A Little Hatred

by Joe Abercrombie

  And with a whimper she slid free, plunged face down into the river, floundered away sobbing, gurgling, half-swimming and half-crawling. She dragged herself up onto wet shingle on quivering hands and knees. For a moment, she wanted to kiss the ground. Until she saw the foamy filth that covered it.

  She looked up, wiping her wet face on the back of one trembling hand.

  The river slurped past, purple and orange and green with great blooms of unnatural colour from the dye-works upstream, bobbing with refuse, churned to stinking froth by dozens of hammering waterwheels. On the left bank was a kind of beach, streaked with tidemarks of dead brown weed, scattered with the city’s flotsam, with rags and skins and broken chairs and splintered glass and rusted wire and things too far rotted to be identified, all vomited up by the tortured waters and pecked at by flocks of birds bedraggled to winged rats.

  A bent-backed woman was picking through the rubbish. She stared at Savine with wild eyes, stared at the sword she still held in one hand, then scuttled away with a bloated sack over one bloated shoulder.

  Savine tottered up the shingle, sodden clothes clinging to her, slapping at her. She had to find something she could hide in. She stumbled along, turning over tree branches draped with rags, plucking up broken boxes, coughing at the stink of watery rot. Flies buzzed near a corpse—pig or sheep or dog, all matted hair and dirty bone.

  Savine caught sight of something beside it. An old coat, one arm torn off and the lining hanging out like offal from a carcass, but she seized on it with far greater delight than she might have the latest silks in the clothiers of Adua. Those, after all, would not save her life. This might.

  Her boots were so caked with dirt, no one could have told they cost more than a house in this neighbourhood, but her petticoats, filthy with river scum, heavy as armour with river water, might give her away. She fumbled at the fastenings with bloody fingertips, ended up sawing at them with her bent sword. She was left squatting on that vile riverbank in her clinging drawers. Her corset had to stay, ripped open and with one of the bones poking out. There was no way she could reach the laces.

  She dragged the muddy coat over it, a thing not even the old beggar woman had seen any value in. It stank of rot with a chemical edge that caught in her throat, but she was grateful for it. At least no one could mistake her for that leader of fashion, that scourge of ballroom and parlour, that terror of inventors and investors, Savine dan Glokta.

  She wanted nothing more, right then, than to burrow into the refuse and hide. But they would be coming for her. They knew who she was. Who her father was. They would have broken down the office door by now, found the loose board. They would be following her bloody trail, through the machines, past the wheel. Any moment now, they would find her.

  She scraped muck from the beach, smeared it across her stubbled scalp, down her face. She hunched over the way the old beachcomber had, dragging one filthy boot behind her. She hardly had to pretend at a limp, she had wrenched her ankle somewhere and it was starting to throb. Everything hurt. She clutched the stinking coat around her, sword tucked out of sight inside, and hobbled away leaving two hundred marks’ worth of the finest Gurkish linen slashed and ruined on the shingle.

  She clambered up a low wall, into the lane behind the mill. The lane where she had seen the armed men earlier. She felt something tickle her neck. By the Fates, her earrings! The gaudy ones Lisbit had picked. She plucked them out, was about to fling them away when she realised what they might be worth. She stuffed them into the torn lining of her corset.

  The sound of the machines had stopped. Now there was only a faint din of crashing metal, ripping cloth, shattering glass. They were the Breakers, after all. They could smash the whole city for all she cared, as long as they left her in one piece.

  She crept to the corner of the wall, peered around it towards the gate of the mill.

  There was the carriage, looking just the way it had when she got into it that morning, driver sitting with his chin squashed into his scarf, one of the horses tossing its head, harness faintly jingling. All strangely safe and normal in the empty street.

  With a whimper of relief, she stumbled towards it.

  The Little People

  Lisbit practised her sitting-up-straight. She wasn’t sure how Lady Savine made her neck look the way she did. She couldn’t have more bones in it than anyone else. But Lisbit had been studying her, every spare moment, and she’d get the trick of it. You had to work your shoulder blades back till it felt like they’d touch, then not lift your chin exactly, but sort of lift your whole throat…

  She slumped back, wriggling her shoulders. Bloody hell, it was hard work. She opened the watch, spent a moment working out what the time was, then snapped it shut with that lovely click. Lady Savine was taking a while, but she’d wait, of course, that’s what a lady’s companion did. She’d wait until the sun went out if she had to. That’s how faithful she was. Better than that brown bitch Zuri, looking down her nose and giving orders to decent people like she was better than them. Well, she wasn’t better than Lisbit, and she’d prove it. She’d finally got her chance and she meant to take it. She straightened one of the very fine lace cuffs on the very fine new dress she was wearing, gave the watch a little pat where it sat above her heart, looking so grand on its beautiful chain. Lisbit Beech, lady’s companion. It just sounded right. She deserved it. More than that bloody Zuri. What kind of a name was that, anyway? A name you’d give a doll.

  Bloody brown witch had everyone convinced she knew best. And now she was bringing her brothers back, too. And Lady Savine had just said, “Bring ’em in! Let ’em live here, where the decent folk have to live!” Lisbit couldn’t believe it. As if there weren’t enough of them in Midderland already. She wanted to be kind. She was a generous person. Big-hearted, ask anyone. Always giving bits to the tramps when she had one spare. But there had to be a limit. Folk in the Union had their own problems, without a crowd of brown bastards flooding in and bringing more. They were everywhere now in Adua! There were places in the city a decent person hardly dared tread.

  She slipped her little mirror out to check her face. This damn heat was the worst thing for powder. While she was tutting at the colour in her cheeks, she caught a glimpse through the window of some beggar limping up the street, making right for the carriage. Some beggar in a filthy coat with one sleeve missing, scrawny arm sticking out. She thought it might be a woman, and her lip curled with disgust. Filthy, she was, stubble hair caked with shit and blood and who knew what else. She looked diseased. The last thing Lisbit needed when Lady Savine got back was some sick cripple with her hand out.

  She snapped the window down and snarled, “Get the fuck away from here!”

  The beggar woman’s red eyes slid sideways, and she veered away from the carriage and hobbled off, hunching down.

  A moment later, there was a clatter as the door on the other side of the carriage was ripped open. A man ducked in. A big man in worn work clothes with a great smear of soot down the side of his face. Barging into Lady Savine’s carriage, bold as you please.

  “Get out!” snapped Lisbit, furious. But he didn’t get out. More men crowded in behind him, leering faces at the windows, dirty hands reaching for her.

  “Help!” she shrieked, cringing against the door. “Help!” And she kicked furiously at the one with the sooty face, caught him a good one on the jaw, but one of the others grabbed her ankle and they dragged her shrieking right out of the carriage and into the gutter and all of a sudden it was like she was drowning in a clutching, stomping sea of hands and boots and furious faces.

  “Where is she?”

  “Old Sticks’ daughter?”

  “Where’s that Glokta bitch?”

  “I’m just the face-maid!” she squealed, no idea what was happening. A robbery! A riot! They’d dragged the driver down from his seat and were kicking him, kicking him while he huddled on the ground with his bloody hands over his head.

  “We’ll give you one chanc
e—”

  “I’m just—”

  Someone hit her. The dull thud of it and her head cracked the pavement, blood in her mouth. Someone pulled her up by her hair. Rip of stitching. The arm of her jacket was half torn off, lace dangling. Someone was rooting through her bag, flinging the pretty pots of paint and powder away, stomping her brushes into the pavement.

  “Get her inside, we’ll soon find out what she knows.”

  “No!” she squealed, watch chain scraping her face as someone tore it off. “No!” They were laughing as they started to drag her through the gate. “No!” She tried to cling to the frame, but one had her left arm, another her right, a third her left ankle. “No!” Her right shoe kicked helplessly at the ground. Such a nice shoe. She’d been so proud to put it on.

  “I’m just the face-maid!” she shrieked.

  “Stop!” roared Kurbman, shoving one man out of his way, then another. “Stop!” He grabbed one lad, who’d eagerly stuck his hand up the girl’s torn skirt, by the throat and threw him to the ground. “Have you forgotten who we are? We’re not animals! We’re Breakers!”

  In that moment, as their maddened faces turned towards him, he had his doubts. But he kept on shouting anyway. What else could he do?

  “We done this so we wouldn’t be victims. Not so we could make victims o’ them. We’re better’n that, brothers!” And he tore at the air with his hands, trying to make ’em see. “We done this to bring the Great Change! For justice, remember?”

  He knew better, o’ course. Some done it for justice, some for vengeance, some for profit and some for the chance to run riot, and it wasn’t like there was no room for a mixture. At a time like this, all flushed with victory and violence, even the better ones could turn dark. Still, there were just enough o’ the first group to get some doubts going.

  “You thinking to let ’er go?” someone asked.

  “No one’s letting anyone go,” said Kurbman. “They’ll be judged with the others. Judged fair. Judged proper.”

  “I’m just the face-maid,” gasped the girl, her powder streaked with tears.

  At that moment, two of the others came out dragging Vallimir between them, his clothes torn and his face bloody and his eyes barely open. One of the lads spat on him. “Fucking bastard!” growled another.

  Kurbman stepped in front of him, hands up. “Easy, brothers. Let’s not do anything we’ll regret.”

  “I’ll be regretting nothing,” snapped someone.

  “And I ain’t your brother,” said another.

  “If you’ve not got the guts for this, leave it to those who do,” said a third, like making yourself part of a mob was quite the act o’ courage.

  Things might’ve turned ugly then, or uglier, at any rate, if it hadn’t been for some prisoners brought rattling up the street. Two dozen, maybe, a lot of fine clothes in disarray and a lot of proud faces bruised, shocked and tear-tracked, shackled in pairs to a great length of chain. Five Breakers minding ’em, home-made manacles hanging from their belts, a hard-faced old bastard at the front Kurbman knew from meetings, though he didn’t think he’d ever heard him talk.

  “Brother Lock!” he shouted, and the man held up his shuffling column. “You taking these to the Courthouse?”

  “I am.”

  “Got two more for you.” Kurbman pulled the girl free and, in spite of the grumbling from his comrades, gave her over to a man with a blond beard who started shackling her to the chain. Bloody hell, but one of the prisoners was Self, the foreman from the third shed at Resling’s Glassworks, eyes down and a great bloody welt on his cheek. He was a good man, Self. Always done his best for his people. Kurbman swallowed. Getting these folk shackled was the best he could do. Getting anyone unshackled would more’n likely see him dead.

  “I’m just the face-maid,” whimpered the girl as they chained Vallimir beside her, head lolling and his hair matted with blood.

  Kurbman turned back to the workers, his voice cracking. “We’ve a chance to make a better world, brothers! A better world, you understand? But we have to do it right.”

  With a jerk on the chain, Resling and the rest were set marching again. Or stumbling, tottering, weeping and groaning, anyway, watched over by half a dozen sinewy men in workmen’s clothes, sticks in their dirty fists.

  “Bastards,” he muttered to himself.

  He was Karlric dan Resling, and he would see them all hanged.

  They were dragged past the burning shell of a carriage. Rubbish scattered the street. Broken timbers, broken glass. He flinched as something burst from an upstairs window—a great desk, tumbling down and shattering, papers spilling across the cobbles.

  Some men stood near it, watching. One ate an apple. Another laughed. A shrill, nervous kind of laughter.

  They had burst onto the bridge. His office, that was, but he called it the bridge. He’d always loved a maritime metaphor. “Get out, damn you!” Shouting always made them lower their eyes. “Get out!” But not this time. He had not believed it! He still could not! He was the admiral! He was Karlric dan Resling!

  They had dragged him from behind his desk. “Damn you!” Dragged him across his own deck. The factory floor, that was, pelted with rubbish by his own employees, who were working with more vigour than they ever had before, destroying the machines he had hired them to operate! “Curse you all!” After everything he had done for these men, for this city. They had manacled him to this damn chain, shackled to two dozen other helpless unfortunates like slaves in bloody Gurkhul. “How dare you?”

  It was a motley group. The man up ahead with the torn coat Resling knew by sight. A lawyer, perhaps? Beside him was that idiot’s wife, what was his name? Sirisk? The girl they had just added to the chain looked more like a bloody maid than a lady. Her tear-streaked cheeks were pink as a farm girl’s. Where were they even being taken? There was no sense to it. There was no sense to any of it.

  A woman with a gaudily painted face leaned from a window above, laughing, laughing, flinging great heaps of papers into the air. Accounts. Receipts. Deeds. Fluttering like demented confetti, coating the cobbles, swirls of elaborate calligraphy smudging in the filth.

  It was more than a strike. More than a riot. It was not just his mill, or the mill next door. The streets were infected by revolution! It was everywhere. The world run mad.

  What would his darling Seline have thought to see her beloved city brought to this? She who spent her evenings giving soup to the destitute. Feeding the bloody scroungers. Perhaps it was a good thing the grip had taken her in that bitter winter, in spite of all the money he lavished on doctors. For the best. Just as they had said at the graveside.

  Down a side street, he saw men pushing over a wagon, its cargo of barrels bouncing across the cobbles.

  “These bastards!” he snarled at the nearest guard. The nearest Breaker. The nearest traitor. The nearest animal. “I am Karlric dan Resling, and I’ll see you all—”

  The man punched him. It was so utterly unexpected, he stumbled back and sat down hard in the road, nearly dragging the woman in front of him down, too. He sat in the dirt, astonished, blood bubbling from his nose. He had never been punched before. Never in his life. He felt, very strongly, that he never wanted to be again.

  “Get up,” said the man.

  Resling got up. There were tears in his eyes. What would his darling Seline think if she could see him now?

  He was Karlric dan Resling. He was the admiral. Wasn’t he?

  He wasn’t sure any more.

  “Bastards,” whimpered the man beside her, but it was a plaintive little bleat now. Even so, it was tempting fate.

  “Stop it!” Condine hissed at him through her tears. “You’ll only make it worse.”

  Could it be worse, though? Men clattered past, snarling faces, clenched fists, sticks and axes. They shouted, whooped, animal noises that hardly sounded like words. One ducked towards her, snapped his teeth at her, and she cringed as they whirled past.

  The tears were stream
ing down her face. They had been ever since the men kicked in the door of the tea shop where she had been spreading Savine dan Glokta’s gossip. They had not needed to kick it in. They could have opened it. Such a charming tinkle the bell always made.

  Her father had always been so impatient when she cried. “Toughen up, girl.” Furious, as though her tears were an unfair attack on him. Sometimes he had cuffed her around the head, but the blows seemed to have made her less tough, not more. Her husband had opted for a kind of benign neglect instead. The idea of his being interested enough to hit her was absurd. Being shackled to a chain was the most attention anyone had paid her in years.

  The line of prisoners shambled past a great manufactory on fire, smoke roiling up into the darkening murk, a popping crash as a window shattered, showering glass, gouting flame, smouldering rubbish and laths and bits of slate tumbling into the street, and Condine held up a hand against the heat of it, drying the tears on her face as fast as she could shed them.

  A workers’ uprising had formed the backdrop to one of her favourite books, Lost Among the Labourers, in which a beautiful mill-owner’s daughter is saved from a fire by one of her father’s roughest hands. The edges of the pages in the passage where she finally yields to him among the machinery had become quite dishevelled. Condine had always particularly enjoyed the description of his arms, so strong, so gentle.

  There were strong arms here. Gentle, no. She saw men kicking wildly at the door of a shop. Others were dragging a carpet from a house. Her smarting, weeping eyes darted to yells, squeals, mad sounds. Petty horrors everywhere. No trace of romance in it.