Sharp Ends: Stories from the World of The First Law (23 page)

‘Fourteen years,’ muttered Shev. ‘Half my life, near as damn it.’ And she felt the back of her nose aching with the need to cry. For all those years wasted. For the ruin of their friendship, which for so long had been all she had. For the fact that it had still been there when she needed it. For the fact that it was still all she had.

Javre puffed out her scarred cheeks. ‘Small wonder we are … somewhat wearied.’

The blades of the oars feathered the water, trails of sparkling drops falling from their ends, then cut silently into the surface. The rowlocks creaked. The wind picked up and stirred Javre’s dirty hair.

‘I am happy for you,’ she said, softly. ‘I try to be, anyway.’

‘Well, I’m happy you’re happy.’

‘Good.’

‘Good.’

Another slow silence. ‘I am just sad for myself.’

Shev looked up, caught Javre’s eye. A wet gleam in the darkness. ‘I’m sorry you’re sad,’ she said.

‘Good.’

‘Good.’

‘Shit,’ mouthed Shev as she scrabbled about in the dark for a reliable toehold on that crumbling wall. Burroia’s damn fort was falling apart. But then it was a ruin. Bit like Shev’s hopes in that regard. ‘Bloody, bloody
shit
.’

Javre might’ve had a point about all the hardware. It was a hell of a weight for someone who’d built their reputation on a light tread. There were a couple of buckles she’d dragged too tight now threatening to cut off the blood to her legs, and a couple she hadn’t dragged tight enough, loose metal clinking and the garrotte knocking distractingly against her arse crack every time she pulled herself up.

What was she doing with a damn garrotte anyway? She’d never used a garrotte in her life, except once to cut a cheese and that was for a joke and hadn’t even ended up that funny. You can make an argument for a knife. Sometimes people just need a knifing. Like Crandall had. She shed no tears for him. But once you start garrotting people you can’t claim to stand with the righteous.

Garrottes simply are not part of God’s chosen path and although, through a combination of personal weakness, evil acquaintance and plain bad luck, Shev had to admit her feet had often left the chosen path behind, she liked to imagine she could at least still see it, in the distance, if she squinted.

She froze at a noise above, the latest of a volley of curses stopped cold on her lips.

Footsteps scraping. The tuneless humming of a person deeply bored and with no musical aptitude. Shev’s eyes went wide. A guard, on patrol. She wondered what the chances were of his not noticing the grapple wedged against the parapet. Not good, was her guess. She clung tight to the rope with one hand, jerked a dart out with the other and shoved it between her teeth.

It would’ve been the perfect end to her career of misadventures if she’d pricked herself in the cheek, lost consciousness and dropped off the rope into the sea. But Shev was blessed with a nimble tongue. Probably that was what Carcolf saw in her. God knows, there had to be something.

The humming stopped. Footsteps scuffed closer. She snatched out her blowpipe, raising it to her lips. Sadly, at that moment, her fingers were less nimble than her mouth. The blowpipe caught on a jutting stone, she fumbled it, juggled it desperately, almost let go of the rope in her confusion, then gave a despairing gasp of, ‘Thuck!’ around the dart in her teeth as she watched it tumble away.

Javre caught it, then peered up, puzzled. ‘What is this?’ she hissed.

Shev looked back to the parapet, helpless panic settling on her like snow on a sleeping tramp. A face suddenly appeared. The face of a big man with curly hair. His thick brows went sharply up when he saw her clinging to the rope with her feet against the wall, close enough to reach out and touch.

Her first bizarre instinct was to give him a hopeful smile, but with the dart between her teeth it was impossible.

‘Bloody hell,’ he said, and leaned out, lifting a spear.

Lucky that Shev had always been a quick thinker in a tight spot. Years of practice, maybe. She jerked herself up as if overpowered by a desire to kiss him and stuck him in the neck with the dart.

‘Bloody hell,’ he said again, but less angry this time, and more surprised. He tried to stab her but she was too close, his elbow caught on the battlements and the spear slid from his slack grip, dropping over Shev’s shoulder.

Fast-acting, that toxin. He flopped limp over the parapet with a sigh and Shev grabbed his belt and dragged herself up by it, rolling silently across his back and onto the walkway.

With rare good fortune, she found it empty. A stretch of stone maybe two strides wide, crumbling battlements to either side, a door leading into an ivy-throttled turret at the far end, faint torchlight showing around its edge. More lights twinkled further off in the windows of the old fortress. The place might be a ruin, but it was evidently far from abandoned.

She leaned over the slumbering guard to hiss at Javre. ‘Planning to fucking join me?’

The Lioness of Hoskopp was still fumbling drunkenly with the rope, her boots scuffing the wall no more than a stride above the boat. ‘Yes I am fucking planning on it!’ she hissed back.

Shev shook her head and padded on towards the door, allowing herself the slightest smile. Considering the mess with the blowpipe, that really couldn’t have gone much—

She frowned as she heard faint laughter, then the door flew open and a man walked out, holding a lamp high and chuckling over his shoulder to another. There were more behind them. At least two more. ‘We’ll finish that hand when Big Lom gets back and I’ll—’ His head turned and he saw her frozen with her mouth an apologetic O of surprise. He had a bent nose and absurd hair cut in a straight line across his forehead.

‘Horald told us to expect you.’ And he grinned as he drew his sword.

Shev had always hated fighting. She’d hidden from it, talked her way free of it, bought her way out of it. She’d dodged it, she’d ducked it and, with shameful frequency, she’d watched Javre do it for her.

But Horald the Finger had pushed her over the line, and she would be pushed no further.

She whipped out the little crossbow and levelled it. The eyes of Horald’s bent-nosed man went wide.

‘He tell you to expect this?’ she asked, and squeezed the trigger.

The string snapped with a ping and the bolt went twittering end-over-end sideways and was lost in the darkness above the water, leaving them staring at one another, all somewhat surprised.

‘Huh.’ Bent Nose cleared his throat. ‘I’m thinking—’

If she’d learned one thing from Javre, it was that when it came to fighting, the less thinking the better. She flung the crossbow at his head and it hit him just above the eye. He gasped, stumbling back into the man behind him, his lamp dropping to the stones and spraying burning oil across the walkway.

‘Shit!’ another shouted, slapping at the flames that had suddenly sprung up his trouser leg.

Shev charged, popping the thong from the hilt of her sword-eater as Bent Nose righted himself, whipping it from the sheath as his hard eyes focused on her, jerking it up just as he flailed his sword down. Steel squealed as blade slid into serrated jaws and she snarled, twisting her wrist. Bent Nose’s outraged bellow turned to a squawk of shock as his sword snapped just above the hilt and left him staggering forwards. He did not have to stagger far, however, before Shev’s fist thudded into his gut and doubled him up, wheezing. She clubbed him on the back of the head with the pommel of the sword-eater so hard it went flying out of her hand and skittered down the walkway.

She saw a heavy mace swinging at her, ducked it on an instinct, the wind of it tearing at her hair, spun away as it whipped past and crashed into the parapet, kept spinning, giving a scream, lifting her leg in a raking kick. Her heel could not have connected more sweetly with the fat man’s head if they’d rehearsed the whole thing. It snatched him off his feet, blood and teeth spraying spectacularly from his face, turned him over in the air and sent him tumbling from the walkway, a satisfying series of crashes below strongly suggesting that he had fallen onto, then through, the fragile roof of a lean-to in the yard.

A flash of metal and Shev jerked back. A skinny man with a birthmark around one eye stabbed at her and she dodged again. He was wearing a ridiculous swashbuckler’s three-cornered hat, no doubt reckoning himself quite the master swordsman now he’d slapped out the flames on his leg. Shev thought it always wise to play to the pretensions of an opponent, so as he brought his sword whistling over she shrank into a crouch, the helpless victim, thrusting her fist into a pouch at her belt, lifting her other arm despairingly as if to block the blow. She saw his rotten teeth as he smiled, sure the blade would strike her hand straight off. It was most satisfying to see him grimace as it clanged instead against the steel rods under her sleeve and scraped clear. She stepped past him as he lurched off balance, ripped her fist free, opened her palm and blew the dust in his face.

He squealed, reeling about, swatting blindly with sword and knife, trampling through the still-burning oil and setting his trousers on fire again. She ducked under his whistling blades, slipped silently behind him, grabbed the back of his coat as he spun around and gently but firmly assisted him over the parapet. A moment later, Shev heard the sweet sound of him hitting water.

Not much time to celebrate, though, as Shev was already wrestling with the last of the four. A little fellow, he was, but slippery as a fish and she was tired now, slow. An elbow in the gut brought vomit to the back of her throat, then a fist above the eye only half-blocked snapped her head back and made her ears ring. He forced her against the parapet. She fumbled for a gas bomb but her straining fingers couldn’t quite get there. Tried to reach her poisoned needle but he caught her wrist first. She growled through gritted teeth as he bent her back, crumbling stones grinding into her shoulders.

‘Quiet, now,’ he hissed, forcing her wrist around. His thumb must have caught the mechanism by accident. The spring twanged, the knife shot out of her sleeve and jabbed him in the throat. He retched, she butted him in the face, then as his head snapped back twisted her hips and kneed him full in the fruits.

He gave a breathy gasp, tried to clutch at her, but she slid around him, caught his hair and mashed his face into the battlements, loosing a shower of crumbled mortar and leaving him floppy as new washing. She jerked out the first thing her free hand closed around.

The garrotte.

God, but no one had ever been in a better position for a garrotting. Easiest thing in the world to jerk the wire across his throat, screw her knee into his back and garrotte the merry hell out of him. Probably he deserved it. Wasn’t as if he’d been taking much pity on her until the knife went off in his face.

But you do right for your own sake. Shev just wasn’t a garrotting sort of girl.

‘God damn it,’ she grunted, clubbing him across the back of the head with the handles and knocking him senseless, then tossing the garrotte over the wall into the sea.

‘What the—’

A great, slow, grinding voice, and Shev turned. A man had ducked out onto the walkway from a door at the other end. He had been obliged to duck because he stood considerably taller than the lintel. The Big Lom mentioned earlier, she guessed, and the name had evidently been bestowed without irony. They hadn’t struck her as a particularly ironic crowd, in truth. His head was immense, with a tiny prim little mouth, hard little eyes, a pimple of a nose all lost in the trackless, doughy expanse of his face. A shield the size of a tabletop was strapped to one trunk of an arm, and as his diminutive features crept together first in puzzlement, then anger, he jerked an enormous hammer from his belt as if it were a child’s toy.

‘Ha!’ Shev whipped her coat open, throwing knives jingling in a gleaming line. Fast as a woodpecker strikes she sent them spinning down the walkway, her hand a blur.

Her accuracy, it had to be admitted, was less impressive than her speed. Several missed entirely, clattering from the walls or twittering off into the night. Three others thudded into Big Lom’s shield and a fourth hit his shoulder handle-first and dropped off.

‘Huh,’ he grunted, peering over the rim with angry little eyes. ‘That your best?’

‘No,’ said Shev. ‘That is.’ And she pointed towards the one knife that had found its mark, lodged in his thigh just below the hem of his studded jacket.

He snorted as he plucked it out and tossed it away, a few specks of blood along with it. ‘If you think that’ll stop me you’re even sillier’n Horald said.’

‘The knife? No.’

Lom roared as he charged, shield up ahead of him like the end of a battering ram. Shev merely planted her hands on her hips and raised her brows. Halfway down the walkway, his great steps went a little unsteady. Above his shield, his hard eyes went a little crossed, then a little wide, and his furious roar turned to a hurt bellow and finally a brainless gurgle.

He was tottering towards her like a drunkard now, carried forward only by his considerable momentum, shield wobbling sideways, the great hammer dropping from his nerveless hand and bouncing into the yard below.

Shev nudged the door to the guardroom open and politely stood aside, pausing only to stick one delicately upturned foot into Lom’s path.

He blundered past, eyes already rolling back in his huge head. She hooked one of his great boots with hers and he tripped, slobbered, drool dangling from his clumsy lips. He bounced from the doorframe, spun wildly, knees drunkenly knocking, arms flung wide, then one foot caught the other and he crashed straight through the midst of a set of chairs and tables sending plates, pots and half-eaten dinner flying. He lay in the wreckage, face in a puddle of spilled stew, breath slurping, about as unconscious as it was possible to be.

‘But the poison’s another matter,’ said Shev, feeling intensely pleased with herself. Hannakar had told her that toxin could knock out an elephant, and for once he hadn’t exaggerated, apparently.

‘Ha!’ came a shout from behind and Shev spun about, rolled neatly, grabbing the sword-eater as she came up in a ready crouch.