The Wisdom of Crowds

by Joe Abercrombie

  “We’re staying,” she said to Shivers.

  “We’re staying,” Shivers pronounced to the room.

  “But we got none o’ the cards!” someone called. Meaning, Rikke gathered, that she’d thrown ’em all away. “The Nail’s gone, and Hardbread’s gone, and Isern-i-Phail’s gone—”

  “Calder’s got the numbers,” growled a fellow with a gravelly voice but a fearful pallor. “Might have the numbers ten to one.”

  “He might have the numbers,” said Rikke, “but we’ve got the walls.”

  “But if those Crinna bastards get inside ’em there’ll be no mercy—”

  “Hoping for mercy from your enemies is a piss-weak way to start a fight!” She jumped up from Skarling’s Chair and sneered at ’em down her nose. “I shouldn’t have to explain that to you lot. You’re meant to make ’em hope for mercy from you! Look at you, clucking and fussing while the women can’t wait to fight!” And she waved a hand at Corleth, who looked, in fact, like she had some sizeable doubts about the whole notion. “Tell you what, Corleth, bring your granny up here to the hall, where it’s safe. Safer, anyway!” And she hacked out a laugh. A bit of fearlessness was what they needed to see from her now. Maybe it’d be catching.

  Corleth stared. “Reckon she’d be happier in her house—”

  “Better sad and alive, though. Shivers’ll help you.” Rikke was already strolling over to Stour’s cage. “And we’ve still got a card or two left to play.” There sat the used-to-be terror of the North, his eyes gleaming in the shadows, one limp leg hanging through the bars so his toes near brushed the stone.

  “Your daddy loves you, eh?” she sang. “Ain’t a thing he wouldn’t give for you. Even Carleon.”

  That pallid warrior’s colour had only got worse. “Maybe Black Calder’ll make a deal. But d’you really think he’ll stick to it once you give this bastard over?”

  Stour put a thin hand on the bars and pulled himself into the light, making the chain creak. First time she’d seen that sharp-toothed, wet-eyed smile in a while and it gave her a most unpleasant feeling to add to her nerves. Folk are rarely made better by suffering, after all. Once he got free of that cage, chances were he’d be a worse terror than ever. “You should run,” he whispered. “You should run now, and never stop.”

  Rikke felt a shiver through her shoulders, but she turned it into a careless shrug. “I’m minded to stay. We’re all back to the mud one way or another. Only a question of how. And when. Far as that goes…” And she grinned as she tapped at her cheek, where the runes were. “Maybe I know something you don’t.”

  Horror on Horror

  “Finally, you show yourself,” Clover grunted at the sun, “you coy bastard.”

  It was good to feel its warmth on his face, finally. Like an old friend, much missed. Like Wonderful, in that regard. He couldn’t help wincing at the thought. She wouldn’t be back. His knife had made sure of that. As for the sun, it had turned up too late to help much.

  A couple of weeks of marching and Black Calder’s carefully stitched-together host was coming apart at the seams. Men sick. Men hungry. Men frozen and frostbitten. Men sleepless and exhausted. Men so filth-caked they looked like devils, white eyes staring haunted from dirt-grey faces. Plenty more chosen to turn their backs on this boggy nightmare and run, in spite of the deserters strung from trees by the road and carved with the bloody cross, flyblown guts dangling. Scouts stared into their fires rather than at the far hills. Carls fretted more on warmth than weapons. The only enemy on anyone’s mind was the mud, against whom no victory could be won, a great trail of discarded gear, mired wagons, dead horses, not to mention dead men left abandoned across the boot-mashed country behind them.

  Not far from the jealously guarded patch of grass on which Clover and his people had got a lick of fire going, a column cursed through the swampy morass in the valley’s bottom, spears wobbling at all angles like the prickles of a hedgehog, a filthy standard slumping from a filthy pole. There’d been a road under that slop once, Clover thought, a thing now dimly remembered, a fantastical story once heard, like dry boots, warmth and unchafed fruits.

  “I’m starting to think…” murmured Flick as he added a couple of damp sticks to the fire with wincing care, “that war ain’t half the fun it’s made out to be.”

  “It’s worth all the effort,” grunted Downside, “when you get a good battle.”

  “Good… battle.” Sholla held her hands so close to the flames it was only the stubborn damp in their rag-wrappings stopped ’em catching fire. “Not sure those two words belong next to one another.”

  “A bit like saying it’s worth the weeks of slow death to enjoy an hour or two’s furious murder.” Clover tried to pull his bedraggled wolfskin collar up higher, but there was no hiding from the keen wind knifing down the valley sides, still with the odd patch of melting snow splattered on ’em.

  “Talking o’ furious murder…” Flick stared wide-eyed the way they’d come, a great wagon grinding towards them, men backing horrified out of its way. “Here comes Stand-i’-the-Barrows.”

  Clover had expected some raven-haired, brooding giant, like Stranger-Come-Knocking had been. But the new Chief of a Hundred Tribes was a colourless man, with whirls of grey scar cut into his hollow cheeks, thick veins showing in the skull-like rings under his eyes in which you almost thought you could see the blood pulse.

  He sat swaying in the wagon’s seat as its wheels ground through the rutted mud, calm and easy as a farmer on his turnip cart. Trouble was, his cargo wasn’t turnips but bones. Heaps of ’em, boiled bare, white and yellow. The four horses that drew it were covered head to hoof in bones, made devil-steeds, their eyes showing wild through split horse skulls, bones dangling from their tattered manes, woven into their tails. The man himself had tiny bones stitched to his armour in strange designs. Finger bones. Children’s finger bones, maybe.

  “Bones is the theme, I reckon,” muttered Sholla.

  “One to which he has committed,” said Flick, wider-eyed than ever.

  A wretched group were dragged after, chained to the wagon’s seat by collars around their necks. Boys and girls, men and women, half-naked and spattered with filth to their hair, beaten and bloody, stumbling and slipping. They sent up a miserable music of moans to which the clunking of the wagon’s soiled axles was the percussion.

  “Will you look at this fucking pantomime,” muttered Clover, as if anyone could’ve looked away. He was a hard man to disgust, but this spectacle had managed it.

  A crowd of spiked and scarred and war-painted savages trotted behind, with their jagged weapons and their strange standards and their pierced faces, eyes rolling in ecstasy at the thought of the blood to be spilled. There were dogs with them, great dogs straining at iron-toothed leads, cruel dogs treated cruelly, big as wolves and far meaner, teeth filed to points, snarling and snapping at whoever was fool enough to stray near.

  Carls and Thralls scrambled from the path of this visitation from hell—

  or beyond the Crinna, which was about the same thing—with various expressions of grim hate, shock, fear, outrage and disgust.

  Downside noisily hawked up phlegm and spat roughly in the savages’ direction. “It’s arseholes like this give the North a bad name.”

  “For once we agree,” said Sholla.

  Stand-i’-the-Barrows reined in his bone-covered horses, not moved one bit by the disgust of his supposed allies, and Clover saw Black Calder nudge his own black mount up beside the wagon. You expected a jagged howl to rip from that ghost-pale corpse face. It was almost worse to hear an ordinary sort of voice, saying ordinary sorts of things.

  “Black Calder, my friend. Good to see the sun. It may dry things up.”

  “We can hope,” said Calder, voice a little tight. “The scouts are looking down on Carleon, just over those hills.” He squinted up at the clouds shifting. “Reckon there’ll be a battle tomorrow.”

  “Lovely.” Stand-i’-the-Barrows’ colourless eyes we
re fixed on the horizon. “I still have empty wagons and Bayaz told me you would help me fill them. Should we stop for dinner soon?” He turned around to talk to one of his slaves. “What do we have for dinner?”

  Her split lips moved. She whispered something.

  Stand-i’-the-Barrows caught her chain from the bunch and dragged her towards him so sharply, the corner of the cart dug into her shoulder and she was knocked down in the mud. He wound the chain around his fist, hauling her bruised face up towards his, her bare toes scraping at the ground. “Did you not hear me? I asked what’s for dinner.”

  She had her fingers squeezed into her collar, skin all white around it from the pressure. “Mutton,” she gasped out.

  Stand-i’-the-Barrows let her drop and she knelt in the mud, spitting and gasping. “I like mutton. We will have a nice gravy with it, too.” He smacked his lips. “I insist always on a good gravy.”

  “It makes the meat,” muttered Calder, watching the girl scramble back to the rest of the slaves.

  “Do you like mutton, Black Calder? Will you join me for mutton and gravy later?”

  “Other business, sadly. Have to get the men ready.”

  “You’re all work! A man must make time for fun. But still.” Stand-i’-the-

  Barrows laughed a high, good-humoured laugh. “More mutton for me!” And he snapped his reins, and sent his wagon o’ nightmares rattling on.

  “Y’ever feel,” murmured Flick as he watched the slaves dragged after, bouncing off each other, clutching at their collars, sending up a chorus of sobs, “that you’re on the wrong side o’ the question?”

  “Increasingly.” Clover scratched gently at his scar. “Whichever side I pick.”

  “I mean…” Flick was looking down at himself, patting his chest as if picturing a costume like Stand-i’-the-Barrows wore. “Why cover yourself with bones?”

  “’Cause being feared is a heady brew,” muttered Downside, who was bringing out his whetstone for his favourite hobby of sharpening his axe. “Men get drunk on it.”

  “First fear’s their weapon.” Clover remembered winning a few fights before they began, using just a hard stare and the weight of his name. “Then it becomes their shield. Only thing that’ll stop their enemies trying to kill ’em. Only thing that’ll stop their friends trying to kill ’em. They get scared o’ not being feared enough, so they pile horror on horror. Turn ’emselves into monsters. And since memory tends to make the past look bigger, today’s bastards are always hunting for ways to out-bastard the bastards o’ yesteryear.”

  “It’s sort of… an atrocity contest,” mused Sholla, tapping her lip with one finger as she watched Downside grinding at his axe-blade.

  “Aye,” said Clover, sighing, “and the winner gets the same prize as the losers. An early grave.”

  “Enough to make you miss the Bloody-Nine. He might’ve killed more men than winter, but he never made some fucking travelling show out of it.”

  “The sad truth is, men love to follow a man other men fear,” said Clover. “Makes them feel fearsome, too. We tell the odd fond story of the good men. The straight edges. Your Rudd Threetrees, your Dogmen. But it’s the butchers men love to sing of. The burners and the blood-spillers. Your Cracknut Whirruns and your Black Dows. Your Bloody-Nines. Men don’t dream of doing the right thing, but of ripping what they want from the world with their strength and their will.”

  “And that’s what we’ll do tomorrow!” Downside gave his axe one last lick with the stone and held it up to the light to admire its edge. “Something to look forward to, eh?”

  Clover watched him, grinning in the sunlight at the idea of mayhem. By the dead, had he once been that way?

  “Why hasn’t she run?” he muttered, frowning towards the hills. He thought of Rikke, perched in Skarling’s Chair with that knowing smile. That big black eye with the runes around it, the pupil yawning like a pit full of secrets. “What’s she seen, with that Long Eye of hers?”

  He gave a shiver. A cloud had come across the sun again and cast the muddy valley into shadow.

  The Dragon’s Hoard

  It was cold, but the lethal sting was off the air. The snow was melting fast, chill water dripping from the eaves, filthy tracks of stomped-up slush down the pavements, dirty slop gurgling in the gutters. The queues were already long outside the bakery and the coal merchant, bundled-up Citizens ready to fight to the death for whatever had leaked into the city overnight. At the street corner a district crier cheerfully called out the names of yesterday’s denounced. Most likely he’d be at it a while.

  “They found the manager, then?” Tallow gave a long sniff as he looked up at the bank. Before the Great Change, Valint and Balk had towered over every scrap of business done in the Union, an untouchable colossus. Now the marble skin had been stripped from the pillars of its headquarters to show the cheap bricks beneath, the word Usurers slopped in red paint a thousand thousand times, all over the ruined façade.

  The banking hall had been picked clean. Chill and empty but for broken furniture, torn papers, two or three dozen frowning Constables and dust. Commissioner Pike stood gazing up at the giant vault door, its brass wheel, its two tiny keyholes, no more than a few bright scratches on its black surface for all the efforts of the People’s Inspectorate to get inside.

  “You found the manager, then?” asked Vick.

  Pike glanced over as she strode up. “Thanks to your efforts, in fact. Once that cellar in the Three Farms was shut down there was no one to bring him food. An old woman heard him singing and alerted the authorities.”

  “Singing?”

  “He had bricked himself into a secret space between two slum tenements owned by the bank. He had been hiding there for weeks.” Almost as uncomfortable as having Bremer dan Gorst wedged into her tiny apartment, she imagined. “He appears to have gone quite mad.”

  Vick resisted the urge to ask who hadn’t.

  “But he did have this.” Pike held up a long steel key and offered her another. The one the senior over-clerk for loans had given her the day she broke into the bank with an unloaded cannon. “Perhaps you might help me do the honours?”

  She looked up at the towering door, feeling the need for something more momentous than the turning of a little rod of metal. But that’s how locks open. She slid the key into one of the keyholes and looked across at Pike as he did the same.

  “On three,” she said, “I suppose.”

  “Whyever not? One, two, three.” They turned the keys together with a gentle click. “Constable?”

  The biggest man to hand gripped the wheel, dipped his shoulder and began to turn it. There was a whirring of well-oiled gears, then an answering clatter, faint, from within, and the door began to edge smoothly open.

  Vick had never been that interested in money. But even she couldn’t help a shiver at the thought of what might be beyond that mighty thickness of steel. Her imagination spun out heaps of gleaming coins, chests of gemstones, jewelled swords, ivory drinking horns. Incense and pearls, silks and resins, too, why not? Sculpted relics of the Old Empire, lost works by Aropella, deeds to whole countries, the Master Maker’s private diaries. The plunder of a barbarian army and the profits of a city of merchant princes combined.

  Once the gap was wide enough to slip through it became an effort not to start forward. But Pike waited, with epic patience, as the vast weight of steel inched towards them, and past, and the vault of the Adua headquarters of Valint and Balk finally stood open.

  It wasn’t that big. A room slightly wider than the great door itself, lined floor to ceiling with shelves. And on the shelves, as Vick stepped after Pike, through the vast doorway and into the heavy silence beyond, eyes gradually adjusting to the gloom…

  Nothing.

  It was entirely bare.

  Vick had faced some disappointments, but she wasn’t sure she’d ever experienced so intense an anticlimax.

  “They moved the money long ago,” murmured Pike.

  Vick tou
ched a fingertip to one of the shelves and drew it along, leaving a neat trail through a light layer of dust. Sealed up in here, it might’ve taken years to form. Decades. “If there was ever any here.”

  “The power of Valint and Balk comes down to an empty vault.” Pike sounded almost impressed. “Just promises, just lies, just…”

  “Nothing,” said Vick.

  Pike had started making a sort of gurgling wheeze. At first, she thought he might be choking. She was on the point of calling for help when she realised it was laughter. Of all the unexpected things she had seen since the Great Change, its chief instigator laughing his arse out in Valint and Balk’s empty vault might’ve been the strangest.

  He straightened, with a final shiver of mirth, dabbing his running eyes. “Ah, dear me. A vast fortune in gold would certainly have been helpful.”

  “It usually is,” said Vick, her mind on the bribes she’d already arranged with Princess Cathil’s jewels, and the ones she still had to engineer.

  “But… all this really changes is the timing,” Pike was saying. “How is your conspiracy coming along, by the way?”

  For a giddy moment, it didn’t quite register. Vick stood there with the puzzled frown of someone who sees blood squirting but hasn’t yet realised it’s their own throat that’s slit.

  Her first instinct, once she picked back through his words and gathered their meaning, was to run. Her second to fight. A habit from the camps. Her eyes darted to the vault door. Her fingers twitched to her weapons. But the place was crawling with Constables. She wouldn’t make it five strides. And with that certainty came an odd calm. She’d always expected to be found out. Every moment she wasn’t had been coming as a surprise. She closed her eyes and took a breath.

  Would they kill her here, on the spot, her body found floating by the docks as her old master Arch Lector Glokta had been so fond of saying? Would they drag her off to the House of Purity for questioning, then the Court of the People for judgement, then the Tower of Chains for the long drop? Or would Pike make an exception in her case, for irony’s sake, and send her back to the camps in Angland?