The Wisdom of Crowds

by Joe Abercrombie

  “First things first,” Judge was saying as Broad trudged dumbly from the Round behind the prisoners. “This ain’t so much an Assembly now as a courtroom. And in it we will purge the Union of its enemies.”

  The doors clattered shut.

  It was cold outside, but Broad’s face felt hot. Across the Square of Marshals, Square of Equality, Square of Murder, whatever they were calling it now, curious eyes following them all the way. He narrowed his own eyes as a chilly gust swept up, brown leaves chasing each other across the flagstones.

  “You cannot do this!” gurgled Risinau. “You cannot do this!”

  “Shut up, fat man,” said Sarlby.

  “I will see you all punished—”

  Sarlby slapped him, and again, and again. Slapped him till his face was pink. “Understand yet?”

  Risinau blew a bloody bubble from his nose, breath coming fast and his eyes a little crossed. “Yes,” he squeaked.

  Broad stepped through an archway and the Tower of Chains reared up ahead, slim as a lady’s finger, white stone streaked with sooty dirt. He’d heard it toppled the day Bayaz destroyed the Eaters, and he’d had it rebuilt even taller.

  A woman near the front must’ve fainted when she saw it, suddenly collapsed, skirt billowing. Broad picked her up under the arm. Not rough, but firm. They could do this without being disrespectful. Guided her back into the queue.

  Closer came the tower, and closer. It was like he stood outside himself. Couldn’t change a thing. If he didn’t do this, someone else would, and he’d take the drop with the rest and never go home to Liddy and May.

  “Captain Broad,” hissed Brint, from the side of his mouth. “You have to stop this now. You have a chance to stop this.” Broad didn’t speak. Wasn’t sure he could speak.

  One of the prisoners was crying. Another tried desperately to wedge himself in the doorway to the tower, pressing his face to the stone. “No! No! No—”

  A Burner clubbed him across the skull and he fell senseless, blood from his cut head pattering across the threshold.

  “Oh, that’s just brilliant,” said Sarlby, hands on hips.

  The man looked a bit put out. “I couldn’t just leave him there, could I?”

  “Give him a kick, then! Now we’ll have to carry the bastard. Or you will, anyway.”

  “Fuck,” said the man, bending down to heave him over one shoulder.

  Onto an endless stair of neatly cut stone, shoving the prisoners ahead. Echoing of footsteps. Echoing of breath, of cries, of whimpers, of words. The tone changed the higher they got. Bluster, at the bottom.

  “How dare you!”

  “I have friends, you know!”

  “You’ll pay for this!”

  A glimpse of the rooftops outside the Agriont, through a narrow window. Then came the bartering.

  “I can give you a thousand marks. Two thousand!”

  “Only let me reach my pocket!”

  “I have friends, rich friends!”

  Scrape, scrape, scrape of boots on stone. Then came the begging.

  “Please!”

  “I have three children! They don’t even know what’s happened!”

  “Please!”

  “I tried to do the right thing. No one’s more loyal to the Great Change than I am!”

  “Please!”

  All wasted breath. All herded on up the endless stairs.

  “Be strong,” someone was whispering, “be strong.” Broad didn’t know if they were talking to themselves or someone else. What difference could being strong make? Strong or weak, the fall was still the fall.

  How many steps? Hundreds, it felt like. Risinau’s wheezing getting worse and worse behind him. Not a man built for steps.

  “Get up there, you fat bastard.”

  “Can’t we just roll him out here?”

  “Ain’t a window big enough.” Laughter.

  Broad kept climbing. His legs burned. The breath cut at his chest. But he hardly felt it. Someone else’s legs. Someone else’s breath.

  Out from the darkness and onto the roof and he blinked at a clear, crisp day. Adua spread out below them, the chimneys jutting, plumes of smoke carried off by the chill wind, tiny ships at tiny wharves in the bay. Toy people swarming in a toy city.

  “Damn, that’s high!” Sarlby took his red cap off to wipe his forehead, thin hair whipping around a smile full of yellow teeth. He’d found an empty crate somewhere, and he dragged it up next to the parapet. A little step to stand on.

  The prisoners were dragged from the stair, breathing hard from the climb, whooping sobs, puffs of smoke on the chill air. The Burners watched in their red hats and their red sashes and their clothes dashed and spattered with red paint, their weapons drawn and their eyes bright and righteous.

  Broad noticed a bird perched on the roof of the little turret above the stairwell. Watching the whole business, unblinking.

  “Right, then.”

  Sarlby and one of the other Burners took the nearest prisoner under the arms and marched him across the rooftop. Tall fellow, he was, with a birthmark under his ear. He went meekly enough, till he got to the box, then he snarled and twisted, his shoes scraping on the stones.

  “Help us out, Bull!”

  Broad caught a fistful of the man’s jacket from behind, kicked his foot away and helped shove him up onto the box. He stood there, breathing hard, staring down in disbelief at the city below, feet level with the embrasure in front of him.

  Broad saw the lump on his neck bob as he swallowed. “Tell my wife that I— Oh!”

  Sarlby shoved him off. He turned in the air, surprised. Then he was gone. Broad felt like he should flinch, look away, cover his face with his hands. But he just watched. Sweat from the climb tickled under his red-daubed breastplate. He scratched at his sticky armpit.

  Sarlby peered eagerly over the battlements, like a boy who’d tossed something off a bridge into a river and was waiting for it to show up on the other side.

  There was a sharp smack far below. Like a whip-crack. Sarlby straightened up, puffing out his cheeks. “Well, that’s the end o’ that, eh?”

  Sarlby had been a good man. In Styria, and in Valbeck. One of the better ones. Better than Broad had been. A good man. What kind of good was this, though? What would Liddy have said to it? What would May? Broad felt like he should be crying. Should be screaming. But all he did was check his sleeves were rolled right, then guide another one over from the stairs. A clerk, he thought, used to sit at the far end of the table with a ledger. The man had rolled his eyes at Broad when Risinau was spouting off one time, and Broad had stopped himself smiling. Across the roof he went now, towards the box, stumbled on the way, but one of the Burners caught him before he fell, helped him back up. Wouldn’t want him falling before time.

  “Sorry,” he muttered, trying to get his foot up on the box but it was trembling so bad he couldn’t manage it. “So sorry.”

  “Here you go.” Sarlby gave him a shove and he tumbled straight over, then beckoned for the next one.

  “I’m just a sculptor! I’m just a sculptor!” She was saying it over and over, in a Styrian accent, which wasn’t helping. No one liked a foreigner any more. “I’m just a sculptor!” Like a prayer. Higher and higher, faster and faster, more and more desperate. “I’m just a sculptor!” She’d pissed herself. A trail of spatters across the roof, hem of her dress dragging through it. “I’m just a sculptor!”

  “You’re a sculptor found guilty o’ treason,” said Sarlby, and he pricked her up onto the box with the point of his knife.

  “No! I am only here to help carve new statues! I’m just a—”

  And over she went. It was the way he didn’t even let ’em finish a sentence. Like nothing they could say would matter. Like they were rubbish tossed in a ditch. And those behind just stared. Like it was nothing to do with them. Even as they were herded closer to the parapet. Even as Broad helped.

  Brint was next. They never had found anything to put that other cuff a
round, on account of his one arm, so when one of the Burners caught hold of him he shook the man off, waved the others away, walked without a word towards the box. He took a breath, stepped up himself, and stepped off himself, and made no sound on the way down.

  Broad blinked. Brint had been a good man. He was reasonably sure of that. He’d tried to do the right thing, when everything fell apart. But good or bad, right or wrong, the fall is still the fall.

  Some went off flailing, like they were trying to find something to catch hold of. Some dropped, limp. Some made no sound. Some made strange ones as they were pushed. A shocked gasp. A surprised little hoot. A scared whimper. A lot of ’em screamed. Screamed all the way down. They were the worst. The scream, and the way the scream suddenly stopped. The sound at the bottom. A sharp smack. But with a kind of wetness to it. And then maybe a distant spatter. Like slops thrown from an upstairs window.

  A crowd had gathered now. You could hear them whooping and cheering and gasping down there in the city, beyond the dry moat. You didn’t see a thing like this every day.

  Broad looked at the smear of red paint across his breastplate. Had he been forced to do this? Had he chosen to do it? Had he wanted to do it? Was he one of them, like Judge said? Had he always been? He took off his lenses, rubbed his eyes.

  “You all right, Bull?” asked Sarlby.

  Broad swallowed as he hooked his lenses back on, nudged them into that groove where they belonged. Helped to have a routine. “Aye,” he lied. “Fine.”

  Risinau looked near dead already from the climb. Face pale and beaded with sweat and tears, mouth hanging open, gasping for breath. “I wish…

  to say—”

  “You’ve fucking said enough,” said Sarlby, and jabbed his knife into the Chairman’s arse, herding him up onto the box.

  Vick watched another little speck fall from the Tower of Chains. Took a long time. Seemed a lucky thing, that from where she stood she couldn’t see them hit the ground. In the slimy bottom of the drained moat, most likely. But she heard it, she thought. The faint scream, carried on the wind, suddenly cut off. Felt like the last shreds of hope for Sibalt’s better world were cut off with it.

  Vick had borne witness to some horrors in her life. In the camps. In the mines. In the rebellion in Starikland, the uprising in Valbeck, the battle at Stoffenbeck. But she’d never seen anything like this.

  “What have you done?” she whispered.

  Pike raised one hairless brow at her. “What have we done, you mean? It was you who told me Risinau had to go. And you were right.”

  “Risinau had to go, but…” She wanted to be sick as she said the name. “Judge?”

  “Too many principles did not work for us.”

  “So we’ll try none at all?” Her voice had become a disbelieving shriek.

  “The time for half-measures is past.” Pike looked evenly back at her. “Sometimes, the only way to improve something is to destroy it, so it can be rebuilt better.” There was a time she’d thought that burned face was a perfect mask for his feelings. Now she wondered whether there were any underneath. “Sometimes, to change the world, we must first burn it down.”

  Another little speck tumbled from the top of the Tower of Chains.

  Beyond the ruined walls of the Agriont, the crowd applauded.

  PART VIII

  “In crowds it is stupidity and not mother wit that is accumulated.”

  Gustave Le Bon

  A Sea of Terror

  “Welcome, Citizens and Citizenesses, to this sixteenth biannual general meeting of Adua’s Solar Society. Somewhat delayed, I regret to say, by… events.”

  Curnsbick, understated in a rough-spun waistcoat with a flavour of workman’s apron, held up his broad hands for silence, though more from habit than necessity. The members used to raise the roof. Now they sat in anxious silence.

  “With thanks to our distinguished patron, Citizeness Brock.” Curnsbick gestured in the vague direction of the box where Savine sat. She forced an awkward smile and eased deeper into the shadows. She had spent half her life trying to stand out from the crowd, but only fools made themselves conspicuous these days.

  “I come before you full of optimism!” called Curnsbick, with the sweaty demeanour of a pedlar who would never buy what he was being forced to sell. “The Great Change offers us brave new opportunities! Workers flock to the cities.” Or were driven there by cold, hunger and war to freeze on the roads or starve in the doorways. “Regulations are relaxed.” Because no one knew who was in charge or whether anything would be enforced. “Land long occupied becomes available.” Chiefly through the mechanism of uncontrolled fire.

  He neglected to mention the worsening shortages of food, coal and raw materials, the dangers of riot and summary arrest, or the never-ending trials for profiteering, speculation and usury. The many empty seats in the audience testified to them more eloquently than even the Great Machinist ever could.

  “Our friends in Starikland, Angland and Westport are… a little wary.” On the verge of declaring their secession from the Union, indeed. “Traditional markets may, for now, have been closed off. But a world of possibilities opens up for the enterprising innovator!” Those not rendered into pulp at the foot of the Tower of Chains. “There is a grand harvest to be reaped, not merely material but, far more importantly, moral, social and cultural.” If one could overlook the Burners’ slogans daubed on every mill and manufactory. “With liberty and equality added to our traditional virtues of imagination and endeavour, the Great Change will surely bring prosperity to all its children!” Those it did not eat alive. Curnsbick spread his arms wide as he built to a crescendo of insincerity. “No man can stop, nor would any man want to stop, progress!”

  Nobody dared stand out by being first to clap, and so an agonising silence stretched, huge and heavy.

  It struck Savine as profoundly strange that, out in the foyer, beneath the two great chandeliers and the broken plaster where the third had once hung, no one was screaming. No one wept, vomited or tore at their faces with their fingernails. Life simply went on. The knots of conversation, the babble of business, the offers, the promises, the investments of a lifetime.

  “Where’s old Hogbeck?” someone was asking. “Arrested?”

  “Killed himself testing a flying balloon, the old fool. Hoped to swoop down and carry away young Citizenesses, presumably.”

  “No woman ever entered his basket and emerged with virtue intact. And Zillman?”

  “Ruined. Bet everything he had on glazing, what with all the windows being smashed. Trouble is no one’s bothering to replace the bastards in case they’re smashed again tomorrow…”

  Nothing was more changed by the Great Change than fashion. Rich men’s costume had gained workmen’s flourishes, while the ideal for women was the artless shepherdess. Cheeks were painted slapped-arse pink while fans had become a loathed aristocratic affectation. Some women had stopped wearing wigs altogether, proudly displaying their conspicuously lifeless actual hair as if it was a badge of revolutionary pride. Exotic curios had been all the rage; now anything foreign was scorned with a patriotic side-eye. Jewels had plunged in popularity, but fortunes were spent on dried flowers and woven grasses. It was a wonder no one had brought a herd of goats as an accessory. Nurturing bosoms were thrust up so high they presented a danger of suffocation to bystanders. The Great Change had brought freedom to all, of course, but the corsetry of the Citizeness was, if anything, even more constricting than that endured by a lady of King Jezal’s reign.

  “Equality never quite comes in equal shares,” murmured Savine.

  “I am from Gurkhul,” said Zuri, checking the watch. “I am well aware.”

  “Nothing sells but coupling and pratfalls,” the theatre’s owner was lamenting to an acquaintance in a quavering bass. “Once great Juvens’ exhortation to the senators echoed from the rafters! Now we watch a fat man trip over the night pot and pretty people pretend to fuck.”

  “Can we not admit that
fucking has always been popular?”

  “I suppose. These days I hardly know whether I’m hiring actors or whores.”

  “There’s a difference?” Followed by stutters of forced laughter.

  They all were skaters on thin ice, their smiles stretched tight over their terror, gliding on as the cracks shot out beneath them. People startled at every noise in the street, expecting Burners to burst into the theatre and drag away the membership of the Solar Society wholesale. The workmen of Adua had lived in constant fear of the people in this room. Now it was their turn. But life went on, even as the world simultaneously froze and burned around them. What was the alternative?

  “Credit!” a man with immense side-whiskers frothed. “There’s no bloody credit anywhere. All the banks are shuttered!”

  “Most of the bankers are in the House of Truth. Sorry, House of Purity. The ones who haven’t taken the long drop yet, anyway. Usury. Is that even a crime?”

  “If it is, aren’t we all guilty?”

  “If Pike wanted to strangle business he’s gone about it the right way…”

  Savine had once felt nowhere more at home than here, flitting from one opportunity to another, hopes and dreams left wrecked in her wake. Now all she wanted was to slit the laces of her corset and sag down with her children, slap the stopper from the decanter and never put it back.

  “By the Fates,” she muttered. “I have become my mother.”

  “There are worse things one could become,” said Zuri.

  It had all been so much more fun with a ready supply of pearl dust and no ever-present threat of death. But there was no pearl dust to be had, and life had never been cheaper.