The Wisdom of Crowds

by Joe Abercrombie

  “A man who does good, you can predict. A man who does bad, the same. But what do you do with a man who can’t make up his mind?”

  “I’ve often wondered.”

  “I like you. But I can’t have you around. Shivers?”

  Clover shut his eyes then, expecting the sword in the back of his head. Like Black Dow. Like Black Calder. But when he gathered the courage to squint around, he saw Shivers was offering him a bag. He took it and looked inside. The gleam of silver, and a decent amount, by all appearances.

  “That’s… more’n generous,” he said. “If I was you I wouldn’t have me around, either. Hell, I’m me, and I often tire of my company.” He put his hand on Sholla’s shoulder and drew her forwards. “But if you’ll entertain me with a brief hearing, I’d like to recommend this article. Her name’s Sholla, and I’ve never yet had cause to doubt her loyalty. A fine hand with an arrow, the softest footstep I never heard and an undisputed master at the noble art of cheese-shaving. She can get ’em like a sheet of paper. I swear you can see through the bastards.”

  Rikke raised the brow over her blind eye at Sholla. “If I’ve one regret it’s that my cheese never quite carves thin enough.”

  “And then there’s this, which is called Flick. I have yet to discover any talents but I’ve no doubt there’s one lurking beneath the unpromising exterior, and even if there ain’t he has a pleasant manner, which is too rare a thing in the North, I think you’ll agree.”

  Rikke glanced about her closest. Caul Shivers. Isern-i-Phail. She puffed out her cheeks. “Well, I won’t disagree.”

  “Good. Good.” Clover gave Flick’s shoulder a parting squeeze, then let his hand fall. He gave the room a smile. “Watch yourself, in Adua. I hear folk down there can’t all be trusted the way they can up here.”

  Rikke gave a snort. “Fine advice.”

  “And if anyone should want to learn sword-work, I am available.” And with a gesture caught on awkward ground between a nod and a bow, Clover took his leave.

  “Don’t we get a say?” muttered Sholla, following him out with Flick. The sun was getting low now, and the yard was half in bright light, half in deep shadow. Rarely all one way or the other, like he’d told Rikke.

  “I’m sparing you the pain of it,” said Clover. “You’re both better off here, and I know it, and you know it, and once you thought about it you’d see you had to tell me so, and it’d be an awkward scene all around. Afford me the dignity o’ this one last call as chief on your behalf.” He gathered ’em in an awkward hug. Mostly so he didn’t have to listen to ’em argue with him. “Thanks for your support through hard times. And thanks especially for that arrow in Downside’s shoulder.”

  “Aye, well,” said Sholla, and Clover flattered himself that she might be struggling to hold back a tear or two. “Didn’t want to give the bastard the satisfaction o’ killing you.”

  “You’re joking! I had that bloody half-head just where I wanted him. Waiting for my moment was all.”

  “What’ll you do?” asked Flick, who wasn’t trying to stop himself crying at all and had dirty tear tracks all over his cheeks.

  Clover grinned. “Something usually comes up.” And he turned and started walking, sword over his shoulder.

  Sunrise

  “You don’t like the palace,” said Leo.

  Savine didn’t seem to like anything lately, and her husband least of all. “I find it hard to sleep here,” she said, with a sullen glance at one of the Anglanders who were guarding every landing and doorway.

  He wanted to say she was lucky to be alive but was trying hard to be sympathetic. He’d won, after all. He could afford to be. “After what you’ve been through it’s a wonder you can sleep at all.”

  “The place is a ruin,” said Savine, sweeping past a mural of some grand coronation with all the faces chiselled out. “It still smells.” She watched a man in blazing-sun livery teetering on a stepladder so he could scrub at slogans up near the ceiling. “There is evidence of the Burners’ tenancy everywhere. Of… Judge’s tenancy.” She gave an ugly shiver of disgust and held baby Ardee closer. “It feels like a prison.”

  Leo clenched his jaw. How grateful most people would’ve been to be kept in a cage like this one. “The children are safest here, in the Agriont.” He winced as he shifted Harod’s weight in the crook of his arm. “We’re already patching up the walls. A king belongs in a palace, and Harod will be king now.”

  “Harod is a baby.”

  “That’s why he’ll need guidance.”

  Savine looked sideways at him, and hardly with the proper affection a wife should have for her husband. “From you, I suppose?”

  “From both of us.” But it was only right that a father should have the final word when it came to his son. By the dead, his stump was throbbing, his bad arm tingling, his shoulder aching from the effort of holding the child as he lurched along. “We’re together in this.”

  “Are we? When we discussed bringing back the monarchy we never mentioned changing the monarch.”

  “Plans have to bend with circumstance,” grunted Leo. The sort of thing he’d always hated hearing his mother tell him. “I would’ve warned you if I could. Of course I would. But how could I? I was scrambling to save your life. To save the bloody Union!”

  He had to stop. He’d wanted to sweep into the Hall of Mirrors carrying his son. To be seen as a father, head of the ideal family. The shining example to be copied across the reborn nation. But dropping the tiny king on his head then tripping over him would have won him few admirers. To be a cripple well, you have to accept what you can’t do.

  “Jurand?” he forced through gritted teeth. “Could you help?” And he dumped the future monarch into his arms and turned away, leaving him blinking with elbows everywhere. No doubt he was handsome and clever and loyal as they come, but he made a poor nursemaid.

  Still, the only alternative was Zuri, and Leo trusted her less than ever these days. Even though Savine loved her so much. Because Savine loved her so much, maybe. It was a bad message to send, having brown faces around the royal children.

  Savine frowned towards the tall windows as she walked, rocking Ardee gently, criss-cross shadows of the lead between the panes sliding across her face. Her careful powdering couldn’t hide the fading bruises from her struggle at the top of the Tower of Chains. Or perhaps—far more likely now he thought about it—she’d chosen to leave them on display, for a hint of the noble martyr. Nothing in Savine’s appearance ever happened by accident, after all.

  Servants were busy in the unkempt gardens outside, clipping suns of the Union back into the bushes, weeding it back into the flower beds, chiselling it back into the scarred stonework. They must’ve ripped off those royal liveries when the Great Change made them fatal. Now they rushed to wriggle back into them. People adjust. They adjust more quickly and more completely than you’d ever imagine.

  Leo winced as he hurried to catch up. “What can I do?” he asked. “To make things easier?”

  “I want no more executions.”

  An uncomfortable pause. Jurand gave Leo one of those oh-so-expressive glances from under his brows. Leo took his meaning at once, as always, and agreed at once, as always—there would need to be at least one more. King Orso was a problem with only one solution.

  “I understand your feelings,” he murmured. As if fucking feelings should set policy. “I understand, but—”

  “No more, Leo.”

  “Savine, the guilty have to be punished. Quietly, privately, yes, but…

  we have to be made safe.”

  “We have to be better than Judge. Otherwise what is the point?”

  “The point is that we win.” That was so obvious he was amazed he had to explain it, and to her of all people, who had been happy to trample over her own father, mother and brother if she could use them as a ladder to her own ambitions. “And some people will always be a threat. Orso’s girl Hildi is too naive, and Bremer dan Gorst is too stubborn, and I wo
uldn’t trust that bastard Tunny to carry my chamber pot. Honestly, I’m a long way from trusting Teufel. The woman’s proved herself quite the plotter. I worry she’s not loyal—”

  “You worry she’s too loyal, you mean, but not to you.”

  “What’s the difference?”

  “She has proved herself effective. My father is gone and Pike was never apprehended. We must have someone competent in charge of the Inquisition. There are hundreds of Breakers and Burners still at large. Thousands, maybe. We have to root them out.” Her grazed cheek tightened as she clenched her jaw. “We have to make sure nothing like the Great Change can ever happen again.”

  “It didn’t turn out too badly.” He caught her staring at him, shocked. “All right, if it makes you happy, I’ll give Teufel a chance to prove herself.”

  “It will make me less unhappy, at least.”

  “Anything for you, my love,” he said, sulkily. “Don’t you trust me?”

  “It can be hard to trust men who stab their allies in the back.”

  “I don’t plan to do it once a week!” he snapped. “Or ever again,” he added, hurriedly. He felt bad for Lord Marshal Forest. A good man, a good soldier. He felt bad, but there’d been no choice. And as a point of fact, he’d stabbed him in the front. “At Stoffenbeck I bloody dithered, and we bloody lost, and I swore I’d never let a moment slip past again. So I saw an opportunity and I grabbed it. For us. I thought you’d be pleased!”

  The truth was she’d changed, and not for the better. He’d said his vows to someone who let no scruple get in her way. But then she’d said hers to a man who could fasten his own belt without help. That’s marriage. People change, and not always in the way you want, and you’re chained together anyway.

  Leo took a breath as they reached the great doors, fabulously carved with food and drink and celebration, only slightly spoiled by a burned patch and a few axe marks. “We have to be united,” he said, wondering who he was trying to convince. “For the sake of the children. For the sake of the nation. Our marriage made sense. It still makes sense. It makes more sense than ever.”

  Applause rang out as Savine swept into the Hall of Mirrors, wearing a radiant smile.

  “Lord and Lady Brock!” bellowed Glaward, smashing his big hands together.

  There were perhaps two hundred Representatives gathered there, standing up to clap from a mismatched array of seating scavenged from across the Agriont. Battered armchairs spilling stuffing, royal dining chairs and children’s schooling chairs, even a milking stool and one great curved bench somehow salvaged from the ruins of the Lords’ Round, scorched at one end.

  Savine had not set foot in that building during Risinau’s reign, but even she could tell the balance of the Representatives had greatly changed since then. Less than half this crowd had been voted for, and those were mostly from the richer towns and districts. Landowners, merchants, men of business. The rest had all once been nobles. Members of the Open Council lucky and unprincipled enough to slip from one body to another. Now Leo had made them nobles again. There were even a few women, taking the places of fathers, brothers, husbands who had met their ends in the Great Change. On the front row, Lords Isher and Heugen gave their own continuing survival a standing ovation, heavy with the furs and chains of aristocracy they had so eagerly cast off.

  Thousands of reflections applauded, too, of course. In places a broken mirror split a face into mismatched halves, or a shattered one smashed the world into a thousand distorted fragments. Smears of paint still clung in the corners where the slogans had been hastily scrubbed away. But then the Hall of Mirrors was a vast room. Putting it right would be the work of weeks. The palace? Years. The Agriont? Decades. The city of Adua? The Union as a whole? Could any of it really go back together?

  Savine remembered Judge falling. That flash of her sneer as she dropped away. She shed no tears for the evil bitch. The Fates knew, no one had ever deserved the long drop more. And yet she could not stop thinking of it. The hand at her throat. The parapet grinding into her back. The hollow sucking in her stomach as she tumbled over.

  She clenched her fist as she sat facing those ranks of false smiles, nails cutting sharp into her palm. She told herself she was safe. The Representatives might well have been outnumbered by Leo’s heavily armed Anglanders, standing watchful at every door and window. She could not have been safer. She had to focus on what could be changed, and change it for the better. She glanced down at her infant daughter, nudged the blanket from her sleeping face. She had to turn her back on the past and focus on the future.

  “Are you all right?” Zuri murmured in her ear.

  Savine forced out a smile. “I should be asking you that.”

  Zuri looked as composed as ever. She had not breathed a word of whatever tortures she had endured beneath the House of Questions and Savine had not the courage to ask. That way she could almost pretend it had never happened. Except there were some strange marks on the backs of Zuri’s hands now. Pinpricks. Dimples. Not exactly scars. But not quite normal, either.

  Zuri saw her looking and worked the sleeves of her dress down over them.

  “My friends!” called Leo as the clapping faded. “My peers! Noblemen and commoners! Representatives of the people of the Union! The Great Change… is behind us!”

  The applause at that was even louder. Few indeed mourned its passing, and Leo had made sure any that did occupied cells in the House of Questions rather than seats in this chamber.

  “Thanks to the courage of my wife, Lady Brock—” He was interrupted by cheers, mostly from the commoners’ side of the room.

  “The Darling of the Slums!” someone shouted.

  “The Mother of the Nation!” roared another, smashing his hands together.

  Savine had to force out another smile. Kindly meant, she was sure, but their clamour reminded her too much of the crowd at her trial. Of the mobs on the day of the Great Change. She was safe. All those guards. But it was as if her body had not quite realised it. Sweat prickled under her clothes.

  Leo, looking slightly put out at the admiration for his wife, held up his hand for silence. “Thanks to Lady Brock, Judge has been thrown down. The Burners and the Breakers are routed, their ringleaders dead, captured or even now being hunted down. They’ll find there’s nowhere to hide! They won’t scrub the blood of innocents from their clawing hands. Justice will find them out, whatever hole they wriggle into!”

  More applause. Savine had to admit she was impressed. She had always been more comfortable with small rooms, intimate groups, hushed whispers. But Leo knew how to fill a hall. “He speaks well,” she murmured.

  “Vanity, a loud voice and a loose relationship with the truth,” whispered Zuri. “All the qualities of a successful politician.”

  Leo smiled, relishing his moment of victory, and a hundred reflections in the great mirrors smiled back at him. Was there something horrible in that? Given the price? A hundred reflections of Savine looked on in adoring triumph, but she could see the pale worry hidden in those copies of her own bruised face. She was not sure she had ever really loved him, but there had been plenty to admire, once. He had been generous, honest and brave. She had wanted him to be more ruthless. More ambitious. More calculating. She had moulded him into her image. Now she found she had much preferred him before.

  “We must bring back the best of the past!” he was calling. “Families once honoured by a ‘dan’ in their name will be honoured again. Our restored Open Council will be made up of commoners and noblemen in equal numbers, united in their purpose, with respect given by every member, to every member. A grand declaration has been prepared to that effect. I trust everyone here will sign their names to it and join us in this brave new dawn. This new sunrise!”

  Zuri laid the great book open on the table and turned it around to face the Representatives. Neat blocks of her perfect calligraphy on one side. Spaces for two hundred signatures on the other. Savine had brought her lawyer Temple over from the Near Country t
o help draw it up, the keenest eye she knew for both the art and science of a contract. Leo might like to harp on the past, but this paved the way for a new government, a new monarch, a new Union.

  Isher sprang up from his chair. “I will be honoured to be the first to sign!” Though no one had asked him to be.

  “And I the second!” shouted Heugen, not to be outdone.

  “We must institute a new government!”

  “One based on justice and fairness!”

  “We must return to our principles,” said Leo, sternly. “And as the first step, we must elect a new king.”

  The lords, clearly prepared for this development, applauded again, but Savine saw worried faces on the other side of the room. The Burners might have humiliated the king, after all, but even they had not presumed to replace him. An old man with wispy hair was finally urged to his feet, clasping his hands, more like a supplicant approaching the throne than a proud Representative of the people.

  “My Lord Brock, if I may… no one here, I am sure, doubts your motives…” He glanced nervously towards Leo’s many loyal soldiers. “Or dreams of denying your contribution, or disagrees with a word of your admirable speech…”

  “I sense a but coming,” said Isher, one white eyebrow raised.

  “But when it comes to electing a new king… do we not still have…

  well… an old one to worry about?”

  The silence was total. Then Leo shrugged. “I’ve always been more of a doer than a worrier.”

  Mocking laughter from the noblemen’s benches.

  “But, Lord Brock, Orso is the anointed High King of the Union. He wore the crown! He cannot be simply dismissed—”

  “Oh, I find he can,” said Leo, “like that.” He snapped his fingers with an echoing crack. “He’s put right out of my mind.” Some of the lords crowed. Others mockingly snapped their fingers in the old man’s face. Others sneered their contempt for the entire commoner’s side of the chamber, their scorn reflected in the mirrors over and over, into the far distance. Unity and respect, it seemed, were only for those who did as they were told.