The Wisdom of Crowds

by Joe Abercrombie

  His brother had once told him how to punch, but he hadn’t really been listening. He wished he’d listened now. But then his brother hadn’t really known anything about punching, either.

  The man caught Leeb in the side with his shoulder, knocked his wind out, lifted him bodily and brought him down on the wet cobbles with a stunning crash.

  Then they were all on him, kicking, swearing. Slavering madmen. Furious animals. Leeb curled up as best he could, whimpering at each blow. Something hit him so hard in the back he was sick. To his horror, he saw one of them take out a knife.

  It was a shock when Cal pulled the blade. Maybe it shouldn’t have been. Doors knew he carried one. He stopped kicking the officer to stare at it. Thought about shouting at him not to do it. But by then Cal was stabbing.

  “Shit,” whispered Doors. Hadn’t planned on killing anyone when he left his spot in the mill and ran out to join the Breakers flooding down the Sparway. Not sure what he had been planning. Setting things right, maybe. Getting a fair deal for once. Not this, anyway. They all looked shocked. Cal most of all.

  “Had to be done,” he said, staring down at the poor bastard wheezing and spitting blood and leaking red all over the street. “Had to be done.”

  Doors didn’t see why. Wasn’t like this fool had set their wages. They could’ve given him a kicking. Taught him a lesson. Left it at that. But whether it had to be done or not, it was done now. No undoing it.

  “Come on.” Doors turned. Left the dying officer behind. Started hurrying back towards the Sparway. Towards the Agriont. Didn’t know what’d happen when they got there, just like they hadn’t known what’d happen when they started kicking that officer.

  Regrets were for tomorrow.

  “They’re here.” Shawley watched a set run down the alley below, footsteps clapping from the fronts of the narrow buildings, and he tossed back the last of his wine and swung his legs from the window seat.

  “Who’s here?” slurred Rill, her eyes all unfocused from the husk.

  “The Breakers, you fucking dunce,” and he planted his hand on her face and shoved her back onto the bed. She caught her head on the headboard as she fell, and put fingers to her scalp, and the tips came away bloody, and Shawley had to burst out laughing. He’d always been quite the joker.

  He took his hatchet from the table and slid the haft up his sleeve. “Good time to settle some scores, I reckon.” And he perched his hat on his head at just the right angle, straightened his collar in the mirror, took one last pinch of pearl dust, then trotted jauntily down the stairs and out into the street.

  There was an explosive feel to the air. A feel of things ripped up so they could be put back together a new way. A woman ran past him, screaming, or maybe laughing, and Shawley tipped his hat to her. He was known for his good manners. Then he stood out of the way so some men could dash by, gripping his axe all the while. Just in case, you understand. He wasn’t the only one with scores to settle, and Shawley had a lot of enemies. Always had a talent for making ’em.

  He passed a ragged old couple stripping a dead officer lying in a slick of blood and swaggered on, keeping his head down, sticking to the back streets and the shortcuts. Always had a knack for finding his way. He’d been worried that getting through Arnault’s Wall might be a problem. Been thinking about slipping through the sewers, though it would’ve ruined the nice boots he’d stolen off that merchant. But the Sable Gate stood wide open. Must’ve been a fight there, a crowd dragging the bloody corpses of some King’s Own up onto the walls. The guts were hanging out of one. The head was off another. Shawley had no clue where it might’ve ended up. Seemed impolite to ask. He tipped his hat to a hideous woman with no more than four teeth in her head and slipped through the gate.

  He could hear the violence, further on. The mad noise, spreading through the richer districts inside Arnault’s Wall. They might call it the People’s Army, and there might be a few high principles tossed about, but if you wanted his opinion, there were plenty of thugs with pretty excuses mixed in, and no small number who weren’t even bothering with the excuses, just turning a quick profit from the chaos. Evidence of their handiwork all over. Shawley stopped to filch a nice ring off a corpse that someone had left begging. Always been blessed with sharp eyes.

  He saw the house. How often had he stood outside, in the shadows, planning his revenge? Now, thanks to happy circumstances, it dropped in his lap and he just had to catch it. The gate was locked but he slipped off his coat and tossed it over the railings on top of the wall while no one was looking. He took a run up and jumped over, slipped through the wet garden where the bushes were clipped to look like birds or some such. Bloody waste of money if you wanted his opinion. Money that should’ve been his.

  The dining-room window still didn’t lock properly and Shawley eased it open, slipped over the sill and dropped down silent in the darkened room on the other side. Always had a knack for treading softly. Place hadn’t changed much. Dark table and chairs, dark dresser with the silver plate gleaming. Silver plate that should’ve been his.

  He heard laughter, talking, more laughter. A woman’s voice, he thought, a young woman, an older man. They’d no idea what was happening in the city yet, by the sound of it. Strange, that fifty strides from the madness it could be just an ordinary day. He padded down the corridor and peered around a door frame.

  It was an odd scene given the carnage in the streets. A girl of twenty with a mass of blonde hair stood admiring herself in a mirror of Visserine glass which must’ve cost more’n Shawley’s house. She wore a half-made dress of shining fabric, two seamstresses attending to her—a young one with a mouthful of pins and an old one on her knees busy stitching at a hem. Furnevelt sat in a corner, wine glass in his hand. He had his back to Shawley, but you could see him smiling in the mirror as he watched it all done.

  And Shawley realised the girl must be Furnevelt’s daughter. That was how long he’d been waiting. Should’ve just killed the old bastard where he sat, but Shawley wanted him to know. So he stepped around the door frame and tipped his hat.

  “Ladies,” he said, smirking into the mirror, and they turned to look, puzzled. Not scared yet. That’d come. Shawley couldn’t remember her name, Furnevelt’s daughter, but she’d turned out so pretty. That’s what happens when you grow up with all these advantages. These advantages that should’ve been his.

  “Shawley?” Furnevelt jumped from his chair, a delicious shock across his face. “I thought I told you never to come back here!”

  “You told me a lot of things.” Shawley let the axe slide from his sleeve so he was gripping the haft. “You self-righteous old shit.” And he hit him on the side of the head.

  Furnevelt got his hand up and knocked it wide, but the blade still caught his scalp, blood flying across the room.

  He made a funny little gasp, stumbled, dropped his wine glass and it broke across the floor.

  One of the dressmakers screamed, pins falling from her open mouth. Furnevelt’s daughter stared, the tendons starting from her pale bare feet.

  Second time, Shawley caught Furnevelt right between the eyes, axe sinking into his skull with a bang.

  The dressmaker screamed again. Bloody irritating scream she had.

  Furnevelt’s daughter sprinted out, fast as a ferret given she had all that half-stitched cloth about her. “Damn it!” Shawley had to get her, too, to make it fair, but the axe was stuck fast in Furnevelt’s skull and however he tugged it wouldn’t come free. “Get back here, bitch!”

  Lilott ran. There was no thought involved. She fled in terror down the hall, spurred on by the shrieks of her dressmakers. She fumbled with the locks, plunged across the gardens, crashed through the gate. She ran, clutching up the gauzy skirts of her unfinished wedding dress, her bare feet slapping at the wet cobbles.

  She burst into the square. People everywhere. People shocked, joyous, curious, furious. Strange people with strange intensities of emotion twisting their pale faces into animal masks. W
here had they come from?

  A man stood on a packing crate, screaming something about votes. Leering labourers bellowed back at him. A woman with wild hair bounced on a big man’s shoulders, shaking a sword and swearing at the sky. Lilott had been about to scream for help, but some instinct made her bite her lip and shrink against the wall, trying to catch her breath. She hardly knew what had happened. The Breakers, she supposed. It must be the Breakers.

  She once listened to one of them give a speech. Hidden at the back of a meeting in a shawl she borrowed from her maid. She had thought it such a daring thing to do, had been expecting fire and fury and, well… danger. But it had all sounded so reasonable. Fair pay. Equitable hours. Decent treatment. She had hardly been able to understand why everyone was so afraid of them. Later, flushed and eager, she had repeated all the arguments to her father. He had told her she had no notion of the complexities of managing a labour market, that what seemed to her eminent good sense might sound to some ears like treason, and that this was not the kind of thing the lady of taste he was raising her to be would ever need to worry about.

  In that much, at least, he had been horribly mistaken.

  She limped down a crowded street. The sun had gone in and a chilly gust brought a new sprinkle of rain. Someone was playing a fiddle far too fast and they danced, and whooped, and clapped, like guests at a particularly wild party, and not far away a well-dressed corpse was draped over a railing, blood dripping from its broken skull and trickling in the gutter. Was her father dead? She gave a kind of moan, had to bite her knuckle to keep from screaming.

  There had been warning signs. The price of bread and meat, she heard from the cook, kept going up. Loyalty in the army, she heard from Harbin, kept going down. There had been that uprising in Valbeck. Vague worries that there might be more when the rebels landed in Midderland. News of the king’s victory had brought relief. But then came the rumours of Breakers approaching Adua. Then came the curfew, then the arrests by the Inquisition, then the hangings by the Closed Council.

  She had suggested they postpone the wedding, but her father was as deaf to that as he had been to the Breakers’ arguments. He refused to put off his only child’s happiness on account of a crowd of ruffians. Harbin laughed at the notion that the capital could fall to an army of peasants, so Lilott forced out laughter, too, since agreeing with your husband-to-be was expected of a young lady. At least before the marriage. They had convinced themselves it would not happen.

  They had been horribly mistaken on that score, too.

  She hardly recognised the streets she had grown up in, flooded with crazed humanity, surging on invisible currents of joy and fury. She was so cold. Not exactly crying but her eyes and her nose constantly leaking, her bare shoulders clammy from the drizzle and her bare feet bruised from the unforgiving cobblestones. Her breath came in terrified whoops, her skin crawling under her half-finished, pearl-stitched bodice.

  Only that morning it had felt so important that all the right guests should accept their invitations. That the words of their vows be perfect. That the hem of her dress was stitched just so. Now the hem of her dress was black with road-filth and, Fates help her, speckled brown with her father’s blood, and all the world was turned upside down and inside out.

  She hobbled on. Not knowing where she was or where she was heading. Some unsewn flap of her dress caught on a broken fence as she ran past and nearly jerked her off her bare feet. Someone laughed at her. Another clapped. On any other day, a desperate, barefooted girl in a blood-spattered wedding dress would have excited some attention. Today it was nothing to remark upon. The whole city had gone mad. The whole world.

  Over the roofs she glimpsed the parapet of the Tower of Chains, the tallest tower of the Agriont, and she gave a moan of relief. But when she burst gasping onto the paving stones beside the moat it became a groan of horror.

  She had wandered lazily across this bridge on happy summer days, among the wealthy revellers, on her way to the Agriont’s park to see and be seen, to applaud the fencers at the Summer Contest. She remembered smiling at floating ducklings following their mother in dignified single file, remembered counting the green and red and purple lily pads with Harbin, on the day he proposed. So picturesque.

  The gates were sealed now. People were crushed against them, waving frantically, wailing at the towering gatehouse to be let in. An old woman in a very fine dress was scratching at the wood with her fingernails. Lilott added her voice to the rest as she staggered across the bridge. She hardly knew what else to do. “Help!” she screeched. “Help!”

  She saw a pale man with a red scarf staring past her and spun about to follow his eyes. A crowd was coming up the wide Middleway, banners bobbing over it, steel of pikes and armour glinting.

  “Oh no,” she whispered. She could not run any more. There was nowhere left to run to. A house was on fire, smoke rolling from the upstairs windows into the spitting sky.

  People began to scatter, knocking each other down, trampling each other in their mindless haste. Lilott took an elbow in the face and tottered back, tasting blood. Her foot caught in her torn dress, the parapet hit her in the knees and, with a despairing gasp, she tumbled over.

  It was not that far to the moat, but even so the water hit her hard, knocked out her breath and sucked her down in a rush of bubbles. The floating glory of her dress became an instant dead weight, fabric clutching at her, dragging her down. She was beyond exhaustion. Beyond terror. Part of her wanted just to sink, but another would not let go, made her thrash, kick, struggle.

  She came up coughing dirty water, wriggled through the clutching, slapping lily pads, far less picturesque at close quarters, and into the darkness under the bridge. She pressed herself to the slimy stones, hair plastered across her face, her head full of the smell of vegetable rot.

  Not far away a corpse floated, face down. A hint of sodden cloth, of tangled hair. She watched it turn slowly, bump against the moss-covered wall of the moat, drift away. She wondered who it had been. She wondered who she was now. She wondered if she would live out the hour. Everything was changed.

  The People’s Army was coming. Wasn’t she the people, too? When had she become their enemy? She squeezed her eyes shut, shivering in the icy water, and gave up trying to smother her own sobs. No one could have heard them over the deafening noise of the mob above. Tramping boots, clashing metal, breaking glass, rumbling wagon wheels. A demon with many voices.

  “Bread! Give us bread!”

  “Send out the Closed Council!”

  “The Great Change is come!”

  “Let us in, you fuckers.”

  “Let us in or we break in!”

  And, louder than all, a sawing, maddened shriek. “Bring out His fucking Majesty!”

  “Bring him out!” screamed Mother Mostly, shoving forward.

  They’d made it to the Agriont. Ready to seize their own justice for once, rather’n be crushed by the king’s. But now folk held up. From some shred of respect for their old masters, or fear of ’em, at least. They loitered at the head of the bridge.

  “There’s men up there!” someone said. “King’s men, with bows!”

  Mother Mostly’s eyesight weren’t near good enough to see any king’s men that far off. The whole gatehouse was a looming blur over the heads of the folk packed in front. The king’s men couldn’t kill this whole crowd, but no doubt they could kill a few, and no one was eager to be first.

  But Mother Mostly wouldn’t be fucking bullied. Her father had tried it, when she was a girl, and she’d stabbed him with a knitting needle and run away from home. Her first husband had tried it, and she’d stabbed him with a butcher’s knife and rolled his body into the canal. The Styrians had tried it, when they came to put their boot across the Arches. They’d come asking for money and she’d told ’em to go back where they fucking came from. They’d beaten her, but she healed. They’d cut two of her fingers off, and she got her hands back in the soap the same day. They’d smashed her door
s, smashed her shutters, smashed her tubs, but she got new ones. In the end their boss turned up, and she was sure he’d kill her, but he gave her a nod of respect instead. She needn’t pay, he’d said. She alone.

  It was just a fact. Everyone in the Arches knew it. Mother Mostly won’t be fucking bullied. Not by Styrians. Not by king’s men. Not by anyone.

  So she shouldered through the crowd, skirts gathered up and tucked into her belt the way she did when there was work to do. She jostled her way to the front, which one way or another she’d been doing all her life, using her elbows and her fixed jaw and her great loud voice. “Out o’ my way!” Forced a path through the big men, the armed men, the armoured men, still loitering. They might be hard on the outside, but they were soft where it counted. Mother Mostly hadn’t been born with much softness in her, and a life in the laundries had pared away what there was and left her as yielding as a length of wire.

  She shoved onto the empty bridge, giving the towering gatehouse, and its notched battlements, and its slitted windows the kind of baleful frown she gave to folk owed her money.

  “I’m a woman of the Union!” she roared. “Fifty years, and I’ve worked every one of ’em! I won’t be bullied, you hear?”

  Cheers and jeers behind her, whoops and hoots, like folk watching freaks dance at a sideshow.

  “Bring out that Styrian cunt!” she screamed at the battlements, shaking her knife. “The king’s mother!”

  “She ain’t there!” someone called from behind. “Scurried back to Styria months ago!”

  Mother Mostly glowered up at the gatehouse, still a blur, more or less, but she knew there must be men up there, and she wasn’t about to be bullied by the bastards.

  She took another step forward. “Then bring out her cunt of a son, the king!”

  Rithinghorm pressed his mouth to the arrow-loop and bellowed at the very top of his voice. “Halt! In the name of His Majesty!”