A Little Hatred (The Age of Madness #1) - Joe Abercrombie Page 0,74

he grabbed them. Then he saw it was skin.

‘Damn it!’ snarled Sarlby, digging again with the crowbar. Bricks and mortar tumbled down and the boy slithered out into Broad’s arms in a shower of soot.

He was hot, too hot to touch. It was a painful effort not to let him drop.

‘Set him down!’ rasped Malmer, sweeping a bench clear and slapping embers from the boy’s smouldering hair.

‘Fuck,’ whispered Sarlby, back of his arm across his mouth.

The boy didn’t move. Didn’t breathe. Burned as he was, maybe that was a good thing. There was a smell like cooking. A smell like bacon in the pan of a morning.

‘What do we do?’ shouted Broad. ‘What can we do?’

‘Naught we can do.’ Malmer’s grey-fuzzed jaw worked as he stared down. ‘He’s dead.’

‘Cooked,’ whispered Sarlby. ‘He fucking cooked alive.’

‘I thought you said the west side …’ Broad turned to see the sweep standing there, the little lad next to him, staring. ‘I thought you said—’

It was cut off in a gurgle as Broad caught him by his collar, lifted him, rammed him into the broken chimney. He fumbled helplessly at Broad’s fists, the tendons standing stark from the tattoo on the back of his hand.

‘I didn’t know …’ Tears wet on his face and his breath stinking of drink and rot. ‘I didn’t know …’

‘Easy,’ Broad heard someone saying. A deep voice, soft and soothing. ‘Easy, big man. Let him go.’

Broad was like a flatbow cranked too tight, all that strain running through him, far easier to let the bolt fly than not. Took a mighty effort not to break the sweep’s back over the chimney, to unclench his hands and let go of his dirty coat, to step away from him, let him slide down to sit blubbing on the floor beside the boiler.

Malmer patted Broad on the chest. ‘There you go. Nothing to gain with violence. Not now.’

Not ever. Broad knew that. He’d known that for years. But what he knew and what he did had never had much to do with each other.

He looked back at the boy, lying there all blackened, all reddened. He made his aching fists unclench. He fumbled off his dirty lenses and stood breathing. He looked up at Sarlby and Malmer, two blurs now in the lamplight.

‘Where are these meetings?’

Surprises

Rikke flopped down, misjudged it and sat so hard she bit her tongue and gave her backside quite the bruising. Isern had to shoot out a quick hand to stop her chair going over backwards.

‘You’re drunk,’ she said.

‘I am drunk,’ said Rikke, proudly. She’d hit the chagga pipe as well and everything had a lovely glow. Faces all shiny and smeary and happy in the candlelight.

‘You’re proper shitted,’ said Isern. ‘But people are forgiving of you because you’re young, foolish and strangely lovable.’

‘I am lovable.’ Rikke took another drink, which met just a smidge of burp-sick coming up the other way and made her half-choke and splutter ale everywhere. Would’ve felt extremely undignified if she’d been less drunk. As it was, she just laughed. ‘And being drunk, well, that’s the point of a feasht.’

Isern’s eyes slipped slowly towards her over the rim of her cup. ‘The word is feast.’

‘That’s what I said,’ said Rikke. ‘Feasht.’ Bloody word, she couldn’t quite get her numb teeth all the way around it. The hall – or the barn, in fact, because they had to use what they could get these days – was falling quiet. Rikke’s father was getting up to give a speech.

‘Shush!’ hissed Rikke. ‘Shush!’

‘I didn’t speak,’ said Isern.

‘I said shush!’ Her cracked voice rang out across the now-silent barn, and her father cleared his throat, and Rikke felt all eyes on her and her face burned and she squashed herself down as low as she could go and took a stealthy slurp from her cup.

‘Might be Calder and Scale and their bastards have us on the run!’ called Rikke’s father. ‘So far.’

‘So far, the bastards!’ someone bellowed, and others seized the chance to growl insults of one kind or another at the enemy and Rikke curled her lip and spat onto the straw.

‘Might be my garden’s been trampled to muck!’

‘Was naught but brambles anyway!’ someone called from the back.

‘Might be I’m giving a speech in some fool’s barn rather’n my hall in Uffrith!’

‘That hall smelled o’ dog!’ came a voice, and there was a scattering of laughter from the hundred or more Named Men wedged around tables made from old doors.

Rikke’s father looked grave, though, and