Rikke raised her brows as a whole column of dark-skinned soldiers tramped out of a side street, gilded standards flashing and spears lowered. Wasn’t until a wagon rattled right through ’em she realised they weren’t there.
“By the dead.” She held a hand over her left eye, hot and itching and aching right into her teeth.
“Still seeing things?” murmured Isern, jaw chomp-chomping happily on chagga. “Take it as proof the moon has marked you special, and rejoice.”
It all made Rikke more than a bit nostalgic for a time when folk just thought she was mad. “If this is special, I reckon I’d rather be ordinary.”
“Aye, well, we all want the things we haven’t got.”
“That’s it? Thought you were here to help me with the Long Eye?”
“I said I’d work out if you had it, then help you ease it open. Plain to everyone at that battle or that duel you’ve got it and it’s wide open.” Isern grinned over. “Closing the bastard was never numbered among my promises.”
“Fucking marvellous,” muttered Rikke, nudging her horse on so she could find some space to get a breath. Wasn’t easy in this damn place, though.
By the dead, the air. Close and sticky and full of odd smells. There was a catch and a scratch in her throat, a sting at her eyes, like far-off burning. And the noise. The babbling in a dozen languages she didn’t know, pleading, shouting, fighting, everyone shoving on to nowhere as if they were all endlessly late for everything. Hammers clanging, wheels turning and fires burning, so many it became a low rumble that made the ground buzz. As though the city itself were alive, and tortured, and angry, and desperate to wriggle free of its infestation of human lice.
“All this progress.” Bayaz again, glancing approvingly at vast building sites to either side, with their towering cranes and their cobwebs of rope and scaffold and their swarms of bellowing workmen. “You would not believe how much it has changed in so short a time. This district, the Three Farms? I remember when it was three farms, and far outside the city walls! The city burst those walls and they threw up another set and it burst those, too, and the Three Farms is so built over with manufactories, there’s barely a stride of grass left in the borough. All iron and stone, now.”
Rikke watched one of the horses in front lift its tail and drop a few turds. There was still plenty of that in the streets. “All iron and stone? That a good thing?”
Bayaz snorted as if the whole idea of good was a waste of his valuable time. “It is a thing as irresistible as the tide. A golden tide of industry and commerce. There is no limit on what can be bought and sold. Why, I saw a shop not far behind that was selling nothing but soap. A whole shop. For soap! When you reach my age, you learn to swim with the current.”
“Huh. Would’ve thought famous wizards would ride up front with the big folk, rather than getting stuck at the back with the dross.”
Bayaz smiled. He was a hard bastard to rattle, the First of the Magi. “The figurehead goes at the front of the ship. Braves the terror of wind and waves, takes the risks and reaps the glory. But it’s an unnoticed fellow hidden away near the back who does the steering.” He smiled up towards the head of the column. “No leader worth a damn ever led from the front.”
“Words to live by, I reckon,” murmured Rikke.
“The last wisdom I can offer you for the moment, I fear.” And Bayaz pulled his horse up at the grand front steps of a building. Vast, it was, somewhere between fortress and temple with huge pillars at the front and carved masonry all over but precious little in the way o’ windows.
“What’s this place?” She didn’t much like its looks. Lots of serious people going in and out, stepping around some well-dressed fellow with papers dangling from one limp hand, the strangest horrified look on his face. “A school for wizards?”
“Not quite,” said the First of the Magi. “It is a bank.”
“Master Bayaz?” An ordinary-looking man had come up to hold the wizard’s bridle.
“Ah! This is Yoru Sulfur, a member of the Order of Magi.”
“I’m Rikke,” said Rikke, “rhymes with—”
“Yes,” said Sulfur, smiling up. “The Dogman’s daughter. The one blessed with the Long Eye.”
Rikke was caught between suspicion and satisfaction that her legend had come ahead of her. “Or cursed with it, I guess.”
“I hope we might speak more later,” said Bayaz. “Young women born with the Long Eye are rare indeed in these latter days.”
“Almost as rare as Magi,” she grunted.
Sulfur smiled wider, his eyes never leaving her face, and she realised they were different colours, one blue, one green. “We relics of the Age of Magic really should stick together.”
“Can’t see why not. I’m hardly besieged by admirers.”
“Not yet, perhaps.” Bayaz gave her one last thoughtful glance. Like a butcher assessing a shepherd’s flock and judging what to offer. “But who can say what the future holds?”
“Aye,” murmured Rikke as she watched him climb the steps with his curly haired sidekick, “that’d be a fine bloody trick.”
Shivers was sitting in his saddle, turning that ring he wore on his little finger around and around, glaring up at the bank with a frown hard even for him.
“What’s your problem?” asked Rikke.
He turned his head and spat. “Never trusted banks.”
The man they called Old Sticks, the king’s chief torturer, Arch Lector Glokta, hunched behind a giant desk loaded with papers, frowning as he signed one after another. Death sentences, Leo imagined, bloodlessly executed with a flick of the pen.
His Eminence made Leo wait an insultingly long time before he finally looked up, winced as he leaned to drop his pen into its bottle of ink, and smiled. On that gaunt, waxy, wasted face, etched by deep grimace-lines, a yawning gap where the four front teeth should’ve been, it was an expression as painfully unsettling as a leg bent the wrong way at the knee. If inward corruption expressed itself as outward ugliness—and Leo had always been sure it did—the Arch Lector was even more vile than the vilest things they said about him. And that was saying something. He held out his hand.
“Forgive me, Your Grace, I cannot easily rise.”
“Of course.” Leo limped forward, leaning heavily on his cane. “Not too sprightly myself right now.”
“You, I trust, will heal.” Glokta’s revolting grin grew wider. “I fear that ship has sailed for me.”
He looked as if a stiff breeze would shred him, but his bony hand, its liver-spotted skin almost transparent, gripped far harder than Bremer dan Gorst’s great paw. You can tell a lot about a man from his handshake, his father had always said, and this old cripple’s was like a smith’s pincers.
“I must congratulate you on your victory,” said Glokta, after studying Leo a moment longer. “You have done the Crown a great service.”
“Thank you, Your Eminence.” Though who could’ve denied it? “But I didn’t do it alone. Lot of good men dead. Good friends… dead. And the cost to Angland’s coffers was huge.” Leo pulled out the weighty scroll his mother had given him. “The ruling council of the province asked me to present His Majesty’s advisors with this accounting for the campaign. In the absence of any help from the Crown during the war, they expect—they demand—financial support in the aftermath.” Leo had practised that speech on the trip and was rather pleased with how it came out. He could manage this bureaucracy business as well as anyone. But Glokta looked at the scroll as if he was being presented with a turd. His eyes moved up to Leo’s.
“Your triumph will take place in three days’ time. A parade of some four thousand soldiers, as well as foreign dignitaries and members of the Closed and Open Councils. It will begin at the palace, chart a course through the city around Arnault’s Wall, and return to the Square of Marshals. There His Majesty will give an address to the Union’s foremost citizens and present you with a commemorative sword.”
Leo couldn’t help smiling. “That a
ll sounds… marvellous.” The stuff of boyhood dreams, indeed.
“Crown Prince Orso will ride alongside you,” added Glokta.
“Pardon me?” asked Leo, smile quickly vanishing.
The Arch Lector’s eyelid flickered and a tear rolled down his cheek. He wiped it gently away with a fingertip. “His Highness won a famous victory of his own recently, putting down a rebellion in Valbeck—”
“He hanged some peasants.” Leo had been so pleased with himself all day that this sudden shock was doubly disappointing. “It’s hardly the same!”
“True,” said Glokta. “He is the heir to the throne, after all, and you the grandson of a traitor. Great generosity, on his part, to share the glory.”
Leo’s face tingled as if he’d been slapped. He bloody had been slapped, and in his pride, which was far more sensitive than his face. “I beat Stour Nightfall in a duel! I spared his life!”
“In return for what?”
“For his father and uncle quitting our land, keeping the Dogman’s Protectorate alive and safeguarding Angland!”
“No further concessions?” asked Glokta, his eyes glittering in their deep, bruised sockets. “No ongoing assurances?”
Leo blinked, wrong-footed. “Well… there’s a code of honour among Northmen.”
“Even supposing there was, you aren’t one.”
“Among warriors! Wherever they were born. And I was raised with Northmen!” Leo curled his lip as he looked the cripple up and down. “You wouldn’t understand.”
“No? How do you think I got crippled? Codes of honour, I fear, aren’t worth the paper they’re not written on. You could have taken Stour hostage. Could have delivered him to the king to ensure Scale Ironhand’s future good behaviour. Instead, you secured nothing but his word.”
Leo wasn’t sure whether he was more furious because Glokta was obviously wrong or because he wondered whether he might have a point. Perhaps there was more to this bureaucracy business than he’d thought. “I won.” His voice had a hint of that whine it had when he complained to his mother. “I beat the whole bloody North! And without one soldier from Adua. I risked my life—”
“You risked not only your life, which is yours to lose, but Union interests, too, which most definitely are not. I am prone to be more generous, but some might call that reckless.”
“I…” Leo could hardly believe it. “I made a friend of the next King of the Northmen! I’m a soldier, not a bloody diplomat!”
“You must be both.” Glokta was implacable. “You are a lord governor now. One of the greatest men in the Union. One of His August Majesty’s most important servants. You cannot simply think with your sword any more. Do you understand, Your Grace?”
Leo sat and stared, stunned by the disrespect, the injustice, the rank ingratitude. He’d been far from keen on the Closed Council when he arrived in Adua. One interview with this crooked desk-worm and he was utterly disgusted by them.
“By all the fucking dead,” he whispered, in Northern.
The Arch Lector either took that for agreement or simply acted as if he did. “I believe the lord chancellor wished to talk to you next. Some concerns over the latest tax receipts from Angland. It wouldn’t do to keep him waiting.” He nodded towards the scroll, which Leo only at that moment realised was still in his clenched fist. “Perhaps you should present your war debts to him.” Glokta plucked up his pen and slid down the next document in a heap. “It seems a lord governor must be warrior, diplomat and accountant.”
A Natural
Broad turned the handle, swung the carriage door open and respectfully stood out of the way.
Savine raised a brow at him. “And?”
“Oh.” He offered her his hand. “Er… my lady.” He helped her down while Rabik grinned from the driver’s seat, thoroughly tickled to see the business handled so badly.
So Broad reckoned he was a coachman now. He had the livery, anyway. Bright green jacket with brass buttons, better than most officers had got in Styria. Shiny new boots, too, though they were prone to pinch. He might’ve felt quite the fool in all the finery, if it hadn’t been so clear that anyone within a hundred paces would be staring at Savine instead, and that included him.
He could still hardly believe this beautiful, masterful woman was the same ragged, helpless girl who’d hidden in his daughter’s room. She seemed to come from a different species than the sorry rest of humanity now. Her clothes were a masterpiece of engineering as much as tailoring, twisting her into a shape no person ever was. She was graceful as a tightrope-walker, unstoppable as a warship’s figurehead. Folk stood gaping at her, like one of the Fates had dropped from the sky and was taking a stroll through their building site.
“Should I stay here?” muttered Broad as he helped Zuri down, not that she needed it, she was deft as a dancer. Probably she should’ve been helping him.
“No, no.” She had a smile that was hard to pin down. “It would be lovely if you came along.”
They’d made a huge breach in the old city walls, rubble showing through a teetering mass of scaffolding and two cranes towering overhead. They’d knocked down a few rows of houses, too, and were digging a mighty trench through the midst of it all. Parties of men, some of them bare-chested even in the cold, thumped away with picks and shovels in time to a work song growled between gritted teeth. Women in filthy dresses, wet hair plastered to their faces, slipped and slid up the bank with yokes across their shoulders holding buckets full of mud. Further back, children swarmed in the bottom of the great diggings, smeared grey from head to toe, stamping clay down around the sides of the trench with their bare feet.
“What is this?” muttered Broad.
“It will be a canal,” said Zuri, “floating cargo into the heart of the city. And out again, of course.”
“What’s Lady Savine’s interest?”
“One-fifth of it. Or it should be. We are here to make sure.”
They clattered up a stair and between two long rows of clerks. A narrow office at the end was crowded by a big, pudgy man with grey hair scraped over his bald pate and an oversized desk covered in green leather. He had to lean dangerously far across it to shake Savine’s hand, giving the buttons on his waistcoat quite the test.
“Master Kort,” she said as Broad shut the door.
“Lady Savine, I am delighted to see you well.” Kort gave Broad a slightly troubled smile. Broad didn’t return it. He was getting the sense he hadn’t been brought there to smile. “Everyone has been… extremely worried.”
“So moving,” said Savine, pulling off her gloves one finger at a time while Zuri whipped free a dagger of a hatpin. “But in business, we must set sentiment aside.” With the slightest twist, Zuri lifted Savine’s hat away from a wig that must’ve cost more than Broad used to earn in a year. “I am delighted to see work on our canal progressing so well.”
Kort winced, hesitated, winced again and finally leaned forward, clasping his hands. “There is no easy way to say this—”
“Take the hard way, then, I am not made of glass.”
“Regrettably, Lady Savine, I was obliged… to come to a new accommodation.”
“And who has been so accommodating?”
“Lady Selest dan Heugen.” Savine’s expression didn’t seem to change, but Broad had the feeling it took a struggle. “Her cousin was kind enough to arrange for some permits—”
“We had an agreement, Master Kort.”
“We did, but… you were not here to fulfil it. Thankfully, Lady Selest was able to step into the breach.”
Savine smiled. “And you think you can just slip her into my breach without so much as a by-your-leave?”
Kort shifted uncomfortably in his chair. “The banking house of Valint and Balk was kind enough to act as her backer, and she was kind enough to act as mine. Lady Savine, I was really given no choice—”
“I recently spent several weeks living like a dog.” Savine still smiled, but there was something brittle in it now. Somet
hing jagged. “And I do not mean that figuratively. Starving. Filthy. Hiding in a corner, constantly afraid for my life. It has changed my perspective. It has made me see how very fragile we all are. Then I have been involved in a… let us call it an affair of the heart, which did not end to my satisfaction. It did not end to my satisfaction at all.”
“I have nothing but sympathy, Lady Savine—”
“Your sympathy is not worth a speck of shit.” Savine fished an infinitesimal mote of dust from her sleeve and rubbed it away between finger and thumb. “It’s your canal I want. Just what was agreed. No more and no less.”
“What can I say?” Kort spread his big hands. “My canal is no longer available.”
Savine’s smile had hardened to a skull’s grin. The fibres in her neck stood out as she bit off the words. “The thing is, so much of business is a show. It is about the confidence people have in you. And confidence is so fragile. I am sure we have both seen it a hundred times. Cast from iron one moment, crumbling like sand the next. Following my misadventures in Valbeck, confidence in me has been profoundly shaken. People are watching me. Judging me.”
“Lady Savine, I assure you—”
“Don’t bother. I am merely trying to make you understand that, whoever your backers might be, I cannot afford the luxury of letting you and Selest dan Heugen fuck me on this occasion.” And she glanced over at Broad, and caught his eye.
At least there’ll be no trouble, serving a fine lady, eh? Liddy had said. Broad had smiled. Aye. No trouble. He didn’t smile now.
He knew exactly what Savine wanted. He’d seen that look in her eye before, on some of the men he’d fought with. The ones you had to watch. The ones you had to worry about. He knew he’d had the same look. A kind of mad delight that it had come to this.
He didn’t understand business, or deals, or canals. But he understood that look. All too well.
So Broad took hold of the edge of Kort’s great desk and moved it out of his way. There was no room to push it into, so he just lifted one end. Papers, ornaments, a nice letter opener, all slid down the green leather as it tilted like a sinking ship, clattering off onto the floor beside it. He hefted the great thing all the way upright, leaving Kort oddly exposed in his chair, eyes wide and plump knees pressed fearfully together.
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