The Great Leveller: Best Served Cold, The Heroes and Red Country (14 page)

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Authors: Joe Abercrombie

Tags: #Fantasy, #Omnibus

BOOK: The Great Leveller: Best Served Cold, The Heroes and Red Country
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‘Bastard,’ Murcatto grunted through frozen lips.
‘I see that you have.’ He rose, slipped around the table and perched himself beside her. ‘I really must apologise, but you understand that I am, as you have been, a person at the precarious summit of my profession. We of extraordinary skills and achievements are obliged to take extraordinary precautions. Now, unimpeded by your ability to move, we can speak with absolute candour on the subject of . . . Grand Duke Orso.’ He swilled around a mouthful of wine, watched a little bird flit between the branches. Murcatto said nothing, but it hardly mattered. Morveer was happy to speak for them both.
‘You have been done a terrible wrong, I see that. Betrayed by a man who owed you so much. Your beloved brother killed and you rendered . . . less than you were. My own life has been littered with painful reverses, believe me, so I entirely empathise. But the world is brimming with the awful and we humble individuals can only alter it by . . . small degrees.’ He frowned over at Day, munching noisily.
‘What?’ she grunted, mouth full.
‘Quietly if you must, I am trying to expound.’ She shrugged, licking her fingers with entirely unnecessary sucking sounds. Morveer gave a disapproving sigh. ‘The carelessness of youth. She will learn. Time marches in only one direction for us all, eh, Murcatto?’
‘Spare me the fucking philosophy,’ she forced through tight lips.
‘Let us confine ourselves to the practical, then. With your notable assistance, Orso has made himself the most powerful man in Styria. I would never pretend to have your grasp of all things military, but it scarcely takes Stolicus himself to perceive that, following your glorious victory at the High Bank last year, the League of Eight are on the verge of collapse. Only a miracle will save Visserine when summer comes. The Osprians will treat for peace or be crushed, depending on Orso’s mood, which, as you know far better than most, tends towards crushings. By the close of the year, barring accidents, Styria will have a king at last. An end to the Years of Blood.’ He drained his glass and waved it expansively. ‘Peace and prosperity for all and sundry! A better world, surely? Unless one is a mercenary, I suppose.’
‘Or a poisoner.’
‘On the contrary, we find more than ample employment in peacetime too. In any case, my point is that killing Grand Duke Orso – quite apart from the apparent impossibility of the task – seems to serve nobody’s interests. Not even yours. It will not bring your brother back, or your hand, or your legs.’ Her face did not flicker, but that might merely have been due to paralysis. ‘The attempt will more than likely end in your death, and possibly even in mine. My point is that you have to stop this madness, my dear Monzcarro. You have to stop it at once, and give it no further thought.’
Her eyes were pitiless as two pots of poison. ‘Only death will stop me. Mine, or Orso’s.’
‘No matter the cost? No matter the pain? No matter who’s killed along the path?’
‘No matter,’ she growled.
‘I find myself entirely convinced as to your level of commitment.’
‘Everything.’ The word was a snarl.
Morveer positively beamed. ‘Then we can do business. On that basis, and no other. What do I never deal in, Day?’
‘Half-measures,’ his assistant murmured, eyeing the one cake left on the plate.
‘Correct. How many do we kill?’
‘Six,’ said Murcatto, ‘including Orso.’
‘Then my rate shall be ten thousand scales per secondary, payable upon proof of their demise, and fifty thousand for the Duke of Talins himself.’
Her face twitched slightly. ‘Poor manners, to negotiate while your client is helpless.’
‘Manners would be ludicrous in a conversation about murder. In any case, I never haggle.’
‘Then we have a deal.’
‘I am so glad. Antidote, please.’
Day pulled the cork from a glass jar, dipped the very point of a thin knife into the syrupy reduction in its bottom and handed it to him, polished handle first. He paused, looking into Murcatto’s cold blue eyes.
Caution first, always. This woman they called the Serpent of Talins was dangerous in the extreme. If Morveer had not known it from her reputation, from their conversation, from the employment she had come to engage him for, he could have seen it at a single glance. He most seriously considered the possibility of giving her a fatal jab instead, throwing her Northern friend in the river and forgetting the whole business.
But to kill Grand Duke Orso, the most powerful man in Styria? To shape the course of history with one deft twist of his craft? For his deed, if not his name, to echo through the ages? What finer way to crown a career of achieving the impossible? The very thought made him smile the wider.
He gave a long sigh. ‘I hope I will not come to regret this.’ And he jabbed the back of Murcatto’s hand with the point of the knife, a single bead of dark blood slowly forming on her skin.
Within a few moments the antidote was already beginning to take effect. She winced as she turned her head slowly one way, then the other, worked the muscles in her face. ‘I’m surprised,’ she said.
‘Truly? How so?’
‘I was expecting a Master Poisoner.’ She rubbed at the mark on the back of her hand. ‘Who’d have thought I’d get such a little prick?’
Morveer felt his grin slip. It only took him a moment to regain his composure, of course. Once he had silenced Day’s giggle with a sharp frown. ‘I hope your temporary helplessness was not too great an inconvenience. I am forgiven, am I not? If the two of us are to cooperate, I would hate to have to labour beneath a shadow.’
‘Of course.’ She worked the movement back into her shoulders, the slightest smile at one corner of her mouth. ‘I need what you have, and you want what I have. Business is business.’
‘Excellent. Magnificent. Un . . . paralleled.’ And Morveer gave his most winning smile.
But he did not believe it for a moment. This was a most deadly job, and with a most deadly employer. Monzcarro Murcatto, the notorious Butcher of Caprile, was not a person of the forgiving variety. He was not forgiven. He was not even in the neighbourhood. From now on it would have to be caution first, second and third.
Science and Magic
 
S
hivers pulled his horse up at the top of the rise. The country sloped away, a mess of dark fields with here or there a huddled farm or village, a stand of bare trees. No more’n a dozen miles distant, the line of the black sea, the curve of a wide bay, and along its edge a pale crust of city. Tiny towers clustered on three hills above the chilly brine, under an iron-grey sky.
‘Westport,’ said Friendly, then clicked his tongue and moved his horse on.
The closer they came to the damn place the more worried Shivers got. And the more sore, cold and bored besides. He frowned at Murcatto, riding on her own ahead, hood up, a black figure in a black landscape. The cart’s wheels clattered round on the road. The horses clopped and snorted. Some crows caw-cawed from the bare fields. But no one was talking.
They’d been a grim crowd all the way here. But then they’d a grim purpose in mind. Nothing else but murder. Shivers wondered what his father would’ve made of that. Rattleneck, who’d stuck to the old ways tight as a barnacle to a boat and always looked for the right thing to do. Killing a man you never met for money didn’t seem to fit that hole however you twisted it around.
There was a sudden burst of high laughter. Day, perched on the cart next to Morveer, a half-eaten apple in her hand. Shivers hadn’t heard much laughter in a while, and it drew him like a moth to flame.
‘What’s funny?’ he asked, starting to grin along at the joke.
She leaned towards him, swaying with the cart. ‘I was just wondering, when you fell off your chair like a turtle tipped over, if you soiled yourself.’
‘I was of the opinion you probably did,’ said Morveer, ‘but doubted we could have smelled the difference.’
Shivers’ smile was stillborn. He remembered sitting in that orchard, frowning across the table, trying to look dangerous. Then he’d felt twitchy, then dizzy. He’d tried to lift his hand to his head, found he couldn’t. He’d tried to say something about it, found he couldn’t. Then the world tipped over. He didn’t remember much else.
‘What did you do to me?’ He lowered his voice. ‘Sorcery?’
Day sprayed bits of apple as she burst out laughing. ‘Oh, this just gets better.’
‘And I said he would be an uninspiring travelling companion.’ Morveer chuckled. ‘Sorcery. I swear. It’s like one of those stories.’
‘Those big, thick, stupid books! Magi and devils and all the rest!’ Day was having herself quite the snigger. ‘Stupid stories for children!’
‘Alright,’ said Shivers. ‘I think I get it. I’m slow as a fucking trout in treacle. Not sorcery. What, then?’
Day smirked. ‘Science.’
Shivers didn’t much care for the sound of it. ‘What’s that? Some other kind of magic?’
‘No, it most decidedly is not,’ sneered Morveer. ‘Science is a system of rational thought devised to investigate the world and establish the laws by which it operates. The scientist uses those laws to achieve an effect. One which might easily appear magical in the eyes of the primitive.’ Shivers struggled with all the long Styrian words. For a man who reckoned himself clever, Morveer had a fool’s way of talking, seemed meant to make the simple difficult. ‘Magic, conversely, is a system of lies and nonsense devised to fool idiots.’
‘Right y’are. I must be the stupidest bastard in the Circle of the World, eh? It’s a wonder I can hold my own shit in without paying mind to my arse every minute.’
‘The thought had occurred.’
‘There is magic,’ grumbled Shivers. ‘I’ve seen a woman call up a mist.’
‘Really? And how did it differ from ordinary mist? Magic coloured? Green? Orange?’
Shivers frowned. ‘The usual colour.’
‘So a woman called, and there was mist.’ Morveer raised one eyebrow at his apprentice. ‘A wonder indeed.’ She grinned, teeth crunching into her apple.
‘I’ve seen a man marked with letters, made one half of him proof against any blade. Stabbed him myself, with a spear. Should’ve been a killing blow, but didn’t leave a mark.’
‘Ooooooh!’ Morveer held both hands up and wiggled his fingers like a child playing ghost. ‘Magic letters! First, there was no wound, and then . . . there was no wound? I recant! The world is stuffed with miracles.’ More tittering from Day.
‘I know what I’ve seen.’
‘No, my mystified friend, you think you know. There is no such thing as magic. Certainly not here in Styria.’
‘Just treachery,’ sang Day, ‘and war, and plague, and money to be made.’
‘Why did you favour Styria with your presence, anyway?’ asked Morveer. ‘Why not stay in the North, swaddled in the magic mists?’
Shivers rubbed slowly at the side of his neck. Seemed a strange reason, now, and he felt even more of a fool saying it. ‘I came here to be a better man.’
‘Starting from where you are, I hardly think that would prove too difficult. ’
Shivers had some pride still, and this prick’s sniggering was starting to grate on it. He’d have liked to just knock him off his cart with an axe. But he was trying to do better, so he leaned over instead and spoke in Northern, nice and careful. ‘I think you’ve got a head full of shit, which is no surprise because your face looks like an arse. You little men are all the same. Always trying to prove how clever y’are so you’ve something to be proud of. But it don’t matter how much you laugh at me, I’ve won already. You’ll never be tall.’ And he grinned right round his face. ‘Seeing across a crowded room will always be a dream to you.’
Morveer frowned. ‘And what is that jabber supposed to mean?’
‘You’re the fucking scientist. You work it out.’
Day snorted with high laughter until Morveer caught her with a hard glance. She was still smiling, though, as she stripped the apple core to the pips and tossed it away. Shivers dropped back and watched the empty fields slither by, turned earth half-frozen with a morning frost. Made him think of home. He gave a sigh, and it smoked out against the grey sky. The friends Shivers had made in his life had all been fighters. Carls and Named Men, comrades in the line, most back in the mud, now, one way or another. He reckoned Friendly was the closest thing he’d get to that in the midst of Styria, so he gave his horse a nudge in the flanks and brought it up next to the convict.
‘Hey.’ Friendly didn’t say a word. He didn’t even move his head to show he’d heard. Silence stretched out. Looking at that brick wall of a face it was hard to picture the convict a bosom companion, chuckling away at his jokes. But a man’s got to clutch at some hope, don’t he? ‘You were a soldier, then?’
Friendly shook his head.
‘But you fought in battles?’
And again.
Shivers ploughed on as if he’d said yes. Not much other choice, now. ‘I fought in a few. Charged in the mist with Bethod’s Carls north of the Cumnur. Held the line next to Rudd Threetrees at Dunbrec. Fought seven days in the mountains with the Dogman. Seven desperate days, those were.’

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