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

by Joe Abercrombie

  ‘That’s true. I’m his other son.’

  ‘But he was hardly more ’n a boy . . .’ Dogman paused, counting the winters in his head. ‘Shit. It’s that long ago?’

  ‘That long ago.’

  ‘You’ve grown some.’

  ‘That’s what boys do.’

  ‘You got a name now?’

  ‘Shivers, they call me.’

  ‘How come?’

  He grinned. ‘Because my enemies shiver with fear when they face me.’

  ‘That so?’

  ‘Not entirely.’ He sighed. ‘Might as well know now. First time I went out raiding, I got drunk and fell in the river having a piss. Current sucked my trousers off and dumped me half a mile downstream. I got back to the camp shivering worse than anyone had ever seen, fruits sucked right up into my belly and everything.’ He scratched at his face. ‘Bloody embarrassment all round. Made up for it in the fighting, though.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘I got some blood on my fingers, over the years. Not compared to you, I daresay, but enough for men to follow me.’

  ‘That so? How many?’

  ‘Two score Carls, or thereabouts. They’re not far away, but don’t get nervous. Some o’ my father’s people, from way back, and a few newer. Good hands, each man.’

  ‘Well, that’s nice for you, to have a little crew. Been fighting for Bethod, have you?’

  ‘Man needs some kind o’ work. Don’t mean we wouldn’t take better. Can I put my hands down yet?’

  ‘No, I like ’em there. What you doing out here in the woods alone, anyhow?’

  Shivers pursed his lips, thoughtful. ‘Don’t take me for a madman, but I heard a rumour you got Rudd Threetrees over here.’

  ‘That’s a fact.’

  ‘Is it now?’

  ‘And Tul Duru Thunderhead, and Harding Grim, and Black Dow an’ all.’

  Shivers raised his brows, leaned back against a tree, hands still up, while Dogman watched him careful. ‘Well that’s some weighty company you got there, alright. There’s twice the blood on you five than on my two score. Those are some names and no mistake. The sort of names men might want to follow.’

  ‘You looking to follow?’

  ‘Might be that I am.’

  ‘And your Carls too?’

  ‘Them too.’

  It was tempting, the Dogman had to admit. Two score Carls, and they’d know where Bethod was at, maybe something of what he’d got planned. That’d save him some skulking around in the cold woods, and he was getting good and tired of wet trees. But he was a long way off trusting this tall bastard yet. He’d take him back to the camp, and Threetrees could weigh up what to do. ‘Alright,’ he said, ‘we’ll see. Why don’t you step off up the hill there, and I’ll follow on a few paces behind.’

  ‘Alright,’ said Shivers, turning and trudging up the slope, hands still up in the air, ‘but watch what you do with that shaft, eh? I don’t want to get stuck for you not looking where you’re stepping.’

  ‘Don’t worry about me, big lad, the Dogman don’t miss no—gah!’

  His foot caught on a root and he lurched a step and fumbled his string. The arrow shot past Shivers’ head and thudded wobbling into a tree just beyond. Dogman ended up on his knees in the dirt, looking up at him looming over, clutching an empty bow in one hand. ‘Piss,’ he muttered. If the man had wanted to, Dogman had no doubt he could have swung one of those big fists down and knocked his head off.

  ‘Lucky you missed me,’ said Shivers. ‘Can I put my hands down now?’

  Dow started as soon as they walked into the camp, of course. ‘Who the hell’s this bastard?’ he snarled, striding straight up to Shivers and staring him out, bristling up to him with his axe clutched in his hand. It might have looked a touch comical, Dow being half a head shorter, but Shivers didn’t seem much amused. Nor should he have.

  ‘He’s—’ the Dogman started, but he didn’t get any further.

  ‘He’s a tall bastard, eh? I ain’t talking up to a bastard like him! Sit down, big lad!’ and he threw his arm out and shoved Shivers over on his arse.

  The Dogman thought he took it well, considering. He grunted when he hit the dirt, of course, then he blinked, then he propped himself on his elbows, grinning up at them. ‘I reckon I’ll just stay down here. Don’t hold it against me though, eh? I didn’t choose to be tall, any more than you chose to be an arsehole.’

  Dogman winced at that, expecting Shivers to get a boot in the fruits for his trouble, but Dow started to grin instead. ‘Chose to be an arsehole, I like that. I like him. Who is he?’

  ‘His name’s Shivers,’ said the Dogman. ‘He’s Rattleneck’s son.’

  Dow frowned. ‘But didn’t Ninefingers—’

  ‘His other son.’

  ‘But he’d be no more ’n a—’

  ‘Work it out.’

  Dow frowned, then shook his head. ‘Shit. That long, eh?’

  ‘He looks like Rattleneck,’ came Tul’s voice, his shadow falling across them.

  ‘Bloody hell!’ said Shivers. ‘I thought you didn’t like tall folk? It’s two of you standing on top of each other ain’t it?’

  ‘Just the one.’ Tul reached down and pulled him up by one arm like he was a child fell over. ‘Sorry ’bout that greeting, friend. Those visitors we get we usually end up killing.’

  ‘I’ll hope to be the exception,’ said Shivers, still gawping up at the Thunderhead. ‘So that must be Harding Grim.’

  ‘Uh,’ said Grim, scarcely looking up from checking his shafts.

  ‘And you’re Threetrees?’

  ‘That I am,’ said the old boy, hands on his hips.

  ‘Well,’ muttered Shivers, rubbing at the back of his head. ‘I feel like I’m in deep water now, and no mistake. Deep water. Tul Duru, and Black Dow, and . . . bloody hell. You’re Threetrees, eh?’

  ‘I’m him.’

  ‘Well then. Shit. My father always said you was the best man left in all the North. That if he ever had to pick a man to follow, you’d be the one. ’Til you lost to the Bloody-Nine, o’ course, but some things you can’t help. Rudd Threetrees, right before me now . . .’

  ‘Why’ve you come here, boy?’

  Shivers seemed to have run out of words, so the Dogman spoke for him. ‘He says he’s got two score Carls following him, and they all want to come over.’

  Threetrees looked Shivers in the eye for a while. ‘Is that a fact?’

  Shivers nodded. ‘You knew my father. He thought the way you did, and I’m cut from his cloth. Serving Bethod sticks in my neck.’

  ‘Might be I think a man should pick his chief and stick to him.’

  ‘I always thought so,’ said Shivers, ‘but that blade cuts both ways, no? A chief should look out for his people too, shouldn’t he?’ Dogman nodded to himself. A fair point to his mind. ‘Bethod don’t care a shit for none of us no more, if he ever did. He don’t listen to no one now but that witch of his.’

  ‘Witch?’ said Tul.

  ‘Aye, this sorceress, this Caurib, or whatever. The witch. The one who makes the mist. Bethod’s dabbling with some dark company. And this war, there’s no purpose to it. Angland? Who wants it anyway, we got land aplenty. He’ll lead us all back to the mud. Long as there was no one else to follow we stuck with it, but when we heard Rudd Threetrees might still be alive, and with the Union, well . . .’

  ‘You decided to have a look, eh?’

  ‘We’ve had enough. Bethod’s got some strange boys along. These easterners, from out past the Crinna, bones and hides men, you know, hardly men at all. Got no code, no mercy, don’t hardly speak the same language we do. Fucking savages, the lot of ’em. Bethod’s got some down in the Union fortress there, and they got all the bodies hung up on the walls, all cut with the bloody cross, guts hanging out, rotting. It ain’t right. Then there’s Calder and Scale tossing out orders like they know shit from porridge, like they got some names o’ their own besides their father’s.’

 
; ‘Fucking Calder,’ growled Tul, shaking his head.

  ‘Fucking Scale,’ hissed Dow, spitting on the wet ground.

  ‘No bigger pair o’ bastards in all the north,’ said Shivers. ‘And now I hear tell that Bethod’s made a deal.’

  ‘What kind of a deal?’ asked Threetrees.

  Shivers turned and spat over his shoulder. ‘A deal with the fucking Shanka, that’s what.’

  Dogman stared. They all did. That was some evil kind of a rumour. ‘With the Flatheads? How?’

  ‘Who knows? Might be that witch found some way to talk to ’em. Times are changing, fast, and it ain’t right, any of it. There’s a lot of boys over there ain’t happy. That’s without getting started on that Feared.’

  Dow frowned. ‘Feared? I never heard of him.’

  ‘Where you lot been? Under the ice?’

  They all looked at each other. ‘Pretty much,’ said the Dogman. ‘Pretty much.’

  Cheap at the Price

  ‘You have a visitor, sir,’ muttered Barnam. His face, for some reason, was pale as death. ‘Clearly,’ snapped Glokta. ‘That was them knocking at the door, I assume.’ He dropped his spoon into his barely touched bowl of soup and licked sourly at his gums. A particularly disgusting excuse for a meal, this evening. I miss Shickel’s cooking, if not her attempts to kill me. ‘Well, who is it, man?’

  ‘It’s . . . er . . . it’s . . .’

  Arch Lector Sult ducked through the low doorway so as not to disturb his flawless white hair on the frame. Ah. I see. He swept the cramped dining room with a scowl, lip wrinkled as though he had stumbled into an open sewer. ‘Don’t get up,’ he spat at Glokta. I wasn’t planning to.

  Barnam swallowed. ‘Can I get your Eminence any—’

  ‘Get out!’ sneered Sult, and the old servant nearly fell over in his haste to make it to the door. The Arch Lector watched him go with withering scorn. The good humour of our previous meeting seems a vaguely remembered dream.

  ‘Damn peasants,’ he hissed as he slid in behind Glokta’s narrow dining table. ‘There’s been another uprising near Keln, and this bastard the Tanner was in the midst of it again. An unpopular eviction turned into a bloody riot. Lord Finster entirely misjudged the mood, got three of his guards killed and himself besieged in his manor by an angry mob, the halfwit. They couldn’t get in, fortunately, so they satisfied themselves with burning down half the village.’ He snorted. ‘Their own damn village! That’s what an idiot does when he gets angry. He destroys whatever’s nearest, even if it’s his own house! The Open Council are screaming for blood of course. Peasant blood, and lots of it. Now we have to get the Inquisition going down there, root out some ringleaders, or some fools who can be made to look like them. It should be Finster himself we’re hanging, the dolt, but that’s hardly an option.’

  Glokta cleared his throat. ‘I will pack for Keln immediately.’ Tickling the peasantry. Hardly my choice of task, but—

  ‘No. I need you for something else. Dagoska has fallen.’

  Glokta raised an eyebrow. Not so great a surprise, though. Hardly enough of a shock, one would have thought, to squeeze such a figure as his Eminence into my narrow quarters.

  ‘It seems the Gurkish were let in by a prior arrangement. Treason, of course, but at a time like that . . . hardly surprising. The Union forces were massacred, such as they were, but many of the mercenaries were merely enslaved, and the natives, by and large, were spared.’ Gurkish mercy, who could have thought it? Miracles do happen, then.

  Sult flicked angrily at a speck of dust on one immaculate glove. ‘I hear that, when the Gurkish had broken into the citadel, General Vissbruck killed himself rather than be captured.’ Well I never. I didn’t think he had it in him. ‘He ordered his body burned, so as not to give the enemy any remains to defile, then he cut his own throat. A brave man. A courageous statement. He will be honoured in Open Council tomorrow.’

  How wonderful for him. A horrible death with honour is far preferable to a long life in obscurity, of course. ‘Of course,’ said Glokta quietly. ‘A brave man.’

  ‘That is not all. An envoy has arrived on the very heels of this news. An envoy from the Emperor of Gurkhul.’

  ‘An envoy?’

  ‘Indeed. Apparently seeking . . . peace.’ The Arch Lector said the word with a sneer of contempt.

  ‘Peace?’

  ‘This room seems rather small for an echo.’

  ‘Of course, your Eminence, but—’

  ‘Why not? They have what they want. They have Dagoska, and there is nowhere further for them to go.’

  ‘No, Arch Lector.’ Except, perhaps, across the sea . . .

  ‘Peace. It sticks in the craw to give anything away, but Dagoska was never worth much to us. Cost us more than we made from it, if anything. Nothing more than a trophy for the King. I daresay we’re better off without it, the worthless rock.’

  Glokta bowed his head. ‘Absolutely, your Eminence.’ Although it makes one wonder why we bothered fighting for it.

  ‘Unfortunately, the loss of the place leaves you with nothing to be Superior of.’ The Arch Lector looked almost pleased. So it’s back to plain old Inquisitor, eh? I suppose I’ll no longer be welcome at the best social gatherings— ‘But I have decided to let you keep the title. As Superior of Adua.’

  Glokta paused. A considerable promotion, except that . . . ‘Surely, your Eminence, that is Superior Goyle’s role.’

  ‘It is. And will continue to be.’

  ‘Then—’

  ‘You will share the responsibilities. Goyle is the more experienced man, so he will be the senior partner, and continue running the department. For you I will find some tasks suited to your particular talents. I’m hoping that a little healthy competition will bring out the best in you both.’

  More than likely it will end with one of us dead, and we can all guess who the favourite is. Sult gave a thin smile, as though he knew precisely what Glokta was thinking. ‘Or perhaps it will simply demonstrate that one of you is superior to the other.’ He barked a joyless laugh at his own joke, and Glokta gave a watery, toothless grin of his own.

  ‘In the meantime, I need you to deal with this envoy. You seem to have a way of handling these Kantics, though you might avoid beheading this one, at least for the time being.’ The Arch Lector allowed himself another minuscule smile. ‘If he’s after anything more than peace, I want you to sniff it out. If we can get anything more than peace from him, then of course, sniff that out too. It would do no harm if we could avoid looking like we got our backs whipped.’

  He stood awkwardly and manoeuvred himself out from behind the table, all the while frowning as though the tightness of the room was an intentional affront to his dignity. ‘And please, Glokta, find yourself some better quarters. A Superior of Adua, living like this? It’s an embarrassment!’

  Glokta humbly bowed his head, causing an unpleasant stinging right down to his tailbone. ‘Of course, your Eminence.’

  The Emperor’s envoy was a thickset man with a heavy, black beard, a white skull-cap, and a white robe worked with golden thread. He rose and bowed humbly as Glokta hobbled over the threshold. As earthy and humble-seeming as the last emissary I dealt with was airy and arrogant. A different kind of man, I suppose, for a different purpose.

  ‘Ah. Superior Glokta, I should have guessed.’ His voice was deep and rich, his mastery of the common tongue predictably excellent. ‘Many people on our side of the sea were very disappointed when your corpse was not among those found in the citadel of Dagoska.’

  ‘I hope you will convey my sincere apologies to them.’

  ‘I will do so. My name is Tulkis, and I am a councillor to Uthman-ul-Dosht, the Emperor of Gurkhul.’ The envoy grinned, a crescent of strong white teeth in his black beard. ‘I hope I fare better at your hands than the last emissary my people sent to you.’

  Glokta paused. A sense of humour? Most unexpected. ‘I suppose that would depend on the tone you take.’

  ‘Of c
ourse. Shabbed al Islik Burai always was . . . confrontational. That, and his loyalties were . . . mixed.’ Tulkis’ grin grew wider. ‘He was a passionate believer. A very religious man. A man closer perhaps to church, than to state? I honour God, of course.’ And he touched his fingertips to his forehead. ‘I honour the great and holy Prophet Khalul.’ He touched his head again. ‘But I serve . . .’ And his eyes slid up to Glokta’s. ‘I serve only the Emperor.’

  Interesting. ‘I thought that in your nation, church and state spoke with one voice.’

  ‘It has often been so, but there are those among us who believe that priests should concern themselves with prayer, and leave the governing to the Emperor and his advisors.’

  ‘I see. And what might the Emperor wish to communicate to us?’

  ‘The difficulty of capturing Dagoska has shocked the people. The priests had convinced them that the campaign would be easy, for God was with us, our cause was righteous, and so forth. God is great, of course,’ and he looked up to the ceiling, ‘but he is no substitute for good planning. The Emperor desires peace.’

  Glokta sat silent for a moment. ‘The great Uthman-ul-Dosht? The mighty? The merciless? Desires peace?’

  The envoy took no offence. ‘I am sure you understand that a reputation for ruthlessness can be useful. A great ruler, especially one of as wide and various a country as Gurkhul, must first be feared. He would desire to be loved also, but that is a luxury. Fear is essential. Whatever you may have heard, Uthman is neither a man of peace, nor of war. He is a man of . . . what would be your word? Necessity. He is a man of the right tool at the right time.’

  ‘Very prudent,’ muttered Glokta.

  ‘Peace, now. Mercy. Compromise. These are the tools that suit his purposes, even if they do not suit the purposes of . . . others,’ and he touched his fingers to his forehead. ‘And so he sends me, to find out if they suit you also.’

  ‘Well, well, well. The mighty Uthman-ul-Dosht comes with mercy, and offers peace. These are strange times we live in, eh, Tulkis? Have the Gurkish learned to love their enemies? Or simply fear them?’