Swords & Dark Magic - By Jonathan Strahan Page 0,187

our conversation sometime.”

I didn’t reply. It seemed we’d said all that needed to be said. Since I was already pointed at one of the doors, I continued in that direction and opened it. There was a darkened corridor behind the door, leading only a few feet inward before it took a sharp right turn. I could smell a heavy and cloying musk from somewhere within, both attractive and repellent, fragrant decay. I also heard the distant sharpening of many knives, odd skittering sounds, and the musical notes of a thousand glass shards brushing against each other. The attractive part of the odor grew stronger, tugging at me, almost compelling me to enter.

I slammed the door and stepped back.

In the central room, the blade-armed golems had been released from whatever invisible force was confining them to the upper landing. They were shuffling down both staircases, increasing speed with each step. Swords and knives and spears were twisting and shaking in the grips of the statues, screeching, metal against metal, straining to be free of them. And the animal sounds from downstairs were growing louder, more agitated, and more proximate. Whatever it was down there was on its way up.

Okay, I may be in some trouble here.

* * *

JOE ABERCROMBIE attended Lancaster Royal Grammar School and Manchester University, where he studied psychology. He moved into television production before taking up a career as a freelance film editor. His first novel, The Blade Itself, was published in 2004, and was followed by two further books in the First Law trilogy, Before They Are Hanged and Last Argument of Kings. His most recent book is a stand-alone novel set in the same world, Best Served Cold, and he is currently at work on another, The Heroes. Joe now lives in Bath with his wife, Lou, and his daughters, Grace and Eve. He still occasionally edits concerts and music festivals for TV, but spends most of his time writing edgy yet humorous fantasy novels.

* * *

THE FOOL JOBS

Joe Abercrombie

Craw chewed the hard skin around his nails, just like he always did. They hurt, just like they always did. He thought to himself that he really had to stop doing that. Just like he always did.

“Why is it,” he muttered under his breath, and with some bitterness too, “I always get stuck with the fool jobs?”

The village squatted in the fork of the river, a clutch of damp thatch roofs, scratty as an idiot’s hair, a man-high fence of rough-cut logs ringing it. Round wattle huts and three long halls dumped in the muck, ends of the curving wooden uprights on the biggest badly carved like dragon’s heads, or wolf’s heads, or something that was meant to make men scared but only made Craw nostalgic for decent carpentry. Smoke limped up from chimneys in muddy smears. Half-bare trees still shook browning leaves. In the distance the reedy sunlight glimmered on the rotten fens, like a thousand mirrors stretching off to the horizon. But without the romance.

Wonderful stopped scratching at the long scar through her shaved-stubble hair long enough to make a contribution. “Looks to me,” she said, “like a confirmed shit-hole.”

“We’re way out east of the Crinna, no?” Craw worked a speck of skin between teeth and tongue and spat it out, wincing at the pink mark left on his finger, way more painful than it had any right to be. “Nothing but hundreds of miles of shit-hole in every direction. You sure this is the place, Raubin?”

“I’m sure. She was most specifical.”

Craw frowned round. He wasn’t sure if he’d taken such a pronounced dislike to Raubin ’cause he was the one that brought the jobs and the jobs were usually cracked, or if he’d taken such a pronounced dislike to Raubin ’cause the man was a weasel-faced arsehole. Bit of both, maybe. “The word is ‘specific,’ half-head.”

“Got my meaning, no? Village in a fork in the river, she said, south o’ the fens, three halls, biggest one with uprights carved like fox heads.”

“Aaaah.” Craw snapped his fingers. “They’re meant to be foxes.”

“Fox Clan, these crowd.”

“Are they?”

“So she said.”

“And this thing we’ve got to bring her. What sort of a thing is it, exactly?”

“Well, it’s a thing,” said Raubin.

“That much we know.”

“Sort of, this long, I guess. She didn’t say, precisely.”

“Unspecifical, was she?” asked Wonderful, grinning with every tooth.

“She said it’d have a kind of a light about it.”

“A light? What? Like a magic bloody candle?”

All Raubin could do was shrug, which wasn’t a scrap of