But even the Bloody-Nine, even the most feared man in the North, had never looked on anything like this.
Bodies were stacked beside the wide avenue in heaps, chest-high. Sagging mounds of corpses, on and on. Hundreds upon hundreds. Too many for him to guess at the numbers. Someone had made an effort at covering them, but not that great an effort. The dead give no thanks for it, after all. Ragged sheets flapped in the breeze, weighted down with broken wood, limp hands and feet hanging out from underneath.
At this end of the road a few statues still stood. Once-proud kings and their advisers, stone faces and bodies scarred and pitted, stared sadly down at the bloody waste heaped round their feet. Enough of them for Logen to recognise that this truly was the Kingsway, and that he hadn’t somehow stumbled into the land of the dead.
A hundred strides further and there were only empty plinths, one with broken legs still attached. A strange group were clustered around them. Withered-looking. Somewhere between dead and alive. A man sat on a block of stone, staring numbly as he pulled handfuls of hair out of his head. Another was coughing into a bloody rag. A woman and a man lay side by side, gawping at nothing, faces shrivelled to little more than skulls. Her breath came crackling short and fast. His did not come at all.
Another hundred strides and it was as if Logen walked through some ruined hell. There was no sign that statues, buildings, or anything else had ever stood there. In their place were only tangled hills of strange rubbish. Broken stone, splintered wood, twisted metal, paper, glass, all crushed together and bound up with tons of dust and mud. Things stuck from the wreckage, strangely intact – a door, a chair, a carpet, a painted plate, the smiling face of a statue.
Men and women struggled everywhere among this chaos, streaked with dirt, picking at the rubbish, throwing it down to the road, trying to clear paths through it. Rescuers, workmen, thieves, who knew? Logen passed by a crackling bonfire high as a man, felt the kiss of its heat on his cheek. A big soldier in armour stained with black soot stood beside it. ‘You find anything in white metal?’ he was roaring at the searchers, ‘anything at all? It goes in the fire! Flesh in white metal? Burn it! Orders of the Closed Council!’
A few strides further on, someone was on top of one of the highest mounds, straining at a great length of wood. He turned round to get a better grip. None other than Jezal dan Luthar. His clothes were torn and grubby, his face was smudged with mud. He barely looked any more like a king than Logen did.
A thickset man stood staring up, one arm in a sling. ‘Your Majesty, this is not safe!’ he piped in an oddly girlish voice. ‘We really should be—’
‘No! This is where I’m needed!’ Jezal bent back over the beam, straining at it, veins bulging from his neck. There was no way he was going to get it shifted on his own, but still he tried. Logen stood watching him. ‘How long’s he been like this?’
‘All night, and all day,’ said the thickset man, ‘and no sign of stopping. Those few we’ve found alive, nearly all of them have this sickness.’ He waved his good arm towards the pitiful group beside the statues. ‘Their hair falls out. Their nails. Their teeth. They wither. Some have died already. Others are well on the way.’ He slowly shook his head. ‘What crime did we commit to deserve this punishment?’
‘Punishment doesn’t always come to the guilty.’
‘Ninefingers!’ Jezal was looking down, the watery sun behind him. ‘There’s a strong back! Grab the end of that beam there!’
It was hard to see what good shifting a beam might do, in all of this. But great journeys start with small steps, Logen’s father had always told him. So he clambered up, wood cracking and stones sliding underneath his boots, hauled himself to the top and stood there, staring.
‘By the dead.’ From where he was standing, the hills of wreckage seemed to go on forever. People crawled over them, dragging frantically at the rubble, sorting carefully through it, or simply standing like him, stunned by the scale of it. A circle of utter waste, a mile across or more.
‘Help me, Logen!’
‘Aye. Right.’ He bent down and dug his hands under one end of the great length of scarred wood. Two kings, dragging at a beam. The kings of mud.
‘Pull, then!’ Logen heaved, his stitches burning. Gradually he felt the wood shift. ‘Yes!’ grunted Jezal through gritted teeth. Together they lifted it, hauled it to one side. Jezal reached down and dragged away a dry tree-branch, tore back a ripped sheet. A woman lay beneath, staring sideways. One broken arm was wrapped around a child, curly hair dark with blood.
‘Alright.’ Jezal wiped slowly at his mouth with the back of one dirty hand. ‘Alright. Well. We’ll put them with the rest of the dead.’ He clambered further over the wreckage. ‘You! Bring that crowbar up here! Up here, and a pick, we need to clear this stone! Stack it there. We’ll need it, later. To rebuild!’
Logen put a hand on his shoulder. ‘Jezal, wait. Wait. You know me.’
‘Of course. I like to think so.’
‘Alright. Tell me something, then. Am I . . .’ He struggled to find the right words. ‘Am I . . . an evil man?’
‘You?’ Jezal stared at him, confused. ‘You’re the best man I know.’
They were gathered under a broken tree in the park, a shadowy crowd of them. Black outlines of men, standing calm and still, red clouds and golden spread out above, around the setting sun. Logen could hear their slow voices as he walked up. Words for the dead, soft and sad. He could see the graves at their feet. Two dozen piles of fresh turned earth, set out in a circle so each man was equal. The Great Leveller, just as the hillmen say. Men put in the mud, and men saying words. Could’ve been a scene out of the old North, long ago in the time of Skarling Hoodless.
‘. . . Harding Grim. I never saw a better man with a bow. Not ever. Can’t count the number o’ times he saved my life, and never expected thanks for it. Except maybe that I’d do the same for him. Guess I couldn’t, this time. Guess none of us could . . .’
The Dogman’s voice trailed off. A few heads turned to look at Logen as his footsteps crunched in the gravel. ‘If it ain’t the King o’ the Northmen,’ someone said.
‘The Bloody-Nine his self.’
‘We should bow, shouldn’t we?’
They were all looking at him now. He could see their eyes gleaming in the dusk. Nothing more than shaggy outlines, hard to tell one man from another. A crowd of shadows. A crowd of ghosts, and just as unfriendly.
‘You got something you want to say, Bloody-Nine?’ came a voice from near the back.
‘I don’t reckon,’ he said. ‘You’re doing alright.’
‘Was no reason for us to be here.’ A few mumbles of agreement.
‘Not our bloody fight.’
‘No need for them to have died.’ More mutters.
‘Should be you we’re burying.’
‘Aye, maybe.’ Logen would have liked to weep at that. But instead he felt himself smiling. The Bloody-Nine’s smile. That grin that skulls have, with nothing inside but death. ‘Maybe. But you don’t get to pick who dies. Not unless you’ve got the bones to put your own hand to it. Have you? Have any of you?’ Silence. ‘Well, then. Good for Harding Grim. Good for the rest o’ the dead, they’ll all be missed.’ Logen spat onto the grass. ‘Shit on the rest of you.’ And he turned and walked back the way he came.
Into the darkness.
Answers
So much to do. The House of Questions still stood, and someone had to take the reins. Who else will do it? Superior Goyle? A flatbow bolt through the heart prevents him, alas. Someone had to look to the internment and questioning of the many hundreds of Gurkish prisoners, more captured every day as the army drove the invaders back to Keln. And who else will do it? Practical Vitari? Left the Union forever with her children in tow. Someone had to examine the treason of Lord Brock. To dig him up, and root out his accomplices. To make arrests, and obtain confessions. And who else is there, now? Arch Lector Sult? Oh, dear me, no.
Glokta wheezed up to
his door, his few teeth bared at the endless pains in his legs. A fortunate decision, at least, to move to the eastern side of the Agriont. One should be grateful for the small things in life, like a place to rest one’s crippled husk. My old lodgings are no doubt languishing under a thousand tons of rubble, just like the rest of—
His door was not quite shut. He gave it the gentlest of pushes and it creaked open, soft lamplight spilling out into the corridor, a glowing stripe over the dusty floorboards, over the foot of Glokta’s cane and the muddy toe of one boot. I left no door unlocked, and certainly no lamps burning. His tongue slithered nervously over his empty gums. A visitor, then. An uninvited one. Do I go in, and welcome them to my rooms? His eyes slid sideways into the shadows of the corridor. Or do I make a run for it? He was almost smiling as he shuffled over the threshold, cane first, then the right foot, then the left, dragging painfully behind him.
Glokta’s guest sat by the window in the light of a single lamp, brightness splashed across the hard planes of his face, cold darkness gathered in the deep hollows. The squares board was set before him, just as Glokta left it, the pieces casting long shadows across the chequered wood.
‘Why, Superior Glokta. I have been waiting for you.’
And I for you. Glokta limped over to the table, his cane scraping against the bare boards. As reluctantly as a man limping to the gallows. Ah, well. No one tricks the hangman forever. Perhaps we’ll have some answers, at least, before the end. I always dreamed of dying well-informed. Slowly, ever so slowly, he lowered himself grunting into the free chair.
‘Do I have the pleasure of addressing Master Valint, or Master Balk?’
Bayaz smiled. ‘Both, of course.’
Glokta wrapped his tongue round one of his few remaining teeth and dragged it away with a faint sucking sound. ‘And to what do I owe the overpowering honour?’
‘I said, did I not, that day we visited the Maker’s House, that we should have a talk at some point? A talk about what I want, and about what you want? That point has come.’
‘Oh joyous day.’
The First of the Magi watched him, the same look in his bright eyes that a man might have while watching an interesting beetle. ‘I must admit that you fascinate me, Superior. Your life would seem to be entirely unbearable. And yet you fight so very, very hard to stay alive. With every weapon and stratagem. You simply refuse to die.’
‘I am ready to die.’ Glokta returned his gaze, like for like. ‘But I refuse to lose.’
‘Whatever the cost, eh? We are two of a kind, you and I, and we are a rare kind indeed. We understand what must be done, and we do not flinch from doing it, regardless of sentiment. You remember Lord Chancellor Feekt, of course.’
If I cast my mind a long way back . . . ‘The Golden Chancellor? They say he ran the Closed Council for forty years. They say he ran the Union.’ Sult said so. Sult said his death left a hole, into which he and Marovia were both keen to step. That is where this ugly dance began, for me. With a visit from the Arch Lector, with the confession of my old friend Salem Rews, with the arrest of Sepp dan Teufel, Master of the Mints . . .
Bayaz let one thick fingertip trail across the pieces on the squares board, as though considering his next move. ‘We had an agreement, Feekt and I. I made him powerful. He served me, utterly.’
Feekt . . . the foundation on which the nation rested . . . served you? I expected delusions of grandeur, but this will take some beating. ‘You would have me suppose that you controlled the Union all that time?’
Bayaz snorted. ‘Ever since I forced the damn thing together in the time of Harod the Great, so-called. It has sometimes been necessary for me to take a hand myself, as in this most recent crisis. But mostly I have stood at a distance, behind the curtain, as it were.’
‘A little stuffy back there, one imagines.’
‘An uncomfortable necessity.’ The lamplight gleamed on the Magus’ white grin. ‘People like to watch the pretty puppets, Superior. Even a glimpse of the puppeteer can be most upsetting for them. Why, they might even suddenly notice the strings around their own wrists. Sult caught a glimpse of something, behind the curtain, and only look at the trouble he caused for everyone.’ Bayaz flicked one of the pieces over and it clattered onto its side, rocked gently back and forth.
‘Let us suppose you are indeed the great architect, and you have given us . . .’ Glokta waved his hand towards the window. Acres of charming devastation. ‘All this. Why such generosity?’
‘Not entirely selfless, I must confess. Khalul had the Gurkish to fight for him. I needed soldiers of my own. Even the greatest of generals needs little men to hold the line.’ He absently nudged one of the smallest pieces forward. ‘Even the greatest of warriors needs his armour.’
Glokta stuck out his bottom lip. ‘But then Feekt died, and you were left naked.’
‘Naked as a babe, at my age.’ Bayaz gave a long sigh. ‘And in poor weather too, with Khalul making ready for war. I should have arranged a suitable successor more quickly, but my thoughts were elsewhere, deep in my books. The older you get, the more swiftly the years pass. It’s easy to forget how quickly people die.’
And how easily. ‘The death of the Golden Chancellor left a vacuum,’ muttered Glokta, thinking it through. ‘Sult and Marovia saw a chance to take power for themselves, and advance their own notions of what the nation should be.’
‘Exceptionally cock-eyed notions, as it happens. Sult wanted to return to an imaginary past where everyone kept their place and always did as they were told, and Marovia? Hah! Marovia wanted to piss power away to the people. Votes? Elections? The voice of the common man?’
‘He aired some such notion.’
‘I hope you aired the suitable level of contempt. Power for the people?’ sneered Bayaz. ‘They don’t want it. They don’t understand it. What the hell would they do with it if they had it? The people are like children. They are children. They need someone to tell them what to do.’
‘Someone like you, I suppose?’
‘Who better suited? Marovia thought to use me in his petty schemes, and all the while I made good use of him. While he tussled with Sult over scraps the game was already won. A move I had prepared some time before.’
Glokta slowly nodded. ‘Jezal dan Luthar.’ Our little bastard.
‘Your friend and mine.’
But a bastard is no use unless . . . ‘Crown Prince Raynault stood in the way.’
The Magus flicked a piece over and it rolled slowly from the board and rattled to the table. ‘We talk of great events. There is sure to be some wastage.’
‘You made it seem that he was killed by an Eater.’
‘Oh, he was.’ Bayaz watched smugly from the shadows. ‘Not all who break the Second Law serve Khalul. My apprentice, Yoru Sulfur, has long been partial to a bite or two.’ And he snapped his two rows of smooth and even teeth together.
‘I see.’
‘This is war, Superior. In war one must make use of every weapon. Restraint is folly. Worse. Restraint is cowardice. But only look who I am lecturing. You need no lessons in ruthlessness.’
‘No.’ They cut them into me in the Emperor’s prisons, and I have been practising them ever since.
Bayaz nudged one of the pieces gently forward. ‘A useful man, Sulfur. A man who long ago accepted the demands of necessity, and mastered the discipline of taking forms.’ He was the guard, weeping outside Prince Raynault’s door. The guard who vanished into thin air the next day . . .
‘A shred of cloth taken from the Emissary’s bedchamber,’ murmured Glokta. ‘Blood daubed on his robe.’ And so an innocent man went to the gallows, and the war between Gurkhul and the Union blossomed. Two obstacles swept neatly away with one sharp flick of the broom.
‘Peace with the Gurkish did not suit my purposes. It was sloppy of Sulfur to leave such blatant clues. But then he never expected you to care about the truth when there was a convenient explanation to hand.’
Glokta nodded, slowly, as t
he shape of things unfolded in his mind. ‘He heard of my investigations from Severard, and I received a charming visit from your walking corpse, Mauthis, telling me to halt or die.’
‘Exactly so. On other occasions Yoru took another face, and called himself the Tanner, and incited a few peasants to some rather unbecoming behaviour.’ Bayaz examined his fingernails. ‘All in a good cause, though, Superior.’
‘To lend glamour to your latest puppet. To make him a favourite with the people. To make him familiar to the nobles, to the Closed Council. You were the source of the rumours.’
‘Heroic acts in the ruined west? Jezal dan Luthar?’ Bayaz snorted. ‘He did little more than whine about the rain.’
‘Amazing the rubbish idiots will believe if you shout it loudly enough. And you rigged the Contest too.’
‘You noticed that?’ Bayaz’ smile grew wider. ‘I am impressed, Superior, I am most impressed. You have fumbled so very close to the truth this whole time.’ And yet so very far away. ‘I wouldn’t feel badly about it. I have many advantages. Sult groped towards the answers, in the end, but far too late. I suspected from the first what his plans might be.’
‘Which is why you asked me to investigate?’
‘The fact that you did not oblige me until the very last moment was the source of some annoyance.’
‘Asking nicely might have helped.’ It would have been refreshing, at least. ‘I regret that I found myself in a difficult position. A case of too many masters.’
‘No longer, though, eh? I was almost disappointed when I found out how limited Sult’s studies were. Salt, and candles, and incantations? How pathetically adolescent. Enough to put a timely end to that would-be democrat Marovia, perhaps, but nothing to pose the slightest threat to me.’
Glokta frowned down at the squares board. Sult and Marovia. For all their cleverness, for all their power, their ugly little struggle was an irrelevance. They were small pieces in this game. So small they never even guessed how vast the board truly was. Which makes me what? A speck of dust between the squares, at best.
The First Law Trilogy Boxed Set: The Blade Itself, Before They Are Hanged, Last Argument of Kings Page 180