“Havel dan Mustred!”
Leo looked down, blinking. It was only now that he noticed the audience. Not a large one, and most of them strangers, seated on an assortment of battered chairs dragged from the wrecked buildings about the square. It was Lord Chamberlain Hoff who spoke, droning the name from an ink-spotted list. “You are found guilty of High Treason and open rebellion against the Crown and sentenced to death.” King Orso sat beside him, scarcely looking like he was enjoying this any more than the convicts. “Have you anything to say?”
“I did not fight against my king,” growled out Mustred, “I fought for Angland. That’s all.”
On the king’s other side, Lord Marshal Rucksted gave a great snort of contempt. The worms of the Closed Council. But Leo could summon up no hatred. He saw now that their tyranny had only been an excuse, and a flimsy one too. All he’d wanted was an enemy to fight. Jurand had been right about that. Jurand had been right about everything. The one consolation was that his best friend could remember him as he had been. Would never have to see him… like this.
It was better to imagine that Leo dan Brock died on the battlefield. It was true, in every way that mattered. He’d been a great fire, burning brightly. Why cry at the snuffing out of the feeble ember that remained?
One of the executioners offered Mustred a hood. He shook his head. He was guided onto his trapdoor, and as the noose was pulled tight, Hoff was already naming the next in the line of the doomed.
Leo’s bleary eyes wandered across the faces in the audience. Not far from the king sat a gaunt woman with close-clipped hair and a bandaged forehead. He wondered for a moment why she was looking at him with such desperate intensity. Then he let out a gasp, and the one knee he still had began to tremble so badly he nearly fell again.
It was his wife.
He’d never seen her stripped of all artifice before. Without her paint, her wig, her jewels, her dozen attendants, her hundred carefully calibrated smiles. He realised now that even her appearances at breakfast had been carefully staged. Even her appearances in bed. Especially those, maybe. It seemed she’d emerged from the Battle of Stoffenbeck almost as broken as he was.
But it was her.
What should he have felt, to see her in the audience at his execution? Useless guilt, at what had become of her? Impotent anger, that she’d urged him on? Sappy sorrow, that he wouldn’t see his child born? You’d have thought a man with only a few breaths left would have no time to waste on shame, but shame was what won. A crushing weight of it. At how pitiful he must look. At how badly he’d let her down. At how little was left of the man she’d married.
He could hardly bear to look at her. Even though hers was the only sympathetic face in the whole ruined square. Because hers was the only sympathetic face. At the sight of her, he might realise all he was about to lose.
Hoff was still naming the convicted. Each faced death their own way. Some raged against the world. Some tearfully begged forgiveness. Lady Wetterlant barked insults at every witness until the king ordered her gagged. One young man with broken eye-lenses started to make a speech on the deficiencies of monarchy, maybe hoping to bore a pardon from the king. Orso cut him off after a minute or two with a curt, “If you wanted to change the world you should have won.”
There were even different kinds of silence. An obstinate refusal to speak. A baffled inability to understand what was happening. A lip-trembling, stuttering, quivering fear.
“Stevan dan Barezin, you are found guilty of High Treason and open rebellion against the Crown and sentenced to death. Have you anything to say?”
“I have,” croaked out Barezin, jowls wobbling as he turned to stare at Leo. “It was Leo dan Brock that brought us to this! He was the instigator! He was the perpetrator! It was you that brought us to this, you bloody fool!”
There were a dozen other people who’d brought them to this. A hundred. Isher, nowhere now to be seen, had sown the seed. Heugen and Barezin himself had eagerly watered the sprouts. Savine and Stour had their parts in tending the crop. Even Rikke and the Breakers, by going back on their word, had helped bring in this harvest of hangings.
But Leo didn’t have the strength to defend himself. He hardly had the strength to look up. Without him, it could never have happened. Why not shoulder the blame? He wouldn’t have to carry it for long.
“I throw myself on your mercy, Your Majesty!” Barezin was almost sobbing. “It was all Brock!”
“You damn coward!” snarled Mustred from the far end of the line.
The blubbing brought nothing but contempt from His Majesty in any case. “Stick a hood on him,” he snapped, and Barezin squawked as the hood was shoved over his head and the noose pulled tight.
Leo saw now that his father had been wrong. It’s after the battle. That’s when a man finds out who he truly is.
He was no hero. He never had been. He was a fool. A great bloated tower of vanity. It had got his friends, his allies and hundreds who’d followed him killed. Now it would get him killed, too. He wondered for a moment if he might’ve become a better man for the lessons he’d learned here. He stared down at that endlessly throbbing leg that wasn’t there. It hardly mattered now, did it? He’d go back to the mud, as the Northmen say, and all the hard-learned lessons with him.
“Leonault dan Brock, you are found guilty of High Treason and open rebellion against the Crown and sentenced to death. Have you anything to say?”
The whole while, as he listened to the others rage, blurt, weep, reason, all to no purpose, he’d wondered what he’d say. Now the moment came, the last moment, he found he had nothing.
He looked up at Orso and shrugged. “I’m sorry.” He hardly even recognised his own voice any more, throaty and weak. He looked over at Savine. “I’m sorry, that’s all.” If he stood much longer, he’d fall. If he looked at her much longer, he’d weep. He shook his head as he was offered the hood. “Let’s get on with it.” And he did his best to lift his chin so it was easy to tighten the noose about his throat.
“Most kind,” murmured the executioner.
Hoff rolled up his list of names and tucked it in the pocket of his robes. Rucksted brushed dust from his shoulder. An ordinary-looking, curly haired fellow leaned forward to murmur something in the king’s ear. Something familiar about him. Could he be the man who’d come to the docks with Leo’s mother, begging him not to go? By the dead, his mother. Why hadn’t he listened to her? King Orso gave the executioners a quick nod and they pulled the first lever.
Leo flinched as Mustred dropped with a clatter and a thud, and a set of crows that had gathered on the bare beams of a fallen roof flapped outraged into the sky.
Once they’d started it went shockingly fast. Bang, and the second man was gone, rope trembling. Bang, and the third vanished. The young lecturer in governmental theory was next. He squeezed his face tight before he dropped, like a boy jumping into a cold millpond. By some freak chance, his eye-lenses must’ve bounced off at the bottom, spun back up through the trapdoor to rest on the platform. One of the executioners bent and slipped them into his pocket.
Leo’s life was measured in moments now. In breaths. In heartbeats. He didn’t want to look, couldn’t look away, winced as the executioner pulled Lady Wetterlant’s lever—
She didn’t drop.
He pulled the lever again, and again. The trapdoor refused to open.
“Damn it,” came muffled from behind his mask. Orso squirmed in his chair. Hoff rubbed at his temples.
Another executioner stepped forward to mutter with the first, pointing angrily at the trapdoor. Lady Wetterlant growled into her gag. Four ropes stretched taut. Seven prisoners still stood, waiting helplessly for the end.
One of the executioners started kicking at the trapdoor while another dragged pointlessly at the lever again. A third had ducked under the platform and could be heard scrabbling with the mechanism below.
Leo bared his teeth. An agony of waiting. Each moment a horror, but still a moment h
e was grateful for. The onlookers coughed and narrowed their eyes as a gust of wind swept grit across the ruined square. A few nooses down, one of the conspirators sobbed inside his hood.
“Fuck yourselves, you bastards!” Lady Wetterlant had worked free of her gag and now started screaming insults again. “Damn you all, you vultures! You worms!”
King Orso jumped up. “For pity’s sake, just—”
Her trapdoor sprang suddenly open. She had been turning, fell awkwardly, scream suddenly cut off as she caught her arm on the edge of the platform and slithered through. It soon became clear that the drop hadn’t killed her. The rope twitched wildly. A kind of spluttering groan came from below. Everyone stared as it became a spitty gurgle.
Leo saw piss run from the trouser leg of the man who’d been sobbing to pool on the platform around his boot.
“Proceed,” said Hoff, angrily.
The next man swooned, knees giving and dropping to the platform. One of the executioners dragged him up, slapped his hooded face, stood him straight on his trapdoor. Clatter and thud as he dropped.
As if making up for lost time, they rushed from one lever to the next. Thud, thud, thud, each sending a faint vibration through Leo’s own noose.
The canvas over Barezin’s face flapped faster and faster with his desperate breath. The executioner grasped his lever. “Wait!” came muffled from under the hood. “I—”
He dropped under the platform and with a snap his rope jerked tight. So it seemed great lords of the Open Council meet the long drop just like other men.
Leo looked up at Savine. She gave a desperate smile, tears in her eyes. Meant to give him strength, maybe. He’d never loved her like he did at that moment. Perhaps he’d never really loved her until that moment. He tried to smile back. To leave her with something good. Some glimpse of who he used to be.
He felt the executioner step up beside him. Heard him grip the lever that worked the trapdoor under his feet. Under his foot. Still wasn’t used to having just the one. He closed his eyes.
Time stretched. A breeze came up and kissed his sweaty face. He took a long breath out, and held it. His last breath, he realised. He waited for the end.
“Stop.”
He thought it was Orso’s voice.
He wasn’t sure.
He opened his eyes again. Had to squint, somehow, as if into a wind.
The king wasn’t looking at him. He was looking sideways. At Savine. And she was looking back. Everything was still, time chopped up into stretched-out moments by the thudding of Leo’s heart. Someone cleared their throat. One of the crows, gathered again on the naked beams, flapped its wings. Barezin’s taut rope still hummed faintly. The executioner’s hand shifted on the lever.
Then Orso slumped back in his chair and gave a sharp wave of his hand. “Leo dan Brock, I commute your sentence to life imprisonment.”
There was a collective gasp. Savine closed her eyes, tears running down her face.
“Your Majesty,” that curly headed man was saying, a warning note in his voice, “my master will not—”
“I have made my decision!” Orso nodded towards the scaffold. “Take the rope off him.”
And Leo felt the noose loosened, then slipped over his head. As if that had been the only thing holding him up, he slumped, crutch clattering down. The executioner was ready and caught him, lowered him to the platform.
Now he did cry. He couldn’t help it. He huddled on his one knee, shoulders shaking with sobs and the tears pattering from the tip of his nose onto the rough-sawn boards. He couldn’t even raise his useless left hand to wipe them.
He heard the king’s chair scrape as he stood. “Lady Brock!” he snapped. “For pity’s sake, get your husband down before he embarrasses us any further.”
Loyalties and Sympathies
It was a bright autumn day when Vick rode back into Valbeck. The place looked nothing like the last time she was there, in the final chaotic days of the uprising. No rubbish choking the streets, no burned-out shells of buildings, no sounds of distant violence, no unattended corpses. Only a few pink smears showing through the hastily applied whitewash, reminding the careful observer that these buildings were once daubed with Burners’ slogans. There was even a pleasant breeze, carrying the smog of the rebuilt manufactories away inland and leaving the air halfway clean.
All quiet and orderly. Almost too quiet, the few people in the streets scurrying off to stare from alleys and doorways. But then cheering crowds might be too much to ask for when the Arch Lector of the Inquisition arrives in your city with thirty armed Practicals. Pike’s last visit, after all, had left the road out of town decorated with hanged men.
“No sign of revolution,” murmured Vick.
“No,” said Pike. “You sound… almost disappointed.”
She looked sharply sideways. His Eminence stared straight back at her, eyes bright in his burned mask of a face. No way to tell what he was thinking. There never was. But she saw the danger hidden in the observation. Like a cake full of nails.
“No one’s fought harder to stop the Breakers than I have,” she said.
“I am well aware! You scotched their schemes in Adua with impressive ruthlessness. And we could not have dealt so smoothly with the uprising here without your efforts. Nobody doubts your loyalty.”
“Good,” said Vick. She had become acutely aware how many Practicals were surrounding her.
“To Arch Lector Glokta.” And she felt the hairs stand on the back of her neck. “He was the one who helped you escape the camps, after all. Who gave you a new life. Who moulded you into such a formidable spy. But Glokta is gone.” Pike gave the sigh of a mourner at a funeral, if not the tears. “And your loyalty to me is quite another question. I, after all, have done nothing to earn it. To count upon it so lightly would be awfully presumptuous.”
“The Breakers are traitors,” said Vick. Stick to the official line. He could only judge her on what she said, not what she thought. “Enemies of the king. There’s nothing to sympathise with.”
“Nothing?” They rode beneath the towering crane at the edge of a deserted building site, Pike’s eyes hidden in the sudden darkness of its shadow. “Do you really think so? Can you really think so? A good soldier fights in a world of black and white. He must make monsters of his enemies. The devious Southerner, the degenerate Styrian, the barbaric Northman, the treacherous Breaker. But a good spy must swim in an ocean of grey, swept by unpredictable currents, far out of sight of land. Those of us who walk, talk, sleep with the enemy, well—we see that they are people. We hear their motives, their hopes, their justifications. Despite your efforts to prove the contrary, you are not made of stone, Inquisitor. None of us are. Proud men like Sibalt. Noble men like Malmer. How could you not sympathise? Given where you come from?”
“Adua?” Vick kept her face neutral, but behind the mask her mind was racing. Was he trying to trap her? Say she had no sympathy with the Breakers, and he’d call her a liar. Say she had sympathy, he’d call her a traitor.
“I meant the prison camps of Angland. I have come to believe… that the heart of a society… is revealed in its prisons.” Pike rocked gently with the movement of his horse, eyes fixed up the empty street ahead. “I was not there nearly as long as you, but long enough to lose my face. Honestly, I was never a handsome man. I daresay I turn more heads now. Your scars may not show quite so clearly, but I never doubt you have them. So I believe I understand you.”
“Really?” In spite of all her efforts, her voice sounded strangled.
“Oh, yes. I believe I understand you better than you understand yourself.”
It worried her that Pike was suddenly so talkative. It made her think that he was working his way to something, and she would not like it at all when they got there. She had the feeling, yet again, that this was one of those moments when her life hung by a thread. But when she faced Sibalt, Risinau, Vitari, Savine dan Brock, she had gone in with her eyes open, had known the line she must walk. What P
ike wanted was a mystery.
“It was Colonel West who pulled me from the camps,” he mused, “without the slightest idea that we had known each other years before. In his company I even held a shield in a duel, if you can believe that. When the Bloody-Nine beat the Feared and made himself King of the Northmen! Life is… such a cobweb of coincidences, isn’t it? West was a man one could admire.” He gave a sorry sigh. “But the truly good men never seem to last. He died, and I began to work with Arch Lector Glokta. Even though I knew he was far from a good man. Even though he was the very man who had sent me to the camps in the first place. Does any of this sound familiar?”
It did. Not the part about holding a shield in a duel, but otherwise quite uncomfortably so.
Pike watched a nervous-looking set of labourers clear out of their way to huddle against the houses as they clattered past. “In the name of justice, I tortured dissenters in Adua. In the name of freedom, I imprisoned rebels in Starikland. In the name of order, I spread chaos across the Far Country. I was as loyal a servant as the Crown ever had.”
Vick couldn’t help but frown at that choice of words. “Was?”
“Then the manufactories started to spring up, and the unrest began among the spinners, and I was sent here, to Valbeck, as Superior of the Inquisition.”
“You were Superior of Valbeck?”
Pike had that little curl at the corner of his mouth which was the closest he came to a smile. “You didn’t know?”
The street opened out and they rode into the square that should’ve been Valbeck’s busy heart. It was deserted now, except for well-armed guards posted at the corners and clustered on the steps of the courthouse where Judge had tossed out death sentences. Men with fine new breastplates, fine new halberds, fine new swords, everything twinkling in the autumn sun.
A double row of them was drawn up in front of the rebuilt Valbeck branch of Valint and Balk, a temple to debt more magnificent than ever, scaffolding clinging to its pillared façade so sculptors could finish a frieze of history’s richest merchants upon its giant pediment.
The Trouble with Peace Page 60