greg’s Reviews > Red Country > Status Update

‘That my old sword you got there?’ asked Lamb.

Shivers shrugged. ‘Took it off Black Dow. Guess it all comes around, eh?’

‘Always.’ Lamb stretched his neck out one way, then the other. ‘It
always comes around.’

'Conscience is a burden we choose to bear. Morality is the lie we tell ourselves to make its bearing easier. There have been many times in my life when I have wished it was not so. But it is so.’

‘I used to have one o’ those.’ Lamb tossed his own broken blade skittering across the floor and over the edge into nothingness.

‘The work of the Maker himself,’ said Waerdinur. ‘You should have kept it.’

‘Friend o’ mine stole it.’ Lamb stepped towards one of the anvils, fingers whitening as he wrapped them around a great iron bar that lay against it, tall as Shy was. ‘And everything else.’

The crowd had fallen eerily quiet, and Golden’s doubt turned to a sucking dread because he finally knew the old man’s name. ‘By the dead,’ he whispered, ‘it can’t be.’

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

‘You don’t know what I deserve.’ She slumped back on her elbows,
head sinking into her bony shoulders. ‘You don’t know what I’ve done.’

‘Can’t be worse than what you did to me last night.’

She didn’t laugh. She was looking past him, eyes focused far away.
‘When I was seventeen I killed a boy.’

Temple swallowed. ‘Well, yes, that is worse.’

“Ain’t you a clever little bastard?’ snarled Lamb, eyes burning and the veins suddenly popping from his thick neck. ‘Best be careful when you pull that mask off, fucker, you might not like what’s under there!”