Free Before They Are Hanged by Joe Abercrombie

The Great Leveller
    Damn mist. It
gets in your eyes, so you can’t see no more than a few strides
ahead. It gets in your ears, so you can’t hear nothing, and
when you do you can’t tell where it’s coming from. It
gets up your nose, so you can’t smell naught but wet and damp.
Damn mist. It’s a curse on a scout.
    They’d
crossed the Whiteflow a few days before, out of the North and into
Angland, and the Dogman had been nervy all the way. Scouting out
strange land, in the midst of a war that weren’t really their
business. All the lads were jumpy. Aside from Threetrees, none of ’em
had ever been out of the North. Except for Grim maybe. He weren’t
saying where he’d been.
    They’d
passed a few farms burned out, a village all empty of people. Union
buildings, big and square. They’d seen the tracks of horses and
men. Lots of tracks, but never the men themselves. Dogman knew Bethod
weren’t far away, though, his army spread out across the land,
looking for towns to burn, food to steal, people to kill. All manner
o’ mischief. He’d have scouts everywhere. If he caught
Dogman or any of the rest, they’d be back to the mud, and not
quickly. Bloody cross and heads on spikes and all the rest of it,
Dogman didn’t wonder.
    If the Union
caught ’em they’d be dead too, most likely. It was a war,
after all, and folk don’t think too clearly in a war. Dogman
could hardly expect ’em to waste time telling a friendly
Northman from an unfriendly one. Life was fraught with dangers,
alright. It was enough to make anyone nervy, and he was a nervy sort
at the best of times.
    So it was easy
to see how the mist might have been salt in the cut, so to speak.
    All this
creeping around in the murk had got him thirsty, so he picked his way
through the greasy brush, over to where he could hear the river
chattering. He knelt down at the water’s edge. Slimy down
there, with rot and dead leaves, but Dogman didn’t reckon a
little slime would make the difference, he was about as dirty as a
man could be already. He scooped up water in his hands and drank.
There was a breath of wind down there, out beyond the trees, pushing
the mist in close one minute, dragging it out the next. That’s
when the Dogman saw him.
    He was lying on
his front, legs in the river, top half up on the bank. They stared at
each other a while, both fully shocked and amazed. He’d got a
long stick coming out of his back. A broken spear. That’s when
the Dogman realised he was dead.
    He spat the
water out and crept over, checking careful all around to make sure no
one was waiting to give him a blade in the back. The corpse was a man
of about two dozen years. Yellow hair, brown blood on his grey lips.
He’d got a padded jacket on, bloated up with wet, the kind a
man might wear under a coat of mail. A fighting man, then. A
straggler maybe, lost his crew and been picked off. A Union man, no
doubt, but he didn’t look so different to Dogman or to anyone
else, now he was dead. One corpse looks much like another.
    â€œThe Great
Leveller,â€

Best Laid Plans
    It was cold in
the hall of the Lord Governor of Angland. The high walls were of
plain, cold render, the wide floor was of cold stone flags, the
gaping fireplace held nothing but cold ashes. The only decoration was
a great tapestry hanging at one end, the golden sun of the Union
stitched into it, the crossed hammers of Angland in its centre.
    Lord Governor
Meed was slumped in a hard chair before a huge, bare table, staring
at nothing, his right hand slack around the stem of a wine cup. His
face was pale and hollow, his robes of state were crumpled and
stained, his thin white hair was in disarray. Major West, born and
raised in Angland, had often heard Meed spoken of as a strong leader,
a great presence, a tireless champion of the province and its people.
He