Orso frowned sideways. “That’s what disgusts you?”
“I’ve seen you piss yourself often enough,” sneered Tunny at Yolk, and the whores spilled more false laughter. The side whiskers of the man in front twitched as he ground his teeth.
Orso gritted his as he looked to the scaffold. Hildi had been right, he could stop this. If not him, who? If not now, when?
There was some problem with the girl’s noose, the Inquisitor hissing furiously at one of the executioners as he dragged his hood up over his sweaty face to peer at the knots.
Orso was just about to step forward. Was just about to roar, Stop!
But circumstances always conspired to stop him doing the right thing. He heard a soft, high voice in his ear. “Your Highness.”
Orso turned to see the broad, flat and decidedly unwelcome face of Bremer dan Gorst at his shoulder.
“Gorst, you tiresome bastard.” The insult caused not the slightest reaction. Nothing ever did. “How did you track me down?”
“Just followed the stench of disgrace,” said Tunny.
“It is quite powerful hereabouts.” Orso reached for the pearl dust and realised it was gone, snatched Yolk’s bottle from his hand instead and took a swig.
“The queen has sent for you,” piped Gorst.
Orso blew out through his pursed lips to make a long farting sound. “Hasn’t she better things to do?”
Yolk chuckled. “What could matter more to a mother than the welfare of her eldest son?”
Gorst’s eyes slid across to him, and stuck there. All he did was look, but it was enough to make Yolk’s laughter sputter into nervous silence. He might sound a clown, but His Majesty’s First Guard was not a man you trifled with.
“Any chance I can bring the whores with me?” asked Orso. “I’ve paid for the whole day.” It was his turn to face Gorst’s fish-eyed stare. He sighed. “Would you conduct the ladies to their residence, Tunny?”
“Oh, I’ll conduct a symphony with ’em, Your Highness.” More false giggling.
Orso turned away without much reluctance. He hated bloody hangings, but the girls had wanted to go and he hated disappointing people, too. As a result of which, it seemed, he disappointed everyone. At his back, there was that strange sound between gasp and cheer as the next trapdoor dropped open.
Orso tossed his hat onto the bald head of a bust of Bayaz, congratulating himself that it came to rest on the legendary wizard at a pleasingly rakish angle.
The tapping of his boot heels echoed in the vast spaces of the salon as he crossed a sea of gleaming tiles to the tiny island of furniture in its centre. The High Queen of the Union sat fearsomely erect there, dripping with diamonds, growing out of the chaise like a spectacular orchid from a gilded pot. It hardly needed to be said that he’d known her his whole life, but the sheer regality of the woman still took him aback every time.
“Mother,” he said, in Styrian. Using the tongue of the country they actually ruled only aggravated her, and he knew from long experience that aggravating Queen Terez was never, ever worth it. “I was just on my way to visit when Gorst found me.”
“You must take me for a rare kind of fool,” she said, angling her face towards him.
“No, no.” He bent to brush one heavily powdered cheek with his lips. “Just the usual kind.”
“Really, Orso, your accent has become appalling.”
“Well, now that Styria is almost entirely controlled by our enemies, I get so little chance to practice.”
She plucked a minute tuft of fluff from his jacket. “Are you intoxicated?”
“Can’t think why I would be.” Orso picked up the decanter with a flourish and poured himself a glass. “I’ve snorted just the right amount of pearl dust to even out the husk I smoked this morning.” He rubbed at his nose, which was still pleasantly numb, then raised his glass in salute. “Bottle or two to smooth off the rough edges and it should be straight sailing till lunch.”
The royal bosom, constrained by corsetry that was a feat of engineering to rival any wonder of the new age, inflated majestically as the queen sighed. “People expect a certain amount of indolence in a Crown Prince. It was quite winning when you were seventeen. At twenty-two, it began to become tiresome. At twenty-seven, it looks positively desperate.”
“You have no idea, Mother.” Orso dropped into a chair so savagely uncomfortable it was like being punched in the arse. “I have long been thoroughly ashamed of myself.”
“You could try doing something to be proud of. Have you considered that?”
“I’ve spent whole days considering it.” He frowned discerningly through the wine as he held it up to the light from the giant windows. “But doing it really feels like such a lot of effort.”
“Frankly, your father could use your support. He is a weak man, Orso.”
“So you never tire of telling him.”
“And these are difficult times. The last war did… not end well.”
“It ended pretty well if you’re King Jappo of Styria.”
His mother pronounced each word with icy precision. “Which you… are…not.”
“Sadly, for all concerned.”
“You are King Jappo’s mortal enemy and the rightful heir to all he and the thrice-damned Snake of Talins have stolen, and it is high time you took your position seriously! We have enemies everywhere. Inside our borders, too.”
“I am aware. I just attended the hanging of three of them. Two peasants and a girl of fifteen. She pissed herself. I’ve never felt prouder.”
“Then I trust you come to me in a receptive mood.” Orso’s mother gave two sharp claps and Lord Chamberlain Hoff strutted in. With waistcoat bulging around his belly and legs stick-like in tight breeches, he looked like nothing so much as a prize rooster jealously patrolling the farmyard.
“Your Majesty.” He bowed so low to the queen, he virtually buffed the tiles with his nose. “Your Highness.” He bowed just as low to Orso but in a manner that somehow expressed boundless contempt. Or perhaps Orso only saw his own contempt for himself reflected in that obsequious smile. “I have positively scoured the entire Circle of the World for the most eligible candidates. Dare one suggest that the future High Queen of the Union waits among them?”
“Oh, good grief.” Orso let his head drop back, staring up towards the beautifully painted ceiling of the peoples of the world kneeling before a golden sun. “The parade again?”
“Ensuring the succession is not a joke,” pronounced his mother.
“Not a funny one, anyway.”
“Don’t be facetious, Orso. Your sisters both did their dynastic duty. Do you suppose Cathil wanted to move to Starikland?”
“She’s an inspiration.”
“Do you think Carlot wanted to marry the Chancellor of Sipani?”
Actually, she had been delighted by the idea, but Orso’s mother loved to imagine everyone sacrificing all on the altar of duty, the way she was always telling them she had. “Of course not, Mother.”
By then, two footmen were easing an enormous painting into the room, straining not to catch the frame in the doorway. A pale girl with an absurdly long neck smiled winsomely from the canvas.
“Lady Sithrin dan Harnveld,” announced the lord chamberlain.
Orso sank lower into his chair. “Do I really want a wife who measures the distance from her chin to her tits in miles?”
“Artistic licence, Your Highness,” explained Hoff.
“Call it art, you can get away with anything.”
“She is quite presentable in the flesh,” said the queen. “And her family can be traced back to the time of Harod the Great.”
“A true thoroughbred,” interjected the lord chamberlain.
“She’s stupid as a horse, all right,” said Orso. “And you can’t have an idiot for both king and queen.”
“Next,” grated out Orso’s mother, a second pair of footmen nearly colliding with the first as they carted in a painting of a slyly smirking Styrian.
“The Countess Istarine of Affoia is a proven politician, and would bring us valuable allies in Styria.”
“From the looks of her, she’s more likely to bring me a dose of the cock-rot.”
“I had imagined you would be immune from constant exposure,” observed the queen, waving the portrait away with an exquisite flourish of her fingers.
“Such a shame I never see you dance any more, Mother.” She danced superbly. Sometimes she even seemed to enjoy it.
“Your father is an absolute oaf of a partner.”
Orso gave a sad smile. “He does his best.”
“This is Messela Sivirine Sistus,” proclaimed the lord chamberlain, “younger daughter of the Emperor Dantus Goltus—”
“He doesn’t even merit the older daughter?” demanded the queen, before Orso had the chance to raise his own objections. “I think not.”
And so it went, as Orso marked the turning of morning into afternoon by the steadily decreasing level of wine in the decanter, and dismissed the flower of womanhood, one by one.
“How could I abide a wife taller than me?”
“She’s a worse drunk than I am.”
“At least we know she’s fertile, she’s borne two bastards that I know about.”
“Is that a nose on her face or a prick?”
He almost wished he was back at the hanging. That, he could theoretically have stopped. Over his mother, he was utterly powerless. His only chance was to wait her out. There were a finite number of women in the Circle of the World, after all.
Eventually, the last portrait was manhandled from the room and the lord chamberlain was left wringing his hands. “Your Majesty, Your Highness, I regret—”
“Finished?” asked Orso. “No portrait of Savine dan Glokta lurking in the hallway?”
Even at this distance, he felt the chill of the queen’s displeasure. “For pity’s sake, her mother is a low-born boor, and a drunk to boot.”
“But an absolute scream at parties, and whatever you say for Lady Ardee, Arch Lector Glokta has the people’s respect. Or at any rate their abject terror.”
“A crippled worm,” spat the queen. “A torturer!”
“But our torturer, eh, Mother? Our torturer. And I understand his daughter has made herself quite spectacularly rich.”
“Money made through trade, and dealings, and investments.” The queen spat the words as though they were criminal enterprises. For all Orso knew, Savine’s dealings were criminal enterprises. He wouldn’t at all have put it past her.
“Oh, come now, money shamefully made from trade fills the same holes in the treasury as the kind nobly wrung from the misery of the peasantry.”
“She is too old! You are too old, and she is even older than you are.”
“But she has impeccable manners and is still quite the celebrated beauty.” He waved a loose hand towards the doorway. “She’d make a prettier portrait than any of those piglets, and the painter wouldn’t even have to lie. Queen Savine sounds rather well.” He gave a chuckle. “It even rhymes.”
His mother was an icicle of fury. “Do you do this just to annoy me?”
“Not just to annoy you.”
“Promise me you will have nothing to do with that ambitious worm of a woman.”
“With Savine dan Glokta?” Orso sat back with a bemused expression. “Her mother’s a commoner, her father’s a torturer and she made her money from business.” He shook the last drops from the decanter into his glass. “Quite apart from which, really, she’s far too bloody old.”
“Oh,” he gasped. “Oh! Oh fuck!”
He arched his back, clutched desperately at the edge of the desk, kicked a pot of pens onto the floor, smacked his head against the wall and sent a little shower of plaster across his shoulders. He tried desperately to squirm away, but she had him by the balls. Quite literally.
He crushed his face up, nearly swallowed his tongue, coughed and hissed one more desperate, “Fuck!” through gritted teeth, then sagged back with a whimper, kicked and sagged again, legs shuddering weakly with aching after-spasms.
“Fuck,” he breathed.
Savine looked around, lips pursed, then took Orso’s half-full wine glass and spat into it. Even under those circumstances, he noticed, she held it by the stem in the most elegant manner. She scraped her tongue against her front teeth, spat again and set the glass down on the desk next to hers.
Orso watched his seed float around in the wine. “That… is somewhat disgusting.”
“Please.” Savine rinsed her mouth out from the other glass. “You only have to look at it.”
“Such cavalier disrespect. One day, madam, I shall be your king!”
“And your queen will no doubt spit your come into a golden box to be shared out on holidays for the public good. My congratulations to you both, Your Highness.”
He gave vent to a silly giggle. “Why does someone as altogether perfect as you waste her energy on a dolt like me?”
She pushed out her lips discerningly, as though considering the mystery, and for a strange, stupid moment he almost asked her. The words tickled at his lips. There was no one better suited to him. She had all the qualities he wished he had. So sharp. So disciplined. So decisive. Besides, it would have been worth it just for the look on his mother’s face. He almost asked her.
But circumstances always conspired to stop him doing the right thing.
“I can only think of one reason,” she said, hitching her skirts up and wriggling onto the desk beside him.
His sweaty arse juddered against the leather as he slid down onto still-wobbly legs, trousers flopping about his ankles. He flipped the box open and sprinkled some pearl dust onto the back of his hand, sniffed half himself then offered her the rest.
“Let it never be said I think only of myself,” he said as she covered one nostril to snort it up. She blinked at the ceiling for a moment, eyelids fluttering, as if she might sneeze. Then she dropped back on her elbows, working her hips towards him.
“Get to it, then.”
“You really are in no mood for romance today, are you?”
She slid her fingers into his hair, then twisted his head somewhat painfully down between her legs. “My time is valuable.”
“The naked gall.” Orso gave a sigh as he hooked her leg over his shoulder, sliding his hand down the bare skin, hearing her gasp, feeling her shudder. He kissed gently at her shin, at her knee, at her thigh. “Is there no end to the demands of one’s subjects?”
The Breakers
“What sort of a name is Vick, anyway?”
“Short for Victarine.”
“Very fucking fancy,” sneered Grise. Vick hadn’t known her long, but she was already getting tired of her. “Daresay you’ve got a fucking ‘dan’ in your name, too, eh, your ladyship?”
She was joking. But things had to get pretty funny before Vick started laughing, and this didn’t qualify.
She held Grise’s eye. “I did have a ‘dan’ in my name, once. My father was Master of the Royal Mints. Had a great big apartment in the Agriont.” And Vick nodded towards her best idea of where the fortress was, though the points of the compass were hard to tell apart in a mouldy cellar. “Right next to the palace. Big enough for a statue of Harod the Great in the hall. Life fucking size.”
Grise had quite the frown on her round face now, light flickering across it as boots, and hoofs, and cartwheels clattered past the little windows high up near the ceiling. “You grew up in the Agriont?”
“You weren’t listening. My father had an apartment there. But when I was eight years old, he trod on the wrong toes and the Inquisition took him. I hear it was Old Sticks himself who asked the questions.”
That changed the atmosphere, Grise flinching a little and Tallow blinking into the shadows as if the Arch Lector himself might be loitering behind the dusty shelves with a dozen Practicals.
“My father was innocent. Of what they accused him of, anyway. But once Old Sticks got started…”
Vick slapped the table with a bang, Tallow jumping so high he nearly hit the ceiling. “He leaked confessions like a broken drain. High Treason. They sent him to Angland. To the camps right up North.” Vick didn’t feel much like it, but she grinned. “And no one likes to split up a happy family. So they sent my ma with him. My ma, and my brother, and my sisters, and me. The camps, Grise. That’s where I grew up. So don’t question my commitment to the cause. Not ever.”
You could hear the ill squelch as Tallow swallowed. “What are the camps like?”
“You get by.”
Oh, the filth, pain, hunger, death, injustice and betrayal that she buried in that phrase. The black chill of the mines, the searing glow of the furnaces, the gnashing rage and sobbing desperation, the bodies in the snow. Vick forced her face to stay blank, pressed down the past like you might press down the lid on a box full of maggots.
“You get by,” she said, firmer. When you tell a lie, you have to sound like you believe it. Goes double for the ones you tell yourself.
Grise spun around as the door squealed open, but it was only Sibalt come at last, Moor big and dour at his shoulder. He planted his fists on the table and took a heavy breath, that noble face of his sadly sagging.
“What is it?” asked Tallow, in a tiny voice.
“They hanged Reed,” said Sibalt. “They hanged Cudber. They hanged his daughter.”
Grise stared at him. “She was fifteen.”
“What for?” asked Tallow.
“Just for talking.” Sibalt put his hand on the boy’s thin shoulder and gave it a squeeze. “Just for organising. Just for trying to get workers to stand together and speak with one voice. That’s treason now.”
“Then the time for talk’s fucking past!” snarled Grise.
Vick was angry as anyone. But she’d learned in the camps that every feeling is a weakness. You have to lock your hurt away, and think about what comes next. “Who did they know about?” she asked.
“That all you can think of?” Grise stuck her fat fist in Vick’s face and shook it. “Whether you’re fucking safe?”
Vick looked from her fist to her eye. “Whatever names they knew, they’ll have given up.”
A Little Hatred Page 5