Read The Great Leveller: Best Served Cold, The Heroes and Red Country for Free Online Page A

arrangement of instruments. Pincers, pliers, needles and scissors. A small but very businesslike saw. A dozen knives at least, all shapes and sizes. Her widening eyes darted over their polished blades – curved, straight, jagged edges cruel and eager in the firelight. A surgeon’s tools?
    Or a torturer’s?
    ‘Benna?’ Her voice was a ghostly squeak. Her tongue, her gums, her throat, the passages in her nose, all raw as skinned meat. She tried to move again, could scarcely lift her head. Even that much effort sent a groaning stab through her neck and into her shoulder, set off a dull pulsing up her legs, down her right arm, through her ribs. The pain brought fear with it, the fear brought pain. Her breath quickened, shuddering and wheezing through her sore nostrils.
    Click, click.
    She froze, silence prickling at her ears. Then a scraping, a key in a lock. Frantically now she squirmed, pain bursting in every joint, ripping at every muscle, blood battering behind her eyes, thick tongue wedged into her teeth to stop herself screaming. A door creaked open and banged shut. Footsteps on bare boards, hardly making a sound, but each one still a jab of fear in her throat. A shadow reached out across the floor – a huge shape, twisted, monstrous. Her eyes strained to the corners, nothing she could do but wait for the worst.
    A figure came through the doorway, walked straight past her and over to a tall cupboard. A man no more than average height, in fact, with short fair hair. The misshapen shadow was caused by a canvas sack over one shoulder. He hummed tunelessly to himself as he emptied it, placing each item carefully on its proper shelf, then turning it back and forth until it faced precisely into the room.
    If he was a monster, he seemed an everyday sort of one, with an eye for the details.
    He swung the doors gently shut, folded his empty bag once, twice, and slid it under the cupboard. He took off his stained coat and hung it from a hook, brushed it down with a brisk hand, turned and stopped dead. A pale, lean face. Not old, but deeply lined, with harsh cheekbones and eyes hungry bright in bruised sockets.
    They stared at each other for a moment, both seeming equally shocked. Then his colourless lips twitched into a sickly smile.
    ‘You are awake!’
    ‘Who are you?’ A terrified scratch in her dried-up throat.
    ‘My name is not important.’ He spoke with the trace of a Union accent. ‘Suffice it to say I am a student of the physical sciences.’
    ‘A healer?’
    ‘Among other things. As you may have gathered, I am an enthusiast, chiefly, for bones. Which is why I am so glad that you . . . fell into my life.’ He grinned again, but it was like the skulls’ grins, never touching his eyes.
    ‘How did . . .’ She had to wrestle with the words, jaw stiff as rusted hinges. It was like trying to talk with a turd in her mouth, and hardly better tasting. ‘How did I get here?’
    ‘I need bodies for my work. They are sometimes to be found where I found you. But I have never before found one still alive. I would judge you to be a spectacularly lucky woman.’ He seemed to think about it for a moment. ‘It would have been luckier still if you had not fallen in the first place but . . . since you did—’
    ‘Where’s my brother? Where’s Benna?’
    ‘Benna?’
    Memory flooded back in a blinding instant. Blood pumping from between her brother’s clutching fingers. The long blade sliding through his chest while she watched, helpless. His slack face, smeared with red.
    She gave a croaking scream, bucked and twisted. Agony flashed up every limb and made her squirm the more, shudder, retch, but she was held fast. Her host watched her struggle, waxy face empty as a blank page. She sagged back, spitting and moaning as the pain grew worse and worse, gripping her like a giant vice, steadily tightened.
    ‘Anger solves nothing.’
    All she could do was growl, snatched breaths slurping through her gritted teeth.
    ‘I imagine