Last Argument of Kings

by Joe Abercrombie

  'I've been trying to get through this damn book again.' Ardee slapped at a heavy volume lying open, face down, on a chair.

  'The Fall of the Master Maker,' muttered Glokta. 'That rubbish? All magic and valour, no? I couldn't get through the first one.'

  'I sympathise. I'm onto the third and it doesn't get any easier. Too many damn wizards. I get them mixed up one with another. It's all battles and endless bloody journeys, here to there and back again. If I so much as glimpse another map I swear I'll kill myself.'

  'Someone might save you the trouble.'

  'Eh?'

  'I'm afraid you are no longer safe here. You should come with me.'

  'Rescue? Thank the fates!' She waved a dismissive hand. 'We've been over this. The Gurkish are away on the other side of the city. You're in more danger in the Agriont I shouldn't—'

  'The Gurkish are not the threat. My suitors are.'

  'Your gentleman-friends are a threat to me?'

  'You underestimate the extent of their jealousy. I fear they will soon become a threat to everyone I have known, friend or enemy, my whole sorry life.' Glokta jerked a hooded cloak from a peg on the wall and held it out to her.

  'Where are we going?'

  'A charming little house down near the docks. A little past its best, but plenty of character. Like the two of us, you could say.'

  There were heavy footsteps in the hallway and Cosca stuck his head into the room. 'Superior, we should leave if we want to reach the docks by—' He stopped, staring at Ardee. There was an uncomfortable silence.

  'Who is this?' she murmured.

  Cosca pushed flamboyantly into the room, swept off his hat, displaying his scabrous bald patch, and bowed low, low, low. Any lower and his nose would scrape the floorboards. 'Forgive me, my lady. Nicomo Cosca, famed soldier of fortune, at your service. Abject, in fact, at your feet.' His throwing knife dropped out of his coat and rattled against the boards.

  They all stared at it for a moment, then Cosca grinned up. 'You see that fly, against the wall?'

  Glokta narrowed his eyes. 'Perhaps not the best moment for—'

  The blade spun across the room, missed the target by a stride, hit the wall handle-first and gouged out a lump of plaster, bounced back and clattered across the floor.

  'Shit,' said Cosca. 'I mean… damn.'

  Ardee frowned down at the knife. 'I'd say shit.'

  Cosca passed it off with a rotten smile. 'I must be dazzled. When the Superior described to me your beauty I thought he must have… how do you say… exaggerated? Now I see that he came short of the mark.' He retrieved his knife and jammed his hat back on, slightly askew. 'Please allow me to declare myself in love.'

  'What did you tell him?' asked Ardee.

  'Nothing.' Glokta sucked sourly at his gums. 'Master Cosca has a habit of overstating the case.'

  'Especially when in love,' threw in the mercenary. 'Especially then. When I fall in love, I fall hard, and, as a rule, I do it no more than once a day.'

  Ardee stared at him. 'I don't know whether to feel flattered or scared.'

  'Why not be both?' said Glokta. 'But you will have to do it on the way.' We are short of time, and I have a rank garden to weed.

  The gate came open with an agonised shrieking of rusted metal. Glokta lurched over the decaying threshold, his leg, his hip, his back all stabbing at him from the long limp to the docks. The ruined mansion loomed out of the gloom at the far end of the shattered courtyard. Like a mighty mausoleum. A suitable tomb for all my dead hopes. Severard and Frost waited in the shadows on the broken steps, dressed all in black and masked, as usual. But not at all alike. A burly man and a slender, one white haired and one dark, one standing, arms folded, the other sitting, cross-legged. One is loyal, the other… we shall find out.

  Severard unravelled himself and got up with the usual grin around his eyes. 'Alright, chief, so what's all the—'

  Cosca stepped through the gate and wandered lazily across the broken paving, tapping a few lumps of masonry away with the toe of one shabby boot. He stopped beside a ruined fountain and scraped some muck out of it with a finger. 'Nice place. Nice and…' He waved the finger around, and the muck with it. 'Crumbly.' His mercenaries were already spreading out slowly around the rubble-strewn courtyard. Patched coats and tattered cloaks twitched back to display weapons of every size and shape. Edges, points, spikes and flanges glinted in the shifting light from their lanterns, their steel as smooth and clean as their faces were rough and dirty.

  'Who the hell are these?' asked Severard.

  'Friends.'

  'They don't look too friendly.'

  Glokta showed his Practical the yawning hole in his front teeth. 'Well. I suppose that all depends whose side you're on.'

  The last traces of Severard's smile had vanished. His eyes flickered nervously around the yard. The eyes of the guilty. How well we know them. We see them on our prisoners. We see them in the mirror, when we dare to look. One might have hoped for better from a man of his experience, but holding the blade is a poor preparation for being cut by it. I should know. Severard dashed towards the house, quick as a rabbit, but he only got a step before a heavy white hand chopped into the side of his neck and flung him senseless on the broken paving.

  'Take him downstairs, Frost. You know the way.'

  'Downthairth. Unh.' The hulking albino dragged Severard's limp body over his shoulder and set off towards the front door.

  'I have to say,' said Cosca, flicking the scum carelessly off his finger, 'that I like your way with your men, Superior. Discipline, I've always admired it.'

  'Fine advice from the least disciplined man in the Circle of the World.'

  'I have learned all kinds of things from my many mistakes.' Cosca stretched his chin up and scratched at his scabby neck. 'The one thing I never learn is to stop making them.'

  'Huh,' grunted Glokta as he laboured up the steps. A curse we all have to bear. Round and round in circles we go, clutching at successes that we never grasp, endlessly tripping over the same old failures. Truly, life is the misery we endure between disappointments.

  They stepped through the empty doorway and into the deeper darkness of the entrance hall. Cosca held his lamp high, staring up towards the ragged roof, his boots squelching heedless in the bird droppings spattering the floor. 'A palace!' His voice echoed back from the shattered staircases, the empty doorways, the naked rafters high above.

  'Please make yourselves comfortable,' said Glokta. 'But out of sight, perhaps. We can expect visitors some time tonight.'

  'Excellent. We love company, don't we lads?'

  One of Cosca's men gave a wet-lunged chuckle, displaying two rows of shit-coloured teeth. A set so incredibly rotten I am almost glad to have my own. 'These visitors will come from his Eminence the Arch Lector. Perhaps you could take a firm hand with them, while I'm downstairs?'

  Cosca glanced round approvingly at the crumbling hall. 'A nice place for a warm welcome. I'll let you know when our guests have been. I doubt they'll stay long.'

  Ardee had found a place near the wall, her hood up, her eyes on the floor. Trying to fade into the plaster, and who could blame her? Hardly the most pleasant company for a young woman, or the most reassuring setting. But better than a slit throat, I suppose. Glokta held his hand out to her. 'It would be best if you were to come with me.'

  She hesitated. As though not entirely sure that it would, in fact, be best to come with me. But a brief glance at some of the ugliest men in one of the world's ugliest professions evidently persuaded her. Cosca handed her his lamp, making sure his fingers lingered on hers for an uncomfortably long moment.

  'Thank you,' she said, jerking her hand away.

  'My particular pleasure.'

  Sheets of hanging paper, broken laths, lumps of fallen plaster cast strange shadows as they left Cosca and his thugs behind and picked their way into the guts of the dead building. Doorways passed by, squares of blackness, yawning like graves.

  'Your friends se
em a charming crowd,' murmured Ardee.

  'Oh indeed, the brightest stars in the social firmament. Some tasks demand desperate men, apparently.'

  'You must have some truly desperate work in mind, then.'

  'When don't I?'

  Their lamp barely lit the rotting drawing room, panelling sagging from the cheap brickwork, the best part of the floor a single festering puddle. The hidden door stood open in the far wall and Glokta shuffled round the edge of the room towards it, his hips burning with the effort.

  'What did your man do?'

  'Severard? He let me down.' And we will soon find out how badly.

  'I hope I never let you down, then.'

  'You, I am sure, have better sense. I should go first, then if I fall at least I fall alone.' He winced his way down the steps while she followed with the light.

  'Ugh. What's that smell?'

  'The sewers. There's an entrance to them down here, somewhere.' Glokta stepped past the heavy door and into the converted wine cellar, the bright steel grilles on the cells to either side glimmering as they passed, the whole place reeking of damp and fear.

  'Superior!' came a voice from the darkness. Brother Longfoot's desperate face appeared, pressed up against one set of bars.

  'Brother Longfoot, my apologies! I have been so very busy. The Gurkish have laid siege to the city.'

  'Gurkish?' squeaked the man, his eyes bulging. 'Please, if you release me—'

  'Silence!' hissed Glokta in a voice that brooked no dallying. 'You should stay here.'

  Ardee glanced nervously towards the Navigator's cell. 'Here?'

  'He isn't dangerous. I think you'll be more comfortable than you would be…' and he nodded his head towards the open doorway at the end of the vaulted hall, 'in there.'

  She swallowed. 'Alright.'

  'Superior, please!' One despairing arm stuck from Longfoot's cell, 'please, when will you release me? Superior, please!' Glokta shut the door on his begging with a gentle click. We have other business today, and it will not wait.

  Frost already had Severard manacled to the chair beside the table, still unconscious, and was lighting the lamps one by one with a flaming taper. The domed chamber gradually grew bright, the colour leaking into the mural across the round walls. Kanedias frowned down, arms outstretched, the fire burning behind him. Ah, our old friend the Master Maker, always disapproving. Opposite him his brother Juvens still bled his lurid last across the wall. And not the only blood that will be spilled in here tonight, I suspect.

  'Urr,' groaned Severard, his lank hair swaying. Glokta lowered himself slowly into his chair, the leather creaking under him. Severard grunted again, his head dropped back, eyelids flickering. Frost lumbered over, reached out and undid the buckles on Severard's mask, pulled it off and tossed it away into the corner of the room. From a fearsome Practical of the Inquisition to… nothing much. He stirred, wrinkled his nose, twitching like a boy asleep.

  Young. Weak. Helpless. One could almost feel sorry for him, if one had a heart. But now is not the time for sentiment and soft feelings, for friendship and forgiveness. The ghost of happy and promising Colonel Sand dan Glokta has been clinging to me for far too long. Farewell, my old friend. You cannot help us today. Now is the time for the ruthless Superior Glokta to do what he does best. To do the only thing that he does well. Now is the time for hard heads, hard hearts and even harder edges.

  Time to cut the truth out.

  Frost jabbed Severard in the stomach with two fingers and his eyes snapped open. He jerked in his chair, the manacles rattling. He saw Glokta. He saw Frost. His eyes went wide as they darted round the room. They went wider still when he realised where he was. He snorted in air, the quick, hard breath of abject terror, the greasy strands of hair across his face blowing this way and that with the force of it. And how will we begin?

  'I know…' he croaked. 'I know I told that woman who you were… I know… but I had no choice.' Ah, the wheedling. Every man, more or less, behaves the same way when he's chained to a chair. 'What could I do? She would've fucking killed me! I had no choice! Please—'

  'I know what you told her, and I know you had no choice.'

  'Then… then why—'

  'Don't give me that, Severard. You know why you're here.' Frost stepped forward, as impassive as ever, and lifted the lid on Glokta's wonderful case. The trays inside opened up like an exotic flower, proffering out the polished handles, the gleaming needles, the shining blades of his instruments.

  Glokta puffed out his cheeks. 'I had a good day, today. I woke up clean, and made it to the bath on my own. Not too much pain.' He wrapped his fingers around the grip of the cleaver. 'Something to celebrate, a good day. I get so very few of them.' He slid it from its sheath, the heavy blade flashing in the harsh lamplight. Severard's eyes followed it all the way, bulging with fear and fascination, beads of sweat glittering on his pale forehead.

  'No,' he whispered. Yes. Frost unlocked the cuff around Severard's left wrist, lifted his arm in both meaty hands. He took the fingers and spread them out one by one until they were flattened on the wood in front of him, wrapping his other arm around Severard's shoulders in a tight embrace.

  'I think we can dispense with the preamble.' Glokta rocked forward, got up and limped slowly around the table, his cane clicking on the tiles, his left leg dragging behind it, the corner of the cleaver's blade scraping gently across the wood of the table-top. 'I need not explain how this will work to you. You, who have assisted me so very ably, on so very many occasions. Who could know better how we will proceed?'

  'No,' whimpered Severard, trying half a desperate smile, but with a tear leaking from the corner of his eye nonetheless. 'No, you wouldn't! Not to me! You wouldn't!'

  'Not to you?' Glokta gave a sad smile of his own. 'Oh, Practical Severard, please…' He let the grin slowly fade as he lifted the cleaver. 'You know me so much better than that.'

  Bang! The heavy blade flashed down and hacked into the table-top, paring the slightest sliver of skin from the end of Severard's middle finger.

  'No!' he squawked. 'No!' You don't admire my precision any longer, then?

  'Oh, yes, yes.' Glokta tugged at the smooth handle and dragged the blade free. 'How did you think this would end? You've been talking. You've been saying things you shouldn't, to people you had no business saying anything to. You will tell me what. You will tell me who.' The cleaver glimmered as he raised it again. 'And you had better tell me soon.'

  'No!' Severard thrashed and wriggled in the chair but Frost had him as tightly as a fly in honey. Yes.

  The blade sliced cleanly through the end of Severard's middle finger and took it off at the first joint. The end of his index finger spun across the wood. The tip of his ring finger stayed where it was, wedged into a joint in the table top. With Frost's hand still clamped tight as a vice round his wrist the blood only dribbled gently from the three wounds and spread out in slow rivulets down the grain.

  There was a breathless pause. One, two, three… Severard screamed. He wailed, and jerked, and trembled, his face quivering. Painful, eh? Welcome to my world.

  Glokta worked his aching foot around in his boot. 'Who would ever have thought that our charming association, so enjoyable and profitable to us both, could possibly end like this? Not my choice. Not mine. Tell me who you spoke to. Tell me what you said. Then this unpleasantness will all be over. Otherwise…'

  Bang! The end of his little finger, now, and three more pieces of the rest. His middle finger was down to the knuckle, almost. Severard stared, his eyes wide with horror, his breath coming in short, fast gasps. Shock, amazement, stunned terror. Glokta leaned down to his ear. 'I hope you weren't planning to take up the violin, Severard. You'll be lucky if you can play a fucking gong by the time we're done here.' He winced at a spasm in his neck as he lifted the cleaver again.

  'Wait!' sobbed Severard. 'Wait! Valint and Balk! The bankers! I told them… I told them…'

  I knew it. 'What did you tell them?'

/>   'That you were still looking for Raynault's murderer when we'd already hung the Emperor's emissary!' Glokta met Frost's eyes, and the albino stared back, emotionless. And another secret is dragged kicking into the merciless light. How disappointingly right I was. It always amazes me, how swiftly problems can be solved, once you start cutting things off people. 'And… and… I told them that you wanted to know about our bastard king, and about Bayaz, and I told them you weren't checking up on Sult like they asked, and I told them… I told them…'

  Severard stuttered to a halt, staring at the remains of his fingers, scattered out across the table in a spreading slick of blood. That mixture of unbearable pain, even more unbearable loss, and total disbelief. Am I dreaming? Or have I really lost half my fingers, forever?

  Glokta nudged Severard with the end of the cleaver. 'What else?'

  'I told them anything I could. I told them… everything I knew…' The words came spitting and drooling from his lips, curled back with agony. 'I had no choice. I had debts, and… they offered to pay. I had no choice!'

  Valint and Balk. Debts, and blackmail, and betrayal. How horribly banal it all is. That's the trouble with answers. They're never as exciting as the questions, somehow. Glokta's lips twitched into a sad smile. 'No choice. I know exactly how you feel.' He lifted the cleaver again.

  'But—'

  Bang! The heavy blade scraped against the table-top as Glokta swept four more neat slices of flesh carefully out of the way. Severard screamed, and gasped, and screamed some more. Desperate, slobbering screams, his face screwed up tight. Just like the prunes I sometimes have for breakfast. He still had half his little finger, but the other three were nothing more than oozing stumps. But we cannot stop now, not after we have come so far. We cannot stop for anything, can we? We must know it all.

  'What about the Arch Lector?' asked Glokta, stretching his neck to the side and working his stiff shoulder. 'How did he know what went on in Dagoska? What did you tell him?'