The First Law Trilogy Boxed Set: The Blade Itself, Before They Are Hanged, Last Argument of Kings

by Joe Abercrombie

  ‘Drop it,’ hissed the red-haired woman, glaring at him through narrow eyes.

  ‘I will not!’ said Jezal, tremendously offended that she might think he was on the side of these villains.

  ‘Erm . . .’ said Quai.

  ‘Aaargh,’ groaned Ninefingers, clutching up a bloody handful of carpet and dragging it towards him, making the table lurch across the floor.

  A third Practical crept through the door, around the red-haired woman, a heavy mace in his gloved fist. An unpleasant-looking weapon. Jezal could not help picturing the effect it might have on his skull, if swung in anger. He fingered the hilt of his sword uncertainly, feeling in terrible need of someone to tell him what to do.

  ‘Coming with us,’ said the woman again, as her two friends advanced slowly into the room.

  ‘Oh dear,’ murmured Longfoot, taking cover behind the table.

  Then the door to the bathroom banged against the wall. Bayaz stood there, entirely naked, dripping with soapy water. His slow gaze took in first Ferro, scowling with her knife out, then Longfoot hiding behind the table, Jezal with sword drawn, Quai standing with his mouth open, Ninefingers sprawled out in a bloody ruin, and finally the three black masked figures, weapons at the ready.

  There was a pregnant pause.

  ‘What the fuck is this?’ he roared, striding into the centre of the room, water dripping from his beard, down through the grizzled white hairs on his chest, off his slapping fruits. It was a strange sight to see. A naked old man confronting three armed Practicals of the Inquisition. Ridiculous, and yet no one was laughing. There was something strangely terrifying about him, even without his clothes and running with wet. It was the Practicals who shifted backwards, confused, scared even.

  ‘You’re coming with us,’ the woman repeated, though a certain doubt seemed to have entered her voice. One of her companions stepped warily toward Bayaz.

  Jezal felt a strange sensation in his stomach. A tugging, a sucking, an empty, sick feeling. It was like being back on the bridge, in the shadow of the Maker’s House. Only worse. The wizard’s face had turned terribly hard. ‘My patience is at an end.’

  Like a bottle dropped from a great height, the nearest Practical burst apart. There was no thunderclap, only a gentle squelching. One moment he was moving toward the old man, sword raised, entirely whole. The next he was a thousand fragments. Some unknown part of him thudded wetly against the plaster next to Jezal’s head. His sword dropped and rattled on the boards.

  ‘You were saying?’ growled the First of the Magi.

  Jezal’s knees trembled. His mouth gaped. He felt faint, and queasy, and awfully hollow inside. There were spots of blood across his face, but he dared not move to wipe them off. He stared at the naked old man, unable to believe his eyes. It seemed that he had watched a well-meaning old buffoon change in an instant into a brutal murderer, and without the slightest grain of hesitation.

  The red-haired woman stood there a moment, spattered with blood and flecks of meat and bone, eyes wide as two dinner plates, then started to shuffle slowly backwards towards the door. The other one followed her, almost tripping over Ninefingers’ foot in his haste to get away. Everyone else stayed motionless as statues. Jezal heard quick footsteps in the corridor outside as the two Practicals ran for their lives. He almost envied them. They, it seemed, would escape. He was trapped in this nightmare.

  ‘We must leave, now!’ barked Bayaz, wincing as if he was in pain, ‘just as soon as I have my trousers on. Help him, Longfoot!’ he shouted over his shoulder. For once, the Navigator was lost for words. He blinked, then got up from behind the table and bent down over the unconscious Northman, ripped off a strip of his tattered shirt to use as a bandage. He paused, frowning, as though unsure where to begin.

  Jezal swallowed. His sword was still in his hand, but he seemed to lack the strength to put it away. Bits of the unfortunate Practical were scattered around the room, stuck to the walls, the ceiling, the people. Jezal had never seen a man die before, let alone in so hideous and unnatural a fashion. He supposed he should have been horrified, but instead he felt only an overpowering sense of relief. His worries seemed now rather petty things.

  He, at least, was still alive.

  The Tools we Have

  Glokta stood in the narrow hallway, leaning on his cane and waiting. On the other side of the door, he could hear raised voices.

  ‘I said, no visitors!’

  He sighed to himself. He had many better things to do than to stand around here on his aching leg, but he had given his word and he meant to keep it. A pokey, unremarkable hallway in a pokey, unremarkable house among many hundreds of others the same. The whole district was recently built, terraces of houses in the new fashion: half-timbered, three stories, good perhaps for a family and a couple of servants. Hundreds of houses, one very much like another. Houses for the gentlefolk. The new rich. Jumped-up commoners, Sult would probably have called them. Bankers, merchants, artisans, shop keepers, clerks. Perhaps the odd townhouse of some successful gentleman farmer, like this one here.

  The voices had stopped now. Glokta heard movement, some clinking of glass, then the door opened a crack and the maid peered out. An ill-favoured girl with big, watery eyes. She looked scared and guilty. Still, I am used to that. Everyone seems scared and guilty around the Inquisition.

  ‘She’ll see you now,’ the girl mumbled. Glokta nodded and shuffled past her into the room beyond.

  He had some hazy memories of staying with West’s family for a week or two one summer, up in Angland, a dozen years ago perhaps, although it seemed more like a hundred. He remembered fencing with West in the courtyard of their house, of being watched every day by a dark-haired girl with a serious face. He remembered meeting a young woman in the park not long ago, who had asked him how he was. He had been in a lot of pain at the time, scarcely seeing straight, and her face was a blur in his memory. So it was that Glokta was not sure what to expect, but he certainly had not expected the bruises. He was a touch shocked, for a moment. Though I hide it well.

  Dark, purple and brown and yellow, under her left eye, the lower lid well swollen. Round the corner of her mouth too, the lip split and scabbed over. Glokta knew a lot about bruises, few men more. And I hardly think she got these by accident. She was punched in the face, by someone who meant it. He looked at those ugly marks, and he thought about his old friend Collem West, crying in his dining room and begging for help, and he put the two together.

  Interesting.

  She sat there, all the while, looking back at him with her chin high, the side of her face with the worst bruises turned towards him, as though challenging him to say something. She is not much like to her brother. Not much like at all. I don’t think she’ll be bursting into tears in my dining room, or anywhere else.

  ‘What can I do for you, Inquisitor?’ she asked him coldly. He detected the very slightest slurring of the word Inquisitor. She has been drinking . . . though she hides it well. Not enough to make her stupid. Glokta pursed his lips. For some reason he had the feeling that he needed to watch his step.

  ‘I’m not here in a professional capacity. Your brother asked me to—’

  She cut him off rudely. ‘Did he? Really? Here to make sure I don’t fuck the wrong man, are you?’ Glokta waited for a moment, allowing that to sink in, then he began to chuckle softly to himself. Oh, that’s grand! I begin to quite like her! ‘Something funny?’ she snapped.

  ‘Pardon me,’ said Glokta, wiping his running eye with a finger, ‘but I spent two years in the Emperor’s prisons. I daresay, if I had known I’d be there half that long at the start, I would have made a more concerted effort to kill myself. Seven hundred days, give or take, in the darkness. As close to hell, I would have thought, as a living man can go. My point is this – if you mean to upset me you’ll need more than harsh language.’

  Glokta treated her to his most revolting, toothless, crazy smile. There were few people indeed who could stomach that for long, but
she did not look away for an instant. Soon, in fact, she was smiling back at him. A lop-sided grin of her own, and one which he found oddly disarming. A different tack, perhaps.

  ‘The fact is, your brother asked me to look after your welfare while he is away. As far as I’m concerned you can fuck whomever you please, though my general observation has been that, as far as the reputations of young women are concerned, the less fucking the better. The reverse is true for young men of course. Hardly fair, but then life is unfair in so many ways, this one hardly seems worth commenting on.’

  ‘Huh. You’re right there.’

  ‘Good,’ said Glokta, ‘so we understand each other then. I see that you hurt your face.’

  She shrugged. ‘I fell. I’m a clumsy fool.’

  ‘I know how you feel. I’m such a fool I knocked half my teeth out and hacked my leg to useless pulp. Look at me now, a cripple. It’s amazing where a little foolishness can take you, if it goes unchecked. We clumsy types should stick together, don’t you think?’

  She looked at him thoughtfully for a moment, stroking the bruises on her jaw. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I suppose we should.’

  Goyle’s Practical, Vitari, was sprawled on a chair opposite Glokta, just outside the huge dark doors to the Arch Lector’s office. She was slumped into it, poured onto it, draped over it like a wet cloth, long limbs dangling, head resting on the back. Her eyes twitched lazily around the room from time to time under heavy lids, sometimes coming to rest on Glokta himself for insultingly long periods. She never turned her head though, or indeed moved a muscle, as though the effort might be too painful.

  Which, indeed, it probably would be.

  Plainly, she had been involved in a most violent melee, hand to hand. Above her black collar, her neck was a mass of mottled bruises. There were more around her black mask, a lot more, and a long cut across her forehead. One of her drooping hands was heavily bandaged, the knuckles of the other were scratched and scabbed over. She’s taken more than a couple of knocks. Fighting hard, against someone who meant business.

  The tiny bell jumped and tinkled. ‘Inquisitor Glokta,’ said the secretary, as he hurried out from behind his desk to open the door, ‘his Eminence will see you now.’

  Glokta sighed, grunted and heaved on his cane as he got to his feet. ‘Good luck,’ said the woman as he limped past.

  ‘What?’

  She gave a barely perceptible nod towards the Arch Lector’s office. ‘He’s in a hell of a mood today.’

  As the door opened, Sult’s voice washed out into the anteroom, changing from a muffled murmuring into an all-out scream. The secretary jerked back from the gap as if slapped in the face.

  ‘Twenty Practicals!’ shrieked the Arch Lector, from beyond the archway. ‘Twenty! We should have been questioning that bitch now, instead of sitting here, licking our wounds! How many Practicals?’

  ‘Twenty, Arch Lec—’

  ‘Twenty! Damn it!’ Glokta took a deep breath and insinuated himself through the door. ‘And how many dead?’ The Arch Lector was striding briskly up and down the tiled floor of his huge circular office, waving his long arms in the air. He was dressed all in white, as spotless as ever. Though I fancy a hair is out of place, maybe even two. He must truly be in a fury. ‘How many?’

  ‘Seven,’ mumbled Superior Goyle, hunched into his chair.

  ‘A third of them! A third! How many injured?’

  ‘Eight.’

  ‘Most of the rest! Against how many?’

  ‘In all, there were six—’

  ‘Really?’ The Arch Lector thumped his fists on the table, leaning down over the shrinking Superior. ‘I heard two. Two!’ he screamed, pacing once more round and round the table, ‘and both of them savages! Two I heard! A white one and a black one, and the black one a woman! A woman!’ He kicked savagely at the chair next to Goyle and it wobbled back and forth on its feet. ‘And what’s worse, there were countless witnesses to this disgrace! Did I not say discreet? What part of the word discreet is beyond your comprehension, Goyle?’

  ‘But Arch Lector, circumstances cannot—’

  ‘Cannot?’ Sult’s screech rose an entire octave higher. ‘Cannot? How dare you give me cannot, Goyle? Discreet I asked for, and you gave me bloody slaughter across half the Agriont, and failed into the bargain! We look like fools! Far worse, we look like weak fools! My enemies on the Closed Council will waste no time in turning this farce to their advantage. Marovia’s already stirring trouble, the old windbag, whining about liberty and tighter reins and all the rest of it! Damn lawyers! They had their way, we’d get nothing done! And you’re making it happen, Goyle! I’m stalling, and I’m saying sorry, and I’m trying to put things in the best light, but a turd’s a turd, whatever light it’s in! Do you have any notion of the damage you’ve inflicted? Of the months of hard work you’ve undone?’

  ‘But, Arch Lector, have they not now left the—’

  ‘They’ll be back, you cretin! He did not go to all this trouble simply to leave, dolt! Yes they’ve gone, idiot, and they’ve taken the answers with them! Who they are, what they want, who is behind them! Left? Left? Damn you, Goyle!’

  ‘I am wretched, your Eminence.’

  ‘You are less than wretched!’

  ‘I cannot but apologise.’

  ‘You’re lucky you’re not apologising over a slow fire!’ Sult sneered his disgust. ‘Now get out of my sight!’

  Goyle flashed a look of the most profound hatred at Glokta as he cringed his way out of the room. Goodbye, Superior Goyle, goodbye. The Arch Lector’s fury could not fall upon a more deserving candidate. Glokta could not suppress the tiniest of smiles as he watched him go.

  ‘Something amusing you?’ Sult’s voice was ice as he held out his white gloved hand, purple stone flashing on his finger.

  Glokta bent to kiss it. ‘Of course not, your Eminence.’

  ‘Good, because you’ve nothing to be amused about, I can tell you! Keys?’ he sneered. ‘Stories? Scrolls? What could have possessed me to listen to your drivel?’

  ‘I know, Arch Lector, I apologise.’ Glokta edged humbly into the chair that Goyle had so recently vacated.

  ‘You apologise, do you? Everyone apologises! Some good that does me! Fewer apologies and more successes is what I need! And to think, I had such high hopes for you! Still, I suppose we must work with the tools we have.’

  Meaning? But Glokta said nothing.

  ‘We have problems. Very serious problems, in the South.’

  ‘The South, Arch Lector?’

  ‘Dagoska. The situation there is grave. Gurkish troops are flocking to the peninsula. They already outnumber our garrison by ten to one, and all our strength is committed in the North. Three regiments of the King’s Own remain in Adua, but with the peasants getting out of hand across half of Midderland, they cannot be spared. Superior Davoust was keeping me informed in weekly letters. He was my eyes, Glokta, do you understand? He suspected that there was a conspiracy afoot within the city. A conspiracy intending to deliver Dagoska into the hands of the Gurkish. Three weeks ago the letters stopped, and yesterday I learned that Davoust has disappeared. Disappeared! A Superior of the Inquisition! Vanished into thin air! I am blind, Glokta. I am fumbling in the dark at a most crucial time! I need someone there that I can trust, do you understand?’

  Glokta’s heart was thumping. ‘Me?’

  ‘Oh you’re learning,’ sneered Sult. ‘You are the new Superior of Dagoska.’

  ‘Me?’

  ‘Many congratulations, but forgive me if we leave the feast until a quieter moment! You, Glokta, you!’ The Arch Lector leaned down over him. ‘Go to Dagoska and dig. Find out what happened to Davoust. Weed the garden down there. Root out everything disloyal. Everything and anyone. Light a fire under them! I need to know what’s going on, if you have to toast the Lord Governor until he drips gravy!’

  Glokta swallowed. ‘Toast the Lord Governor?’

  ‘Is there an echo in here?’ snarled Sult, looming
even lower. ‘Sniff out the rot, and cut it away! Hack it off! Burn it out! All of it, wherever it is! Take charge of the city’s defences yourself if you must. You were a soldier!’ He reached out and slid a single sheet of parchment across the table top. ‘This is the King’s writ, signed by all twelve chairs on the Closed Council. All twelve. I sweated blood to get it. Within the city of Dagoska, you will have full powers.’

  Glokta stared down at the document. A simple sheet of cream-coloured paper, black writing, a huge red seal at the bottom. We, the undersigned, confer upon His Majesty’s faithful servant, Superior Sand dan Glokta, our full powers and authority . . . Several blocks of neat writing, and below, two columns of names. Crabby blotches, flowing swirls, near illegible scrawls. Hoff, Sult, Marovia, Varuz, Halleck, Burr, Torlichorm, and all the rest. Powerful names. Glokta felt faint as he picked up the document in his two trembling hands. It seemed heavy.

  ‘Don’t let it go to your head! You still have to tread carefully. We can stand no more embarrassments, but the Gurkish must be kept out at all costs, at least until this business in Angland is settled. At all costs, do you understand?’

  I understand. A posting to a city surrounded by enemies and riddled with traitors, where one Superior has already mysteriously disappeared. Closer to a knife in the back than a promotion, but we must work with the tools we have. ‘I understand, Arch Lector.’

  ‘Good. Keep me well informed. I want to be swamped by your letters.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘You have two Practicals, correct?’

  ‘Yes, your Eminence, Frost and Severard, both very—’

  ‘Not nearly enough! You won’t be able to trust anyone down there, not even the Inquisition.’ Sult seemed to think about that for a moment. ‘Especially the Inquisition. I have picked out a half dozen others whose skills are proven, including Practical Vitari.’