The Great Leveller: Best Served Cold, The Heroes and Red Country (223 page)

Lamb shoved Camling tottering away and stood, breath growling in his throat. Then he put the sword carefully on the counter and his palms flat before it, fingers spreading out, the wood gleaming in the space where the middle one should have been. Savian walked around behind the counter, shouldering Camling out of the way, took a glass and bottle from a high shelf, blew out one then pulled the cork from the other.

‘You need a hand, you got mine,’ he grunted as he poured.

Lamb nodded. ‘You should know lending me a hand can be bad for your health.’

Savian coughed as he nudged the glass across. ‘My health’s a mess.’

‘What are you going to do?’ asked Temple.

‘Have a drink.’ And Lamb picked up the glass and drained it, white stubble on his throat shifting. Savian tipped the bottle to fill it again.

‘Lamb!’ Lord Ingelstad walked in somewhat unsteadily, his face pale and his waistcoat covered in stains. ‘He said you’d be here!’

‘Who said?’

Ingelstad gave a helpless chuckle as he tossed his hat on the counter, a few wisps of stray hair left standing vertically from his head. ‘Strangest thing. After that fun at Majud’s place, I was playing cards over at Papa Ring’s. Entirely lost track of time and I was somewhat behind financially, I’ll admit, and a gentleman came in to tell Papa something, and he told me he’d forget my debt if I brought you a message.’

‘What message?’ Lamb drank again, and Savian filled his glass again.

Ingelstad squinted at the wall. ‘He said he’s playing host to a friend of yours . . . and he’d very much like to be a gracious host . . . but you’ll have to kiss the mud tomorrow night. He said you’ll be dropping anyway, so you might as well drop willingly and you can both walk out of Crease free people. He said you have his word on that. He was very particular about it. You have his word, apparently.’

‘Well, ain’t I the lucky one,’ said Lamb.

Lord Ingelstad squinted over at Temple as though only just noticing his unusual attire. ‘It appears some people have had an even heavier night than I.’

‘Can you take a message back?’ asked Lamb.

‘I daresay a few more minutes won’t make any difference to Lady Ingelstad’s temper at this point. I am
doomed
whatever.’

‘Then tell Papa Ring I’ll keep his word safe and sound. And I hope he’ll do the same for his guest.’

The nobleman yawned as he jammed his hat back on. ‘Riddles, riddles.

Then off to bed for me!’ And he strutted back out into the street.

‘What are you going to do?’ whispered Temple.

‘There was a time I’d have gone charging over there without a thought for the costs and got bloody.’ Lamb lifted the glass and looked at it for a moment. ‘But my father always said patience is the king of virtues. A man has to be realistic. Has to be.’

‘So what are you going to do?’

‘Wait. Think. Prepare.’ Lamb swallowed the last measure and bared his teeth at the glass. ‘Then get bloody.’

High Stakes

‘
A
trim?’ asked Faukin, directing his blank, bland, professional smile towards the mirror. ‘Or something more radical?’

‘Shave it all off, hair and beard, close to the skull as you can get.’

Faukin nodded as though that would have been his choice. The client always knows best, after all. ‘A wet shave of the pate, then.’

‘Wouldn’t want to give the other bastard anything to hold on to. And I reckon it’s a little late to damage my looks, don’t you?’

Faukin gave his blank, bland, professional chuckle and began, comb struggling with the tangles in Lamb’s thick hair, the snipping of the scissors cutting the silence up into neat little fragments. Outside the window the noise of the swelling crowd grew louder, more excited, and the tension in the room swelled with it. The grey cuttings spilled down the sheet, scattered across the boards in those tantalising patterns that looked to hold some meaning one could never quite grasp.

Lamb stirred at them with his foot. ‘Where does it all go, eh?’

‘Our time or the hair?’

‘Either one.’

‘In the case of the time, I would ask a philosopher rather than a barber. In the case of the hair, it is swept up and thrown out. Unless on occasion one might have a lady friend who would care to be entrusted with a lock . . .’

Lamb glanced over at the Mayor. She stood at the window, keeping one eye on Lamb’s preparations and the other on those in the street, a slender silhouette against the sunset. He dismissed the notion with an explosive snort. ‘One moment it’s a part of you, the next it’s rubbish.’

‘We treat whole men like rubbish, why not their hair?’

Lamb sighed. ‘I guess you’ve got the right of it.’

Faukin gave the razor a good slapping on the strap. Clients usually appreciated a flourish, a mirror flash of lamplight on steel, an edge of drama to proceedings.

‘Careful,’ said the Mayor, evidently in need of no extra drama today. Faukin had to confess to being considerably more scared of her than he was of Lamb. The Northman he knew for a ruthless killer, but suspected him of harbouring principles of a kind. He had no such suspicions about the Mayor. So he gave his blank, bland, professional bow, ceased his sharpening, brushed up a lather and worked it into Lamb’s hair and beard, then began to shave with patient, careful, hissing strokes.

‘Don’t it ever bother you that it always grows back?’ asked Lamb. ‘There’s no beating it, is there?’

‘Could not the same be said of every profession? The merchant sells one thing to buy another. The farmer harvests one set of crops to plant another. The blacksmith—’

‘Kill a man and he stays dead,’ said Lamb, simply.

‘But . . . if I might observe without causing offence . . . killers rarely stop at one. Once you begin, there is always someone else that needs killing.’

Lamb’s eyes moved to Faukin’s in the mirror. ‘You’re a philosopher after all.’

‘On a strictly amateur footing.’ Faukin worked the warm towel with a flourish and presented Lamb shorn, as it were, a truly daunting array of scars laid bare. In all his years as a barber, including three in the service of a mercenary company, he had never attended upon a head so battered, dented and otherwise manhandled.

‘Huh.’ Lamb leaned closer to the mirror, working his lopsided jaw and wrinkling his bent nose as though to convince himself it was indeed his own visage gazing back. ‘There’s the face of an evil bastard, eh?’

‘I would venture to say a face is no more evil than a coat. It is the man beneath, and his actions, that count.’

‘No doubt.’ Lamb looked up at Faukin for a moment, and then back to himself. ‘And there’s the face of an evil bastard. You done the best a man could with it, though. Ain’t your fault what you’re given to work with.’

‘I simply try to do the job exactly as I’d want it done to me.’

‘Treat folk the way you’d want to be treated and you can’t go far wrong, my father used to tell me. Seems our jobs are different after all. Aim o’ mine is to do to the other man exactly what I’d least enjoy.’

‘Are you ready?’ The Mayor had silently drifted closer and was looking at the pair of them in the mirror.

Lamb shrugged. ‘Either a man’s always ready for a thing like this or he’ll never be.’

‘Good enough.’ She came closer and took hold of Faukin’s hand. He felt a strong need to back away, but clung to his blank, bland professionalism a moment longer. ‘Any other jobs today?’

Faukin swallowed. ‘Just the one.’

‘Across the street?’

He nodded.

The Mayor pressed a coin into his palm and leaned close. ‘The time is fast approaching when every person in Crease will have to choose one side of the street. I hope you choose wisely.’

Sunset had lent the town a carnival atmosphere. There was a single current to the crowds of drunk and greedy and it flowed to the amphitheatre. As he passed, Faukin could see the Circle marked out on the ancient cobbles at its centre, six strides across, torches on close-set poles to mark the edge and light the action. The ancient banks of stone seating and the new teetering stands of bodged-together carpentry were already boiling with an audience such as that place had not seen in centuries. Gamblers screeched for business and chalked odds on high boards. Hawkers sold bottles and hot gristle for prices outrageous even in this home of outrageous prices.

Faukin gazed at all those people swarming over each other, most of whom could hardly have known what a barber was let alone thought of employing one, reflected for the hundredth time that day, the thousandth time that week, the millionth time since he arrived that he should never have come here, clung tight to his bag and hurried on.

Papa Ring was one of those men who liked to spend money less the more of it he had. His quarters were humble indeed by comparison with the Mayor’s, the furniture an improvised and splinter-filled collection, the low ceiling lumpy as an old bedspread. Glama Golden sat before a cracked mirror lit by smoking candles, something faintly absurd in that huge body crammed onto a stool and draped in a threadbare sheet, his head giving the impression of teetering on top like a cherry on a cream cake.

Ring stood at the window just as the Mayor had, his big fists clamped behind his back, and said, ‘Shave it all off.’

‘Except the moustache.’ Golden gathered up the sheet so he could stroke at his top lip with huge thumb and forefinger. ‘Had that all my life and it’s going nowhere.’

‘A most resplendent article of facial hair,’ said Faukin, though in truth he could see more than a few grey hairs despite the poor light. ‘To remove it would be a deep regret.’

In spite of being the undoubted favourite in the coming contest, Golden’s eyes had a strange, haunted dampness as they found Faukin’s in the mirror. ‘You got regrets?’

Faukin lost his blank, bland, professional smile for a moment. ‘Don’t we all, sir?’ He began to cut. ‘But I suppose regrets at least prevent one from repeating the same mistakes.’

Golden frowned at himself in that cracked mirror. ‘I find however high I stack the regrets, I still make the same mistakes again and again.’

Faukin had no answer for that, but the barber holds the advantage in such circumstances: he can let the scissors fill the silence. Snip, snip, and the yellow cuttings scattered across the boards in those tantalising patterns that looked to hold some meaning one could never quite grasp.

‘Been over there with the Mayor?’ called Papa Ring from the window.

‘Yes, sir, I have.’

‘How’d she seem?’

Faukin thought about the Mayor’s demeanour and, more importantly, about what Papa Ring wanted to hear. A good barber never puts truth before the hopes of his clients. ‘She seemed very tense.’

Ring stared back out of the window, thick thumb and fingers fussing nervously behind his back. ‘I guess she would be.’

‘What about the other man?’ asked Golden. ‘The one I’m fighting?’ Faukin stopped snipping for a moment. ‘He seemed thoughtful. Regretful. But fixed on his purpose. In all honesty . . . he seemed very much like you.’ Faukin did not mention what had only just occurred.

That he had, in all likelihood, given one of them their last haircut.

Bee was mopping up when he passed by the door. She hardly even had to see him, she knew him by his footsteps. ‘Grega?’ She dashed out into the hall, heart going so hard it hurt. ‘Grega!’

He turned, wincing, like hearing her say his name made him sick. He looked tired, more’n a little drunk, and sore. She could always tell his moods. ‘What?’

She’d made up all kinds of little stories about their reunion. One where he swept her into his arms and told her they could get married now. One where he was wounded and she’d to nurse him back to health. One where they argued, one where they laughed, one where he cried and said sorry for how he’d treated her.

But she hadn’t spun no stories where she was just ignored.

‘That all you got to say to me?’

‘What else would there be?’ He didn’t even look her in the eye. ‘I got to go talk to Papa Ring.’ And he made off up the hall.

She caught his arm. ‘Where are the children?’ Her voice all shrill and bled out from her own disappointment.

‘Mind your own business.’

‘I am. You made me help, didn’t you? You made me bring ’em!’

‘You could’ve said no.’ She knew it was true. She’d been so keen to please him she’d have jumped in a fire on his say-so. Then he gave a little smile, like he’d thought of something funny. ‘But if you must know, I sold ’em.’

She felt cold to her stomach. ‘To who?’

‘Those Ghosts up in the hills. Those Dragon fuckers.’

Her throat was all closed up, she could hardly talk. ‘What’ll they do with ’em?’

‘I don’t know. Fuck ’em? Eat ’em? What do I care? What did you think I was going to do, start up an orphanage?’ Her face was burning now, like he’d slapped her. ‘You’re such a stupid sow. Don’t know that I ever met anyone stupider than you. You’re stupider than—’

And she was on him and tearing at his face with her nails and she’d probably have bitten him if he hadn’t hit her first, just above the eye, and she tumbled into the corner and caught a faceful of floor.

‘You mad bitch!’ She started to push herself up, all groggy, that familiar pulsing in her face, and he was touching his scratched cheek like he couldn’t believe it. ‘What did you do that for?’ Then he was shaking out his fingers. ‘You hurt my fucking hand!’ And he took a step towards her as she tried to stand and kicked her in the ribs, folded her gasping around his boot.

‘I hate you,’ she managed to whisper, once she was done coughing.

‘So?’ And he looked at her like she was a maggot.

She remembered the day he’d chosen her out of all the room to dance with and nothing had ever felt so fine, and of a sudden it was like she saw the whole thing fresh, and he seemed so ugly, so petty and vain and selfish beyond enduring. He just used people and threw them away and left a trail of ruin behind him. How could she ever have loved him? Just because for a few moments he’d made her feel one step above shit. The rest of the time ten steps below.