The Wisdom of Crowds

by Joe Abercrombie

  “You’re hurting,” she said, looking at him sidelong.

  “I’m all right.” Had he said that? Didn’t sound like something he’d say. He was about as far from all right as could be. Even further from it than he’d been in Styria. He’d promised no more trouble. But if life had taught him one thing, it was that he was shit at keeping promises.

  “Sixty-five today,” his mouth burbled out.

  “We’ll do better tomorrow.”

  When she said better, did she mean they’d kill fewer? He’d a horrible feeling she meant they’d kill more.

  He had the pipe. Hardly remembered taking it, but he had it. Sucked on it hard as he could, deep as he could, till it filled his lungs and his head, and when he blew out, everything turned numb.

  “It’s not easy.” said Judge. “Believe me, I know it’s not easy.” She was across the table. Had she slid under it like a snake? Or had he climbed over it? “But if the good work was easy, it would’ve been done long ago.” Seemed like her black eyes saw right through him. Saw his guilt and his horror and his black memories. No doubt in her eyes. Just the fire. Just the certainty, brighter’n ever. Or was that him, reflected back?

  “You know why they call me Judge?” she asked, and her fists were clenched, and her teeth were bared, like each word hurt her. “’Cause if the world’s going to change, someone has to give the verdict. Someone has to bury their feelings and sentence the past to death.” He felt her hand, pressed light against his breastplate. “And someone has to carry out the sentence. Not ’cause we want to. But ’cause it has to be done, and we’re fitted for the task…”

  They were alone in that vast space, alone with the empty benches, and the empty galleries, and the empty slogans, echoes of their whispers whispering back at them from the darkness.

  “We won’t be thanked. We won’t be forgiven. Not by anyone. Least of all ourselves…”

  He could kill her now. Catch her thin, rash-speckled throat and choke the life from it. Smash her head against the table, spray her blood across the tiles, easy as crushing a beetle. He could put an end to this madness.

  But all he did was stand there. He told himself he was a coward. That was better’n the alternative. That there was something in her he couldn’t resist. Something he wanted like a drunk wants the bottle, knowing it’s bad for him, bad for everyone, but knowing he can’t stop himself.

  “We have to bear the weight of it,” she whispered. “For those whose names are carved in the stone outside. For those who gave everything they had. For those who’ll come after us…”

  She narrowed her eyes, and reached up for him, and he stood there dumb and drunk as she pulled the lenses off his nose, so the Court of the People became nothing but dots of haloed light in a great blurred, husk-smelling darkness.

  “Can’t see a fucking thing,” he muttered.

  “Maybe it’s better that way,” she whispered, breath hot on his face and smelling like spirits. “Maybe it’s time to let go.”

  She grabbed him. Or did he grab her? They were kissing, anyway, if you could even call it kissing. Too hard, too violent, too painful for that. Growling and biting. Like they were eating each other.

  He tried to fling her away. Or did he pull her closer? Clutching at her. Tearing at her already-torn clothes, his fists tangled in the tatters of her ruined old dress and his nose full of the sour smoke smell of her. Wanted her more than he’d ever wanted anyone. Hated her more than he’d ever hated anyone. Except himself, maybe.

  He had her by the dozen chains around her neck, and she had him by his belt with one hand, dragging it open, the other clawing at his face, hard, at his jaw, merciless, her thumb was inside his cheek, pulling his head down towards her, pulling him down on top of her. He wanted her to hurt him. Her bare feet around the back of his bare arse, stuck tight to him, and he ripped her torn skirts up over the tattooed treatise on her thigh, dragging his face close to hers, close enough that he could see the fire reflected in her eyes.

  “You’re mine,” she hissed in his face. “You’re mine,” and they snapped and snarled at each other like coupling cats.

  He’d promised no more trouble, and now here he was fucking it, or letting it fuck him, maybe, on the floor of the Lords’ Round. Or whatever they were calling it now.

  He was crying while he did it, maybe. At least to begin with.

  But that doesn’t mean you’re not doing it.

  The World a Camp

  The procession wended from the gloom of falling snow. The Burners walked ten abreast in their paint-spattered clothes, their red-speckled armour, each of them holding high a torch, light falling hard on their hollow faces. Everyone else had to scrape out of their way, press themselves to the buildings and the doorways. Even Vick and her Constables and their prisoners.

  Now came the coffin, borne on the shoulders of eight women looking mighty cold in white dresses slush-stained around the hems. There was an antique feel to it all, as if the funeral procession of great Juvens had marched from the pages of the storybooks for this one moment.

  “Who’s in the casket?” grunted Vick.

  “Some Burner. Led the revolt in Keln, I heard.” Tallow glanced about, then leaned close to whisper, “They say he was killed by royalists, but he was a moderate.”

  “Meaning what?” Extreme last week was moderate now. By next week it would have become collaboration.

  “The rumour is Judge done away with him. They say she’s drunk on blood. Gone mad with it.”

  “To go mad you have to be sane to begin with.” Vick watched the shuffling column fade into the snow, off towards the Mausoleum of

  the Great Change, not even half-built beside the Four Corners, where the heroes of the Breakers and Burners were being laid to rest. “Let’s move!” she called, trudging on through the slush and the crowds and the frosty cold, past a great heap of burning books, pages occasionally floating on fire into the night, and down the echoing entrance tunnel of the Agriont.

  On the street that was once the Kingsway the statues had been replaced. Or, at least, their faces, their hands, their clothes had. Clumsy alterations had turned them from centuries of kings and their advisors into miners, builders, farmers, nursing mothers. Heroes of the common folk. Risinau’s plans, cheaply realised, awkwardly posed, something pained and accusatory in their clumsily carved expressions.

  “Bloody hell it’s cold.” Tallow hugged himself, blathering steam into the early darkness. “My sister’s got ice on the inside of her window. She spends half her time queueing. For coal, for bread, for meat. When she gets to the end, often as not they’ve run out. There was some lunatic on the corner screeching long live the king all night, preaching that Harod would rise from his grave and bring order, and Bayaz himself was flying to the city on a great eagle to appoint a new Closed Council.”

  “Wish there was a great eagle coming,” muttered Vick. “We could eat it.”

  They tramped past the Court of the People, light burning from its windows. They were trying groups of a dozen now, till dusk and beyond, those with evidence against them and those with none mixed together as if their cases were all connected, so the guilt of one would splatter the rest and they all could be dragged down, like swimmers chained together. The only folk who got acquitted these days were those who denounced freely. Those who denounced anyone and everyone. Denounced their lovers, their parents, their children.

  The House of Purity was overflowing with bankers and clerks. Traitors against the Great Change, suspected of aristocratic plots, foreign conspiracies, royalist schemes, arrested by the Burners and awaiting trial, had to be squeezed in elsewhere. They’d made the Fortress of the Knights Herald into a prison, then the walled treasury buildings. Families traipsed the courtyards, begging to know where their loved ones were being held, gathered in the snow outside the windows with children on their shoulders for a glimpse of daddy.

  “I hear they’re setting up new courts,” said Tallow.

  “I guess Judge c
an’t pronounce the death sentences fast enough on her own.”

  “Aiming at one in each district of Adua.”

  “In each district?”

  “And each town in Midderland. Three in Keln. Two in Valbeck. They say they’ll have to set up more when Forest and his royalists are finally brought to justice. They’re appointing new magistrates to hear all the cases. I hear they’re paid by the conviction.”

  “Fuck,” whispered Vick.

  “New places of execution, too.”

  “I guess they’ll need them.”

  “They tried to use the bell tower on the old Spicers’ guildhall, but, well, it wasn’t high enough.”

  Vick winced. “Fuck.”

  “They didn’t all die right off. Had to have a Burner at the bottom with a pickaxe to finish the poor bastards—”

  “All right, Tallow, I get the picture.” It was coming to something when a child of the prison camps was finding life in the capital too dark for comfort.

  Her mind wandered back there. To the camps. To her own father, coughing blood in that cold winter. She’d tried to trade for a blanket, work for an empty sack, steal a little knuckle of coal, but it was never enough. Her mother, wasted away to nothing. So thin at the end you could see her bones. Her sister’s screams behind her in the mine as the floodwater rushed into the tunnel.

  Vick came to a stop in the snow, watching the Constables herding her latest batch of prisoners across the Square of Martyrs.

  “I’d hoped it might get better,” she muttered. “But it’s getting worse.”

  Tallow hopped from one foot to the other for warmth. “You could’ve said that any time since I met you.”

  “That’s your comfort? We’re not at the bottom yet? Judge is more powerful now than the king ever was. Even Harod the Great answered to Bayaz. Judge answers to no one but the fire. She won’t be happy till she’s burned it all to the ground.”

  “Not even then, I daresay.” Tallow glanced towards another sorry set of the accused being driven hunched through the snow. “But you might want to keep your voice down.”

  “This was meant to set us all free. Instead we’ve turned the whole Agriont into a prison.” Vick frowned at the names cut into the stones under her feet, half-seen through the slush. She wondered if Sibalt’s was there, somewhere. She remembered lying in his narrow bed, talking about how they’d change the world. She’d known they were dreams. But they’d been pretty dreams, at least. Was this the better world he’d died for? “We’ve made the whole city into a camp. The whole Union.”

  “You always say we should stand with the winners…”

  One of the prisoners broke from the line, chains on her ankles clanking, rag-wrapped hands clutching. Vick was ready to punch her. Almost did it. But all she wanted was to push something into Vick’s hands. A folded paper.

  “You’ve a kind face! Take this to my daughter, please.”

  “Come here,” grunted one of the Burners, grabbing her under the arm without malice, without gentleness. The way a shepherd grabs a sheep. “Sorry ’bout that, Inspector.”

  “Please!” the woman blubbed as he dragged her away.

  Vick knew she had nothing close to a kind face. A bag of chisels was how she’d always thought of what she saw in the mirror. She’d been given the letter, not Tallow or someone softer, because she looked like someone who got things done. She unfolded it, fingers cold and sluggish even in her gloves.

  “What does it say?” asked Tallow.

  There was no poetry to it. Scrawled on a scrap of candle-wrapper with a stub of charcoal from a dead fire. Just love, and best wishes, and keep going, and don’t forget me. She realised she’d no idea who to take it to. No idea who the woman had been. Could’ve been anyone. Could almost have been Vick herself. Except she had no one to write a letter to.

  “It says goodbye.” She crumpled the paper in her fist. “Get the prisoners where they’re going.” And she turned and strode off, back the way they’d come, boots crunching in her own footprints, already turning dirty white with new snow.

  Seemed the Great Change had been almost as tough on Styrian spies as on everyone else. The warren of gloomy cellars under the sign of the fish-woman reminded Vick more of the mines of Angland than ever. Not only was it underground but freezing, too, puddles of icy meltwater from the streets above gathered in the corners.

  There was no music. No dancers. Few patrons of any kind. The barman stood where he had on her last visit, the same magnificent array of glassware behind him, but a lot of the bottles were down to dribbles. Seemed a fine metaphor for where the Great Change had taken them, all in all. Same bottles. But empty.

  “Victarine dan Teufel graces my establishment for a second time,” said the barman, raising one orange brow at her.

  “No ‘dans’ any more, remember? Where’s your monkey?”

  “Off sick.”

  “Shame. Of the two of you, he was my favourite.”

  The barman grinned. “Most of my clientele would concur.”

  “Have you got any of that piss you poured me last time? What did you call it?”

  “Sworfene, and sadly no. Supply of late, what with the weather, and the politics, is something of a nightmare. If you can get stale bread from the end of the road you’re doing well. To get liquor in from Jacra requires a magician.” His hand skimmed across the bottles, then plucked one out. “Why don’t you…” And he slipped a glass in front of her and poured a shot. “Try this instead?”

  She grimaced as she tasted it. “Damn, that’s sweet.”

  “Sometimes we need challenge. Sometimes we need comfort.”

  “Do I look that bad?”

  “You look far better than most in Adua.”

  She drank again. “That bad. I don’t suppose our mutual friend in Talins, the woman with all the whispers, might be tempted to intercede in affairs on this side of the Circle Sea? Help put an end to this… chaos? Get the liquor flowing again?”

  The barman gave a sad smile. “I wouldn’t demean us both by making such a suggestion to our mutual friend. Her mistress, lest we forget, is far from the most open-handed of rulers at the best of times, and positively delights in chaos on this side of the Circle Sea. I hear the news makes her giggle daily over breakfast.”

  “Didn’t have the Serpent of Talins down as a giggler.”

  “No one did till now.”

  Vick pushed her empty glass at him. Like most drinks, it got better with time. “A little optimistic of me, I’ll admit. If not to say desperate.”

  He poured her another. “There is no place for either optimism or desperation in our business.”

  Vick raised her glass. “To pessimism and hard heads.”

  “I can drink to that.” And he slipped another glass onto the bar. “The Union, I fear, is beyond help. This Great Change is a fever that has to burn itself out. But you always struck me as a woman who’d save herself.” She stopped sipping to watch him over the rim of her glass. “If you decided Adua no longer held any charms…” He glanced up and down the vaulted cellar. “Which would be thoroughly understandable… I expect our mutual friend would still welcome you with open arms.”

  “Spring in Talins, eh?”

  “The weather alone would be worth the trip. The time comes…” And he swallowed his shot in one and slapped the empty glass down on the bar. “You have to get out.”

  She slowly nodded. Wouldn’t be the first time she’d got out. Saved herself in the camps, hadn’t she? And in Rostod, during the rebellion. And in Valbeck, during the uprising. Saved herself, even if she saved no one else.

  Truth was, she wouldn’t be missed. She’d made sure of it. Never stay in a place you can’t walk straight out of without a backward glance. Never own a thing you can’t leave behind. Never make a friend you can’t turn your back on. A life that leaves no marks. She thought about that, as if for the first time. The people she’d tricked, betrayed, left behind, and she wondered—is a life that leaves no marks a life at
all?

  She hadn’t come for a way out. Not really. She’d come to try one on and see how it fit.

  “Can’t say I’m not tempted.” She thought about that last look on her brother’s face, before they dragged him away. The last words Sibalt said, before he cut his own throat. “But the time comes…” She drained her glass and set it down. “You have to stand up.”

  “Where are you going?”

  She set a coin spinning on the counter and left without looking back. “To stand with the losers.”

  Better Than Carnage

  Orso woke to the clanging of Corporal Halder’s truncheon on the bars of his cellar. He much preferred the word “cellar” to “dungeon.” The place was designed for wine, after all, even if the purpose it was being put to now was, one had to admit, more than a bit dungeony.

  “Wake up, Your Majesty,” grunted Halder.

  Orso sighed, then flung back the rags he preferred to call blankets and swung his feet to the clammy floor.

  Bloody hell, it was cold down here. But then it was cold everywhere. He took perverse pleasure in tolerating the same conditions his least fortunate subjects must be enduring. He used to have such privilege and such guilt. He felt far lighter, carrying neither one.

  Hildi had been busy scrubbing his other shirt. In cold water, of course, since that was all that could be had. Now she was pegging it up to dry near the bars. The washing had frozen there a couple of times, cloth turned stiff as chilly card.

  “Get back from the door, girl,” said Halder, keys in his hand.

  Orso distracted him by ostentatiously stretching. “You know my mother searched for years to find a bride who’d meet my standards, but we never could light upon quite the right balance of outstanding beauty, impeccable breeding, piercing intellect, ethereal grace, subtle diplomacy and boundless patience.” He pressed one hand to his chest. “If only you’d presented yourself at the time, Corporal Halder, perhaps there’d be a royal heir or two already…”