The Wisdom of Crowds

by Joe Abercrombie

  “Tallow had nothing to do with it,” she said. A mistake, of course. Breaking all her own rules yet again. She might as well have torn her shirt open and pointed out the exact position of her heart. But it was a mistake she couldn’t help making. As if she wanted, at the end, to have done one thing worth doing.

  “You like the boy, don’t you?” Pike’s face was a mask again. “There’s no shame in liking someone. I like you, in fact. Far more than most. To put both Brocks and King Orso together in one scheme? Ambitious, to combine such volatile ingredients. Reckless, even. Not at all what I expected. You always struck me as cautious to a fault.”

  “I always was,” said Vick. She thought of Sibalt, then. That sad little smile, in the half-light of the foundry, before the end. “But the time comes…” She supposed she could allow herself a little flourish. “You have to stand up.”

  “Yes.” Pike’s burned lips curled back from his teeth. “There is the lesson the camps taught me.” He turned from the empty shelves to consider her, and took a long breath through his nose, and let it sigh away. Then he gave a neat little nod. “Proceed.”

  There was a heavy silence in the vault. A muffled banging from somewhere behind, where the Constables must have found something still worth smashing. Again, it took a moment for Vick to catch up. Then she gently cleared her throat. “What?”

  “The Great Change has done its work.”

  “Its work?”

  “A wise man once told me that sometimes… to change the world…

  we must first burn it down. But Judge is a fire out of control. The time has come to douse the flames and restore order, before everything is reduced to ashes.”

  “So…” The silence stretched between them. “Proceed?”

  “Exactly. I wish I could offer you help beyond turning a blind eye, but I fear, under the present circumstances, there is no one in the Inspectorate that I fully trust. No one but you, of course, Inspector.” Pike turned back to consider the empty shelves, clasping his hands behind him. “It really has become almost impossible, these days, to tell where people stand.”

  Vick stood and stared at him for a long moment. “You don’t fucking say,” she muttered.

  Outside in the chilly street the snow was still melting. The queues still stretching. The crier still busy with his list of doomed names.

  “You look pleased,” said Tallow, still hugging himself. “Must’ve been a lot o’ money in that vault.”

  A rare smile was forming on Vick’s face. “It was empty.”

  She wasn’t sure how it had happened, but she was starting to think they had a chance. If Pike was with them, or at least not against them. If Lord Marshal Forest and the Young Lion could do their part without killing each other. If Bremer dan Gorst could stay out of sight. If King Orso could keep his mouth shut. If they could avoid disasters for only a few more days, they had a chance.

  “And finally!” roared the crier with a parting flourish. “Accused of profiteering and speculation, exploitation and grand usury, betrayal of the Great Change, royalism and incest… Citizeness Savine Brock!”

  Vick’s smile was gone as quickly as it had come.

  “Fuck,” she whispered.

  None Saved

  “I should caution you,” said Citizeness Vallimir, pausing at the front door, “it can be rather… overwhelming.” She wore a sober black dress and stained apron. Hardly recognisable as the fussy hostess Savine had dined with in Valbeck. But who had come through the Great Change quite the same?

  “Believe me, it could be rather overwhelming when my parents were…

  still in residence…” Savine trailed off as she crossed the threshold. Jokes did not feel appropriate.

  The hallway was full of children. Crowded with them, down both sides. Ragged. Scabbed. Filthy. Five or six haggard nurses stood among them, looking hardly better. Savine’s mother had insisted on fresh flowers here, every day. There were no flowers now. Someone had taken away the chandelier, and the place smelled stale. Savine forced a queasy smile onto her face. Nodded a greeting at no one in particular. She heard Zuri take a sharp breath, as unsettling from her as a scream of horror might have been from someone else.

  “Children, this is Citizeness Brock! This is her house. It is thanks to her generosity that you have food and shelter—”

  “That’s all right,” said Savine. “Really.” She realised the strange carpet of rags the children were standing on were their blankets, wedged in left and right to leave a narrow path of scuffed floor to walk down. “Do they sleep here?” she muttered, flinching away from the great dark eyes of a girl who would not, could not, stop staring. They were like a bird’s eyes, unblinking.

  “We need the space.” Citizeness Vallimir pushed open the door to the room where Savine had once drunk with her mother, laughed with her mother, been sick with horror at the secret her mother had told her. The windows were mostly boarded up, and it took a moment for her eyes to adjust to the gloom.

  She had allowed herself to imagine neat files of clean, grateful, pretty orphans. Saved orphans. The sight of those in the hall had shocked her. Now she realised they had been the presentable ones.

  The children crowded into the bare room were like some other species. Twisted, stunted, wounded, strange. Shafts of dusty light fell on ugly details. A great bloom of scabs on a hollow ribcage. A hunched shape, endlessly rocking. Mouths gaped and dribbled. Flies buzzed about leaking eyes. Some of them slumped, insensible. Some of them crouched, baring blackened teeth. They were thin as stray cats. They were mad as mean dogs. One girl had puke in her hair. One boy’s face was a mass of sores. Another stared at the peeling wallpaper, slapping the side of his own half-bald head over and over. They made strange noises. Not words, exactly. Warbles and wheezes and snarls. Like an abandoned menagerie in which the animals had all gone mad.

  When Savine looked into those ranks of hungry faces, it was no sappy desire to hold them and stroke their hair that rose up but a trapped panic. An urge to run, barging children out of her way. The challenge of each of her own two babies was almost more than she could manage. How could anyone satisfy the scale of the need in this room, let alone this house?

  “By the Fates,” she whispered, unable to stop herself putting a hand over her mouth at the overpowering stink.

  “You forget, once you’re used to it,” said Citizeness Vallimir. “We do our best to keep them clean, to contain the sickness and the lice, but there are too few of us, no soap to be had, no spare fuel to heat water. We keep the younger children downstairs, the older ones upstairs.” She glanced towards the great staircase in the hall—down which Savine used to sweep, in the giddy height of fashion—as if she was a general frowning into no man’s land. “They are more… malevolent. They form gangs. They prey on each other. At night… well. One must be careful here at night.”

  “How many do you have?” whispered Savine, staring about her mother’s old salon. It made her think of the mill in Valbeck, where children once toiled for her profit.

  “Honestly… I couldn’t say. We kept records to begin with, where we could. Names, birthplaces, ages, but… once we realised what was happening in the city…” She gave a helpless sigh. “The children band together and huddle anywhere warm. Then they are in terrible danger. They are hunted, rounded up like sheep. They are bought and sold. Traded into slavery in the mills. Pressed into… worse kinds of slavery. They started to come here by themselves. Soon there were dozens of them crowding about the gate every morning. We were less interested in counting them than in getting them out of the cold, feeding them, and then…” She hopelessly raised her hands, hopelessly let them fall, eloquently conveying the size of the challenge.

  Savine felt Zuri’s reassuring touch on her shoulder. “You have done good here. All the good you could. Never forget that.”

  It was hard for Savine to imagine, at that moment, that she had done anything more than concentrate the most intense misery into one place. She forced the hand away fro
m her mouth, forced down her panic and tried to think through it, like any other problem. She had been expecting challenges of education, occupation, betterment. Having taken a few steps over the threshold, it was clear no one was looking past survival. “You need money, for food, fuel, clothing.” She had given the last of what she had to Leo so he could bribe the People’s Army. “If I am to go to the government…” If there was anything left still worthy of the title. “Or find some wealthy benefactor…” Though those who had money were hoarding it to hide behind. “I need at least some idea of how many we have.”

  “I will try to make a count.” Zuri slipped her pencil from behind her ear, wagging it at each child as she made a quick circuit of the room, each flick of its point a whole life to be rebuilt, from the ground up. Even counting them was no easy task. There were some wretched bunks, three high, but their blankets were crammed onto every available patch of floor as well, stuffed into every corner.

  “It gets worse each day,” said Citizeness Vallimir as Zuri slipped from the room to continue the tally. Savine felt faint at the thought of the whole house like this, from cellars to attic. “Those orphaned, abandoned, those who have found their way to the city from hopeless conditions in the country. The stories they tell… things no child should have to hear of, let alone suffer.” She lowered her voice to a whisper, eyes darting sideways

  as though worried she might be overheard. “And with the executions…

  there are no provisions made for the children of those who fall from the Tower of Chains—”

  There was a crash in the hall and Savine jerked around. Another crash, splintering, raised voices.

  “Whatever is that?” asked Citizeness Vallimir.

  Savine closed her eyes and took a deep breath. She already knew.

  Burners were tramping through the shattered front door, their armour spattered with red paint, pushing children out of their way, squeals of fear spreading through the house. They were already stomping up the stairs, getting their pikes hopelessly tangled with the banisters. They were everywhere.

  So it seemed Judge would finally have a genuine conspiracy to expose before the Court of the People. Teufel had been caught, or Orso had talked, or Leo had failed. While Savine was thinking that all was lost, she was also thinking that pikes were an absurd weapon for a confined space, and she felt tears in her eyes and almost giggled at once.

  Citizeness Vallimir drew herself up. “What is the meaning of—”

  “It’s all right,” said Savine, easing her aside. She appreciated the gesture, but it could not do the slightest good. “I expect they are here for me.”

  “Got it in one,” said a sinewy Burner with a red handprint on his breastplate and a broad grin on his face. The grin of a polite tradesman, here with a much-anticipated delivery. “My name’s Sarlby.”

  “I remember. From the barricades in Valbeck.”

  He gave a disbelieving laugh, then. “You’re the girl who lived with the Broads! Well I never. Hey, Bull, it’s—”

  “I know who it is.” The floor creaked as Broad stepped into the hall. He had grown a scruffy beard and there was something crusted at the corners of his mouth. Savine remembered his first visit to this house, with Liddy and May, hunched and overawed. He stood tall now, bridge of his nose creased in permanent rage, the menace that he had once tried to hide, that she had coaxed out to use against her striking workers, put on savage display. The children inside the door frame shrank away into the corners. It was the most Savine could do not to shrink away, too.

  Sarlby held up a smudged document. “Citizeness Brock, you’ve been denounced—quite fucking spectacularly, as it happens—and are summoned to the House o’ Purity to await trial.”

  “Denounced by whom?” asked Savine, though it hardly mattered.

  “Some noblewoman. All bosoms. Didn’t catch her name—”

  “Heugen,” grunted Broad.

  Selest. Not Teufel, then. Not Orso. Had she simply been caught up in the ordinary, merciless grind of the Court of the People? What a bitter joke it would be, if she was brought down not by a wide-ranging plot to betray the Great Change, but by an old feud with a jealous rival. Savine swallowed, her mind racing. Then Leo might still be free. Their schemes might still be moving forward.

  “Citizeness Vallimir,” she murmured, “I would be very grateful if you could get a message to my husband—”

  “Oh, the Young Lion knows all about it,” said Sarlby, pulling out a set of heavy chains, polished bright about the bracelets with use. “Done a deal wi’ Judge, I understand. Bull was there, weren’t you? What was the phrase he used?”

  The light flashed on Broad’s eye-lenses. “The nation must judge her.”

  Savine could only stand, staring, as Sarlby snapped the manacles shut around her limp wrists. As quickly as it had flared up, hope was smothered. Had her own husband turned on her? Or had he done what he had to, to gain control of the People’s Army? She hardly recognised him any more. Hardly knew what he might do from one moment to the next.

  “Don’t worry,” said Sarlby, giving her shoulder a reassuring pat. “You won’t have to wait long. You’ve been bumped right up the schedule. Friends in high places, eh?”

  Or enemies. The weight of the chains, the coldness of them, had somehow taken Savine’s breath away. She wondered how many others had worn this very set. She wondered if any of them were still alive. The reasons for your conviction in the Court of the People made little difference to the sentence, after all. The fall was still the fall.

  “Citizeness Vallimir,” she managed to say, “might I beg a favour? Bring my children to me at the House of Purity. They are in danger, do you understand?” Her voice was getting higher and higher as she thought of them, helpless in their cots with only a nurse. “They have to stay with me.”

  “Doubt that’ll work,” said Sarlby, rattling the bracelets on her wrists to make sure they were locked tight.

  “She wants to bring her children.” Broad took off his lenses, and breathed on them, and started to polish them with his shirt-cuff. His eyes rolled up to Savine’s, red-rimmed and bloodshot. He looked as if he hardly knew her. “She can bring her children.”

  There was a clattering above, the Burners bundling someone down the stairs. “We’ve got her!” one shouted in triumph. Savine realised with a lurch of horror that their prisoner was Zuri, wrists and ankles shackled with great black fetters, links a finger thick. She could hardly move for their weight.

  “For pity’s sake!” called Savine. “Do you need those chains?”

  “Can’t take chances,” said Sarlby as they dragged Zuri roughly to her feet at the bottom of the stairs. “Could be an Eater.”

  Her hair had come loose, and she gave Savine the briefest look through the black tangle across her face. “Do not worry about me, it—”

  “Shut your mouth, you brown bitch.” One of the Burners tore the silver watch from around Zuri’s neck, the chain catching her ear and making her gasp, gave an approving grunt and slipped it into his pocket. Another pulled her head back and started to strap some contraption of buckles and wire over her face. By the Fates, they were muzzling her.

  “Are you mad?” shrieked Savine. She regretted it at once. Quite obviously they were all mad. “She’s a lady’s companion, not a sorceress! You know her, Gunnar.”

  Broad winced, as if the sound of his first name was painful. “Not up to me,” he grunted, and he lifted a flask and took a little sip. “Up to the court.”

  “How many suspected Eaters have you arrested?” asked Savine as they dragged Zuri towards the door, kicking through the children’s bedding.

  “Dozens,” said Sarlby.

  She clasped her hands, her own chain rattling. “And how many have actually been Eaters?”

  “Once they’re chained and muzzled, what difference does it make? She has brothers, does she?”

  “But they’re… good people,” whispered Savine. What a pointless thing to say. She stared at the
orphans, cringing against the peeling walls. How foolish she had been, to think she could save anyone. She could not even save herself.

  Sarlby took her under the arm and walked her towards the door. “It’s a shame, but there’s not so many turning up for the executions any more,” he was saying, as if they were discussing the weather. “Bored of ’em, I guess. If there’s one human ability I’ve always been amazed by, it’s the capacity to get bored. Saw it in Styria. Saw it in Valbeck. Don’t matter how mad, strange or outrageous, folk’ll get bored of anything. Don’t worry, though. Given who your father is… or your fathers were… I’m sure there’ll be no shortage of interest.” He gave her a wink as he brought her through the door of the house where she had dreamed of being queen and out into the chill air. “And we still get a good turnout for the pretty ones.”

  The Same Side

  Leo had a trick for putting a shirt on. He needed a trick for most things these days. First, he gathered the sleeve and twisted it over his useless hand.

  The arm had withered. Thin, soft, pale apart from the scattered pink scars. Sometimes he thought he could feel the metal buried in the meat. Sharp splinters among the dull throb. His left hand looked strange, now. The nails had a purplish tint. Old skin flaking from the numb fingertips. Like the hand of a corpse, and about as useful.

  He clenched his jaw, worked the sleeve up his numb arm to his shoulder, then whipped his right hand around behind his head—collar sliding between finger and thumb—and into the other armhole with a snapping of cloth, smooth as a step in a dance.

  He had a trick for it. But these days Leo needed a trick for anything more complicated than turning a doorknob.

  Jurand ducked through the tent-flap. “They’re here. The royalists.”

  Leo raised his brows as he shoved the tails of his shirt down behind his belt. “Inspector Teufel has made us all royalists.”

  “They’re deploying on the other side of the valley.” Jurand pulled the general’s jacket from the back of a folding chair and stepped over. He didn’t embarrass Leo by asking if he wanted help. He knew what was needed before he was told, just as he always had. “If you can call it deploying.”