The Wisdom of Crowds

by Joe Abercrombie

  “Looks good on you. Very fearsome.”

  “I guess this has all been worthwhile, then.” It was hard to point out much else the Great Change had achieved so far. No doubt some folk had gained and some folk lost, but that better world she’d let herself hope was coming felt as far away as ever.

  The Constables had finally heaved the wagon into position, maw of the cannon pointing at the bank’s doors. She leaned towards their leader, a big-shouldered bastard so acne-scarred he’d probably looked less frightening when they still wore masks. “This bloody thing loaded?”

  “I’ve got shot,” he said, “but there’s no powder to be had.”

  All shot and no powder summed it right up. She’d just have to blow the door down with lies, like usual. “Get the match-cord lit at least, make it look like we think the damn thing works.” She cleared her sore throat and turned back to the bank. “Can you hear me in there?”

  “I can hear you.”

  “Can you see me?”

  A pause. A tiny slot slid open in one of the doors. “I can see you,” came considerably louder from the opening.

  Vick ground her teeth again. They were going to be down to the gums by the time this door was open. “Then why didn’t you open the bloody slot before?”

  No answer.

  “You see we’ve got a cannon pointed at you.”

  No answer.

  “I’ll take that as a yes.” There was a puff of sparks as one of the Constables finally got the match-cord to splutter into life, and some of their growing audience took nervous steps away. “I’m going to count down from ten. If this door isn’t open when I get to nothing, I’m going to open it the hard way.”

  No answer, but she thought she saw a pair of eyes behind the slot blink.

  “Anything within twenty strides of that door’ll get opened the hard way, too.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You,” said Vick. “You’ll be open. You’ll all be wide fucking open.”

  “Perhaps we could—”

  “Ten.”

  There was a clattering of keys, a rattling of bolts, one half of the double doors opened and a balding head stuck around it into the chill autumn air. “We surrender,” it said.

  Vick looked over at the lead Constable. Something she would rather have done as little as possible. “Well, then?”

  “Oh. Right.” And he pulled out his stick and stomped forwards, beckoning the others after him.

  “Why’s the Commissioner so interested in banks, anyway?” muttered Tallow. “Why not, I don’t know, the armouries, or the barracks, or the granaries?”

  “Daresay we’ll get to those.”

  “But why banks first?”

  When Arch Lector Glokta was in charge, Vick had found it helped not to waste too much thought on the whys. She guessed the same applied to Commissioner Pike. Probably it applied double. So she just shrugged.

  “Better raiding bankers than Breakers, I guess,” said Tallow.

  “Is it?”

  “On the right side of history, maybe.”

  Vick snorted. “The thing about history is you don’t know what the right side is till long afterwards, and by then it hardly matters.”

  “That’s the sort o’ thing you hear from folk who know they’re on the wrong side.”

  Vick conceded the point with a weary grunt. “I daresay.”

  “Safe!” bellowed the Constable from inside and, with care, Vick stepped through the open front doors of the Adua headquarters of the Banking House of Valint and Balk.

  The knot of employees inside hardly looked like a threat to the new Union. They looked like a set of very scared clerks with a cannon pointing at them. Vick picked out the best dressed. A balding man trying to hide behind the others.

  “You’re in charge?” she asked.

  “Well…” He glanced about nervously, but no one fell over themselves to take responsibility. “I suppose I am the longest serving member of staff on site. I am Ario Matterno, senior over-clerk for loans—”

  “Styrian?”

  “Is that…” he swallowed. “A problem?”

  “Not for me.” Vick was keenly aware that most of the considerable harm done to her in her life had been by her own countrymen, but foreigners were not popular with the mobs. A few days before, a dozen Gurkish immigrants had been burned as spies in the Three Farms. Being too dark or too fair or too rich or too poor or too mad or too sane was a bad idea in the new Union. Freedom did not seem to have made anyone any less angry. But then the price of bread kept going up, and Chairman Risinau’s oratory wasn’t edible.

  “The vault’s this way?” Vick started walking. Matterno managed to keep pace with her while hurrying along sideways, rubbing his hands. “Inquisitor—”

  “Inspector,” corrected Tallow.

  “Sorry, yes, so many changes to keep track of… are you really sure you want to do this?”

  “It’s not a question of what I want to do.” Vick wasn’t sure it had ever in her life been a question of that. “Commissioner Pike has ordered every branch of Valint and Balk shut down. At once.”

  The man looked baffled. As though Commissioner Pike had ordered water to flow upwards. “But… it’s Valint and Balk. You can’t do that.”

  “You didn’t see the cannon?”

  He tried to explain it again. “The Banking House is owed money everywhere. Everywhere. So many, many friends, here in the Union and abroad. It would be very unwise… it would be utter madness—”

  “Have you been outside lately? Wisdom is not at a premium, madness is the fashion, the balance sheets are all torn up and the friends that were assets have become liabilities.” Vick kept walking. “Threats for tomorrow don’t cut very deep when today is so damn threatening. You might want to keep ’em to yourself.”

  It felt cold in the banking hall. Colder than outside, almost. Vick had to resist the urge to put her feet down softly on account of the volley of echoes produced by every step. The place was high as a Gurkish temple, carved from dark marble and dark wood, gilt glittering in shafts of dusty light from the high windows. There were little islands of expensive chairs where supplicants would wait to receive the bank’s blessing, or to hear their schemes ripped to tatters, but no business was being done today. The only merchants in attendance were marble busts of history’s richest men, frowning greedily at them from the past.

  “Now that is a door,” said Tallow.

  It was the door to end all doors, taking up most of the far wall and towering over the room, an expanse of black iron with the weighty names Valint and Balk etched in gold in the centre. Down near the bottom was a brass wheel like the wheel of a ship, a tiny-looking lock to either side.

  Tallow gazed up at it, open-mouthed. “I’m guessing that’s the vault?”

  “It’d be a fancy door for the kitchen.” Vick waved some of the Constables out into the room and they began to drag drawers from desks, root through papers, throw things around in that slightly disinterested way they had.

  “Shouldn’t it be hidden?” asked Tallow. “Underground or something?”

  “The whole point is that no one who comes in can miss it. They all have to imagine how much money sits behind a door as big as that. How much power.” She nodded Matterno towards the brass wheel. “Open it.”

  The senior over-clerk for loans spoke in a very small voice. “I don’t have the authority, Inspector.”

  Vick planted her hands on her hips again. “Don’t make me wheel that bloody cannon in here.”

  “It’s a two-foot thickness of Angland steel. You’ll barely scratch it with a cannon.”

  Vick looked him right in the eye. “It’s you I was going to point it at.”

  Matterno swallowed, and slipped a key from his pocket, and offered it out. A very long, thin, delicate key for such an immensity of door, wards so complex they looked like a tiny maze. “I only have one. You need the other.”

  “Don’t tell me. The manager has it.”

>   Ever so slowly, Matterno spread his palms. “I… think?”

  “Arrest him,” said Vick. “And the others. Seal this place up.”

  “But… Inspector!” Two Constables caught the disbelieving senior over-clerk for loans under the armpits and started manhandling him away. “It’s Valint and Balk!”

  “You can explain it to Commissioner Pike!” Vick called after him. “Get them all to the House of Questions.”

  “House of Truth,” corrected Tallow.

  “Whatever.” She winced as she rubbed at her stiff hip. Damn thing always started niggling as the weather turned colder. “Lots of empty cells up there these days.”

  “Aye.” Tallow gave a faraway sigh. “I suppose it’s high time we filled ’em up again.”

  Citizens

  “The deeper question…” Risinau sank back, the ornate chair that was once Orso’s creaking under his bulk, to consider the gilded dome above. “Is what are we now?”

  Orso considered that one of the best questions of recent times. A few tiles were cracked, a few benches broken, and one of the glorious stained-glass windows had been smashed and badly boarded up so a chilly draft occasionally swept through the hall, but otherwise the Lords’ Round was much as it had been. They called it the Commons’ Round now, though. They’d turned the cushions over so the embroidered suns of the Union didn’t show, and the unruly gathering who sat upon them was no longer the Open Council, but the Assembly of Representatives.

  There had been votes in the districts of Adua, apparently. Votes from every Midderland-born man, no matter how mean and ignorant, resulting in a body of representatives, as far as Orso could tell, every bit as mean and ignorant as they were. Votes. He could only imagine his mother’s reaction to that. The tyranny of the majority. Representatives would be elected in other cities of the Union in due course, but those benches were still empty while the Assembly argued over the rules. They argued even more than the Open Council had, if that was possible. They argued every point. They argued the order of the points. They argued the method of argument.

  “What are we?” one of Risinau’s cronies pronounced, with great emphasis. “Or… what should we be?” Everything was said with great emphasis. The most banal observations became profound revelations, tear-tracked protestations, chest-thumping declarations.

  “A republic?”

  “How?” Someone frowned towards Orso. He looked vaguely familiar. Impressive whiskers. “We still have a king.”

  “A regrettable state of affairs.” Orso could not tell who had said that. Probably everyone thought it. He had long been thinking it himself, after all. He was not at all sure why the Breakers had not done away with him on the day of the Great Change. Perhaps they could not quite shrug off some vestige of deference to the monarch. Perhaps they thought his presence might lend proceedings a patina of legitimacy. Perhaps they preferred him as a contemptible prop than a martyr to be avenged. More likely they feared to smash the past all in one go, and were holding him back for a spectacular finale.

  Whatever the reasons, they had built an absurd little enclosure to contain the royal person, halfway between a theatre box and a dock for the accused, splattered in cheap gilt, already peeling. He felt like the ridiculous peacock some Southern ambassador had once given his mother. She had kept it in a silver cage as a curio for visitors. It had looked deeply unhappy, produced an astonishing quantity of dung and not lived very long.

  It would have helped at least a little if all the old denizens of the Open Council had lost their places in the Great Change, but a smattering of Orso’s worst enemies had managed to cling to their seats. Lord Isher had slithered from hiding, Lord Heugen had slipped out of prison and the Young Lion sat in the front row along with several other surviving aristocratic rebels. Those few noblemen who had stayed loyal to the Crown were languishing in cells beneath the House of Truth. The world was turned upside down, indeed. Traitors were patriots, turncoats were loyalists, corruption was purity and the truth a lie.

  Aside from the reduced Lord Brock there were no delegates from Angland. Lady Finree was back in charge there, carefully considering her options. Starikland was not represented, either. Lord Governor Skald had denounced the Great Change and, if Orso knew his brother-in-law at all, would even now be wondering how he could twist it to his advantage. The only representatives from beyond the shores of Midderland were a few alarmed Aldermen of Westport, no doubt regretting their decision to remain inside the Union more with every passing day. Orso wondered absently if he might get a message via them to his mother and sister in Sipani. Just to let them know he was well. Reassuring lies had always been the glue that held his family together, after all.

  “The Union is and has always been a monarchy,” came Risinau’s endlessly overemphasising voice. Chairman Risinau, he was calling himself. Appropriate, for a man forever sitting down. “We must acknowledge the past even as we shape the future. But we are a new variety of monarchy and must devise new terminology!” Nothing pleased him more than to tinker with terminology. The man was a positive manufactory of verbiage. “You might call it a representative, or perhaps a constitutional monarchy…”

  Among the newly elected there were labourers, merchants, printers, lens-makers, clock-makers, candle-makers, even a couple of maids and a belligerent laundress, but also a disproportionate number of artists, poets and that most nebulous of designations: intellectuals. Risinau clearly considered himself to be artist, poet and intellectual combined, though in his labyrinthine speeches Orso perceived little artistry, only the cheapest kind of poetry and no intellect whatsoever.

  “I have been considering a written constitution!” Whiskers, again, leaning over the parchments on the High Table, pen in inky hand. It finally came to Orso who he was: Spillion Sworbreck, that bloody writer in whose office he used to meet Savine. In spite of everything, the memory brought a rare smile to his face. “I was thinking something along the lines of… we consider these facts to be self-evident—”

  There was instant opposition from among the great thinkers. “What? Nothing is self-evident!”

  “Pretentious! Presumptuous!”

  “Asking for trouble.”

  “Terrible first line.”

  There was the scrape of a nib crossing out. “Thorny, isn’t it, once you start drafting? Not at all like fiction.”

  Judge delivered one of her explosive snorts of scorn. She was draped over a chair with one bare foot up on the High Table, its dirty sole directed at the Chairman, her lip permanently twisted and her eyes forever narrowed. Her followers, the Burners, had taken to dyeing parts of their clothes red. You could see a few of them on the benches. Red hats. Red sleeves. Red trouser legs. As if they had been dipped in blood. Perhaps they had.

  “Let us skip over the first line for now.”

  “The first line? And already we’re skipping over?”

  “Don’t writers always say you should write the first line last?”

  “Just the sort of bloody rubbish writers would say…”

  This was the way of it. Business was steered by Risinau’s whims, or whoever could shout loudest. Halfway through discussing one thing they’d be dragged onto another. It was the most dispiriting display of mismanagement Orso had witnessed, indeed, since the last time he sat in this room, before the Great Change. He leaned sideways, holding out his goblet. “Don’t suppose you could fill me up again, Hildi?”

  The day the Agriont fell she had melted into the crowd as ordered, then melted straight back when he was not immediately torn to pieces. He had admonished her sternly for her disobedience, but in truth was pathetically grateful for this one undeserved shred of loyalty. They had confiscated her old cap—leading to a flood of swearing which had still not quite dried up—but otherwise allowed her to stay in post, wearing an absurd livery. This was typical of the new regime. Some things they furiously tore down. Others they let stand, even tearfully celebrated. All without apparent pattern or purpose.

  “You sure?
” she muttered through tight lips.

  “Worried they’ll take a dislike to my drinking? They took enough of a dislike to me already to overthrow the monarchy. They’ve given me wine. Bad wine, but still. Might as well make use of it.”

  His eyes met Corporal Tunny’s for a moment, slumped upon a bench towards the back. It hurt Orso more than it should have, to see his old standard-bearer seated among his enemies. But one can hardly expect paid hangers-on to keep hanging on after the pay dries up, and it could not be denied that no one better represented the faithlessness, degradation and low character of the commons than Corporal Tunny.

  Sworbreck droned on. “If we accept, just for the time being, temporarily and reversibly, that we do consider these facts to be self-evident…” There was an expectant pause. “Which facts should they be?”

  “Ah.” Risinau placed a finger on his lips and considered the dome once again. “Well, that would be the deeper question.”

  Orso sank into his chair with a groan, letting his gaze wander lazily along the front row. Only one man there met his eye. The Young Lion looked neither young nor particularly leonine any more, his face hollowed out and lined with pain, beard scattered with still-healing scars on the left side, one of them dragging his mouth into a permanent half-frown.

  Orso raised his goblet in a silent toast. Why waste energy on hatred, after all? The world in which they had been rivals had dropped into oblivion beneath them like a sunken ship. They all were treading water to survive.

  Leo sat there, in agony.

  The cold throb through his ruined arm and into his shoulder. The salty sting where his teeth were missing. The endless ache in the foot he no longer had. The tormenting itch in the butchered stump.

  “By the dead,” he mouthed, squirming in his seat.

  He wanted to rip open his sewn-shut trouser leg and tear at the red wounds with his nails. Gnaw at the stitches like a wolf might at a leg caught in a trap. He squeezed his eyes shut, trying to breathe, trying to listen, but he could hardly follow a word. The crowd bellowed and warbled along with the blood rushing in his ears, no more meaning in it than in a stormy sea.