The Great Leveller: Best Served Cold, The Heroes and Red Country by Joe Abercrombie

torn his ear half-off. Shivers took a step forwards but she’d already wrenched herself free. Gobba blubbered, somehow dragged himself up to sitting, back against a big water butt. His hands had swollen up to twice the size they had been. Purple, flopping mittens.
    ‘Beg!’ she hissed. ‘Beg, you fat fucker!’
    But Gobba was too busy staring at the mincemeat on the end of his arms, and screaming. Hoarse, short, slobbery screams.
    ‘Someone might hear.’ Friendly looked like he didn’t care much either way.
    ‘Better shut him up, then.’
    The convict leaned over the barrel from behind with a wire between his fists, hooked Gobba under the neck and dragged him up hard, cutting his bellows down to slippery splutters.
    Monza squatted in front of him so their faces were level, her knees burning as she watched the wire cut into his fat neck. Just the way it had cut into hers. The scars it had left on her itched. ‘How does it feel?’ Her eyes flickered over his face, trying to squeeze some sliver of satisfaction from it. ‘How does it feel?’ Though no one knew better than her. Gobba’s eyes bulged, his jowls trembled, turning from pink, to red, to purple. She pushed herself up to standing. ‘I’d say it’s a waste of good flesh. But it isn’t.’
    She closed her eyes and let her head drop back, sucked a long breath in through her nose as she tightened her grip on the hammer, lifted it high.
    ‘Betray me and leave me alive?’
    It came down between Gobba’s piggy eyes with a sharp bang like a stone slab splitting. His back arched, his mouth yawned wide but no sound came out.
    ‘Take my hand and leave me alive?’
    The hammer hit him in the nose and caved his face in like a broken egg. His body crumpled, shattered leg jerking, jerking.
    ‘Kill my brother and leave me alive?’
    The last blow broke his skull wide open. Black blood bubbled down his purple skin. Friendly let go the wire and Gobba slid sideways. Gently, gracefully almost, he rolled over onto his front, and was still.
    Dead. You didn’t have to be an expert to see that. Monza winced as she forced her aching fingers open and the hammer clattered down, its head gleaming red, a clump of hair stuck to one corner.
    One dead. Six left.
    ‘Six and one,’ she muttered to herself. Friendly stared at her, eyes wide, and she wasn’t sure why.
    ‘What’s it like?’ Shivers, watching her from the shadows.
    ‘What?’
    ‘Revenge. Does it feel good?’
    Monza wasn’t sure she felt much of anything beyond the pain pulsing through her burned hand and her broken hand, up her legs and through her skull. Benna was still dead, she was still broken. She stood there frowning, and didn’t answer.
    ‘You want me to get rid of this?’ Friendly waved an arm at the corpse, a heavy cleaver gleaming in his other hand.
    ‘Make sure he won’t be found.’
    Friendly grabbed Gobba’s ankle and started dragging him back towards the anvil, leaving a bloody trail through the sawdust. ‘Chop him up. Into the sewers. Rats can have him.’
    ‘Better than he deserves.’ But Monza felt the slightest bit sick. She needed a smoke. Getting to that time of day. A smoke would settle her nerves. She pulled out a small purse, the one with fifty scales in it, and tossed it to Shivers.
    Coins snapped together inside as he caught it. ‘That’s it?’
    ‘That’s it.’
    ‘Right.’ He paused, as though he wanted to say something but couldn’t think what. ‘Sorry about your brother.’
    She looked at his face in the lamplight. Really looking, trying to guess him out. He knew next to nothing about her or Orso. Next to nothing about anything, at a first glance. But he could fight, she’d seen that. He’d walked into Sajaam’s place alone, and that took courage. A man with courage, with morals, maybe. A man with pride. That meant he might have some loyalty too, if she could get a grip on it. And loyal men were a rare commodity in Styria.
    She’d never spent much time alone.