The Wisdom of Crowds

by Joe Abercrombie

  She put her own hand on top of his, and took a deep breath, and puffed it out in a smoky sigh. They stood together in the entrance of Skarling’s Hall, watching the meltwater drip, drip, drip from the archway.

  Thaw

  Drip, drip, drip. Cold water, onto Clover’s head, his shoulders, his back, working its way through every seam, trickling, tickling against his sore and clammy skin.

  “Bloody dripping,” he muttered, frowning up at the branches, but rain was just one more of life’s buffets he was powerless to prevent.

  “Guess we could move out from under the trees,” muttered Flick.

  “Aye, but then we’d have the mud to deal with.” Clover shook his head and scraped a smear of dirt from his trousers with his thumbnail. Wasted effort, since they’d be spattered afresh before you knew it. “Bloody mud. Worst thing about war.”

  “Worse’n the death?” asked Sholla, who’d been busy for the past hour at least with her endless quest to cut the thinnest slice of cheese imaginable.

  “Death is but an occasional hazard. Mud is a constant.” And Clover rubbed that bit of dirt thoughtfully between thumb and forefinger. “Strange, isn’t it? Soil and water are both good things. Things you can’t live without. But mix the two and add an army, you’ve got a nightmare.”

  It’d been a cold winter, snow banked up man tall in the High Places. With the weather tilting warmer, seemed the world was melting. Water dripped from the trees. Dripped from the eaves of Currahome’s sodden houses. Seeped through the boggy grass and gathered in the streams and swole ’em to dirty rivers. Downside came squelching over, knocking melting snow from the brambles.

  “Where have you been?” asked Clover.

  “There’s two things I enjoy, fucking and killing. I can’t do the one, so I’ve been at the other.”

  Sholla didn’t look up from her cheese-cutting. “And did your hand enjoy it as much as you did?”

  Clover chuckled. Flick chuckled. Downside frowned as he worked it through, then he worked it out, and frowned more. Didn’t say anything, though. No doubt he could’ve twisted Sholla’s head off in a wrestling match, but he knew that in a battle of wits she was much the better armed.

  “By the dead, boy,” grunted Clover as Flick nudged him in the ribs, “you’ve got the sharpest damn elbows in the North—” Then he saw the worry. Black Calder, stalking over with a grim crowd of Named Men, all striving to look mighty while they tiptoed through the winter muck.

  “Chief!” Clover jumped up, slapping dirt from the seat of his trousers. He knew he was on thin ice with Calder, so he was being specially

  accommodating. “Good to see you!”

  Calder frowned up from under wrinkled brows. “Don’t spoon it on too thick. I’ve come to tell you we’re moving out.”

  “Moving out where?”

  “Carleon.”

  “High time,” grunted Downside with an approving nod, and you know you’ve a reckless notion on your hands when you win Downside’s approval.

  “You’re marching now?” Clover waved at the valleyful of filth, mostly black mud with some sad streaks o’ white snow clinging to the hollows, sprinkled with rubbish and the wreckage of tents, crawling with unhappy men like a rotten log with woodlice, the keen wind snatching ash from dead fires and blowing it in folks’ faces. “In this?”

  “Better weather’s on the way.”

  “Aye, but that’ll make things even wetter. Every river’ll be swollen, every ford neck high, every road a bloody mire. That’s ’fore we even set foot on it. We’ll be drowning in mud by the time we get to Carleon!”

  Calder narrowed his eyes. “Might be we’ll lose a couple of the weak ones, but I’ll see the rest there. Aren’t you always carping on how a man has to seize his moment? The moment’s come, whatever the weather. Rikke’s weak. The Nail’s swinging his prick down south and she’s had to send Hardbread to deal with him.” He gave a snort. “When bloody Hardbread’s your answer you know you’re short on choices.” And some of his Named Men dug out a chuckle. “She’s hardly got enough warriors to hold on to Carleon, let alone to hold it against us. I mean to get there before she can find any more. And Stand-i’-the-Barrows is growing restless. If we don’t find him some folk to kill, he’ll find ’em here.”

  Clover frowned up towards the bone and hide standards planted on the high ground. “You can tell the best allies ’cause they’re so fixed on taking men’s bones they’ll skin friends if they run out of enemies.”

  “Allies all have their shortcomings.”

  “Some more’n others.”

  “Like lazy fucks whose first preference is sitting under a tree and whose second is betraying you? Don’t try my patience, Clover, I’ve none to spare these days. We march today.”

  Clover took a long breath, then forced the smile onto his face. “Whatever you say, Chief.” He made sure he kept grinning as Calder and his men strode off towards the hall, spreading the bad news to each fire they passed.

  Flick doused theirs with a hiss and Clover turned about to stare at him. “What are you doing?”

  “Well… we’re marching, ain’t we? Don’t want to leave it burning.”

  “What? You’re afraid this fucking morass will catch fire? There’s a whole valley to empty and only one road. We’ll be lucky if we’re off the spot by nightfall. Now we’ll be cold into the bargain.”

  “Hold on,” whispered Sholla. “Hold on.” She was wincing with the effort as she teased at her knife, a shaving coming off the cheese so fine the light shone through it. “Nobody… fucking… move.” Like a scrap of paper, it was, as she held up the blade, so pale and perfect, fluttering a little with the breeze. “I’ve done it.”

  And a great drip came from the tree above and spattered on the knife, breaking the shaving in bits and scattering ’em across the muddy ground.

  “Fucking shit!” she barked, and Downside threw his head back and laughed.

  “Just goes to show,” said Clover, “how fate can smash all our plans in an instant.”

  “You’ve got plans?” asked Flick, looking genuinely surprised.

  “I’ve got plans like I’ve got boots.” Clover frowned down at his waterlogged footwear. “Honestly, I could always do with better ones.”

  Sholla had stood, cheese in one hand, knife in the other, watching the weary men stirring about their fires, striking their tents, gathering their gear, as Black Calder’s orders spread. “What happens when we get to Carleon?”

  “That is a question I’m still grappling with.” Rikke would be wondering why he’d sent no word back about her offer to Calder and, with good reason, likely thought he’d betrayed her. Calder, meanwhile, knew Clover had betrayed him once already and handed his beloved son over for rough handling by his enemies. Putting it nicely. He might be telling the truth when he said he liked Clover. But Black Calder had killed men he liked more for lesser offences. And that was without considering the outcome if the Great Wolf ever did get his freedom.

  Clover winced. Something he did whenever he considered the current situation. “Seems we might be trapped ’twixt the mountains and the sea, so to speak.”

  “You are,” said Sholla. “Doubt anyone much cares about the rest of us.”

  “Oh, you’d be surprised how vengeance, falling from a great height, can spatter the most innocent o’ bystanders. And you, my cheese-shaving beauty, by no means qualify.”

  “Hmmm.” She glanced over at Trapper, who was happening past with the remnants of his dozen, and pushed her tangled hair off her dirty

  face so she could try out a smile. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it won nothing from him. “Running away might be an option,” she murmured through her fixed grin.

  “By all means take to your heels, but running’s for the young. I need to sit down. Somewhere dry. And I reckon my best chance of that is to stay close to the action and try to nudge things my way.” Clover scratched gently at his scar. “Close to the action, by the dead. You make every effort to steer cle
ar o’ something, and all you do is end up mired to your fucking neck in it.”

  “We’ll all be mired soon enough.” Flick stared at the bog in the valley bottom and gave a gloomy sniff.

  Sholla leaned close. “D’you reckon there comes a time when you’ve betrayed folk so often that there’s no one left to betray?”

  Clover gave a weary sigh. “We may find out.”

  Love, Hate, Fear

  The palace wasn’t at all how he remembered it from his last visit, but King Jezal had still been alive then, and Leo had been a loyal Lord Governor with all his limbs, and the Lords’ Round had held a high-minded brotherhood of noblemen rather than a bloodthirsty rabble under the sway of an insane witch.

  Times change, he supposed. The winners are those who change with them.

  The gilded hallways echoed with strange sounds, something between a demented carnival and a riot. Jagged music came from somewhere. Or maybe someone was smashing a harp. There was an odd smell, like a cheap brothel. Slashed paintings of smug monarchs had been hung upside down. A neatly dressed, dark-skinned man sat in a chair, fussing nervously with his hat and jumping at every sound. Some ambassador, maybe. A pair of women in red dresses scarcely fastened stumbled giggling past, one holding a wine bottle, the other a pot of slopping paint, leaving a snaking trail of red footprints behind them.

  “They used to say the heart of the state was rotten,” muttered Glaward, with one glance back over his shoulder. “Now look at it.”

  “It’s hell,” whispered Jurand. “They’ve turned it into bloody hell.”

  Snow swirled in through a broken window, bang, bang, banging a shutter against the frame and leaving a chilly puddle in the hallway. Overstoked blazes in every fireplace made it greasy-hot even so, and if that wasn’t enough to get the sweat springing from Leo’s forehead there were armed Burners everywhere, armour dotted with red paint. Some of them even had their faces smeared with crimson lady’s blusher, stuck somewhere between war-daubed savages from beyond the Crinna and murderous clowns.

  “Please! He’s innocent. I swear!”

  A cultured voice, weeping and begging at once, coming from a door ajar, its lock hacked away with an axe.

  “They’re taking him to the tower today!”

  “Maybe I could talk to Judge on your behalf, Lilott…” A man’s voice. He sounded like he was enjoying himself.

  “Just tell me what I can do!”

  “Get your clothes off, for a start.”

  Glaward faltered, jaw clenched as the strip of light from that slightly open door fell across his face. “Should we do something?” he whispered.

  Leo didn’t even slow down. “Don’t be fucking ridiculous.”

  Before the Great Change it would’ve been him asking whether they should do something. Bursting through that door in some self-indulgent, self-defeating puke of gallantry. But then he used to be a reckless, soft-hearted fool. He remembered giving out bread and blankets in the slums with Savine, a thousand years ago. He’d torn his hair at the state of those poor people. Wept that he couldn’t do more.

  Now he winced at the tiresome interruption of this woman’s pain. It felt trivial, beside the pain in his stump. As his mother always used to say, he couldn’t allow himself to be swept off by whatever emotion blew his way. He had the big picture to worry about.

  “Well?” purred the man’s voice. “You want him saved or not?”

  “There’s nothing we can do.” Jurand caught Glaward’s elbow and hurried him on, the woman’s snivelling soon lost behind them. Leo clenched his jaw and upped the pace, his face twitching with each scrape of his metal foot.

  He was finding a way to live with this shit, wasn’t he? So could she.

  Everywhere the walls were hacked and scored, carvings scarred where the sun of the monarchy had been torn down, chiselled out, scraped away. Slogans had been sloshed in their place in red paint. Rise up. Equality. Midderland for its People. And finally, across the tiled floor at the foot of a stairway crusted with gilded leaves, Fuck yourselves.

  Jurand raised his brows. “I never yet saw the Burners’ philosophy so succinctly expressed.”

  “That gets to the heart of it,” muttered Leo as he struggled up the steps. Flat, he could almost manage now without a cane. Stairs were still an embarrassment. He had to take them one at a time, slightly sideways. Cane first, then the false leg, then the good one. There was always a moment, when the weight went through his stump, through the socket, through his iron foot, when he’d feel like he was about to fall. Always a moment when he gritted his teeth against the pain and simply refused to go down.

  He realised Glaward was lurking at his elbow, as if to catch him. “Don’t hover,” he grunted.

  “He’d rather you didn’t brain yourself,” said Jurand, trotting past.

  Leo paused at the top of the steps to catch his breath, let the pain in his throbbing stump subside, mop away sweat with the back of his good sleeve, wedge the other more firmly into his jacket. He became aware of a regular creaking of furniture through the closed door beside him. A noisy grunting, groaning, moaning. At least four different voices. One might’ve been crying.

  “They’re either fucking or killing each other,” muttered Jurand.

  “Or both,” said Leo, setting himself as proudly as he could for the last few steps to Judge’s door.

  Her office was a huge domed chamber choked with rubbish. Empty bottles. Full bottles. Bent cutlery. Axes and flatbows. Stained and ripped-up bundles of documents. A half-picked chicken carcass. Antique vases used as ashtrays. An ornate bed the size of a small warship had half its silk curtains hanging in tatters, one of its pillows split and spilling feathers across the floor, dancing in a draft. Jurand was staring at something with a vaguely horrified expression. Leo followed his gaze. He hoped he was mistaken. He very much hoped. But it looked as though someone had done a shit on the floor.

  Through an open door, Leo glimpsed limp, bare limbs. Burners sleeping off their revels, maybe, but he wouldn’t have been at all surprised to find they were corpses. A woman bound up in bandoliers of little knives squatted against the wall, rolling dice. A pair of scarred men watched the snow fall outside one of the narrow windows. An ill-favoured bastard with a badly broken face sneered at them, arms folded.

  Gunnar Broad stood in towering silence, sipping from a bottle as he watched Leo limp in. He’d changed as much as the palace, and in much the same direction. No trace of the careful guardian who’d watched over Leo and Savine that day in the slums. His eyes, tiny behind those thick lenses, had an awful blankness Leo didn’t want to meet. As if the only reason he hadn’t exploded into violence was that he couldn’t decide whose head to crush first.

  Judge sprawled beside him on a monstrous couch in front of a monstrous fire. She wore a tattered robe of bright Suljuk silk that showed a slice of pale, knobbly breastbone and an angry dotting of rash all the way up her neck. Her hair hung in a tangled orange curtain over one eye, the other narrowed, red-rimmed, fixed on Leo.

  “If it ain’t Citizen Brock himself.” That black eye darted to Jurand and Glaward. “And the survivors o’ the Young Lion’s Angland boys’ club. Welcome to my parlour.”

  An ancient mural covered the walls, or its battered remains, at least. Above Judge’s head, an old man lay bleeding in a forest, five figures walking away from him on one side, six on the other. Leo hadn’t taken much notice of his tutors, so he’d only the vaguest idea what it represented. The death of Juvens, bleeding his last while his apprentices, the magi, marched off to avenge him. He supposed the balding one at the front was Bayaz, but someone had scraped his face off and daubed a red cock in its place.

  Probably it had been quite the masterpiece a few months ago, but the Burners had set to work on it like everything else, hacked and hammered at it, daubed bold slogans and crabby treatises and crude horns and tails and childish obscenities over it, adding to Juvens’ wounds until he was bleeding a great dripping flood around the fireplace.r />
  Judge grinned. “Fire, death and vengeance. And my favourite wizard.” She waved at the wall behind Leo and he twisted to frown over his shoulder. Looming above the door he’d come in by, grim, forbidding and untouched by red paint, was Juvens’ brother, and his murderer, the Master Maker Kanedias, spreading his arms wide with a sea of flames behind him. “Now there’s a bastard who knew how to set fires.”

  Leo forced a smile over his disgust and limped into the room, feeling like a cockerel strutting into a fox’s den. “Citizeness Judge! I believe you sent for me.”

  “You believe correctly. Why don’t you all sit down?” Judge waved to battered chairs. “Just shove that shit on the floor.”

  “I’d rather stand.”

  She looked down at his leg and wrinkled her nose in a disbelieving little grin. “That’s a funny thing for a one-legged man to rather do. Come on. Take the weight off your foot. Have some fucking tea.” She nudged a teapot across the table through a rattling mass of junk, knocking a stack of books flapping to the floor. “Not a fan of Southern habits myself but a little tea can poke the right hole.”

  Glaward righted a toppled nursing chair and perched nervously on its edge. One of the men at the window bared his teeth and gave a strange hiss. Leo winced as he tried to sit with a measure of dignity. Judge had fished a husk-pipe from the rubbish, was sucking on it hard enough to make her cheeks go hollow.

  “You all reckon I’m mad, don’t you?” she said, letting smoke spill from her nose in brown plumes like a dragon.

  There was a nervous silence. Jurand cleared his throat. “I wouldn’t say—”

  “Being mad has its uses. Or having people think you’re mad does. They don’t see you coming. King Orso saw you coming at Stoffenbeck, didn’t he, Young Lion?”

  “He did,” said Leo. “From a thousand miles away. A painful lesson. One I’ll never need to learn again.”