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

by Joe Abercrombie

  ‘Don’t worry. I am quite precise.’ An awful lot of practice.

  ‘Wait!’ screeched Goyle.

  The hammer made three metallic clicks, almost disappointingly quiet, as it drove the nail cleanly between the bones of Goyle’s forearm and into the table beneath. He roared with pain, spraying bloody spit over the table.

  ‘Oh, come now, Superior, compared to what you did to your prisoners in Angland this is really quite infantile. Try to pace yourself. If you scream like that now, you’ll have nowhere to go later.’ The fat mercenary seized Goyle’s other wrist in his pudgy hands and dragged it out across the map of the Union.

  ‘Nail?’ asked Cosca, raising an eyebrow.

  ‘You’re getting the hang of it.’

  ‘Wait! Ah! Wait!’

  ‘Why? This is the closest I’ve come to enjoying myself in six years. Don’t begrudge me my little moment. I get so very few of them.’ Glokta raised the hammer.

  ‘Wait!’

  Click. Goyle roared with pain again. Click. And again. Click. The nail was through, and the one-time scourge of Angland’s penal colonies was pinned flat by both arms. I suppose that’s where ambition gets you without the talent. Humility is easier to teach than one would think. All it takes to puncture our arrogance is a nail or two in the right place. Goyle’s breath hissed through his bloody teeth, pinioned fingers clawing at the wood. Glokta disapprovingly shook his head. ‘I would stop struggling if I was you. You’ll only tear the flesh.’

  ‘You’ll pay for this, you crippled bastard! Don’t think you won’t!’

  ‘Oh, I’ve paid already.’ Glokta turned his neck around in a slow circle, trying to make the grumbling muscles in his shoulders unclench just a fraction. ‘I was kept, I am not sure for how long, but I would guess at several months, in a cell no bigger than a chest of drawers. Far too small to stand, or even to sit up straight in. Every possible position twisted, bent, agonising. Hundreds of interminable hours in the pitch darkness, the stifling heat. Kneeling in a stinking slurry of my own shit, wriggling, and squirming, and gasping for air. Begging for water which my jailers let drip down through a grate above. Sometimes they would piss through it, and I would be grateful. I have never stood up straight since. I really have no idea how I remained sane.’ Glokta thought about it for a moment, then shrugged. ‘Perhaps I didn’t. In any case, these are the kind of sacrifices I have made. What sacrifices will you make, just to keep Sult’s secrets?’

  No answer but the blood running out from under Goyle’s forearms, pooling around the glittering stone that marked the House of Questions in the city of Keln.

  ‘Huh.’ Glokta gripped his cane hard and leaned down to whisper in Goyle’s ear. ‘There’s a little bit of flesh, between your fruits and your arsehole. You never really see it, unless you’re a contortionist, or unnaturally fond of mirrors. You know the one I’m talking about. Men spend hours thinking about the area in front of it, and almost as long on the area behind, but that little patch of flesh? Unfairly ignored.’ He scooped up a few nails and jingled them gently in Goyle’s face. ‘I mean to set that right, today. I’m going to start there, and work outwards, and believe me, once I’m done, you’ll be thinking about that patch of flesh for the rest of your life. Or you’ll be thinking about where it used to be, at least. Practical Cosca, would you be kind enough to help the Superior out of his trousers?’

  ‘The University!’ bellowed Goyle. He had a sheen of sweat all over his balding head. ‘Sult! He’s in the University!’

  So soon? Almost disappointing. But then few bullies take a beating well. ‘What’s he doing there, at a time like this?’

  ‘I . . . I don’t—’

  ‘Not good enough. Trousers, please.’

  ‘Silber! He’s with Silber!’

  Glokta frowned. ‘The University Administrator?’

  Goyle’s eyes darted from Glokta, to Cosca, and back again. He squeezed them shut. ‘The Adeptus Demonic!’

  There was a long pause. ‘The what?’

  ‘Silber, he doesn’t just run the University! He conducts . . . experiments. ’

  ‘Experiments of what nature?’ Glokta jabbed sharply at Goyle’s bloody face with the head of the hammer. ‘Before I nail your tongue to the table.’

  ‘Occult experiments! Sult has been giving him money, for a long time! Since the First of the Magi came calling! Before, maybe!’

  Occult experiments? Funding from the Arch Lector? It hardly seems Sult’s style, but it explains why those damn Adepti were expecting money from me when I first visited the place. And why Vitari and her circus have set up shop there now. ‘What experiments?’

  ‘Silber . . . he can make contact . . . with the Other Side!’

  ‘What?’

  ‘It’s true! I have seen it! He can learn things, secrets, there is no other way of knowing, and now . . .’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘He says he has found a way to bring them through!’

  ‘Them?’

  ‘The Tellers of Secrets, he calls them!’

  Glokta licked at his dry lips. ‘Demons?’ I thought his Eminence had no patience with superstition, when all this time . . . The nerve of the man!

  ‘He can send them against his enemies, he says. Against the Arch Lector’s enemies! They are ready to do it!’

  Glokta felt his left eye twitching, and he pressed the back of his hand against it. A year ago I would have laughed to my boots and nailed him to the ceiling. But things are different, now. We passed inside the House of the Maker. We saw Shickel smile as she burned. If there are Eaters? If there are Magi? Why should there not be demons? How could there not be? ‘What enemies?’

  ‘The High Justice! The First of the Magi!’ Goyle squeezed his eyes shut again. ‘The king,’ he whimpered.

  Ahhhh. The. King. Those two little words are my kind of magic. Glokta turned to Ardee, and showed her the yawning gap in his front teeth. ‘Would you be so kind as to prepare a Paper of Confession?’

  ‘Would I . . .’ She stared at him for a moment, eyes wide in her pale face, then hurried to the Arch Lector’s desk, snatched up a sheet of paper and a pen, dipped it rattling in a bottle of ink. She paused, her hand trembling. ‘What should I write?’

  ‘Oh, something like, “I, Superior Goyle, confess to being an accomplice in a treasonous plot of his Eminence Arch Lector Sult, to . . .” ’ How to phrase it? He raised his brows. How else but call it what it is? ‘ “To use diabolical arts against his Majesty the king and members of his Closed Council.”

  The nib scratched clumsily over the paper, scattering specks of ink. Ardee held it crackling out to him. ‘Good enough?’

  He remembered the beautiful documents that Practical Frost used to prepare. The elegant, flowing script, the immaculate wording. Each Paper of Confession, a work of art. Glokta stared sadly down at the ink-spotted daub in his hand.

  ‘But a brief step from unreadable, but it will serve.’ He slid the paper under Goyle’s trembling hand, then took the pen from Ardee and wedged it between his fingers. ‘Sign.’

  Goyle sobbed, sniffed, scrawled his name at the bottom of the page as best he could with his arm nailed down. I win, and for once the taste is almost sweet.

  ‘Excellent,’ said Glokta. ‘Pull those nails, and find some sort of bandage. It would be a shame if he bled to death before he had the chance to testify. Gag him, though, I’ve heard enough for now. We’ll take him with us to the High Justice.’

  ‘Wait! Wait! Wurghh—!’ Goyle’s cries were sharply cut off as the mercenary with the boils wedged a wad of dirty cloth in his mouth. The dwarf slid the pliers from the case. So far, and we are still alive. What ever are the odds of that? Glokta limped to the window and stood, stretching his aching legs. There was a muffled shriek as the first nail was ripped from Goyle’s arm, but Glokta’s thoughts were elsewhere. He stared out towards the University, its spires looming up through the smoky murk like clawing fingers. Occult experiments? Summonings and sendings? He licked sourly
at his empty gums. What is going on in there?

  ‘What is going on out there?’ Jezal strode up and down the roof of the Tower of Chains in a manner which he hoped was reminiscent of a caged tiger, but probably was closer to a criminal on the morning of his own hanging.

  Smoke had drawn a sooty veil across the city and made it impossible to tell what was happening any further than a half mile distant. Members of Varuz’ staff, scattered around the parapets, would occasionally call out useless and wildly contradictory news. There was fighting in the Four Corners, up the Middleway, throughout the central part of the city. There was fighting on land and on sea. By turns all hope was lost and they were on the verge of deliverance. But one thing was in no doubt. Below, beyond the moat of the Agriont, the Gurkish efforts continued ominously unabated.

  A rain of flatbow bolts continued to pepper the square outside the gates, but for every corpse the Gurkish left, for every wounded man dragged away, five more would vomit out from the burning buildings like bees from a broken hive. Soldiers swarmed down there in teeming hundreds, enclosing the whole circuit of the Agriont in an ever-strengthening ring of men and steel. They squatted behind their wooden screens, they shot arrows up towards the battlements. The pounding of drums had drawn steadily closer and now echoed out around the city. Peering through his eyeglass, with every muscle tensed to try and hold it steady, Jezal had begun to notice strange figures scattered below.

  Tall and graceful figures, conspicuous in pearly white armour edged with glinting gold, they moved among the Gurkish soldiers, pointing, ordering, directing. Often, now, they were pointing towards the bridge that led to the west gate of the Agriont. Dark thoughts niggled at the back of Jezal’s mind. Khalul’s Hundred Words? Risen up from the shadowy corners of history to bring the First of the Magi to justice?

  ‘If I didn’t know better, I would have said that they were preparing for an assault.’

  ‘There is no cause for alarm,’ croaked Varuz, ‘our defences are impregnable.’ His voice quavered, then cracked entirely at the final word, doing little to give anyone the slightest reassurance. Only a few short weeks ago, nobody would have dared to suggest that the Agriont could ever fall. But nobody would ever have dreamed that it would be surrounded by legions of Gurkish soldiers, either. Very plainly, the rules had changed. A deep blast of horns rang out.

  ‘Down there,’ muttered one of his staff.

  Jezal peered through his borrowed eyeglass. Some form of great cart had been drawn up through the streets, like a wooden house on wheels, covered by plates of beaten metal. Even now, Gurkish soldiers were loading barrels into it under the direction of two men in white armour.

  ‘Explosive powder,’ someone said, unhelpfully.

  Jezal felt Marovia’s hand on his arm. ‘Your Majesty, it might be best if you were to retire.’

  ‘And if I am not safe here? Where, precisely, will I be out of danger, do you suppose?’

  ‘Marshal West will soon deliver us, I am sure. But in the meantime the palace is much the safest place. I will accompany you.’ He gave an apologetic smile. ‘At my age, I fear I will be little use on the walls.’

  Gorst held out one gauntleted hand towards the stairs. ‘This way.’

  ‘This way,’ growled Glokta, limping up the hall as swiftly as his ruined feet would carry him, Cosca ambling after. Click, tap, pain.

  Only one secretary remained outside the office of the High Justice, peering disapprovingly over his twinkling eyeglasses. No doubt the rest have donned ill-fitting armour and are manning the walls. Or, more likely, have locked themselves in cellars. If only I were with them.

  ‘I am afraid his Worship is busy.’

  ‘Oh, he will see me, don’t worry about that.’ Glokta hobbled past without stopping, placed his hand on the brass doorknob of Marovia’s office, and almost jerked it back in surprise. The metal was icy cold. Cold as hell. He turned it with his fingertips and opened the door a crack. A breath of white vapour curled out into the hall, like the freezing mist that would hang over the snowy valleys in Angland in the midst of winter.

  It was deathly cold in the room beyond. The heavy wooden furniture, the old oak panelling, the grubby window panes, all glittered with white hoar-frost. The heaps of legal papers were furry with it. A bottle of wine on a table by the door had shattered, leaving behind a bottle-shaped block of pink ice and a scattering of sparkling splinters.

  ‘What in hell . . .’ Glokta’s breath smoked before his smarting lips. Mysterious articles were scattered widely about the wintry room. A long, snaking length of black tubing was frozen to the panelling, like a string of sausages left in the snow. There were patches of black ice on the books, on the desk, on the crunching carpet. There were pink fragments frozen to the ceiling, long white splinters frozen to the floor . . .

  Human remains?

  A large chunk of icy flesh, partly coated in rime, lay in the middle of the desk. Glokta turned his head sideways to better take it in. There was a mouth, still with some teeth attached, an ear, an eye. Some strands of a long beard. Enough, in the end, for Glokta to recognise whose parts were scattered so widely around the freezing room. Who else but my last hope, my third suitor, High Justice Marovia?

  Cosca cleared his throat. ‘It seems there is something to your friend Silber’s claims after all.’

  An understatement of devilish proportions. Glokta felt the muscles round his left eye twitching with a painful intensity. The secretary fussed up to the door behind them, peered through, gasped, and reeled away. Glokta heard him being noisily sick outside. ‘I doubt the High Justice will be lending us much assistance.’

  ‘True. But isn’t it getting a little late in the day for your papers and so forth anyway?’ Cosca gestured towards the windows, flecked and spotted with frozen blood. ‘The Gurkish are coming, remember? If you’ve scores to settle, get them settled now, before our Kantic friends tear up all the bills. When plans fail, swift action must serve, eh, Superior?’ He reached behind his head, unbuckled his mask, and let it drop to the floor. ‘Time to laugh in your enemy’s face! To risk all on one final throw! You can pick up the pieces afterward. If they don’t go back together, well, what’s the difference? Tomorrow we might all be living in a different world.’

  Or dying in one. Not the way we wanted it, maybe, but he is right. Perhaps we might borrow one final shred of Colonel Glokta’s dash before the game is over? ‘I hope I can still count on your help?’

  Cosca clapped him on the shoulder and sent a painful shudder through his twisted back. ‘A noble last effort, against all the odds? Of course! Though I should mention that I usually charge double once the diabolical arts are involved.’

  ‘How does triple sound?’ After all, Valint and Balk have deep pockets.

  Cosca’s grin grew wider. ‘It sounds well.’

  ‘And your men? Are they reliable?’

  ‘They are still waiting for four fifths of their pay. Until they receive it I would trust any one of them with my life.’

  ‘Good. Then we are prepared.’ Glokta worked his aching foot around in his boot. Just a little further now, my toeless beauty. Just a few shuddering steps more, and one way or another, we both can rest. He opened his fingers and let Goyle’s confession float down to the frosty floor. ‘To the University, then! His Eminence has never liked to be kept waiting.’

  Open the Box

  Logen could feel the doubt in the men around him, could see the worry on their faces, in the way they held their weapons, and he didn’t blame them. A man can be fearless on his own doorstep, against enemies he understands, but take him long miles over the salty sea to strange places he never dreamed of, he’ll take fright at every empty doorway. And there were an awful lot of those, now.

  The city of white towers, where Logen had hurried after the First of the Magi, amazed at the scale of the buildings, the strangeness of the people, the sheer quantity of both, had become a maze of blackened ruins. They crept down empty streets, lined with the outsize skele
tons of burned-out houses, charred rafters stabbing at the sky. They crept across empty squares, scattered with rubble and dusted with ash. Always the sounds of battle echoed, ghostly – near, far, all around them.

  It was as if they crept through hell.

  ‘How d’you fight in this?’ whispered the Dogman.

  Logen wished he had an answer. Fighting in forests, in mountains, in valleys, they’d done it all a hundred times, and knew the rules, but this? His eyes flickered nervously over the gaping windows and doorways, the piles of fallen stones. So many places for an enemy to hide.

  All Logen could do was aim at the House of the Maker and hope for the best. What would happen when they got there, he wasn’t sure, but it seemed a safe bet there’d be blood involved. Nothing that would do anyone the slightest good, most likely, but the fact was he’d said go, and the one thing a leader can’t do is change his mind.

  The clamour of fighting was getting louder, now, and louder. The stink of smoke and anger was picking at his nose, scratching at his throat. The scored metal of the Maker’s sword was slippery in his sweaty palm. He crept low to the ground, over a heap of rubble and along beside a shattered wall, his hand held flat behind him to say go careful. He eased up to the edge, and peered around it.

  The Agriont rose up just ahead, great walls and towers black against the white sky, a second set reflected in the moat below. A lot of men were gathered near the water, crowded up and down the cobbled space as far as Logen could see. It didn’t take a sharp mind to realise they were Gurkish. Arrows flitted up towards the battlements, bolts flitted back down, spinning from the cobbles, sticking wobbling into wooden screens.

  Not thirty strides away they’d drawn up a line, facing into the city. A good, clean line, bristling with spears, set out on either side of a tall standard, golden letters twinkling on it. A tough-looking line of hard men, well armed and well armoured, nothing like the rubbish they’d faced outside the walls. Logen didn’t reckon shouting was going to get this lot moving anywhere. Except straight at him, maybe.