The Wisdom of Crowds

by Joe Abercrombie

  Downside looked big when he was on your side. He looked a lot bigger on the other, with his scarred shield up, heavy mail from neck to knees and a steel cap on. A hard bastard to put down with a sword. Faster than Clover was, and stronger, and better armed. But it’s a man’s wits that set him apart from the beasts. Or so he told himself. Downside stepped forwards again and Clover slipped sideways, trying to keep the flat rock between them and hoping some opportunity might present itself. The fighting crouch he used to use didn’t feel too comfortable. Stiffer joints and a lot more belly than the last time he tried it, maybe.

  Calder’s standard-bearer stood a few strides off, a young lad with eyes big as cartwheels at all the battle and death, not to mention the duel that had broken out right under his nose.

  “You!” shouted Calder. “Kill him.”

  The standard-bearer numbly drew his sword. He looked at Clover. He looked at Calder. He looked at one of Calder’s guards, crawling through the grass with an arrow in his shoulder while the others shuffled to plug the gap. Then he let go of the standard and sprinted for the trees. Calder stared after him. A little wistful, almost, as his standard toppled over and slid down the hill. For twenty years, his authority had been iron-forged. Now it was cobwebs in a storm. All it takes is one lost fight. Clover could’ve told him that, but he was a little busy.

  He gasped as Downside rushed at him, managed to dodge the first whipping axe swing. Clover looked for an opening he could stab at but the big shield came at him fast, the rim crunching into his mouth, snapping his head up. He got his bearings just in time to see the axe flashing at him the other way and staggered clear, heavy blade hissing past and knocking a great chunk from the stone. Clover stumbled away, trying to shake the throbbing from his head, from his jaw, nearly blundered into one of Calder’s guards as he ran wild-eyed for the trees. Downside grinned over the bright rim of his shield. Clover stuck his tongue into the sore hole where a tooth used to be and spat blood.

  The truth was, a stubborn splinter of Jonas Steepfield was still buried in him. Buried so deep it could never be worked free. Buried so deep that it stung at him whenever he backed down, whenever he ran away, whenever he changed sides. And now it worked its way up to the surface. Worked its way up and came out in a long, low growl.

  “All right, fucker,” he snarled, fist tightening around the grip of his sword. “Let’s have you.”

  “Have me?” sneered Downside. “Can you even—”

  An arrow came looping from the trees and stuck into Downside’s shoulder. It didn’t stick deep. Just lodged in his mail. Probably didn’t even draw blood. But it was enough to make him turn his head, for an instant.

  In the end, the only thing a man can really do is pick his moment. Watch for the opening, and recognise it when it comes, and seize it.

  Clover feinted left, switched right, heard the grunt of surprise as Downside’s axe thudded into the turf where he might’ve been. Clover was already rolling across the flat stone, came up turning, edge of his sword flicking out and catching the back of Downside’s boot, below the hem of his mail coat.

  Downside hardly even noticed, growled as he turned, lifting his axe, stepping forwards. Then he lurched sideways with a surprised hoot, clutching the edge of the stone with his shield hand. Clover reckoned that was the tendon snapping at the back of his ankle.

  Downside hopped once on his good leg, giving a great spitty roar, swinging wildly. Clover whipped back, let the heavy blade sail pass his nose. As Downside spun, he stepped forwards, thrusting under the rim of the shield.

  Metal scraped as the point slid through Downside’s mail and into his belly. Clover might never draw the thing in anger, but he kept it sharp even so.

  Downside’s eyes went very wide. He tottered forwards as Clover pulled his sword back, his ruined ankle gave under him and he slumped onto one knee. He took a gasping breath. “I think—”

  “No one cares.” Clover took his head off with one whipping swing. It bounced once, then rolled down the slope, towards where Calder’s last guards were tossing away their weapons. The body dropped sideways, blood spilling out in a great wash that Jonas Steepfield would no doubt have taken great pleasure in.

  Calder raised his brows at it. “You can still swing that sword, then.”

  “I try not to advertise the fact.” Clover turned his head and spat blood again. “I find it makes folk want to try to kill you.”

  Rikke stood outside the gates of Carleon, rubbing gently at her red-stained hand and frowning down at Stour Nightfall’s broken corpse. No one else was paying it much mind. Nothing on it worth stealing, after all.

  She’d often heard it said that there’s no sweeter sight than dead enemies. Usually by folk who’d never really had an enemy, let alone killed one. The truth was she felt no satisfaction, seeing the Great Wolf back to the mud. But she felt no regret, either. It had needed doing. For her father. For her people. For herself. It had been long overdue.

  The battle was done with, more or less. A few men still fighting, in little knots against the walls, and a lot running, dotting the valley sides, but mostly Calder’s warriors were tossing their weapons down, holding their hands up, kneeling on the wheel-rutted, boot-smashed, arrow-prickled ground. Those that weren’t lying down already, of course, never to rise, of which there were many.

  She felt no satisfaction at the sight. But no regret, either.

  “There’s my girl!” Isern came swaggering through the carnage, blood streaking her face from a cut on her forehead but her missing tooth showing in a great smile even so.

  “Isern-i-Phail.” And Rikke hugged her tight, and kissed her on the cheek, and her sour sweat and chagga smell was a surprising comfort. “Knew you wouldn’t let me down.”

  Isern licked her fingers and rolled a chagga pellet. “Always said you’d come to something, didn’t I? Never once doubted it.”

  “You said how much you doubted it every morning, noon and night,” said Rikke, making a grab for the chagga.

  With marvellous dexterity, Isern flicked it into her mouth before Rikke’s fingers could close on it. “If your faults aren’t spread clearly before you, how can you improve on the bastards?”

  Men shuffled back as she passed, heads lowered. Men stood out of her way, respectful. Men cleared an open pathway for her, and stomped their boots, and rattled their swords, and tapped their axes against their shields till they sent up a great clatter of approval as she strode by. The same one they might’ve made for the Bloody-Nine, or Skarling Hoodless, or any of the great War Chiefs of the past. The truth was she could hardly believe the plan had worked. But it wouldn’t do to let anyone else know that. So she walked head high, shoulders back, the way she’d seen Savine dan Brock walk, as if she’d never known what doubt was, to the foot of a green tummock under the eaves of the forest where the dead were thickly scattered.

  Shivers nodded at her, his shield pecked and scored in the fighting and his hair unbound again and hanging across his face. “All good?”

  “All good.” No need for more between the two of them.

  Black Calder was at the top. Beside a flat rock half-buried in the turf where his standard lay fallen. The man who shaped the North for twenty years, on his knees, with Jonas Clover’s sword at his throat. You had to admire his calmness, in defeat. Rikke wondered if she’d have taken it so cool, or if she’d have schemed and blubbed and begged for her life. But then who cares a shit what the losers do? It’s the winners that change things.

  Clover gave her a nod. “I got him, Chief.”

  “That a fact?” Rikke nudged a big corpse lying in a slick of blood with her foot. “And did you get him, too?”

  “My man Downside. He always did suffer from too much fight and not enough judgement.”

  “So you’ve chosen a side, finally?”

  “I’ve always been on the same one,” said Clover. “Whichever wins.”

  All the while, Calder was frowning up at her. “You found my spy.”


  “Isern-i-Phail had her picked the moment she arrived.”

  “I can smell a lie,” said Isern, spear across her shoulders with her blue hand and her pale dangling over the haft. “And that bitch reeked.”

  “I thought it all felt too easy,” mused Calder, frowning off towards Carleon, across the corpse-scattered fields where even now the last of his army were being driven off or taken prisoner.

  “Aye, well,” said Rikke, “we’re all prone to believe what we want to. It was Shivers handed me the notion, to begin with.”

  Shivers gave a modest shrug. “No strength like looking weak.”

  “All I did was…” Rikke fluttered her fingers. “Sprinkle some glitter on it.”

  “It was well done.” Calder narrowed his eyes thoughtfully at her. “Tell me one thing, between us… does it really work? The Long Eye? Did you know how it would turn out all along?”

  She looked down at him, thumb inside the chain of emeralds she wore. “I know how it’ll turn out now. Years ago, my father swore to kill you if you crossed the Cusk again.”

  “I remember.” Calder nodded slowly, his eyes fixed far off. “It all has to be paid for, in the end.”

  “Took a while for me to keep his word,” said Rikke. “But we got there. Shivers?”

  “Aye,” he said, and drew his sword.

  Calder looked up as its shadow fell across him. “Been a long time.”

  “Aye,” said Shivers.

  “I remember when you saved my life. In the Circle at the Heroes.”

  “Aye.”

  “Quite the irony. That it should be you who ends it.”

  “Aye.”

  “Well. I can hardly say I don’t deserve it.”

  “Seems your father’s dream came true after all,” said Rikke. “The North united.” She put her hands behind her head and stretched up tall. “It just won’t be his blood that leads it. Scale’s back to the mud. Stour’s back to the mud. Bethod’s line ends with you.”

  “Ah.” For some reason, Calder had the ghost of a smile at the last. He leaned forwards and spoke so softly only she could hear. “So you don’t see everything.”

  The blade fell. There was a sharp crack, blood sprayed up in dark streaks and Calder flopped face down on the dirty grass.

  There was a long silence, after the great noise of the battle. Every eye fixed on the bubbling wound in the back of Black Calder’s head. Shivers stood frowning down in the midst of those staring faces, the sword that had been the Bloody-Nine’s in his fist, that dull, grey blade with the one silver letter dashed and speckled with blood.

  Then Scenn-i-Phail lifted high his hammer, which looked to have some hair stuck to the scarred head. “This was well done!” he roared.

  “Truly the girl is beloved o’ the moon!” said his brother Scofen, laughing and waving his axe.

  “Black Calder ruled the North.” Isern slapped a hard hand down on Rikke’s shoulder. “She who beat him should do the same. The children of Crummock-i-Phail stand with Black Rikke!”

  “And I!” roared the Nail, before Rikke could get a word in, stepping up out of the crowd, so spattered head to toe with blood it looked like he’d gone swimming in it. “I stand with Black Rikke!”

  “And I,” grunted Hardbread, clambering with some effort onto the little knoll. He gave a burp and thumped at his breastbone, peering down at Calder’s corpse. “Your father would’ve been proud.”

  Rikke blinked at them. Calder had stolen the name from Black Dow, that day on the Heroes. Seemed now she’d stolen it from him.

  “Black Rikke!” men were shouting all around, even some who’d been Calder’s men until the sword fell. They had to be someone else’s men now, after all. “Black Rikke!” All competing to shout it loudest, as though having a girl with a tattooed face in charge who used to shit herself in the streets of Uffrith was their fondest dream. “Black Rikke!” As though this had been what everyone wanted all along. What they’d expected.

  Shivers carefully wiped his sword with a rag, sunlight glinting on his metal eye. “Looks like you win,” he said.

  Rikke looked from that little hill across the churned-up battlefield, then down at Calder’s corpse. She felt no satisfaction in it.

  Well, maybe just a bit.

  PART IX

  “History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.”

  Karl Marx

  Ready for a Fight

  “Tight enough,” gasped Savine, fists clenched on the table, and she heard Freid grunt with effort as she knotted the laces.

  Someone had daubed the words We Will Burn the Past above the fireplace and taken an axe to the wallpaper, but as prison cells went, she supposed it could have been a great deal worse. A room in the palace where some minor visiting dignitary could have gently aged as they waited on His Majesty’s pleasure. One could almost have mistaken it for the dressing chamber of a lady of fashion. Except for the crooked bars bodged into the window frames and the sense of barely contained mortal terror.

  They had given her good food and clean linen. They had given her matching cribs in which Harod and Ardee snored, blissfully unaware of the danger they were in. They had supplied her with all the soaps and scents, powders and paints, wigs and dresses the most exacting socialite might need for a grand public appearance. They had even sent for her old maids Freid and Metello to help her prepare. It reminded Savine a little of happier times, before she was a Lady Governor, before she betrayed the king, before the Great Change came. Except that Lisbit was dead and Zuri was in prison.

  She winced at that thought. They tortured people suspected of hoarding flour. What might they do to someone accused of being a flesh-eating sorcerer in the service of the Prophet? Haroon and Rabik, too, who had followed her so faithfully. Had their loyalty landed them in fathoms of chain? It was insane. It was laughable. But in the current climate, the insane and laughable could quickly turn fatal.

  Savine closed her eyes and took a shuddering breath. She had charges of her own to answer. Some almost as insane and laughable as those against Zuri and her brothers. Others all too horribly true. She had to fight for herself first. If they found her guilty, she could help no one.

  “This one?” asked Metello, in her thick Styrian accent.

  She had a dress over one arm, a great swag of bright blue Suljuk silk with Osprian lace at the cuffs and embroidered flowers all around the hem. It had been made for an appearance at the theatre, she thought, but never worn. That colour had always seemed to be trying too hard.

  Savine waved it away. “By the Fates, no.”

  Judge hoped to swindle her with good treatment. To put her off guard with familiar luxuries. To coax her into appearing at the trial as her old self. The personification of the ruthless, exploitative, privileged elite that the Great Change had set out to destroy.

  She had even furnished Savine with jewels. Some excellent earrings and a very fine ruby necklace, no doubt taken as bribes from some ex-lord’s wife in return for a pardon that never came. Judge did not really do pardons, not even for rubies as fine as these. Savine put a finger under them and held them to the light, admiring their bloody sparkle. Then she slid the stand firmly away.

  Judge might very well be sending her to the Tower of Chains, but she was a damn fool if she thought Savine would be helping. “Let’s keep it very simple, ladies. Very clean and very humble. No jewels and no wig.” Metello gave an upset cluck, frowning at Savine’s own fuzz of clipped brown hair. “No silk and no—”

  There was a crash outside and Savine spun towards the door, took a lurching step for the children, one hand pressed to her churning stomach, the other reaching for the cribs.

  From a practical point of view, quite apart from the agony of producing them and the permanent damage they had done to her body, her babies were nothing but an almighty annoyance. Nipple-chewing, dung-leaking, sleep-killing monsters with no conversation at all. But she was even more terrified for them than for herself.

  Laughter be
yond the door. Another crash, then cheery voices burbling off into silence. Just the Burners, doing what Burners do. Savine forced the panic away. Forced her clutching hand down, then turned in surprise at a great sob. Freid stood with her face screwed up, shoulders shaking.

  “Whatever is it?” demanded Savine. If anyone should have been weeping, she rather thought she had the best claim. She had scarcely slept since they arrested her. It felt as if only the savagely laced corsetry was keeping her standing.

  “When all this happened… the Great Change, I mean…” Freid’s bottom lip trembled, then she blurted it out. “I thought it might be a good thing! It seemed to be, for a while, freedom and all, and folk so happy, but then…” She stared into the corner, eyes brimming. “But then… by the Fates, my lady, forgive me!”

  Savine’s first impulse was to slap her. She knew she would be lucky to see sunset and did not particularly want to spend the hours she had left soothing a wardrobe maid’s regrets. How she missed Zuri. She had never cried. Even when they dragged her away in a muzzle. But we must work with the tools we have, as Savine’s father had been so fond of saying. She forced down her anger and put a gentle hand on Freid’s shoulder.

  “There is nothing to forgive,” she said, with an effort. “Perhaps it could have been a good thing. Should have been. And I am not a lady any more. Just plain Citizeness. That is what I need people to see.”

  Freid sniffed back her tears and picked up the powder. “I’ll cover up your scar—”

  “No,” said Savine, looking at it in the mirror, running pink and crooked up her forehead and into her clipped hair. “Get the blusher. Bring it out a little. Let them see that I know what pain is. We never met Savine dan Glokta, terror of the salons, you understand? Have them put the Darling of the Slums on trial.”