The Wisdom of Crowds

by Joe Abercrombie

  “The Agriont!” someone bellowed. “Stop for nothing!”

  The carriage lurched forwards. Savine would have been thrown from her seat had Zuri not shot out an arm. She clung desperately to the empty window frame, bit her lip at another flash of pain in her swollen stomach.

  She saw people scatter. Heard shrieks of terror. A body was knocked reeling by the corner of the carriage, clattered against the door and went down under the milling hooves of a knight herald. There were strands of blonde hair caught in the broken window.

  Wheels bounced over a trampled sign, whirred over pamphlets stuck flapping to the damp road. The prison wagon clattered ahead, striking sparks from the cobbles, maddened horses all around, whipping manes and flapping harness. Something clonked against the other side of the carriage, then they were past, leaving Harber’s mill and its rioting workers behind.

  Cold wind rushed through the broken window, Savine’s heart hammering, her hand frozen on the sill but her face burning as if she’d been slapped. How could Zuri be so calm beside her? Her face fixed, her arm so firm around Savine. The baby squirmed as the carriage rocked and jolted. It was alive, at least. It was alive.

  Outside the window she saw Lord Chamberlain Hoff clinging to his reins, chain of office tangled tight around his red throat. She saw the king’s old, grey-haired standard-bearer gripping his flagstaff, the sun of the Union streaming overhead, an oily smear across the cloth of gold.

  Streets whipped by, so familiar, so unfamiliar. This city had been hers. No one more admired. No one more envied. No one more hated, which she had always taken as the only honest compliment. Buildings flashed past. Buildings she knew. Buildings she owned, even. Or had owned.

  It would all be forfeit now.

  She squeezed her eyes shut. She could not remember how it felt, not to be scared.

  She remembered taking Leo’s ring, with the Agriont and all its little people spread out beneath them. The future had been theirs. How could they have so totally destroyed themselves? His recklessness or her ambition alone could not have done it. But like two chemicals which, apart, are merely mildly poisonous, combined they had produced an unstable explosive which had blown both their lives and thousands of others to hell.

  The cut beneath the bandages on her shaved head itched endlessly. Perhaps it would have been kinder if the chunk of metal that scarred her had flown just a little lower and split her skull instead of just her scalp.

  “Slow!” Gorst’s squealing voice. “Slow!” They were crossing one of the bridges into the Agriont, the great walls looming ahead. Once they had made her feel safe as a parent’s embrace. Now they looked like prison walls. Now they were prison walls. Her neck was not out of the noose yet, and nor was Leo’s.

  After they brought him down from the gallows, she had changed the dressing on his leg. It seemed the sort of thing a wife should do for her wounded husband. Especially when his wounds were in large part her doing. She had thought she could be strong. She was notorious for cool ruthlessness, after all. But as she unwound the bandages in an obscene striptease they had gone from spotted brown, to pink, to black. The stump revealed. The dressmaker’s nightmare of clumsy stitching. The weeping purple-redness of the jagged seams. The terrible, bizarre, fake-looking absence of the limb. The cheap spirits and butcher-shop stench of it. She had covered her mouth. Not a word said, but she had looked into his face and seen her own horror reflected, then the guards had come to take her away, and she had been grateful. The memory made her sick. Sick with guilt. Sick with disgust. Sick with guilt at her disgust.

  She realised she was shivering, and Zuri squeezed her hand. “It will be all right,” she said.

  Savine stared into her dark eyes and whispered, “How?”

  The carriage juddered to a halt. When an officer opened the door, glass tinkled from the broken window. It took a moment to make her fingers unclench. She had to peel them away, like the death grip of a corpse. She wobbled down in a daze, thinking she would piss herself with every movement. Had she pissed herself already?

  The Square of Marshals. She had wheeled her father across this expanse of flagstones once a month, laughing at the misfortunes of others. She had attended Open Council at the Lords’ Round, sifting the blather for opportunities. She had discussed business with associates, who to raise up, who to grind down, who to pay off and who would pay the price. She knew the landmarks above the soot-streaked rooftops—the slender finger of the Tower of Chains, the looming outline of the House of the Maker. But they belonged to a different world. A different life. All around her men goggled in disbelief. Men with faces grazed, fine uniforms torn, drawn swords stained red.

  “Your hand,” said Zuri.

  It was smeared with blood. Savine turned it stupidly over and saw a shard of glass stuck into her palm, where she had been gripping the window frame. She hardly even felt it.

  She glanced up, and her eyes met Orso’s. He looked pale and rattled, his golden circlet skewed, his mouth slightly open as if to speak, hers slightly open as if to reply. But for a while they said nothing.

  “Find Lady Savine and her husband some quarters,” he croaked, eventually. “In the House of Questions.”

  Savine swallowed as she watched him walk away.

  She could not remember how it felt, not to be terrified.

  Orso strode across the Square of Marshals in the rough direction of the palace, fists clenched. The sight of her still somehow took his breath away. But there were more pressing concerns than the smouldering ruins of his love life.

  That his homecoming triumph had degenerated from anticlimax into bloodbath, for instance.

  “They hate me,” he muttered. He was used to being despised, of course. Scurrilous pamphlets, slanderous rumours, sneers in the Open Council. But for a king to be politely loathed behind his back was the normal state of society. For a king to be physically manhandled by a crowd was a short step from outright revolt. The second in a month. Adua—the centre of the world, the zenith of civilisation, that beacon of progress and prosperity—was plunged into lawless chaos.

  It was quite the shocking disappointment. Like popping some delightful sweetmeat into one’s mouth and, upon chewing, discovering it was actually a piece of shit. But that was the experience of being a monarch. One shocking mouthful of shit after another.

  Lord Hoff was wheezing away as he struggled to keep up. “There are always… complaints—”

  “They fucking hate me! Did you hear them cheering for the Young Lion? When did that entitled bastard become some man of the people?” Before Orso’s victory, everyone had considered him a contemptible coward and Brock a magnificent hero. By rights, surely, their positions should have been reversed. Yet now he was considered a contemptible tyrant, while they cheered the Young Lion as a pitiable underdog. If Brock had wanked in the street it would have been to thunderous approval from the public.

  “Bloody traitors!” snarled Rucksted, grinding gloved fist into gloved palm. “We should hang the bloody lot of them!”

  “You can’t hang everyone,” said Orso.

  “With your permission, I’ll head back into the city and make a damn good start at it.”

  “I fear our mistake has been too many hangings rather than too few—”

  “Your Majesty!” A knight herald of horrifying height was waiting on the Kingsway beneath the statue of Harod the Great, winged helmet under one arm. “Your Closed Council has urgently requested your attendance in the White Chamber.” He fell in step beside Orso, having to shorten his stride considerably. “Might I congratulate you on your famous victory at Stoffenbeck?”

  “That feels a very long time ago,” said Orso, stalking on. He was concerned that if he did not keep moving, he might collapse like a child’s tower of bricks. “I have already received the congratulations of a considerable crowd of rioters on the Kingsway.” And he frowned up at the looming statue of Casamir the Steadfast, wondering whether he had ever been obliged to flee from his own people through the s
treets of his own capital. The history books made no mention of it.

  “Things have been… unsettled in your absence, Your Majesty.” Orso did not care for the way he said unsettled. It felt like a euphemism for something much worse. “There was a disturbance shortly after you left. Over the rising price of bread. With the rebellion, and the poor weather, not enough flour has been getting into the city. A crowd of women forced their way into some bakers’ shops. They beat the owners. One they declared a speculator, and… murdered.”

  “This is troubling,” said Sulfur, with towering understatement. Orso noticed he was carefully wiping blood from the side of his hand with a handkerchief. Of the slight smirk he had managed to maintain through the execution of two hundred people outside Valbeck, there was no sign at all.

  “The next day there was a strike at the Hill Street Foundry. The day after there were three more. Some guardsmen refused to patrol. Others clashed with the rioters.” The knight herald worked his mouth unhappily. “Several deaths.”

  Orso’s father was last in the procession of immortalised monarchs, gazing out over the deserted park with an expression of decisive command he had never worn in life. Opposite him, on a slightly less monumental scale, loomed that famous war hero Lord Marshal West, that noted torturer Arch Lector Glokta, and the First of the Magi himself, glaring down with wrinkled lip as though all men were complaining ants to him indeed. Orso had often wondered which retainers would end up opposite his own statue, in future years. This was the first time he had ever wondered if he would get a statue at all.

  “There’ll be order now!” Hoff struggled to lift the funereal mood. “You’ll see!”

  “I hope so, Your Grace,” said the knight herald. “Groups of Breakers have taken over some of the manufactories. They march openly in the Three Farms, calling for… well, the resignation of His Majesty’s Closed Council.” Orso did not care for the way he said resignation. It felt like a euphemism for something considerably more final. “People are stirred up, Your Majesty. People want blood.”

  “My blood?” muttered Orso, trying and failing to loosen his collar.

  “Well…” The knight herald gave a rather limp parting salute. “Blood, anyway. I’m not sure they care whose.”

  It was a sadly reduced Closed Council that struggled to its aged feet as Orso clattered into the White Chamber. Lord Marshal Forest had been left behind in Stoffenbeck with the shattered remnants of the army. Arch Lector Pike was terrifying the ever-restless denizens of Valbeck into renewed submission. A replacement had yet to be found for High Justice Bruckel after his head was split in half during a previous attempt on Orso’s life. Bayaz’s chair at the foot of the table was—as it had been for the great majority of the last few centuries—empty. And the surveyor general, one could only assume, was once again out with his bladder.

  Lord Chancellor Gorodets’ voice was rather shrill. “Might I congratulate Your Majesty on your famous victory at Stoffenbeck—”

  “Put it out of your mind.” Orso flung himself into his uncomfortable chair. “I have.”

  “We were set upon!” Rucksted stormed to his seat with spurs jingling. “The royal party!”

  “Rioters in the bloody streets of Adua!” wheezed Hoff as he sagged down and began to dab his sweat-beaded forehead with the sleeve of his robe.

  “Bloody streets indeed,” murmured Orso, wiping his cheek with his fingertips and seeing them come away lightly smeared with red. Gorst’s handiwork had left him speckled all over. “Any news from Arch Lector Pike?”

  “You haven’t heard?” Gorodets had graduated from his usual habit of fluffing and combing his long beard to wringing it between clawing fingers. “Valbeck has fallen to an uprising!”

  The glug of Orso swallowing echoed audibly from the stark white walls. “Fallen?”

  “Again?” squealed Hoff.

  “No word from His Eminence,” said Gorodets. “We fear he may be a captive of the Breakers.”

  “Captive?” muttered Orso. The room was feeling even more intolerably cramped than usual.

  “News of turmoil pours in from all across Midderland!” blurted the high consul, warbling on the edge of panic. “We have lost contact with the authorities in Keln. Troubling news from Holsthorm. Robbings. Lynchings. Purges.”

  “Purges?” breathed Orso. It appeared he was doomed to endlessly repeat single words in a tone of horrified upset.

  “There are rumours of bands of Breakers ravaging the countryside!”

  “Huge bands,” said Lord Admiral Krepskin. “Converging on the capital! Bastards have taken to calling ’emselves the People’s Army.”

  “A bloody plague of treason,” breathed Hoff, eyes fixed on the empty chair at the bottom of the table. “Can we get a message to Lord Bayaz?”

  Orso dumbly shook his head. “Not soon enough to make a difference.” He imagined the First of the Magi would choose to keep a discreet distance in any case, while calculating how he could profit from the aftermath.

  “We have done all we can to keep the news from becoming public—”

  “To prevent panic, you understand, Your Majesty, but—”

  “They may be at our gates within days!”

  There was a long silence. The sense of triumph as Orso approached the city was a dimly remembered dream.

  If there was a polar opposite to feeling like a king, he had discovered it.

  Change

  “You must confess,” said Pike. “It’s impressive.”

  “I must,” said Vick. And she wasn’t easily impressed.

  The People’s Army might have lacked discipline, equipment and supplies, but there was no arguing with its scale. It stretched off, clogging the road in the valley bottom and straggling up the soggy slopes on both sides, until it was lost in the drizzly distance.

  There might’ve been ten thousand when they set out from Valbeck. A couple of regiments of ex-soldiers had formed the bright spearhead, gleaming with new-forged gifts from Savine dan Brock’s foundries. But order soon gave way to ragged chaos. Mill workers and foundry workers, dye-women and laundry-women, cobblers and cutlers, butchers and butlers, dancing more than marching to old work songs and drums made from cookpots. A largely good-natured riot.

  Vick had half-expected, half-hoped that they’d melt away as they slogged across the muddy country in worsening weather, but their numbers had quickly swelled. In came labourers, smallholders and farmers with scythes and pitchforks—which caused some concern—and with flour and hams—which caused some celebration. In came gangs of beggars and gangs of orphans. In came soldiers, deserted from who knew what lost battalions. In came dealers, whores and demagogues, dishing up husk, fucks and political theory in tents by roadways trampled into bogs.

  There was no arguing with its enthusiasm, either. At night, the fires went on for miles, folk drawing dew-dusted blankets tight against the autumn chill, blurting out their smoking dreams and desires, talking bright-eyed of change. The Great Change, come at last.

  Vick had no idea how far back that sodden column went now. No idea how many Breakers and Burners were part of it. Miles of men, women and children, slogging through the mud towards Adua. Towards a better tomorrow. Vick had her doubts, of course. But all that hope. A flood of the damn stuff. No matter how jaded you were, you couldn’t help but be moved by it. Or maybe she wasn’t quite so jaded as she’d always told herself.

  Vick had learned in the camps that you stand with the winners. It had been her golden rule ever since. But in the camps, and in all the years since she left them, she’d never doubted who the winners were. The men in charge. The Inquisition, the Closed Council, the Arch Lector. Looking down on that unruly mass of humanity, fixed on changing the world, she wasn’t so sure who the winners would be. She wasn’t sure what the sides were, even. If Leo dan Brock had beaten Orso, there might have been a new king, new faces in the Closed Council, new arses in the big chairs, but things would’ve stayed much the same. If this lot beat Orso, who knew what came nex
t? All the old certainties were crumbling, and she was left wondering whether they’d ever been certainties at all, or just fools’ assumptions.

  In Starikland, during the rebellion, Vick had felt an earthquake. The ground had trembled, books had dropped from shelves, a chimney had fallen into the street outside. Not for long, but for long enough, she’d felt the terror of knowing all she’d counted on as solid could in a moment shake itself apart.

  Now she had that feeling again, but she knew the quake had only just begun. How long would the world shiver? What would still be standing when it stopped?

  “I notice you are still with us, Sister Victarine.” Pike clicked his tongue and nudged his mount down the slope, towards the head of the bedraggled column.

  Vick had a strong instinct not to follow. But she did. “I’m still with you.”

  “So you are a convert to our cause?”

  There was a hopeful piece of her that wanted to believe this could be Sibalt’s dreams of a better world coming true and was desperate to see it happen. There was a nervous piece of her that smelled blood coming and wanted to cut out that night and run for the Far Country. There was a calculating piece that reckoned the only way to control a mad horse is from the saddle, and the danger of keeping your grip might be less than the danger of letting go.

  She looked sideways at Pike. In truth, she was still trying to work out what their cause really was. In truth, she reckoned there was a different cause for every one of those little dots in the People’s Army. But this was no time for the truth. When is? “I’d be a fool to say I’m not at all convinced.”

  “And if you said you were entirely convinced, I would be a fool to believe you.”

  “Since neither of us is a fool… let’s just say maybe.”

  “Oh, we are all fools. But I enjoy a good maybe.” Pike showed no sign of enjoyment or of anything else. “Absolutes are never to be trusted.”

  Vick doubted the two leaders of the Great Change riding towards them across the grassy slope would have agreed.