Sharp Ends

Skipping Town

The Near Country,Summer 575

‘Maybe we should skip town.’ said Javre.

‘Oh no, no, no, not this time,’ Shev snapped back at her. ‘You can’t just career through life leaving the wreckage of your mistakes behind you.’

A silence as they hurried on through the shadows, Shev having to half-jog to keep up as Javre ploughed ahead with immense strides, brow furrowed in thought.

‘What is it that we have been doing this past year, then?’

‘Well … we’ve …’ Shev thought about it. ‘That’s just my point! We can’t keep doing it.’

‘I see. So we give Tumnor his jewel, we collect the promised money, we pay our gambling debts-’

‘Your gambling debts.’

‘Then what? We put down roots here?’ Javre raised one red brow at the crumbling buildings, the rubbish-strewn street, a fish-stinking beggar hacking out diseased coughs in a doorway.

‘Well, no. We move on.’

‘And what we left behind us tonight?’ Javre jerked her head the way they’d come. ‘Would you call that wreckage?’

‘I would call that …’ Shev wondered how much this particular truth would stretch before it tore to bits. ‘A series of mishaps.’

‘It looked like wreckage to me. Once the front of the mansion collapsed, you would have to call that wreckage, no?’

Shev glanced quickly over her shoulder yet again to make sure no one was following. ‘I suppose an uncharitable speaker could describe it so.’

‘Then explain to me, if you would, Shevedieh, how your way differs from mine, except that we leave town with less money?’

‘We leave with less enemies as well! I tire of leaving a new score in every shit-hole we pass through like a rabbit leaves droppings! Sooner or later I might need a good shit-hole to pass through again. All the damn enemies. I wake up sweating, you know, in the night!’

‘That is all that spicy food,’ said Javre. ‘I do not know how often I have warned you about your diet. And enemies are a good thing. Enemies show you make … an impression.’

‘Oh, you make an impression, all right, that I would never deny. You made a hell of an impression on those boys tonight.’

Javre grinned a mass of white teeth as she punched one scabbed fist into one calloused palm with a smack like a door slamming. ‘I certainly did.’

‘But I’m a thief, Javre, not … whatever you are. I’m supposed to keep a low profile.’

‘Ah!’ Javre raised that same red brow again as she glanced sideways. ‘Hence all the black.’

‘And it does look rather well on me, I think you’d have to agree.’

‘You certainly are a shadowy and seductive corruptor of innocent maidenhood!’ Javre playfully jogged Shev in the ribs with an elbow and nearly sent her careering into the nearest wall, then caught her by the hand and dragged her into a crushing embrace, her cheek squashed into Javre’s armpit. ‘We shall do it your way, then, Shevedieh, my friend! Straight and true and morally upright, just as a thief should be! We shall pay your debts, then get drunk and find some men.’

Shev was still struggling to get a breath in after that elbow. ‘What is it exactly that you think I’d do with them?’

Javre grinned. ‘The men would be for me. I am a woman of Thond and have grand appetites. You can keep watch.’

‘My towering thanks for the immensity of that honour,’ said Shev, slipping from under the weight of Javre’s mightily muscled arm.

‘It is the least I could do. You have been a fine sidekick so far.’

‘I thought this was an equal partnership.’

‘All the best sidekicks think that,’ said Javre, striding towards the front door of the Weeping Slaver, its sign hanging precariously from a rusting pole by one loop.

Shev caught Javre’s arm and, by hanging off it with all her weight and digging her heels into the mud, managed to stop her taking the next step. ‘I have a feeling Tumnor will be expecting us.’

‘That was the arrangement.’ Javre looked down at her, puzzled.

‘Given that he was less than entirely forthcoming about the job, it may be that he’ll try to double-cross us.’

Javre frowned. ‘You think he might break the agreement?’

‘He didn’t mention the traps, did he?’ asked Shev, still heaving at Javre’s arm. ‘Or the long drop? Or the wall? Or the dogs? And he said two guards, not twelve.’

Muscles worked as Javre clenched her jaw. ‘He said nothing about that sorcerer, either.’

‘Exactly,’ Shev managed to gasp, every sinew trembling with effort.

‘Breath of the Mother, you’re right.’

Shev breathed a sigh of relief and slowly stood, patting Javre’s arm as she released it. ‘I’ll sneak in around the back and make sure that-’

Javre gave her a huge smile. ‘The Lioness of Hoskopp never uses the back door!’ And she sprang up the steps, raised one boot, kicked the front door splintering from its hinges and strode inside, the filthy tails of her once-white coat flapping after.

Shevedieh gave brief but serious consideration to sprinting off down the street, then sighed and crept up the steps after her.

The Weeping Slaver wasn’t the most auspicious of settings, though Shev had to admit she’d been in worse. Indeed, she’d spent most of the last few years in worse.

Size it had, big as a barn with a balcony at first-floor level, ill-lit by a vast circular chandelier with smoking candles in stained glass cups. The floor was covered in dirty straw and a mismatched jumble of chairs and tables, a warped counter down one side with the cheapest spirits of a dozen dozen cultures stacked on shelves behind.

The place smelled of smoke and sweat, of spilled drinks and sprayed vomit, of desperation and wasted chances, and was very much as it had been three nights ago when they took the job, just before Javre lost half their promised earnings at dice. There was one clear difference, however. That night it had overflowed with scum of every kind. Tonight there appeared to be just the one patron.

Tumnor sat at a table in the middle of the room, a fixed grin on his plump face and a sheen of sweat across his forehead. He looked extremely nervous, even for a man perpetrating a double-cross on a pair of notorious thieves. He looked in imminent fear of his life.

‘It’s a trap,’ he grunted through his clenched teeth, without moving his hands from the tabletop.

‘That we had gathered, fiend!’ said Javre.

‘No,’ he grunted, eyes swivelling wildly sideways, then back to them, then sideways again. ‘A trap.’

That was when Shev noticed his hands were nailed to the table. She followed his glance, past a large brown stain on the floor that looked suspiciously like blood and into the shadows. She saw a figure there. The glint of eyes. The glimmer of steel. A man poised and ready. Now she took in other telltale gleams in the dark corners of the inn – an axeman wedged behind a drinks cabinet, the nose of a flatbowman peeking into the light on the balcony above, a pair of boots sticking out from the door to the cellar which she deduced must still be attached to the dead legs of one of Tumnor’s hired men. Her heart sank. She hated fighting, and she had the strong feeling she was going to be fighting very soon.

‘It would appear,’ murmured Shev, leaning towards Javre, ‘that the scum who double-crossed us have been double-crossed by some other scum.’

‘Yes,’ whispered Javre. Her whispers were louder than the usual speaking voice of most people. ‘I find myself conflicted. Who to kill first?’

‘Perhaps we could talk our way out?’ Shev ventured hopefully. It was important to stay hopeful.

‘Shevedieh, we must face the possibility that there will be violence.’

‘Your prescience is uncanny.’

‘When things get underway, I would be ever so grateful if you could attend to the flatbowman on the balcony just there?’

‘Understood,’ muttered Shev.

‘Most of the rest you can probably leave to me.’

‘Too kind.’

And now the unmistakable tread of heavy boots and jingling metal echoed from the back of the inn, and Tumnor’s face grew even more drawn, beads of sweat rolling down his cheeks.

Javre narrowed her eyes. ‘And the villain is revealed.’

‘Villains tend to love a bit of theatre, though, don’t they?’ muttered Shev.

When she emerged into the shifting candlelight, she was lean and very tall. Almost as tall as Javre, perhaps, her black hair chopped short, one sinewy arm bare and covered in blue tattoos and the other with plates of battered steel, a gauntlet like a claw at the end, curving nails of sharpened metal clicking as she walked. Her green, green eyes glinted as she smiled towards them.

‘It has been a while, Javre.’

Javre pushed her lips out. ‘Oh, arse of the Goddess,’ she said. ‘Well met, Weylen. Or badly met, at least.’

‘You know her?’ muttered Shev.

Javre winced. ‘I must admit she is not an entire stranger to me. She was Thirteenth of the Fifteen.’

‘I am Tenth now,’ said Weylen. ‘Since you killed Hanama and Birke.’

‘I offered them the same choice I will soon offer you.’ Javre shrugged. ‘They chose death.’

‘Er …’ Shev held up one gloved finger. ‘If I may ask … What the hell are we talking about?’

The woman’s emerald-green eyes moved across to her. ‘She did not tell you?’

‘Tell me what?’

Javre winced even more. ‘Those friends of mine I mentioned, from the temple.’

‘The temple in Thond?’

‘Yes. They’re not so much friends.’

‘So … neutral towards you, then?’ Shev ventured hopefully. It was important to stay hopeful.

‘More enemies,’ said Javre.

‘I see.’

‘The fifteen Knights Templar of the Golden Order are forbidden to leave the temple except on the orders of the High Priestess. On pain of death.’

‘And I’m guessing you had no such permission to go?’ asked Shevedieh, looking around at all the sharpened steel on display.

‘Not in so many words.’

‘Not in so many?’

‘Not in any.’

‘Her life is forfeit,’ said Weylen. ‘As is the life of anyone who offers her succour.’ And she extended her steel-taloned forefinger and drove it into the top of Tumnor’s head. He made a sound like a fart, then dropped forward, blood bubbling from the neat wound in his pate.

Shev held her empty palms up. ‘Well, I’ve offered no succour, that I promise you. I like a succouring just as much as the next girl, if not a good deal more, but Javre?’ She worked her hand gently, making sure the mechanism was engaged, hoping that it looked like nothing more than an expressive gesture. ‘No offence to her, I daresay she’ll make several men a wonderful husband some day, but she’s not my type at all.’ Shev raised her brows at Weylen who, it had to be said, was much closer to her type, those eyes of hers really were something. ‘And, you know, not wanting to blow my own horn, but once I offer succour? I generally get all the succouring one woman can-’

‘She means help,’ said Javre.

‘Eh?’

‘Succour. It is not a sexual thing.’

‘Oh.’

‘Kill them,’ said Weylen.

The flatbowman raised his weapon, candlelight glinting on the sharpened tip of the loaded bolt, as several other thugs burst from the shadows brandishing a selection of unpleasant-looking weapons. Though what weapons look pleasant, Shev reflected, when brandished at you?

Shev twisted her wrist and the throwing knife sprang into her hand. Unfortunately, the spring was wound too tight, and it shot straight through her clutching fingers and thudded into the ceiling, neatly cutting the rope that held the chandelier. Pulleys whirred and the huge thing began to plummet towards them.

The flatbowman smiled as he squeezed the trigger, aiming straight at Shev’s heart. A thug raised a huge axe above his head. Then a great weight of wood, glass and wax crashed down upon him, crushing him flat, the flatbow bolt shuddering into the side of the chandelier an instant before it hit the ground with a shattering impact, taking two more thugs with it and sending dust, splinters, shards and candles flying.

‘Shit,’ whispered Shev, stunned and blinking as the echoes faded. She and Javre stood together in the centre of the chandelier’s circular wreckage, apparently entirely unhurt.

Shev gave a whoop of triumph which turned, as many of her triumphant whoops did, into a gurgle of horror as an uncrushed thug sprang over the ruins of the chandelier with his sword a blur of hard-swung steel. She leaped back, tripped over a table, fell over a chair, rolled, saw a blade flash past, scrambled under another table, dust filtering around her as someone beat it with an axe. She heard crashes, clashes, loud swearing and all the familiar noise of a fight in an inn.

Bloody hell, Shev hated fights. Hated them. Considering how much she hated them, she got into a lot of them. Partnering up with Javre had not helped her record in that regard or, at a brief assay, any other. She slid out from under the table, sprang up, was punched in the face and sprawled painfully against the counter, spluttering and wobbling and trying to blink the tears from her eyes.

A snarling thug came at her overhand with a knife and she jerked back at the waist, steel flashing by her and thunking into the counter. She jerked forward and butted him in the face, knocked him staggering with his hands to his nose, snatched his knife from the wood and sent it whirling through the air in one smooth motion, burying itself in the flatbowman’s forehead as he levelled his reloaded weapon. His eyes rolled up and he toppled off the balcony and onto a table below, sending bottles and glasses flying.

‘What a knife-thrower,’ Shev muttered to herself, ‘I could have- Urgh!’ Her smugness was knocked out of her along with her breath as a man cannoned into her side and sent her reeling.

He was a big man of surpassing ugliness, swinging this way and that with a mace almost as big and ugly as he was, smashing glasses and furniture, filling the air with splinters. Shev whimpered every curse she could think of as she weaved and dodged, scrambling and jumping desperately, not even getting the chance to look for an opening, running steadily out of space and time as she was herded towards a corner.

He raised his mace to strike, broad face twisted with rage.

‘Wait!’ she wailed, pointing over his shoulder.

It was amazing how often that worked. He jerked his head to look, pausing just long enough for her to knee him in the fruits with all her strength. He gasped, tottered, dropped to his knees, and she whipped out her dagger and stabbed him sharply at the meeting of his neck and his shoulder. He groaned, tried to stand, then sprawled on his face, welling blood.

‘Sorry,’ said Shev. ‘Damn it, I’m sorry.’ And she was, just as she always was. But it was better to be sorry than dead. Just as it always was. That lesson she had learned long ago.

No further fights presented themselves. Javre stood by the chandelier’s wreckage, her dirty white coat spotted with blood and the twisted bodies of a dozen thugs scattered about her. She had another bent over with his head wedged in the crook of one arm, and yet another pinned against a table by his neck at arm’s length, kicking and struggling to absolutely no effect.

‘Things must be going downhill.’ And with a twitch of her face and a flex of her muscular arm she snapped the first man’s neck and let his body flop to the floor. ‘The temple used to stretch to a better class of thug.’ She dipped her shoulder and flung the other one bodily through a window and into the street, tearing the shutters free, his despairing squeal cut off as his head tore a chunk from a supporting pillar with him.

‘The best I could find at short notice,’ said Weylen, reaching behind her back. ‘But it was always going to come to this.’ And she drew a curved sword, the long blade looking to Shev’s eye to be made of a writhing black smoke.

‘It need not,’ said Javre. ‘You have two choices, just as Hanama and Birke did. You can go back to Thond. Go back to the High Priestess and tell her I will be no one’s slave. Not ever. Tell her I am free.’

‘Free? Ha! Do you suppose the High Priestess will accept that answer?’

Javre shrugged. ‘Tell her you could not find me. Tell her whatever you please.’

Weylen’s mouth bitterly twisted. ‘And what would be my other-’

‘I show you the sword.’ There was a popping of joints as Javre shifted her shoulders, boots scraping into a wider stance, and from inside her coat she drew a bundle, long and slender, a thing of bandages and rags, but near the end Shev caught the glint of gold.

Weylen lifted her chin, and did not so much smile as show her teeth. ‘You know there is no choice for us.’

Javre gave a nod. ‘I know. Shevedieh?’

‘Yes?’ croaked Shev.

‘Close your eyes.’

She jammed them shut as Weylen sprang over a table with a fighting scream, high, harsh and horrible. She heard quick footsteps on the boards, rushing up with inhuman speed.

There was a ringing of metal and Shev flinched as a sudden bright light shone pink through her lids. A scraping, and a croaking gasp, and the light was gone.

‘Shevedieh.’

‘Yes?’ she croaked.

‘You can open them now.’

Javre still held the bundle in one hand, torn rags flapping about it. With the other she held Weylen up, her limp arms flopping back, steel-cased knuckles scraping the floor. There was a red stain on her chest, but she looked peaceful. Aside from the black blood pouring from her back to spatter on the boards in spurts and dashes.

‘They will find you, Javre,’ she whispered, blood specking her lips.

‘I know,’ said Javre. ‘And they each will have their choice.’ She lowered Weylen to the boards, into the spreading pool of her blood, and gently brushed her eyelids closed over her green, green eyes. ‘May the Goddess have mercy on you,’ she murmured.

‘May she have mercy on us first,’ muttered Shevedieh, wiping the blood from under her throbbing nose as she approached the counter, dagger at the ready, and peered over. The inn’s owner was cowering behind and cringed even further as he saw her. ‘Don’t kill me! Please don’t kill me!’

‘I won’t.’ She hid the dagger behind her back and showed him her open palm. ‘No one will. It’s all right, they’ve …’ She wanted to say ‘gone’ but, glancing around the wreckage of the inn, was forced to say, rather croakily, ‘died. You can get up.’

He slowly stood, peered over the counter, and his jaw dropped open. ‘By the-’

‘I must apologise for the damage,’ said Javre. ‘It looks worse than it is.’

Part of the far wall, riddled with cracks, chose that moment to collapse into the street, sending up a cloud of stone dust and making Shev step back, coughing.

Javre pushed her lips out and put one considering fingertip against them. ‘Perhaps it is exactly as bad as it looks.’

Shev heaved up an aching sigh. Not the first she’d given in the company of Javre, Lioness of Hoskopp, and she doubted it would be the last. She pulled the pouch from her shirt, undid the strings and let the jewel roll onto the split counter, where it sat glinting.

‘For your trouble,’ she said to the gawping innkeeper. Then she wiped her dagger on the jacket of the nearest corpse and slid it back into its sheath, turned without another word, stepped over the splintered remains of the door and out into the street.

Dawn was coming, the sun bringing the faintest grey smudge to the eastern sky above the ramshackle roofs. Shev took a long breath and shook her head at it. ‘Damn it, Shevedieh,’ she whispered to herself, ‘but a conscience is a hell of an encumbrance to a thief.’

She heard Javre’s heavy footsteps behind, felt her looming presence at her shoulder, heard her deep voice as she leaned to speak in Shev’s ear.

‘Would you like to skip town now?’

Shev nodded. ‘Yes, I think we’d better.’