The Wisdom of Crowds

by Joe Abercrombie

  Brock had the city sealed as tightly as Valint and Balk’s famous vault. They were hungry, cold, exhausted and entirely out of friends. A likely reward of thousands of marks for your capture really was a heavy load to place on anyone’s loyalty. It was getting to the point where Orso was considering turning himself in if it meant he could afford a decent meal.

  They all shrank back at the sound of clattering hooves, a gilded carriage whirring through the wet night beyond the bushes in its own pool of light. Orso was sure he heard a drunken titter echoing from its open window.

  “Guests leaving the royal function,” he murmured, wistfully.

  “Wonder which of the perennial arse-lickers is in there,” grunted Hildi, with a sour sniff. “That lying slime Heugen. That treacherous bastard Isher.”

  “Tongues neatly extracted from my rear and slipped between the Young Lion’s scarred buttocks without so much as a blush, no doubt. They used to huddle around me at those bloody events like geese at the trough.”

  “You miss it?” asked Tunny.

  “I don’t miss the sycophancy,” mused Orso, putting a hand to his growling stomach. “I do miss the food.”

  “And the clothes,” said Tunny.

  “And the roofs,” said Hildi, squinting up at the steadily pissing heavens.

  “And the not being hounded by bitter enemies with unlimited resources who control every gate, wharf and corner.” Orso cringed into the shadows again at the sound of tramping feet. Beyond the bushes, wet armour gleamed as yet another patrol came past. “Those were good times,” he whispered.

  There was a brief pause.

  “Admit it,” said Tunny, “you miss the sycophancy, too.”

  “Little bit, but, honestly? I was in a wretched state back then. I actually feel much more cheerful starving out here in the rain.” Orso gave a disbelieving chuckle. He was a riddle even to himself. “Once I’m out of the city…” He did not mention the other, more likely possibility. The one involving a halving of the number of living High Kings of the Union. “You should have no trouble getting away yourselves. Tunny, send that standard to my mother and sister in Sipani. They can use it as a tablecloth or something.”

  “It’ll stay on the pole,” growled Tunny, “and be ready when you need it.”

  “Let me come with you.” Hildi gripped him by the wrist. “You need…

  someone with you—”

  “No. You’d just… get in the way.” His voice failed him slightly on the last word, and he had to clear a lump from his throat. He suspected they both guessed the real reason he had to leave them. That their loyalty to him had cost them enough already and it was time for him to repay the favour and take his own risks. He prised her fingers gently free. “What’s our tally at now?”

  “Two hundred and sixteen marks…” Hildi was pretending her eyes were wet from the rain and fooling no one. “And thirty bits.”

  “Sounds a touch high.”

  “I’m never wrong about numbers.”

  “She’s never wrong about numbers,” said Tunny.

  “No.” Orso wrapped his hands gently around her fist. “I am so, so sorry, Hildi, but I think… for now… I’ll have to owe you.”

  “If they hurt you I’ll be revenged on the bastards!” she snarled at him, wet eyes suddenly blazing. “I swear!”

  Orso smiled, then. It was an effort, considering everything, but he managed it. “I appreciate the thought more than you can know, but… if anything happens to me… I’d really rather you let it go.” He laid a hand gently on Hildi’s wet cheek. “Have a life instead. You deserve it.”

  Rikke stumbled getting down from the carriage and would’ve gone flat on her face but that nice man Haroon caught her and whisked her up straight again like she weighed nothing at all, which she had to admit she quite enjoyed.

  “Thank you very much,” she said, patting his arm. Quite an arm, far as she could tell. Then she teetered across the slick cobbles towards the steps. Bloody things wouldn’t stay still, wobbling about all over the place. Or was that her? She was drunk as shit and making no apologies.

  “No forgiveness from little Leo, then?” asked Isern, damp skirts gathered up to her knees so she could clamber to the front door.

  “Don’t think he’s got any,” said Rikke. The thought of their little exchange chased the pleasant glow of drink away for a moment. “The boy’s turned dark. Dark and vengeful.”

  “I could’ve told you that when I saw all the bloody flags. Flags never add to a man, d’you see, just stand in for something he’s missing. He always was a bully, and not too clever, but you can forgive a lot for a nice arse and a nice smile.” Isern shook herself at the top of the steps like a dog who’d run through a river, raindrops flying from her wet hair. “Now his arse is in ruins and I didn’t see him smile all night.”

  “Might be I was too sharp with him,” fretted Rikke. “Come all this way to heal wounds and all I did was rub salt in ’em.” Partly it was the pearl dust, which had made her feel quick-tongued, numb-faced and also rather frisky. “Might be I should’ve grovelled more.”

  “Shit on that.” Isern turned the doorknob and they spilled into the hall together, leaving a crooked trail of wet footprints. “You’re the North now, and the North kneels to no one. Besides, a man who’s moved by grovelling will never get enough grovelling for his taste. Let him once set his foot on your back and you’ll have a fucking bootprint ’twixt your shoulder blades till the day you’re buried. What’re you doing still up?”

  Shivers was leaning against the wall, pipe in his hand, puffing a plume of chagga smoke a manufactory chimney might’ve been proud to produce. “You’ve a visitor,” he said.

  Rikke giggled. “Tell me it’s a handsome man!”

  Shivers scratched gently at his great scar. “I’m no expert on handsome, but I have heard him described so.” And he nudged the door beside him creaking open.

  Rikke stepped frowning towards it. “Well, this is a tantalising mystery and no—” She stopped just over the threshold, staring. “Bloody fuck.”

  He half-sat, half-lay, draped across the cushions on one of those things between a chair and a bed they had down here, a mostly empty glass of wine dangling from one hand. His hair was a damp tangle, his face smudged with dirt, his clothes stained and torn, but his grin was the same as when he’d brought her an egg in bed, and it looked better than ever.

  “Bloody fuck, Your Majesty,” said Orso.

  “Everyone’s calling ’emselves that these days,” muttered Rikke. “I hear even babies are doing it.”

  “Much to my dismay.”

  “You look…” She took a step or two into the room. Felt like she couldn’t help it. “A touch less prosperous than last time we met.”

  “I can only apologise for my wretched appearance. I have been slightly on the run the last few days.”

  “I’d have thought you’d be used to being pursued.”

  “Of course. Furious creditors, needy ambassadors, jilted lovers, husbands of jilted lovers, families of jilted lovers and so forth, but Leo dan Brock really does represent a new level of damnable persistence. He’s like a dog with a bone. Lion with a bone, maybe.”

  “So you’re the bone?” asked Rikke, raising her brows.

  Orso smiled a little wider. “Poor choice of words, perhaps. You look…”

  “Like the fucking fortune-teller at an overpriced carnival?”

  His eyes moved over her dress, which was clinging somewhat from the rain, then up to her face. Her blind eye and her Long Eye. The black rings pricked into the skin around it. “I was going to say beautiful and mysterious.”

  “Oh.” Rikke found she was tidying a damp strand of hair behind her ear and made herself stop. “Well. In that case, proceed.”

  “Don’t like this at all,” came Isern’s voice, in Northern. She was right at Rikke’s shoulder, her tattooed arm and her pale tightly folded across her purple ball-dress and her narrowed eyes fixed suspiciously on Orso. “This i
s dangerous.”

  “Never mind that!” said Rikke, herding her towards the door. She was keenly aware of how dangerous it was. Maybe that was the appeal. Maybe she was a moth drawn to the flame and would very soon go up in a fireball.

  “You need to think about this, Rikke.” Isern caught the door frame, leaning close to growl under her breath, “Just don’t be thinking with your quim.”

  “Yes, yes, make of your quim a stone.” Rikke managed to bundle her out into the hall, wrestled the door shut and leaned back against it with an over-wide grin.

  Orso was looking approvingly around the room, which was almost as big as Skarling’s Hall and a damn sight more expensively furnished, with glittering vases and polished wood and candles twinkling in gilded holders. “So… you won.”

  “I did,” said Rikke, enjoying a little swagger about the tiles herself. Nothing had been easily won, after all. Might as well enjoy it.

  “I lost,” said Orso, but without much rancour.

  “So I hear.”

  He stood, took the stopper from the decanter with a pleasant clinking of glass. “The Queen of the Northmen!”

  “Just Black Rikke. If you’ve got the power you don’t need the title.”

  “I was always the other way around. So many titles. No power at all.” And Orso snapped out a little laugh and started pouring two glasses of wine. He looked even more carelessly at ease as the Union’s most wanted outlaw than he had as its crown prince. “Your friend Isern isn’t wrong. I’m afraid I’m…” And he looked up from under his brows with that smile that seemed to give her a sharper tickle every time. “Trouble.”

  “And you’re happy to tread trouble across my carpet?”

  “My old standard-bearer thought it was a bad idea but… no one would expect me to come to you.”

  “I’ll confess I’m fucking astonished.” But the truth was Rikke was glad to see him, and not just because of the pearl dust and the drink. Though partly because of the pearl dust and the drink. And partly because he was handsome, and funny, and charming, and the certain knowledge that he was a very excellent lover was kissing constantly at the back of her pearl-dusted mind. She had to keep herself hidden, these days. Behind the tattoos and the knowing smiles and the stony heart. With him, she could let herself show.

  “I need someone to get me out of Adua,” he said. “Someone powerful. Someone brave. Someone with a large entourage, in which an extra face, suitably obscured, might go unnoticed. And you did write me that letter, after all, so I wondered if you might still have some trifling attachment to my lost cause?”

  “Mostly suited my own needs, if I’m honest. But it’s true I’ve always liked lost causes.”

  “There was… something else.” He paused, his grin curling wider, as if he was casting his mind back to a happy memory. “That night we spent together. And that morning after. I’ve thought about it often.”

  She couldn’t help smiling herself. “So have I.” In fact, she was thinking about it right now, and she pulled one of those ridiculous lace gloves off with her teeth. It was all out of shape from the damp anyway.

  “I’ve wondered, now and again, what might have happened… had we been different people.”

  She licked her finger and thumb and started snuffing out candles, each one dying with a little fizz and a curl of smoke. “So have I.” The room gradually grew dimmer, gradually felt hotter, in spite of the clammy fabric clinging to her, till there was only the gleam on the gold thread in the curtains, on the silverware and the glassware, at the corners of Orso’s smiling eyes.

  “And… well… we’re different people now,” he said.

  “No doubt. We’re all of us changed.” All the things seen since then. The things done. The people gone back to the mud. He’d lost his throne, she’d gained one. But as she came close and took the glass from his hand, he had that same look in his eyes he’d had that night. That look of unguarded desire. And being looked at that way felt just as good. Better’n ever, maybe.

  She knocked the wine off in one throw, then had to stand there wincing, one hand pressed to her chest, fighting the urge to puke it back up. That would’ve been quite the mood-killer.

  “Need a bucket?” he asked.

  “No, I think I’ve got it—” Fighting down an acrid little tickle at the back of her throat with a shudder. “Under control.” And she took her wet hat off and started to slide the pins from her hair, toss them on the table beside her so they bounced and clicked and tumbled twinkling on the floor.

  She was a leader. She had responsibilities. Hard choices to make.

  But they could wait till tomorrow.

  “Sometimes feels like life’s just a long preparation for something,” she said, and she put a finger on his chest and pushed him, so he had no choice but to sit down, hard, wine slopping from his glass. “Hard work getting everything right for a perfect future.” And she scrubbed her damp hair with her nails, scrubbed it back into its usual wild tangle then blew a stray strand out of her face. “But nothing’s ever finished, is it? Nothing’s ever right. Not really.”

  “Certainly not in my experience,” he whispered, slightly throaty, as she reached out and perched the hat slanted on his head.

  “And if it is, it turns wrong soon enough.” She took two fistfuls of her damp dress and gathered it up. “It rots. It rusts. It dies.” Gathered it up all the way to her thighs, goosefleshed from the cold outside and the warm inside. “Life’s naught but a set of moments.” And she slipped one knee onto the cushions to either side of him, lowered herself gently into his lap. “You’ve got to live each one.”

  “I’ve always thought so,” he murmured, eyes fixed on hers.

  “All that time spent tending the garden,” she whispered. Seemed fine luck now she hadn’t bothered with all that mass of underwear they trussed themselves up in down here. “You forget to sit back in the garden and enjoy it.” And she pushed her hands into his hair, cool and damp from the rain, and twisted his face up towards hers, and started to kiss him.

  Of Your Heart a Stone

  When Orso woke in a comfortable bed for the first time in months he wondered, for a blissful moment, whether it might all have been a dream. The rebellion. The Great Change. The Court of the People. The baying crowds and the prison cells. The figures dropping from the Tower of Chains.

  Then he saw the sunlight glimmer from between the heavy drapes, the faint glint on the gilded wallpaper, and it came back in a pleasurable rush whose bed he was in. The smile spread across his face and he stretched, rolled, thinking he might politely offer Rikke the chance to make use of his morning wood, the way she had so enthusiastically made use of the midnight variety—

  But the bed was empty.

  Someone had left fresh clothes on a chair and he slipped from the covers and pulled the trousers on. He crept to the window, nudged the curtains back with a cautious finger to peer across gardens glistening with last night’s rain towards the Middleway.

  He caught a glimpse of flags through the budding branches. The crossed hammers of Angland, maybe. He heard the familiar tramp of armoured feet and let the curtains fall. No doubt they were still searching for him. Plainly, he was far from free. But with Rikke on his side he had a chance. In Adua, self-styled zenith of civilisation, they liked to think of anything beyond the Circle Sea as primitive. But they could have learned a lot from the Northmen. About courage, about endurance, about loyalty. About the enthusiastic use of wood, for that matter. He found he was smiling again.

  He had no idea what would happen now. But for the first time in a long time, he was eager to find out.

  He padded down the stairs into the empty hallway. Far from the first time he had stolen from a lady’s bed, but the stakes had rarely been so high. He heard soft voices, talking in Northern, and slipped across to the open door of the dining room.

  Rikke sat at the head of a table set for breakfast. Isern-i-Phail had one hand on the back of her chair, leaning down to mutter in her ear. Orso ha
d the impression he had interrupted a difficult conversation, and more than likely he had been its subject. By the frown on Isern’s face, his way with the ladies did not extend to hillwomen. But then, since he lost the crown, his way with the ladies probably did not extend very far at all. It was something of a surprise that it still reached Rikke. Looking at her troubled expression now, he wondered whether, in the cold light of morning, it might not fall short of her, too.

  But Orso’s father had insisted the best way to brighten the mood was to act as if it was already incandescent. An approach he had applied to Orso’s mother for thirty years with a total lack of success. So Orso plastered on a smile, strutted into the room and called out, “Morning!” with almost offensive enthusiasm.

  “Barely,” said Isern as she stalked past him to the door, endlessly chewing. From the short patch of sunlight in front of the windows it could not have been far short of midday.

  “My mother would have counted it quite the victory to get me up at this hour.” Orso licked his lips as he pulled out a chair. Last night’s exertions had left him with an appetite. Well, that and barely eating for a few days. “Do you mind if I…?”

  “Dig in,” said Rikke.

  He started to fork sausages onto a plate, mouth thoroughly watering. “Is there anything better than a good meal after lean times?”

  “There’s a few in the North who’d swear by a good revenge after a long feud.”

  He closed his eyes in simple pleasure as he chewed. “Revenge won’t fill your belly.”

  “You sound like my father.”

  “By all accounts a shrewd man.”

  “He was all heart,” said Rikke, nudging some crumbs about her plate.

  Orso felt that need to lift the mood again. “Have an egg,” he said, plucking one from a dish and holding it out. Not much of a gift, especially when it had been hers in the first place. But then the whole North was hers now. She was the one with the power, while he had nothing to