The Trouble with Peace (The Age of Madness #2) - Joe Abercrombie Page 0,23

a fire or maybe they were nailed into its skull, the rough flesh swollen around the strips of metal.

Grab the moment, ’fore it slips through your fingers.

“Spears!” roared Clover, and men popped from the undergrowth, long spears all pointed down the gully so there was nowhere for the flatheads to run to. They checked and clawed and skittered, surprised by that thicket of bright blades. One couldn’t stop and went tumbling onto the spears, took a point right through the throat and hung there, spitting dark blood and trying to turn around and looking somewhat surprised that it couldn’t.

Clover almost felt sorry for it. But feeling sorry’s always a waste of time, and specially in a battle.

“Arrows!” he roared, and men leaned out over the rocks at the sides of the gully. Bows sang and shafts fluttered down among the Shanka, bounced, rattled, stuck into flesh. He saw one flathead flailing, trying to reach with one twisted arm to where an arrow was sticking from its neck. The archers drew and strung and shot, easy as shooting lambs in a slaughter-pen. A spear went flying up the other way but bounced from a rock, harmless.

The flatheads were shook up, now. Seems Shanka and men don’t behave all that differently when they’re bottled in a gully with shafts showering down on ’em. One tried to climb the rocks and caught three arrows, dropped off on top of another. A third charged at the spears and got stuck through the guts, ripped open all up its side and a metal plate torn from its shoulder, bloody bolts showing underneath.

Clover saw one flathead dragging another that had an arrow in its chest, trying to get it to the back. Almost like something a person might do. A better person than he was, anyway. Made him wonder if flatheads had feelings like people, as well as blood and screams much the same. Then an arrow stuck into the head of the one doing the dragging and it fell with the other one on top and that was that for the demonstration of human feelings. On either side.

Clover got the sense they were ready to break.

“Axes!” he bellowed, and the spearmen split apart, pretty neat. Not too far from what they’d practised, which was quite the wonder under the circumstances. The best fighters Stour had given him came pouring through the gap, mail and shields and good axes smashing into the flatheads from uphill with a sound like hail on a tin roof.

Downside was right at the front, of course. He was a bad bastard. Mad bastard. Fought with that total lack of concern for his own safety that men usually grow out of fast or die of even faster. Hell of a fighter, but no one wanted him ’cause he’d a habit of getting carried away and not really caring who he smashed on the backswing. Or even the frontswing.

Still, when you’re sent to fight monsters, it’s a good idea to have a monster or two of your own. That, and the way he was never happier’n when he was charging at the Great Leveller reminded Clover of himself twenty years past, when they still called him Jonas Steepfield and misfortunes hadn’t taught him to tread lightly. He was just congratulating himself on staying well clear of the action when a spearman gave a screech, dropped clutching at his shoulder, and a giant flathead came roaring out of the pack, a great studded club in its fists.

Clover never saw a Shanka so big nor so covered in iron. They liked to rivet any metal they could find into their skin, but this one was covered all over with hammered plates. A mist sprayed from its mouth as it bellowed, and it sent a man reeling with its club. Others scrambled back, and Clover was not ashamed to say he was with them, jaw well lowered and shield well raised.

The great Shanka took a step forward, lifting its club, then squawked and dropped wobbling on one knee. Sholla had slipped up behind, now set her knife between two of the plates on its head and smashed the pommel with the back of her hatchet calm as hammering a nail. Made this hollow bonk and drove the knife into the Shanka’s skull to the grip, popped one of its eyes right out of its metal-cased head.

“Fuck,” said Clover as it crashed down at his feet with a sound like a chest full of cooking pots.

“Told you