A Little Hatred (The Age of Madness #1) - Joe Abercrombie Page 0,131

slop and trickle as she passed it to May, her legs, her arms, her shoulders trembling with the effort. Was it the cold, or the exhaustion, or the fear that made her shake so? What was the difference?

Her breath snagged and she was caught with a coughing fit, sudden as a punch in the gut. She doubled up, wasted ribcage buzzing with each choking gasp, tore the rag from her face and was sick. All she had to be sick with, anyway, bitter bile and bad water, her own little contribution to the river’s filth.

She wrested back control of her lungs, then stooped to fill the bucket. Clatter, gurgle, slop and trickle—

There was a hand on her shoulder. Liddy. ‘It’s out,’ she said.

Savine stared dumbly at her, then up the bank towards the buildings. Smoke still rolled skywards, but the flames were gone. She waded from the river and flopped on the slimy shingle on her hands and knees, utterly spent. She arched her back, one way then the other, aches stabbing right through into her heels, right up into her neck. The faintest shadow of what her father felt, perhaps, every morning. Maybe it should have given her sympathy for him. But as he was so fond of saying, pain only makes you sorry for yourself.

‘It’s out,’ rasped May, sinking down on the shore beside her.

Savine groaned as she came up to sitting, winced as she tried to work her fingers, cracked and wrinkled by cold water, ripped raw by the rusted handles of the buckets.

‘It’s out over here,’ she whispered, staring across to the great blaze still raging on the far bank.

‘All we can worry about is here. Over there …’ The orange glow of the fires across the river picked up the hollows of Liddy’s face even more starkly than usual. Savine understood. Over there was lost. Over there was gone.

When she arrived in the city, she had smiled to see the building sites everywhere, the cranes and scaffolds, the stuff of creation. But Valbeck was one vast demolition now.

She caught some fragment of her mind trying to calculate the scale of the investments gone up in smoke. The buildings and machinery destroyed, the people ruined. What were her own losses, for that matter? None of it felt very important, compared to the pain in her hands.

There was a breeze, at least, carrying the haze of smoke down the river. Enough that Savine could get a proper breath into her raw chest.

‘What happened?’ she whispered.

‘Reckon the Burners set some fires on their way out of town.’ Liddy wiped her face on the back of her sleeve and only succeeded in smearing ash across it. ‘A little parting gift.’

‘Their way out?’

May ran her tongue around the inside of her mouth and spat. ‘They say the crown prince is coming with five thousand soldiers. Rumour is they’ll be outside the city tomorrow.’

‘Orso is here?’ she whispered. She had hardly thought of him since the uprising. Hunger, cold and the constant threat of death rather blunted one’s appetite for romance. Now his grin came up in her memory, painfully sharp, and she felt weak with a sappy welling of relief.

‘Guess they managed to prise him out of the whorehouse,’ said Liddy. ‘No doubt he’ll be bringing the Inquisition with him.’

‘Oh,’ said Savine, stupidly. For most people here, a horrifying prospect. For her, the best news in weeks.

‘Seems the party’s over,’ murmured May.

There was a rumble and Savine jerked up. On the other side of the river, the roof of a burning mill was falling in, fountains of sparks towering into the night, smoke boiling as half of one wall toppled inwards. The brave new age collapsing on itself.

Crown Prince Orso was riding to her rescue. Perhaps she should have laughed at that. Perhaps she should have wept at it. But she had no laughter and no tears left. She was a husk.

She sat on the bank and watched the flames dance in the water.

Eating Peas with a Sword

‘Should we attack, Your Highness?’

‘Attack, Colonel Forest?’ Orso did not blame the man. Violence is very much the job of a career soldier, after all. But the limits of his imagination were becoming clear. ‘Attack who? The city itself is an asset, not an enemy. As for the inhabitants, we really have no idea who is loyal and who disloyal. Who a rebel and who a hostage. Making war on our own citizens … it would look dreadful. We would create more