Inquisition?”

  “Must admit I am, but no one else seems to be.” And he nudged the door open with his tattooed hand, and offered them the way.

  Vick didn’t speak much, but that was a choice. Actually being lost for words was rare with her. All she could manage as she stepped over the threshold of that warehouse, though, was, “Shit.”

  “Aye.” Tallow’s eyes had gone wider than ever. “Shit.”

  Must’ve been five hundred people crowded close in there. It was hot as an oven and noisy as a slaughterhouse and it smelled of old tar, unwashed bodies and rage. It was ill-lit by torches and the flickering of fire lent everything an edge of madness. Against one wall, someone had unfurled a huge banner made from old bedsheets, the words Now or Never daubed across it.

  Some children had climbed up to sit on the high rafters, legs dangling, and for a moment, Vick thought they had a row of hanged men below them. Then she saw they were straw dummies, with leering painted faces. The king and queen, with wooden crowns over their eyes. A bloated Lord Chancellor Gorodets, a twisted Arch Lector Glokta. The bald one with a stick in his hand she reckoned must be Bayaz, First of the Magi. The great and good of government, mocked in the open.