The Great Leveller: Best Served Cold, The Heroes and Red Country (229 page)

The snow had stopped falling but it was drifted deep now, sparkling as dawn came fumbling through the forest, her feet crunching, her face prickling with the cold. Ahead the trees began to thin and she hurried on, hoping perhaps to look out upon fields or flower-filled valleys or a merry township nestled in the hills.

She burst out at the edge of a dizzy cliff and stared far over high and barren country, sharp black forest and bare black rock slashed and stabbed with white snow fading into long grey rumour without a touch of people or colour. No hint of the world she had known, no hope of deliverance, no heat now from the earth beneath and all was cold inside and out and Ro breathed into her trembling hands and wondered if this was the end of the world.

‘Well met, daughter.’ Waerdinur sat cross-legged behind her, his back against a tree-stump, his staff, or his spear – Ro still was not sure which it was – in the crook of one arm. ‘Do you have meat there in your bundle? I was not prepared for a journey and you have led me quite a chase.’

In silence she gave him a strip of meat and sat down beside him and they ate and she found she was very glad he had come.

After a time he said, ‘It can be difficult to let go. But you must see the past is done.’ And he pulled out the dragon scale that she had left behind and put the chain around her neck and she did not try to stop him.

‘Shy’ll be coming . . .’ But her voice sounded tiny, thinned by the cold, muffled in the snow, lost in the great emptiness.

‘It may be so. But do you know how many children have come here in my lifetime?’

Ro said nothing.

‘Hundreds. And do you know how many families have come to claim them?’

Ro swallowed, and said nothing.

‘None.’ Waerdinur put his great arm around her and held her tight and warm. ‘You are one of us now. Sometimes people choose to leave us. Sometimes they are made to. My sister was. If you really wish to go, no one will stop you. But it is a long, hard way, and to what? The world out there is a red country, without justice, without meaning.’

Ro nodded. That much she’d seen.

‘Here life has purpose. Here we need you.’ He stood and held out his hand. ‘Can I show you a wondrous thing?’

‘What thing?’

‘The reason why the Maker left us here. The reason we remain.’

She took his hand and he hoisted her up easily onto his shoulders. She put her palm on the smooth stubble of his scalp and said, ‘Can we shave my head tomorrow?’

‘Whenever you are ready.’ And he set off up the hillside the way she had come, retracing her footprints through the snow.

In Threes

‘
F
uck, it’s cold,’ whispered Shy.

They’d found a shred of shelter wedged in a hollow among frozen tree-roots, but when the wind whipped up it was still like a slap in the face, and even with a piece of blanket double-wrapped around her head so just her eyes showed, it left Shy’s face red and stinging as a good slapping might’ve. She lay on her side, needing a piss but hardly daring to drop her trousers in case she ended up with a yellow icicle stuck to her arse to add to her discomforts. She dragged her coat tight around her shoulders, then the frost-crusted wolfskin Sweet had given her tight around that, wriggled her numb toes in her icy boots and pressed her dead fingertips to her mouth so she could make the most of her breath while she still had some.

‘Fuck, it’s cold.’

‘This is nothing,’ grunted Sweet. ‘Got caught in drifts one time in the mountains near Hightower for two months. So cold the spirits froze in the bottles. We had to crack the glass off and pass the booze around in lumps.’

‘Shhh,’ murmured Crying Rock, faintest puff of smoke spilling from her blued lips. ’Til that moment Shy had been wondering whether she’d frozen to death hours before with her pipe still clamped in her mouth. She’d scarcely even blinked all morning, staring through the brush they’d arranged the previous night as cover and down towards Beacon.

Not that there was much to see. The camp looked dead. Snow in the one street was drifted up against doors, thick on roofs toothed with glinting icicles, pristine but for the wandering tracks of one curious wolf. No smoke from the chimneys, no light from the frozen flaps of the half-buried tents. The old barrows were just white humps. The broken tower which in some forgotten past must’ve held the beacon the place was named for held nothing but snow now. Aside from wind sad in the mangy pines and making a shutter somewhere tap, tap, tap, the place was silent as Juvens’ grave.

Shy had never been much for waiting, that wasn’t news, but lying up here in the brush and watching reminded her too much of her outlaw days. On her belly in the dust with Jeg chewing and chewing and spitting and chewing in her ear and Neary sweating an inhuman quantity of salt water, waiting for travellers way out of luck to pass on the road below. Pretending to be the outlaw, Smoke, half-crazy with meanness, when what she really felt like was a painfully unlucky little girl, half-crazy with constant fear. Fear of those chasing her and fear of those with her and fear of herself most of all. No clue what she’d do next. Like some hateful lunatic might seize her hands and her mouth and use them like a puppet any moment. The thought of it made her want to wriggle out of her own sore skin.

‘Be still,’ whispered Lamb, motionless as a felled tree.

‘Why? There’s no one bloody here, place is dead as a—’

Crying Rock raised one gnarled finger, held it in front of Shy’s face, then gently tilted it to point towards the treeline on the far side of the camp.

‘You see them two big pines?’ whispered Sweet. ‘And them three rocks like fingers just between? That’s where the hide is.’

Shy stared at that colourless tangle of stone and snow and timber until her eyes ached. Then she caught the faintest twitch of movement.

‘That’s one of them?’ she breathed.

Crying Rock held up two fingers.

‘They go in pairs,’ said Sweet.

‘Oh, she’s good,’ whispered Shy, feeling a proper amateur in this company.

‘The best.’

‘How do we flush ’em out?’

‘They’ll flush ’emselves out. Long as that drunk madman Cosca comes through on his end of it.’

‘Far from a certainty,’ muttered Shy. In spite of Cosca’s talk about haste his Company had loitered around Crease like flies around a turd for a whole two weeks to resupply, which meant to cause every kind of unsavoury chaos and steadily desert. They’d taken even longer slogging across the few dozen miles of high plateau between Crease and Beacon as the weather turned steadily colder, a good number of Crease’s most ambitious whores, gamblers and merchants straggling after in hopes of wrenching free any money the mercenaries had somehow left unspent. All the while the Old Man smiled upon this tardy shambles like it was exactly the plan discussed, spinning far-fetched yarns about his glorious past for the benefit of his idiot biographer. ‘Seems to me talk and action have come properly uncoupled for that bastard—’

‘Shhh,’ hissed Lamb.

Shy pressed herself against the dirt as a gang of outraged crows took off clattering into the frozen sky below. Shouting drifted deadened on the wind, then the rattle of gear, then horsemen came into view. Twenty or more, floundering up through the snow drifted in the valley and making damned hard work of it, dipping and bobbing, riders slapping at their mounts’ steaming flanks to keep them on.

‘The drunk madman comes through,’ muttered Lamb.

‘This time.’ Shy had a strong feeling Cosca didn’t make a habit of it.

The mercenaries dismounted and spread out through the camp, digging away at doorways and windows, ripping open tents with canvas frozen stiff as wood, raising a whoop and a clamour which in that winter deadness sounded noisy as the battle at the end of time. That these scum were on her side made Shy wonder whether she was on the right side, but she was where she was. Making the best from different kinds of shit was the story of her life.

Lamb touched her arm and she followed his finger to the hide, caught a dark shape flitting through the trees behind it, keeping low, quickly vanished among the tangle of branch and shadow.

‘There goes one,’ grunted Sweet, not keeping his voice so soft now the mercenaries were raising hell. ‘Any luck, that one’ll run right up to their hidden places. Right up to Ashranc and tell the Dragon People there’s twenty horsemen in Beacon.’

‘When strong seem weak,’ muttered Lamb, ‘when weak seem strong.’

‘What about the other one?’ asked Shy.

Crying Rock tucked away her pipe and produced her beaked club, as eloquent an answer as was called for, then slipped limber as a snake around the tree she had her back to and into cover.

‘To work,’ said Sweet, and started to wriggle after her, a long stretch faster than Shy had ever seen him move standing. She watched the two old scouts crawl between the black tree-trunks, through the snow and the fallen pine needles, working their way towards the hide and out of sight.

She was left shivering on the frozen dirt next to Lamb, and waiting some more.

Since Crease he’d stuck to shaving his head and it was like he’d shaved all sentiment off, too, hard lines and hard bones and hard past laid bare. The stitches had been pulled with the point of Savian’s knife and the marks of the fight with Glama Golden were fast fading, soon to be lost among all the rest. A lifetime of violence written so plain into that beaten anvil of a face she’d no notion how she never read it there before.

Hard to believe how easy it had been to talk to him once. Or talk at him, at least. Good old cowardly Lamb, he’ll never surprise you. Safe and comfortable as talking to herself. Now there was a wider and more dangerous gulf between them each day. So many questions swimming round her head but now she finally got her mouth open, the one that dropped out she hardly cared about the answer to.

‘Did you fuck the Mayor, then?’

Lamb left it long enough to speak, she thought he might not bother. ‘Every which way and I don’t regret a moment.’

‘I guess a fuck can still be a wonderful thing between folk who’ve reached a certain age.’

‘No doubt. Specially if they didn’t get many beforehand.’

‘Didn’t stop her knifing you in the back soon as it suited her.’

‘Get many promises from Temple ’fore he jumped out your window?’

Shy felt the need for a pause of her own. ‘Can’t say I did.’

‘Huh. I guess fucking someone don’t stop them fucking you.’

She gave a long, cold, smoking sigh. ‘For some of us it only seems to increase the chances . . .’

Sweet came trudging from the pines near the hide, ungainly in his swollen fur coat, and waved up. Crying Rock followed and bent down, cleaning her club in the snow, leaving the faintest pink smear on the blank white.

‘I guess that’s it done,’ said Lamb, wincing as he clambered up to a squat.

‘I guess.’ Shy hugged herself tight, too cold to feel much about it but cold. She turned, first time she’d looked at him since they started speaking. ‘Can I ask you a question?’

The jaw muscles worked on the side of his head. ‘Sometimes ignorance is the sweetest medicine.’ He turned this strange, sick, guilty look on her, like a man who’s been caught doing murder and knows the game’s all up. ‘But I don’t know how I’d stop you.’ And she felt worried to the pit of her stomach and could hardly bring herself to speak, but couldn’t stand to stay silent either.

‘Who are you?’ she whispered. ‘I mean . . . who were you? I mean— shit.’

She caught movement – a figure flitting through the trees towards Sweet and Crying Rock.

‘Shit!’ And she was running, stumbling, blundering, snagged a numb foot at the edge of the hollow and went tumbling through the brush, floundered up and was off across the bare slope, legs so caught in the virgin snow it felt like she was dragging two giant stone boots after her.

‘Sweet!’ she wheezed. The figure broke from the trees and over the unspoiled white towards the old scout, hint of a snarling face, glint of a blade. No way Shy could get there in time. Nothing she could do.

‘Sweet!’ she wailed one more time, and he looked up, smiling, then sideways, eyes suddenly wide, shrinking away as the dark shape sprang for him. It twisted in the air, fell short and went tumbling through the snow. Crying Rock rushed up and hit it over the head with her club. Shy heard the sharp crack a moment after.

Savian pushed some branches out of his way and trudged through the snow towards them, frowning at the trees and calmly cranking his flatbow.

‘Nice shot,’ called Crying Rock, sliding her club into her belt and jamming that pipe between her teeth.

Sweet pushed back his hat. ‘Nice shot, she says! I’ve damn near shat myself.’

Shy stood with her hands on her hips and tried to catch her smoking breath, chest on fire from the icy coldness of it.

Lamb walked up beside her, sheathing his sword. ‘Looks like they sometimes go in threes.’

Among the Barbarians