Free Sharp Ends: Stories from the World of The First Law by Joe Abercrombie Page B

man down. As Craw turned back, an arrow came from the dead knew where and clicked into the mud wall just in front of him, almost made him fall over backwards with shock. Whirrun went into his arse and knocked him sprawling, gave him a mouthful of mud. When he struggled up, a man was charging right at him, a flash of screaming face and wild hair smeared across his sight. Craw was twisting around behind his shield when Scorry slid out from nowhere and knifed the running bastard in the side, made him shriek and stumble. Craw took the side of his head off, blade pinging as it chopped through bone then thumped into the ground, nearly jerking from his raw fist.
    ‘Move!’ he shouted, not sure who at, trying to wrench his blade free of the earth. Jolly Yon rushed past, head of his axe dashed with red, teeth bared in a mad snarl. Craw followed, Whirrun behind him, face slack, eyes darting from one hut to another, sword still sheathed in one hand. Around the corner of a hovel and into a wide stretch of muck scattered with ground-up straw. Pigs were honking and squirming in a pen at one side. The hall with the carved uprights stood at the other, steps up to a wide doorway, only darkness inside.
    A red-haired man pounded across the ground in front of them, a wood-axe in his fist. Wonderful calmly put an arrow through his cheek at six strides distant and he came up short, clapping a hand to his face, still stumbling towards her. She stepped to meet him with a fighting scream, swept her sword out and around and took his head right off. It spun into the air, showering blood, and dropped in the pigpen. Craw wondered for a moment if the poor bastard still knew what was going on.
    Then he saw the heavy door of the hall being swung shut, a pale face at the edge. ‘Door!’ he bellowed and ran for it, pounding across squelching mud and up the wooden steps, making the boards rattle. He shoved one bloody, muddy boot in the gap just as the door was slammed and gave a howl, eyes bulging, pain lancing up his leg. ‘My foot! Fuck!’
    There were a dozen Fox Clan or more crowded around the end of the yard now, growling and grunting louder and uglier than the hogs. They waved jagged swords, axes, rough clubs in their fists, a few with shields, too, one at the front with a rusted chain hauberk on, tattered at the hem, straggling hair tangled with rings of rough-forged silver.
    ‘Back.’ Whirrun stood tall in front of them, holding out his sword at long arm’s length, hilt up, like it was some magic charm to ward off evil. ‘Back, and you needn’t die today.’
    The one in mail spat, then snarled at him in broken Northern. ‘Show us your iron, thief!’
    ‘Then I will. Look upon the Father of Swords, and look your last.’ And Whirrun drew it from the sheath.
    Men might’ve had a hundred names for it – Dawn Razor, Grave-Maker, Blood Harvest, Highest and Lowest, Scac-ang-Gaioc in the valley tongue which means the Splitting of the World, and so on, and so on – but Craw had to admit it was a disappointing length of metal. There was no flame, no golden light, no distant trumpets or mirrored steel. Just the gentle scrape as long blade came free of stained leather, the flat grey of damp slate, no shine or ornament about it except for the gleam of something engraved down near the plain, dull crosspiece.
    But Craw had other worries than that Whirrun’s sword weren’t worth all the songs. ‘Door!’ he squealed at Yon, scrabbling at the edge of it with his left hand, all tangled up with his shield, shoving his sword through the gap and waving it about to no effect. ‘My fucking foot!’
    Yon roared as he pounded up the steps and rammed into the door with his shoulder. It gave all of a sudden, tearing from its hinges and crushing some fool underneath. Him and Craw burst stumbling into the room beyond, dim as twilight, hazy with scratchy-sweet smoke. A shape came at Craw and he whipped his shield up on an instinct, felt something thud into it,