The Wisdom of Crowds

by Joe Abercrombie

“If there is a chance it will help her brother, she is content.” And he nodded briefly, and disappeared into the crowd.

  Behind him, a set of young men clashed their tankards together, sent up a spray of froth and dissolved into raucous laughter.

  Oh, to be a careless young idiot.

  She stopped beside a boy selling matches, so swaddled by his scarf he could barely see.

  “First give me some matches,” she said, holding out a silver mark so his eyes lit up.

  “Then?”

  Vick made sure not to turn. “Do you see a big man watching me? With a hood and a grey beard?”

  The boy glanced past her. “He’s stopped maybe twenty strides back.”

  She bared her teeth. Bastard had picked up her trail again somehow. “I’m going to take a left here. You hold him up as long as you can.”

  “For another mark I’ll fight him.”

  “Good lad.” She pushed another coin into his hand. “But you can leave that to me.”

  She ducked past him, darted in front of a skeletal horse dragging a near-empty cart and slipped around the corner, down an alley into one of those blackened scars in the city. Someone had set a fire, burned one of the Southerner’s temples down, taken a few streets with it. Now the houses yawned empty—blackened rafters, scorched windows, glimpses

  of charred wreckage through the broken doorways.

  Quiet here. That soft, muffled silence that comes with snow. A few sets of tracks, from people taking refuge in the ruins, or doing dark business of one kind or another, but they’d partly filled up with the most recent fall. She stomped a dozen clear bootprints into the white then backed up quick, planting her feet in the tracks so she made no more. She gathered herself, then sprang sideways into a dripping doorway, pressing her back against the scorched plaster. She made herself silent, made herself small, and waited.

  She could’ve slipped away. But if this bastard had found her twice, he’d find her again, and when he did, it might be him who got the jump on her. She had to know who he was, who’d sent him, in which of the thousand possible ways her rickety plan had shaken apart. There could be a dozen Burners waiting right now at her apartment with a fistful of letters from the king and her name all over them. She had to know.

  She slid out her stick, heavy, hard and black. One thing that hadn’t changed when the Inquisition became the Inspectorate. A blunt tool for digging out answers, but a shockingly effective one, used the right way. Amazing, the problems you can solve with a piece of wood.

  It all reminded her of the camps. The snow, the cold, the dark. The waiting for a man in the shadows with a stick and a clenched jaw. She heard him coming. Heavy footsteps, crunching in the snow. He saw the prints. A muttered curse. Then he strode past the doorway, head down, following the trail. His hand was in his coat, she thought. On the hilt of a weapon, maybe, and she gripped her stick tighter, and slipped from the doorway.

  His back was still to her, but he was even bigger than she’d thought. A terribly sturdy look to his shoulders. No way she could risk giving him any chances. Hit first, hard as you can. Chances after.

  Her heart was thudding in her ears as she crept up behind him. He’d reached the end of the trail, was casting about, trying to work out what had happened. She took one more careful step towards him, then winced at a twinge in that bloody hip of hers. Snow crunched faintly under her boot as she raised the stick.

  His head whipped around, a glimpse of his grey-bearded face, the corner of an eye.

  She bared her teeth as she swung for the side of his knee, but at the last moment he lifted his leg and it caught the meat of his calf with a dull smack. He didn’t go down. He didn’t even cry out. A little grunt, maybe, and a stumble sideways. As he turned, she’d set herself and was already bringing the stick down, overhand, with all the strength she had.

  He jerked his head to the side and the stick thudded into his shoulder. He didn’t even grunt this time. Just took a half-step back. She swung again but he caught it on one forearm, brushed it off and came at her so fast she barely even saw it, let alone got out of the way.

  Vick had been hit plenty. But she’d never been hit so hard.

  She folded up like a paper bag, stick tumbling from her numb fingers, and she was on her knees in the snow with her jaw hanging open and a string of spit dangling from her lip, making a kind of helpless wheeze with her arms clutched around her and great jolting waves of pain throbbing from the side of her stomach.

  She’d a knife in her boot. But she couldn’t move. She couldn’t even breathe.

  He squatted down in front of her, but she couldn’t see anything higher than his knees.

  “Inspector Teufel? The king’s servant told me to find you.”

  There was no mistaking that high little voice. It was Bremer dan Gorst.

  “There’s no one else here?” he asked as she shouldered the door open.

  She almost laughed, but even that sent a flash of pain through her side. “No. There’s no one else here.” Her last guest had been Tallow. When she paid him for betraying his friends. She glanced at Gorst. “Ever feel like you made some bad choices?”

  He didn’t answer. Somehow, she took that for a yes. She limped down the hall, so narrow he had to turn his great shoulders slightly sideways to fit. Damn, the place was cold. Felt colder inside than out. She eased herself down beside the little table in the little dining room, fumbled out those matches she’d bought and lit the stub of candle. She sat back gripping her side.

  Gorst stood in the doorway, faint light chiselling shadows into his slab of a face. “Does it hurt?”

  “Only when I breathe.” She’d a suspicion he’d cracked a rib or two. “Didn’t hurt you, did I?”

  He put her stick down carefully on the table and shook his head.

  “You could pretend, couldn’t you, for the sake of my pride?”

  “You’re joking?” He said it as an honest question. As if he couldn’t really have told the difference.

  “I’m trying. Guess we all like to think we’re tougher than we are. Having the illusion shattered is never pleasant.” She waved a hand towards the empty cupboards, a couple of the doors still broken from when the Breakers first stormed the Agriont. “I’d offer you something, but… I don’t have anything.”

  She looked around the room as if seeing it through new eyes. If the place where you lived was a glimpse into your life, then hers could hardly have been emptier. The dusty squares board that was never played with. The dusty books that were never read. Apart from Sibalt’s well-thumbed copy of The Life of Dab Sweet, maybe. But looking at one picture over and over while you think about everything you’ve thrown away hardly counts.

  “Not really used to having guests,” she muttered.

  “Nor I to being one.” Gorst pushed back his hood. Vick remembered him with his whole head rigorously shaved. Now he had grey thatch around the sides and a wispy tuft on top. He looked more like an oversized lawyer than a swordsman. “Corporal Tunny was hiding me in his…”

  “Knocking shop?”

  “The Burners visited. I was obliged to climb out of the window.”

  “Must have bigger windows than I’d have expected.”

  “It was a squeeze.” Gorst gave a puzzled frown. “I stand accused of being a royalist.”

  “Well, you did lead the Knights of the Body for two kings. Don’t get much more royalist than that.”

  “And you?”

  “I did dirty work for two Arch Lectors, I suppose. I grew up in the camps…” She sat with her mouth open a moment, wondering where to go with that. “You learn to stand with the winners.”

  “Then what brings you to the losing side?”

  It was a good question. A woman who’d suffered more than most under the old regime. Who’d had her childhood and her youth and her family stolen by it. No one should’ve rejoiced in its fall more than her. But here she was, risking her life to restore it.

  “I’ve seen enough folk thrown off
the Tower of Chains. And I quite like King Orso.” A strange thing for her to say. She hardly even knew the man. Just that little bit of appreciation he’d given her, when she came back from Westport. And his hand on hers, in a room under the House of Questions. Was that all it took, to win her devotion? Maybe Glokta had been right. She really was desperate for something to be loyal to. “You can stay here for now. Doubt they’ll be looking for you a few hundred strides from the Court of the People. And they’ve plenty of others to chase. Seems to me they don’t care much who they execute as long as there’s a queue.”

  “What were you doing,” he asked, “in that tavern?”

  “Don’t trust me?”

  He said nothing. She supposed where the king’s safety was concerned, a First Guard trusts no one.

  “I was getting these.” She winced as she pulled the packet out from behind her belt and slipped it onto the table. “Jewels. From the king’s sister, in Sipani. We’re going to use them to buy the city gates.”

  “Greed still works?”

  She snorted. “People are still people—”

  There was a heavy knock at the door.

  Vick met Gorst’s eye and put a finger to her lips. A pointless gesture, since he barely spoke anyway. He pressed himself to the wall and silently slid out his short steel, a forearm’s length of immaculately polished metal catching the candlelight.

  So those dozen Burners she’d been expecting had done the clever thing and waited for her to get home before paying a visit. She grimaced as she bent down and slid the knife from her boot, holding it out of sight behind her arm.

  “Coming!” she called breezily as she strolled down the hall, while her heart thudded in her ears. She tried to pull the door open as if she was guilty of nothing and had no broken ribs, then felt a giddy rush of relief, then a giddy rush of pain as she breathed in too hard. “What is it, Tallow? I’ve got company.”

  He stood there in the chilly dusk, staring up at her. “Hadn’t heard from you in a day or two. I was worried. Then, you know, I heard voices—”

  “And the only reason a man would darken my door is to kill me, is it?” She shifted to block the doorway. Not hard to do. It wasn’t a big doorway. “We’ve all got needs, Tallow.”

  He looked first surprised, then slightly disturbed, by the idea that she might have needs. “Oh. Right.”

  “I appreciate your concern.”

  He stood staring at her.

  She wafted her fingers off into the night. “You can go.” And she shouldered the door shut.

  She leaned against the wall for a moment, holding her side and breathing carefully, not too shallow, not too deep. Then she walked back down the hall, slipped around Gorst and over to the window, twitched the shutter back a chink to make sure Tallow was on his way.

  “You don’t trust him?” muttered Gorst.

  “I don’t trust anyone.”

  It was easier to tell herself that, somehow, than to admit she didn’t want to put him in danger. She watched him trudge off hunched through the snow, until he was lost around the corner. Damn, he was like her brother.

  She glanced at Gorst, a slit of faint light down his lined face, a slice of scraggy beard and a wisp of greasy hair over his forehead.

  “So the two of us are the great hope?” She held her side as she lowered herself gingerly back into her chair. “Fates help the Union.”

  A Spicy Denunciation

  “The state of these,” murmured Orso as he was herded past the new statues on what used to be the Kingsway. The freezing weather, and now the soggy thaw, had not been kind to them. The nose of one of the giant nursing mothers had already dropped off, broken lumps of it scattered about her pedestal. There were some troubling cracks in her bust besides. Probably that would drop off next, braining some unfortunate passer-by. Crushed by giant tits. It was the way Tunny had always wanted to go.

  “Risinau brought some sculptor over from Styria to remake them,” said Hildi, frowning up, “but she was tossed off the Tower of Chains along with him. So they got some masons to do it.”

  “Oh. Yes.” He vaguely remembered that being discussed by the Representatives before court one day. Some young firebrand from the provinces frothing up a fury. “An actual sculptor would have been an aristocratic indulgence. There is no task beyond the skill of a proud working man of the Union!” He puffed out his cheeks. “By the Fates, they can’t even destroy things well.”

  “You’re saying you miss the old ones?” asked Hildi.

  Orso opened his mouth to answer, then paused. As with so many things these days, he had hopelessly mixed feelings. Lord Hoff had once referred to the statues on the Kingsway as the Union’s greatest treasure. A celebration of all that was most noble. A true wonder of the world, if patriotic swagger was your fetish.

  Except they had also, of course, been a total pack of lies. A parade of self-serving arrogance in which Orso would one day have taken his place, where rapacious torturers were celebrated for their compassion, vengeful warmongers praised for their forbearance, heedless do-nothings eulogised for their painstaking care. As if to set the tone for this shameless distortion of history, Bayaz, the world’s most shameless thief, had been literally raised up on a pedestal at both ends for all that he had given the Union.

  “Which do you prefer?” asked Orso, with a shrug. “Grand lies or ugly truths?”

  “Reckon we might be better off with neither,” muttered Hildi.

  Orso had even more mixed feelings about the changes to the Square of Marshals. He tried to keep his chin up and walk with that careless swagger that so annoyed his many guards, but could not seem to prevent his eyes from drifting down. Could not help reading the names carved into the flagstones where a parade in his honour once ended. Here and there, melted mounds of candle stubs, and decaying wreaths, and sodden letters of gratitude had built up, impromptu shrines around the names of the most admired martyrs. So many names. Thousands upon thousands, and each one a person dead so that he could sit on a golden chair and seem to be in power.

  Perhaps fortunately, perhaps not, his attention was soon claimed by the jeering. Winter had drastically reduced the size of the crowds before the Court of the People, but the fanatics that remained made up for it by sheer weight of anger, pressing in around the guards, shaking pamphlets and yelling insults.

  Orso smiled, waved, blew kisses, as he always did. “Too kind, my subjects! To turn out in the cold, for me? Too kind!” A sneering woman spat on him, and he clutched it to his stained jacket like a bouquet. “I shall treasure it!”

  “Long live the king!” came a scream.

  “Oh no,” said Hildi.

  Someone had clambered up on one of the broken pedestals near the steps of the court. A flash of the golden sun of the Union on a piece of cloth, frantically waved. Rage flashed through the mob. “Long live the—” Cut off in a squawk as he was dragged down. A surge as people struggled to get close enough to participate in the beating.

  This kind of thing was becoming more and more common. Were these spur-of-the-moment royalists lunatics? Simpletons? Suicidal? Or had the disappointments of the Great Change simply piled on them so heavily it induced a kind of mania? Orso was grateful for any support, but could they not support him silently? Open demonstrations of monarchism did no one any good. Least of all the monarch himself.

  In her last message, Teufel had told him that plans were in place. That he should be ready. That it might be a matter of days. He had to smother a surge of nerves at the thought. He leaned close to Hildi to whisper, “I think Judge is going to put me on trial soon.”

  “You’ve been saying that for weeks.”

  “It’s getting dangerous.”

  “You’ve been saying that for weeks.”

  “And I’ve been right. Hildi, I mean it, this would be an excellent moment for you to abandon me.”

  She dropped her voice even further, murmuring through tight lips. “Your friends will come through.”

  Orso caught a
glimpse of his latest supporter dragged past insensible, blood in his hair. One of the guards aimed a lazy kick at him. The crowd had fallen on the old flag like wolves on a carcass and were trampling each other in their eagerness to trample it. Corporal Halder surveyed the scene with an air of bored detachment, hands on hips.

  “I still hope they will,” muttered Orso, “but, being realistic—”

  “When have you ever done that?”

  “—the chances of failure are very high.” The closer the day came, indeed, the higher the chances of failure seemed. “The consequences of failure…” It was hardly worth spelling them out. He spent every waking moment powerlessly turning them over, after all, and every sleeping moment

  dreaming about them. “If they don’t come through—”

  “You’ll know about it when you hear me denouncing you to the Court of the People.”

  Orso smiled. “That’s my girl. Make it a spicy denunciation, though, won’t you? None of these droning lists of names we get these days. I want it overflowing with scandal, shocks and low moral character.”

  “Oh, it’ll be a real firecracker,” said Hildi. “I’ll make ’em shit in the galleries.”

  “Maybe stop short of that. The place smells bad enough as it is.”

  “Let’s go,” grunted Halder, nudging Orso up the steps to the Court of the People. There had been a time when access to the royal person was governed by a book of rules four fingers thick. Now any fool could poke him with impunity.

  Judge was getting comfortable in the high chair as Orso was manhandled into the sovereign’s cage, but there was a gap on the front benches where Citizen Brock and his Anglanders would usually have been preening themselves. Orso rather hoped they might have been spicily denounced and dragged off to the House of Purity themselves, but that was probably too much luck to hope for. Luck had really not been falling his way the past couple of decades.

  “Silence in the court!” And the murmur of voices dropped away as Sworbreck strode forwards. He had acquired a blood-red suit of clothes now, having been appointed Chief Prosecutor for the Great Change. Since the proceedings were less about law than consolatory fantasy and cheap melodrama, no doubt the writer was uniquely qualified.