The Wisdom of Crowds

by Joe Abercrombie

  “From what I hear,” muttered Leo, “that man was the best sergeant in the army.”

  Glaward nodded sadly. “Solid, careful, caring, not much imagination.” He could’ve been describing himself.

  “All the qualities that make a terrible general,” murmured Jurand.

  “I understand you served with the notorious royalist Lord Marshal Forest?” Sworbreck sneered the name as if Forest was some monster no adult believed in. “At the Battle of Osrung, when he was a sergeant major? During the wars in Styria, when he rose by the king’s favour through the commissioned ranks?”

  Bell blinked about at the benches, but there was no sentimental applause now. “I did, but—”

  “You knew him well?”

  “Everyone in the army knew him.”

  “And respected him?”

  “Of course, he was—” Bell saw the trap too late. His face turned even redder than it had at his promotion. “No one had a reason to disrespect him. No one had a bad word for the man!”

  “Admiration!” shrieked Sworbreck. “For one of the most implacable and perfidious enemies of the Great Change! For a man who sheds Union blood on Union soil to put the snake Orso back above us!” And he pointed to the king with that always-trembling finger.

  Risinau had put Orso on a smaller and smaller chair. Now Judge had gone a step further and locked him in a cage while the court was in session. All it had done was give him a kind of louche dignity. His knowing smile seemed to ask what kind of a coward someone would have to be to fear a coward like him.

  Sworbreck thumped at the rough-sawn rail of the dock again. “An army of honest patriots could never be beaten fairly by Lord Marshal Forest’s royalist hirelings!” He rubbed at his hand, having clearly picked up a splinter from the shitty carpentry. “You came to an accommodation with them, didn’t you? You betrayed the Great Change!”

  Gasps of disgust from every side. Leo expected the truth was simpler. Bell had been promoted far beyond his ability and thrown against a dedicated enemy on ground of their choosing. His army was ill-provisioned, ill-equipped and stuffed with Purity Officers who bastardised every military decision with politics. The surprise was that disaster hadn’t struck sooner.

  “There was no bloody accommodation with the enemy!” shouted Bell. “They caught us strung out on the roads, in the rain. My men were exhausted. The Purity Officers insisted we march double time!”

  “Always someone else to blame! The Purity Officers now, Burners of unimpeachable pedigree, keen to get to grips with the hated enemy!”

  “But the People’s Army have been in the field for weeks. They’ve barely been paid. Now they’re hardly being fed—”

  “And whose responsibility is it that the army should be prepared, might I ask, if not the general in charge? Ours, I suppose?” The benches bristled. Even Leo grunted denials. You couldn’t give seeds of accusation the chance to take root. Before you knew it, suspicion would be sprouting everywhere. Disgust rained down on Bell from the public gallery.

  “Poor bastard,” muttered Glaward, with the sympathy of one big, lacklustre man for another.

  “I’ve always been loyal.” Bell had tears in his eyes. “Ask anyone I’ve served with.”

  The chamber fell silent as Judge shifted forwards from her chair, long fingers sliding across the table like a cat stretching out to sharpen its claws. Sworbreck might blather up a hurricane, but everyone knew it was Judge’s few words that counted.

  “It’s true I hear some fine reports o’ your conduct, Bell. It’s how you got the job in the first place. Put yourself in danger to save wounded soldiers. Gave up meals so others could eat. Walked while sick men rode on your horse. Noble stuff. It’d make me weep in a storybook.” Judge stretched further, her black eyes fixed on the accused. “But I weep very easily. You told us you did everything you could to win.”

  “I did, Citizeness Judge, please believe—”

  “But you didn’t win.”

  Bell blinked, mouth half-open.

  “Can’t say for sure you’re a traitor,” said Judge, “but I know for a fact you’re a loser. And for a general that’s just as bad. Dare I say it’s fucking worse?” She lifted her hammer and smacked the battered table. “Guilty. Get him to the Tower o’ Chains.” Broad caught Bell under the arm and hauled him from the dock.

  Leo dimly remembered a time—a few weeks ago—when there had been a middle ground. Room for compromises, on some things, some of the time. Now everyone was an extremist or a traitor to the cause and any trace of doubt was a betrayal.

  “We need a new general!” someone roared from the back of the benches, while the old one was still being dragged to his doom.

  “These damned royalists have to be stopped!”

  Jurand leaned close. “Now?”

  Leo had to smother a smile. Their thinking was more in step than ever. “Let’s test the ground, at least,” he murmured.

  “Citizens!” Jurand sprang to his feet. “Representatives! Officers of the court! Thanks to foreign intrigues and royalist conspiracies, we have faced frequent defeat in the field.” He’d always been one of the quickest thinkers Leo knew, and it had taken him no time at all to learn the language of the Great Change. He made a fine speaker, earnest and believable, with a little flush of passionate colour in his cheeks. “Lord Marshal Forest and his traitors should never have been allowed to get the better of the People’s Army. But now our patriots are in disarray. Low on morale. Paralysed by corruption, conspiracy and criminal incompetence.”

  Leo glanced over at Kort and gave him the slightest nod. He rose to roar the piece they’d agreed on. “Only five days ago, a group of farmers on the coast near Keln, banding together against Gurkish invaders, were mistaken for Gurkish invaders themselves and attacked by a group of armed fishermen. Twelve men died!” It had actually been one, but nobody got excited over a single corpse any more.

  “What we desperately need is organisation!” called that leader of fashion Lord Heugen, now the soberly dressed Citizen Heugen, right on cue. “What we must have is tried and tested leadership.”

  “Might I put forward a name known to us all?” asked Jurand, with a zealous shake of his fist. “A name already at the tip of many right-thinking men’s tongues when it comes to the defence of the Union. A name synonymous with courage, loyalty and fighting spirit. None other than Citizen Brock, the Young Lion!”

  Leo had expected a mixed reaction. The ex-lords and the Anglanders cheered, along with Kort and some other representatives Savine had bribed his way. There was scattered applause in the public gallery. He hadn’t lost all his charm along with his leg. But there was a low murmur of suspicion, too. There were shaken heads and sullen glances.

  And then there was Judge, considering Leo with the same narrowed eyes that had just considered the ill-fated Bell. Charm against her was like a match against the ever more merciless winter outside—unlikely to make much difference. “I’d have more faith in a man who’d won a battle rather’n lost one,” she said.

  “Stoffenbeck was a battle he knew he couldn’t win!” lied Jurand smoothly, clapping Leo on the shoulder. “But one he chose to fight anyway, whatever it cost him. Against the odds. Against countless royalist forces. Every Citizen can see the sacrifices he made on their behalf!”

  The king’s snort of scorn could’ve been heard in the upper gallery. No doubt he remembered Stoffenbeck differently, and no doubt he wasn’t alone, but if these trials were teaching Leo anything, it’s that what really happened doesn’t matter half so much as what people want to hear. He caught Glaward’s shoulder and dragged himself to his feet, took his cane from Jurand and lurched out onto the tiles as the hall fell silent.

  “Citizens!” he called. “Citizenesses! I gave up the ‘dan’ in my name. Gave it up happily, right on this spot. I gave up my Lord Governorship, my birthright, because I believe in what we’re doing here. Because I believe in the Great Change!”

  He waved down shouts of support from thos
e Representatives he’d persuaded to shout support. “Still! It’s true I was a nobleman. And the Army of the People should be led by a man of the people.” Just as Sergeant Bell had been, when they buttoned him into General Brint’s ill-fitting uniform and sent him off, armed with essays, to lose to the royalists. “I regret I cannot take up this honour.”

  King Orso gave another great snort, but it was soon lost in the applause at his selflessness and sacrifice. Perhaps he’d convinced some of the doubters to cheer. Even Judge gave him a cool nod as he dropped back onto the benches.

  “You turn it down?” whispered Glaward.

  “Better to turn it down before they refuse to offer it,” murmured Jurand, lips carefully pursed as he gauged the feeling in the galleries. “Then we can take it up later.”

  “We need a patriot!” someone was shouting.

  “Enough bloody generals! Enough bloody experts!”

  “We need someone who truly believes!”

  Leo adjusted his useless arm in his jacket. Belief won’t stop a cannon-stone. He could’ve told them that.

  Charity

  Snow fell weighty on the slums. Wisps and flutters, dirty from the smoke of the furnaces, drifting grey into the corners of the windows, the doorways, the alleys.

  The Burners’ slogans were everywhere, daubed in red paint across the houses. All Equal and Death to the Royalists and Sacrifice Everything. The fury of Sworbreck and his ilk at the world and everything in it had spread like a sickness from books, to newsbills, to pamphlets, until the poorly printed tantrums were pasted everywhere directly onto the sooty walls, today’s rant against those who would drag the Union back into the past splattered on top of yesterday’s, torn paper fluttering.

  A snatch of song floated across the frozen street. A man staggered by, sucking at a bottle. Someone screamed with laughter from an upstairs window and Savine flinched. Laughing in Adua these days felt as grimly inappropriate as laughing at a funeral. At an execution.

  “I hope you are well, Citizen Vallimir.”

  “I am alive, Citizeness Brock, and my wife is alive, which, after the events we endured in Valbeck, I consider to be remarkable good fortune.”

  “Your fortunes otherwise?” She could see those at a glance. Vallimir had always been lean, but he looked positively skeletal now, frayed clothes carefully darned. “I still fondly remember that jelly you served at your house in Valbeck.”

  Vallimir snorted. “There have been no jellies lately. I was employed as a foreman in a textile mill for a while, but following the Great Change… the price of coal… the place shut down. My wife takes in laundry. I have been carving toys. Soldiers are always popular.” He leaned close to murmur, “Providing they sport no royalist symbols.”

  “These are difficult times for everyone.”

  There were hawkers everywhere, struggling to turn a few bits from matches, ribbons, apples, shoestrings. Beggars, too, offering up their wounds, their diseases, their misery for inspection, knowing that despite the poverty, people here were more generous than in the richer parts of town. People here understood what it was to have nothing. Most of them were only one payday away from it.

  Prostitutes stood shivering on a corner in the same tall shoes and slit skirts they had worn when King Jezal was on the throne. The Great Change had not changed much for them. It took a brave woman now to show a bare leg to the freezing winter, but they tried their best, pale gooseflesh and pinched faces chapped pink from the cold, breath smoking as they whined hopeless come-ons to the uncaring chill. Then there were the footpads and tricksters, circling anyone who looked as if they might have a coin. There had been a time when Savine counted on her father’s name to keep her safe on these streets. Now she never stepped out of doors without Haroon and a few well-armed men.

  “You know I have the highest regard for you as a woman of business.” Vallimir cleared his throat. His voice had an ill crackle to it. “But prominent connections are not the safest thing these days. Might I ask why you sent for me?”

  “In Valbeck you helped me make money. Now… I want you to help me give it away.”

  They had reached the back of the queue. Dozens of lumpen figures crowded along one side of the street, bound up into shapeless bundles of torn clothes, blankets, rags. They stamped at the snow to keep warm, hugged themselves, hugged each other. Further on, someone sawed at a violin while a woman danced. Danced well. Children pelted each other with snowballs. Caught bystanders. There was laughter. Clapping. A cheerful feeling all too rare in the city now.

  “What are they queueing for?”

  Savine sighed. She still was faintly embarrassed to utter the words. “My charity, Citizen Vallimir.” She gestured towards a tin chimney peering over the roofline, dark smoke billowing up as the pale specks swirled down. “I own six bakeries now in the borough and have agents scouring Midderland for flour. Soup is made from whatever we can find. Thread is brought from Valbeck and the blankets woven just up the street. Coal comes in from my mines in Angland through an agreement with Lady Governor Finree. I was using the canal I own with Dietam Kort to move goods, until it froze.”

  Everything in the city had frozen. The water in the fountains. The river around the boats. Festoons of ice hung from broken gutters. In some of the cheaper taverns, she understood, the wine was known to freeze in the cups.

  “When I first tried to give bread away it turned into a riot. One of the wagons was upended. People wrestled in the mud for crumbs. People who got away with what I had given them were robbed in the next street. I observed the whole sorry business pressed into a doorway while my companion’s brothers shielded me with their bodies.”

  “It is not like you to show too much faith in people’s good nature.”

  Who knew generosity could be more dangerous than greed? “A mistake I will not make again. Ever since then I have been applying the same rigour to giving my money away as I did to making it.” They crunched through the boot-mashed snow to the front of the queue, where it passed through the iron gates into the warehouse. “Real estate in these parts has plummeted. I bought this place for a price you would not believe.” She had bought half the decaying buildings in the neighbourhood, in fact, and slashed the rents. “I saw the roof mended and invested in guards and gates. I hired locals to drive wagons, handle goods, stoke ovens, knead dough. I distributed some carefully judged bribes among the local Burners, secured some help from an old contact in the criminal fraternity and made sure she kept order on the streets.”

  She waved towards one of the braziers, a matching pair of Majir’s frowning thugs in attendance. “The people queue, hopefully without freezing. They receive a bag of coal, two loaves of bread, a blanket. There might be meat or milk for children, on a good day. Names and addresses are taken, marks and signatures given to discourage fraud. But sometimes examples have to be made even so.”

  Vallimir raised a brow at her, and she shrugged. “It is not like me to show too much faith in people’s good nature. These days we have fewer disruptions.”

  “Charity on an industrial scale,” murmured Vallimir. “You were never one for half-measures.”

  “No. I mean to set up a similar operation across the river and need to leave the management of this one in capable hands.”

  “Mine?”

  “Unless they are fully occupied carving toys? I have no doubt I could make use of your wife’s talents as well. My parents’ house is currently filled with orphaned children. The work has no end…” She trailed off into awkward silence.

  Vallimir was studying her with a healthy degree of suspicion. “I read that pamphlet, you know.”

  The pamphlets that circulated under the old regime had been bad enough. Some of the ones that circulated now went far beyond slander into the realm of sordid fantasy.

  “I hardly dare to ask which one,” said Savine, already feeling pinched by the cold.

  Vallimir took out a paper, creased and faded. The Darling of the Slums. And there was that etching of a rad
iantly smiling Savine dan Brock dispensing coins to the starving while orphans clutched at her skirts. The sight of it made Savine feel faintly nauseous.

  “What did you think?”

  “I could not avoid the conclusion that you were a damned liar.”

  Savine gave a brittle smile. “I would not dream of denying it.”

  “So I am forced to ask… what is the angle?” Understandable, of course, given he had known her before Stoffenbeck. Before Valbeck. Hard to believe it was only a year and a half ago. Savine dan Glokta seemed a faint acquaintance, dimly remembered, and not with much affection. “Is there some profit hidden in all this?”

  Savine thought of Zuri shaking her head over the numbers in the book. “Not of the financial kind, certainly.”

  “Goodwill, then? Popularity?”

  “We could all use a little goodwill in these troubled times, but I daresay I could polish my image for a fraction of what I am spending here.”

  “So why…” Vallimir waved towards a woman waddling from the warehouse gates with a bag of coal, the bulge of pregnancy showing even through her mass of clothes, three children of decreasing height waddling after her like ducklings after their mother, the one at the back with a loaf in his pink hand and two glistening streaks of snot down his face. “All this?”

  Why indeed? Savine took a deep breath, the cold of it almost painful, and gazed into the flames in the brazier. “It is, as you have no doubt guessed, entirely selfish. The truth is… the past seems to be a scab I cannot stop picking. I often think about Valbeck. About the uprising, and what I did there… and what I did before. About the children we used in our mill. The children… I made you use.” The fire, the queue, the snowy street, it had all become a sparkling blur, her eyes focused beyond. “I think about the battlefield at Stoffenbeck, too. The graves there. You would hardly believe… the size of the graves. The truth is… I wonder if the Great Change has really made things worse, or if it simply made them worse for me. Are there more beggars now, or do I simply see them for the first time? Was I any better than Judge, when I held the power? Was I worse? The truth is… I jerk awake, in the night, sure the Burners have come for me at last, and I know… that I deserve it.”