Last Argument of Kings

by Joe Abercrombie

  'You are hurt?' he asked.

  Logen sucked sourly at his teeth. 'Hardly the first time.'

  'And yet it gets no easier.' Bayaz placed his meaty fists on the stone next to Logen's and stared out happily at the view. Just as if it was a field of flowers instead of a sweep of epic ruin. 'I hardly expected to see you again so soon. And to see you so very far advanced. I understand that your feud is over. You defeated Bethod. Threw him from his own walls, the way I heard it. A nice touch. Always thinking of the song they will sing, eh? And then you took his place. The Bloody-Nine, King of the Northmen! Imagine that.'

  Logen frowned. 'That wasn't how it happened.'

  'Details. The result is the same, is it not? Peace in the North, at last? Either way, I congratulate you.'

  'Bethod had a few things to say.'

  'Did he?' asked Bayaz, carelessly. 'I always found his conversation rather drab. All about himself, his plans, his achievements. It is so very tiresome when men think never of others. Poor manners.'

  'He said you're the reason why he didn't kill me. That you bargained for my life.'

  'True, I must confess. He owed me, and you were the price I demanded. I like to keep one eye on the future. Even then, I knew I might have need of a man who could speak to the spirits. It was an unexpected bonus that you turned out to be such a winning travelling companion.'

  Logen found he was talking through gritted teeth. 'Would have been nice to know is all.'

  'You never asked, Master Ninefingers. You did not want to know my plans, as I recall, and I did not want to make you feel indebted. "I saved your life once" would have been a poor start to our friendship.'

  All reasonable enough, like everything Bayaz ever said, but it left a sour taste still, to have been traded like a hog. 'Where's Quai? I'd like to—'

  'Dead.' Bayaz pronounced the word smartly, sharp as a knife thrust. 'We feel his loss most keenly.'

  'Back to the mud, eh?' Logen remembered the effort he'd made to save that man's life. The miles he'd slogged through the rain, trying to do the right thing. All wasted. Perhaps he should've felt more. But it was hard with so much death spread out in front of him. Logen was numb, now. Either that, or he really didn't care a shit. It was hard to say which.

  'Back to the mud,' he muttered again. 'You carry on, though, don't you.'

  'Of course.'

  'That's the task that comes with surviving. You remember them, you say some words, then you carry on, and hope for better.'

  'Indeed.'

  'You have to be realistic about these things.'

  'True.'

  Logen worked at his sore side with one hand, trying to make himself feel something. But a scrap of extra pain helped no one. 'I lost a friend yesterday.'

  'It was a bloody day. But a victorious one.'

  'Oh aye? For who?' He could see people moving among the ruins, insects picking at the rubble, searching for survivors and finding the dead. He doubted many of them were feeling the flush of victory right now. He knew he wasn't. 'I should be with my own kind,' he muttered, but without moving. 'Helping with the burying. Helping with the wounded.'

  'And yet you are here, looking down.' Bayaz' green eyes were hard as stones. That hardness that Logen had noticed from the very start, and had somehow forgotten. Somehow grown to overlook. 'I entirely understand your feelings. Healing is for the young. As one gets older, one finds one has less and less patience with the wounded.' He raised his eyebrows as he turned back towards the horrible view. 'I am very old.'

  He lifted his fist to knock, then paused, fingers rubbing nervously against his palm.

  He remembered the sour-sweet smell of her, the strength of her hands, the shape of her frown in the firelight. He remembered the warmth of her, pressed up close to him in the night. He knew there had been something good between them, even if all the words they had said had been hard. Some people don't have soft words in them, however much they try. He didn't hold much hope, of course. A man like him was better off without it. But you get nothing out if you put nothing in.

  So Logen gritted his teeth and knocked. No reply. He chewed at his lip, and knocked again. Nothing. He frowned, twitchy and suddenly out of patience, wrenched the knob round and shoved the door open.

  Ferro spun about. Her clothes were rumpled and dirty, even more than usual. Her eyes were wide, wild even, her fists clenched. But her face quickly fell when she saw it was him, and his heart sank with it.

  'It's me, Logen.'

  'Uh,' she grunted. She jerked her head sideways, frowning at the window. She took a couple of steps towards it, eyes narrowed. Then she snapped round suddenly the other way. 'There!'

  'What?' muttered Logen, baffled.

  'Do you not hear them?'

  'Hear what?'

  'Them, idiot!' She crept over to one wall and pressed herself up against it.

  Logen hadn't been sure how it would go. You could never be sure of anything with her, he knew that. But he hadn't been expecting this. Just plough ahead, he reckoned. What else could he do?

  'I'm a king, now.' He snorted. 'King of the Northmen, would you believe it?' He was thinking she'd laugh in his face, but she just stood, listening to the wall. 'Me and Luthar, both. A pair of kings. Can you think of two more worthless bastards to put crowns on, eh?' No answer.

  Logen licked his lips. No choice but to get straight to it, maybe. 'Ferro. The way things turned out. The way we… left it.' He took a step towards her, and another. 'I wish I hadn't… I don't know…' He put one hand on her shoulder. 'Ferro, I'm trying to tell you—'

  She turned, quickly, plastered her hand over his mouth. 'Shhhhh.' She grabbed his shirt and pulled him down, down onto his knees. She pressed her ear against the tiles, eyes moving back and forward as if she was listening for something. 'Do you hear that?' She let go of him and pushed herself into the corner. 'There! Do you hear them?'

  He reached out, slowly, and touched the back of her neck, ran his rough fingertips over her skin. She shook him off with a jerk of her shoulders, and he felt his face twist. Perhaps that good thing between them had been only in his mind, and never in hers. Perhaps he had wanted it so badly that he had let himself imagine it.

  He stood up, cleared his dry throat. 'Never mind. I'll come back later, maybe.' She was still on her knees, her head against the floor. She did not even watch him leave.

  Logen Ninefingers was no stranger to death. He'd walked among it all his days. He'd watched the bodies burned by the score after the battle at Carleon, long ago. He'd seen them buried by the hundred up in the nameless valley in the High Places. He'd walked on a hill of men's bones under ruined Aulcus.

  But even the Bloody-Nine, even the most feared man in the North, had never looked on anything like this.

  Bodies were stacked beside the wide avenue in heaps, chest-high. Sagging mounds of corpses, on and on. Hundreds upon hundreds. Too many for him to guess at the numbers. Someone had made an effort at covering them, but not that great an effort. The dead give no thanks for it, after all. Ragged sheets flapped in the breeze, weighted down with broken wood, limp hands and feet hanging out from underneath.

  At this end of the road a few statues still stood. Once-proud kings and their advisers, stone faces and bodies scarred and pitted, stared sadly down at the bloody waste heaped round their feet. Enough of them for Logen to recognise that this truly was the Kingsway, and that he hadn't somehow stumbled into the land of the dead.

  A hundred strides further and there were only empty plinths, one with broken legs still attached. A strange group were clustered around them. Withered-looking. Somewhere between dead and alive. A man sat on a block of stone, staring numbly as he pulled handfuls of hair out of his head. Another was coughing into a bloody rag. A woman and a man lay side by side, gawping at nothing, faces shrivelled to little more than skulls. Her breath came crackling short and fast. His did not come at all.

  Another hundred strides and it was as if Logen walked through some ruined hell. There was no sig
n that statues, buildings, or anything else had ever stood there. In their place were only tangled hills of strange rubbish. Broken stone, splintered wood, twisted metal, paper, glass, all crushed together and bound up with tons of dust and mud. Things stuck from the wreckage, strangely intact—a door, a chair, a carpet, a painted plate, the smiling face of a statue.

  Men and women struggled everywhere among this chaos, streaked with dirt, picking at the rubbish, throwing it down to the road, trying to clear paths through it. Rescuers, workmen, thieves, who knew? Logen passed by a crackling bonfire high as a man, felt the kiss of its heat on his cheek. A big soldier in armour stained with black soot stood beside it. 'You find anything in white metal?' he was roaring at the searchers, 'anything at all? It goes in the fire! Flesh in white metal? Burn it! Orders of the Closed Council!'

  A few strides further on, someone was on top of one of the highest mounds, straining at a great length of wood. He turned round to get a better grip. None other than Jezal dan Luthar. His clothes were torn and grubby, his face was smudged with mud. He barely looked any more like a king than Logen did.

  A thickset man stood staring up, one arm in a sling. 'Your Majesty, this is not safe!' he piped in an oddly girlish voice. 'We really should be—'

  'No! This is where I'm needed!' Jezal bent back over the beam, straining at it, veins bulging from his neck. There was no way he was going to get it shifted on his own, but still he tried. Logen stood watching him. 'How long's he been like this?'

  'All night, and all day,' said the thickset man, 'and no sign of stopping. Those few we've found alive, nearly all of them have this sickness.' He waved his good arm towards the pitiful group beside the statues. 'Their hair falls out. Their nails. Their teeth. They wither. Some have died already. Others are well on the way.' He slowly shook his head. 'What crime did we commit to deserve this punishment?'

  'Punishment doesn't always come to the guilty.'

  'Ninefingers!' Jezal was looking down, the watery sun behind him. 'There's a strong back! Grab the end of that beam there!'

  It was hard to see what good shifting a beam might do, in all of this. But great journeys start with small steps, Logen's father had always told him. So he clambered up, wood cracking and stones sliding underneath his boots, hauled himself to the top and stood there, staring.

  'By the dead.' From where he was standing, the hills of wreckage seemed to go on forever. People crawled over them, dragging frantically at the rubble, sorting carefully through it, or simply standing like him, stunned by the scale of it. A circle of utter waste, a mile across or more.

  'Help me, Logen!'

  'Aye. Right.' He bent down and dug his hands under one end of the great length of scarred wood. Two kings, dragging at a beam. The kings of mud.

  'Pull, then!' Logen heaved, his stitches burning. Gradually he felt the wood shift. 'Yes!' grunted Jezal through gritted teeth. Together they lifted it, hauled it to one side. Jezal reached down and dragged away a dry tree-branch, tore back a ripped sheet. A woman lay beneath, staring sideways. One broken arm was wrapped around a child, curly hair dark with blood.

  'Alright.' Jezal wiped slowly at his mouth with the back of one dirty hand. 'Alright. Well. We'll put them with the rest of the dead.' He clambered further over the wreckage. 'You! Bring that crowbar up here! Up here, and a pick, we need to clear this stone! Stack it there. We'll need it, later. To rebuild!'

  Logen put a hand on his shoulder. 'Jezal, wait. Wait. You know me.'

  'Of course. I like to think so.'

  'Alright. Tell me something, then. Am I…' He struggled to find the right words. 'Am I… an evil man?'

  'You?' Jezal stared at him, confused. 'You're the best man I know.'

  They were gathered under a broken tree in the park, a shadowy crowd of them. Black outlines of men, standing calm and still, red clouds and golden spread out above, around the setting sun. Logen could hear their slow voices as he walked up. Words for the dead, soft and sad. He could see the graves at their feet. Two dozen piles of fresh turned earth, set out in a circle so each man was equal. The Great Leveller, just as the hillmen say. Men put in the mud, and men saying words. Could've been a scene out of the old North, long ago in the time of Skarling Hoodless.

  '… Harding Grim. I never saw a better man with a bow. Not ever. Can't count the number o' times he saved my life, and never expected thanks for it. Except maybe that I'd do the same for him. Guess I couldn't, this time. Guess none of us could…'

  The Dogman's voice trailed off. A few heads turned to look at Logen as his footsteps crunched in the gravel. 'If it ain't the King o' the Northmen,' someone said.

  'The Bloody-Nine his self.'

  'We should bow, shouldn't we?'

  They were all looking at him now. He could see their eyes gleaming in the dusk. Nothing more than shaggy outlines, hard to tell one man from another. A crowd of shadows. A crowd of ghosts, and just as unfriendly.

  'You got something you want to say, Bloody-Nine?' came a voice from near the back.

  'I don't reckon,' he said. 'You're doing alright.'

  'Was no reason for us to be here.' A few mumbles of agreement.

  'Not our bloody fight.'

  'No need for them to have died.' More mutters.

  'Should be you we're burying.'

  'Aye, maybe.' Logen would have liked to weep at that. But instead he felt himself smiling. The Bloody-Nine's smile. That grin that skulls have, with nothing inside but death. 'Maybe. But you don't get to pick who dies. Not unless you've got the bones to put your own hand to it. Have you? Have any of you?' Silence. 'Well, then. Good for Harding Grim. Good for the rest o' the dead, they'll all be missed.' Logen spat onto the grass. 'Shit on the rest of you.' And he turned and walked back the way he came.

  Into the darkness.

  * * *

  Answers

  « ^ »

  So much to do.

  The House of Questions still stood, and someone had to take the reins. Who else will do it? Superior Goyle? A flatbow bolt through the heart prevents him, alas. Someone had to look to the internment and questioning of the many hundreds of Gurkish prisoners, more captured every day as the army drove the invaders back to Keln. And who else will do it? Practical Vitari? Left the Union forever with her children in tow. Someone had to examine the treason of Lord Brock. To dig him up, and root out his accomplices. To make arrests, and obtain confessions. And who else is there, now? Arch Lector Sult? Oh, dear me, no.

  Glokta wheezed up to his door, his few teeth bared at the endless pains in his legs. A fortunate decision, at least, to move to the eastern side of the Agriont. One should be grateful for the small things in life, like a place to rest one's crippled husk. My old lodgings are no doubt languishing under a thousand tons of rubble, just like the rest of-—

  His door was not quite shut. He gave it the gentlest of pushes and it creaked open, soft lamplight spilling out into the corridor, a glowing stripe over the dusty floorboards, over the foot of Glokta's cane and the muddy toe of one boot. I left no door unlocked, and certainly no lamps burning. His tongue slithered nervously over his empty gums. A visitor, then. An uninvited one. Do I go in, and welcome them to my rooms? His eyes slid sideways into the shadows of the corridor. Or do I make a run for it? He was almost smiling as he shuffled over the threshold, cane first, then the right foot, then the left, dragging painfully behind him.

  Glokta's guest sat by the window in the light of a single lamp, brightness splashed across the hard planes of his face, cold darkness gathered in the deep hollows. The squares board was set before him, just as Glokta left it, the pieces casting long shadows across the chequered wood.

  'Why, Superior Glokta. I have been waiting for you.'

  And I for you. Glokta limped over to the table, his cane scraping against the bare boards. As reluctantly as a man limping to the gallows. Ah, well. No one tricks the hangman forever. Perhaps we'll have some answers, at least, before the end. I always dreamed of dying well-informed. Slowly, ever
so slowly, he lowered himself grunting into the free chair.

  'Do I have the pleasure of addressing Master Valint, or Master Balk?'

  Bayaz smiled. 'Both, of course.'

  Glokta wrapped his tongue round one of his few remaining teeth and dragged it away with a faint sucking sound. 'And to what do I owe the overpowering honour?'

  'I said, did I not, that day we visited the Maker's House, that we should have a talk at some point? A talk about what I want, and about what you want? That point has come.'

  'Oh joyous day.'

  The First of the Magi watched him, the same look in his bright eyes that a man might have while watching an interesting beetle. 'I must admit that you fascinate me, Superior. Your life would seem to be entirely unbearable. And yet you fight so very, very hard to stay alive. With every weapon and stratagem. You simply refuse to die.'

  'I am ready to die.' Glokta returned his gaze, like for like. 'But I refuse to lose.'

  'Whatever the cost, eh? We are two of a kind, you and I, and we are a rare kind indeed. We understand what must be done, and we do not flinch from doing it, regardless of sentiment. You remember Lord Chancellor Feekt, of course.'

  If I cast my mind a long way back… 'The Golden Chancellor? They say he ran the Closed Council for forty years. They say he ran the Union.' Sult said so. Sult said his death left a hole, into which he and Marovia were both keen to step. That is where this ugly dance began, for me. With a visit from the Arch Lector, with the confession of my old friend Salem Rews, with the arrest of Sepp dan Teufel, Master of the Mints…

  Bayaz let one thick fingertip trail across the pieces on the squares board, as though considering his next move. 'We had an agreement, Feekt and I. I made him powerful. He served me, utterly.'

  Feekt… the foundation on which the nation rested… served you? I expected delusions of grandeur, but this will take some beating. 'You would have me suppose that you controlled the Union all that time?'