She planted one elbow on the stretch of counter Zuri had wiped so she could lean closer and draw out both syllables. “Savine.”
“That’s a lovely name.”
“Oh, if you enjoy the tip, you’ll go mad for the whole thing.”
“That so?” he purred at her. “How does it go?”
“Savine… dan…” And she leaned even closer to deliver the punchline. “Glokta.”
If a name had been a knife and she had cut his throat with hers, the blood could not have drained more quickly from his face. He gave a strangled cough, took a step back and nearly fell over one of his own barrels.
“Lady Savine.” Majir was coming from an upstairs office, wooden steps creaking under her considerable weight. “What an honour.”
“Isn’t it, though? Your man and I were just getting acquainted.”
Majir glanced towards the ghost-faced barman. “Would you like him to apologise?”
“For what? Not being as brave as he claimed? If we executed men for that, I swear there wouldn’t be a dozen left alive in the Union, eh, Zuri?”
Zuri clasped Savine’s hat sadly to her breast. “Heroes are in lamentably short supply.”
Majir cleared her throat. “If I’d known you were coming all the way down here yourself—”
“If I spent all my time shut up with Mother, we would kill each other,” said Savine. “And I feel that business should be conducted, whenever possible, in person. Otherwise one’s partners can convince themselves that one’s eyes are not on the details. My eyes are always on the details, Majir.”
In low company, Savine could be low. These were bullies, so they needed to be bullied. It was the language they understood. Majir’s thick neck shifted as she swallowed. “Who would dare doubt it?” And she laid a flat leather pouch on the counter.
“It’s all there?”
“A promissory note from the banking house of Valint and Balk.”
“Really?” Valint and Balk had a dark reputation, even for a bank. Savine’s father had often warned her never to deal with them, because once you owe Valint and Balk, the debt is never done. But a promissory note was just money, and money can never be a bad thing. She tossed the pouch to Zuri, who peered inside and gave the smallest nod. “It’s coming to something when even the bandits are using the bank.”
Majir mildly raised one brow. “Honest women have the law to protect them. Bandits must take more care with their earnings.”
“You’re a darling.” Savine reached across the counter to pinch her fat cheek and give it an affectionate tug. “Thank you, Zuri. You’re a darling, too.” Her companion was already sliding the hatpin back into position.
“If you don’t mind,” said Majir, “I’ll have a few boys follow you out of the neighbourhood. I could never forgive myself if something were to happen to you.”
“Oh, come now. If something happened to me, your own forgiveness would be the least of your problems.”
“True.” Majir watched her turn away, big fists pressed into the counter. “Do pass my regards to your father.”
Savine laughed. “Let’s not demean ourselves by pretending my father gives a dry fuck for your regards.” And she blew a kiss at the terrified barman on her way out.
Dietam dan Kort, famed architect, was a man who gave every appearance of being in control. His desk, scattered with maps, surveys and draughtsman’s drawings, was certainly a wonder of engineering. Savine had moved among the most powerful men in the realm and still doubted she had ever seen a larger. It filled his office so completely, there was only the narrowest of passages around the edges to reach his chair. He must have needed help to squeeze himself through every morning. She wondered if she should recommend her corset-maker.
“Lady Savine,” he intoned. “What an honour.”
“Isn’t it, though?” She made him lean dangerously far across the desk in order to kiss her hand. Savine studied his, meanwhile, big and broad with fingers scarred from hard work. A self-made man. His greying hair was painstakingly scraped across a pate quite obviously bald. A proud and a vain man. She noticed a slight fraying of the cuffs on his once-splendid coat. A man in straitened circumstances, intent on appearing otherwise.
“To what do I owe the pleasure of your visit?” he asked.
She settled herself opposite while Zuri whisked off her hat. A lady of taste should appear to make no effort. The right things simply happen around her. “The opportunity for investment you mentioned at our last meeting,” she said.
Kort brightened considerably. “You have come to discuss it?”
“I have come to do it.”
Zuri placed Majir’s pouch on the desk as delicately as if it had been deposited by a summer breeze. It looked very small on that immense expanse of green leather. But that was the magic of banks. They could render the priceless tiny, the immense worthless.
The slightest sheen of sweat had sprung from Kort’s forehead. “It’s all there?”
“A promissory note from Valint and Balk. I hope that will suffice?”
“Of course!” He was unable to disguise a note of eager greed as he reached across the desk. “I believe we agreed a twentieth share—”
Savine placed one fingertip on the corner of the pouch. “You mentioned a twentieth. I remained silent.”
His hand froze. “Then…?”
“A fifth.”
There was a pause. While he decided how outraged he could afford to be, and Savine decided how little to appear to care.
“A fifth?” His already ruddy face turned positively volcanic. “My first investors received half as much for twice the money! I only own a fifth myself, and I near as damn it dug the thing with my own hands! A fifth? Have you lost all reason?”
To Savine, there was no more enticing invitation than a door slammed in her face. “One man’s mad is another’s perceptive,” she said, her smile not even dented. “Your canal takes a clever route and your bridge is a wonder. Truly, I congratulate you on it. In a few years, they’ll be building everything from iron. But it isn’t finished and you’ve run out of money.”
“I have two months’ reserves!”
“You have two weeks’ at best.”
“Then I have two weeks to find a more reasonable investor!”
“You have two hours.” Savine sent her brows up very high. “I am visiting with Tilde dan Rucksted tonight.”
“Who?”
“Tilde, the young wife of Lord Marshal Rucksted. A wonderfully sweet-tempered girl, but phew, what a gossip!” And she glanced up for confirmation.
“It pains me to speak ill of one of God’s creatures,” admitted Zuri, with a pious fluttering of her long lashes, “but she is an abysmal blabbermouth.”
“When I confide, in strictest confidence, that you are short of investment, lacking the necessary permissions and troubled by restless workmen, it will be all over town before sunup.”
“Sure as printing it in a pamphlet,” said Zuri, sadly.
“Good luck finding an investor then, reasonable or otherwise.”
It had only taken a moment for Kort to go from bright red to deathly pale, and Savine burst out laughing. “Don’t be silly, I won’t do that!” She stopped laughing. “Because you are going to sign one-fifth of your enterprise over to me. Now. Then I can confide in Tilde that I just made the investment of a lifetime, and she won’t be able to resist investing herself. She’s not only loose-lipped, you see, but tight-fisted, too.”
“Greed is a quality the priests abhor.” Zuri sighed. “Especially the rich ones.”
“But so widespread these days,” lamented Savine. “If Lady Rucksted sees some gain in it, I daresay she can persuade her husband to make a breach in Casamir’s Wall so you can extend your canal into the Three Farms.” And Savine could sell the worthless slum buildings she had bought on the canal’s likely route back to herself at an immense profit. “The marshal’s notoriously stubborn for most of us but to his wife he’s a pussycat. You know how i
t is with old men and their young brides.”
Kort was trapped halfway between anger and ambition. Savine rather liked him there. Most animals, after all, look better in a cage. “Extend my canal… into the Three Farms?”
“The first to do so.” Where it could service Savine’s three textile mills and the Hill Street Foundry, incidentally, and sharply raise their productivity. “I daresay—for a friend—I could even arrange a visit of His Majesty’s Inquisitors to a labour meeting. I imagine your troublesome workers will be far more pliable after a few stern examples are made.”
“Stern examples,” threw in Zuri, “are something the priests are always in favour of.”
Kort was almost drooling. Savine thought they had better stop before he needed a change of trousers.
“A tenth part,” he offered, in a voice rather hoarse.
“Pffft.” Savine stood and Zuri eased forward with her hat, spinning the pin in her long fingers with the delicacy of a magician. “You’re an architect to rival Kanedias himself, but you’re entirely lost in the maze of Aduan society. You need a guide, and I’m the best there is. Be a darling and give the fifth before I take a quarter. You know I’d be a bargain at a third.”
Kort sagged, his chin settling into the roll of fat beneath it, his eyes fixed resentfully upon her. Clearly, he was not a man who liked to lose. But where would be the fun in beating men who did?
“Very well. One-fifth.”
“A notary from the firm of Temple and Kahdia is already drawing up the papers. He will be in touch.” She turned towards the door.
“They warned me,” Kort grunted as he slid Valint and Balk’s note from the pouch. “That you care about nothing but money.”
“Why, what a pompous crowd they are. Beyond a point I passed long ago, I don’t even care about money.” Savine flicked the brim of her hat in farewell. “But how else is one to keep score?”
A Little Public Hanging
“I hate bloody hangings,” said Orso.
One of the whores tittered as if he’d cracked quite the joke. It was the falsest laugh he had ever heard, and when it came to false laughter, he was quite the connoisseur. Everyone was false in his presence, and he the worst actor of all.
“I guess you could stop it,” said Hildi. “If you wanted.”
Orso frowned up at her, perched on the wall with her legs crossed and her chin propped on one palm.
“Well… I suppose…” Strange how the idea had never occurred to him before. He pictured himself springing onto the scaffold, insisting these poor people be pardoned, ushering them back to their miserable lives to tearful thanks and rapturous applause. Then he sighed. “But… one really shouldn’t interfere with the workings of the judiciary.”
Lies, like everything that left his mouth, engineered to make him appear just a touch less detestable. He wondered who he was trying to fool. Hildi undoubtedly saw straight through it. The truth was, when it came to stopping this, as with so much else, he simply couldn’t be arsed. He took another pinch of pearl dust, his heavy snorts ringing out as the Inquisitor in charge stepped to the front of the scaffold and the crowd fell breathlessly silent.
“These three…people,” and the Inquisitor swept an arm towards the chained convicts, each held under the armpit by a hooded executioner, “are members of the outlawed group known as the Breakers, convicted of High Treason against the Crown!”
“Treason!” someone screeched, then dissolved into coughing. It was a still day, so a bad one for the vapours. Not that there were many good days for the vapours lately, what with the new chimneys sprouting up all over Adua. People at the very back must have been struggling to see the scaffold through the murk.
“They have been found guilty of setting fires and breaking machinery, of incitement to riot and sheltering fugitives from the king’s justice! Have you anything to say?”
The first prisoner, a heavyset fellow with a beard, evidently did. “We’re faithful subjects of His Majesty!” he bellowed in a hero’s voice, all manly bass and quivering passion. “All we want is an honest wage for honest work!”
“I’d sooner take a dishonest wage for no work at all,” grunted Tunny.
Yolk burst out laughing while swigging from his bottle and sprayed a reeking mist of spirits, which settled over the wig of a well-dressed old lady just in front.
A man with spectacular grey side whiskers, presumably her husband, clearly felt they were not treating the occasion with appropriate gravity. “You people are a damn disgrace!” he snapped, rounding on them in a fury.
“That so?” Tunny pushed his tongue into his grizzled cheek. “Hear that, Orso? You’re a damn disgrace.”
“Orso?” muttered the man. “Not—”
“Yes.” Tunny showed his yellow grin and Orso winced. He hated it when Tunny used him to bully people. Almost as much as he hated hangings. But somehow he could never bring himself to stop either one.
The side-whisker enthusiast had turned pale as a freshly laundered sheet, something Orso had not seen in some time. “Your Highness, I had no idea. Please accept my—”
“No need.” Orso waved a lazy hand, wine-stained lace cuff flapping, and took another pinch of pearl dust. “I am a damn disgrace. Notoriously so.” He gave the man a reassuring pat on the shoulder, realised he had smeared dust all over his coat and tried ineffectually to brush it off. If Orso excelled at anything, after all, it was being ineffectual. “Please don’t concern yourself over my feelings. I don’t have any.” Or so he often said. The truth was he sometimes felt he had too many. He was dragged so violently in a dozen different directions that he could not move at all.
He took one more pinch for good measure. Peering down through watering eyes, he noticed the box was getting dangerously empty.
“Hildi!” he muttered, waving it at her. “Empty.”
She sprang down from the wall and drew herself up to her full height. Which put her about on a level with his ribs. “Again? Who shall I go to?”
“Majir?”
“Y’owe Majir a hundred and fifty-one marks. Said she can’t give you more credit.”
“Spizeria, then?”
“Y’owe him three hundred and six. Same story.”
“How the hell did that happen?”
Hildi gave Tunny, Yolk and the whores a significant glance. “You want me to answer that?”
Orso racked his brains to think of someone else, then gave up. If he excelled at anything, after all, it was giving up. “For pity’s sake, Hildi, everyone knows I’m good for it. I’ll be coming into a considerable legacy one of these days.” No less than the Union, and everything in it, and all its unliftable weight of care, and impossible responsibility, and crushing expectation. He grimaced and tossed her the box.
“You owe me nine marks,” she muttered.
“Shoo!” Orso tried to wave her away, got his little finger painfully tangled in his cuff and had to rip it free. “Just get it done!”
She gave a long-suffering sigh, jammed that ancient soldier’s cap down over her blonde curls and stepped off into the crowd.
“She’s a funny little thing, your errand girl,” warbled one of the whores, dragging too heavily on his arm.
“She’s my valet,” said Orso, frowning, “and she’s a fucking treasure.”
On the scaffold, meanwhile, the bearded man was bellowing out the Breakers’ manifesto with ever more emotion. The noise from the crowd was growing but, much to the upset of the Inquisitor, he was starting to strike a chord. Calls of support were breaking through the mockery.
“No more machines!” the bearded man roared, veins bulging in his thick neck. “No more seizure of common land!”
He seemed a useful fellow. More useful than Orso, certainly. “What a bloody waste,” he muttered.
“The Open Council shouldn’t just be for the nobles! Every man should have a voice—”
“Enough!” snarled the Inquisitor, waving one of the executioners forward. The prisoner kept trying to sp
eak as the noose was pulled tight, but his words were drowned by the rising anger of the crowd.
It was a riddle. This man, born with no advantages, believed in something so much he was willing to die for it. Orso, born with everything, could scarcely make himself get out of bed of a morning. Or, indeed, an afternoon.
“Bed is warm, though,” he murmured.
“Certainly is, Your Highness,” cooed the other whore in his ear. Her perfume was so sickeningly strong, it was a wonder pigeons didn’t drop stunned from the sky around her.
The Inquisitor gave a nod.
Rather than needing strong men or horses to haul up the condemned, some enterprising fellow had devised a system whereby prisoners could be dropped through the scaffold floor at a touch upon a lever. There was an invention to make everything more efficient these days, after all. Why would killing people be an exception?
A strange sound rose from the crowd as the rope snapped taut. Part cheer of joy, part hoot of derision, part groan of discomfort, but mostly gasps of relief. Relief that it wasn’t them at the end of the rope.
“Damn it,” muttered Orso, working a finger into his collar. There was nothing even faintly satisfying in this. Even if these people really were enemies of the state, they hardly looked like very dangerous ones.
The next in line to receive the king’s justice was a girl who might not yet have been sixteen. Her eyes, wide in bruised sockets, flickered from the open trapdoor to the Inquisitor as he stepped towards her. “Have you anything to say?”
She appeared hardly to comprehend. Orso found himself wishing the vapours were thicker, and that he could not see her face at all.
“Please,” said the man beside her. There were tears streaking his dirty cheeks. “Take me but, please—”
“Shut him up,” snapped the Inquisitor, not at all enjoying his part in this grisly pantomime. A few desultory vegetables were being tossed at the scaffold, but whether they were intended for the accused or those carrying out the sentence, it was hard to say. There was a dark stain spreading down the front of the girl’s dress.
“Yuck,” said Yolk. “She’s pissed herself.”
A Little Hatred Page 4