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

side of the chandelier an instant before it hit the ground with a shattering impact, taking two more thugs with it and sending dust, splinters, shards and candles flying.
    ‘Shit,’ whispered Shev, stunned and blinking as the echoes faded. She and Javre stood together in the centre of the chandelier’s circular wreckage, apparently entirely unhurt.
    Shev gave a whoop of triumph which turned, as many of her triumphant whoops did, into a gurgle of horror as an uncrushed thug sprang over the ruins of the chandelier with his sword a blur of hard-swung steel. She leaped back, tripped over a table, fell over a chair, rolled, saw a blade flash past, scrambled under another table, dust filtering around her as someone beat it with an axe. She heard crashes, clashes, loud swearing and all the familiar noise of a fight in an inn.
    Bloody hell, Shev hated fights. Hated them. Considering how much she hated them, she got into a lot of them. Partnering up with Javre had not helped her record in that regard or, at a brief assay, any other. She slid out from under the table, sprang up, was punched in the face and sprawled painfully against the counter, spluttering and wobbling and trying to blink the tears from her eyes.
    A snarling thug came at her overhand with a knife and she jerked back at the waist, steel flashing by her and thunking into the counter. She jerked forward and butted him in the face, knocked him staggering with his hands to his nose, snatched his knife from the wood and sent it whirling through the air in one smooth motion, burying itself in the flatbowman’s forehead as he levelled his reloaded weapon. His eyes rolled up and he toppled off the balcony and onto a table below, sending bottles and glasses flying.
    ‘What a knife-thrower,’ Shev muttered to herself, ‘I could have— Urgh!’ Her smugness was knocked out of her along with her breath as a man cannoned into her side and sent her reeling.
    He was a big man of surpassing ugliness, swinging this way and that with a mace almost as big and ugly as he was, smashing glasses and furniture, filling the air with splinters. Shev whimpered every curse she could think of as she weaved and dodged, scrambling and jumping desperately, not even getting the chance to look for an opening, running steadily out of space and time as she was herded towards a corner.
    He raised his mace to strike, broad face twisted with rage.
    ‘Wait!’ she wailed, pointing over his shoulder.
    It was amazing how often that worked. He jerked his head to look, pausing just long enough for her to knee him in the fruits with all her strength. He gasped, tottered, dropped to his knees, and she whipped out her dagger and stabbed him sharply at the meeting of his neck and his shoulder. He groaned, tried to stand, then sprawled on his face, welling blood.
    ‘Sorry,’ said Shev. ‘Damn it, I’m sorry.’ And she was, just as she always was. But it was better to be sorry than dead. Just as it always was. That lesson she had learned long ago.
    No further fights presented themselves. Javre stood by the chandelier’s wreckage, her dirty white coat spotted with blood and the twisted bodies of a dozen thugs scattered about her. She had another bent over with his head wedged in the crook of one arm, and yet another pinned against a table by his neck at arm’s length, kicking and struggling to absolutely no effect.
    ‘Things must be going downhill.’ And with a twitch of her face and a flex of her muscular arm she snapped the first man’s neck and let his body flop to the floor. ‘The temple used to stretch to a better class of thug.’ She dipped her shoulder and flung the other one bodily through a window and into the street, tearing the shutters free, his despairing squeal cut off as his head tore a chunk from a supporting pillar with him.
    ‘The best I could find at short notice,’ said Weylen, reaching behind her back. ‘But it was always going to come to this.’ And she drew a curved sword,